Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
Americans of a certain age learned that the dollar was once backed by gold. The real history was messier than the classroom version, but the core idea held: behind the paper sat an asset the government could not print. Congress could pass any law it liked, but it could not legislate another million ounces into Read More “The Treasury Standard: Stablecoins, Gold, and the Debt Behind the New Dollar”
A factory can have a full order book, a skilled workforce, and every intention of opening on Monday morning. Its executives can have secured financing, negotiated shipping contracts, and purchased sophisticated equipment. Yet a missing component can render all that preparation useless. The value of the missing part may be modest. Its power over everything Read More “What does China want in return?”
There are moments in business when the price tells you that you are looking at the wrong thing. NVIDIA is reported to have agreed to pay $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, a company whose annual revenue has been put at roughly $150 million. Reuters carried the story on August 27, relaying reporting from The Information, Read More “The Empire Strikes Back”
Every so often a small, unglamorous fact arrives that tells you more about the character of a nation than any speech does. Last week, a company almost nobody outside a narrow community of software engineers had heard of released a piece of software that, on its own modest terms, may matter more than most of Read More “The Quiet Company Challenging China’s Open AI Lead”
The first mistake is looking for disappearing jobs. The second mistake is looking only at Silicon Valley. The third mistake is assuming that the country with the best artificial intelligence model automatically wins the century. Each of these mistakes is comfortable, because each of them lets us keep the maps we already own. Taken together, Read More “Welcome to the Iceberg Economy”
There was a time when horse racing was gloriously inefficient, which is to say human. A man in a wrinkled seersucker suit could study a racing form folded soft from handling, squint toward the paddock, listen to a rumor drifting through cigar smoke, and persuade himself that wisdom, not luck, had brought him to the Read More “This is why we can’t have nice things”
There was something almost quietly radical in the announcement, though it arrived wrapped in the familiar language of a government press release. Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Ottawa and proposed what Canada has never had before, a national sovereign wealth fund. The Canada Strong Fund was introduced as an instrument of nation-building, a vehicle Read More “When Democracies Start Thinking Like Investors”
Something has changed in the texture of professional life, though it is difficult to name precisely because the change is happening in the quietest of places. A spare bedroom. A converted den. A home office overlooking a backyard where no one is watching. A single person sits at the center of a system. Emails are Read More “The Conductor and The Rise of the One-Person Company”
Politics tends to flatten people. Over time, complex lives get reduced to a handful of talking points, a voting record, or a few moments on cable news. The result is a public square populated by simplified figures rather than human beings shaped by place, culture, and experience. Mary Peltola is often described as the first Read More “Who Is Mary Peltola and Why You Want to Know”
There is a man in his mid-fifties who works in logistics outside of Columbus, Ohio. He owns his home outright, drives a truck he paid cash for, and has a 401(k) that has roughly doubled in the past decade, tracking the market as he was told it would. By the numbers that define American economic Read More “Stability Versus Growth in Late-Stage Capitalism”