Sublime

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Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

“Sam, we’re broke,” the prime minister confessed. Sam wasn’t broke. Just then Sam was the opposite of broke. Alameda Research was no longer paying loan shark interest rates to borrow tens of millions of dollars from effective altruists. The new crypto lenders like Celsius and Genesis were willing to hand Alameda Research collectively between $10 bi

The pandemic brought the economy to a temporary standstill. The pause let us see through the usual blur of change to the deeper permanence of our arrangements. In 2020, inequality killed large numbers of Americans. Whatever the arguments about government spending and taxes and regulations, our economic system makes national solidarity in a crisis i

For most of the 2020s, the driving economic force will be low growth in productivity, decreased opportunities for investment of accumulated capital, and low interest rates. It will also be a period of increasing unemployment, driven by continued decline in industry and stagnation in high tech as the result of the maturation of the core technology.

The Second World War left the United States in an extraordinary position. It was rich, it was powerful, and, thanks to its chemists and engineers, it had the means to deal with foreign lands without colonizing them. But the war also conferred another advantage, harder to see and operating on a deeper level. It had to do with standards. Standards—th