What we’ve lost are the foundations of a healthy standard of living / quality of life. Amidst the constant drumbeat of tech “progress” and grandiose “solutions,” it’s a useful exercise to ask: what have we lost in the past 40 years despite all the “progress” and “solutions”? Put another way: what […]
Here’s the real problem: there’s no profit in a raw carrot and a walk around the block. Here’s our mythology in a nutshell: human needs are limited but human desires are unlimited, and the economy is fueled by smart people motivated by profit to fulfill our desires. Since desires and human […]
Just as a reminder of what’s being gambled on “AI supremacy”: it’s not just financial capital, it’s everything. The risk that AI transitions from Servant to Master is dramatically appealing–Skynet!–but the real risks are in the mundane realms of the socio-economic order. As I explain in my new book Investing In Revolution, […]
The pool of speculative fervor will be drained, as impossible as that seems in this moment in history. 2025 may go down as The Year When Everything Happened in No Particular Order, tracking William Gibson’s famous line that “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Those expecting […]
As I often note, making Plans B and C is free. The stock market is always looking past “bad news” to front-run “good news.” Once it became clear that the Titanic was indeed going to sink, the stock market would rally on the prospect of sharp growth in lifeboat shares. In other words, […]
The lines of dominoes being toppled run through every nook and cranny of the economy. As we all know, the problem with euphoria is the inevitable collision with reality and the resulting disillusionment. But wait–it gets worse. The new love of your life, your savior who is going to make everything […]
Are we wise enough to refuse politicians’ offer of “free money” to spend today that was stolen from our future, and from our future generations? Probably not. Can Social Security be saved for future generations? Many have already concluded it’s hopeless, and if the current trajectory is left untouched, that is […]
The consensus holds there will be another bubble after the Everything Bubble pops, but this might be misplaced confidence in the godlike powers of central banks. The consensus holds that central banks–the Federal Reserve in the US–will gradually inflate away the world’s rising debt burden while propping up assets and the […]
The most pressing need now is for AI tools to protect us from AI tools. The good news about AI is there will be productive uses. The bad news is it will take 5 to 10 years to sort the wheat from the chaff. According to a recent study by Morgan […]
What nobody seems to notice is all the incentives for deploying AI are perverse. The real story of the US economy isn’t about AI, it’s about an economy that’s run out of rope. AI is being hyped not just by promoters reaping billions of dollars in stock market gains, it’s being […]