Entrepreneur
In 1929 Harold Hotelling proved that two sellers on one shoreline end up back to back at the midpoint — the law behind the sameness of apps, candidates, and now AI assistants. AI is a machine for standing at the midpoint, and once it stands there for free, the law reverses: value runs to the ends of the beach. … readThe Middle of the Beach
The machine being better than you at everything was answered in 1817: work is not assigned by who is better, but by what the winner’s hour would have earned elsewhere. As long as the machine’s hour has a price, you will keep work it could do better — and the wage of thinking will be set in the datacenter. … readBetter at Everything
You decide at planting and deliver at harvest, so supply always answers an old price — and the cobweb theorem says markets built that way must swing. AI puts a harvest-time forecast on every kitchen table, and a hundred-year-old cycle starts to die where the lag is made of learning and survive where it is made of matter. … readPlanted at Yesterday’s Price
Baumol’s cost disease was never a disease. It is how an economy reprices the hour that refuses to compress — and AI, the largest productivity event ever aimed at thinking, is about to run that law at machine speed. The interesting question is not what gets cheap. It is who gets the raise. … readThe Expensive Hour
Every institution you have ever stood inside is scaffolding around one old problem: anyone who acts for you has interests that are not yours. AI delivers the first agent that wants nothing — and the appetite does not vanish. It moves upstream, to the maker, where it can finally be put in writing. … readThe Agent Without Appetite
Kevin Warsh and Scott Bessent are not running a coordinated tag team. The Fed wants the long yield left as an honest reading, the Treasury wants it lower, and eight days after the hike the 10-year hit its highest level since 2007. … readTwo Hands on One Curve
China stepped out of the oil market this spring, but mostly by draining its stockpiles, not because of its EVs — and at the same time it held its diesel at home. Now it is stepping back in. … readThe Valve and the Tourniquet
Each firm that swaps a paycheck for a server keeps the savings and spreads the lost spending across everyone. That is a tragedy of the commons, and the commons is aggregate demand. … readThe Automation Tragedy: How the Free Market Is Overgrazing Aggregate Demand
AI is bought like capital but does the work of labor. Stiglitz, Korinek and Acemoglu agree that strains the models economics runs on, and disagree sharply about whether it breaks them. … readCapital That Clocks In: Why Economists Say AI Won’t Stay in the Capital Box
Britain’s empire did not fall to a rival. It fell to compound interest, and the dollar happened to be standing nearby. America has now crossed the same line — and this time nobody is standing nearby, which is the more dangerous fact. … readThe Crown Nobody Wants