Happy new year to everyone who reads this blog! I am planning for there to be quite a lot more activity here in 2025, moving from an average of one article a month to at least weekly. There should be more cartoons too – Pinhead and Spikes even made it to our Christmas cake this year.
There is a lot I want to write about this year. Expect some or all of the following themes in the next few months (in no particular order):
- Some examples using Steve Keen’s Ravel software to demonstrate how Government debt is not the constraint they think it is.
- Extending Naomi Alderman’s argument in The Future that we could get rid of the Tech Bros and not miss them, effectively upending Ayn Rand’s ideas in Atlas Shrugged. They are not key workers.
- Keynes’ argument that, with the future so uncertain, we should not sacrifice people in the present to our models of it.
- Spiegelhalter on the four types of luck, which cuts away at the meritocracy argument for distributing wealth.
- How the professions have become a way of solidifying and enabling the massively uneven distribution we see. Have they outgrown their usefulness in their current form, just like the guilds did?
- How the choice for providing public goods appears to boil down to public ownership or private monopoly – with accompanying Technofeudalism replacing capitalism. Why are we so much more relaxed about private monopolies than we were 100 years ago, when it accelerates inequalities so much?
- The relationship between worldbuilding in science fiction and people living in their own models in the policy making world. Great example of this just this morning in the FT.
So plenty to do. If this sounds interesting to you, please stick with the blog, which will not be going to Substack and will not be charging a subscription. If it sounds really interesting to you, tell a friend! Will be in touch again soon.