The Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary recently described a nightmare experience dealing with the Internal Revenue Service. “My husband and I received a notice from the IRS in November indicating that we owed an additional $11,786 in income taxes for the 2018 tax year … | Continue reading
Perhaps nowhere is the gap between America’s cognitive elite and its populace larger than in their preferred urban forms. For nearly a century, Americans have been heading further from the urban core, seeking affordable and safe communities with good schools, parks, and a general … | Continue reading
The name “cobalt” comes from the German word kobold, which translates as “goblin” or “evil spirit.” When sixteenth-century miners in Saxony discovered the metal, they thought they had stumbled upon silver, yet it was later revealed that the ores were poor in metals that were know … | Continue reading
Calls for an American industrial policy have attracted support across the political spectrum.1 While proponents on the left see value in righting the wrongs of inequality and climate change,2 proponents on the right are most alarmed by the rise of China as a strategic competitor … | Continue reading
Whatever one thinks of today’s culture wars, it is hard to deny that the various barbarians currently rattling the gates were, in some sense, created by the failure of the prior generation to live up to its promises. Old center-left bromides about growing the economy by endlessly … | Continue reading
Throughout 2021, U.S. stock market valuations have hovered near all‑time highs. In June, the unadjusted price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of the S&P 500 index eclipsed the tech boom record of 2000. Many other asset classes have attained, or nearly attained, record valuations as well. … | Continue reading
Competition between the United States and China frequently triggers Cold War comparisons. Ideologies are contrasted, alliances are touted, and geopolitical maneuvers are proposed. These sorts of comparisons are tempting. China is no longer Maoist in orientation, but still ostens … | Continue reading
Sandel is among the few thinkers who warn fellow elites that the very system that has afforded them prestige, material comfort, and the tools to survive, and even thrive, amid economic and social instability has given rise to pervasive political discontent and lies at the root of … | Continue reading
Operation Warp Speed1 (OWS) was launched on May 15, 2020. A partnership between the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Defense (DoD), other agencies, and the private sector, its goal was to “accelerate the testing, supply, development, and distribution of safe and … | Continue reading
With increasing income inequality and social stratification reminiscent of the Gilded Age, talk of an “establishment” has returned to our political discourse. As in the past, the word is typically used as a pejorative describing an incumbent power structure that needs to be ove … | Continue reading
The West’s involution finds its mirror image in the original country of the future, the nation doomed forever to remain the country of the future, the one that never reaches its destination: Brazil. The Brazilianization of the world is our encounter with a future denied, and in … | Continue reading
In his recent book, Fredrik deBoer tells an anecdote about one of his freshman writing students. Bright but indifferent to academics, the student asked deBoer—not rhetorically—“What else am I supposed to do?” “I couldn’t answer,” writes deBoer, whom you may know from sharp essay … | Continue reading
Despite all the attention and investment that Silicon Valley’s recent start-ups have received, they have done little but lose money: Uber, Lyft, WeWork, Pinterest, and Snapchat have consistently failed to turn profits, with Uber’s cumulative losses exceeding $25 billion. Perhap … | Continue reading
The feverish rise in the trading value of digital currencies in the last twelve months suggests that they are in the advanced throes of a faddish and complicated reenactment of the typical investment bubble. Yet to dismiss the whole phenomenon would be a mistake. At some point o … | Continue reading
It may seem quaint to recall the hand-wringing that accompanied the cancellation of the South by Southwest music and film festival back in March 2020. Yet one of the documentaries slated to premier there has nevertheless resonated in a post-Covid world. Focusing on five young men … | Continue reading
Amid the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing U.S.-China “trade war,” many multinational corporations are reconsidering the opportunities and risks of global supply chains, particularly those based in China. Within China, another long-festering question is growing more acute on … | Continue reading
On my drive home from work on March 11, 2020, I could tell something was awry. The Utah Jazz game against the Oklahoma City Thunder was set to tip off, but the radio play-by-play announcer seemed confused. Players and officials mingled on the court, but nobody walked to the cent … | Continue reading
The knowledge economy is the science- and technology-intensive practice of production, devoted to perpetual innovation, that has begun to assume a commanding role in all the major economies of the world. It is present in every sector of these economies—in services and even agricu … | Continue reading
As America transitions to 5G wireless networks, the U.S. intelligence community sees the Chinese telecom giant Huawei as a systemic security risk. In response, President Trump has banned the use of Chinese 5G equipment in U.S. networks. But despite these measures, there is still … | Continue reading
The Evangelical Christians I have met in the United States often talk about how reading the Bible changed their lives. They talk about being born again. I am not an Evangelical Christian. I am a Chinese atheist who came to the West to study at the world’s best universities and, l … | Continue reading
Something strange happened to the news over the past four years. The dominant stories all resembled the scripts of bad movies—sequels and reboots. The Kavanaugh hearings were a sequel to the Clarence Thomas hearings, and Russian collusion was rebooted as Ukrainian impeachment. Jo … | Continue reading
Physicist Richard Feynman had the following advice for those interested in science: “So I hope you can accept Nature as She is—absurd.”1 Here Feynman captures in stark terms the most basic insight of modern science: nature is not understandable in terms of ordinary physical conce … | Continue reading
A new political formation has arrived on the scene: technopopulism, or the synthesis of populism and technocracy. At first blush, such a formulation might seem like a contradiction. Technocracy and populism are typically understood as being deeply antagonistic to each other, perh … | Continue reading
The U.S. education system spent more than $26 billion on technology in 2018. That’s larger than the entire Israeli military budget. By one estimate, annual global spending on technology in schools will soon total $252 billion. But the technology pushed into schools today is a th … | Continue reading
The concept of disruptive innovation arose from the study of innovation in companies, but it can also be applied to nations. In this essay I will use some of the concepts of disruptive innovation to analyze the dynamics of national innovation and growth in America and China.1 The … | Continue reading
Since at least 2016, the divide between the “working class” and the “elite” has been considered a defining issue in American (and Western) politics. This divide has been defined in occupational terms (“blue collar” versus “information workers”), geographic terms (rural and exurba … | Continue reading
As the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989, so too, it seemed, did the dream of socialism. The German sociologist Rolf Dahrendorf declared, “The point has to be made unequivocally that socialism is dead and that none of its variants can be revived for a world awakening from the double n … | Continue reading
On October 1, 2018, the newly christened Klarman Hall opened to much acclaim on the campus of Harvard Business School. The stunning $120 million building houses a conference center as well as a gleaming auditorium built around a 32-million-pixel, 1,250-square-foot video wall and … | Continue reading
In ever more areas of life, algorithms are coming to substitute for judgment exercised by identifiable human beings who can be held to account. The rationale offered is that automated decision-making will be more reliable. But a further attraction is that it serves to insulate va … | Continue reading
Since it began operations in 2010, Uber has grown to the point where it now collects over $45 billion in gross passenger revenue, and it has seized a major share of the urban car service market. But the widespread belief that it is a highly innovative and successful company has n … | Continue reading
In 1934, the Saturday Review of Literature published an ad on how to read James Joyce’s Ulysses. The ad is remarkable for its relationship to reading, democracy, and elitism. On the one hand, the ad dismisses critics who fret over the difficulty of the novel and presents it as a … | Continue reading
Imagine sitting in front of your television in 1969, watching the Apollo lunar landing, and noting the marvels of modern engineering. The person sitting next to you responds, “Oh yes, but this is a passing fad; soon we will return to premodern engineering. Groping in the dark req … | Continue reading
It would be too much to say that the office is the prime locus of utopian aspirations in American life. But the claim wouldn’t be entirely misleading, either, and it might even shed some light on what the office actually is. From their earliest days as dingy counting houses in Bo … | Continue reading
In the jargon of finance, America is suffering from a capital allocation problem. The country seems incapable of making the necessary investments to fuel future productivity and growth, or to ensure widespread prosperity. At the government level, public spending on basic research … | Continue reading
Buried in the middle of a two-hour debate in 2014 on religion and modernity is a thought-provoking observation by Peter Thiel regarding technology and the modern economy. Instead of praising Silicon Valley for its tremendous digital inventiveness, Thiel criticized the technologic … | Continue reading
On the first page of his best-selling memoir, Ray Dalio unburdens himself of the opinion that he is “a dumb shit.” Nothing in the ensuing six hundred or so pages convinced me that I should dissent from this verdict. I can say honestly, in keeping with the book’s own serial induce … | Continue reading
Explaining the dramatic rise of incarceration in the United States has been surprisingly difficult. Theories abound, but they are continually defeated by the vastness and complexity of the American criminal justice system. For a time, the prime suspect was the War on Drugs, which … | Continue reading
In a 1986 speech, then president Ronald Reagan lamented that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” This statement epitomizes the neoliberal view of how Silicon Valley became a global beacon of high-technology i … | Continue reading
In March 2018, China’s state-controlled internet, amid rumors that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was secretly visiting China, rendered the term “fatty” unsearchable. In China, “Fatty the Third” is a derogatory nickname for Kim, who inherited his position from his father and g … | Continue reading
Friedrich von Hayek, the preeminent theorist of laissez-faire, called the “knowledge problem” an insuperable barrier to central planning. Knowledge about the price of supplies and labor, and consumers’ ability and willingness to pay, is so scattered and protean that even the wise … | Continue reading