Economics and History
This category follows the long arc of how societies rise, trade, adapt, and sometimes fall. I’ve always felt that living in the Pacific Northwest, where old logging towns sit beside modern tech corridors, makes it easier to see how economic forces and historical currents shape each other in real time. Here you’ll find articles that explore economic systems, historical turning points, and the archaeological clues that anchor both. The goal is to connect past and present with clear analysis, so we can understand not just what happened, but why it still matters now.
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The Foundations of Civilization and the Hedgehog Problem
The conversation started the way many good conversations start in Seattle. Not with certainty, but with coffee. Proptaku and I had just left the Museum of History and Industry. We’d spent the afternoon wandering through exhibits on innovation, transportation, manufacturing,… Continue reading
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Libertarianism: The Politics of Removing the Guardrails
A few days ago, I posted a meme on Facebook with the simple caption: “One month out… Vote!” The image was deliberately blunt. On one side sat a grinning donkey labeled “Democratic Platform,” beneath a list of tangible policy areas:… Continue reading
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Loch Lomond, a Loch, a Song, and a Lost Cause
Loch Lomond entered the conversation almost by accident. A few pints of stout in, the topic drifted toward Scottish lochs, their size, their place in the landscape, and the way certain names seem to carry more weight than geography alone… Continue reading
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The Long Shadow Behind “School Choice”
I recently saw a political meme that listed out a highly partisan set of reasons to vote in the 2026 election. It was essentially a MAGA “why vote” graphic, presenting every issue as a struggle between national ruin on one… Continue reading
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Against Entropy
Schrödinger’s Search for Life in a World at War This essay was supposed to be about a cat. Not a real cat, of course, but Schrödinger’s Cat, that unfortunate thought experiment that has escaped the lab, escaped physics, and somehow… Continue reading
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It Was There, Then It Wasn’t
Homoioteleuton, Homoioarcton, and the Fragility of Copying And now for something completely different, a gift for the real word nerds. There’s even almost a rhyme there. I came across this when talking about how much the Bible and other ancient… Continue reading
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When Collective Language Masks Control
The recurring pattern of oligarchal rule The prompt that started this was posted as a simple question on Threads, “When Oligarchs build structures that ultimately belong to the government, could that be called communism?” It drew me in less because… Continue reading
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The Little Man Theory
A Narrative Essay in Minor Keys I have always been suspicious of great men. Not because they do not exist, but because the stories about them are too clean, too self-satisfied. The “Great Man Theory” of history; Carlyle’s tidy assertion… Continue reading
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Truth, Repetition, and the Soft Collapse of Meaning
How Orwell’s concept of doublespeak echoes in modern political language I keep coming back to the language in Orwell’s 1984, not because it is distant, but because it keeps insisting it isn’t. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”… Continue reading
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The Bronze Age, Allegedly
A cross-continental look at a label that sprawls more than it explains The Bronze Age outside the Middle East does not feel like a single chapter. It feels like a set of overlapping weather systems, each arriving on its own… Continue reading
