Continuations

In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity. After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. With that set of technologies (planting, irrigation, domestication of animals, etc.), invented roughly 10,000 years ago, the constraint shifted from food to land in what became the Agrarian Age. Then only a couple ...

When I first started talking to Dina who is helping me with research, I explained that I consider myself a technology optimist. By which I mean that I am optimistic that over time we the human species will figure out how to use technology to make things better. Dina rightly challenged me to define what I mean by “better” and by the related word “progress.” And that turns out to be a lot harder than I thought. Let’s start with what it is not. Economic growth as measured by GDP is an increasing...

Technology companies have a tendency towards the quantitative. We like to measure things. And there is a lot that can be measured from page load times to net promoter scores. Even in board meetings the question “have we A/B tested that” is common. But the quantitative can only take you so far. Here is a recent tweet from Patrick at StripeI think the biggest systemic improvement we could make to software and products would be to have a general way to measure user frustration.To which I replied...

The secular stagnation discussion has a bad title and sounds wonkish but is extremely important – it is about nothing short of understanding what the economy is and should be about. If you want a lot of detail you can read through Marc Andreessen’s epic secular stagnation tweet storm and all the great source material that he links to. At the heart of the secular stagnation discussion is the idea that somehow the economy is growing more slowly than it should. See for instance the following quo...