Politics in the US has become ever more tribal on both the left and the right. Either you agree with 100 percent of group doctrine or you are considered an enemy. Tim Urban, the author of the wonderful Wait but Why blog has written a book digging into how we have gotten here. Titled “What’s Our Problem” the book is a full throated defense of liberalism in general and free speech in particular. As with his blog, Urban does two valuable things rather well: He goes as much as possible to source ...

As humans we like to put things into categories. It makes communicating and thinking easier. Scratch that. It makes communicating and thinking possible. Categories go hand in hand with words as providing us with crucial compression of reality. Just like a 1:1 map is completely useless (it is the terrain itself), so would be a need to describe every detail of every person or object before being able to make a point. We would never get anywhere. Not surprisingly then, categories are everywhere....

Given the ongoing decay of our institutions and their utter failure to address the climate crisis it is not far fetched to ask whether we are headed for some kind of societal collapse. A highly relevant book is Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, published in 1988. I had two key takeaways from reading it. First, there are way more examples of complex societies collapsing than I was aware of. I was of course familiar with the collapse of the Roman Empire and was also aware of M...

Many leaders and also parents mistakenly believe that the only way to be demanding is to be a jerk. I had found myself trapped in this flawed thinking at times. What made a huge difference for me was understanding that there are actually two dimensions to leadership (parenting): the demanding and the caring dimension, as shown here in a graph from Angela Duckworth’s wonderful book Grit:It has recently occurred to me that much of the debate about society is caught in a similar one-dimensionali...

A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a subreddit called Wallstreetbets. The stock shot up to crazy valuations and eventually plummeted back down. Along the way the hedge funds nearly went under and the popular trading app Robinhood suspended trading in Gamestop, which in turn fueled a narrative that Wall Street was b...

On Monday of this week the Business Roundtable, an organization which “represents chief executive officers (CEOs) of America’s leading companies,” published a new statement on the purpose of a corporation. The new statement, which was signed by 181 executives, explicitly states that “we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders” (emphasis mine). This is an important departure from the singular focus on shareholders as the focus that has dominated the American corporate landsca...

Today marks my 8-year anniversary of blogging. I have learned so much from it and want to thank everyone who has engaged in the comments over the years. I am particularly grateful for comments that are critical and for ones that provide links to additional material. The reason is that those help move my thinking forward. They are part of the critical process through which knowledge improves over time (of course the occasional compliment or thanks are also much appreciated). We should not take...

I have been telling lots of people that I am writing a book about our transition past the industrial economy. If you have been reading Continuations for a while you know that this has been the subject of much of my writing here. So why write a book? For starters I greatly enjoy reading books so the idea of writing one is appealing. But what is the goal, what am I trying to accomplish with the book? The key reason is that I am trying to influence where we are headed. Earlier this week I tweete...

Tonight I will be participating in a panel discussion about Universal Basic Income. One of the key arguments for UBI is that we need to decouple people’s ability to meet their basic needs from traditional work because of the rise of automation. This is the case I make in my TEDx talk. But there is another way of framing the problem that has been on my mind. It starts with my contention that the current transition is as profound as the ones from the forager age to the agrarian age and from the...

I did not write directly about the death of Michael Brown although what happened in Ferguson was on my mind and I referred to it indirectly. I was not planning to write about the death of Eric Garner but then I saw a tweet last night that reminded me that if you do nothing in the face of violence and injustice you are contributing to it. So what will I do? My immediate action is relatively straight forward: assist in putting pressure on state and federal authorities to re-examine both cases a...