Droning On in the Middle East
Back in the early 2010s when I first started playing with drones, I speculated in the FT that if I could own a drone, anyone could, and that this would have big implications for global politics. At that time, drone technology was largely controlled by the U.S. and Israel,
Infrastructure, Governance, and Trust
Before I get off the subject of infrastructure, I want to make a more general point about the nature of governance at this point in the 21st century, which has to do with social trust. I wrote a whole book on this subject back in the 1990s, but a lot
In Praise of Industrial Policy
My friend Steve Rhoads, emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, will be publishing through Cambridge University Press a 35th anniversary edition of his 1984 book The Economist's View of the World. The book reviews and explains many of the fundamental concepts of modern neo-classical economics, like opportunity costs, marginalism,
Covid and Bureaucratic Autonomy
The Covid pandemic has raised in an acute way the question of how much autonomy the political authorities in our government should grant to the bureaucratic experts that work for them. A simple-minded principal-agent model would say that in a democracy, the people are the principals who elect representatives—the
2034
2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Eliot Ackerman and James Stavridis (New York: Penguin Press, 2021) imagines a future war between the United States and China that takes place in the eponymous year, much like Peter Singer’s Ghost Fleet. Admiral Stavridis had a highly distinguished military
Facebook Sovereignty
Neal Stephenson’s classic 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash depicts a future United States in which all forms of hierarchical authority have collapsed and each suburban subdivision has become its own burbclave requiring visas and passports to enter. There is a character named Raven who is untouchable for crimes he
A Highway in Montenegro and the Struggle with China
While we are on the subject of infrastructure, I want to take a moment to talk about how a highway in little Montenegro is playing out in the larger geopolitical struggle with China. Montenegro is the smallest country in the Balkans, with a population of just over 600,000. It
Freedom to Fail
In my recent post on bureaucratic autonomy, I noted how the CDC was too risk averse during the Covid crisis. As Michael Lewis explained, this tendency stretched all the way back to the Ford Administration, when the CDC director was blamed for alarmism regarding a possible swine flu epidemic. The
