Henry George foresaw San Francisco’s housing crisis. His solution is still the way forward: a bold developmentalist orientation, starting with a land value tax to incentivize denser building.

Jonah Bennett and Wolf Tivy interview Sean Pawley on his work developing a new bank in East Africa and how Rwanda has developed under a Singapore-style model since 1994.

Since the Cultural Revolution, China has feared and suppressed mass mobilization. But the coronavirus crisis is revealing this strategy’s fragility. The ghost of French thinker Gustave Le Bon haunts both the CCP and its discontented rivals.

Wolf Tivy interviews Ben Landau-Taylor and Oberon Dixon-Luinenburg on state-directed industrialization, the relationship between economics and political power, and why we should care about the development of machine tools.

South Korea’s bold story of state-led development is how every wealthy country on Earth has industrialized. State capacity is necessary to coordinate long-term industrial investments.

Chinese political theorist Jiang Shigong, accused of acting as the Party’s black hand in Hong Kong, has been quietly building a vision for a new world order that appears tolerant of difference—but with Chinese power at its center.

I originally planned a literary excursion to famously stable Chile. Instead, I came to a country engulfed in protests, where trains pass by the wreckage without a word. From Santiago and Valparaiso to the Atacama Desert, I delved into a conflict for the future.

Ash Milton interviews Jason Crawford about the development of progress studies as a new field of research and community.

Civility is critical to collective self-government. But the formal structure of self-government has no way to maintain it against political division and private interest. Civility can only be restored by some outside intervention.

Jonah Bennett and Wolf Tivy discuss why the bachelor’s degree is the new citizenship, and what it would take to actually build a status-generating alternative to the university.

Wolf Tivy and Pasha Kamyshev discuss Pasha’s latest article on AI grand strategy, and the deeper foundations of the problem: we are building digital totalitarianism, but we don’t know how to reconcile that with creating a good society.

The locus of legitimate authority in the American state is increasingly unclear. A reconfiguration of Marxist thought on the state reveals how elites interact with it, and also the state’s power to shape the elite itself.

There are times in politics where top-down, elite-driven mandates are necessary for the common good. Building communities is not one of them.

The current American AI strategy is disorganized and unambitious. With no real innovation on the strategy front, the U.S. is just playing not to lose.

Universities have endured plague, population collapse, scandal, and even outlasted nations. Despite proclamations of the university system’s death, one thing is certain: it’s not going anywhere.

Ash Milton discusses his review of economist Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Value of Everything with Jonah Bennett and Wolf Tivy.

Ash Milton reviews Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Value of Everything. Mazzucato’s work confronts an overreaching financial sector and provides a powerful case for rebuilding state capacity.

Facebook’s global payment system, Libra, would usurp the role of the dollar, but it doesn’t have the hegemonic military, historical moment, or political utility to make that viable.