Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
1. I think quality homes in good locations will be extremely valuable. Those could be taxed more. You could call that a wealth tax, but arguably it is closer to a “housing services tax.”
2. You could put higher consumption taxes on items the wealthy purchase to a disproportionate degree. Paintings and yachts, and so on. Tom Holden argues: “In a world in which capital is essentially the only input to production, taxing capital reduces the growth rate of the economy. Whereas at present capital taxes have only level effects. So if anything, capital taxes will become less desirable as the labour share falls.”
3. I think the amount of money spent on health care will go up a lot. And people will live much longer, which will further boost the amount spent on health care. Taxing health care more is the natural way to address fiscal problems. Some people will fly abroad for their knee surgeries, but for a long time most health care will be consumed nearby, even in a strong AI world. If the way we keep the budget sane is to have people die at 95 instead of 97, there may be some positive social externalities from the shorter life spans. We also could use some of that money for birth subsidies.
4. As a more general point, capital will not be a perfect substitute for labor, or anything close to that, anytime soon.
5. Final incidence of the AI revolution is not just about the degree of substability of capital for labor. It is also about supply and demand elasticities in goods and services markets. For instance, to the extent AI makes various services much cheaper, real wages are rising not falling. That may or may not be the dominant effect, but do not assume too quickly that wages simply fall.
5b. It is not an equilibrium for capital to simply “have all the goodies.” Let’s say that Simon Legree, using advanced AI, can produce all the world’s output using a single watt of energy. And no one else with an AI company can produce anything to compete with that (this already sounds implausible, right?). If Simon simply hoards all that output, he has no profit, though I guess he can cure his own case of the common cold. The prices for that output have to fall so it can be purchased by someone else. The nature of the final equilibrium here is unclear, but again do not assume all or even most of the returns will stay with capital. That is almost certainly not the case.
Addendum: Here is some follow-up from Dwarkesh. I think he is talking about a world very different from our own, as there is talk of ownership of galaxies. That said, many other people wish to implement his ideas sooner than that.
Private equity firms sold companies to themselves at a record rate this year, making use of a controversial tactic to hold on to assets as managers struggled to find buyers or list their investments.
The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account
The word “capitalism” originated in France in the 1840s, but the system is much older. Sven Beckert starts the story in the port of Aden in 1150...
A Brief History Of The Spreadsheet
HackADay: “We noted that Excel turned 40 this year. That makes it seem old, and today, if you say “spreadsheet,” there’s a good chance you are talking about an Excel spreadsheet, and if not, at least a program that can read and produce Excel-compatible sheets.
Next I was pleased to see my post in which I explain some standard economics but in a deeper, more fundamental way than is usually done: One of my favorite posts of the year
if you read a book in 2025—just one book—you belong to an endangered species. Like honeybees and red wolves, the population of American readers, Lector americanus, has been declining for decades. The most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, from 2022, found that fewer than half of Americans had read a single book in the previous 12 months; only 38 percent had read a novel or short story. A recent study from the University of Florida and University College London found that the number of Americans who engage in daily reading for pleasure fell 3 percent each year from 2003 to 2023.
This decline is only getting steeper. Over the past decade, American students’ reading abilities have plummeted, and their reading habits have followed suit. In 2023, just 14 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day, down from 27 percent a decade earlier. A growing share of high-school and even college students struggle to read a book cover to cover.
Educators and policy makers have been agonizing about this trend line for decades, but they haven’t managed to change it. Now some are trying a new tactic: If people won’t read books because they enjoy it, perhaps they can be persuaded to do it to save democracy. The International Publishers Association, which represents publishers in 84 countries, has spent the past year promoting the slogan “Democracy depends on reading,” arguing that “ambitious, critical, reflective reading remains one of the few spaces where citizens can rehearse complexity, recover attention and cultivate the inner freedoms that public freedoms require.”
The problem with these kinds of arguments isn’t that they are wrong; it’s that they don’t actually persuade anyone to read more, because they misunderstand why people become readers in the first place. Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society. It’s a utilitarian argument for what should be a personal passion.
It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.
One of my strongest early memories of reading comes from fifth grade, when I was so engrossed in a book that I read right through a spelling test without noticing it was happening. I remember this incident partly because I was afraid I would get in trouble. But I think the real reason it stays in my memory after 40 years was the feeling of uncanniness. The time that had passed in the classroom had not passed for me; in a real sense I was in another world, the world of the book.
Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive. Reading is not profitable; it doesn’t teach you any transferable skills or offer any networking opportunities. On the contrary, it is an antisocial activity in the most concrete sense: To do it you have to be alone, or else pretend you’re alone by tuning out other people. Reading teaches you to be more interested in what’s going on inside your head than in the real world.
Anyone who was a bookish child could probably tell a similar story to mine. Marcel Proust tells one in Swann’s Way, the first volume of his epic novel In Search of Lost Time, when he writes about reading on summer afternoons in the country and not hearing the church bell.
Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour which I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence.
In this passage, the ability to fall so deeply under the spell of a book seems like a blessing. But as the novel goes on, Proust’s narrator shows that his sensitivity to books—and later to music and art—is an expression of the same qualities that make him unfit for life and relationships. He is so susceptible to the poetry of place names that when he visits the actual places, he is always disappointed. His hyperawareness of what is going on inside his mind makes him an egotist; other people exist for him as providers of emotional stimuli, not as real individuals with their own minds and desires.
As a rule, if you’re looking for evidence that reading makes you a better world citizen, the last place you’ll find it is the work of great writers. They know too much about literature to idealize it the way educators do. In fact, some of the greatest novels are about how reading ruins lives—starting with the book often considered the first modern novel, Don Quixote. Cervantes’s comic hero is addicted to “reading books of chivalry,” until “his fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense.” Convinced that he is a character in a novel—which, of course, he is—he embarks on a series of knightly adventures that go laughably and pathetically wrong.
Centuries later, the heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary makes the same mistake, with more tragic consequences. Emma Bovary is addicted to reading—Flaubert writes that, as a teenager, she “made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.” When she gets married and finds that she doesn’t love her husband the way novels had led her to expect, she turns to adultery “to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.” But what is beautiful in books turns out to be ugly in life, and Emma’s attempt to live like the heroine of a romance ends in ruin and suicide.
After Madame Bovary was published, in 1856, its frank depiction of sexual immorality got Flaubert prosecuted in Paris for obscenity. He was acquitted, and the attempt to censor the novel only made it more popular, just as would happen in the 20th century with Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Today, all of these books are considered classics, which means that most of us encounter them only in the classroom, as objects of dutiful study.
If we want to keep reading from going extinct, then the best thing we could do is tell young people what so many great writers readily admit: Literature doesn’t make you a better citizen or a more successful person. A passion for reading can even make life more difficult. And you don’t cultivate a passion for the sake of democracy. You do it for the thrill of staying up late to read under the covers by flashlight, unable to stop and hoping no one finds out.
“In the woods where snow is thick, bars of sunlight lay like pale fire.”
🔥 Catherine Mansfield
“But its the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”
This quote, "thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day," is from
Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations, reflecting on how a single, significant event (like meeting Miss Havisham) sets off a chain reaction of life-altering experiences, good or bad, that shape one's destiny. It emphasizes the profound impact of seemingly small moments and chance encounters in creating our life's complex story.
Key Idea:
The Power of the First Link: The quote uses the metaphor of a chain (made of iron or gold, thorns or flowers) to show that everything that follows—the good (gold/flowers) and the bad (iron/thorns)—stems from that initial, pivotal moment, linking everything together.
Context in Great Expectations:
This sentiment reflects the protagonist Pip's realization about how his entire life's trajectory changed after his first encounter with the eccentric Miss Havisham on a particular "memorable day," leading to his "great expectations".
“My books are teachers but also companions who know more than I do, and who in the long run wish me well. I would no sooner get rid of them than I would an old friend.” - NPR
Reading is down “thanks in large part to the number of digital distractions competing for our limited attention.” Ironically, these podcasts might help fix that. - The New York Times
“You could be anybody of any kind of background. And for basically the equivalent of a dollar or two, you could be educated. You didn't have to be in a structure. You didn't have to be an elitist.” And now? That era is over. -
Like maple syrup, frankincense is harvested by tapping the sap of a tree, in this case several varieties of the Boswellia tree, which grows in the Horn of Africa. Those trees — all wild; for whatever reasons, nobody farms Boswellia — are threatened by climate change, pest infestation, local conflict, and, above all, overharvesting....
The list of small deformities passed unrecorded In the stupor of heredity, Like our weather, Clouding over the tiny barn Where he said he saw Judas hanging Behind the old tractor But it was the Swensby boy in a blue and yellow plaid shirt And no note. He went screaming Judas into the cornfield And couldn’t be hushed until evening. Oh God the failure of prayers in the idiot days Of summer behind the goldenrod, Dusty on my hands; scattering doubts like the dandelions Turned white and blown to seed— More doubts and more prayers Asking God not to hide his face: The face of our weather, immense and old, Covering the sky with clouds to smother the moon: A small oval, like the small pale face of Jesus In the blue book on the table with one unsteady leg. Look at the sky, Marit, Look at the bland green behind the leaves’ paralysis In the minutes when panic is suspended In an estranged color, Before the cellar door is raised And we descend into the air Preserving canned goods, Before the prayers in the damp on the cold concrete And long before the rain. Inga with a withered hand waves it over the uprooted maple Where the swing hung for twelve years And where we played the fields were an ocean And the tree a ship, Before the mosquitoes came at about nine And we fled in to cards or stories upstairs: Matching suits as one moth tries the screen And flies for the bulb A puny tremor of white over the grey mattress Where you sat naked on a Friday that summer. I fingered the scar on your hip in the empty house And whispered anyway: Our clandestine music in muggy weather During a walk Past the still green grapes and the clothesline With one pair of socks and an apron; Belated spectres of surprise in the night, Belonging to no one, except the heat And our tipsy inclination. Those hours were unmartyred, Almost unspent, Requiring the same effort as a dream When the scenery becomes illegible, And I forgot the ache of familiarity in the outlines Of the rainwater barrels and the pump And I concentrated on the stars, The dot to dot of the big and little dipper. But they began to die as the storm Gathered for the drowning. Turn off the lights so I can’t see your face, Hide your prints made in the mud With your bare feet between the zinnias and the columbine So they never reach morning, And let me have your scent only. When the hidden sun was just giving pink to the sky You pressed me into a corner behind the door And traced with your finger The large violet birthmark on the left side of my face.
In 1962, Elizabeth Bishop predicted that John Berryman would be "all the rage" in 100 years. His posthumous reception has been more complicated... more »
During the 1890s, astronomers were in a state of epistemic turmoil over the prospect of life on Mars. Turns out they saw what they wanted to see... more »
Anthony Appiah: “I don’t think encouraging people to resent everything they think is a moral mistake made by everybody else is a good way to prepare yourself for a happy life”... more »
What explains the success of Colson Whitehead, Jennifer Egan, and Kazuo Ishiguro? Publishers want literary fiction that looks like genre fiction... more »
“What if the identity politics undergirding “left ‘cancel culture’” was always pretty much the same as the identity politics of offended Christians?”... more »
