How Cheaply Could We Build High-Speed Rail?

At the end of April, the Transit Costs Project released a report: it’s called How to Build High-Speed Rail on the Northeast Corridor. As the name suggests, the authors of the report had a simple goal: the stretch of the US from DC and Baltimore through Philadelphia to New York and up to Boston, the densest stretch of the country. It’s an ideal location for high-speed rail. How could you actually build it — trains that get you from DC to NYC in two hours, or NYC to Boston in two hours — without breaking the bank?

That last part is pretty important. The authors think you could do it for under $20 billion dollars. That’s a lot of money, but it’s about five times less than the budget Amtrak says it would require. What’s the difference? How is it that when Amtrak gets asked to price out high-speed rail, it gives a quote that much higher?

We brought in Alon Levy, transit guru and the lead author of the report, to answer the question, and to explain a bunch of transit facts to a layman like me. Is this project actually technically feasible? And, if it is, could it actually work politically? (...)

 I’m excited for this conversation, largely because although I'm not really a transit nerd, I enjoyed this report from you and your colleagues at the Transit Costs Project. But it's not really written for people like me. I'm hoping we can translate it for a more general audience.

The report was pretty technical. We wrote the original Transit Costs Project report about the construction cost of various urban rail megaprojects. So we were comparing New York and Boston projects with a selection of projects elsewhere: Italian projects, some Istanbul subway and commuter rail tunnels, the Stockholm subway extension, and so on.

Essentially the next step for me was to look at how you would actually do it correctly in the US, instead of talking about other people's failures. That means that the report on the one hand has to go into broad things, like coordination between different agencies and best practices. But also it needs to get into technical things: what speed a train can go on a specific curve of a specific radius at a specific location. That’s the mood whiplash in the report, between very high-level and very low-level.

I think you guys pulled it off very well. Let's get into it —  I'll read a passage from the intro:

“Our proposal's goal is to establish a high-speed rail system on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington. As the Corridor is also used by commuter trains most of the way… the proposal also includes commuter rail modernization [speeding up trains], regularizing service frequency, and… the aim is to use already committed large spending programs to redesign service.”

As a result, you think we could get high-speed rail that brings both the Boston–New York City trip and the New York City–Washington trip under two hours. You'd cut more than a third of the time off both those trips.

And here’s the kicker: you argue that the infrastructure program would total about $12.5 billion, and the new train sets would be under $5 billion. You're looking at a $17–18 billion project. I know that's a big sticker price in the abstract, but it's six to eight times cheaper than the proposals from Amtrak for this same idea. That’s my first question: Why so cheap?

First of all, that $18 billion is on top of money that has already been committed. There are some big-ticket tunnels that are already being built. One of the things that people were watching with the election was if the new administration was going to try to cancel the Gateway Tunnel, but they seem to have no interest in doing so. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy talks about how there’s a lot of crime on the New York City subway, and how liberals want people to ride public transportation more and to drive less, but I have not seen any attacks on these pre-existing projects. So, as far as I’m concerned, they’re done deals.

The second thing is that along the length of the Northeast Corridor, this investment is not all that small. It’s still less than building a completely new greenfield line. With the Northeast Corridor, most of the line pre-exists; you would not need to build anything de novo. The total investment that we’re prescribing in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and most of Maryland is essentially something called a track-laying machine.

The Northeast Corridor has this problem: Let’s say that you have a line with a top speed of 125 mph, and the line has six very sharp curves that limit the trains to 80 mph. If those six curves are all within a mile of each other, there’s one point in the middle of the line where you have six 80 mph curves. That couple-mile stretch is 80 mph, while the rest of the line is 125. Now, what happens if these curves are evenly spaced along the line?

You have a way longer commute, right?

Yes. If you have to decelerate to 80 mph and back five times, that’s a lot slower. That’s the problem in the Northeast Corridor: there are faster and slower segments. Massachusetts is faster. Rhode Island is mostly fast. Connecticut is slow. If you have a line that’s slow because you have these restrictions in otherwise fast territory, then you fix them, and you’ve fixed the entire line. The line looks slow, but the amount of work you need to fix it is not that much.

The Northeast Corridor (red is stretches with commuter rail)

Most of the reason the Northeast Corridor is slow is because of the sharp curves. There are other fixes that can be done, but the difficult stuff is fixing the sharp curves. The area with the sharpest curves is between New Haven and southern Rhode Island. The curves essentially start widening around the point where you cross between Connecticut and Rhode Island, and shortly thereafter, in Rhode Island, it transitions into the fastest part of the Corridor.

In southeast Connecticut, the curves are sharp, and there’s no way to fix any of them. This is also the lowest-density part of the entire Northeast: I-95, for example, only has four lanes there, while the rest of the way, it has at least six. I-95 there happens to be rather straight, so you can build a bypass there. The cost of that bypass is pretty substantial, but that’s still only about one-sixth of the corridor. You fix that, and I’m not saying you’ve fixed everything, but you’ve saved half an hour.

Your proposal is not the cheapest possible high-speed rail line, but I want to put it in context here. In 2021, there was a big proposal rolled out by the Northeast Corridor Commission, which was a consortium of states, transit providers, New Jersey Transit, Amtrak, and federal transportation agencies. Everybody got in on this big Connect Northeast Corridor (Connect NEC) plan, and the top line number was $117 billion, seven times your proposal. And this is in 2021 dollars.

They didn’t think that they could do Boston to New York and New York to DC in two hours each, either. There are two different reasons for their high price tags. The first reason is that they included a lot of things that are just plain stupid.

For example, theirs involved a lot of work on Penn Station in New York. Some of it is the Gateway Project, so that money is committed already, but they think that they need a lot beyond the tunnel. They have turned Gateway into a $40 or $50 billion project. I’m not going to nitpick the Gateway spending, although I’m pretty sure it could be done for much cheaper, but they think they need another $7 billion to rebuild Penn Station, and another $16 billion to add more tracks.

And you don’t think that’s necessary.

No. We ran some simulations on the tracks, and it turns out that the Penn Station that currently exists, is good enough — with one asterisk — even if you ran twice as much service. You can’t do that right now because, between New Jersey and New York Station, there is one tunnel. It has two tracks, one in each direction. They run 24–25 trains per hour at the peak. This is more or less the best that can be done on this kind of infrastructure. (...)

Unfortunately, they think Penn Station itself can’t handle the doubled frequency and would need a lot of additional work. Amtrak thinks that it needs to add more tracks by condemning an entire Midtown Manhattan block south of Penn Station called Block 780. They’re not sure how many tracks: I’ve seen between 7 and 12.

To be clear, the number of additional tracks they need is 0, essentially because they’re very bad at operations.

Well, let’s talk about operations. You say one way to drive down the cost of high-speed rail is just better-coordinated operations for all the trains in the Corridor. The idea is that often fast trains are waiting for slow trains, and in other places, for procedural reasons, every train has to move at the speed of the slowest train that moves on that segment.

What’s the philosophical difference between how you and the rail managers currently approach the Corridor?

The philosophical difference is coordinating infrastructure and operations. Often you also coordinate which trainsets you’re going to buy. This is why the proposal combines policy recommendations with extremely low-level work, including timetables to a precision of less than a minute. The point of infrastructure is to enable a service. Unless you are a very specific kind of infrastructure nerd, when you ride a train, you don’t care about the top speed, you don’t care about the infrastructure. You care about the timetable. The total trip time matters. Nobody rides a TGV to admire all the bridges they built on the Rhone.

I think some people do!

I doubt it. I suspect that the train goes too fast to be a good vantage point.

But as I said, you need 48 trains per hour worth of capacity between New Jersey or Manhattan. You need to start with things like the throughput you need, how much you need to run on each branch, when each branch runs, how they fit together. This constrains so much of your planning, because you need the rail junctions to be set up so that the trains don’t run into each other. You need to set up the interlockings at the major train stations in the same way. When you have fast and slow trains in the same corridor, you need to write timetables so that the fast trains will not be unduly delayed.

This all needs to happen before you commit to any infrastructure. The problem is that Connect NEC plans (Connect 2035, 2037) are not following that philosophy. They are following another philosophy: Each agency hates the other agencies. Amtrak and the commuter rail agencies have a mutually abusive relationship. There’s a lot of abuse from Amtrak to various commuter rail operators, and a lot of abuse by certain commuter rail operators, especially Metro North and Connecticut DOT against Amtrak. If you ask each agency what they want, they’ll say, “To get the others out of our hair.” They often want additional tracks that are not necessary if you just write a timetable.

To be clear, they want extra tracks so that they don’t have to interact with each other?

Exactly. And this is why Amtrak, the commuter railways, and the Regional Plan Association keep saying that the only way to have high-speed rail in the Northeast Corridor is to have an entirely separate right of way for Amtrak, concluding with its own dedicated pair of tunnels to Penn Station in addition to Gateway.

They’re talking about six tracks, plus two tracks from Penn Station to Queens and the Bronx, with even more urban tunneling. The point is that you don’t need any of that. Compromising a little on speed, the trip times I’m promising are a bit less than four hours from Boston to Washington. That’s roughly 180 kilometers an hour [~110 mph]. To be clear, this would be the slowest high-speed line in France, Spain, or Japan, let alone China. It would probably be even with the fastest in Germany and South Korea. It’s not Chinese speed. For example, Rep Moulton was talking about high-speed rail a couple of months ago, and said, “This is America. We need to be faster. Why not go 200, 250 mph?” He was talking about cranking up the top speed. When we were coming up with this report, we were constantly trying to identify how much time a project would save, and often we’d say, “This curve fix will speed up the trains by 20 seconds, but for way too much hassle and money.” The additional minutes might be too expensive. Twenty seconds don’t have an infinite worth. (...)

I want to go back to something you said earlier. You were contrasting the aesthetic of this proposal with Representative Moulton’s proposal, who wants our top speeds to be faster than Chinese top speeds. How do you get voters to care about — and I mean this descriptively — kinda boring stuff about cant angles?

Voters are not going to care about the cant angle efficiency on a curve. They’re not going to care about approach speed. However, I do think that they will if you tell voters, “Here's the new timetable for you as commuters. It looks weird, but your commute from Westchester or Fairfield County to Manhattan will be 20 minutes faster.”

With a lot of these reports, the issue is often that there are political trade-offs. The idea of what you should be running rail service for, who you should be running it for, that ended up drifting in the middle of the 20th century.

But also, the United States is so far from the technological frontier that even the very basics of German or Swiss rail planning, like triangle planning of rolling stock/infrastructure/operations, that's not done. Just doing that would be a massive increase in everything: reliability, frequency, speed, even in passenger comfort.

 The main rail technology conference in the world, it's called InnoTrans, it's in Berlin every two years. I hear things in on-the-floor interviews with vendors that people in the United States are just completely unaware of.

by Santi Ruiz and Alon Levy, Statecraft |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Fascinating stuff! (I think, anyway). And, for something completely different, see: How to Be a Good Intelligence Analyst (Statecraft):]

***

I think the biggest misconception about the community and the CIA in particular is that it's a big organization. It really isn't. When you think about overstuffed bureaucracies with layers and layers, you're describing other organizations, not the CIA. It is a very small outfit relative to everybody else in the community. (...)

What kinds of lessons were consistently learned in the Lessons Learned program?

There's an argument that the lessons learned are more accurately described as lessons collected or lessons archived, rather than learned.

Because learning institutionally is hard?

Learning institutionally is hard. Not only is it hard to do, but it's also hard to measure and to affect. But, if nothing else, practitioners became more thoughtful about the profession of intelligence. To me, that was really important. The CIA is well represented by lots of fiction, from Archer to Jason Bourne. It's always good for the brand. Even if we look nefarious, it scares our adversaries. But it's super far removed from reality. Reality in intelligence looks about as dull as reality in general. Being a really good financial or business analyst, any of those kinds of tasks, they're all working a certain part of your brain that you can either train and improve, or ignore and just hope for the best.

I don't think any of those are dull, but I take your point about perception vs. reality.

I don't mean to suggest those are dull, but generally speaking, they don't run around killing assassins. It's a lot less of that.

Why Putin Thinks Russia Has the Upper Hand

Why Putin Thinks Russia Has the Upper Hand (NYT)

Vladimir V. Putin exuded confidence. Sitting back, surrounded by foreign dignitaries, the Russian president explained the futility of Ukrainian resistance. Russia had the advantage on the battlefield, as he saw it, and by rejecting his demands, Ukraine risked even more for peace.

“Keep at it, then, keep at it. It will only get worse,” Mr. Putin said at an economic forum in June, as he taunted the Ukrainian government. “Wherever a Russian soldier sets his foot, it’s ours,” he added, a smirk animating his face.

His self-assurance is born out of the Russian military’s resurgence.

In the depths of 2022, his underequipped forces were disoriented, decimated and struggling to counter Ukraine’s hit-and-run tactics and precision-guided weapons. Instead of abandoning the invasion, Mr. Putin threw the full strength of the Russian state behind the war, re-engineering the military and the economy with a singular goal of crushing Ukraine. In his push, the country revamped recruitment, weapons production and frontline tactics.

This is now a war of attrition favoring Russia, which has mobilized more men and arms than Ukraine and its Western backers. While their casualties are mounting, Russian forces are edging forward across most of the 750-mile front, strengthening Mr. Putin’s resolve to keep fighting until he gets the peace deal he wants.

via:
Image: Production of the Geran-2 drones at the Yelabuga plant; Russian television.]

Disruptor 16: Carbon Robotics

Seattle-based Carbon Robotics offers an AI-powered laser weeder that attaches to farmers’ tractors and looks like a space-age combine, except that it weeds instead of harvests.

Supplied with a database of 40 million images, the AI-powered agtech system shoots lasers as it passes over rows of crops, with machine learning enabling it to recognize weeds and kill them at their base using a laser, replacing the need for both manual labor and herbicides. The company says it has destroyed more than 15 billion weeds on more than 100 crops.

Carbon Robotics says its approach to weeding increases yields, quality and consistency, and helps preserve topsoil. The latter is a growing global concern, as experts estimate most of the world’s topsoil has been degraded to the point that its agriculturally usable life is measured in decades. (...)

Cost of agtech upgrades, and unproven technology compared to conventional farming approaches, is an issue. Laser weeder costs can run over $1 million, based on public reports, but farmers that have used the technology have endorsed it.

Recently, Carbon Robotics debuted the LaserWeeder G2, a smaller, less expensive version of its technology, though still a significant investment for many farmers in a business that’s made inherently risky due to weather and the volatility of global commodities markets. (...)

Carbon Robotics is growing its manufacturing in eastern Washington State, with a recent 70% headcount increase to about 200, and it ultimately has plans to grow its tech applications beyond farming. “The real driver is having AI systems doing things in the real world. Will Carbon Robotics always be in the ag industry? We’ll probably do things well outside it,” said Mikesell in an interview with GeekWire.

by Elizabeth MacBride, CNBC | Read more:
Image: Igor Gnedo, Antonina Lepore & Adrianne Paerels
[ed. Weedtech. From CNBC's Disruptor 50 list. Number one is, of course, Anduril (drones, surveillance, other AI-enabled weaponry - defense tech sector). We're screwed.]

From Babylon to Wall Street – How Bankers Make You Poor

Michael Hudson has been expanding his historical window, from the ancient history of abolition of debt jubilees, which had prevented the rise of oligarchs, to the increased power over times of creditors, or in lay parlance, bankers. He’s added in the re-establishment of the influence of lenders in medieval times, thanks to the role of the Catholic Church in the Crusades and the accompanying rise of banking to provide war finance. This interview with Jonathan Brown reviews this trajectory, focusing on the way that debt burdens rise over time and amount to destructive rentierism.

Jonathan: You’ve often spoken about your aha [00:01:00] moments when delving into ancient economic history. I just wonder what have been some of your profound or unexpected discoveries about studying ancient civilizations like Sumer or Babylonia?

Michael Hudson: My, entire life, ever since I became an economist in, the 1960s was to realize that debt was the major problem that was going to be growing exponentially and stifling society. And it was clear that debt grew at compound interest faster than the economy was able to grow and pay the debts.

I spent, quite a few, decades warning about the fact that the global south could not pay the Dollarized debts, as indeed it didn’t in the 1970s. There was such a reaction to what I was saying, such a refusal by the economics profession to look at debt as being important, that I decided [00:02:00] to look at the whole history of how different societies had coped with debts.

And I began to write a history of debt, after I left the United Nations in 1979 after warning that there was going to be a, third world, Latin American debt crash in a few years, as indeed there was in 1982. I got all the way back to Greece and Rome, and then into the biblical, and came across the jubilee year. (...)

So I began to write up my ideas, shared them with a friend of mine, Alex Marshak, a professor at Harvard. He introduced me to the head of Harvard’s anthropology and archeology department. I was made a research fellow at the Peabody Museum by Carl Lambert Klowski. I realized that there was this wealth of Babylonian, Sumerian, and near [00:04:00] Eastern, academic records that economists had completely ignored.

And the reasons that our economists ignored it was that the way that society created its economic relationships were completely different from those that they ended up with after Greece and Rome. And so I realized that I can’t simply write this all up myself because I’m an economist, not an Assyriaologist.

So at Harvard we decided to organize a group of scholars who were specialists in Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Judaic and other Middle Eastern records and we decided to do three volumes.

by Jonathan Brown and Michael Hudson, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed.  See also: The Bull Market for Economists Is Over. It’s an Ominous Sign for the Economy (NYT). Thinkng of commissioning some new t-shirts: Cognitive Dissonance is Killing Me ©]

***

"For decades, earning a Ph.D. in economics has been a nearly foolproof path to a lucrative career. Even as bearers of advanced degrees in history, English or anthropology struggled to find gainful employment, the popularity of economics as an undergraduate major created plenty of tenure-track teaching positions, while government agencies snatched up Ph.D. economists in bulk. Those looking for even larger paychecks could turn to tech companies, Wall Street and consulting firms, which bid up the price of economists as if they were a bespoke cryptocurrency.

Last year, the average base salary for newly hired economics professors at major research universities was more than $150,000, according to the American Economic Association, and their compensation swelled to about $200,000 once bonuses and summer pay were included. As recently as the 2023-24 academic year, the employment rate for Ph.D. economists within a few months of graduation was 100 percent, said John Cawley, the chair of the association’s Committee on the Job Market, citing the group’s surveys. Job satisfaction topped 85 percent.

Those glory days seem to be ending. Universities and nonprofits have scaled back hiring amid declining state budgets and federal funding cuts. At the same time, the Trump administration has laid off government economists and frozen hiring for new ones. (...)

Tech companies also have grown stingier, and their need for high-level economists — once seemingly insatiable — has waned. Other firms have slowed hiring in response to the economic uncertainty introduced by President Trump’s tariffs and the possibility that artificial intelligence will replace their workers, even if those workers have a doctoral degree.

“The advent of A.I. is also impacting the market for high-skilled labor,” said Betsey Stevenson, a labor economist at the University of Michigan, in an email. “So the whole thing is kind of a mess.”

Of course, if it were only some egghead economists scrambling to find work, that might be not be terribly consequential. But the same forces bedeviling economists are crimping employment for other highly trained scientists and social scientists, as well as for many recent college graduates, whose jobless rate has been unusually high for an otherwise strong economy.

The drop in government payrolls and federal funding for universities and nonprofits alone is a major problem, since they support two to three times as many jobs for college graduates as for those without degrees. In some cases, workers with Ph.D.s are displacing others with master’s or bachelor’s degrees.

Then there is the potential impact on the country’s future. Marcia McNutt, a geophysicist who is president of the National Academy of Sciences, said a sharp drop in the number of research jobs in the hard sciences and social sciences would send Ph.D.s abroad. Their flight will deprive the government of the brainpower it needs to perform basic functions and leave U.S. firms less innovative and competitive.

“U.S. industry is incredibly dependent on the training that is done in colleges and universities,” Dr. McNutt said. “When the top people go elsewhere, we’ll be left with the B team in America.”

~ The Bull Market for Economists Is Over. It’s an Ominous Sign for the Economy. Norm Scheiber

Silence on SNAP

Poverty and hunger will rise as a result of the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to the US federal “food stamps” program, according to experts. Low-income workers who rely on the aid are braced for dire consequences.

Katie Giede, a single mother and waitress in Conyers, Georgia, is one of the 42 million Americans who use the supplemental nutrition assistance program (Snap). Even with the maximum benefit permitted, she struggles to afford food for her and her child.

She makes $3 an hour plus tips at the fast-food chain Waffle House, where she has worked for 11 years. The company deducts meals from workers’ pay check per shift, regardless of whether they eat one or not.

“Our pay is already so little that we’re struggling with everything,” Giede told the Guardian. “Single mothers like myself are reliant upon the benefits like Snap and Medicaid. So when you go and you cut that as well, now you have mothers out here that are not only worried at night because they already can’t afford housing or a vehicle, but we’re also worried what is our kid is going to eat? Because we no longer have help.”

Giede said she received $450 a month for her and her child. She said working too many hours or receiving too much income was a constant concern, due to eligibility cut-offs.

According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, at the end of 2024, even the maximum Snap benefit would not cover the cost of a modestly priced meal in 99% of all counties in the US.

“I dread that trip to the grocery store every week, because you have to sit down and you really have to budget,” said Giede. “Every time you go, you’re having to make the choice between something that’s healthy or something that’s cheaper, just so you can get enough to last all week.

“There are so many people in this country that rely on these benefits, and with these cuts, half of the people that are surviving right now off of this are going to lose their benefits. That’s not even just people not eating a little bit. They’re already not eating enough, so we’re going to lose lives over this. It’s those of us at the bottom that are really feeling it.”

Waffle House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” set the stage for significant cuts to Snap by shifting higher administrative costs to each state, expanding work reporting requirements and imposing restrictions on non-citizen eligibility.

Many lower-wage workers have grown more reliant on Snap in recent years. US food prices rose by 23.6% between 2020 and 2024, according to official data. While inflation has since moderated, grocery costs remain high.

As a result of the latest Snap changes, states will be responsible for 75% of administrative costs of handling the program from 2027, up from 50% cost-sharing with the federal government, which is likely to strain state budgets.

From 2028, for the first time states will be forced to pick up some of the multibillion-dollar bill for Snap benefits. The state of New York, for example, faces a budget impact of about $1.2bn, according to the Food Research and Action Center (Frac), a non-profit advocacy group.

While such shifting costs have raised fears that states will cut back Snap support, expanded work requirements have sparked concern that few people will be eligible. Analysis by the Urban Institute found about 22.3 million US families are set to lose some or all of their Snap benefits.

“This is a very targeted, well-thought-out plan of dismantling the Snap program that federal policy makers won’t take responsibility for, because it is the states, it is the governors who will have to cut resources for Snap, who will have to cut the program in order to say we can’t operate this because of what’s happening at the federal level,” said Gina Plata-Nino, Snap deputy director at the Frac.

“Snap is a very important ecosystem at the local level, at the state level and the federal level, because billions of dollars go into states, and this federal money supports local economies,” she added. “All of these proposals threaten this very delicate balance.”

The White House deferred comment to the office of management and budget, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

States across the US are braced for stark consequences. “We’re going to have worse hunger and ultimately, worse poverty,” said Seth DiStefano, policy outreach director at the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. “There are entire regions of West Virginia where there aren’t 20 hours a week [expanded Snap work requirement] of anything to apply for. What do you tell those families?

“We’re talking families with kids now that are going to be subjected to these harsh work reporting requirements. We’re talking folks in their 60s, literally in communities where there are no jobs, none, and ripping away the one outlet to their basic needs that’s available to them.”

Among the employers with the most workers reliant on Snap is Walmart, the largest private employer in the US, as much of its workforce receives only part-time hours.

Christina Gahagan, 66, has worked at Walmart for a decade in western New York at several stores. She is currently based at a store in Geneseo, New York.

“I would say at least 50% of the people in my store rely on food stamps to make ends meet for their families,” said Gahagan. “They’re always trying to figure out where the best deals are, coupon clipping at lunch and reading circulars to see who’s got the best deal on whatever, just to make their money stretch.” (...)

“Walmart is the largest employer in the US. We rival Amazon almost dollar for dollar in what we do. You would think a company like that could shell out a little bit more money per hour for associates in the store across the board, so that there aren’t people who are having to depend so heavily on public assistance.”

Walmart did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

by Michael Sainato, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Richard Levine/Alamy
[ed. No one wants to comment on a new bureaucracy to process and administer oversight requirements? Jobs! Remember who did this the next time you vote.]

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future

I didn’t write a letter last year. Rather, I wrote seven, all of which is new material.

They make up my book BREAKNECK: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. It’s driven by a few simple ideas. That Americans and Chinese are fundamentally alike: restless, eager for shortcuts, ultimately driving most of the world’s big changes. That their rivalry should not be reasoned through with worn-out terms from the past century like socialist, democratic, or neoliberal. And that both countries are tangles of imperfection, regularly delivering — in the name of competition — self-beatings that go beyond the wildest dreams of the other.

The simplest idea I present is that China is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in contrast with America’s lawyerly society, which brings a gavel to block almost everything, good and bad.

Breakneck begins with a bike ride I took from Guiyang to Chongqing in 2021. China’s fourth-poorest province, I was delighted to find, has much better infrastructure than California or New York, both wealthier by orders of magnitude. Five days of grueling climbs on stunning green mountains gave me glimpses of what socialism with Chinese characteristics really looks like. But there is more to the engineering state than tall bridges. The heart of the book concerns how badly Beijing goes off track when it engages in social engineering. My handy formulation of the Communist Party is that it is a Leninist Technocracy with Grand Opera Characteristics — practical until it collapses into the preposterous.

The idea of the lawyerly society became obvious when I returned to the U.S. in 2023. The Paul Tsai China Center (as I say in my acknowledgments) was the best possible place to write this book, not only because it’s so supportive, but also because it set me inside the Yale Law School. Elite law schools, now and in the past, fashion the easiest path for the ambitions to step into the top ranks of the American government. The dominance of lawyers in the American elite has helped transmute the United States into a litigious vetocracy. I believe that America cannot remain a great power if it is so committed to a system that works well mostly for the wealthy and well-connected.

The engineering state versus the lawyerly society is not a grand theory to explain absolutely everything about the U.S. and China. Rather, the book is rooted in my own experiences of living in China from 2017 to 2023. I offer this framework to make sense of the recent past and think about what might come next.

It helps to explain a number of things. For example, the trade war and the tech showdown. The U.S. has relied on legalisms — levying tariffs and designing an ever more exquisite sanctions regime — while China has focused on creating the future by physically building better cars, more beautiful cities, and bigger power plants. Though China has constructed roads and bridges abroad, it struggles to inspire global cultural appeal, because engineers aren’t smooth talkers and tend to censor whatever they can’t understand. The Chinese state is sometimes too rational, proceeding down a path that feels perfectly logical, until the country’s largest city is suddenly in a state of lockdown for months.

Breakneck will be published on August 26. I hope you’ll order this book. You can also send me an email if you would like a review copy for your publication or Substack, or to book me for speaking.

***

It’s a bit boring to write only a book announcement. This is also a space for me to reflect on the bookwriting process.

The hard part of bookwriting is the beginning, the middle, and the end. Each stage demands unrelated skills. The opening phases involve engaging an agent, beating ideas into the shape of a proposal (which typically stretch over 50 pages), and approaching a publisher. The long middle is the writing. The end is the mishmash of tasks related to revision, production, and promotion. Fortunately I had a superb agent and a faithful editor to navigate the first and third stages. Overall the process was more fun than I expected, such that I now actively encourage friends to pursue their own book ideas.

Writing is necessarily a solitary task. My usual process is to putter around until late evening, until I finally cannot bear to avoid the page any longer, at which point I spend a lot of time picking out appropriate music, and finally get to the task. I knew that could no longer be a sane approach for a lengthier writing project (not that it ever was). Every day I repeated my mantra to be a cool, calm, collected Canadian, through which I achieved a modest degree of discipline. I met my deadline.

I became a better writer over the course of the book. Breakneck, as I said, is seven annual letters. I thought I understood this format, but I still saw myself improving, such that the final chapter was much easier to write than the first. I felt my prose loosening and my confidence rising as I moved from chapter to chapter. Bookwriting is a bit like climbing a mountain: best not to look up too much at the beginning and feel daunted by the task ahead. When I had completed two-thirds of the book, I started feeling elated about how much I’ve written, which propelled me towards the end.

Writing is thinking. As I worked on my final chapter, I found myself reflecting on my Yunnan heritage. Yunnan is, in my estimation, China’s freest province: far away amid southwestern mountains, it has mostly escaped sustained attention from the imperial center, which would be attracted to greater wealth or restive minority issues. My parents both have deep Yunnan roots. They would have been in China’s middle class, only the concept did not really exist when they emigrated to Canada when I was seven. I’m glad to have had an upbringing in this economic backwater, which is undeveloped in part because it’s inflected by a bit of the suspicion of the state that is common to mountain peoples everywhere. Growing up in the periphery endowed me with greater skepticism of the state glories that Beijing chooses to celebrate and greater reluctance to participate in the competitive culture common in Shanghai or Shenzhen.

I wrote this book partly to sort out my own thoughts about China. It really was staggering to write about how many miles of roadways, how many new nuclear power plants, how much steel China has produced over the past four decades. China is a good operating model of abundance. I state clearly in the book that America doesn’t have to become China to build infrastructure; it would be sufficient to reach the construction cost levels of France, Japan, or Spain. Still, the U.S. should still study some aspects of China’s method: how do they build it? What are the tradeoffs? How do we learn? China has gotten a lot of things right with mass transit, plentiful housing, and functional cities.

The problem is that China’s leadership just can’t stop at physical engineering. Sooner or later, they treat the population as if it were another building material, to be moulded or torn apart as the circumstances demand. That’s why America shouldn’t look to China as the model. My favorite chapter concerned the one-child policy. I had been completely unprepared to study the brutality of its enforcement, which was only possible through mass sterilizations and forced abortions. At its peak in the 1980s, the one-child policy morphed into a campaign of rural terror meted out against female bodies, namely the mother and the cruelly discarded daughter.

Nearly all the letters are focused on China. The final one is about the United States. I concluded my book by writing about what my parents gained and lost with their emigration. They lost the chance to build wealth as part of China’s luckiest generation: urban residents born after 1960 who were able to acquire property or build businesses after the 2000s. But they would not trade that for their gain of living in the suburbs of Philly, which I find boring, but their friends find enviable. I also reflected on America’s own legacy as an engineering state, focused on two engineers: Robert Moses and Hyman Rickover. Too many parts of America feel like the well-preserved ruins of a once-great civilization. Americans should take a clearer look at the industrial achievements that are usually ignored and frequently scorned. (...)

I cooked a lot of fish as I wrote, in the Cantonese style: steaming a whole bronzino or a filet of sea trout for ten minutes, then drizzled with ginger, spring onion, soy sauce, and sizzling olive oil. My wife and I also planned a few writing retreats, in which we would park ourselves in new places to focus on food, exercise, and writing. After six years of intensively eating Chinese cuisines, I was also pleased to move into new culinary worlds. (...)

When I last visited Shanghai, at the end of 2024, I was surprised to feel that the average person might be eating worse than before. The trend of consumption downgrading has been real. Smart restaurants are no longer difficult to book. Sichuan and Hunan restaurants are taking over. A lot of the restaurant foods are prepared in centralized commissaries. Many more places focus more on deliveries than the sit-down experience. And there seems to be a trend of chain restaurants from third-tier cities moving to first-tier cities, offering slightly worse food at much cheaper prices.

The worst part is the influencer culture. China’s influencer culture is much more intense than America’s. It’s easy to see, in public spaces, how many people are glued to their phones. Anywhere charming, whether a café or a mountaintop, is full of people intently taking photos. It’s common to see Chinese couples or groups of friends barely interacting with each other over a meal, leaning over their phones. I remember having coffee once at the Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai, where a group of girls sat near me photographing each other over cakes for over an hour. Influencer culture has pushed restaurants to make dishes better photographed than tasted.

It doesn’t mean that China will fall behind America in food. No way. China retains a commanding lead, and it has so much vitality in smaller cities and the countryside. But I wonder whether China will maintain its culinary peaks, or if they will be corroded by consumer-driven homogenization and the priority of convenience over tastiness. On present trendlines, America is learning to get better, while China is slightly worse.

by Dan Wang |  Read more:

Image: Breakneck

[ed. I've been a fan of Dan's annual China summaries since discovering them back in 2021 (see here, here and here). When 2025 rolled around and none appeared I wrote and asked if he was still planning something. That's when he told me about this book. Definitely plan to get it when it's released.]

Elon’s Edsel

Tesla Cybertruck Is The Auto Industry’s Biggest Flop In Decades

The list of famous auto industry flops is long and storied, topped by stinkers like Ford’s Edsel and exploding Pinto and General Motors’s unsightly Pontiac Aztek crossover SUV. Even John Delorean’s sleek, stainless steel DMC-12, iconic from its role in the “Back To The Future” films, was a sales dud that drove the company to bankruptcy.

Elon Musk’s pet project, the dumpster-driving Tesla Cybertruck, now tops that list.

After a little over a year on the market, sales of the 6,600-pound vehicle, priced from $82,000, are laughably below what Musk predicted. Its lousy reputation for quality–with eight recalls in the past 13 months, the latest for body panels that fall off–and polarizing look made it a punchline for comedians. Unlike past auto flops that just looked ridiculous or sold badly, Musk’s truck is also a focal point for global Tesla protests spurred by the billionaire’s job-slashing DOGE role and MAGA politics.

“It’s right up there with Edsel,” said Eric Noble, president of consultancy CARLAB and a professor at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California (Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen, who styled Cybertruck for Musk, is a graduate of its famed transportation design program). “It’s a huge swing and a huge miss.”

Judged solely on sales, Musk’s Cybertruck is actually doing a lot worse than Edsel, a name that’s become synonymous with a disastrous product misfire. Ford hoped to sell 200,000 Edsels a year when it hit the market in 1958, but managed just 63,000. Sales plunged in 1959 and the brand was dumped in 1960. Musk predicted that Cybertruck might see 250,000 annual sales. Tesla sold just under 40,000 in 2024, its first full year. There’s no sign that volume is rising this year, with sales trending lower in January and February, according to Cox Automotive.

And Tesla’s overall sales are plummeting this year, with deliveries tumbling 13% in the first quarter to 337,000 units, well below consensus expectations of 408,000. The company did not break out Cybertruck sales, which is lumped in with the Model S and Model X, its priciest segment. But it’s clear Cybertruck sales were hurt this quarter by the need to make recall-related fixes, Ben Kallo, an equity analyst for Baird, said in a research note. Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The quarterly slowdown underscores the fact that when it comes to the Cybertruck, results are nowhere near the billionaire entrepreneur’s carnival barker claims.

“Demand is off the charts,” he crowed during a results call in November 2023, just before the first units started shipping to customers. “We have over 1 million people who have reserved the car.”

In anticipation of high sales, Tesla even modified its Austin Gigafactory so it could produce up to 250,000 Cybertrucks a year, capacity investments that aren’t likely to be recouped.

“They didn't just say they wanted to sell a lot. They capacitized to sell a lot,” said industry researcher Glenn Mercer, who leads Cleveland-based advisory firm GM Automotive. But the assumption of massive demand has proven foolhardy. And it failed to account for self-inflicted wounds that further stymied sales. Turns out the elephantine Cybertruck is either too large or non-compliant with some countries’ pedestrian safety rules, so there’s little opportunity to boost sales with exports.

“They haven’t sold a lot and it’s unlikely in this case that overseas markets can save them, even China that’s been huge for Tesla cars,” Mercer said. “It’s really just for this market.”

More than a decade before Cybertruck went into production, Musk hinted that Tesla would eventually do some kind of electric pickup. When he unveiled his design to the world for the first time, Musk was clear that he did not want a conventional aesthetic or even something that played with pickup looks a bit but was still familiar, the approach Rivian took with its R1T pickup.

“Pickup trucks have been the same for 100 years,” and Cybertruck “doesn’t look like anything else,” said Musk, who earlier that month had proudly told an audience at a conference for space entrepreneurs, “I do zero market research whatsoever.”

That would be an apt tagline for Musk’s preposterous pickup. “The spectacular failure of Cybertruck was a failure of empathy,” said CARLAB’s Noble, whose company helps carmakers develop products based on consumer research. “Everything from the bed configuration to the cab configuration to its performance and all sorts of pickup truck duty-cycle issues, it’s just not empathetic to a pickup truck buyer.”

Cybertruck’s distinctive look resulted from two key forces, said a person familiar with the development process, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. One was Musk’s passion for sci-fi designs. The other was an early decision to create a vehicle that didn’t need to be painted.

If Tesla opted not to paint the trucks, it wouldn’t need to install a new $200 million paintshop, a big potential cost savings. And it wouldn’t have to worry about EPA scrutiny from the harmful emissions and runoff those facilities often produce.

Ultimately, Musk opted for a stainless steel exterior, the same choice Delorean made for his ill-fated sports car four decades earlier. But because Musk isn’t a production engineer, he may not have fully appreciated the challenges it presents versus aluminum or composite materials, the person said. Aside from the fact that stainless steel shows handprints–a common gripe about kitchen appliances–it’s hard to bend and likes to snap back to its original shape, one of the reasons there have been problems with Cybertruck body panels.

“This is where I think they misconstrued the tradeoff,” Mercer said. “They drooled over not spending $200 million on a paint shop, but probably spent that much trying to get the stainless steel to work.” 

by Alan Ohnsman, Forbes | Read more:

Image: Fernando Capeto for Forbes; Photos by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images and Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

What Was Scattered Was Not Destroyed

Mega churches have replaced the Good News with a mission statement.

Here in Rockford, Illinois, a Rust Belt city well-acquainted with extraction and abandonment, that line isn’t satire. It’s an observation. You can’t drive across the east side without passing half a dozen colossal church buildings, their parking lots repaved more often than their theology. Inside, you’ll find stage lighting, fog machines, and sermons that sound suspiciously like quarterly business updates. If you drive west, over the Rock River, you’ll pass a dozen smaller sanctuaries. These are the old brick churches with crooked signage and overgrown hedges. The lights are off. The pews gather dust.

In my work as a therapist, I’ve sat with the shepherds of these flocks, who confess, quietly and often tearfully, that the Church is dying. Not changing. Dying. Some say it with a kind of weary relief, as if finally naming aloud what they’ve known for years, but didn’t have permission to speak. Others say it with resignation, their voices thin from holding up too much for too long. They speak of empty pews and aging congregations, of buildings they can no longer afford to heat, and the pressure to stay upbeat and innovate. Many of them have baptized, married, and buried three generations of the same families. What they grieve is not the loss of status or size, but the slow unraveling of something sacred, something that once held people together, and now struggles to hold at all. None of them say it flippantly because they’ve stayed, and love the flock, even as the pasture thins.

It reminds me of what’s happened to the land itself. This region was once a checkerboard of crop rotations and small farms that provided local goods and sustained families. Rockford made things that lasted. Spoken of now almost like mythology, this was the land of the monkey sock, the screw capital of the world, a manufacturing goliath built with many hands. It was a place of quarried limestone, used to build roads and homes with local stone and labor. Then the quarries closed. The factories shuttered. The fields gave way to monocrops, and the people were left to wander inside the skeleton of something that once provided. And now I see it happening again—this time in the sanctuary. Congregations are being mined for tithe, for clout, for spectacle. Rock bands and prosperity gospels work the crowd while the till stands open, not to offer, but to receive.

The Church has begun to mimic the economic logic of the industry that abandoned it. Build bigger. Consolidate. Extract. Move on. What follows isn’t meant to be a eulogy, exactly. It’s a reflection, maybe even a small lament. A slow walk around the ruins of Babel, with some help from Richard Rohr, Maslow, and a few thoughts from the therapy chair. There are still pockets of quiet faith out there. Faith with dirt under its fingernails, content to grow things instead of counting them. But it’s getting harder to hear that voice through the static. If the Tower of Babel was a warning label, we’ve peeled it off the pack and lit the match anyway.

As a therapist, I spend my days listening to people sift through the wreckage of their own lives. They are lives marked not just by trauma or loss, but by confusion. A kind of existential disorientation. They come in asking some of the same questions the builders must have asked when the mortar started to crumble: How did we get here? Why doesn’t anything feel solid anymore? Why doesn’t anyone understand me?

I used to think the Church could still be the place to hold those questions. Once upon a time, it was a vessel that held the complexity, the grief, the beauty, the doubt, and yes, the dogma too, but not as branding, and not as the product of a board meeting. But lately, it seems more interested in managing the brand. These days, the tower doesn’t just reach toward the heavens. It comes with WiFi and a gift shop. There’s a campus map in the foyer, a latte in your hand, and a QR code for online giving projected where the crucifix used to hang.

I’ve sat with pastors and priests in that same confusion, some who’ve grown sick from what they’re serving. “The church is dying,” they whisper. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they laugh in a way that doesn’t feel right. They’re caught in the middle of an institution that once held the sacred, and now can’t hold much of anything. Certainly not silence. Certainly not a mystery. And in therapy, I see what happens when people have nowhere to put their anguish. It metastasizes into panic, into addiction, into rage. The Church, when it was at its best, offered not just answers, but a place to ask. Now, it too speaks in bullet points and marketing copy.

The builders of Babel wanted to make a name for themselves. I see the same instinct in my consulting inbox: churches asking how to grow their footprint, expand their “reach,” capture a younger demographic. They aren’t offering peace. They’re optimizing for engagement. And what gets built in the end is impressive. But like all “Babels,” it can’t bear the weight of the human soul.

It’s here that the voice of Richard Rohr begins to matter. A Franciscan priest and spiritual writer, Rohr has become a quietly subversive figure in modern Christianity. His work challenges the institutional Church, not with rebellion, but with depth. He critiques its obsession with purity over transformation, certainty over mystery, and control over grace. Though Catholic by vocation, Rohr’s appeal crosses denominations. He has found a massive following among mainline Protestants, evangelicals, and Catholics in spiritual transition, those no longer satisfied with black-and-white answers, but still drawn to the sacred. He writes of descent, paradox, and the long arc of inner change, offering something few religious institutions still know how to hold: permission to fall apart without being lost.

Rohr says we grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right, not as license, but as invitation. The descent doesn’t excuse sin, but neither does it condemn the sinner. It opens the door to the kind of grace that breaks us open and remakes us from the inside. That’s a hard sell in a church culture obsessed with excellence, relevance, and strategic growth initiatives. Failure doesn’t trend. Paradox doesn’t preach. And yet, every mystic worth reading tells us the same thing: the way up is down. Rohr calls it “falling upward.” The idea that transformation doesn’t come from climbing higher but from being stripped of the ladders entirely. We come to wisdom not through conquest, but through surrender. Through the wilderness. Through the kind of quiet that makes you question every illusion you once knew with certainty.

This doesn’t play well on stage. It’s not sexy. You can’t build a satellite campus around it.

But it’s real.

The spiritual desert has always been the crucible where illusions die. In therapy, I see that too. People come in looking for solutions, but what they really need is space. A place to fall apart without being judged or fixed. A place to let go of the performance and admit they’re scared, angry, tired, or lost. Rohr’s genius is that he gives theological permission for that unraveling. He speaks of a God found in the tension between opposites, in the unresolved spaces, in the compost heap of your failed certainties. Rohr doesn’t offer escape. He offers depth, like good soil, not poured concrete. Somewhere beneath that depth runs living water, though not always visible from the surface. And depth, like good soil, takes time and rot. (...)

In the therapy room, I hear the echoes. No one asks how to self-actualize. They ask why they feel numb, why the anxiety will not go away, why success does not satisfy, or why their relationships feel like transactions. They are not chasing the top of a pyramid. They are trying to understand what broke, and whether anything real can grow in its place. (...)

In Rockford, that difference shows up in the space between pride and grief. This is a city that once made things, machine parts, fasteners, hard goods with weight and permanence. When that vanished, we didn’t evolve. We mourned, slowly and without permission. The prosperity gospel doesn’t play well here, except in places that pretend the grief never happened. The landscape remembers. It’s a patchwork of rusted factories, cracked sidewalks, and churches that were built to last but now echo with silence. Faith here has to grow low to the ground. It doesn’t rise like glass towers. It creeps through the broken concrete and clings to whatever light is left. It is not triumphant. It is tenacious.

In therapy, I often feel caught between the two ladders. Clients want to “fix” their lives. They’re not asking how to self-actualize. They’re trying to understand why the scaffolding they built their life on no longer holds. They come in chasing Maslow, but often find Rohr: the painful gift of being broken open. Of discovering that transformation isn’t about climbing higher, but surrendering to what they can no longer control. The Church used to know something about that. Before it became obsessed with branding and metrics and appearing successful, it offered something harder and holier. It didn’t hand out blueprints. It offered bread, wine, and silence. Now it offers sermon series with titles like “Level Up.” (...)

And now, beloved, let us speak plainly of what’s become of Babel.

The Babel story was never just about language. It was about the illusion of unity: everyone speaking the same tongue, chasing the same goal, convinced that ambition itself was holy. It is easy to hear that same cadence today. In politics, in the media, even in ministry, everyone is talking. No one is listening. Each angle is convinced it is speaking sense while the other just refuses to understand. We have built towers of ideology, platforms of performance, and digital sanctuaries where clarity is promised but rarely delivered. The noise is constant, and underneath it all is something quieter, something heavier. Loneliness. (...)

The Church once served as a counterweight to all this. It was an embodied community, stubbornly local, where you sat beside people you did not entirely like and still called them brother or sister. It held tension instead of amplifying it. Now, many churches have become political performance halls, leaning into culture wars, doubling down on certainty, and selecting congregants more for their alignment than their presence. The container that once held our contradictions has become another venue for tribal identity. (...)

Babel didn’t end with a curse. It ended with dispersion. With people being sent back to their places, their languages, their particular lives. The tower fell, but the story didn’t. It just stopped trying to reach heaven by force. I walk through my community, meditating on this as I pass shuttered buildings, familiar faces, and the quiet persistence of people who keep showing up. So many of them carry disappointment like an old coat they cannot quite throw away. The plant closed. The school consolidated. The church split. And still, they show up.

by Colin Gillette, Front Porch Republic |  Read more:

Image: GetArchive

The Bitcoin Coup

How Crypto Accelerationists Engineered America’s Financial Collapse. JD Vance and the Tech Oligarchs Who Want to Burn Down the Dollar.

There are conspiracies that sound too outrageous to believe, and then there are conspiracies so brazen that they hide in plain sight, documented in government filings and boasted about on podcasts. What I’m about to expose falls into the latter category: a systematic effort by some of America’s most powerful tech billionaires to accelerate the collapse of the American financial system because they believe they’ll profit from the chaos that follows.

This isn’t speculation. This isn’t connecting dots that don’t exist. This is based on direct conversations with people inside this movement, people who have explicitly told me that they view the destruction of the dollar as both inevitable and desirable, who see the suffering of ordinary Americans during financial collapse as an acceptable cost for achieving their vision of a Bitcoin-dominated economy, who have positioned JD Vance as their primary vehicle for implementing policies they know will undermine American monetary stability.

To understand how we reached this moment—where crypto accelerationists are actively working to engineer dollar collapse from within the highest levels of government—we need to trace the intellectual evolution I documented in ”The Plot Against America.” What began as abstract criticism of democratic institutions during the 2008 financial crisis has become a concrete blueprint for dismantling them through cryptocurrency-enabled financial sabotage.

The Philosophical Foundation

Peter Thiel’s own public statements reveal the framework driving this project. Speaking at Libertopia in 2010, he described PayPal’s founding vision as an attempt “to overturn the monetary system of the world.” He continued: “We could never win an election,” but technology could “unilaterally change the world.” In 2021, he declared that “Bitcoin is the most honest market we have in the country. It’s a canary in the coal mine. It tells us that this decrepit regime is about to blow up.”

This represents more than economic analysis—it’s a declaration that existing monetary systems are fundamentally illegitimate and that technological alternatives should replace democratic currency governance. Thiel isn’t merely predicting dollar instability; he’s advocating for conditions that would accelerate it. (...)

The Network of Coordination

The financial relationships between these figures make coordination clear. After their PayPal exit, Sacks, Thiel, and Musk’s wealth became deeply interwoven. Sacks launched Craft Ventures and frequently co-invests alongside Thiel’s Founders Fund, with stakes in companies like Palantir and SpaceX. They didn’t just get rich together—they coordinated their investments in ways that create mutual dependencies and shared interests.

As White House AI & Crypto Czar, Sacks holds a special ethics waiver that allows him to influence digital-asset and tech policy while maintaining investments in companies that benefit from those policies. Despite divesting from crypto assets upon entering government, he likely retains holdings in SpaceX and Palantir—companies building infrastructure that could replace traditional government functions with privately controlled systems.

The audacity of their approach is revealed even in their naming choices. The Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE—wasn’t just an acronym chosen for bureaucratic convenience. It was deliberately named after Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency that Musk has relentlessly promoted. When a government department takes its name from a digital currency promoted by the man running it, the agenda becomes transparent.

Dogecoin was itself based on a popular internet meme, but by strange irony, the term “Doge” originates from the title of rulers of Venice and Genoa—elected elites who presided over commercial republics for life. Whether intended or not, this historical reference reflects their vision of governance: efficient, corporate-style rule rather than messy democratic processes.

The Scale of Their Vision

What distinguishes this from ordinary corruption is the scope of their ambition. These men aren’t simply seeking to accumulate more wealth within existing systems. If their vision succeeds—if government currencies collapse and Bitcoin becomes dominant—their early cryptocurrency positions would transform them from billionaires into something unprecedented: controllers of the fundamental infrastructure of human exchange.

This represents the complete transformation of the American political economy. When they speak enthusiastically about dollar collapse, they’re not just making investment predictions—they’re describing a world where their cryptocurrency holdings make them the effective central bankers of whatever system emerges from the wreckage.

The temporary chaos of currency collapse becomes acceptable when viewed as the price for establishing permanent control over the monetary system itself. They’re not just betting on America’s financial decline—they’re positioned to profit regardless of the human cost.

JD Vance: The Ideological Convert

JD Vance’s role represents something more dangerous than typical political opportunism. His transformation from Trump critic to cryptocurrency advocate reflects his genuine conversion to neoreactionary ideology under Thiel’s decade-long cultivation.

Vance has publicly praised Curtis Yarvin, the neoreactionary theorist who advocates replacing democracy with corporate-style governance. Discussing Yarvin’s ideas, Vance has suggested that Trump should “Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people....And when the courts stop you...stand before the country, and say...the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This isn’t standard conservative rhetoric about limited government. This is advocacy for the systematic elimination of constitutional constraints on executive power—exactly what would be necessary to implement the kind of monetary policy changes that could destabilize the dollar.

Vance understands what Yarvin calls “neocameralism”—the vision of society run like a corporation rather than a democracy. In this framework, citizenship becomes shareholding, elections become obsolete, and governance becomes a technical matter for qualified executives rather than a democratic process. (...)

The Succession Strategy

As constitutional crises consume the Trump presidency—particularly around the Epstein revelations where promised evidence has failed to materialize—the crypto accelerationists appear to be positioning for the next phase of their plan.

They have invested over a decade in positioning Vance not as an emergency replacement for Trump, but as the natural evolution—someone who shares their fundamental critique of democratic governance but possesses the intellectual framework to implement systematic change.

Where Trump operates through impulse and grievance, Vance would operate through ideology and systematic planning. He arrives not needing to learn how to subvert democratic institutions, but with a fully developed philosophical framework for why such subversion is necessary and justified.

The Constitutional Trap

Evidence suggests that Sacks may have positioned Trump for exactly the kind of constitutional crisis that would necessitate succession. The mechanism appears to be cryptocurrency-related violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause.

TrumpCoin and World Liberty Financial create potential constitutional violations because they allow foreign entities to provide financial benefits to the president. The Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits the President from receiving any gift, payment, or benefit from foreign governments without explicit Congressional approval. World Liberty Financial’s investor rolls include entities like the UAE, whose purchases could constitute exactly this kind of prohibited foreign benefit.

Cryptocurrency’s structure makes such violations both easier to commit and harder to hide—blockchain creates permanent, traceable records of every transaction. Sacks, with his University of Chicago law degree, would understand these implications perfectly.

While ensuring his own conflicts were addressed through narrow divestitures, Sacks never publicly warned Trump about these constitutional landmines. Instead, he legitimized TrumpCoin on television, describing it as “a baseball card or a stamp” rather than acknowledging its potential regulatory implications. (...)

The Seditious Nature

What we’re witnessing constitutes sedition in its most systematic form. When government officials use their positions to undermine the financial systems they’ve sworn to protect, when they engineer constitutional crises for personal and ideological benefit, when they work to replace democratic governance with privately controlled systems—they’ve crossed the line from legitimate political activity to betrayal of their constitutional obligations.

David Sacks, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and JD Vance are actively working to subvert the constitutional order of the United States. Not through dramatic rebellion, but through the patient capture and systematic undermining of the institutions that make democratic self-governance possible.

Their sedition is particularly dangerous because it operates through legal mechanisms and maintains the appearance of legitimate governance while systematically destroying its substance. They’re not overthrowing the government—they’re reprogramming it to serve their interests rather than democratic publics.

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:

Image: Jp Valery on Unsplash

[ed. For a good summary of where we are and how we got here with crypto, see also: From Truth Social to bitcoin empire: Trump’s $2 billion pivot (PI):]

***

On Monday, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), a publicly traded company majority-owned by Trump, announced that it had acquired $2 billion in bitcoin. Trump is turning a failing media company into a bitcoin holding company. TMTG, the parent company of Truth Social, lost over $185 million on just $3.6 million in revenue in 2024. (...)

Trump’s embrace of crypto provided a sizable fundraising boost. The New York Times reported that Bailey raised $30 million for the Trump campaign from fellow crypto executives. Sacks also hosted a multimillion-dollar fundraiser with San Francisco tech executives. Major crypto investors like Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss donated millions of dollars to various pro-Trump super PACs. In total, the crypto industry accounted for over half of all corporate money in the 2024 election across federal races, raising $245 million. (...)

The financial conflicts in the White House go beyond Trump. Sacks, Trump’s crypto czar, is continuing to work as a partner at Craft Ventures, a venture capital firm co-founded by Sacks that has investments in crypto companies.

A memo released by the White House in March states that Sacks and Craft Ventures divested over $200 million in digital-asset related investments. However, the memo also states that Craft Ventures continues to hold “private equity of digital asset-related companies that are highly illiquid and thus not easily divested.” At the time of the memo, Sacks also had a direct interest in a venture capital investing platform “that may presently have some minor digital asset industry holdings or might in the future.”

Normally, government employees are subject to conflict of interest laws. But the White House has issued multiple waivers to allow Sacks to work in the Trump administration while maintaining his investments. The first waiver, released in the March memo, allows Sacks “to participate as a special government employee in certain particular matters regarding regulation and policy related to the digital asset industry, including cryptocurrency.”

The White House memo acknowledges that Sacks’ work in the Trump administration could affect his investments, but argues that his personal financial interest is “not so substantial as to be deemed likely to affect the integrity of [his] services.”

Gerontocracy is Everywhere

You’ve probably heard it said of American politics: we're stuck in a gerontocracy.

And it’s true. Our political system, especially at the federal level, is largely run by the elderly. The current president is 78. His predecessor, famously, left office at 82. Congress is older than ever, with a quarter of its members over 70. The age of the federal judiciary is a record 69 years old. Senior moments from Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and the late Dianne Feinstein have lodged in the public consciousness and rattled civic trust.

The discourse here is well-worn, but it frequently misses a crucial point: Some of the same forces that have created our political gerontocracy — medical advances enabling graceful aging, combined with a generation unwilling to relinquish power — have also allowed the old to tighten their grip on other areas of American life.

The median age in America is rising, but the percentage of older workers has grown at a faster rate. This is most apparent when you look at positions within elite society, such as tenured academics and corporate executives.

In other words, step outside Washington and you’ll find that gerontocracy is everywhere. (...)

Several years ago, Derek Thompson wrote a piece exploring why our elite workforce is aging. The simplest explanation, applicable across many professions, is that wealthy Americans are living longer, healthier lives. For example, the richest quartile of men has gained 0.2 years of life expectancy annually throughout the 21st century. But Thompson emphasizes that “many positions and institutions are getting older much faster than that.”

One simple explanation that fits across all these fields is that white-collar work just isn’t that physically demanding, which makes it easier for older workers to stick around. But there are also some more specific dynamics at play. For high-status professionals like CEOs, it might be less about physical ability and more about identity. As Derek Thompson puts it, we’re living in an era of “workism,” where the most affluent people have actually cut back on leisure and now report the longest workweeks in the country.

This theory could apply to our aging scientific researchers and academics too, but there’s another compelling explanation worth considering. According to the landmark paper, The Burden of Knowledge, it now takes researchers a much longer time to master the foundational knowledge in their field. For example, Einstein was only 26 when he published the Theory of Relativity, and it’s hard to imagine someone that young making such a seismic contribution to physics today.

There is also a growing body of research that finds a direct link between aging researchers and a slowdown in scientific innovation. Thompson theorizes in his piece that “as academia and funding institutions get older, they develop an implicit ageism against younger researchers, who they assume are too naive to do paradigm-shifting work in established domains.”

And that brings us to the most important question.

How bad is the gerontocracy?

I spoke to labor economists and experts in business management to get some perspective on this question. First, there is strong evidence that older leaders are likely to be less effective decision-makers. Extensive research shows a decline in executive function that begins at age 60. Economists Rosemond Desire and Scott Seavey conducted a survey that looked at CEOs of 17,000 firms between 1992 and 2018. Overall, they found “a strong and consistently negative relationship between CEO age and managerial ability.” Another study by researchers Brandon Cline and Adam Yore found that even after adjusting for the fact that younger CEOs are attracted to faster-growing companies, every additional year in CEO age was associated with a 0.3% decrease in the value of the firm.

This problem isn’t restricted to CEOs. Another study by researchers at Ohio State University analyzed 5.6 million biomedical research publications and concluded that the work of biomedical scientists makes less of an impact in the field as the scientists get older. This is consistent with the finding that we generally become less creatively productive after we leave middle age.

To be clear, this sweeping generalization obviously doesn’t apply to every individual. Warren Buffett is crushing the stock market well into his 90s. Dr. Richard Bond was just awarded the prestigious Shaw Prize at the age of 75 for his research estimating the age and mass of the universe. I’m not asking anyone to quit their job because of their age, nor am I ignoring the fact that ageism is still very real. Gerontocracy might rule at the top, but less senior workers are still regularly pushed out of jobs due to their age. I do think, though, that we need to be cognizant of how an aging elite might handicap our economic and intellectual growth. And how in certain cases, older workers occupying senior positions might deny younger workers the opportunity of career advancement.

Joseph Fuller, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, told me he could see this leading to “a lack of upward mobility for younger academics in certain disciplines.” But also cautioned about making any sweeping statements, because, “It's very occupationally specific and industry specific.”

The U.S. economy is enormous, with millions of workers hired and fired each month, so of course it’s important to avoid over generalizing. But the economist Nicola Bianchi looked at 35 years of income survey data from the US and found that the pay gap between workers over 55 and those under 35 increased by 61 percent between 1979 and 2018. His explanation is intuitive: “Older workers have accrued more promotions and have been occupying those slots for longer, which means younger workers cannot reach those levels anymore.”

Sixty-one percent is a striking number. But even if it’s only directionally correct, it suggests a serious shift in how opportunity is distributed, with younger workers increasingly locked out of the best-paying roles.

The future of the gerontocracy

In each of my conversations about the gerontocracy and the labor market, the topic of generative intelligence came up repeatedly. Whether you’re an AI evangelist or a doubter, it’s impossible to deny that AI will have some impact on the workplace. And I think there’s a strong case to be made that it could either entrench or reduce the power of older workers.

Let’s start with the worst-case scenario.

If AI is at least, as Benedict Evans put it, a collection of infinite interns, then it’s coming for the positions typically held by people one to three years out of college first. But the function of a new associate position at Accenture or a computer programmer at Amazon isn’t just to handle entry-level tasks; it’s also to prepare employees to move towards the middle, and eventually to higher management level positions at the company. Take those away, and you’re not just automating grunt work, you’re cutting off the ability for younger workers to gain a foothold in the workforce.

Guy Berger, a labor market economist and senior advisor at the Burning Glass Institute, doesn’t see this future as inevitable, but he did offer a fairly pessimistic theory: “Organizations find themselves saying this is really good at cutting out young people. We can save resources. And have AI agents run by a bunch of people in their late 30s and early 40s. Then, 20 years later, 70-year-olds are still running things, with no new crop coming in behind them.”

To be clear, there is no evidence that the incorporation of generative AI in the workplace is driving this trend. But there’s been some indication that this future could be around the corner. The accounting firm PwC cut 1,500 jobs and reduced on-campus recruiting after making a billion-dollar investment with OpenAI. Kevin Roose reported that one tech company is no longer hiring for positions below midlevel engineer. The labor market research firm Oxford Economics recently released a report stating, “There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates.” (...)

The comparative adoption rates of AI in the 2020s versus personal computers in the 1980s underscore Fuller’s point. AI is entering the workplace much faster than computers once did. And while this acceleration is driven primarily by younger, more educated workers, a Federal Reserve survey finds adoption is “widespread across gender, age, education, industries, and occupations.” If senior level white-collar workers become quickly fluent in using AI to enhance their productivity, it’s possible to imagine them using it to extend their careers even longer. As a result, the upper-echelon of the labor market becomes increasingly calcified.

Addressing the gerontocracy

There is no single fix for gerontocracy, largely because, as Fuller emphasized, aging labor is a sector-specific problem that will require sector-specific solutions.

For example, the gerontocracy narrative doesn't accurately fit the make-up of the employees or executives who steer our world-beating tech companies. Nevertheless, certain sectors remain dominated by older workers, who cling to power because of status, a hefty paycheck, or some combination of the two. This is having a measurable impact on the wages of younger workers and is likely, to an extent, suppressing dynamism in the American economy. (...)

So are there any fixes?

by Ben Krauss, Slow Boring |  Read more:

Image: New Yorker