Andrei Stoica

Is Moskowitz right? Should economists all be required to read, “work through”, and understand Adam Smith and Karl Marx? Is the discipline “fake” because most haven’t done this?

First of all, it’s important to point out that studying history of thought isn’t always useful. Just as doctors usually don’t study the works of Galen, and physicists... See more

College offered a lateral move into another subspecies of suburb: Claremont, California, a town whose entire identity orbits the five liberal arts colleges planted there like orchids in a parking lot. Arizona’s sprawl felt like a spreadsheet, but Claremont was a Venn diagram: overlapping circles of academia, twee downtown boutiques, and streets... See more

But this is no clean severance. It is a flow — a continuous autoamputation in which we externalize part of our cognition into the machine, and are refilled not with what we were, but with what we are becoming. This is not the old paradigm of man and machine, tool and user. We are not simply delegating labor. We are gradually repatterning identity ,... See more

DC’s relative success can be traced to a few decisions made decades ago. In the 1970s, policymakers in Arlington County made a decision to adopt what’s known as ‘transit-oriented development planning’ ahead of the opening of DC’s Metro Orange Line, which runs between Arlington and Prince George County, Maryland (via DC). Arlington policymakers... See more

The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies is a fantastic book, which argues that people create these models because if you can reduce decision-making to an algorithm, or a formula, or a process, or a procedure, you avoid the risk of blame. Computer says no, effectively.

Instinctively, people love to codify things, and make them numerical, and turn... See more