Christian Baaki

The empathy for and interest in protecting the powerless and a ruthless pursuit of opportunity for all, no matter of high or low birth, that once defined a righteous and productive political movement has been set aside in favor of a performative politics—whose most zealous adherents are often more interested in signaling membership in a caste—that

This breed of company will never spring from the mind of a committee; it would never have been permitted to endure in its current form, with thousands of employees organizing themselves around problems at hand, if we had submitted to the conventional managerial model in American corporate life.

Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

…the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

The anecdote helped explain the change

if you don’t have any public work or public proof then congratulations, you are whatever the hive mind imagines you to be.

Starting with the “Great Society” splurge in the 1960s, which created many social programs but failed to provide any way to pay for them, America has become accustomed to living beyond its means, essentially by borrowing huge amounts of money and passing the debt along to future generations. (An admirable exception was the Clinton presidency, which

By keeping long-term interest rates deliberately low, the Fed in effect subsidized government deficit spending by keeping the cost of borrowing artificially low. Only now as the Fed has had to raise interest rates to counter inflation have the costs to the federal fisc become more apparent.

The only 2 steps for asymmetric upside:

1. Identify someone else’s bottleneck(s)

2. Solve and provide uncomfortable amounts of free value to them