war, geopolitics, and governance

do we really want a unified world? Is that the right thing for humanity? It may be our technical destiny. Is it our human destiny?

It is difficult to look at human history and say that large, homogeneous, peaceful countries work better. Actually, the main leaps in human development seem to come from periods of smaller, competing sovereign structures... See more

War is the father of all things,” said the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus

Aerospace is one of the deepest branches of humanity’s technological tree. It is a telling fact that more countries have produced a nuclear bomb than have mass-produced a jet engine. Recent history illustrates how hard it is to build these capabilities. China has provided an estimated $71 billion dollars in funding to the Commercial Aircraft Corpor... See more

One is simply the sheer difficulty of building a modern commercial aircraft, which is probably one of the five or six most complex technical achievements of modern civilization (along with jet engines, leading-edge semiconductor fabrication, and nuclear submarines). Commercial aircraft must couple a high level of performance in some of the most adv... See more

In a way, the modern world was created by a version of Orson Welles’ insight. We call it “capitalism.” England in the 18th century developed the core technology behind the modern world—not the steam engine, but the joint-stock company.

The English joint-stock company is a pseudostate. A sovereign state creates a layer of secondary state-like entiti... See more