Sublime

publicly visible.

Six years before we installed it, I experimented with the moving final assembly line which is now the crowning touch of American mass production. Before the eyes of Henry Ford, I worked out on a blackboard the figures that became the basis for his $5 day and the overwhelming proof of the present economic truism that high wages beget lower-priced

doubled. For several decades after World War II, ordinary workers’ inflation-adjusted wages (known as “real wages”) increased by 2 percent each year. But since 1979, real wages have grown by only 0.3 percent a year.[21] Astonishingly, the real wages for many Americans today are roughly what they were forty years ago. Ninety percent of Americans who

Malthus pointed out that when population increases beyond the means of subsistence, food prices increase, real wages decline, and per capita consumption, especially among the poorer strata, drops.

These are the scales of modern human networks, and it’s Dunbar’s number multiplied by millions. In these large-scale communities, standards and self-governance can’t be maintained by people simply running around and talking to each other. Instead, the builders of these networked products must create features that nudge the interactions in the right

So the birth rate, like war, may determine the fate of theologies;

During the 1930s, the path toward great-power war was marked by some easily recognizable signposts: strident nationalism, shrinking global trade, accelerated displacement of unwanted populations, the fragmentation of the world into regional economic and security blocks, and a heightening rivalry between the emboldened unfree blocks and the

As we move from the 1950s to the 1970s and then to 2008, we notice a problem. A perfectly good idea morphed into another good idea, spread beyond housing, and then culminated in uncontrolled insanity. By 2008, no one, including the management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or the Department of Housing and Urban Development, had any idea of the