The danger in utopian thinking is that it can easily turn you into a pointless vandal. The more useful thing is to think of betterment as a process rather than thinking that we just have to get rid of the bad people and then everything will be okay. If you could have enough utopianism to question the world as it is and imagine how it could be better, I think that’s a wonderful thing, but if you take it too far, you actually undermine yourself. So, I would say, a like “homeopathic utopianism” I will support.

A sweeping interview about Silicon Valley and the possible shapes of the future with the man who coined the term “virtual reality.”

Homeownership, as it has evolved in the United States, often turns its beneficiaries against progress and change.

How economic incentives drive the political emotions of American homeowners.

Just as a pulley system transforms minimal muscular strength into significant lifting capability, institutions act as cooperative pulleys, transforming weak reputational incentives into powerful drivers of cooperative behavior.

super rich people people are going to support this because they realize that hatred of foreigners is the main thing standing between them and high levels of taxation. And they don’t want to pay taxes

The above is talking about the wealthy in general. For a discussion of Silicon Valley ideology specifically, see this talk by Bhante Sujato and for a discussion of Elon Musk’s specific flavor of psychopathy, listen to this conversation with Elon’s friend, Kara Swisher.

The real point of FDR’s New Deal was to save democracy.

If anyone could see into the future of the British economy it was John Maynard Keynes.

The secret of super-forecasting? It’s a willingness to change your mind.

One of the important contributions of the past 30 years of research has been to clarify the concepts involved in the tragedy of the commons. Things are not as simple as they seem in the prototypical model. Human motivation is complex, the rules governing real commons do not always permit free access to everyone, and the resource systems themselves have dynamics that influence their response to human use. The result is often not the “tragedy” described by Hardin but what [Bonnie] McCay has described as a “comedy”—a drama for certain, but one with a happy ending.

… though money is an idea, basically, it represents stuff, and stuff is made of carbon

An interview with the woman spearheading the new discipline explaining how human social structures impact the environment.

These prices are fake. And in being fake, they are warping our whole system: our relationship to the environment, to animals, and to ourselves.

Capitalism thrives not by destroying natures but by putting natures to work as cheaply as possible.

… as the number of cargo ships has increased, so has a problem: workers stuck on ships that have been completely abandoned by the owners, leaving them stranded out at sea without basic supplies like food.

… a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems

A few case studies of humanity setting out to fix the environment.

By zooming in on tiny fish and out to the entire stratosphere, it beautifully captures the staggering scope of climate change and its challenges. In highlighting the scientists and engineers working on it, the book offers a somewhat more hopeful picture of our possible future: less apocalyptic but still incredibly strange. See 99pi’s “Model Organism” for a taste.

The book also makes a strong case for being skeptical that we even can engineer our way out of climate change. While it nods to the “but what other choice do we have” counterargument, I hope that readers come away from this tension in the book more confident than ever in our need for decarbonization and I hope that readers won’t leap to even worse ideas than those highlighted in the book, such as fatalism or population control. As one character in the book memorably put it:

Pissing your pants will only keep you warm for so long.

This decision is about business. Just not exactly in the way he meant.

On why there are so few actors with disabilities.

The world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession

Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

A classic of modern psychology, Stumbling on Happiness explains in detail the cognitive biases that prevent us from accurately predicting what will make us happy.

The rate of change is visibly unsustainable. The profiteers call this process “disruption,” while commentators on the left generally call it “neoliberalism” or “late capitalism.” Millennials know it better as “the world,” or “America,” or “Everything.” And Everything sucks.

Explaining the economic moment we are caught in, its tangled roots, and the challenges of trying to fight our collective, exponential momentum.

Sprawling industrial complexes where armies of thousands [of workers] manufactured products from start to finish gave way to smaller, more specialized plants that shipped components and half-finished goods to one another in ever-lengthening supply chains. […] Once the world began to change, it changed very rapidly.

The remarkable story of how a metal box changed the world.