2026-06-19 19:11:55
I was walking in the forest recently when I came across a manuscript of political economy that (from the yellowing of the pages) I estimated with some precision had been published on or around Anno Domini 1962. While the front and back coverspieces had been torn away, leaving me no manner to discern the author or title of the work, the inner pages were in miraculously fine fettle, such that I found myself with a remarkable opportunity to compare and contrast the politics of that time period – now, how I marvel!, 60 years in our past – with the political economy of our own magnificent age.
The book begins by arguing that economic and political freedom are seen as different but often intertwined. "The citizen of Great Britain ... after World War II was not permitted to spend his vacation in the United States because of exchange control" – apparently British people weren't able to buy foreign currencies freely until 1979? This is so outside the overton window now that I thought I was misreading it, but apparently it's true. In 1966, Brits couldn't take more than 50gbp1966 (roughly $1500 today) out the country for holidays. And this was before MasterCard.
The author then talks about American cases: the Amish having their livestock confiscated because they didn't want to participate in social security (which they only got exemption from in 1965), and an American who would like to get a Swiss watch "but is prevented from doing so because of quotas." This was unintelligible to my modern mind, but apparently Swiss watches were too cheap, and also there was a Tariff Commission that could limit imports.
The book goes on to mention (in a context not important) a few wealthy patrons of radical movements: Frederick Vanderbilt Field, Anita McCormick Blaine, and Corliss Lamont, "to mention a few names recently prominent." It struck me to my surprise that I have no idea who any of those people are, and only just recognize a couple of the family names. And yet the prominent wealthy patrons of today seem so prominent, it is hard to believe they might be forgotten 60 years from now.
The book mentions in passing that Winston Churchill – already an MP and former cabinet minister – had not been allowed to talk on British radio from 1933 until the outbreak of WWII because the only available radio was the BBC, the BBC was a government monopoly, and Churchill was considered too controversial.[^1] Maybe I should have known about this, but I didn't.
From the other side of the ideological spectrum, the book talks about how 150 writers were blacklisted from Hollywood for their Communist sympathies, until Dalton Trumbo won as Oscar under a pseudonym while the producer pretended he'd bought the screenplay off a random "guy in Spain with a beard".[^2]
The book talks about how only the post office is legally allowed to carry mail. Apparently this is still kinda true today? Since 1979 there's an exemption for "extremely urgent letters", so UPS and FedEx get to do overnights, but regular domestic first-class mail is still USPS only. Also, only USPS can legally put things in your mailbox, so FedEx and UPS have to leave everything at your door. Weird.
The book mentions peacetime military conscription, in passing. I'm not confident if these numbers are right, but looking it up online I'm getting that 82,000 Americans were drafted in 1962 to serve 2 years active duty – that's 0.04% of Americans at the time, but 0.8% of men aged 18-25. And this was peacetime, before Vietnam – I'm not sure I'd internalized how many men were drafted so recently.
At this point, alas, an eagle descended and grasped the manuscript from my hands, before I could finish the book and my survey of comparison. Still, from these brief chapters, I got a strange feeling of the enormity of distance and change from the past: things that now seem outside the window of thinkable policy were not only thinkable but actually happening within one lifetime. (Of course, that means that things that are currently unthinkable may also come to pass within a lifetime from now).
[^1]: Claude says this is mostly true, but not precise: he was largely shut out but not entirely, and also it was partly because of his views and partly because the Director General personally disliked him.
[^2]: Claude says "mostly true" again, but that the 150 included directors, actors and musicians not just writers.
2026-06-18 19:11:32
One of the big questions of my life has been this: some things in life are difficult.
Sometimes, they're difficult in some sense "because" they're worthwhile.
Other times, the difficulty is a cue that you're doing the wrong thing (for you), and if you stopped trying to do it you could do easy things instead, and the easy things would also be more worthwhile.
How do you tell the difference?
I don't know. But here's an image that comes to mind for me: some projects are like pushing a big round rock across a hilly terrain. Others are like pushing a big cube across a hilly terrain.
Obviously on the downhill, the sphere is much easier to roll: every time you push it it gains some momentum and rolls forward on its own.
Whereas the cube requires pushing the entire time.
A lot of projects require activation energy, and that energy will be hard either way: on the uphill, pushing a sphere or a cube are comparably difficult [^1]. And (alas) few things are truly "runaway successes": the terrain of life is full of ups and downs and choices about which direction to go, so you'll rarely just get to coast: you usually have to do some uphill pushing, and that will be difficult.
But fundamentally, when I think about my successful projects, they usually felt like pushing a sphere. By contrast, I don't think I've ever succeeded with a project that involved pushing cubes. (Admittedly this is partly endogenous: I have not been the most perserverant person, so perhaps there's projects I could have succeeded with but gave up on).
In board game world, I meet a bunch of designers who are kind of incredulous at how "easy" things have gone for me with my first game. And on the one hand, it still took a ton of work to get it designed and produced and distributed; it was not an "easy" thing to do. But at various points along the way, people discovered the game and got obsessed with it and helped it develop its own momentum, without me having to push it every inch of the way.
[^1]: ok technically it is easier to push the sphere uphill than the cube, probably 2x as easy on average, but metaphors are difficult.
2026-06-17 19:11:12
When American political candidates run for office, they get inundated (so I understand) with Candidate Questionnaires from various interest groups sounding out their soundness on that group's key issues. So the questionnaire will ask whether the candidate supports or opposes [gun/abortion/upzoning] rights, and the candidates will answer, and the groups will give money to the candidates whose answers they like, or announce to the world that Jo Bloggs scored 94% and is rated A+ by Americans For This Issue.
I am not in a position to do this myself, but it might be nice if someone sent round a questionnaire asking candidates about some basic personal history questions. "Have you ever had sex with someone on your payroll?" seems like a good start; "Have you ever, as an adult, had a relationship with someone under 18?", similarly.
I think it should be possible to come up with 5-10 questions which are concrete, objective, and apolitical, and which could nicely get around the cycle of
"politician gets nominated by a party" --> "stuff comes out about their personal history" --> "politician's team insists that The American People don't care about X/Y/Z" --> "party's voters are pressured to go along with that, because at this point their choices are pretend to be ok with this thing or let The Other Team win the election," even though they would have rather picked another candidate for their team if they'd known the information sooner.
The questionnaire would get around that cycle by forcing the information out in the open earlier in the election cycle, while voters still have other choices.
The whole thing only works if enough politicians sign on to it that not-signing gets to be seen as a bad sign. How hard is it to get over the hill of the social behaviour curve? I'm not sure – in my head it feels like it should be possible to find a race where a few of the politicians are willing to do it, and then build up from there. In theory, any politician who has never done [bad things] should be happy to answer the survey. But maybe they'll figure that it sets a bad precedent and lead to more questionnaires with harder questions in future, or maybe their worse-behaving colleagues will pressure them not to answer the questionnaire so that it doesn't become normalized, I don't know.
Perhaps you could combine all this with an investigative reporting arm that credibly claims to investigate the highest-polling candidate who has not yet answered the questionnaire at any given time, though that's the kind of idea that seems to only happen in fiction and never in fact.
Presumably there's a reason that things like this don't happen, presumably the incentives don't line up. But hey, it's an idea.
This post was pre-scheduled. If something has just happened in the last few days, it is not specifically about that something – sadly this post seems to be evergreen.
2026-06-16 19:11:59
I stumbled on this book in a museum and obviously the title alone had me going: what? Here's the PDF if you want to read along.
(nb: I am aware of Ford's other beliefs, and what he thought of people like me. But I'm still interested in what the discourse about cigarettes was like in 1914).
Ford dedicates the book to The American Boy. He had previously explained in an interview: "I do not feel called upon to try to reform any person over 25 years of age because by that time the habit has been formed. Then it is only a question of the strength of will or mind of the smoker which will enable him to stop. He knows the injurious effects and controls his own destiny. With the boys it is a different matter. Most boys are told to refrain from many things. Seldom are they given a reason. Boys must be educated so they will know why cigarettes are bad for them."
In response, the president of the American Tobacco Company basically told Ford to either prove his claims or publicly retract them. This book is Ford's reply, a compilation of letters from various prominent people complaining about cigarettes. Cool format!
The book opens with this letter from Thomas Edison:
Friend Ford
The injurious agent in Cigarettes comes principally from the burning paper wrapper. The substance thereby formed is called "Acrolein".
It has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys.
Unlike most narcotics this degeneration is permanent and uncontrollable.
I employ no person who smokes Cigarettes.
Yours,
Thomas Edison
The next page is the letter from Percival I Hill, the President of the American Tobacco Company, where he complains about Edison and Ford's comments regarding the innocent, beloved cigarette:
The form of your statement is of a character that denies us an opportunity to demonstrate its falsity and to prove the harmlessness of our product in a court proceeding. If you see fit to make a statement of the harmful effect of any of our brands, in such form that being false it is libelous, we will be delighted to institute suit for damages, and will devote the proceeds to some designated charity.
The scientific facts are all in favor of the cigarette, and no man can change these facts because he personally prefers a pipe to a cigar ... or a chew of plug to a cigarette.
It is extremely funny to me that someone can say "you haven't libeled us, can I ask you to do so so we can respond?" And also: I had initially assumed this book was about the dangers of tobacco, but it seems like maybe it is literally an argument about whether cigarettes are dangerous vs pipes and chewing tobacco? The past is a foreign country, truly.
(The rest of the letter is just about how cigarettes have been tested by "the ablest chemists in America and Europe" and found to be "absolutely pure", plus various arguments from authority + the fact that many doctors and other respectable men enjoy cigarettes. Twelve million Americans can't be wrong!)
The next letter is a reply from Ford's secretary to the The American Tobacco Co. It's fun to remember how hard it was to know what anyone was talking about in 1914: the secretary has to start by clarifying that he doesn't know what's been in which newspaper.
The letter is... not actually convincing, it just says that 1) smoking a lot of cigarettes is bad, 2) "young men addicted to the cigarette habit seldom if ever lead in their studies", 3) "99 per cent of the boys .. who come before [a certain magistrate] charged with crime have their fingers disfigured by cigarette stains." Come on Henry['s secretary], we can do better than this! I know you're trying to look out for "the benefit and uplift of our wayward lads", and history has vindicated your position, but a bit more rigour in the process would be appreciated.
The rest of the book is letters like this one from various doctors, educators and other experts:
It feels like what they're describing is inebriation? I'm curious if cigarettes were different then, or the people involved were also drunk, or if what they're describing is actually cigarette withdrawal, or... some other explanation, hit me in the comments please.
There's also a couple of letters which give a glimpse of how research/statistics/science worked back then, e.g.:
Later, a football coach writes in to say that 65% of non-smokers but only 33% of smokers were successful at football tryouts. I found this interesting because I'm extremely curious how people approached this kind of statistical work in 1914. Randomized controlled trials were only invented in the 1920s, right? How did this kind of "let's survey 210 people and announce the results as percentages" stuff feel to people in 1914?
(Obviously it's plausible that smoking makes you worse at sports, but also plausible that the kind of person who smokes is less likely to make the first team anyway – did people realize that in 1914? I guess most people don't really understand it today, so....)
Similarly, the president of the Georgia Woman's Christian Temperance Union – "a woman of exceptional mental attainments", we are told – writes in about an experiment she ran:
I took two small bottles, each holding about three tablespoonfuls of water. In one I placed 15 of these cigarette papers, and in the other an equal thickness of leaves of tissue paper from between visiting cards, for the tissue papers were much thinner and it took a larger number of leaves.
I found that a few drops of the water from the bottle containing the cigarette paper would kill a mouse quicker than you could say ‘Jack Robinson,’ and a teaspoonful of the water from the other papers seemed to cause a mouse to suffer no inconvenience.
I have killed dozens of mice with this water and there are others who have tried the experiment with the same success. Will Mr. Hill please tell me what made the difference in the same water, in the same kind of bottles, except the papers that were placed in the bottle?
I mean truly, what an age of science – have you ever seen a letter like this in a modern magazine? (Maybe there are, I don't read many modern magazines!) I would dearly love to read something about this spirit of experimentation in 1910s America.
(A later letter-writer speaks of injecting tobacco-juice under a cat's skin; "in less than twenty minutes it died in violent convulsions. I take no pride in relating this experiment, for I knew a shorter as well as a more merciful way of ending the cat's life; but what distresses me now is the fact that thousands of boys are repeating that experiment upon themselves with as certain though less immediate results, and only a few people seem to be concerned over what is taking place right before their eyes.")
One doctor writes a letter saying that tobacco causes a "dissipation [in] sense gratification.... the sedative action which it exerts upon the nervous system... steals away a young man's vigilance and alertness and handicaps him in the struggle for success. The use of tobacco paves the way to other dissipation by requiring a compensating stimulant to overcome its sedative effect." Am I reading into this with modern eyes or is that a pretty subtle understanding of how neurotransmitters work?
Various writers describe cigarettes as a gateway drug to alcohol, and then to morphine and opium.
A lot of the letters equivocate between cigarettes specifically, smoking more generally (including pipes), and other kinds of tobacco products. I think you'd need to actually understand the debates of the era to know what's going on here, and I don't.
There follows an excerpt from the London Lancet medical journal talking about the danger in cigarettes from "aldehydes." (The "acrolein" that Edison blamed for cigarettes' harmfulness is an aldehyde, and so is formaldehyde, but so is vanillin, and so is glucose – it's clearly a large category and I'm out of my depths assessing this). I guess a good reminder that there's a lot of steps between figuring out that something is bad for you and figuring out exactly why.
Connie Mack – GM of the precursor to the Oakland A's – is one of several people who basically writes in to say that smokers amount to nothing, ever. "It is my candid opinion, and I have watched very closely the last twelve years or more, that boys at the age of ten to fifteen who have continued smoking cigarettes do not as a rule amount to anything. They are unfitted in every way for any kind of work where brains are needed. No boy or man can expect to succeed in this world to a high position and continue the use of cigarettes.”
Hudson Maxim, an inventor of explosives who was apparently very famous at the time, wrote: "The wreath of cigarette smoke which curls above the head of the growing lad holds his brain in an iron grip which prevents it from growing and his mind from developing just as surely as the iron shoe does the foot of the Chinese girl." (I don't think Chinese footbinding actually used iron?) "With every breath of cigarette smoke they inhale imbecility and exhale manhood.... The yellow finger stain is an emblem of deeper degradation and enslavement than the ball and chain." (I include this just for the prosody).
The book continues with Volume II, and this comic from the Detroit News, which I'm including only because it's funny how long newspapers have been doing this kind of unsubtle commentary via labelled characters and illustrated puns – that's Edison on the left, and a schoolboy Cigarette Smoker in the middle.
Volume II is about the "economic" side of smoking. Says Mr Ford:
Let us see whether you as an ambitious American boy can afford to ruin your prospects by doing those things which are disapproved by employers generally, and which in many, many cases must put you out of the running entirely.
If "millions of American men have convinced themselves that cigarettes are good for them" they have not succeeded in convincing their employers of this fact, and this is especially true as regards boys. I want you to read the expressions of opinion from some of the large employers of the country.... I know that you will then be in a position to judge for yourself whether you can afford to take chances on losing everything, and I am willing to leave the decision in your own hands.
It feels like a weird avuncular threat from the great industrialist of the age, no? I can't tell how much he means it to be a threat.
There follow a bunch of letters from big companies about how they don't want to employ smokers, e.g. from Cadillac Motor Car Company: "Boys who smoke cigarettes we do not care to keep in our employ. In the future we will not hire anyone whom we know to be addicted to this habit..... We made a study of the effect upon morals and efficiency of men in our employ addicted to this habit and found that cigarette smokers invariably were loose in their morals and very apt to be untruthful, and were far less productive than men who were not cigarette smokers.... We are proud to say that none of the prominent or executive men in this company use cigarettes."
After that there's a bunch of letters about how smoking reduces the moral, physical and intellectual qualities of a worker. (I was surprised mainly at the intellectual part, it does truly seem they thought smoking was bad for your brain). There's also a lot of claims to the effect that NOBODY who smokes has ever succeeded at anything, which seems like a bananas thing to claim, though I do get it's possible that cigarettes in 1914 contained heavy metals (or something) and really did dull the mind.
I was interested how many companies claimed that either they don't hire smokers or at least preferentially hire non-smokers. I wondered if this would be legal today, and it turns out 29 US states have "smoker protection laws" that prevent discrimination against smokers, but in the other 21 you can discriminate against smokers even if it's outside work and irrelevant to their job. (For extra credit, readers can guess if it's Democrat or Republican states that protect smokers' rights – it's not obvious which way it would break, right?)
The book ends with this (presumably made-up) story about a smoker and a non-smoker, which I honestly really enjoyed. Initially they are both rising stars in the journalism business, "two fellows whom to know was to like":
I shall not mention their names. That would be revealing identities that might better not be disclosed, for the sake of both. Neither shall I sketch the two careers too intimately. If I did it is more than likely that even in his pitiable mental state the one would recognize the portrait of himself, and there is no desire on my part to add one jot to the mental anguish he must suffer when in the few lucid moments he is permitted he looks back over opportunities that were worse than wasted.
One offers the other a cigarette, and is rebuffed.
"Ha," laughed the political writer, jokingly, "you have no small vices, eh?"
The reporter looked grave.
"I am not sure that is such a small vice," he replied slowly.
Not to be a spoiler but the non-smoker becomes a journalism superstar in New York while the smoker devolves into a life of farm labouring, then lumber shoving, then panhandling and potato peeling, all due to his crippling addiction to cigarettes.
Overall, I found this book a weird and interesting lens into a time gone by, and at 46 pages long it's not too heavy lifting (ok: admittedly at this point in my life even 46 pages is non-trivial, but relatively speaking).
It was also a source for many fun rabbit holes about once-famous people like Mack, Maxim, and "Luther Burbank the wizard of the plant and vegetable kingdom, whose experiments have caused the civilized world to wonder." I wish more books like this existed.
I wish I understood more of the context of the time and how the debate about cigaretttes worked, and (even more so) why smoking took almost a century longer to phase out.
I inevitably also found myself thinking about my own self-damaging compulsions: I've written before that I feel like modern phone use will someday be seen at-least-partly analogously to cigarettes – movies will show couples in the 2000s in bed on their phones, and people will think how did you live like that? – and this book gave me an odd, knowing feeling that it will be easy to compile a book of similar quotes about how phones are frying us, and that (like cigarette smoking) we're going to keep doing it anyway. It's not that simple, but it is, and also it isn't.
2026-06-15 19:11:46
Given that I write blogs and make boardgames, it's in some sense shocking how FEW of my posts are just "you know, life is like a board game...."[^1] But here's one.
There's a popular genre of boardgames called Engine Builders. The idea, roughly, is that you spend different resources to build "engines" which create more resources. You invest early on and reap more and more of the resources as the game progresses, taking "bigger" turns as a result.
For example, one popular recent(ish) engine building game is Wingspan. The players have to juggle cards and eggs and foods to acquire more cards and eggs and food (to win points and win the game).
I think there's a couple of important takeaways from looking at life as an engine builder.
First, it's really important to realise there are multiple resources in the game simultaneously; that it's easy to get pulled in to one resource early on and not-realise that it's going to cost you in the long run (or, at least, narrow down your options). There's a stereotypical version of e.g. the person who spends their 20s and 30s attempting to maximize the "money" resource, and completely neglecting the "love" resource, which they later come to realise is also important to them. But even if all you care about is the money resource, sometimes you reach a point where your ability to acquire it is bottlenecked by (say) relationships, which you'd completely under-invested in.
Second, I think that engine-builders give a good intuition of how exponential resource-growth can be. "Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe" is a cliche but also sometimes true, and it applies to money and relationships and learning and many other things beside.
I think this is one of the things that is least-obvious until you experience it: the early parts of an exponential curve don't look very different from a linear increase, and (depending on the numbers) could even be lower. But further down the line the exponential just mogs the linear so hard you want to cry.
One important note is that modern boardgame designers generally strive to include catch-up mechanics (or "rubber bands" in the parlance) that make sure the early leader doesn't just run away with everything.
On my worst days I fear that the game of life is kind of broken because NOT ONLY does it not have rubber bands, the players don't even start with remotely similar resources, so some people just luck into an incredible engine early on and then run away from the pack by age 22.
But I'm not so sure about this; part of me thinks that the meta-game is more complicated than the one I see before me, and that the real game is more subtle and better-balanced than it sometimes seems.
[^1]: I'm sure every hobby is full of people saying "you know, life is like [thing from the hobby]" and that this is annoying to everyone outside the hobby, but I'm going to do it anyway.
2026-06-12 19:11:09
I've had the chance to live in a lot of different places, and have come to a mildly surprising conclusion: it's cars that make living in the city stressful.
Basically I have lived in cities which were not very dense but which, due to road-placement, had a lot of traffic around them and it stressed me out. I have likewise lived in places which were dense with tall buildings but for idiosyncratic reasons had very little car-traffic and they did not stress me out. Lastly, I have lived in places that were technically Quiet Suburbs but which had a road nearby where cars went very fast and that stressed me out too.
I am sure the equation is ultimately more complicated, and that buildings and people and factories and whatever else can all play a role. But within the constrained domain of the places I've actually lived, I'm pretty sure that carsiness is the biggest contributor to my stress levels. Which is somewhat optimistic, if (like me) you think we're moving to a future of fewer, quieter and more graceful cars.