2025-04-17 20:03:21
In the 100 Billion Humans Series, I defend that we can and should try to put 100B humans on Earth. Here are all the updates relevant to those articles, including solar energy, nuclear, geoengineering, reforestation, vertical farming, oceans, and more. My favorite is 8: How to grow crops in the dark.
One of the arguments of why we should get to 100B humans is because the more humans we are, the richer we are. The richer we are, the happier we are. Here’s clear backup for that second claim: People in richer countries do report much higher life satisfaction.
It does help to live in a Latin American or Nordic country, but wealth is unmistakably one of the strongest factors.
So if more people makes us richer, and being richer makes us happier, let’s make babies, get rich, and spread happiness!
Ed Conway wanted to write a series about all the materials we’ve exhausted:
“… in trying to hunt around for minerals we have run out of, I came to an unexpected conclusion. So far, we haven’t really, meaningfully run out of, well, pretty much anything. …
He found malachite, which is oxidized copper for decoration, but we can manufacture something equivalent today. Ed ended up canceling that series.
Jason Crawford also looked for materials we’ve exhausted. His conclusion? The same. We haven’t run out of much. When we have, we’ve always found an alternative.
We have exhausted some things that are not elements though: We’ve driven some animals to extinction, some woods are now too rare to be exploited, there’s limited land left to convert to agriculture. But these are not elements, which are irreplaceable. The materials are replaceable, and we have other ways to produce food without using more land. And the more time passes, the better we are at managing our scarce resources.
In 1980, the biologist Paul Ehrlich agreed to a bet with the economist Julian Simon on how the prices of five materials would change over the next decade. Ehrlich thought all materials would go up in price, Simon thought the opposite.
Simon won on all five counts.
This is the long-term price of these materials:
As you can see, adjusted for inflation, these elements don’t tend to become more expensive. They are either stable or go slightly down. Why?
The more we grow, the more we demand resources, and the more we produce them. When they become scarce, there’s so much money to be made finding more, that people simply do it.
In the 100 Billion Humans Series, I was surprised to see the poor quality of the modeling of degrowthers: Every time fearmongers tell us that something really bad is going to happen if we continue this way, I look at their calculations, and there’s some glaring error that would get an entry-level consultant shipped off to Siberia. Apparently, this guy had a similar experience with Limits to Growth, probably the most famous work on the topic.
2025-04-15 20:03:00
As I research the country, these are the most interesting and surprising facts I’ve gathered—and some beautiful images along the way.
This is the biggest argument in favor of Capitalism vs Communism, but most people misinterpret this picture:
Why do they misinterpret it?
Here we can compare population density with night lights:
See how the north has very few lights, but actually a decent-sized population? What’s shocking is that the population in the North vs South has actually been quite stable over history!
Here is that data displayed as a ratio:
If you think about it, it makes sense that the population ratio of each wouldn’t dramatically change over history: Agriculture is a reasonably easy thing to do, where technology improves yields (and hence, more food allows the population to grow), and this technology is somewhat easy to get. Furthermore, crop yields improve slowly. North Korean yields are not much lower than South Korea’s:
So going back to our night lights vs population density map, they are not an indictment of agricultural productivity which translates into population density. No, they simply prove that South Korea has much more light per capita than North Korea. North Korea can’t afford as much lighting. Biggest endorsement of Capitalism ever!
In fact, we can learn a ton more about South Korea by looking at the night lights:
First, Seoul is a monster. It only occupies 12% of SK’s territory, but with 26 million people, its metropolitan area is the 4th largest in the world and accounts for 50% of the country’s total population! One South Korean in two lives in Seoul.
This concentration is even more obvious on this map:
Meanwhile, the metropolitan population of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, is just over 3M. Tiny.
You can see the border between the Koreas on the night map!
The DMZ has a 2 km buffer on each side of the border, where people can’t go.
The border doesn’t have a wall, because nobody is even supposed to get that far. The walls are on the North and South Korean sides.
Another weird thing: Do you notice all the lights in the sea?
We can see something similar off the coast of the Falkland Islands:
What are these?
Ships!
More specifically, fishing ships, especially for squid.
Why the lights? They attract animals.
And why there and not somewhere else?
Because these are water upwells! Nutrients fall to the sea bed. Upwells bring them to the surface, which generates phytoplankton and zooplankton, so fish and shellfish concentrate there to eat them. This is also why the coast of Peru is so rich in fish:
Here’s a map of the topography of Korea’s seas (“bathymetry”):
Most of the ships concentrate at the edge of lower and higher seabed.
You can also notice that the light pattern is completely unlike those of other regions like China, the US, or Europe:
There, light is quite distributed throughout in a fractal way: lots of small towns, a few cities interspersed, and then even fewer metropolises even more spread out.
South Korea is not at all distributed like that. It has several very illuminated areas, with lines of light communicating them. Why?
The pics I took of China, Europe, and the US are from their plains. Without geographic constraints, this is what the human population distribution looks like.
But as we know, Korea is very mountainous. You can see similarities with other mountainous areas like the Alps:
People live wherever there’s a flat area to live! And the lines connecting them are valleys.
We can see that even better in population density vs topography maps. As we discussed in the past, eastern Korea is very mountainous.
If we overlay this topography map with population density, this happens:
If you zoom in, you’ll see that every nook and cranny of somewhat flat land is populated, including the narrow valleys that connect bigger plains!
This reminds me of Italy:
This is why South Korean land is used the way it is:
Mountains are very hard to cultivate, which means there is lots of forest. Agricultural land is mostly concentrated in the western coastal areas—so much so that no grassland remains. And just as agriculture took over grasslands and plain forests, urbanization is taking over agricultural land.
Why?
One of the most common political divides is that cities tend to be much more progressive and rural areas more conservative, as we explained in this article. It makes sense: In rural areas, population density is much lower, so people resolve their conflicts amongst themselves, and they see little impact from governmental actions. And since there’s not a lot of people movement or economic activity, new problems won’t quickly emerge, so tradition is a good proxy for the set of rules you should follow. People vote for smaller governments and more conservative parties. Conversely, in cities people cross paths with strangers all the time, so the state often needs to intervene in social conflicts, and its footprint is therefore everywhere, and people vote for more progressive parties that want a bigger administration.
Since the east of Korea is much more mountainous, it’s much less densely populated, and hence leans more conservative.
Japan is formed by the boundary between the Pacific, Philippine, and Euriasian plates.
This elevated the eastern part against the seabed.
Meanwhile, the Yellow Sea to the west is much shallower so the massive amount of rain that falls on the region from the Pacific influence carries sediments downhill, gaining land on the Yellow Sea through sediment accumulation over tens of millions of years, creating the North China Plain, the Manchurian Plain, and the western plains of Korea.
You can see this sedimentation here at the mouth of the Yellow River:
And more broadly throughout the Yellow Sea:
And this is why the west has more plains and population:
As we saw the other day:
Russia and North Korea have a common border, which means China doesn’t get access to the Sea of Japan. This is a remnant of the USSR invasion of Japan-controlled China and Korea in 1945. The USSR split that corridor between itself and North Korea.
The Korean script (Hangul) is unique in many ways.
First, it’s one of very few scripts with a known origin & creator! And that creator was none less than a king! If you think about it, that makes sense. There are plenty of people who create new scripts, but nobody uses them, because it’s so damn hard to learn a new alphabet, so they don’t convince anybody to learn it. You require coercion for people to learn a new one. So you need a unique situation for a country to adopt a new script. You need:
A ruler who is intelligent enough to see the need for a new script and interested enough in the topic to push for it
They must be strong enough to impose their will on the population
They must stay in power for long enough to make it happen
This lucky bundle of circumstances took place in Korea, and that’s why they have a great script. Why?
Like for most of its cultural influences, Koreans used Chinese script to write. But the writing is disconnected from the speech, so a person who knew how to speak Korean could not write it easily. As a result, only elites wrote in Korea. Sejong the Great, the 4th Joseon king, decided to change this in 1443: Make Korean readable by all, including commoners.
“A smart man can learn it before lunch, and a fool can learn it in ten days.” – King Sejong
If you doubt that this was indeed the goal of the script, it was first published in a document called the Hunminjeongeum: The Proper Sounds for the Education of the People:
[Since] the spoken language of this country is different from that of China, it does not flow well with [Chinese] characters. Therefore, even if the ignorant want to communicate, many of them in the end cannot state their concerns. Saddened by this, I have [had] 28 letters newly made. It is my wish that all the people may easily learn these letters and that [they] be convenient for daily use.—Hunminjeongeum Haerye
How did he achieve that? By creating skeuomorphic letters! The shape of the letters reflects the shape of the mouth when making their corresponding sound:
That way, by looking at a letter, you can guess the sound.
The script would then combine the letters of syllables, reminiscent of Chinese script. Here’s the same sentence translated by Google Translate into Korean and Chinese:
Who stood to lose? The elites, of course. So they pushed back against the adoption of the new script, but failed. The script was adopted by people.
Only when the king stood to lose did the script get banned. This happened in 1504, when the king (Yeonsangun) was criticized in writing—using the more accessible Hangul, of course. In the late 1800s, the government pushed for its adoption by teaching it in schools. During the Japanese occupation between 1910 and 1945, its use was first limited and then banned, but it was revived in North and South Korea after liberation.
The Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, is the tallest building in all the country, but it’s empty! It was never finished.
It’s a hollow pyramid. Surrounded by eerie, pastel-colored residential buildings:
Nearly all the urban photos you can find on the Internet are devoid of traffic, human or automobile. No advertisements, billboards, coffee shops. Everything is deserted, massive concrete. Eerie.
The Science and Technology Complex has the shape of an atom from above.
Here’s a side pic:
This is the zoo:
Of course, a lot of the architecture is dedicated to the triumph of Communism
And the triumph of Korea’s leaders:
Here from the back:
Out of the 13 heads of state since WW2, 12 have experienced a tumultuous end:
And the Spaniards, Italians, Israelis, and even the French.1
It’s even more impressive given that, after WW2, it was as poor as countries like India, China, and Afghanistan, and even poorer than countries like Ghana!
At 0.86 children per woman, it’s the lowest in the world.2
There was a small uptick in 2024, but it’s unclear if this trend will continue. It depends on the underlying reason for this low fertility. I’ll write a full article on it, but in the meantime, here’s one clue:
Across the developed world, women have moved to the left. But in South Korea, we also find that men have moved to the right, resulting in perhaps the biggest ideological gap in the developed world.
We’ll explore much more of that in the upcoming article on South Korea’s gender relations and fertility rate!
On a PPP basis (purchasing power parity)
Excluding Hong Kong
2025-04-10 20:02:45
The force that bisected Korea in 1945 is not recent: It has been pulling it apart for thousands of years. In fact, you can understand all of Korea’s history through this one force, evident in this map:
From this map, you can conclude:
Korea is an appendix at the end of Asia
It’s immediately next to China—across the Yellow Sea from China’s heartland, the North China Plain, and south of the Manchurian Plain.
Only the very narrow Korean Strait separates it from Japan.
Korea is long from north to south and mountainous, with a craggy mountain range to the east and some coastal plains to the west.
What are the direct consequences of that?
Whoever controls East Asia will be well positioned to control the Korean Peninsula—or at least try to.
But it won’t be easy: Korea is long and mountainous, two factors that make it hard to control.
The obvious candidate to attempt to control Korea is China, since it’s very populous and its heartland is so close.
Japan is the other obvious candidate, on the opposite side. But the fact that it’s a smaller country and across a sea makes it much harder for Japan to control Korea.
Since Korea is oriented north-south, so long, and so mountainous, its internal divisions will tend to be north-south, since it’s hard to unify the entire region.
Normally, plains are fertile and have more population that develops agricultural societies, while mountains are more easily defensible and breed roaming pastoral people who tend to descend on the plains people. Therefore, the east and west of Korea will tend to be unstable until one side prevails. Eventually, the capitals of these states will end up in the west, where most of the people and wealth live, to control them better.
The coast is extremely rugged, which is usually great for ports, with lots of protected inlets and deep water access from the coast. Given that, and the proximity to Japan and China, the south and west of Korea would develop trade.
Or in a schematic way:
This is what happened in 1945:
The Eurasian power du jour was the USSR
The seaborne power du jour was the US
They fought for influence in Korea and split it.
Once you look through this lens, it becomes easy to read Korea’s history: It will start as a series of small kingdoms separated by mountains along the length of the peninsula, and the more technology progresses, the more the kingdoms will tend to unite, just as the foreign pressures from north and south increase. Let’s see it.
If you learn three words, you can follow most of Korea’s history.
The first is the particle Go, which is added at the beginning of a word and means “ancient” or ”high”. It was applied after the fact: Imagine that France disappeared and a similar country reappeared 300 years later. It would call itself “France” again to hark back to the legitimacy of the previous kingdom, and would call the old version “Ancient France”, “High France”, or in Korean “Gofrance”.
The second word is Goryeo, which is basically Korea (same sound), spelled differently. We use Korea in Western languages because Westerners discovered the country in medieval times, when it was a kingdom called Goryeo that lasted between ~950 and ~1400,1 ruled by a single family, the Wang Dynasty. Goryeo probably comes from the particle we already know, Go (high, ancient) plus Guri/Guru/Gauri (“castle”, “walled city”, “place”, or “center”), meaning “the high place”.
But that name of Goryeo already existed before! The medieval kingdom took its name from a previous kingdom that existed around the times of the Roman Empire, so that one was renamed with an additional Go particle, and is now called Goguryeo (“ancient high place”).
The third word is Joseon: The Yi dynasty took over Goryeo’s Wang dynasty around 1400, and ruled under that name for ~500 years until ~1900. “Joseon” means “Fresh Dawn” or “New Dynasty”.
Of course, Joseon was also the name of an ancient kingdom, which the Wang dynasty fished back from history to differentiate themselves from Goryeo. The only kingdom that was even more ancient than Goguryeo was Joseon, so they reused that name and rebaptized the old one Gojoseon (“ancient Joseon”, or “ancient new dynasty”).
Below is a broad, stylized timeline of Korea’s history. I tried to portray the northern kingdoms at the top and the southern kingdoms at the bottom.
You can notice a few things:
Korea was split at the beginning of its history—mostly around the north-south axis—until it unified around the year 1000 AD.
It remained broadly unified until the aftermath of WW2, when it split between North and South Korea, again around the north-south axis, and in a way reminiscent of the splits centuries earlier.
It suffered from frequent invasions from the north (red), usually from China (Han, Tang, and Qing dynasties) but also from the Mongols in the 1200s, and more recently, by the Soviet Union in 1945 and Communist China in 1950.
It was subject to naval invasions as Japan became more powerful in the late 1500s, and again in the late 1800s, until it became a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945. After that, the US became the naval power bolstering the south.
As noted, the names of the two longest periods of unity, Goryeo (900s to ~1400) and Joseon (~1400 to the late 1800s) hark back to their ancient (“Go”) versions of Gojoseon and Goguryeo.
Here’s a very quick video to give you a sense of these things:
Let’s look more closely at each of these periods.
The oldest proto-state in Korea, Gojoseon, emerged between 2000 BC and 1000 BC in the north—quite close to present-day North Korea—and lasted until ~100 BC.
It’s not a surprise that the northern kingdom emerged in that part of the peninsula around that time: This is when Chinese civilization arose, and it slowly bled into Korea over the following centuries. It’s also why the Jin state, to the south, emerged much later, around 400-200 BC, and was a loose confederation of states rather than a strong centralized state: Chinese civilization took a long time to travel outward from its North China Plain heartland.
When you have a superpower growing in your neighborhood, sooner or later it will invade you. It’s only a matter of it growing strong enough and getting organized, which the Han did, so in 108 BC, they invaded, destroyed Gojoseon, and put Four Commanderies in place to control the region.
Many people escaped from Han control and joined or helped form new kingdoms.
Over time, these small kingdoms coalesced.
The natural heir of Gojoseon was Goguryeo, adding a big chunk of the Manchurian Plain to its north. With so much plain to cultivate, Goguryeo became by far the strongest power, while the south split along the coasts.
Alas, this made Goguryeo an enemy of China, and the two went to war many times. But China was also a potential enemy to Baekje due to its proximity, while the more distant Silla was less of a threat. Silla was therefore able to grow unimpeded.
Then Silla allied with China’s Tang dynasty to eliminate first Baekje, then Goguryeo. They split Goguryeo, but Silla eventually defeated the Chinese Tang and unified a big chunk of the Korean peninsula for the first time in its history. The remnants of Goguryeo became the kingdom of Balhae, which extended farther to the northeast.
Silla enjoyed peace for 200 years, and attempted to integrate refugees from Baekje and Goguryeo, in the first attempt at creation of a national identity. But it failed, and eventually the old kingdoms split again.
This time, Goguryeo prevailed over Silla and Baekje, absorbed refugees from Balhae, and was first to fully unify the entire Korean peninsula, becoming Goryeo—the name from which Korea comes from.
In Goryeo’s ~500 years, nearly all threats to its existence came from the north. First from the Khitan and Jurchen tribes (Manchus), and later from the Mongols, who invaded Korea nine times, repeatedly destroying the kingdom until they subdued it in the mid 1200s, making it a vassal state of Mongol-controlled China for nearly a century. Notice how the borders of Goryeo are very close to those of present-day North+South Korea!
Throughout Goryeo’s history, it remained a tributary to the Chinese rulers. The only difference was the extent of the tributes: light under the Song Dynasty (960-1279), heavy under the Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty (1270-1356).
Soon after Mongol control weakened and Goryeo regained independence, its ruling family was toppled by the Joseon, who went on to reign for ~500 years.
The Joseon introduced many of the hallmarks of Korean society today. They brought the capital to Seoul, implemented civil service exams, scientifically created a new alphabet to replace the Chinese one, and shifted the country’s religion from Buddhism to Confucianism—which made the country more patriarchal, with stronger gender norms. To maintain the Confucian purity, it became increasingly hermetic with respect to external influences, leading to its reputation as the Hermit Kingdom.
About one century into the Joseon period, a new threat emerged, this time from the south: Japan! Japan had recently unified—a common milestone across countries at that time. This is no coincidence: Technology and institutions2 were sophisticated enough to allow for big swaths of land to be unified. And since governments that unify countries tend to be militaristic, once they’re done, they’re usually like, “What else can we conquer?” Unfortunately for Korea, the only thing close to Japan is Korea.
During the Imjin Wars, in the late 1500s, Japan invaded nearly all of Korea. But the Japanese were quickly expelled, thanks to the support of local guerrillas and China’s Ming dynasty—who didn’t want to lose their tributary state!
Fun fact: In the Battle of Myeongnyang, 13 Korean ships faced over 100 Japanese ships and won, not losing a single ship, while sinking or crippling over 30 Japanese ones! The 2014 movie depicting it was the highest-grossing movie of all time in Korea.
Joseon, too, was a tributary state to China: Sending light tributes to the Ming Dynasty (until 1644), and heavier tributes to the Manchu Qing Dynasty. This is why the Ming sent support against the Japanese in the late 1500s.
In the mid-1800s, Western powers, which had been developing at breakneck speed thanks to their Industrial Revolution, paid a visit to East Asia. They forced China, Korea, and Japan to open up to Western influence. Of those, only Japan industrialized quickly, and in a matter of decades starting in the 1900s, it used this newfound power to break the hold of China over Korea, take over Taiwan, fend off Russia, invade Korea, invade China, and then during WW2, take over half of Asia-Pacific.
This is not a happy period of Korean history.3 Tens of thousands of cultural artifacts were taken to Japan, hundreds of historic buildings were demolished, the Korean language was banned, Koreans suffered mass murders…
Japan’s primary objective was to use Korea for its resources. First, rice—which accounted for as much as 10% of Japan’s food consumption. Japan modernized Korea’s farming methods and expanded its output, but still, the share it took from farmers reduced the overall rice consumption in Korea. Many Korean farmers had to sell their land or leave.4
Japan also took over the timber, coal, and iron industries.
The only silver lining I can see is that Japan saw Korea as an important source of goods to fund an invasion of China, so it developed its agriculture, infrastructure and industries. It built railways, ports and roads.5
This boom in industry also created a population explosion.
And the Japanese brought public education, telephones, cars…
With industry came unions, at a time when the world was playing with the ideas of Socialism and Communism. So as Koreans resisted, they started splitting into nationalist and socialist camps—the same as was happening in China, which would later end up in a civil war and the success of Communism in Mainland China.
During WW2, the exploitation of Korean workers ramped up. Over 5 million Koreans were mobilized to support the Japanese war effort. About 450,000 Korean male laborers were involuntarily sent to Japan—some of their descendants still reside there, some ended up trapped in the Soviet Union.
Japan used hundreds of thousands of women—many from Korea—as comfort women: sex slaves.
These women were raped by up to 40 men per day, and their stories are horrendous.6 Japan also had a covert biological and chemical warfare research division during WW2, named Unit 731,7 which conducted brutal experiments on prisoners, including Koreans.
And this is where we reach the story of the 1945 partition, which I shared here.
Because of its geography, Korea has always been a land that wants to unite: A small, elongated peninsula that naturally belongs together. It’s why today nearly all Koreans are ethnically Korean.
The ancient kingdoms of Gojoseon, Goguryeo, and Silla attempted this unification, but it was Goryeo who succeeded, uniting the peninsula for one thousand years. But the forces surrounding it have always been strong, and have torn it apart. It happened with the Chinese, Mongols, Japanese, Soviets, and the US and the ideas of Capitalist Democracy vs Communist Authoritarianism.
In many ways, I find the South Korean flag extremely fitting for the country.
Officially, the flag has a white background to represent peace and purity, the circle in the flag's center is the Yin and Yang and symbolizes harmony, with the blue half representing negative energy and the red the positive. The four trigrams (the symbols with three rows each) represent the seasons, the cardinal points, family relationships, elements, values…
But I find its unintended symbolism even more interesting. Korea didn’t have a flag until it started negotiating with Japan and the US in the late 1800s. The flag is a direct result of foreign influences.
More importantly, at its heart, the circle (taegeuk) is one unit, like Korea. But it’s split in half, like Korea. The red half at the top and a blue half at the bottom symbolize the two huge influences that Korea has suffered through its history:
The Continental Asians to the north: the Chinese, Mongols, Soviets, and its latest embodiment, the ideology of Communism.
The Seaborne influences to the south: first Japan, and now the US.
Korea is now split, broadly through the middle, following the same line and colors as those of the taegeuk, and representing the unity of Korea and the two forces that pull it apart.
Tellingly, Goryeo also used the names Samhan and Haedong, meaning "East of the Sea". Which sea? The Yellow Sea. Which means Korea would have a name in reference to China (which is west of that same sea), reinforcing the idea of China being a significant reference point in Korean culture and history.
They’re the same thing in my mind: ideas.
Which means I’m sure to offend somebody here, so please accept my apologies beforehand; there’s no desire to hurt anyone.
When I don’t cite a source, the data will come from Korean History in Maps.
Although workers were subjected to extremely poor conditions, and a lot of this infrastructure was destroyed during the 1950–1953 Korean War.
You can read a few here. They are truly horrible. Comfort women were often recruited from rural villages with the promise of factory employment, or jobs as nurses or secretaries. There is evidence that the Japanese government intentionally destroyed official records regarding comfort women. Comfort women stations were created after Japan’s invasion of China and the mass rape and killings that the Japanese soldiers performed on the Chinese. Why these comfort women? Winning soldiers tend to rape their way into the civilian population. Japanese soldiers did that in Nanjing, China, with very bad results. Japanese authorities decided to create these Comfort Women stations to prevent a worsening of anti-Japanese sentiment, reduce venereal diseases among Japanese troops, prevent leakage of military secrets by civilians who were in contact with Japanese officers, and minimize medical expenses for treating venereal diseases that the soldiers acquired from frequent and widespread rape (which hindered Japan's military capacity). Comfort women stations were so prevalent that the Imperial Army offered accountancy classes on how to manage comfort stations, which included how to determine the actuarial "durability or perishability of the women procured”.
This is also quite horrible.
2025-04-08 20:04:11
Today:
New uses of cabs thanks to robotaxis
How Europe is actually rising up
AI art is about to change movies, books, ads, social media, and more. We are all now creators.
What to eat to achieve immortality
The unstoppable intelligence progression of AI
Reaction to your comments in the article What Are My Politics: Is AI telling you what you want to hear?
Why diversity of values is bad
More evidence on the loneliness / aloneness “epidemic”
Accurate cancer diagnosis
The rise of the solopreneurs
The predicted demise of global taxation
My take on the Lab Leak Origin of COVID
AI and jobs
Remember how a month ago I told you that robotaxis are here? And they will change how we use taxis. I gave this example:
You’ll start using robotaxis for new purposes, like dropping off and picking up your 12 year old child from extracurriculars—something you’d never imagine doing with a human driver…
Lo and behold:
A few weeks ago, in Rise Up, Europe!, I incited Europeans to wake up to reality: We are no longer protected by the US against threats like Russia. Since then, Europe has been reacting.
Just one week after that article, Europe unveiled a strategy to become more resilient to crises. It contains 60 proposals, one of which asks its member states and populations to assemble personal emergency kits to aid survival for 72 hours after a crisis breaks.
France pledged €2B in military aid to Ukraine as some 30 leaders met with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Paris on March 27th to discuss strengthening Kyiv's position and what role they might play if a peace deal is struck with Russia.—Reuters
Thank you, German President Merz, for listening to me and prioritizing the fight against Putin with your trillion dollar fund for the military (including Ukrainian help) that requires changing the constitution.
Once the new parliament meets after March 2025, and Greens are not needed for power, you can make a similar move and walk back the closure of nuclear reactors.
The UK’s left-wing government plans to reduce social spending by over €4B, which will withdraw support to over one million people! It will also reduce the spending on civil servants by 15%!
How will these savings be used? They are approximately equal to the increase in military spending—about €7B.
It’s unfortunate that taxpayers can’t spend more money in redistribution, but it reflects reality: Economies can only do so much, and right now the military in Europe is in need of more investment.
The backlog of orders has increased by 75% since the Ukrainian invasion in 2022:
The capital expenditure of European defense companies is growing, too. It used to be about 50% of the US’s spend before the war, and is now over 75%.
A couple of weeks ago, for the article Rise Up, Europe!, I made this image with Midjourney:
The idea was to show the US (imperial eagle) fighting against Russia (bear) and China (dragon), and a Europe (Athena) emerging in the middle as a giant that could side with the US, not as an inferior partner, but as a major one. Hopefully, you got that.
What you probably didn’t get is that I generated over 60 images to get to this one:
It took me about two hours to generate the image I finally used, and I was not quite happy with it: Europe is too small, the bear too big. But I wasn’t going to spend any more time on it.
The following week, I tried again, this time with ChatGPT’s new image generation technology. This was my very first attempt:
It’s not perfect—I don’t like the colors—but the composition is nearly perfect. So I asked it to make some improvements—something I could never do accurately before:
This is the true innovation: We can finally compose images the way we want them, rather than getting something that looks cool but doesn’t represent what we had in mind!
Ethan Mollick has some other good examples. If you prompt Microsoft Copilot’s traditional image generator this: “Show me a room with no elephants in it, make sure to annotate the image to show me why there are no possible elephants”, you’ll get the left image from below. But GPT-4o’s multimodal model will get you the right images:
To illustrate how much image generators have improved, Ethan shared this example from 2.5 years ago. The prompt was “otter on an airplane using wifi”:
To compare the capabilities, this time he didn’t just ask for an otter on an airplane using wifi. That would be too easy. Now he asked that the otter use the wifi to:
Buy an action figure of another otter
The action figure is of a game designer otter, so it includes a tablet with game design rules
The image generator created the otter using wifi on an airplane, the action figure, the game design tablet that it added to the action figure, and added all that to the computer screen! Insane.
Here are a few examples of other images people have created with this technology:
Of course, you can also animate this stuff:
Balaji Srinivasan has some interesting thoughts on how all this will evolve:
(1) This changes filters. Instagram filters required custom code; now all you need are a few keywords like “Studio Ghibli” or Dr. Seuss or South Park.
(2) This changes online ads. Much of the workflow of ad unit generation can now be automated.
(3) This changes memes. The baseline quality of memes should rise, because a critical threshold of reducing prompting effort to get good results has been reached.
(4) This may change books. I’d like to see someone take a public domain book from
Project Gutenberg, feed it page by page into Claude [an LLM like ChatGPT’s text-based chatbot, but from another company, Anthropic], and have it turn it into comic book panels with the new ChatGPT. Old books may become more accessible this way.
(5) This changes slides. We’re now close to the point where you can generate a few reasonable AI images for any slide deck. With the right integration, there should be less bullet-point only presentations.
(6) This changes websites. You can now generate placeholder images in a site-specific style for any <img> tag, as a kind of visual Loren Ipsum.
(7) This may change movies. We could see shot-for-shot remakes of old movies in new visual styles, with dubbing just for the artistry of it. Though these might be more interesting as clips than as full movies.
(8) This may change social networking. Once this tech is open source and/or cheap enough to widely integrate, every upload image button will have a generate image alongside it.
(9) This should change image search. A generate option will likewise pop up alongside available images.
(10) In general, visual styles have suddenly become extremely easy to copy, even easier than frontend code. Distinction will have to come in other ways.
Next up:
What to eat to achieve immortality
The unstoppable AI intelligence progression
Is AI telling you what you want to hear?
Why diversity of values is bad
More evidence on the loneliness / aloneness “epidemic”
Cancer diagnosis is getting crazy accurate
Solopreneurs are rising indeed
What happened to the predicted demise of global taxation
AI and job destruction
2025-04-04 19:45:14
This is the first article in the Korea series. For a future article, I’d love to talk with English-speaking South Korean women about fertility. If that’s you or you know anyone who’d be interested in chatting with me, please have them fill this one-minute form.
Happy birthday P!
Korea had been united as a single country for over 1,000 years. Then, in 1945, the US and the USSR split the country in two. But was this unavoidable? It was not! The story could have turned out completely differently if it hadn’t been for an obscure clause on a document, Hitler’s resolve, scientific skill, and a few days of bad weather.
And it all starts here.
It’s February 1945. The Western Allies have liberated France and Belgium. The Soviet Union is knocking at the doors of Berlin. The fall of the Nazis is not a question of if, but when. So Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill meet in Yalta, Crimea, to decide the fate of the world.
In the Pacific, things are not going so well.
The US was fighting on every island against Japan; it was bleeding its youth dry on the battlefield. So its most pressing need was for the Soviet Union to join the war against Japan, which would reduce American casualties and accelerate the fall of the empire. The USSR agreed to join the war, but only after the fall of Berlin and some time to prepare. Stalin said: We will declare war against Japan three months to the day after the fall of Germany.
This would end up determining the future of Korea, but none of them knew it at the time.
The USSR accepted under the conditions that Mongolia would become an independent country, and that the USSR would receive some Japanese islands.1 Korea was not discussed.
Officially.
At some point during the conference, Roosevelt and Stalin slipped away from Churchill to discuss Korea.
Roosevelt proposed—behind Churchill’s back—that Korea would be put under the trusteeship of Russia, China, and the US, but not the UK. What does that mean? They would jointly manage it. Stalin agreed that they should share the oversight of Korea, but thought the UK should be included. Details were unclear. If they ever talked about it again at Yalta, we don’t know; there are no records.
Germany surrendered on May 8th 1945.
That set the clock ticking: The USSR would join the war against Japan on August 8th 1945.
Which would have been convenient for the US. Except for one thing: In the meantime, it developed a huge wildcard. On July 16th 1945, at 5:29 a.m. MWT, the US successfully carried out the Trinity Nuclear Test. It had acquired the nuclear bomb.
Truman, the new US President, learned about it six days later, on July 21st 1945, while he was again meeting Stalin and Churchill, this time in Potsdam, Germany.
Now, the US was racing against the clock: We don’t need the USSR! We can win the war without them! If we drop a bomb on Japan, they will surrender. But we only have 18 days left before the USSR joins the war. We must hurry!
So that’s what they did. Four days later, on July 26th, a nuclear bomb was ready to be dropped on Japan. The US gave Japan an ultimatum: Surrender unconditionally, or else...
13 days left.
On July 28th, Japan refused.
11 days left.
Truman ordered his forces to drop the bomb as soon as possible.
The bomb was scheduled for August 3rd.
5 days left.
But the weather was bad. It continued on the 4th, then the 5th.
On August 6th, 1945 the US dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
2 days left.
Japan did not react.
Stalin had also known about the bomb: His spies had told him. At that point, the Soviet military was among the most powerful in the world. He calculated that it was now or never: It was the moment to make a move on Asia and take over as much land as possible—just as they had in Eastern Europe, where they had occupied everything all the way to Germany.
So on August 8th 1945, the USSR unleashed 1.5 million soldiers on Japanese-occupied China, Manchuria (Northeast China), Inner Mongolia, Korea (northern part), South Sakhalin & the Kuril Islands (Japan).
They overwhelmed the Japanese.
On August 9th, the US dropped a second bomb, on Nagasaki.
By August 10th, the Russians were already in Korea.
The US freaked out.
It knew that, if it allowed the USSR enough time, it would occupy the entire peninsula and make it a Communist country.
That very evening, on August 10th 1945, the US leadership took two colonels aside and put the destiny of a country in their hands. Their task? Propose a split for Korea to the USSR.
Colonels Chris “Tick” Bonesteel and Dean Rusk did not know anything about Korean geography (!), so they started with a National Geographic map—probably something like this:
This is the extent of information they used to decide how to split Korea.
Holy s**t.
What was their conclusion?
Bonesteel and I retired to an adjacent room late at night and studied intently a map of the Korean peninsula. Working in haste and under great pressure, we had a formidable task: to pick a zone for the American occupation. Neither Tic nor I was a Korea expert, but it seemed to us that Seoul, the capital, should be in the American sector.—As I Saw It, Colonel Dean Rusk
Though some officers argued that they should move the line further north to the 39th parallel, the two officers thought they’d be lucky if the Soviets agreed to the 38th. This is why, on August 14th, six days after the Soviet invasion, Truman proposed to Stalin the 38th Parallel as the place to divide Korea.
On August 16th, to the US’s surprise, he agreed.
Once the USSR and the US had their spheres of influence in Korea, they each put forces on the ground. And a new world began: The fight against Nazism was over; now it was a war between the US and the USSR, Capitalist Democracies and Socialist Dictatorships.
Both the US and the USSR wanted a unified Korea, and both were proponents of self-determination, but neither wanted to cede its side to the other.
In 1946, the Russian Colonel General in charge of Korea, Shtykov, chose a man to lead their side of Korea: Kim Il Sung had fought the Japanese for ages in Manchuria and was trained by the Soviet Union’s military. The Russians “decided the election” and put Kim in power in the North.
In the South, the US wasn’t sure what to do, but it knew it shouldn’t give in to the Communists. So it kept managing Korea through the military, from Japan. Over time, policies in the North and South diverged.
The Soviets proposed a withdrawal from Korea and to let the Koreans decide. The US disagreed, fearing that Communist influence in the south could take over, and preferred to involve the UN, who proposed a vote. The USSR boycotted it: They had the boots on the ground, they were not going to risk losing that advantage with a vote, so they opted out. Only the South held elections.
But southern Koreans saw the writing on the wall: If we have elections just for the south, that’s the beginning of the end for a united Korea! A thousand years of unity, broken by foreigners! Many rebelled, to no avail. US and Korean forces crushed any rebellion. In May 1948, the South carried out elections, and the authoritarian Syngman Rhee won. In 1949, the US military exited South Korea.
The North saw this as the South drifting apart, both as a separate country and into capitalism. They didn’t want that. And now that the Americans had left, Korea was defenseless. Kim Il Sung asked Stalin for support for an invasion of the south. Stalin was hesitant, but thought: The US did nothing to prevent the fall of China to Communist hands. They will probably do nothing here, either?
Indeed, Communist China had just defeated the Nationalists, so it also thought the same would happen in Korea. Kim Il Sung paid a visit to China’s leader, Mao Zedong, to ask for his blessing in May 1950. Mao Zedong gave it. In June, North Korea invaded the South.
South Koreans were initially overwhelmed. They were cornered in the far south of the peninsula. The US had a decision to make. Should they leave the South Koreans to fend for themselves? Pave the way for a Communist takeover?
At this point, the US viewed Communism like Nazism or Japanese Imperialism: Ideologies that would continue to spread unless they were checked. It had already happened in Russia, then in Eastern Europe, then in China, and now in Korea. The earlier Communism could be stopped in Korea, the better. So this is when the US drew the line on the sand and it entered the war.2
Very quickly, the tides turned and the US and South Korea pushed north, nearing the Chinese border. US military leaders were jubilant: They thought they could beat Communism on the battlefield and that China wouldn’t dare to join the war.
But that was a miscalculation. China was now Communist, and had 2,000 years of influence over Korea. It could not let North Korea fall. So it sent nearly 1.5 million soldiers to the south.
They initially gained a lot of ground, moving the border south. But over time, the border returned to nearly where it was at the beginning of the war. In 1953, after over three million Koreans had died, North Korea and South Korea signed an armistice, and the border it established has been kept ever since.
What would have happened if the US had developed the nuclear bomb weeks earlier?
Would it have had time to take over all of Korea?
What if Stalin had asked for four months to join the war against Japan, instead of three?
What if bad weather had not prevented the dropping of the first nuclear bomb? What if the Japanese had surrendered faster and the USSR could not have declared war against them and invade?
What if Seoul had been north of the 38th parallel? Would it be North Korean today?
We will never know, but it’s very possible that all of Korea would have remained intact.
Many questions remain about Korea:
Is the 1953 split between the north and the south a weird event in Korea’s history? No, it’s just a new instance of the same story repeating across the ages. Why? Because of geography.
What’s going on in North Korea? Why do so few people escape? Can it ever become normal?
Why has South Korean culture taken the world by storm?
What’s the future of the country, especially given its crazy fertility collapse?
These are some of the topics I’ll cover next in the Korean series. Subscribe to read them!
South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.
In fact it was the UN. The US was supported by several other countries, because this was a war of aggression from NK to SK, but 90% of the soldiers were either from the US or SK.
2025-04-01 20:03:25
I don’t like writing about politics because it’s depressing, and exhaustively covered elsewhere. Let’s make this article an exception: I feel like it’s time for me to address my own political beliefs.
Because there’s no type of comment at the end of an article that annoys me more than this:
I used to like what you wrote, but in this article you say that you support X policy from Y politician; therefore, you are on the other side and you have lost me.
Given the topics I write about, people constantly ask me if I’m a Democrat or a Republican, right-wing or left-wing. So let’s make it clear: I am none of these.
First, I find bundling policies to be an absurd inheritance of 18th century technology: If I want to fight climate change, why then must I also support more public education, uncontrolled immigration, trans women in women’s sports, or taking billionaires’ assets? If I think the deficit should be low and the state should be small, why must I also believe that the climate is not changing, or that everyone should be free to carry a weapon?
And then what happens when the party changes stances? Like the Democrats did with immigration, going from Obama’s controlled to Biden’s free rein? Or like the Republicans with their support for Ukraine?
Second, people tend to be credulous of what leaders say, simply because they are in leadership. I think we should be the opposite.
I have a systematic skepticism, both of what people say and of people in power, so I have twice the skepticism of what people in power say. To me, this is the right check and balance: Who watches the watchmen? Everybody. We need everybody to question what leaders say—especially what our own leaders say, because we have a confirmation bias that we must actively fight.
The consequence is that when I criticize a political leader, you can’t really know whether I favor this leader or not.
Third, and much more importantly, I don’t create an identity around my beliefs. Doing this is dangerous, because it requires that you shift your beliefs to match your identity. That means you will disregard evidence to fit in with a group with shared beliefs.
I am not Centrist either, because that’s just another identity—and many times it’s just a cop-out, to avoid saying that you’re left or right because you don’t fully identify with either. Center is supposed to be in the middle, milquetoast. No: I may support ideas from the left, from the right, from libertarians, from authoritarians, from capitalists, from communists…
So how do I decide my political stance? I look at the topics that matter the most at any given time, reflect on what’s best for society, and pick the position that best achieves that.
Let’s take a few examples.
I agree with Germany’s Greens on supporting Ukraine against Russia, but I disagree with their nuclear stance. I believe in man-made global warming, but I also think it’s something we can solve through tech.
What’s the best for society? Whatever makes the most people happiest. So for example, housing costs are one of the biggest problems in society, suffered primarily by poor people who aren’t homeowners yet. Therefore, I favor YIMBYism: We should build much more housing to make it more affordable for more people.
I think Trump’s early management of COVID was stupid, but Operation Warp Speed was an immense success to get vaccines fast. I am glad Biden printed money to support people during the pandemic, but the economy remained closed for way too long, and too much money was printed and given away. Vaccine requirements were overreach once everybody who wanted a vaccine could get one.
I think Biden, Harris, and Trump were all awful choices for the last US elections. Biden was clearly not fit for reelection, and it was blatantly obvious at least one year before he stepped down. Harris was not even elected as the Democratic leader; she was just appointed. Trump is unethical and his stance on Ukraine and tariffs are dumb—I’ll explain why later. At the time, I appreciated Clinton, Obama, McCain, and Romney. I generally agree with Macron in France, even if he makes many mistakes and his approval rate is dismal. From my shallow understanding, both Left and Right in the UK seem terrible, and both center-left and center-right in Germany seem reasonable.
I am glad there was a Woke movement. It was good for women and minorities. The rights of women, Blacks, Latinos, homosexuals, and many more groups have greatly increased as a result. But Wokism went too far, so I’m glad we are course-correcting. For example:
DEI statements and the like are very bad for society because they stifle freedom of speech and focus on the wrong metrics.
I welcome pronouns (I’ll call you whatever you want me to call you!) but pressuring people to proactively mention them is a waste of everybody’s time (just say it when it’s relevant).
Trans women should not share sports with biological women; for the same reasons we split men’s and women’s sports.
I don’t believe in historic settler colonialism, and I think there are few legitimate issues of cultural appropriation.
But I also fear that this course-correction is going to go too far. Racism will increase and stupid mistakes will be made, which will be paid for with careers and lives.1
So please, whenever I write an article, don’t say “Are you writing this because you support X party or Y person?” because that is never the case. Positions should stand on their own, supported by our intellect. If you want to convince me, use facts. I am frequently wrong; the only thing that might make me different from the average person on the Internet is that I recognize it fast and learn from it.
With that, I’m going to do something I don’t usually do: Share my rough takes on some important, newsworthy topics. Below are my current thoughts on US politics (I covered most of my EU thoughts here), without having reviewed the issues in depth. I welcome feedback and debate on them! I will review first Republicans (Trump’s administration) and then Democrats.
Again: I haven’t written about these at length because I haven’t studied them at length. But here are my unrefined thoughts:
The concept of DOGE is good. In companies, you want leaders to act extremely aggressively: Lower costs mean higher margins, more dividends, and higher salaries. Companies have an incentive to save money for this reason. But the state does not: It doesn’t spend its own money, but taxpayers’. Frequently, success is measured by the amount of money spent, rather than the benefits provided. The fact that the government is so cavalier about taxpayer money is evident in instances such as the Pentagon failing its 7th audit in a row. There are other failures too, like that the US government seems to have several computers outside of the Federal Reserve that can print money—this should be limited to the FED, and should be independent from the government. This is why the DOGE approach is also valuable for the state: It can lead to less waste, less debt, and lower taxes.
There are two approaches to cutting spending:
Study how money is spent, and delete what is superfluous.
Delete first, and rethink your position after people come to complain.
We are used to #1 because it’s less disruptive. But #2 works much better because it switches the default: If you are already doing some activity, it’s easy to justify, so it’s hard to cut. But if you need to make a case to get your funding back, that’s a greater ask, and many people just won’t do it. This second approach is a more painful process, but I think it’s much more effective and efficient.
This has many positives:
It will save the government (and taxpayers) many billions of dollars
It will change civil servants’ perception of their own job safety. This is important, because if you believe you’re untouchable, your productivity lags.
It will set an example for state and local governments to do the same, making this approach pervasive throughout government.
It will change people’s perception of the corruption and waste in the government. People will be much more likely to pay their taxes and support a big state if they know that state is not wasteful.
Of course, it has negatives. It’s one thing to cut 80% of Twitter employees; it’s completely different for example to cut overnight foreign aid on which millions of people count for survival.
Here’s a positive that DOGE will not have: Make a huge dent in overall government spending.2 The true way to save money is through policy change. But to me these are different things:
The US should watch how it spends money to reduce waste and corruption. That’s what DOGE does.
The US needs to reduce its deficit, and for that, big policies are probably a better tool.
To me, Trump is playing the real estate pseudo-mogul here.
In negotiation, there are two concepts that matter more than anything else: BATNA and anchoring.
BATNA is the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. It means if you don’t reach an agreement, your alternative is acceptable anyway, so you can walk away at any moment. That gives you negotiating power.
Anchoring is fixing the default agreement in terms that are advantageous to you, and then negotiating from there. For example, if you want to sell something for a minimum of $100, you might set the price at $400. The buyer on the other side will fixate on that $400, will use it as an anchor, and will explore discounts from there. He might imagine getting 10%, 20% off. If he gets 30% off, he’ll feel super happy. All of that is way above the minimum price of $100 you would actually accept.
When Trump puts 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, he has a good BATNA: Those tariffs would hurt the US, but they would hurt Canada and Mexico much more. If he walks away, it will be painful for the US (and thus Trump), but devastating for Canada and Mexico—and their presidents. So he uses this leverage.
Meanwhile, anchoring at 25% seems like a huge deal. It’s such a devastating increase in costs that going back to no tariff will appear like a huge win.
That’s my guess as to why he’s doing this. The problem is that it might work for some real estate deals, but likely not with the US government.
When Trump says China is the enemy and yet imposes taxes of 25% on Canada and Mexico, and only 10% on China, what he’s saying is, “I will take advantage of my allies and respect my enemies.” Both enemies and allies take note of this: He’s rewarding force and hostility, so that’s what both allies and enemies will work towards.
I assume Trump wants tariffs because of the consistent US trade deficit. But there are only a few cases in which tariffs are good, such as strategic independence or infant industries. They don’t include reducing the deficit. And broad tariffs are quite bad. They:
Reduce domestic GDP and productivity
Increase unemployment
Increase inequality
Barely impact the trade balance
Are worse for developed economies
In real estate, you can play hardball and burn bridges in your negotiations, because there’s always another piece of land to buy or lease, another bank to sour relationships with. You can usually negotiate as if this deal is the last time you’re going to deal with these people.
That is not the case in politics. You have the same 195 countries in the world; they barely change. Of these, there’s only a handful that will matter over the years, and they will remember prior interactions. They will remember for decades. In fact, they will put your conduct as a leader in the context of thousands of years of history. You can’t burn bridges, because they will come back to bite you.
So when Trump tells Mexico and Canada that he’ll impose 25% tariffs, they will try to avoid them, but the next thing they’ll do is try to reduce their exposure to the US in general. This is bad for the US over the long term.
Something similar happens when the Trump Administration says “Canada is going to be the 51st state” or talks about taking over Greenland or the Panama Canal. Let’s consider Greenland in more detail.
The US Vice President JD Vance said the Danish government (which controls Greenland) is “not doing its job” and “not being a good ally”, and that taking over the island “is what President Trump is going to do because he doesn’t care about what the Europeans scream at us; he cares about putting the interests of American citizens first.”
This can be good for chest-thumping bullies, but the reaction from Denmark is: We will never make life easy for Trump, we will do everything in our power to fend him off. It might push for more EU integration, more EU military power, expanding France’s nuclear umbrella, giving China a foothold on Greenland so that the US doesn’t take over (it’s not the same to anger small Denmark than big China)… None of these are good outcomes.
And of course, other allies pay attention. None of them will be very forthcoming with Trump because they have seen how he deals with his “allies”.
Greenland is strategically positioned between the US and Russia, making it a legitimate security concern,3 but treating an ally like that is the best way to lose allies. And the US can’t do what it does without its allies.
Fun fact, I saw this video post from JD Vance, and I want you to notice one thing:
See how he talks about Greenland as if it was already part of the US? “We’re going to go there to check on the security situation…” This is a known psychological trick: When you speak of things as if they have already happened, people accept them more easily.
The Trump Administration is playing hardball with Ukraine, aggressively trying to pressure it into a peace treaty with Russia. This is bad for Ukraine and bad for America.
Why does Trump want this? I asked Grok to summarize the Trump Administration’s reasons for wanting an end to the war in Ukraine, and it says it’s unclear, but based on declarations, it appears that the main reasons are: reducing deaths, preventing further escalations, better economics, and aligning Russia with the US against China.
This is a laudable goal, but nobody believes this is a true interest because it doesn’t represent America First.
In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. The Allies opted for appeasement: Surely Hitler would now be happy and stop his expansion.
In 1938, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in Czechia. The Allies opted for appeasement.
In 1939, Hitler annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia. The Allies opted for appeasement.
Then in 1939 he invaded Poland, and the Allies realized appeasement doesn’t work with an expansionist dictator.
Between 1999 and 2009, Putin leveled Chechnya. Nobody batted an eye.
In 2008, he invaded Georgia. Nobody batted an eye.
In 2014, he invaded Crimea. The Allies opted again for appeasement and didn’t intervene.
Later that year, he invaded eastern Ukraine. Again, nobody did anything.
Expansionist dictators will continue escalating until they lose. Rewarding them with victory only emboldens them.
Sure, you want to be careful how you support Ukraine to avoid WWIII or nuclear armaggedon, but Putin understands force much more than he understands any other argument.
Apparently, the two ways in which this would be achieved are by stopping distribution of funds to Ukraine, and by taking advantage of peace for more economic exchanges.
Clearly, stopping the war would be a great way to stop sending money to Ukraine. But we should also put this in context.
It looks like the US has spent about $200B on Ukraine since 2022, or about $65B per year. Conversely, the US military budget is ~$900B per year. So, for about 7% of the US’s military spend, the US gets one of the best deals it could ever wish for.
Russia sees the US as its enemy—otherwise why would it get nervous about NATO expansion? Russia’s war with Ukraine gets the US’s traditional enemy bogged down in a war that bleeds its coffers dry, kills its youth, and pushes all its intelligent citizens away, at a cost of zero lives and a tiny share of its defense budget.
In return, the US gets even more goodwill from its European allies, wins an eternal ally (Ukraine), and keeps China in check, sending the message that invading Taiwan would be extremely costly for China. This, in turns, keeps Taiwan as an independent entity, which keeps China contained.
And just a small reminder that this is how the US won the Cold War! The USSR got into a quagmire in Afghanistan, and it bled so much money, soldiers, status, and internal support, that the empire crumbled. The US could have a repeat of this if it wanted. But now Trump says no! Why?
Economically, this is the most value for money the US has ever invested in its military.
If the US pushed for such a victory against Russia, it could easily negotiate an economic deal with Ukraine to tighten their economic exchanges and exploit its resources. The US will never be able to achieve such a deal with Putin, however, for a couple of reasons.
First, Western companies learned the lesson that if you invest in Putin’s Russia, you can lose your money overnight: All multinationals had to leave when the war started.
Second, why would a victorious Putin open up his country to the US more than how it was before the war? This is absurd. The only way Russia and the US will connect more tightly economically is if Putin is out of the picture. Plus, Russia is a tiny economy, as we have seen:
It would indeed be very cool if Trump could get Russia on the US side and against China. And there’s a precedent: Nixon got the US closer to China during the Cold War, against the USSR. Except that China and the USSR had already split.
I just think it’s impossible.
First, Russia and China share a big border, either directly or through their buffers of Mongolia and Kazakhstan:
For Russia, China is much more of a threat than the US.
Second, that threat is very real, because the border with China is:
Extremely far from Russia’s capital, Moscow
Extremely close to China’s capital, Beijing
Basically a 21st century colony for Russia
The Russian side is empty, and the Chinese side is very populated
China’s population and GDP are ~10x Russia’s, and China’s military spend is ~2x Russia’s
For all these reasons, it would be very easy for China to take over parts (or all) of Siberia.
Third, Russia and China don’t have a history of conflict. The USSR invaded Japanese-controlled China to free it, supported Communist China, and gave it its ideology. Compare that with Russia and the US, which have spent the last 80 years at odds.
Fourth, China has become a key ally of Russia, providing many of the resources it needs to keep operating. Antagonizing China for a speculative economic package from Trump—who doesn’t have a reputation of keeping his word, and who will be out of the picture in four years—would be political suicide for Putin.
Finally, the ideologies of Russia and China are much more aligned than those of Russia and the US. Despite Trump’s imperialist élan, the US is firmly a democracy that values freedom, while China and Russia are authoritarian empires.
For all these reasons, I think it’s virtually impossible to turn Russia around, so Trump’s attempts to do so are worthless. It would be easier to turn China against Russia than the other way around, since Russia really depends on China.
It’s hard to judge Trump’s strategy because he hasn’t made it explicit (does he even have one?), but from what I can gather, his positioning with regard to Ukraine is really unwise.
All of this is telling me that Trump, unlike every other Republican president before him, simply doesn’t understand the world order that the US created in 1945 and that allowed it to remain the world’s biggest superpower all this time.
It’s not a coincidence that the US’s biggest allies today are also the countries that the US occupied during WW2: Europe, Japan, and South Korea. You can say they are soft colonies.
The UN, NATO, the World Bank, the IMF… All these “international” organizations that govern the world today are based in the US and / or controlled by the US. This extends to the dollar, the banking SWIFT system, the payment systems (VISA, Mastercard, Paypal…), credit rating organizations, USAID… What the US has built is a constellation of organizations that appear to make the world a safe, neutral, rules-based place. Add capitalism, which makes the world richer, and the US has been able to co-opt half of the world to work with it.
But when you look under the hood, all these organizations are controlled by the US, backed by its military power.
If the US withdraws its military power and bullies its allies, they will stop supporting the system, it will collapse, and the US’s power will crumble with it. We can see it happen in real time:
Hopefully Trump changes his stance or the US and the world can resist four years of this. I don’t want to contemplate the alternative.
Now that we’ve looked at the current state of the Republicans (nothing big today outside of Trump), let’s do the same with Democrats.
Democrats have been radicalizing way too much.
Here’s another visualization of how radical Democratic leaders have become:
This is bad for the Democrats, and it’s bad for the US.
Do you remember the Democrats’ reaction to Trump’s election win in 2016? People flooded the streets, held rallies against his agenda, pushed back against his build the wall crusade. Now, the executive orders keep piling up, and we barely hear Democrats’ reaction. Why? I think it’s because they don’t really know what to fight for. Their position on topics like immigration is quite unpopular,4 but it turns out an even less popular agenda item has been culture wars and identity politics.
In August of last year, I published The Woke Pendulum, in which I suggested that we had passed Peak Woke and that we were now swinging away from it, like a pendulum. Therefore, the anti-woke trend is going to keep gaining momentum until it passes the optimum level and then becomes too anti-fairness.
Since Trump got elected, the Woke Pendulum is in full swing. Trans women are being pushed away from female sports. DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) departments and statements are disappearing everywhere. Affirmative action in employee and student selection is being decimated. Appropriately, Democrat darling AOC dropped her pronouns and went from “US Representative” to “US Congresswoman”:
I have nothing against AOC. In fact, at one point I studied her social media because she’s very good at communication and I was considering helping a female social media campaign for State Congress. I think AOC has some good stances and good intentions but she has radicalized over the years and she has some untenable positions like her visceral hatred for rich people.
Culture Wars is not the Democrats’ only shot in the foot. Another has been the unnecessary attack on billionaires like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. I understand being angry about rentiers—people who’ve done nothing in their lives but live off of the rents of their ancestors. But these are not rentiers. They are self-made people, who have built huge and profitable companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people. And they control several media. Why on Earth would you antagonize them?
The US needs strong Democrat leaders to balance out Trump. The only way we’re going to get them is if they are less radical. But then, what path should they follow? What would an exciting vision be for the left?
Some, like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance, apparently support deregulation to increase the supply of critical things like housing and renewables. I haven’t read the book (yet), but I’ve read some reviews, and I follow the thinkers in this arena from a distance. I’m not sure I buy their approach.
What I hear them ask is: What should the Left defend?
But that sounds backwards to me. You shouldn’t start with the idea of left vs right. Politics is about solving the coordination problems of people, so the right question is: What are people’s main issues? Then you go and solve those.
At a high level, my guess is that people broadly want to be rich, safe, healthy, and free. In addition, the Left tends to put considerable weight on being equal.
Real Estate is by far the biggest cost for families, so it’s obvious that any good party should focus on reducing these costs. Therefore, the Democrats should be YIMBYs (Yes In My BackYard) and promote much more housing.
Tariffs are bad because they make everything more expensive, so any political party should avoid them.
The default position toward regulations should be to avoid them, because they reduce economic activity and make everyone poorer.
More importantly, AI is coming, and there’s a high chance that it will push the masses towards unemployment. If that’s the case, a universal basic income (UBI, a small amount of cash given to every person unconditionally) is probably the right answer. Democrats should be exploring that.
Everyone wants to be safe, but Democratic cities are not. Democrats should stop prioritizing the rights of proven criminals at the cost of the safety of the common people.
Democrats should drop their broad opposition to guns (it’s not going to be popular any time soon) and focus on the few positions that are popular (like limiting the sale of automatic weapons or large magazines).
Safety also means a safe world: a world governed by rules, not by the law of the jungle. Imperialist countries like Russia or China should be opposed, and Democrats should be scorching Trump for his support of Russia against Ukraine.
The US has a massive issue with its healthcare: It’s wasteful and overly expensive, it bankrupts people way too frequently, and it’s not easily accessible to all. So the Democrats should eliminate the stronghold that physicians have on the supply of new physicians, enforce healthcare price transparency5, and push for universal healthcare: It works reasonably well in many other countries, and Medicare and Medicaid are not far from that.
Culture wars have limited freedom of speech too much, so Democrats should tone it down, which apparently they’re already doing.
Regulations also thwart freedom, so they should be limited whenever possible.
Democrats should zero in on the remaining sources of inequality.
One is the wage gap between men and women, but to solve it, they should gain a deep understanding of which part of the remaining gap is legitimate (like choosing to work fewer hours or in lower-income industries) and which part is not (like not negotiating raises).
Another is racial inequality, but the current understanding of the roots of this inequality are shallow, and it shows. For example, I read that African immigrants have much better outcomes than African Americans. If that’s true, that gap can’t be explained by racism—there’s something else. You can’t solve a problem you don’t understand.
Today, people with mental illnesses are not properly cared for in the US. They end up in the streets, which lowers the quality of life for them and for the rest of the city. It would be better for everyone if the community paid for their care.
The biggest inequality of the 21st century will be an economic one, though. Economies naturally tend towards inequality (as Piketty showed in Capital in the 21st Century), and the only way that we’ve reduced wealth inequality historically is through massive crises like wars, revolutions, state disintegration, or epidemics. We don’t want these, and we don’t want too much inequality. Unfortunately the Internet in general, and AI in particular, will usher in a new world of inequality. I suspect the only way to fight that will be—again—universal basic income.
Since the US needs two strong parties, this is the type of approach I’d like to see Democrats come up with—maybe not these specific policies, but a reasoned approach that proves they’re trying to make people happy. Then they could pick the most compelling pieces and build a convincing platform around them:
UBI
Universal healthcare and lower healthcare prices
Lower housing prices with more supply
Safer and cleaner cities
Caring institutions for the mentally ill
A just and safer world, fighting for freedom and democracy
My goal in this article was not to convince you of any policy that US Democrats or Republicans should follow—I haven’t analyzed each one in enough depth to form a definitive opinion. Rather, I have tried to illustrate how I think about politics: Not in terms of one side that should prevail, but rather as independent policies that are better or worse for society, independently from who supports it.
Each US party has strengths and weaknesses. I don’t feel like I belong to either, or favor one over the other. In fact, I root for both parties, because the stronger they both are, the more intelligent the debate will be, and the better the resulting policies.
This is true not just for the US, but for the entire world: I don’t favor one ideological trend over another. They all have some truths, you gotta take the best from each.
I hope more of us can think this way, so we can debate ideas based on what they are rather than who says them.
A more racist environment can easily result in more hate crimes, and can also curtail careers that would have thrived in a meritocracy—like wokism did with other careers.
Billions is not too much when your budget is measured in trillions.
And potentially on the path of missiles from China
They used to be in favor of controlled immigration, which is a reasonable stance, but went for open borders after Trump decided to “build a wall”.
All prices should be posted online and physically, and provided upfront rather than after the service has been provided.
