2026-10-23 21:52:23
Over the last few weeks in France, tens of thousands of people have vandalized and burned schools, cars, official buildings, shops, markets, people…
How did we get there? Initially, students were complaining about their terrible conditions: There’s not enough money for schools and teachers. They said it’s because there’s too much austerity. Is it?
Others say it’s the immigrants—especially Muslims—who wreck everything.
Or the opportunities of non-Whites.
Others say it’s the islamo-leftist alliance.
Or the police, because they’re too violent.
Or the justice system, which doesn’t imprison agitators enough.
I didn’t know, but I wanted to find out, especially as a veteran of French education (I did all my primary and secondary schooling in the French system and got one of my undergrad degrees from a Parisian university). So I did. The following is a detailed account of what has happened, and why I think it happened, based on plenty of videos and data.
This is one of these articles that are very hard to write because of their political load. I think it’s important to push back against all biases, so it was pretty serendipitous that Ground News gave me access to their tool, after I reached out to them. It helped me get a sense of the left and right perspectives on this story.
Ground News is sponsoring this article and has given Uncharted Territories readers a 40% discount for their subscription. You can redeem it here:
It all started in Créteil, a poor Parisian suburb, with 23% of its population in substantial economic deprivation and 26% of its population immigrants1.2 One week after the beginning of this school year in September, teachers at a school there went on strike because of three unfilled teaching positions (out of over 130, so ~2%) and some unfilled staff roles.3 Teachers’ unions supported them, the far-left party La France Insoumise (LFI) joined, and a day later, so did students.
The strike spread from high school to high school in the region of Paris, from there to the rest of the country, and from high schools to universities. 55% of French people approved of these strikes.
But they became violent.
A 15 year old lost a hand, allegedly after grabbing a dispersion grenade thrown by the police, another student suffered a broken jaw, another one lost the sight in one eye.4
Why were students so upset?
Maybe the worst issue is this: 7.5% of instructional hours were lost through unreplaced teacher absences in 2024–25, with another 2.3% lost through school closures, for a total of nearly 10% of classes.
Another reason is the poor condition of schools. Here’s an example:
Another complaint is too many students per class:
Another is racial discrimination: A large recruitment experiment found that North African teacher candidates received 31% fewer callbacks from their applications than did native French people (although other studies show hiring biases are against all foreign-sounding candidates).
So what exactly are students demanding? Here are a couple of specific lists from student unions:
Renovate education buildings
Hire more teachers and admin workers
Start school at 9am instead of 8 or 8.30, and study on Wednesday afternoons (when schools are typically not in session)
Guarantee €1 lunches
Eliminate fees paid by non-EU students
Less violence from the police, and more accountability
Less social and ethnic discrimination in university admissions.
The General Confederation of Labour (CGT), one of France’s largest unions, called for lower prices, higher pensions and boosted wages for school staff.
In other words, there are three issues here:
Funding
Discrimination
Justice / police brutality.
Whenever you’re trying to figure out what causes something, you first need to compare the situation to that in similar places. What’s happening in France right now is not happening elsewhere, so it must not be caused by similar situations in other countries.
France spends $13,787 per pupil per year, more than the OECD average, and more as a share of GDP per capita than countries like South Korea, Australia, Germany, Canada, Italy, Spain, or Switzerland.
The French state spends 4.6% of GDP on education, to the OECD’s 4.2% (nearly 10% more).
And the spend has been pretty stable as a share of GDP.
So whatever the cause of this unrest, it can’t be the total spend on education: Other countries are spending much less, but these countries aren’t up in flames.
Similarly, despite the numbers above, France doesn’t stand out dramatically in class sizes, teacher absenteeism, teacher shortages (0.4%), attrition (1.9% vs 6.4%)…5
Also, funding for primary school infrastructure comes from municipalities, for secondary education, from the region, and for teacher compensation, from the state, so it’s not like poor areas are getting less funding than richer ones. And England found that 700k of its students attend schools requiring major refurbishment, but you don’t see English schools reduced to ashes.
So although the state of education is not perfect in France, its condition doesn’t justify massive riots. What’s happening, then? Maybe the funding is not going where it’s most needed?
France's education ministry allocates ~32% of its budget to pension contributions. A third!! A standard teacher costs ~€85k to the state. Of that amount, how much does this person bring home? €37k! How much goes to pensions? €30k!
And then after that, the teacher still needs to pay about 10% of that to income taxes, and about 10% to VAT! So in reality, he keeps just €31k of the €85k, or ~36%!
I tried to get a breakdown from ChatGPT, and this is where we landed:
Why are pensions so outrageously expensive? Because the French retire early and comfortably.
This lady says she is 90 years old, retired for 25.
She receives €3,000/month from the state—which, if you’re tracking, is about what a working teacher receives!
Indeed, French pensioners are among the most highly paid in the world. They make 90% of the average worker—similar to public school teachers. But public school teachers are paid more than the average worker, so the result is that the average retired teacher makes more money than the average pensioner, or even the average French worker!
And they retire super young! The average French person retires at ~64, but civil servants, including teachers, retire at 62! Some, even at 61!
Is this true across all public services in France? Not quite. Pension contributions are an outsized share of all public salaries in France, but they’re particularly egregious for teachers.
Note that the spend on pensions (angled lines) as a share of all personnel expenditure (blue) is nearly identical across all these jobs? ~28-35% of the compensation of every job goes to retirement spend.
What would the spend on education look like if you took away pensions?
The spend as a share of GDP has actually gone down a bit, from 5% to 4.26%, while other spends have been more stable over the last two decades. It’s still not enough to justify country-wide riots, but it explains some of the concerns.
When I first arrived at university in France, I was flabbergasted to receive every month the CAF6, ~€150 per month for housing. “Great!” I thought. Of course, I didn’t think about where that money came from.
In 2004, we could go to the Restaurant Universitaire and eat a full meal for €3 or so. During COVID, that amount was reduced to €1 for financially vulnerable students, and in 2026, has been extended to all students.
So why are students complaining?
They’re complaining that now there’s not enough staff, nor enough food in each portion, and that they have to wait too long, since demand for these lunches has increased by 48%!
Rather than reducing meal prices, I think it would make much more sense to provide scholarships to students who can’t afford their studies—which would cover food, too—and let the market work elsewhere.
It doesn’t look to me like France has an education funding issue. It has an entitlements issue, especially regarding pensions. The way to solve it is not to support more entitlements, but fewer, especially reducing pension spending, which is quite simple: Instead of retiring at 61-63, push retirement to, say, 72 to get full benefits7— the French live until 83, and teachers until 85. With this change, the entire French budget gets rebalanced overnight, the government can lower taxes, improve the economy, increase investment and spending, more jobs appear, and everybody is richer. Of course, the French riot when this is proposed, they want to have a cake and eat it too.
42% of French students report that classmates do not listen to the teacher, compared with 30% across the OECD. French teachers spend 20% more time maintaining order, they are 10% less satisfied with their jobs, lose 10% more of their time to student interruptions. French public schools see 4x more serious incidents than private schools.8 20% of teachers are apprehensive about going to school every day, 47% don’t think school rules are respected. Just last week, unrelated to the riots, a 14 year old shot a principal and a teacher.
If you ask a French person, about half will tell you it’s the fault of Arabs or Muslims, by which they’ll mean Maghrebins (mainly Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan), and some sub-Saharan Africans (primarily from Senegal and Mali).9 But this opinion is much more common in older generations than the new ones. For example, Islamophobia is 50% lower in the 18-24 than in the 65+. This bias leads to the type of complaints about discrimination that we mentioned before. That’s why students are demanding:
Elimination of fees paid by non-EU students for university access: Because these are easy to pay for non-Muslim, non-African students, who tend to be richer, they select against them.
Less violence from the police, and more accountability: These immigrants and their descendants are less privileged, more often victims of racism, and more prone to violence, so the police are more violent with them.
Less social and ethnic discrimination in university admissions: Most demographic data is scrapped from university admission systems to avoid discrimination, but not the high school they come from. Why is this retained? Because some high schools are more generous with their grades than others, yet the grade counts for the French Baccalaureate results. Having access to high school origins helps universities normalize performance. But it can also be a blunt tool to profile racially, as some schools are near universally native French while others are largely comprised of African immigrants and their descendants.
But France has less immigration than Canada, yet more problems with it.10 Why? Why are immigrant students in France underperforming?
We’ve looked into this in the series on immigration: It’s not unique to students. French immigrant populations tend to have more unemployment, occupy more public housing, and more poverty.
Why? There are at least two causes. One is that, as North African immigrants were concentrated in suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s, many of these became ghettos, where crime became rampant and economic opportunities scarce. Africa is the biggest source of immigration in France today, especially from Muslim countries (primarily Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Turkey, and Senegal), and these immigrants have had a particularly difficult time integrating.
Another cause of underperformance of immigrant students is that immigrants from these countries are, on average, overrepresented in all numbers we have for crime and fiscal cost across the EU.
A third reason is self-selection: As I’ve described in my series on immigration, Canada's point system for immigration is much better than France’s, whose massive welfare state self-selects the immigrants who want welfare rather than the ones who want to work. Their children are now in French schools.
All of this doesn’t mean that all, or even a majority of immigrants from these countries, are problematic. It just means that the average immigrant will underperform, among other reasons because there is a much higher share of disruptive people from these countries.
Unfortunately, these three factors (and maybe others) combine to create a vicious cycle: The worse that immigrants of a certain background perform, the fewer opportunities they will have, the more they will stay in their ghettos, the angrier they will get, and the more crime they’ll commit. When others notice that African and Muslim immigrants underperform, they add fuel to the fire through racism. As the immigrants and their descendants stay behind, they notice that what they have in common is their African ancestry and Islamic religion, and they form an ethnic identity.
And this is one key reason why Palestinian, Algerian, and other Muslim flags are more common than French flags at the strikes and riots.
Whether the root cause is urban ghettoisation, self-selection, racism, human capital, or anything else, the result is that immigrants and their descendants, especially those of Muslim or African background, underperform in education and are overrepresented in strikes and riots. According to this French report on the 2023 riots:11
75% of the suspects were born in France, while 25% were born abroad. According to the Paris Police Prefecture, within its jurisdiction, a large majority of the rioters arrested were young French nationals of immigrant descent (second- or third-generation), primarily of North African (Maghreb) or sub-Saharan African origin.
We don’t have more details about the country origin of the French citizens of immigrant descent, but we do for the 25% born abroad: 40% were from Algeria, 13% from Tunisia, and 21% from other African Muslim countries.
Do we have anything more representative? The French state can’t easily collect ethnic or national origin data, but the share of immigrants in different schools is accessible. The violence in these schools is public data, too. So I asked Claude to correlate these two numbers:
Other groups of immigrants came to France that were even poorer and had the same opportunities, such as the Vietnamese or Chinese, and these groups also formed their own ghettos, but they are not underperformers today in terms of economy, education, or crime.
The Chinese are considered to be a community where things go well, where people manage on their own and are quiet—compared to other immigrants, who are much more demanding, and consider themselves as victims and might consider this Chinese community as competition.
This is the explanation of this young man on why Chinese shops were rampaged:
The Chinese have become too rich in France. I think it’s unfair. They’re now in the category of people with nice clothes and big cars.
I’ve written at length about this topic in the past, and my conclusion is this: There is a serious problem around 1st and subsequent generation immigrants in Europe in general, and France in particular. It starts with a lower human capital from some specific countries and ethnicities, which makes them commit more crime and contribute less economically, but kicks off a vicious cycle of underperformance, racism, violence, discrimination, more crime… Both sides of the political aisle speak some truth, but they’re not listening to each other. For the Left, the entire problem is discrimination and lack of opportunities, and it’s true, but not all the truth: These minorities are overrepresented in all crime and economic statistics across all of Europe, and how immigrants from other countries (even poorer, like Vietnam decades ago) don’t have this problem. For the Right, the entire problem is simply that these immigrants are bad, which flies in the face of evidence that the majority of these people are law-abiding, productive members of society, and that whether they want it or not, today, European economies need immigrants to be sustained.
What started as a valid protest has long since slid into illegitimate riots. There are currently 3x more demonstrations in France than usual, and 24% of strikes have become riots (vs 2% normally).
About 10,000 people have been arrested. What went wrong?
Student unions and the LFI think peaceful demonstrators are being attacked by the police, using disproportionate and indiscriminate violence, so strikers have become violent in retaliation. They also claim that most violence is not actually carried out by demonstrators, but casseurs (“breakers”), who join in for fun and looting.
The Right complains that there is not enough police repression of violence, and that casseurs don’t go to jail often enough.
So which side is right?
A common claim is that demonstrations are initially pacific but are then joined by casseurs: young men, older than students, who are interested in violence and looting and are frequently organized as Black Blocs: rioters dressed in black, hooded, and with masks, so they’re very hard to tell apart from each other and use the anonymity of the crowd to evade identification and arrest.
But this is not quite what happened here. In the first riots, in early October, 87% of those arrested were minors—mostly students12—for what crimes? Resisting arrest, participation in an unlawful assembly, intentional property damage, violence against public officials, and incitement to unlawful assembly.
YOUNG MAN: We’re here to demonstrate, ma’am.
REPORTER: Against?
YOUNG MAN: I don’t know, but we’re here to demonstrate. We’re not listened enough for the new reforms. We come here to show our joy and humour.
REPORTER: And what’s your message?
YOUNG MAN: Break everything!
CROWD: YEEEEES!
I think this video particularly illuminating because it was taken in Belgium, not France. Belgium doesn’t share the same policies as France, so the complains can’t be the same, yet the riots spread there anyways. But only to the French side, not the Dutch-speaking Flanders! Which shows that the main driver of the spread of the riots was not student demands, but cultural spread.
Later, by last weekend’s riots in France, only 27% were minors,13 so young men had joined in the vandalizing and looting, just like in the 2023 riots, which were caused by 18-25 year old men.
I spent six or seven hours in the middle of that shop window, and not once did I hear any political demands. There were plenty of insults, lots of laughter. It was all about the sheer pleasure of it.—Shopkeeper whose shop was vandalized.
From a police union, there are two profiles:
Young people from “sensitive neighborhoods” [code word in French for poor suburbs where Africans are overrepresented, especially Maghrebis] who vandalize and loot, and radical elements of the extreme left.—Hubert Gimenez, police officer and union representative.
According to the police, in Paris, these profiles account for 80% and 20% of cases respectively.
So what we have here are demonstrations that were already turning violent before older men joined in, escalating the vandalism and looting. But did this violence originate with the police?
That’s the main complaint: The police are too violent, so people react with even more violence to protest. This is a compilation I found online:
When I first saw this, I thought: “This is bad!” But then I noticed that in all these videos, we only see the police’s reaction, but never what the action was. What happens when we look at the actions?
For me, the violence can be summarized with this video:
INTERVIEWER: Can you explain what you were trying to achieve?
STUDENT: I went to ask the police why they were using so much violence against students.
But of course, the video shows her pushing into the policeman, not the other way around. And if she had been so scared of their violence, would she have done this?
Until October 14th, the list of injured included 937 policemen, 250 students, and 150 education professionals. That means over 70% of those injured are policemen.
An additional 1,000 policemen were wounded (7 of them severely) during the weekend of October 17th.
I think it’s important to have a measured reaction. The police can’t use overwhelming force against pacific demonstrations, but there are not all pacific demonstrations. But after looking at all this footage, I think it’s possible that the police is not violent enough: Demonstrators don’t appear scared of them, rioters attack people, buildings, and the police with impunity, they loot and destroy… That’s at least what the police union Alliance thinks, as it will sue the French state for risking lives due to unclear and contradictory guidance on how to react to the violence.
When you look at governments that truly abuse violence against demonstrators like in Iran, what you see is police shooting people dead, police motorbikes going through the crowds with guns, police cars running over people, and little violence on the side of the protesters, for they know what will happen to them if they are caught.
Because that’s the next step.
It’s not enough to stop violent riots or arrest their instigators. You also need to make sure that there are consequences, which usually means prison time.
Every drop in that funnel is a problem:
If only 1% of looters are ever arrested, the risk of looting seems worth it.
If most are not declared guilty, they’re not dissuaded from crime.
They also will not be dissuaded if a sentence is delayed, commuted or suspended.
And of course, if it’s short.
In the 2023 riots, 8.5% of rioters were arrested. We don’t yet have nation-wide data this time, but data from Marseille suggests the chances that rioters will be arrested is around 1%. This is impunity.
Short sentences might actually be counterproductive, because prison has both positive and negative effects:
Deterrence: People fear being locked up, so they commit less crime
Incapacitation: While in jail, you can’t commit a crime
Rehabilitation: While in jail, you get trained to not commit crime, either ethically or through learning a profession to earn an alternative source of income
Crime training: You meet more criminals, who become your network and teach you how to become a worse criminal, while you lose your job, your family, and your friends outside, since they moved on without you and you
So what types of sentences are people getting? Here’s a list of sentences from this weekend’s cases. Here are a few to get a taste:
Ylan, 18, Toulouse. Threw a lit Molotov cocktail toward police officers (without an explosion). Maximum: 10 years in prison. Sentence: 12 months suspended, 140 hours of community service, and loss of voting rights for 3 years. [so, no prison for throwing an explosive at the police]
Three men, aged 20–27, Lille (two undocumented immigrants): Arrested carrying bags of merchandise looted from Micromania and Calzedonia. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 10 months in prison, with immediate detention, and a 2-year ban from French territory for the two undocumented immigrants. [how is that a 2-year ban instead of a permanent ban and immediate expulsion?]
Sahel W., 19, Reims. Looted a Carrefour Express supermarket. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 105 hours of community service.
Mohamed, Lyon. Undocumented immigrant who looted a Louis Vuitton store. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 6 months in prison, with immediate detention, and a 2-year ban from French territory [why not expelled and banned from France?]
Hugo M., 20, Reims. Looted clothing from a boutique. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 4 months under electronic monitoring
Unnamed Tunisian delivery worker, Rouen. Looted a gold-buying shop, carrying €16,000 worth of jewelry. Repeat offender. Maximum: 14 years. Sentence: 8 months in prison, with immediate detention, plus activation of a previously suspended 6-month sentence.
Anthony, Rouen. Homeless man who looted a Courir store. Repeat offender. Maximum: 14 years. Sentence: 6 months in prison plus 6 months suspended.
Unemployed man, 26, Rouen. Looted a Micromania store. Repeat offender. Maximum: 14 years. Sentence: 6 months under electronic monitoring.
Cheima, 30, Lyon. Looted a JD Sports store. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 8 months suspended.
Sophia, 27, Lyon. Looted a JD Sports store. Nine previous convictions, including theft. Maximum: 14 years. Sentence: 12 months under electronic monitoring.
You can read more examples in the footnote.14
Initially I was surprised at how much sentences include electronic tracking and community service instead of prison, but after looking at the evidence it makes sense. Electronic tracking seems to be better than a short sentence, because it still deters and slightly incapacitates, without providing crime training. Community service also seems comparable to short term sentences in recidivism.
What does surprise me is that there are a lot of recidivists here receiving very lenient sentences. Studies show that the vast majority of crime is committed by recidivists, and that it’s hard to get them to stop, so you simply want them off the streets for as long as possible.
Also, why aren’t illegal aliens who commit additional crimes expelled?
French lawmakers agree that legislation is too indulgent, and just before the strikes they approved the RIPOST law, which among other things increases sentences for people carrying firework mortars out of festivities contexts, frequently used as weapons in riots.
Another law to be debated next week includes:
Joint accountability, so that demonstrators police each other, as each member of a group is liable for the behavior of every other member.
Easier recovery of riot damages money from rioters.
Easier access to compensation for victims.
Victims who were not properly informed of a criminal hearing can still pursue civil compensation.
Rioters lose certain welfare benefits.
Family allowances and housing benefits, normally protected against seizure, could be used to recover court-ordered damages, subject to legal safeguards.
And during the riots, a few new project laws were added, mostly to keep casseurs more accountable by demanding full compensation for what they destroy, forcing debt collection even when the state or insurance companies don’t want to, and making parents economically accountable for their minor’s activities.
All this evidence suggests policing and sentencing might not be strong enough to deter rioters, so looters take advantage of demonstrations to convert them into riots. But are they the only force behind this radicalization?
Students and teacher unions have standing to demand more resources for education. What they can’t do is ask for more resources for education and pensions. But that’s exactly what they are doing, joined by the extreme-left party La France Insoumise (LFI). To them, the French government is not sufficiently taxing the rich, nor spending enough on education and pensions. Is this true?
The LFI escalated the strikes to the national level, which is consistent with their goals: They want to publicize the bad state of affairs, so that they get more votes in the next election in April 2027.
And the LFI has been instrumental in turning the strikes into riots. Remember that the first round of arrests had a majority of minors. What does the LFI have to say about them? It always defends the demonstrators, whether violent or not. According to them, they’re never at fault. They’re either reacting to police violence, or when they start violence, it’s because they’re so oppressed that it’s the only way they can make their voices be heard. The LFI mayor of a poor suburb (investigated for embezzlement) said violence was legitimate.
This is not typical in French politics. Unions and politicians know that violence is very bad for their movements, so they take extra care in policing their own. Nobody is allowed to commit violence, and everybody must watch out to identify and turn in any violent person.
This is where the youth factor might have been important: Students are not as organized or experienced, they’re more excited about the adventure, and they might have been bad at policing their own—or might have even welcomed the adrenaline, not foreseeing the consequences.
The bridge between politics and violence became obvious when the far-left group La Jeune Garde, endorsed by the LFI and whose leader is a parliamentarian for the party, was declared illegal in France after it was proven to have physically attacked political opponents, organized patrols to intimidate and expel opponents, prevented political opponents from demonstrating, trained members for violent confrontations (under the pretense of self-defense), and promoted and legitimized political violence.
Why escalate strikes into riots? For votes, of course. They allow more visibility for their demands and provoke the police into violent confrontations, thereby playing into their hands. Great for increasing turnout in the upcoming election, pushing other left parties to match their demands, and destabilizing the existing government. That might be bad for students, teachers, and society in general, but it's good for getting more votes.
And who are they trying to attract? Of course, extreme-left voters, but not only those. Between 20% and 60% of the LFI’s voters are Muslim. This is what people call the Islamo-Leftist alliance, which turned really bad for leftist Iranians in the 1979 Revolution, as they carried the revolution in 1979, only to be side-lined, massacred, and then forced into submission by the Islamists. The French center-right magazine Le Point has drawn connections between the illegal Muslim Brotherhood,15 the Muslim Student Organization, and LFI, via organizations like Jeunes Gardes, RED Jeunes and Generation EDR, with supporting coverage from Qatar-funded Al Jazeera.
Why are there riots in France?
Students are suffering from a shrinking spending on education in real terms, which they can feel through poor infrastructure, classes with many students, and missing teachers.
These conditions are not dramatically different to those in other OECD countries though
However, the spending in education has been growing, not shrinking. But students and teachers are not seeing that money, because it goes to existing pensioners, who account for a third of the budget.
Other entitlements may be even more ridiculous, including CAF and €1 lunches for all students.
And France can’t increase its taxes much more. It must reduce its entitlements, especially its pensions. It can be easily done by delaying the age of retirement, exactly the opposite of what the Left demands.
There is discrimination in France, and it applies to all immigrants, but especially Maghrebis.
This discrimination, however, reflects reality, as the immigrants that go to France frequently commit more crime and contribute less economically than natives, or other immigration origins.
I understand the complaint about the high school of origin in the admissions system. However, this information is transparent virtually everywhere else in the world, and people don’t complain about it. My main hypothesis is that there’s real information there, because of the previous point.
Maybe a solution could be eliminating high school, but then all baccalaureate results should be normalized based on the performance of each school’s students: A student coming from an easy-grade school should get a worse grade than a hard-school student.
Other measures seem legitimate to me, including higher tuition fees for foreigners, as in fact you do want to select against the immigrants who can’t pay them. There should be a separate scholarship system based on merit.
Demonstrations do get penetrated by older people (mainly men) who want to vandalize and loot.
This is in part due to the youth of students, who don’t police their own.
However, the older looters are not the only culprits. Students also increased violence that escalated the demonstrations into riots
They were supported in this endeavor by unions and the extreme-left party La France Insoumise
LFI has an electoral incentive in maximizing the publicity to the demonstrations, and will always defend Muslim demonstrators and rioters no matter what, as about a third of its electorate is Muslim
Although police brutality might not help in de-escalating the situation, it looks like their substantially higher numbers of wounded suggest their response is actually not violent enough
The police doesn’t identify and arrest enough looters, so the impunity encourages them
Sentences might appear light, but in many cases that’s reasonable because the alternative—prison—might actually train the imprisoned to become more professional criminals.
However, light (or non-existent) prison sentences for repeat criminals are bad. These people should be locked down for a long time, because for them deterrence doesn’t work as well. You need to incapacitate them as long as possible.
Resident immigrants that commit these types of crimes should lose their status immediately and be deported along with the illegal immigrants.
So what can France do to solve these problems? I’ll cover that in the next article, along with a look at the massive wild card that can change everything here: AI.
Or children of at least one immigrant. 3rd generation descendants of immigrants are not counted in these stats, but there was a fair amount of Algerian immigration into France following the independence of Algeria, and many of their grandchildren today are 3rd generation.
In my youth when my soccer team played against teams like those of Créteil, we joked that we had to stay together before, during, and after the game, for protection. As the French would say, “Ça craint”. This fear was legitimate.
A deputy headteacher (proviseur adjoint), a director of vocational and technological training, a head of the business relations office responsible for coordinating vocational placements, a full-time school nurse, a full-time social worker, and additional disability-support assistants.
One policeman was accused of sexual assault. I’ll let you be the judge.
It has 7.5% unreplaced teacher absences, 21 students per primary education class (OECD levels), and 26 in secondary (10% higher than the OECD’s 23).
Caisse d’Allocations Familiales
It’s an example. I haven’t published on pensions yet, but I have a long draft on the topic. My short take on this is that the retirement age was fixed when life expectancy was decades shorter. It was meant more as disability insurance than funding for decades of holiday. We don't realize that everybody is poorer, including retirees, because of this massive spend on pensions that come too early. Increasing the age of retirement or changing the system completely to depend on something other than age would probably solve these problems.
On a per high school basis. 2% of HS suffer from such serious incidents every year.
The 14 year old shooter’s mother is Ethiopian.
14% of the French population is born abroad (21% if you count their children), but these numbers grow to 15-33% of school-aged kids in France are immigrants or their descendants, and they tend to fail at school. According to the OECD, in France 16% of students are immigrants, but in Canada it’s 34%. So France has half the number of immigrants as Canada, but 48% of these immigrants in France are socioeconomically disadvantaged, compared to only 28% in Canada. In Canada, immigrants outperform natives in international scores by 12 points, but in France they underperform by 51 points.
After a French-Algerian adolescent was killed by the police. The riots lasted one week and started in the suburbs of Paris, before spreading nation-wide.
The data actually refers to minors, not students. But in France, school is mandatory until 16, and from then until 18 people must either study or work, so the vast majority of those under 18 are students.
The 87% is nation-wide, the 27% is Paris, but data from other cities suggest the pattern is the same.
Man, 43, Pau. Threw projectiles at police officers. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 6 months under electronic monitoring.
Physical education teacher, 24, Nîmes. Threw projectiles that injured a police officer, resulting in three days of medically certified incapacity for work. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 18 months suspended with probation.
Ten defendants, aged 18–43, Grenoble. Looted telephone and perfume shops after smashing display windows. Maximum: 7 years. Sentences: Between 4 months suspended and 8 months of immediate imprisonment. One defendant, previously given a suspended sentence in June, received an immediate custodial sentence.
Unnamed undocumented immigrant, 32, Tours. Received or possessed stolen goods from looted shops. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 4 months suspended [why is he not expelled?]
High school student, 19, Tours. Received or possessed stolen goods from looted shops. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 3 weeks of community service.
Four men, aged 19–28, Nantes. An undocumented immigrant, a self-employed worker, a high school student, and a university student. Involved in looting stores, including Fnac and Foot Locker, or violence against law enforcement officers. Maximum: 5–7 years. Sentences: 4, 6, or 8 months suspended.
Two related women, ages unspecified, Agen. Dressed entirely in black, assaulted and insulted a police officer and damaged a police vehicle. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 6 months suspended plus a citizenship education course.
Three men, aged 23–24, Bobigny. Possessed a replica handgun, fireworks mortars, balaclavas, and materials for making Molotov cocktails. Maximum: 7 years. Sentences: Ranging from 10 months suspended to 7 months under electronic monitoring.
Edmondson G., 21, Paris. Former firefighter arrested before a demonstration carrying Molotov cocktail materials in a backpack. Videos on his phone reportedly showed him throwing a Molotov cocktail the previous day. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 2 months in prison, with immediate detention, plus 6 months suspended.
Andy M., 23, Paris. Security guard who fired a fireworks mortar toward law enforcement officers on the Champs-Élysées. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 12 months suspended, with an order excluding the conviction from the relevant criminal-record extract.
Father, age unspecified, Lille. Attempted to break into a store using a crowbar. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 10 months in prison, with immediate detention, and a 3-year ban on participating in demonstrations.
Man, 23, Lille. Fired fireworks mortars toward law enforcement officers. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 12 months under electronic monitoring and 140 hours of community service
Nicolas (garbage collector) and Zakaria, Rouen. Threw projectiles at police officers and verbally insulted them. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 12 months under electronic monitoring.
Adam, 19, Lyon. Swiss national described as a foreign Black Bloc participant. Arrested leaving a looted Monoprix store; also convicted of resisting police. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 12 months suspended.
Man, 20, Perpignan. Threw a construction barrier at two police officers. Maximum: 5 years. Sentence: 6 months under electronic monitoring.
Man, 21, Perpignan. Threw projectiles at police officers and damaged public property. Carried ski goggles, an improvised face covering, and reinforced gloves. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 10 months under electronic monitoring.
Amazon delivery worker, 22, Perpignan. Stole a scooter after a demonstration, with accomplices, forced entry, and a concealed face. Had a previous conviction. Maximum: 10 years. Sentence: 8 months under electronic monitoring.
Woman, 20, Limoges. Participated in looting shops and City Hall, which was subsequently destroyed by fire. Maximum: 7 years. Sentence: 6 months in prison, with immediate detention, plus 18 months suspended with probation.
It’s not banned in France, but only because it has no presence. All associated organizations have been dissolved.
2026-10-20 20:40:15
Over thousands of years, tens of billions of people have spent their entire lives thinking, reasoning, creating, dreaming, solving problems. How many of our thoughts have been completely new? Very few.
When your thoughts have been original, most of the time it was because you applied existing solutions to new situations: You took the arguments and facts gathered by others and chained them in a novel way, adapted to your unique problem.
This means intelligence is mostly a search problem: Search within the body of known facts and surface the most relevant ones for you.
We just didn’t know this because, until now, search was so expensive.
Tomorrow’s agents cannot use yesterday’s search.
Uploading one PDF to an AI works fine. Asking it to search a thousand is where answers go wrong: the documents get cut into pieces, a table split in half, and one bad piece spreads through the answer like a drop of ink in water. POMA AI cuts along the structure instead, so the answer comes back right, with its source.
Hard to search for somebody else’s ideas like that. People had to reinvent the same thoughts over and over again.
5,000 years ago, writing emerged, and we started storing information outside the brain in parchments, papyri, clay tablets… Suddenly, information storage and communication didn’t corrupt as much.
But it was still very expensive to transcribe ideas and consume them: It took a year to copy a full book, and you’d have to travel to where it was to consume it. Hard to search for ideas like that.
500 years ago, the printing press emerged. Now, the cost of writing a book was still the same, but the marginal cost of reproducing it fell dramatically. Suddenly, information became much more available. You could search for others’ ideas, and this was so powerful that the Enlightenment emerged, as scientists around Europe shared their ideas and built on each other’s.
But you still had to print the book, learn about it, search for it, and buy or borrow it. Your search was limited to the size of your pocket and your local library’s shelves.
50 years ago, computers and the Internet emerged. Suddenly, writing an idea was as fast as your fingers on a keyboard. The cost of sharing it fell to nothing. Corruption was exiled. The concept of searching for somebody’s ideas became second nature, googling joined the dictionary. That’s when we realized that virtually all of our problems had already been solved by somebody else, usually someone who had written his solution in an obscure online forum 12 years ago.
Still, to solve your personal problem, you had to look up dozens of microproblems and combine their solutions to tailor them to your needs. The friction of every search was small, but it added up to enough that you couldn’t solve all your problems through search, you had to reinvent the wheel.
5 years ago, we put the world’s knowledge in a cauldron, and from there emerged intelligence. Suddenly, LLMs independently looked at all the problems, recorded the solutions, chained all the thoughts, and brewed an answer tailored to your specific needs. Now that the friction of every search disappeared, it became clear: Intelligence is mostly search. You just need to cast your spell deftly enough to summon the perfect combination of facts, problems, and solutions, chained in the right order from the latent space of human knowledge.
Do we? Consider a PhD: A person spends ~14 years studying until they graduate high school, then four more years in undergrad, then two years of grad school, and then a handful of years for the PhD. After ~25 years studying non-stop, this is what they can hope to do with the horizon of human knowledge:
If 25 years of hyperfocus buys one pixel, how many novel thoughts do we really have? No, most ideas are just the combination of other existing ideas.
Take the logic to its endpoint, and fear might wash over you:
If your thoughts are not original, other people have already thought most of them.
Your advantage was collating other people’s thoughts in your unique way.
LLMs bring the cost of searching others’ thoughts and combining them to zero.
Then, it becomes cheaper to spellcast thoughts than to craft them yourself. There will be no original thoughts for you to have.
From 50,000 to 5,000 to 500 to 50 to 5. The next step in the transition is in 0.5 years. Are you, dear reader, about to get obsoleted?
Luckily, humans + AI will be better than either alone. We saw that with chess already: After Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, the best type of player was neither the machine nor the human, but the centaur—humans working with machines with the right process.
If you join forces with AIs, you’ll be able to create novel ideas faster. We’ve entered a period where breakthroughs across disciplines will be a daily event.
Unfortunately, humans never really learned much from computers: The teal line remained flat. And the Golden Era of centaur rule lasted just about two decades. Eventually, computers caught up.
But something different happened with Go: Although humans don’t beat AIs anymore in that game, the quality of human decisions has skyrocketed since AI surpassed humans, as we learn from AI.
Why have humans progressed with Go and not in chess? Is it because Go is a much more open-ended game? What does that tell us about the future of intelligence beyond search?
Chess is a closed world, so once search got good enough, there was nothing left for the human to supply. Go is open enough that AI became a teacher instead of a replacement. The world is more open still. Knowledge is not a ball, it’s more like a universe.
Most knowledge accumulates in gravity fields we call disciplines. It’s quickly becoming impossible to beat an LLM at any single field, because it can search the field better than you. But there’s an infinite amount of combinations of these fields.
Even the search space itself isn’t defined. Someone has to notice a problem exists before anyone can search for its solution. If you pay attention to people’s unspoken needs, and you can collate the right search across fields like engineering, design, aesthetics, politics, communication, and storytelling, you might produce an experience no human has ever seen.
If intelligence is search, your edge is the query.
If you can identify a unique need and properly orchestrate your agents to combine the data analysis of furniture styles with generative design plus social media trends plus oil painting styles plus an AI to source materials, a robot to carve, and another to paint, you might end up producing unique items like these at scale:
We seem to be entering an era in which deep focus within one discipline is losing ground to frenetic exploration across many, where polymaths will be rewarded compared to experts, as the polymaths will be able to guide their agent networks across fields.
So embrace your ADHD. Go live a life strange enough to come up with questions the cauldron has never considered.
LLMs need data and success measures to become more intelligent than humans. That’s why math, which is extremely difficult for humans, is becoming automated.
But there are spaces where success is unclear, or data unavailable. In these areas, LLMs will take much longer to win, because you can’t search what’s not recorded.
What are ways to achieve that?
You can thrive in the unmeasured: Innovate where you have an internal urge to create something new that doesn’t tap into known tastes. A chef creating a new restaurant concept. A fashion founder coming up with new clothing ideas.
Or you can thrive in the unrecorded: Noticing people’s feelings, their needs, their desires, their problems, and helping them solve them before they even know it. Job related to community—whether that’s a priest or a yoga teacher—will be especially protected from the dictatorship of search.
Do you want to offer a sponsorship like this one? If you have a business that is moving the world towards a techno-optimistic future and would like to reach 135k curious, globally-minded people to learn about it (founders, researchers, investors, policymakers), reach out here.
2026-10-14 20:03:57
Several premium or paywalled articles over the last few days:
Have you seen this? There are more transfers in stablecoins than payments in Visa or Mastercard.
Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value, typically by being pegged to a traditional currency, are worth over $300B.
Mostly through Tether and USDC:
Stablecoin transfers are growing much faster than crypto trading:
Stablecoins are quickly becoming the 2nd big crypto use case after Bitcoin. Why? How big is it going to get? What’s the difference between them and Bitcoin? What’s the future of cryptocurrencies? Since the best way to predict the future is to understand the past, let’s do that with currencies to learn how we got here.
You can understand why Bitcoin has been successful when you consider the history of currencies, as we did in How Silver Made Chinese Empires and How Ancient Metals Started Civilization. Good currencies need to be:
Scarce: eg, the market can be flooded by shells
Stable: Its value can’t be changing all the time
Divisible: for big or small transactions
Durable: eg, shells or bad quality paper can break
Portable: eg, copper was so cheap that you needed to carry a lot of it to make any payment
Fungible: eg, two shells are unlike each other
Acceptable: other people must recognize it as a valid currency
Some things work better than others as currency:
These factors explain why Bitcoin is so valuable now, worth $1.7 trillion dollars, nearly as much as silver.
Indeed, Bitcoin is:
Available: You can easily get Bitcoin wherever you are
Scarce: There will only ever be 21 million BTC
Divisible: One BTC can be divided into one hundred million pieces (0.00000001 BTC, about 0.08 cents today)
Durable: It’s going to be there as long as we see value in it, as BTC is the result of computation
Portable: You can send it anywhere with a few clicks at very little cost
Fungible: One BTC is exactly the same as another
Acceptable: Everybody that is close to crypto knows BTC and accepts it as payment. This is the core reason why BTC is one of the biggest cryptocurrencies and why it will remain so for a long time: As the first one, and one that’s well built, everyone recognizes it as the most important, and that makes it so.
I skipped one of the properties of a good currency. Did you notice which one?
Stability.
The price of BTC is volatile.
This makes it like gold, for the same reasons.
This is the value of gold over time:
Notice this is a logarithmic graph, so gold price swings are even wilder than this. Why?
Gold is very scarce, so in moments of scarcity, people hoarded it. They squirreled it away in chests, jewelry, furniture… Which is a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more people think it’s scarce, the more they hoard it, and the scarcer it becomes.
Scarcity and stability are connected: the scarcer a currency is, the less stable it will be.
Bitcoin has the exact same problem, for the exact same reason. It has the ultimate scarcity (only 21M BTC will ever be minted), so when people think its value is high, they will hoard it, pushing its price up, and when they think its value is shrinking, they will dump it. This is why BTC prices swing so much.1
This has catastrophic consequences for an economy whose currency is gold: When the economy expands, people need more gold, so it becomes more scarce, so its price increases, people start hoarding it, and the lack of currency makes the economy cool off. In other words, a lot of the economy’s productivity increases simply translate into higher gold prices.
This is what made silver so valuable. In the 1400s, after the Black Death in Europe, the economy boomed. By the 1450s, this2 had led to a dramatic shortage of silver, which spurred technology improvements in Central Europe, which helped them discover new silver mines. A few decades later, the Spanish discovered the American ones, flooding the world with silver.3
Since silver is more abundant than gold, it’s less scarce, which made it more stable as a currency.
And stability is key for a currency, because that conserves the value of the signal of prices. We all know how bad inflation is for the economy. Deflation is, too: If a currency gains in value over time, people will reduce their consumption, dragging the economy into a recession.4
The global economy boomed, from Spain to Europe and even China. That’s why silver coins became legal tender around the world:
Hence stablecoins. Get it?
Stablecoins, like most cryptocurrencies, inherit the same benefits as a Bitcoin: availability, divisibility, durability… The main difference is the scarcity vs stability tradeoff.
Since scarcity is what makes Bitcoin like gold—too valuable, which makes its value unstable—then the next generation of successful cryptocurrencies was always going to be the one to solve this problem: Eliminate scarcity, and instead target stability.
That’s how a stablecoin works. A company like Tether tells you: “Give me one dollar, I’ll give you a digital dollar (which I’ll call USDT for United States Dollar – Tether). You can move it around as you please, and when you want, I’ll give you that dollar back.”
Each time a customer asks for one USDT, Tether just mints it, so the stability of the currency is completely tethered to its underlying currency (in this case, USD). How does Tether guarantee that one USDT is always worth one USD? Because5 it uses your dollar to buy a US Treasury security, and it makes money out of the yield on that security (or “treasury”) while you keep that USDT unredeemed. About 3/4 of Tether’s dollars are in US treasuries or equivalent assets.6
This is why the company is one of the most profitable: With interest rates around 4%, its over $200B in assets generate $10B in profits in 2025. With just 200 employees, that’s around $50M of profit per employee—10x more than NVIDIA!
A global adoption of USD stablecoins might have some pretty serious macroeconomic consequences.
With people worldwide buying USD, the entire world economy might dollarize. With this ubiquity, more businesses might put their prices on USD stablecoins and accept them as currency, thereby furthering the cycle.
This would be valuable for the US because it can keep printing dollars while inflation stays low, since it’s distributed over many more dollars around the world.
This is so useful that the US is embracing USD stablecoins, and approved the GENIUS Act as a result. Imagine: The US can print treasuries at will, and the rest of the world gobbles them up! More debt without the consequences of higher required interest rates.
Europe and China see this coming, and they’ll try to fight it with their own stablecoins. The competition will be good for customers—except when it prevents citizens from buying the competing stablecoins.
But of course, the more transactions run on stablecoins, the less they run on the US-led SWIFT system, undermining its influence on global transactions. The US would have fewer financial weapons against its enemies, but a more powerful monetary policy.
All this is not a trivial side-effect. Eliminating the power of a central node is arguably the core purpose of cryptocurrencies.
Along the same lines, most countries wouldn’t be able to influence the economy as much through monetary policy, since many more of their citizens’ and firms’ assets would be in another currency.
From here, via Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution, heavily edited:
Firms and financial institutions in developing countries borrow heavily in USD while their revenues and assets are in local currency. When the US increases its interest rates, the dollar appreciates, the economy slows down, and asset prices shrink. These firms suddenly find themselves squeezed by rising dollar debts and falling asset values. This shock forces cutbacks and retrenchment. This is one of the key channels through which US monetary policy spills over globally.
But if households and firms begin holding dollar assets via stablecoins, now both sides of their balance sheet will be in dollars. A stronger dollar no longer only increases liabilities; it also raises the value of their dollar assets, helping to offset the shock. In effect, stablecoins can act as a decentralized balance sheet stabilizer, muting one of the very mechanisms that drives global financial volatility.
So these are some of the global consequences that stablecoins could have in the global economy, but first we need to get there, and that depends on individuals adopting stablecoins - and from what we can see, there’s demand. Why are so many people interested in that? Why not simply use US dollars?
We talked about the big needs of currencies in history before, but that doesn’t mean we’re done. There are still many pain points with payments today that new payment and currency systems can solve.
If you’re in Venezuela, Turkey, Iran, or Syria right now, you’re losing 15–80% of your currency value every year you hold it. If your money is in the bank, you’re watching it evaporate. It would be better to hold USD, which lose their value much more slowly.
But as a foreigner, you can’t easily access USD. You can’t get a US bank account, your local banks might not offer the service, or your government might simply ban it. Buying USD bills on the streets is at a deep discount, you need a place to store them, and people might steal them from you.
But if you can log into your crypto account and with a few clicks buy a USDT with your own currency,7 you will not lose your life savings just because you happen to live in an inflation country. You’ll have access to this money anywhere in the world.
“Oh I’m sorry, it’s 5:01pm on a Friday. You’ll have to wait 88h for us to process your payment—Monday is a bank holiday.”
And then on top of that, you need 1–5 business days to get your money! Are we in the Middle Ages or what? Are we carrying silver ingots by horse-pulled cart? We’re not, but traditional payment systems like SWIFT can still take day transfer your money.
During that time, the money is neither in the sender’s account nor in the receiver’s, so both need to cover that money during that time. This working capital can add up to a lot, and some companies need huge, expensive loans in the interim. An immediate settlement—which stablecoins can do—bypasses that problem.
Traditional payments are expensive, too. An international wire transfer frequently costs $20–$30, and remittances cost on average over 6% of the amount! If you send home $1,000, the intermediary can shave $100 off your meager income.
Those are just fees. What about exchange commissions? Not great to lose 1-3% of the money in every transaction you make. That’s some medieval financier kind of stuff.
Imagine a company that has thousands of employees in dozens of countries around the world. How do you manage all the currencies, national banking systems, bank accounts…?
A dollar is dumb. It just sits there waiting for you to do things with it. Cryptocurrencies are not.
Imagine a homeowner paying a plumber €500 to replace a water heater. The homeowner sends the money into a digital escrow. The contract releases €250 when the plumber arrives,8
then releases the rest when the homeowner confirms the heater works. If they disagree, the money stays locked until a named mediator decides what happens.
Cryptocurrencies can support smart contracts that settle and move money automatically. For example, they can release funds when certain conditions are met—subject to software, oracle, and governance risks. Trading, collateral, lending, prediction markets, decentralized exchanges, tokenization… These are all examples of things we can do with intelligent money that are hard to do with dumb money.
As you can see, while Bitcoin is a way to store value like gold was (and is), stablecoins are optimized specifically as currencies for payments, the way silver was in the past. All these new stablecoin-related currencies and payment processors are focusing on solving the pain points of our current ones: high costs, slow settlement, accessibility, inconvenience, and stupidity.
This also tells you how we should think about the future of stablecoins in particular, and cryptocurrencies in general: What pain points do we still suffer from existing currencies and payment systems?
Gold had another disadvantage as a currency that BTC doesn’t share: When it was a currency, it was so scarce that it was extremely valuable. This made it great for big purchases (think chests of gold paid between governments in the movies), but bad for small ones. We can say it was not divisible enough.
And some other reasons, like the exhaustion of older silver mines and the loss of silver over time.
You can see the result of that in the price of gold in the 1500s. Once silver was everywhere, the value of gold as a currency plummeted, so its value went down accordingly.
Also, of course, if a silver coin has the exact same value for centuries, you can easily notice when the price of bread goes up, and then plant more wheat, store more grain, or shift your consumption to another staple. If the price of one smith’s knife goes up faster than others’, you know to change your provider.
At some point there was a question on whether Tether was indeed doing this. Theoretically, it could take your dollar and do whatever it wants with it. It would not be the first time this happened in crypto.
The remainder includes gold, secured loans, bitcoin, shares, corporate bonds and other investments. I find that nuts TBH.
USDT and USDC are banned in countries like Syria or Iran, but people there can use VPNs and other ways to get money out of their country and into such instruments.
It can be verified by a tamper-proof geolocation timestamp that proves the plumber was there when he said he’d be there.
2026-10-08 20:00:52
This week's premium article: How Japan Redrew Asia
This is the 8th and final article of the series about Japan. Previous ones:
Why Japan is so populated (free)
Why Japan is the first big economy to shrink its population (premium)
Why Tokyo is the biggest city in the world (paywalled)
Why the imperial capital was Kyoto, and why it moved to Tokyo (premium)
Today, we’re going to explain the crazy trajectory that the country has followed over the last 150 years:
Why was it the only non-Western country that built an empire during the Industrial Revolution?
How did it become the 2nd richest country on Earth?
Why has it stagnated in the last three decades?
Why is it so indebted, but pays so little in interest?
The entire sequence is surprising here:
Why was Japan the only non-Western country to join in on the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s?
Why did it take advantage of it to build an empire?
In 1900, eight countries fought side-by-side to attack China during the Boxer Rebellion. Find the odd one out: Germany, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan. This is shocking, right? A non-Western country marching in the same alliance as seven Western industrial powers?
In the late 1800s, Europeans had made contact with the entire world, but the only outside country that industrialized out of that was Japan.1 Why? Because it had a set of unique characteristics.
To industrialize, you need:
A surplus of food, to allow for a big chunk of the population to not work in farming
Some light industries that could serve as stepping stones to heavy industries
A big urban population that can be brought into factories
Fast transportation
Widespread trade
High literacy and a class of literate administrators
Japan had it all.
We saw how geography brought it the food and the urban population: great fertile plains in a good climate for double cropping, but limited enough so people couldn’t just expand by farming more land, forcing urbanization and specialization into trade. By the mid-1850s, Japan was already very densely populated, with a very high urbanization rate.
As a set of islands with its Seto inland Sea, it was well-situated for fast and cheap transportation. Tokugawa Japan developed transportation on the east and west coasts too, in the Pacific and the Sea of Japan. As the country had been unified and tolls eliminated, Japan also developed roads that allowed short-distance trade of goods and fast communication.
The political unity, good transportation, and high urbanization all helped trade flourish.
All these elements also enabled light industries: textiles, silk, paper, sake, etc.
And the class of samurai had spent 250 years forgetting to fight, because there was just no need. They replaced the katana, horse, and gun for the pen and became administrators.2 The entire country had high literacy, but the samurai class had an exceptionally high one for the time.
Of course, the question becomes: Why did Japan gather these assets and no other country did?
Nick Szabo noted the surprising parallel between Japan and Britain.
Both are islands, neither too big nor too small. They are pretty mountainous, creating several valleys in between and competition between their different rulers. They are close enough to the continent that they could receive plenty of technology. But island geography also made defense unusually efficient: Britain and Japan could concentrate defense at maritime chokepoints rather than have to defend vast land borders.
This also meant that agricultural productivity could be high, because farmers were more secure in their land. They could invest in their long-term improvement, knowing that nobody would come and steal the fruits of their labor. Compare that with Ukraine, for example, which was so exposed to horse-mounted hordes that it invested substantially less in farming.
Thanks to this security, both countries established property rights that allowed landowners to affirm and trade their properties, which increased their value, and justified more investment.
So both Britain and Japan in the 1800s had high homeland security thanks to their geography, which had brought conditions that favored agricultural investment, which increased agricultural yields, which increased the population, which allowed for urbanization, which fostered trade and industrialization.
And since both were secure, they could invest part of that surplus not in more soldiers, but in education, and the administrators needed for industrialization.
This section is a hypothesis, but now that I think about it, a lot of these conditions remind me of the US and Italy too. They’re not islands, but close,3 they’re well defended, had many valleys that fostered competing rulers,4 but were connected enough that they could be unified, and plenty of farmland to produce a surplus of people.5
So Japan was in a unique position to industrialize, but it had to decide to do it. It lived in a feudal system when the Europeans arrived, but rather than dragging their feet, the Japanese recognized the threat and replaced their political system extremely quickly.
China again is a good comparison: It had a big population, cities, trade, taxation, good transportation, high literacy, a huge administration… The ruler could have identified the Western threat in the First Opium War but didn’t. Why did Japan, but not China?
I think it’s again due to the unique geography of Japan: Having all these separated plains in mountainous and elongated islands allowed for political independence. They were all one country, but each lord (daimyo) could manage his lands differently, make different bets, and create some local power. This was crucial to overthrowing the Tokugawa shogun and ushering in a new government system, copying the West.
Once you follow all of the above, pursuing an empire becomes pretty easy to understand:
Japan’s geopolitical priorities: Japan wanted to secure the five gates leading to it.
Japan saw how Western powers were becoming powerful by creating empires. Japan could either eat or be eaten, and it chose to eat.
There’s probably a status question too. Japan industrialized by copying the West. And the West was creating empires, which gave them status. Why not copy them?
After WW2, though, Japan was completely destroyed. How did it become the world’s 2nd biggest economy? And then, after growing for so long, why did it start stagnating? Because the very assets that made it rich became a liability.
2026-10-06 21:47:18
I’m exploring adding short articles like this one every week. LMK if you enjoy them.
