aroonwithaview

It’s hard to feel patriotic for a country that celebrates its quarter millenium since founding with an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight, but one must separate the mud from the meadow. There is something historically unique about the American experiment – in the same way as early Greece – which by definition means that it is…

Like seemingly every other person on the planet today, I grapple daily with the implications of rapid advances in AI. I was too young during the internet age to know how people felt then, but my conjecture is that this feels like a much more profound shift. In more ways than one, it has made…

Inside America are two wolves. Depending on the zeitgeist, one of the two wolves comes out of hibernation to snap its powerful jaws around the public’s neck. The evil wolf bites in the name of the powerful – Andrew Jackson, Richard Nixon, Donald Trump – while the good wolf bites in the name of the…

What is the purpose of a government? There are many theories of state, from regulating violence to coordinating economic activity. The most salient for me in recent years has been the idea that the state is an instrument to address market failures. For a variety of well-studied reasons, individual optimizations can lead to collective disasters,…

Violent revolutions are a particularly stark way of renegotiating a strained social contract. Democracies seem to have done surprisingly well by providing less stark ways of renegotiation, but they seem to be fraying at the seams of late. To me, there are three broad aspects contributing to this trend: rising polarization in beliefs and priorities…