Matt Kaul

Expert ≠ leader (or vice versa):

The pandemic has shown us the dangers of expert rule, and the failures of political and institutional leaders to heed them. It has also demonstrated, through its absence, what good governance might look like.

~Joseph E. Davis in The New Atlantis

From Mallory Owens’s review of Bruno Maçães’s History Has Begun:

It would be disturbing enough if, as Maçães predicts, the great lords of Silicon Valley left us to amuse ourselves in our virtual sandboxes while they went off to conquer the solar system. With an ever-expanding arsenal of digital tools at their disposal, however, they are unlikely to show such restraint. Their war against reality can never truly be won until they have triumphed over the most stubborn and deceitful of all things, the human heart.

Tyler Cowen’s conversation with biographer-historian Ruth Scurr is delightful—bookstores, Cambridge, finding a book’s form, & much more. 🔗🎙

Beautiful light in my office this morning.

A beautiful obituary of Chinese philosopher and aesthetician Li Zehou. 🔗

In the Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs describes the potential for “A New Guild System”:

I envision a world in which the increased fragmentation of our media scene—fragmentation created by institutions that have lost their sense of purpose and individuals who have lost trust in those institutions—leads, over time, to the rise of new institutions that are built on stronger foundations.

Micro.blog is certainly part of this new-institution-building.

And many developments in web3 seem dedicated to the same purposes: distributing political & economic power in new ways; thinking through what institutions could look like if organized differently—in more distributed, bottom-up forms.

Bitcoin and the U.S. Fiscal Reckoning - National Affairs

Until and unless Congress reduces the trajectory of the federal debt, U.S. monetary policy has entered a vicious cycle from which there is no obvious escape. The rising debt requires the Treasury Department to issue an ever-greater quantity of Treasury bonds, but market demand for these bonds cannot keep up with their increasing supply. In an effort to avoid a spike in interest rates, the Fed will need to print new U.S. dollars to soak up the excess supply of Treasury bonds. The resultant monetary inflation will cause increases in consumer prices.

These “increases in consumer prices” have arrived, and they’re planning to stick around a while.

A first post in my shameless theft of Robert‘s Last/Next notebook category. I’ll enjoy looking back on this in a few years. 📓

Daniel A. Kaufman defends “The Good Old Liberal Consensus” against its foes on both right and left. H/t to my friend Bharat. 🔗

This is a wonderful appreciation of Norm MacDonald—the best I’ve read so far. 🔗

“Destiny waits in the hands of God, not in the hands of statesmen / Who do, some well, some ill, planning and guessing, / Having their aims which turn in their hands in the pattern of time.”

~T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

MNUFC old-timer Brent Kallman provides the context behind the “Nicest Rivalry in Sports” moniker. Spoiler alert: it’s not so nice. ⚽️