Industrial Policy, Manufacturing, and the Electric Tech Stack
8 tier-5 · 8 tier-4
Here Smith assembles his most original economic framework: the "Electric Tech Stack" — batteries, rare-earth motors, and power electronics — is now the shared production base for EVs, drones, robots, data centers, and defense, so whoever masters it dominates nearly all of manufacturing, and America forfeited it by miscoding electrification as mere "climate" tech. Around that spine he refines his industrial-policy views (FDI promotion for developing countries, technology policy as industrial policy for rich ones), defends the CHIPS Act and chip export controls as national-security necessities, argues reshoring is genuinely working, makes the counter-to-his-own-priors case to let cheap Chinese EVs in, and watches Trump's culture-war assault on clean energy forfeit the field to China.
TIER 4
Nov 4, 2024
Reacting to reports that Trump and Speaker Johnson would repeal the CHIPS Act, Smith frames the law as an essential first step in countering China's manufacturing dominance and 'escalation dominance' in a potential war. The piece is a forceful articulation of his Cold War 2 thesis—that China's unrivaled production capacity plus alliance-wrecking makes semiconductor industrial policy a national-security imperative—useful as a compact statement of that argument.
CHIPS ActChinaindustrial policynational securitysemiconductors
TIER 5
Dec 4, 2024
Argues that manufacturing capacity is now itself a form of warfare: China's projected 45% share of global manufacturing (matching the US and all allies combined) means an extended war of attrition over drones, batteries, and munitions could be unwinnable for the democracies. Lays out a three-part military-industrial strategy (targeted tariffs, industrial policy, a large non-China common market) and shows how neither US party has a complete version. A landmark framing piece that ties together decoupling, the Second China Shock, drone warfare, and industrial policy into one thesis.
Chinamanufacturingnational securityindustrial policydrones
TIER 4
Dec 13, 2024
Argues that semiconductor export controls, not tariffs, are the true litmus test of Trump's China policy: tariffs are bluster and theater, but the working chip export controls are the load-bearing tool for preserving America's military-technological edge, and Trump could quietly cancel them (as he once did for ZTE) as a favor to Xi. A focused, actionable framing with a clear indicator to watch.
Chinaexport controlssemiconductorsTrumptariffs
TIER 4
Dec 18, 2024
Argues that batteries, EVs, electric motors, and solar are not merely 'climate' technologies but a nexus of physical tech that will determine national power and prosperity, and that framing them as climate issues has caused America and its allies to cede the field to China (illustrated by the collapse of Japan's auto industry). The piece is paywalled after the setup, but the central reframing is a sharp and important argument.
electrificationEVsChinanational powerindustrial policy
TIER 4
Jan 6, 2025
Smith credits Biden with launching America's factory-building 'Great Rebuilding' via the CHIPS Act and IRA but argues his industrial policy was hobbled by progressive interest-group capture and a refusal to tackle regulatory barriers, epitomized by blocking the Nippon Steel-U.S. Steel deal. A substantive critique of left-of-center industrial policy, though paywalled after the Nippon Steel section.
Bidenindustrial policyCHIPS ActNippon Steelregulation
TIER 4
Jan 25, 2025
Smith rebuts the belief that America cannot manufacture, marshaling evidence that solar panels, semiconductors, and batteries are all reshoring successfully thanks to tariffs, the CHIPS Act, and the IRA. The piece matters as a concrete, data-rich counter to deindustrialization fatalism, with the caveat that Trump could strangle the revival by attacking solar and the CHIPS Act.
reshoringindustrial policyCHIPS Actsolarsemiconductors
TIER 5
Mar 31, 2025
A deeply researched guest post by Pedro Franco contrasting two Brazilian industrial-policy experiments: the costly failure of the Manaus Free Zone (manufacturing planted in the Amazon for no economic logic, sustained only by permanent tax breaks) versus Embraer's success, built on the ITA/DCTA engineering institutes, an export discipline, niche product focus, foreign partnerships, and eventual privatization. Extracts concrete, transferable lessons on what separates good IP from bad. A standout reference on industrial policy with lasting analytical value.
industrial policyBrazilEmbraermanufacturingimport substitution
TIER 5
May 19, 2025
Invoking Mark Elvin's 'high-level equilibrium trap' and the Ming/Qing analogy, Smith argues a complacent, slow-growing America now fears new technology (AI, nuclear) the way Chinese people embrace it, because slow growth makes risks loom larger than opportunities. The payoff is his core thesis that the once-a-century shift to electrical technology (magnets, GaN/SiC transistors, lithium batteries) will rule land and sky, and America is intentionally forfeiting it to China. A landmark synthesis of his electrification, decline, and decoupling arguments.
technology stagnationelectric technologyUS-ChinaAIindustrial policy
TIER 4
Jun 29, 2025
Smith dissects how Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill' not only ends solar/wind subsidies but adds new taxes on solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, and batteries while subsidizing coal, threatening to cancel 500+ GW of planned capacity and raise electricity bills. He argues the policy is driven by ignorance and culture-war animus rather than economics, and frames it as national self-sabotage against the energy technologies of the future that China is embracing. A well-sourced explainer on the energy provisions and the political psychology behind them.
energy policysolar and batteriesTrumpindustrial policyclimate
TIER 4
Jul 16, 2025
Smith argues that while Trump hasn't joined a 'New Axis,' his incompetent, corrupt, inward-focused administration is systematically smoothing China's path to hegemony — capitulating on AI chip export controls, tariffing allies whose combined markets could rival China's scale, gutting science funding, expelling Chinese talent, and bungling naval shipbuilding. A coherent, well-sourced indictment tying many disparate Trump actions to a single strategic consequence.
US-ChinaTrumpexport controlsgeopoliticsindustrial policy
TIER 5
Sep 23, 2025
Smith introduces the "Electric Tech Stack" framework: batteries, permanent-magnet electric motors, and power electronics (plus chips) are now both the core of drone-based modern warfare and the shared production base for a widening array of manufacturing (EVs, robots, appliances). Because military necessity makes these an easy industrial-policy "winner" to pick, every country must secure the stack and its mineral inputs or risk losing wars and manufacturing dominance to China. A landmark, reusable framework tying defense, industrial policy, and the electrification of manufacturing together.
industrial policyelectric tech stackdronesmanufacturingUS-China
TIER 5
Jan 2, 2026
Smith makes the full hawkish case that semiconductor export controls are slowing China and preserving America's AI-compute lead, and that selling H200s (and eventually EUV machines) is strategic self-sabotage because China will buy US chips AND keep indigenizing. He ties the AI lead to war deterrence over Taiwan and explains the 'sell us the rope' dynamic, Potemkin Chinese breakthroughs, and Galapagos syndrome. A definitive, reference-quality statement of the export-control argument.
export controlssemiconductorsChinaAITaiwan deterrence
TIER 5
Jan 9, 2026
Smith's flagship 'Electric Tech Stack' argument: lithium-ion batteries, rare-earth motors, and power electronics now give electricity combustion's old advantages, and because these same components underlie EVs, drones, robots, AI data centers, and defense, mastering them confers dominance across nearly all manufacturing. He warns that America's framing of EVs as 'climate' tech caused it to forfeit the one major technological revolution it is missing, ceding it to China. A landmark synthesis with lasting reference value.
electric tech stackbatteriesEVsChinamanufacturing
TIER 5
Jan 27, 2026
Despite his China-hawk record, Smith argues the US should slash tariffs on cheap, high-quality Chinese EVs, paired with import quotas, joint-venture requirements, and local-content incentives, because America urgently needs to adopt EVs to build the 'Electric Tech Stack' (batteries, motors) that underpins future manufacturing and military drones. He contends competition would force Detroit out of its short-termism (citing the China Shock innovation evidence and the Japanese-transplant precedent) while espionage risks can be managed via local sourcing and US-hosted software. A bold, well-argued, counter-to-his-own-priors policy case.
ChinaEVstariffsindustrial policymanufacturing
TIER 4
Mar 30, 2026
Using the Iran war's gas-price spike as a hook, Smith argues EVs insulate drivers from oil-price shocks (electricity prices are far more stable) and reframes the energy transition as a national-security issue, not just a climate one. He warns that America's tariff-and-FUD-driven retreat from EVs, even as the rest of the world's 'flippening' accelerates, will cede the battery/drone/electronics industrial future to China. A timely, persuasive policy argument.
electric vehiclesenergy securityIran warChina competitionindustrial policy
TIER 5
Apr 20, 2026
A self-described evolution of Smith's long-held industrial-policy views into four sharper claims: 'industrial policy' is now too broad a term to be useful; for developing countries FDI promotion (the Poland/Malaysia model) is an easier, more replicable path than building national champions; for rich countries technology policy (AI, the internet) IS industrial policy and picks winners; and China's subsidy experiment has a serious unrecognized flaw in the bank-debt overhang it will leave behind. A landmark synthesis with original framing and lasting reference value.
industrial policyFDIChina subsidiesdevelopmentAI policy
The Tariff Wars and Trade Economics
8 tier-5 · 6 tier-4
This is Smith's running, real-time demolition of the Trump tariff project, grounded in textbook trade economics. He teaches the load-bearing ideas — why imports don't subtract from GDP, why a trade deficit means less money but more stuff, the Diamond-Mirrlees case against taxing intermediate inputs, why exchange-rate adjustment cancels much of a broad tariff — and uses each to show that across-the-board tariffs fail at every stated goal while genuinely harming manufacturing. He is scrupulously fair to the other side, conceding the real China-shock job losses and engaging Michael Pettis's rebalancing framework, but his throughline is that targeted, allied, strategic trade policy is the only version that works.
TIER 5
Nov 18, 2024
A clear explainer distinguishing the two goals of tariffs (securing strategic supply chains vs. reducing trade deficits) and showing why broad tariffs fail at both: exchange-rate adjustment cancels much of their effect, and they raise input costs for domestic manufacturers, while a 20% across-the-board tariff would actually weaken targeted China tariffs. Argues real deficit reduction requires dollar depreciation, not blanket tariffs. A reference-quality piece of trade economics that demystifies a debate most commentators get wrong.
tradetariffsChinaexchange ratesindustrial policy
TIER 5
Jan 16, 2025
A landmark explainer assessing Michael Pettis's framework on China's trade surplus, arguing that international economics is irreducibly hard, that Pettis is the most influential trade theorist alive, and that a collapsing-Chinese-corporate-profits mechanism makes a Pettis-flavored case for tariffs defensible for the Second China Shock specifically. Smith then itemizes where Pettis underplays exchange-rate appreciation and the intermediate-goods problem, making this a durable reference on the tariffs-rebalancing debate.
ChinatradePettistariffsmacroeconomics
TIER 4
Feb 2, 2025
Smith explains why Trump's 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico differ fundamentally from his first-term China tariffs, hitting allies with far broader, larger duties, and walks through the economic harms: higher consumer prices, reignited inflation expectations, and supply-chain damage to U.S. manufacturers who rely on imported inputs and cross-border integration. A solid Econ-101-grounded analysis of why broad tariffs on allies are self-defeating.
tariffstrade warCanada Mexicomanufacturinginflation
TIER 5
Feb 6, 2025
A reference-quality explainer cataloging the legitimate economic cases for tariffs, national security and industrial repurposing, strategic-trade protection of national champions (Brander-Spencer), infant-industry protection (Hamilton), plus the more speculative Pettis rebalancing and de-dollarization theories. Smith shows each argument supports targeted rather than broad tariffs and that all of them indict Trump's across-the-board tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Durable teaching material on trade policy.
tariffstrade policyindustrial policynational securityeconomics
TIER 4
Mar 6, 2025
A data-rich diagnosis that Trump's tariffs (not DOGE or immigration) are driving the slowdown, walking through policy-uncertainty indices, ISM manufacturing contraction, surging input prices, and harm to small businesses and the stock market. Smith frames the tariff agenda as an ideological project of "economic self-reliance" akin to North Korean juche or Maoism, prioritizing autonomy over prosperity. A strong, well-evidenced explainer of why broad tariffs clobber a modern economy.
tariffsTrump economymanufacturingstagflationpolicy uncertainty
TIER 5
Apr 4, 2025
A landmark explainer using the credit-card analogy to show that a trade deficit means a country has less money but more stuff, not that it is being ripped off, while diagnosing Trump's two underlying errors (an accounting mistake about imports in GDP and a false 1-for-1 import-substitution assumption). Crucially, Smith concedes the real problem trade deficits with China did cause (Autor-style manufacturing job losses) while explaining why broad tariffs are the wrong fix. A durable reference piece that fairly states both sides of the deficit debate.
trade deficitscurrent accountChina shockdeindustrializationtariffs
TIER 4
Apr 9, 2025
A systematic point-by-point rebuttal of every pro-tariff argument Trump's defenders deploy, treating each (negotiating tactic, reducing inflation, lowering interest rates, bringing back manufacturing) as seriously as possible before dismantling it. Designed as a reference users can deploy in real arguments. Useful as a consolidated debunking handbook, though the essay cuts off at the paywall partway through the list.
tariffstrade policyinflationtrade deficitsrebuttal
TIER 5
Apr 14, 2025
Sets out a concrete blueprint for economically containing China: zero trade barriers among all non-China nations to build a single 'Non-China' market with China-scale economies of scale and supply chains, value-added (not country-of-assembly) tariffs on Chinese intermediate goods, targeted industrial policy for strategic sectors, and pro-investment reforms at home. A reference-grade policy framework that doubles as a precise inversion of Trump's actual approach.
Chinatrade strategytariffsindustrial policysupply chains
TIER 4
Apr 22, 2025
Uses Oren Cass's continued defense of Trump's tariffs to illustrate the dilemma facing pro-Trump industrialists: defending the policy requires assuming a reindustrialization that real-time evidence (collapsing factory orders, plunging capex, crashing manufacturing stocks, layoffs) contradicts. The analytic core is a clean refutation of Cass's claim that the imported-components problem only affects exports, plus the scale-effects case for export promotion over import substitution.
tariffsdeindustrializationOren Cassindustrial policypunditry
TIER 5
May 3, 2025
A definitive explainer on why imports do NOT subtract from GDP: imports are netted out only as an accounting convenience (the shoes-on-the-scale analogy), and the apparent Q1 2025 import drag is better explained by measurement error, demand diverted from domestic production, or as a forecast signal. It matters because Noah ties the pervasive media error to real policy harm, arguing the accounting confusion helped embed Navarro/Trump's tariff logic.
GDP accountingimportsecon journalismtariffstrade deficits
TIER 5
May 8, 2025
Marshals data to dismantle the dominant protectionist narrative: the US is an unusually closed economy, eliminating the trade deficit would raise manufacturing only from ~10% to ~12.5% of GDP, median incomes and even low-percentile wages have risen 40-50% since the 1970s, and supposedly 'hollowed out' regions like Flint and Greensboro have recovered. It matters as a reference-grade, chart-by-chart rebuttal that reframes how to think about trade, manufacturing, and middle-class prosperity.
globalizationmanufacturingChina Shockmiddle classtrade deficits
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Nov 21, 2025
A clear, lasting explainer of the Diamond-Mirrlees (1971) result that you should never tax intermediate goods, used to explain why Trump's tariffs are crushing US manufacturing — nearly half of imports are intermediate inputs, so tariffs shrink the pie before redistributing it. The piece pairs a deep economic theory with concrete evidence and reference value as a standalone teaching of the optimal-taxation case against tariffs.
tariffsoptimal taxationDiamond-Mirrleesmanufacturingeconomics
TIER 4
Jan 18, 2026
Using the Judgement of Solomon as a frame, Smith argues that treating the economy as a fixed lump of 'resources' to divide produces repeated policy failure — on the right (immigration crackdowns not boosting native jobs, tariffs hurting manufacturing, seizing Venezuela/Greenland oil) and on the left (imperialism-made-us-rich myths, redistribution-over-production). The unifying thesis is that wealth comes from production and human ingenuity, not resource capture.
zero-sum thinkingimmigrationtariffstradegrowth
TIER 4
Feb 22, 2026
After the Supreme Court struck down Trump's IEEPA tariffs, Smith reviews how the tariffs failed at every stated goal (trade deficit unchanged, manufacturing in reverse as predicted by textbook economics, consumers paying 96% of the cost) yet persist via other statutory authorities. His central argument: the real point of the IEEPA tariffs was never economics but personal power, giving Trump dictatorial leverage over countries and companies. A clear, well-evidenced political-economy explainer.
tariffstradeTrumpmanufacturingexecutive power
AI: Supersession, Risk, and the Future of Work
6 tier-5 · 12 tier-4
Smith's AI writing oscillates between awe and alarm. He argues humans have already ceased to be the smartest things on Earth and that a "superintelligence" combining human-level reasoning with machine speed is here now, kicking off a golden age of science (his "Third Magic" of control-without-understanding). On risk he walks back his earlier optimism, naming agentic vibe-coding and AI-enabled bioterrorism as the live dangers and arguing a nation-state's monopoly on force makes government seizure of frontier AI inevitable. On jobs he holds the line that comparative advantage and opportunity cost preserve plentiful human work — humans keeping AI on task, salarymen plugging its jagged gaps — even as he watches the "fall of the nerds" and probes whether the whole industry is a financial mirage.
TIER 4
Aug 30, 2025
Smith scrutinizes the Brynjolfsson, Chandar, and Chen "Canaries in the Coal Mine" paper claiming AI is cutting employment for early-career workers (22-25) in exposed jobs like software and customer service. He's skeptical: there's no plausible reason AI would hurt only the young while 40-somethings in the same roles see robust hiring and flat wages, which smells of specification search; he also questions the AI-exposure measures and the Anthropic Economic Index. A careful, well-reasoned econometric critique that models how to read such claims.
AIlabor marketjobseconomicsresearch critique
TIER 5
Oct 5, 2025
A reposted New Year's essay (with new framing and a GPT-5 critique appended) arguing that humanity has had two great meta-innovations for mastering the world, history (recorded knowledge) and science (generalizable laws), and that AI is a possible third: black-box prediction that delivers control without understanding for complex phenomena science can't reduce to simple laws. The framework draws on Breiman, Wigner, and AlphaFold and reframes the goal of knowledge as control rather than explanation. Smith's most ambitious, durable conceptual essay.
AIepistemologysciencemachine learningphilosophy
TIER 4
Dec 1, 2025
Smith confesses his delight in AI as the 'little robot friend' sci-fi promised and puzzles over why Americans are uniquely fearful of it compared to Asia and even Europe. He then systematically debunks the anti-AI canon—especially the 'AI guzzles water' myth (citing Andy Masley's data showing data centers use a tiny fraction of US freshwater) and inflated job-loss claims—arguing motivated reasoning drives the panic while ignoring the real issue of electricity demand. It matters as a useful, well-evidenced takedown of common AI criticisms.
AIwater usemisinformationjobstechnology attitudes
TIER 4
Jan 30, 2026
Smith raises the underexplored scenario that AI as an industry succeeds wildly while a flagship like OpenAI still loses the race, the way Yahoo, BlackBerry, and Nokia did. His sharpest point is that the 'we'll just be first to AGI and win everything' rationale some OpenAI insiders give is 'Pascal's Wager, not a business model,' resting on a narrow eschatology of a suddenly-appearing machine god rather than fundamentals like cash burn, commoditization, and lack of vertical integration. An incisive outsider take, with the detailed financial case behind the paywall.
AIOpenAIAGIcapexcompetition
TIER 4
Feb 5, 2026
Prompted by a roughly $1 trillion software-stock selloff, Smith argues AI vibe-coding is rendering the hard-won human capital of master software engineers obsolete the way power looms obsoleted master weavers, recasting software work as factory maintenance rather than craft. He frames this as the possible end of a decades-long economic age defined by the rising wealth and status of technical professionals. A timely, evocative essay, though the deeper 'human capital economy' argument is behind the paywall.
AIsoftwarevibe-codinghuman capitalautomation
TIER 4
Feb 13, 2026
Smith argues that for the first time in recorded history humans are ceasing to be the most intelligent things on Earth, using the metaphor of sleeping next to a tiger to convey humanity's coming loss of control over its own destiny. He marshals AI's math-olympiad performance, the METR task-length curve, vibe-coding's takeover of software, and the unprecedented scale of compute investment as evidence the trend is unstoppable. A punchy, agenda-setting framing of AI supersession, though the deeper argument sits behind the paywall.
AIsuperintelligencevibe-codingcomputehuman obsolescence
TIER 5
Feb 16, 2026
Smith explains why his AI-risk view shifted from his 2023 optimism: the rise of agentic 'vibe-coding' showed that LLMs can write and deploy code end-to-end, opening catastrophic scenarios he had missed. He works through three threats (robot takeover, which he deems distant; a 'Machine Stops' starvation scenario from atrophied human coding skill; and AI-enabled bioterrorism, which tops his list) and argues the core danger is overoptimization breeding fragility as economic pressure removes humans from every loop. A landmark, carefully reasoned reframing of existential AI risk with lasting reference value.
AI riskbioterrorismvibe-codingexistential riskfragility
TIER 5
Mar 2, 2026
Smith reframes the AGI debate by arguing that AI is already superintelligent: it combines roughly human-level reasoning and language with the superhuman speed, memory, and breadth that computers always had, so it can do mental tasks (read a whole literature in minutes, solve Erdős problems at scale) no human can. He marshals strong evidence that this is already triggering a golden age of science (math, biology, physics), while warning that autonomy + robots + self-replication could let it take the planet. An original, durable framework on what 'superintelligence' actually means.
AIsuperintelligenceAGIscienceresearch
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Mar 6, 2026
Using the Anthropic-vs-Department-of-War clash as a launchpad, Smith argues that a nation-state's required monopoly on force makes it intolerable for a private firm to control AI of nuclear-grade power ('whoever controls an enslaved god is Emperor of Earth'), so government seizure of frontier AI is inevitable. He then pivots to a second landmark argument: agentic AI is becoming a weapon of mass destruction in everyone's hands (the 'jailbroken Claude builds a supervirus' scenario), yet we regulate it like nothing. A foundational framework on AI, power, and the state.
AInational securityAnthropicAI safetyregulation
TIER 4
Mar 19, 2026
Smith argues that social media empowered a divisive 'Shouting Class' of status-seeking extremists (citing a stack of research on outrage, virality, and algorithmic amplification), and that LLMs could reverse this by acting as a homogenizing, moderating force that pulls users toward the national average rather than their echo chamber. A well-sourced, original framing of AI as an 'epistemically converging' technology that could become a Digital Walter Cronkite for public discourse.
AIsocial mediapolarizationmediadiscourse
TIER 4
Mar 22, 2026
A lightly-framed transcript of Smith's dialogue with Claude developing his 'third magic' thesis: AI will exploit real-but-incompressible 'Cloud Laws' that resist the simple, teachable formulas of human science, so AI-driven science will look fundamentally unlike the past four centuries. They reason from materials science and topological materials to the Lagrange claim that fundamental physics may be 'fished out' and technologically inert, concluding AI's biggest payoff lies in complex systems - biology, neuroscience, society - that govern human experience. Idea-dense and intellectually substantive, though delivered as a chat rather than a polished argument.
AI and sciencethird magicmaterials sciencefundamental physicsphilosophy of science
TIER 4
Mar 26, 2026
Smith satirizes the AI labs' messaging - 'our product may kill your species and make you economically useless' - as a catastrophic value proposition. He argues the extinction-risk framing is the saner half (sincere, regulation-seeking, and best repackaged around relatable terrorism fears) and explores why founders build something they fear, citing the 'someone else will' race and the immortality lure. The job-obsolescence half is an own goal; the post is truncated at the paywall there. A sharp media-criticism take on AI discourse.
AI riskAI messagingexistential riskAI labsregulation
TIER 5
Mar 28, 2026
A repost of Smith's landmark 2024 essay (with new clarifications) arguing that comparative advantage and opportunity cost mean humans can keep plentiful, well-paid jobs even if AI is better at everything - because compute is a producer-specific constraint on AI that doesn't bind humans. He stresses 'possible, not guaranteed,' flagging the horse/glue-factory risk if energy (a non-AI-specific input) becomes the binding constraint, plus inequality and adjustment dangers. The clearest, most-referenced statement of the comparative-advantage case for human labor under AGI.
AI and jobscomparative advantageopportunity costcompute constraintslabor economics
TIER 5
Apr 3, 2026
Smith offers an original framework for the near future of work under AI: jobs will split into three types - specialists in 'strongly bundled' tasks AI can't decompose, generalist 'salarymen' who flit between tasks plugging AI's jagged gaps, and small-business owners who use AI leverage to run tiny teams. He draws on Garicano et al.'s bundling theory and argues America's labor market will come to resemble Japan's salaryman-and-small-business system, consistent with the current 'no-hire, no-fire' economy. A lasting, model-driven reference piece on AI and employment.
AI and jobsfuture of workJapanlabor economicsspecialists vs generalists
TIER 4
Apr 16, 2026
Smith argues that identity should be grounded in consumption (the choices we freely make) rather than production (dictated by the market), inverting the cultural assumption that work gives life meaning. He frames this as a hopeful vision for an AI age that devalues human labor: if redistribution succeeds, society could become a permanent 'elite college,' where people find self-expression in leisure and consumption rather than careers. It matters as an original reframing of the AI-meaning-crisis debate.
AI and meaningconsumptionidentitywork cultureindividualism
TIER 4
May 5, 2026
Smith documents AI leaders (Altman, Huang, Andreessen) pivoting from 'AI will take your jobs' to 'AI will create jobs,' reading it as a political-survival move as public opinion sours and nationalization talk grows. He surveys the pro-AI arguments — task creation, induced demand/Jevons, and the durable 'human touch' relational economy — and argues the messaging shift, even if cynical, could nudge researchers toward genuinely labor-augmenting AI. A useful explainer of the industry's discourse and its political stakes.
AI and jobsOpenAIAnthropicAI policynationalization
TIER 4
May 27, 2026
Smith proposes that as AI automates technical work, humans' enduring comparative advantage is 'knowing what we want,' so future labor will shift toward maintaining AI alignment, verifying output, and keeping autonomous agents on task. He equates verification with alignment work amid a rising tide of low-quality AI 'slop.' (Truncated preview post.)
AIfuture of workalignmentautomationAI slop
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Jun 2, 2026
Pegging off Anthropic's near-trillion-dollar IPO, Smith probes why massive 'tokenmaxxing' AI-coding spend isn't translating into shipped products (only ~18% reaches users). He suggests two deeper possibilities: turning task-level productivity into economic productivity is hard, and software may be a mature industry, so AI's gains may come in new software categories rather than 'better Facebook and Amazon.' (Truncated preview post.)
AIsoftware industryAnthropicproductivitytokenmaxxing
Drone Warfare, Europe, and the Return of Great-Power War
5 tier-5 · 13 tier-4
Smith treats the drone as the decisive weapon of the age and great-power war as a live possibility the post-Cold-War West has forgotten how to fear. He argues cheap, increasingly autonomous FPV drones have made platform-centric militaries (tanks, jets, carriers) obsolete, that the binding constraint is now the electric/manufacturing supply chain China dominates, and — drawing on history — that each great wave of war comes from the social reorganization needed to wield a new technology. Threaded through are the concrete conflicts (Ukraine, Iran, a feared Taiwan invasion), a defense of democracies' war record, the case for allied nuclear deterrents, and the passing of the WW2 order. The cluster folds in Europe's predicament — abandoned by an American right that prizes "Western Civilization" over alliances, menaced by a Russia waging gray-zone war with Chinese backing, and pincered by a China-shock assault on its industry — and his demand that Europe act like a single country, rearm, and resist the Second China Shock to protect its own drone-defense base.
TIER 4
Oct 26, 2024
Smith frames Musk as a real-world 'superhero' whose distinctive power is organization-building—gathering, motivating, and aligning talent (a la founder-CEO outperformance research)—which America needs against China and Russia but which also risks 'supervillain' capture, as his secret Putin contacts suggest. The Henry Ford / Bill Knudsen WWII-mobilization parallel makes this a memorable essay on entrepreneurs, national defense, and the danger of concentrated power.
Elon Muskentrepreneurshipnational securitymanufacturingfounder CEOs
TIER 4
Jan 2, 2025
A New Year's essay from Taipei meditating on the return of great-power war and the prospect of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, arguing that conquest is irrational yet likely because each generation forgets war's horror and the deterring power (the US) has turned inward and complacent. More literary and elegiac than analytical, but it crystallizes Noah's recurring thesis that the post-Cold-War peace is unraveling and America is no longer fit to defend it.
TaiwanChinagreat-power warUS declinegeopolitics
TIER 4
Feb 8, 2025
Smith predicts the Ukraine war most likely ends in a 'Finlandization' settlement: territorial loss and a NATO ban, a formal defeat that is nonetheless a lasting strategic victory preserving Ukrainian independence, drawing the Finland 1939-44 parallel. He argues continued aid plus Russia's economic strain could yet bring Putin to the table, and that Ukraine's booming domestic arms production means it won't collapse even if U.S. aid drops. A clear, historically grounded forecast.
UkraineRussiaFinlandizationgeopoliticsforecasting
TIER 4
Feb 16, 2025
Reading the Hegseth and Vance speeches as a clear signal that America will no longer guarantee European security, Smith argues that regardless of whether the speeches are sincere or disingenuous, Europe must now defend itself, and that it can: the EU plus UK and Turkey vastly outweighs Russia in people and industry. He lays out a combined military-and-economic agenda (5% GDP defense, integrated NATO command, energy, deregulation, software, immigration reform) needed to face down Russia. A thorough strategic-and-economic roadmap for European autonomy.
EuropeRussiadefenseNATOindustrial policy
TIER 4
Feb 19, 2025
Reposting and updating an earlier argument, Smith makes the case that controlled nuclear proliferation to Japan, South Korea, and Poland is the least-bad option as the U.S. nuclear umbrella becomes unreliable under MAGA politics and 'slow empires' Russia and China grind forward. He argues South Asia's India-Pakistan standoffs show modest deterrents can restrain conventional war, and that one-sided non-proliferation only disarms U.S. allies. A substantive, well-reasoned security analysis, though it is a rerun rather than fully new material.
nuclear proliferationdeterrenceus-chinaRussiaalliances
TIER 4
Mar 12, 2025
Offers four non-conspiratorial reasons Trump abandoned Europe and tilted toward Russia: nostalgic 19th-century "America First" pattern-matching, Trump's personal desire to partner with Putin, a values alignment of the American right with Russia against secular liberal Europe, and a perception that Russia is strong and Europe weak. Concludes the one lever Europe controls is to look strong through rearmament. A useful explainer of MAGA foreign-policy psychology.
US-Europe relationsRussiaNATOTrump foreign policyAmerican right
TIER 5
Jun 3, 2025
Using the 2025 Ukrainian drone raid on Russian bombers as a modern Battle of Taranto, Smith argues a revolution in military affairs has made cheap battery-powered FPV drones the dominant weapon, exposing America's expensive platform-centric military to catastrophic vulnerability. The kicker is supply chains: China dominates injection molding, magnets/rare earths, and batteries, while GOP cuts to EV and battery subsidies are unilaterally disarming America's future drone industry. A vivid, well-sourced framework linking industrial policy, decoupling, and national defense.
dronesUS-Chinadefensebatteriesindustrial policy
TIER 4
Jun 19, 2025
Against the trope of decadent, militarily weak democracies, Smith marshals political-science evidence (democracies win ~84% of their wars) and recent cases (Ukraine vs Russia, Israel vs Hezbollah and Iran) to argue democracies fight more selectively, field better economies and technology, and avoid autocratic command pathologies. He then carves out China as the genuine exception: an autocracy with overwhelming manufacturing scale that, unlike Putin's Russia, will choose its wars carefully. A substantive, sourced synthesis of the democracy-and-war literature applied to current conflicts.
democracy and warChinaIsrael-IranUkrainemilitary power
TIER 4
Aug 23, 2025
Argues that Europe's low AC adoption is killing tens of thousands annually (heat deaths far exceed US gun deaths) and is driven by degrowth ideology plus a cultural attachment to not-having-AC as a marker of European identity. Frames it as a case study in how rejecting foreign technology impoverishes a society, citing Japan's wakon-yosai model and Lee Kuan Yew's claim that AC made tropical development possible. A punchy, well-evidenced argument about technology adoption and degrowth.
Europeair conditioningdegrowthtechnology adoptionclimate
TIER 4
Nov 3, 2025
Opening with his grandfather's war stories, Smith argues that the postwar order — eighty years of great-power peace, growth, institutional strength, and the Nazi-evil moral anchor — was an inheritance from the Greatest Generation that is now being spent down as that generation passes and the Arsenal of Democracy cedes ground to China. A reflective, big-picture framing of the current global unraveling. (Paywalled mid-essay.)
World War 2postwar orderhistorygreat powerdecline
TIER 4
Nov 14, 2025
Smith argues that Europeans' habit of mocking America (no healthcare, plutocracy, violence) is both outdated and a 'cope' that distracts from Europe's own crisis of stagnation, expensive energy, overregulation, and military weakness against China and Russia. He marshals data showing US-Europe systems are broadly similar and that becoming a bit more American on regulation and industry is part of what Europe actually needs.
EuropeAmericaeconomic stagnationregulationenergy
TIER 5
Nov 20, 2025
Smith revisits his vindicated 2013 prediction of drone warfare's rise (now confirmed in Ukraine) and builds an original framework: across history, the three great waves of war (Mongol, gunpowder/1600s, World Wars) were triggered not by new weapons but by the social reorganization needed to wield them. He argues the AI-plus-Electric-Tech-Stack revolution will force comparably wrenching societal change, and that China is currently adapting fastest.
military technologydroneshistory of warChinaAI
TIER 5
Dec 7, 2025
Smith argues Europe faces a 'Deluge'-style pincer: abandoned by a US right that values 'Western Civilization' over alliances, militarily menaced by a Russia using gray-zone warfare, a 'Ponzi empire' of enslaved conscripts, and Chinese industrial backing, and economically threatened by a Chinese export/rare-earth assault that is deindustrializing Germany. His prescription is for Europe to panic, act like a country (single market, fiscal union, common defense procurement) and master the entire drone/Electric Tech Stack. It matters as a sweeping, well-sourced strategic synthesis of Europe's geopolitical predicament.
EuropegeopoliticsRussiaChinadeindustrialization
TIER 5
Dec 24, 2025
Smith argues Europe must not passively accept deindustrialization from China's export flood, laying out why: military vulnerability against Russia, unbalanced trade as unrepayable IOUs, and microeconomic externalities (pecuniary rents, lost learning-by-doing and innovative capacity) that could make Europe genuinely poorer. He prescribes China-only protectionism plus export subsidies, allied scale, forced joint ventures, and pressure on the undervalued yuan. A well-argued, framework-rich case on a defining trade question.
China shockEuropetradeprotectionismindustrial policy
TIER 4
Mar 10, 2026
Using the 1930s 'foothills of WW2' analogy (Khalkhin Gol, Guernica), Smith argues the Iran War isn't WW3's start but pulls the world closer by hardening coalitions (US/Ukraine/Israel/Europe vs Russia/Iran), keeping the Eastern theater's alliances uncertain, and showcasing the drone-and-AI weapons of future war. The core insight: uncertain balances of power, driven by new military tech, are scarier and more war-prone than known ones.
geopoliticsworld warIrandronesmilitary AI
TIER 4
May 11, 2026
Against the backdrop of declining global freedom, Smith identifies a counter-trend: 21st-century autocrats and strongmen keep losing actual wars (Assad, Iran's proxies, Russia in Ukraine, Trump in Iran). He offers a three-part framework for why — defenders have the moral advantage of fighting for their homes, democracies cooperate while personalist regimes can't, and the civilizations under attack tend to be technologically superior (Athena over Ares). A clear, transferable thesis tempered with caveats about China's industrial might.
geopoliticsUkraineauthoritarianismdrone warfaredemocracy
TIER 5
May 19, 2026
Drawing on a Latent Space interview with a Ukrainian drone-startup founder, Smith argues that cheap, increasingly autonomous FPV drones have made platform-centric militaries (tanks, jets, carriers) obsolete, citing kill ratios, NATO war-game routs, and cost asymmetries that defeat shotguns and lasers alike. The strategic punchline: China's dominance of batteries, rare-earth motors, and EV-scale manufacturing means it could out-build everyone in drones, exposing a critical Western supply-chain vulnerability.
drone warfaremilitary strategyUkraineChinaelectric supply chain
TIER 4
Jun 6, 2026
Smith argues Europe should erect tariffs and non-tariff barriers against Chinese high-tech goods, primarily to protect its nascent drone-dependent defense industry from a country actively aiding Russia. He also debunks the 'comparative advantage in industrial policy' argument and contends barriers could nudge China away from a mercantilist model that fails to benefit ordinary Chinese people.
trade barriersChinaEuropedefense industrycomparative advantage
Growth, Development, Japan, and the Global South
5 tier-5 · 12 tier-4
Smith's development writing returns to the question of why some countries get rich and applies it to the next big growth stories — with Japan as his central, book-length case study. He revisits his industrialization series against the "export discipline" model, makes the bull case for India while diagnosing its labor-regulation and land barriers, defends sweatshops as the tried engine out of extreme poverty, and looks ahead to a century in which a fifth of humanity lives in five large, poorly-governed "basket case" countries that rich nations have a self-interested stake in helping. Japan he recasts as effectively a developing economy that lost "the future" in 2008, prescribing greenfield platform FDI (TSMC's Kumamoto fabs, Sakana AI) and the global "weeb" phenomenon as a soft-power magnet — while Takaichi-era remilitarization doubles as industrial policy. A US-China divergence book review, a contrarian read on the Middle East, and a Trudeau-era Canada postmortem round out the scan.
TIER 5
Dec 24, 2024
A definitive, carefully reasoned argument that the US-Japan living-standards gap is real and large (Japan ~65% of US per-capita GDP at PPP, down from 85% in 1991), insisting that unmeasured factors cut both ways: Japan's safety, urbanism and health are offset by Americans' greater leisure and Japan's hidden poverty, long hours, tiny housing, and poverty wages. A landmark myth-busting piece grounded in lived experience and data with lasting reference value.
JapanGDPPPPliving standardscost of living
TIER 4
Jan 8, 2025
On Trudeau's resignation, Smith diagnoses Canada's economic malaise: the mid-2010s stagnation traces to collapsing oil prices, while flat per-capita living standards since the pandemic stem from decades-long non-oil productivity weakness masked by mass low-skilled immigration that propped up headline GDP. The honest verdict is that no one fully understands Canada's productivity problem, but Trudeau didn't even try to fix it.
CanadaTrudeauproductivityimmigrationoil
TIER 4
Jan 18, 2025
Smith makes a contrarian long-term-bullish case for the Middle East, arguing that war exhaustion plus Iranian/Russian retreat, cheap solar power and desalination, the end of the oil resource curse, and a favorable demographic dividend could drive a regional reinvention. A speculative but substantive synthesis of geopolitics, energy economics, and demographics, framed against Europe's post-1648 rise.
Middle Eastdevelopmentsolar energydemographicsresource curse
TIER 4
Jul 14, 2025
Revisiting countries from his 2021-22 industrialization series, Smith checks how each fared post-pandemic against the 'export discipline' model: India promising but slow, Bangladesh derailed by political unrest, Vietnam stuck in low-value assembly, plus Pakistan/Mexico/Jamaica stagnant and Poland/Malaysia/Dominican Republic/Turkey graduating to rich status. The recurring lesson — political stability is decisive and exporters need whole domestic ecosystems, not single industries. A valuable comparative-development reference scan.
development economicsindustrializationIndiaexport disciplinecomparative growth
TIER 4
Jul 30, 2025
Rebutting a progressive critique of garment-factory labor, Smith marshals a wide body of development research (Blattman-Dercon, the Bangladesh RMG literature, post-Rana-Plaza studies) to argue that export-oriented sweatshops are the tried-and-true engine that lifts poor countries out of extreme poverty. He concedes that rich-world activism for better conditions can be net positive if it nudges productivity upward, but warns it can also drive factories to close and harm the very workers it aims to help. A well-sourced, evidence-dense development explainer.
development economicssweatshopsBangladeshtradepoverty reduction
TIER 4
Aug 4, 2025
A guest post by Prakash Loungani and Karan Bhasin diagnosing why India, a labor-surplus economy, has failed at labor-intensive manufacturing while excelling at services, and identifying four barriers: rigid industrial labor regulations, land-acquisition hurdles, trade ambivalence/protectionism, and poor ease of doing business. It argues the heavy lifting must happen at the state level (Tamil Nadu, Gujarat) and that India should 'let manufacturing be' like services. A detailed, sourced development-economics explainer on one of the most consequential growth stories.
Indiaindustrializationdevelopmentlabor regulationmanufacturing
TIER 5
Aug 29, 2025
Reviews Dan Wang's book Breakneck, which argues the US-China divergence comes down to America being run by lawyers (who block building) and China by engineers (who build relentlessly). Smith endorses the book but pushes back with a strong counter-framework: the lawyer/engineer split may be an artifact of development stage rather than deep culture, since the US itself out-built everyone in 1920-60 and rich countries naturally shift from mobilizing resources to allocating them. The dueling theses make this a high-value reference on the decoupling and industrial-policy debate.
US-Chinaindustrial policyDan Wangbook reviewdevelopment
TIER 4
Oct 29, 2025
A six-point policy memo for Japan's new PM on restoring growth: raise investment (via export orientation, bank lending to scaling firms, and greenfield FDI), continue the corporate-governance transformation, build a deeper defense-industrial and R&D base, lower electricity prices through nuclear restarts and solar, and train more software engineers. It matters as a concrete, well-sourced application of Smith's development and industrial-policy thinking to a specific country at a pivotal moment.
Japanindustrial policyFDIgrowthdefense
TIER 4
Nov 1, 2025
Smith projects that by 2100 a fifth of humanity will live in five large poor, poorly-governed countries (Pakistan, Nigeria, DRC, Ethiopia, Tanzania) as rich-country and Chinese populations shrink and the Big 5 keep high fertility. He argues rich countries have a self-interested stake (migration pressure, shrinking markets) in helping them via open markets, aid directed to people not governments, and military stabilization.
developmentdemographicsAfricaforeign aidtrade
TIER 4
Nov 9, 2025
An excerpt from Smith's book 'Weeb Economy' arguing that Japan's real turning point was 2008, not 1990 — the mid-2000s felt genuinely futuristic, but productivity has fallen since while real wages stagnated. He recasts stagnation as an opportunity, urging Japan to lean on development economics and a multi-strategy productivity push rather than pure macro policy. (Paywalled mid-essay.)
Japanproductivitystagnationdevelopment economicsgrowth
TIER 5
Dec 17, 2025
In Part II of his Weeb Economy book serialization, Smith argues Japan should specifically court greenfield platform FDI (foreign firms building factories/offices to export from Japan, like TSMC's Kumamoto fabs and Sakana AI) rather than M&A, because it directly adds investment, jobs, exports, yen demand, and transfers intangible assets and tacit know-how. He frames it as a model of multi-strategy development that counters Japan's insularity and shrinking domestic market. It matters as an original, deeply-sourced policy framework with lasting reference value on Japanese economic revival.
JapanFDIsemiconductorsindustrial policyexports
TIER 4
Dec 18, 2025
Smith makes the bull case for India becoming a developed country within two decades, projecting that sustained 7%-plus per-capita growth would lift it to Portugal/Hungary income levels, supported by recent labor-law reform, a growing electronics-export boom (Apple/iPhone assembly moving up the value chain), and political will for pro-growth reform. He rebuts the main bear cases (internal fragmentation, Chinese sabotage, and thinly-veiled national-IQ skepticism) by noting some country always has to industrialize first. It matters as a substantive, optimistic development-economics take on the next big growth story.
Indiaeconomic developmentmanufacturinggrowthFDI
TIER 4
Dec 26, 2025
Part III of Smith's Japan book argues that the world's surging love of Japan — anime, food, design, tourism, top nation-brand rankings — is a strategic economic asset ('the Weeb Dream') for attracting FDI and talent. He explains the appeal through Japan's unique commercial-density urbanism (zakkyo buildings, walkability, small-business vitality) and a theory of Japan as 'alternative modernity': substantively Western but feeling distinctively different. A rich cultural-economic essay, though overlapping with issue 0093.
Japansoft powerurbanismtourismanime
TIER 5
Dec 30, 2025
The entire new section of Smith's Japanese-language book: Japan lost 'the future' in 2008 and is now effectively a developing country with catch-up potential, which it should pursue via multi-strategy development — reviving big firms, growing startups, and especially attracting greenfield platform FDI (TSMC Kumamoto, Sakana AI). The original move is leveraging the global 'weeb' phenomenon and love of Japan as a soft-power magnet for entrepreneurs, capital, and talent, with concrete policy ideas (Japan Life Pass, easier banking, weeb neighborhoods). A long-form, original framework with lasting value.
JapanFDIdevelopment economicssoft powerindustrial policy
TIER 4
Feb 9, 2026
Smith explains Takaichi Sanae's landslide election win and what it means: facing an unreliable US security guarantee and a rising China, Japan is leaving its pacifist era to remilitarize, court allies, and hold society together on a moderate immigration line. He argues defense spending could double as industrial policy, reviving Japan's manufacturing, spurring AI adoption, and attracting greenfield investment, while warning that Japan's fiscal bind makes the buildup hard. A substantive, well-structured explainer of Japanese politics and its economic stakes for Western readers.
JapanTakaichiremilitarizationChinaindustrial policy
TIER 4
Mar 4, 2026
A guest post by Rie Yano (Coral Capital) arguing that the US can't reindustrialize its defense base fast enough alone and should use Japan as a co-manufacturing arsenal, given Japan's industrial depth, political stability under Takaichi, fast permitting, strong IP protection, and existing role in US supply chains (wafers, carbon fiber, robotics, shipyards). Uses Poland's post-2022 FDI-fueled defense buildup as the playbook. A substantive, well-evidenced strategic case.
JapandefensereindustrializationmanufacturingFDI
TIER 5
May 6, 2026
Engaging the JFV/Pritchett critique that development economics has abandoned the big question of why some countries get rich, Smith argues the field hasn't ignored it — there's abundant top-tier work on all ten major growth theories — but that the tools (one-time history, cross-country regressions, structural models, narrative history, micro-RCTs) are inherently weak because development happens too few times to be made into a science. The deeper, durable point is an argument for humility: there is no science of development and exhorting economists toward the Big Questions won't produce Big Answers. A strong methodological framework with lasting reference value.
development economicsRCTsgrowth theorymethodologyindustrial policy
Technology, Society, Living Standards, and the Human Condition
4 tier-5 · 16 tier-4
Smith's most essayistic mode argues that technology "weirds the world" more than it grows GDP, and pairs it with his data-driven pushback against pessimism about how Americans are actually doing. The smartphone and centralized social media collapsed America's "Big Sort" release valve and threw everyone into one room, atomizing community and empowering a "Shouting Class"; the cure is fragmentation back into community-moderated spaces. Around this run his big civilizational essays — the "posthuman age" of vanishing fertility and digital hive minds, his techno-optimist case for a "shallower," less painful future, the campaign to save the human species, the elite-overproduction theory of cultural unrest — plus pop-culture stagnation, fearing the future, and cyberpunk's vindication. The living-standards thread shows service-cost disease leveling off after 2009, debunks the "$140,000 poverty line" and the insurers-as-villain myth (the real cost driver is providers), and reads GLP-1 drugs as proof that technological fixes are underrated against social ones.
TIER 5
Dec 9, 2024
Prompted by the celebration of the UnitedHealthcare CEO's murder, argues with hard numbers that insurers are a minor villain: their profit margins are thin (~6%), Americans pay a smaller share out of pocket than many peer countries, and administrative waste is small relative to the gap, so the real driver of America's excess costs is the providers (hospitals, pharma, doctors) who outsource fee-collection to insurers and let them play the bad guy. A clarifying, evidence-dense reframing of a pervasive misconception.
healthcarehealth insurancecost diseaseproviderspolicy
TIER 4
Jan 28, 2025
Smith argues that fear of the future is rational in a rich, aging society where change risks one's privileged perch, but offers a sharper diagnosis: in a politically divided country, people oppose technologies they think will empower their enemies, Republicans fearing hardware (solar, EVs, vaccines), Democrats fearing software (Big Tech, AI). He balances this with 'green shoots' of dynamism in housing and entrepreneurship. A thoughtful cultural-technological framework with a memorable symmetric thesis.
progresstechnology politicssolar energyAIinnovation culture
TIER 4
May 1, 2025
Argues the cyberpunk authors of the 1980s-90s predicted our present more accurately than mid-century sci-fi, cataloging real-world robots, drones, deepfakes, and AI companions that now mirror their visions, with the 1970s energy plateau explaining why innovation shifted from atoms to bits. The substantive turn is that cyberpunk's social pessimism also rings true: surveillance kills privacy and information tech may tilt the balance of power toward authoritarianism.
technologycyberpunkAIdronessurveillance
TIER 4
May 14, 2025
Smith offers technological-economic explanations for perceived pop-culture stagnation: artistic formats have finite 'low-hanging fruit' that gets mined out (alt-rock, melody, movies vs. longer-format TV), and the disintermediation of the artistic community by viral distribution has hollowed out the avant-garde by removing the peer-gatekeeping that pushed novelty. A creative, idea-dense culture essay that applies his characteristic tech-first lens to a non-economic domain.
culturepop culturetechnologyartmedia
TIER 4
May 27, 2025
Smith chronicles Twitter/X's decline from the nation's single 'town square' into a degraded, unrepresentative platform, attributing the rot to falling usage, algorithmic feeds, and link suppression that broke its breaking-news function. He argues fragmentation is good and that Substack and purpose-built tools can fill the breaking-news role, advancing his recurring thesis that the internet wants to be fragmented rather than centralized in one hive mind.
mediaTwitterSubstacksocial mediatechnology
TIER 4
May 30, 2025
Smith marshals data showing that the dominant 2010s narrative of relentlessly rising service costs is out of date: health care and college costs have leveled off or become more affordable since roughly 2009-2012, and manufacturing productivity has flatlined while service productivity rose, inverting Baumol's cost disease. This means our policy debates about care-economy subsidies and techno-pessimism need updating, and supports more optimism about capitalism and the middle class.
cost diseasehealth careeducation costsproductivityaffordability
TIER 4
Jun 7, 2025
Using his own 45-pound weight loss as a case study, Smith reframes obesity from a moral or willpower problem into a cost-of-attention problem, then into a technological one solved by GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic. He generalizes to a broader thesis (echoing Scott Alexander's 'society is fixed, biology is mutable') that technological solutions are systematically underrated relative to social ones, with the falling US obesity rate as evidence. An engaging, idea-rich essay that lands a transferable framing despite the personal-anecdote frame.
obesityOzempictechnology vs social solutionswillpowerpublic health
TIER 5
Jun 13, 2025
Smith advances an original hypothesis for why the US was uniquely wounded by the 2010s: America relied more than other nations on geographic sorting (the 'Big Sort') as a release valve for diversity and ideological conflict, and smartphone-enabled social media collapsed that release valve, throwing all Americans into one room. Drawing on Hirschman's exit/voice/loyalty and research that bubbles can reduce polarization, he explains the surge in distrust and culture war as the death of 'exit.' A memorable, well-constructed framework with lasting explanatory value.
social mediapolarizationgeographic sortingAmerican societyinstitutional trust
TIER 5
Jun 27, 2025
Smith's most ambitious essay of the batch argues that low fertility (a 'second fertility transition' from low to vanishing) and pervasive digital connectedness are jointly transforming the human experience as profoundly as the Industrial Revolution, even without a productivity boom. He weaves Fernandez-Villaverde's demographic pessimism, Jones's growth theory, and the shift from individual heroics to a digital 'hive mind' into an original framework, sketching a self-reinforcing feedback loop where shrinking societies cling ever harder to AI and online collectives. Landmark synthesis with lasting reference value.
fertility declinedemographicsAIsocial medialong-run growth
TIER 4
Jul 4, 2025
A lightly updated repost of Smith's 2022 essay arguing that the 2000s humanities-major boom collided with the post-2008 collapse of law, publishing, academia, and government jobs, producing a cohort of frustrated, downwardly-mobile educated elites whose dashed expectations (happiness = reality minus expectations) fueled the late-2010s leftist/woke unrest. The 2025 update notes STEM grads now face their own glut. A substantive, framework-driven cultural-economic essay (Turchin-inflected) with lasting explanatory reach.
elite overproductionhigher educationTurchinsocial unrestlabor market
TIER 4
Aug 8, 2025
Argues that RFK Jr.'s cancellation of ~$500M in federal mRNA vaccine funding threatens the promising field of mRNA cancer immunotherapies through a chilling effect, even if cancer research isn't explicitly targeted. Frames this as the MAGA antivax movement extending a culture-war vendetta into territory that will cost American lives, paralleling right-wing climate/green-energy denial and Covid-vaccine refusal. An emotionally framed but substantive argument about how political tribalism degrades health-technology progress.
mRNAcancerRFK JrvaccinesMAGA
TIER 5
Aug 17, 2025
A repost of Smith's favorite essay, reframed around the embryo-screening 'eugenics' controversy, arguing against the romantic instinct to value human suffering and to disdain technologies that make past struggles obsolete. Using Keith Haring's AIDS-era painting, the conquest of maternal mortality, and antibiotics, it makes the case that 'adversity is not worth the price of adversity' and that a safer, 'shallower' world is a moral triumph, not a loss. A landmark essayistic statement of Smith's techno-optimist worldview with lasting reference value.
progresstechno-optimismhuman sufferingtechnologyphilosophy
TIER 4
Nov 7, 2025
A repost (with updates) of Smith's influential 2022 essay arguing that centralized 'town square' social media was a failed Tower-of-Babel experiment in global hive-mind, and that the healthy future is fragmentation into community-moderated forums, group chats, and push media where users can 'exit' (per Hirschman). He sees the Gen Z exodus from Twitter/Facebook as a return to the better, fragmented internet of the 2000s.
social mediainternetfragmentationcommunity moderationculture
TIER 4
Nov 26, 2025
Drawing on the UCSD remediation report and NAEP data, Smith documents the collapse of American math and reading skills, including high schools awarding A's in AP Calculus to students who can't do fractions. His distinctive argument is that diluting standards is a misguided form of 'predistribution' — an attempt to smooth inequality by refusing to educate talented kids — that backfires badly. (Paywalled mid-essay.)
educationinequalitytest scorespredistributionpolicy
TIER 4
Nov 29, 2025
Smith debunks Mike Green's viral claim that a family of four earning under $140,000 is effectively poor, first applying a 'smell test' (it would imply most American families are poor) and then checking necessities one by one—food, living space, health insurance (92% covered), and transportation (80%+ have two cars)—to show most families have them, with overlap meaning far fewer than half lack any. The detailed rebuttal of Green's specific numbers is paywalled. It matters as a clean methodological lesson in sniffing out off-base affordability claims, though the full teardown is partly cut off.
poverty linemiddle classaffordabilitycost of livingdebunking
TIER 4
Jan 16, 2026
Smith hypothesizes that Americans' economic pessimism (despite decent fundamentals) stems from algorithmic social media scrambling their reference points — they now compare themselves to wealthy and upper-class influencers rather than peers, and can't explain or attain those lifestyles. Citing 'keeping up with the Joneses' research and Gen Z's $588k 'success' threshold, he argues neither growth nor redistribution can fully close this perceived gap. A thoughtful, original hypothesis even if speculative.
social comparisonsocial mediaconsumer sentimentinequalityhappiness
TIER 4
Jan 22, 2026
Smith argues that the post-2010s global fertility collapse is a near-existential threat, then systematically dismantles six 'coping' rebuttals (per-capita living standards, productivity, robots, racism/sexism objections, baby bonuses, immigration) showing none solves it. His constructive proposal is a multi-billion-dollar Fertility Policy Research Center running RCTs on interventions, funded by billionaires like Musk and governments. It matters as a clear consolidated case against fertility complacency plus a concrete research agenda.
fertility declinedemographicsChinaresearch policygrowth
TIER 4
Feb 15, 2026
A 2023 repost arguing, against Cowen and Krugman, that we have already been living through radical technological change: smartphones, the internet, and social media transformed how humans socialize, navigate, remember, and access knowledge even if they barely moved the productivity numbers. Smith's central claim is that technology 'weirds the world' more than it grows the economy, reorienting daily life in ways GDP fails to capture. A vivid, durable essay on the lived texture of the digital revolution, though a repost rather than fresh analysis.
technologyinternetsocial mediasmartphonesfuture shock
TIER 4
Jun 10, 2026
In a repost of his 2024 explainer (with fresh framing), Smith argues that health insurers are 'sin-eaters' blamed for a broken system in which they play only a minor role: their profit margins are low, Americans pay relatively little out of pocket, and the real cost driver is provider prices (hospitals, pharma, suppliers). The policy implication is to negotiate down provider costs rather than browbeat insurers.
health careinsuranceprovider costshealth policyexplainer
TIER 4
Jun 11, 2026
Smith argues that smartphones, by tying everyone into an always-on 'hive mind,' have replaced richer in-person interaction and driven rising unhappiness, especially among young people. He cites experimental evidence (mobile-internet blocking improves mental health; social media as a 'collective trap' people pay to escape) and frames network effects as why individuals can't simply opt out.
smartphonessocial mediamental healthnetwork effectstechnology criticism
The MAGA Era: Authoritarianism, Immigration, and National Identity
4 tier-5 · 16 tier-4
This cluster reads the Trump movement as a worldview and a power project, and pairs it with Smith's immigration writing because the two share a single fault line: who counts as a "real American." He maps the New Right's "Western Civilization" identity story, argues MAGA "doesn't build" but sterilizes state and civic capacity, and tracks authoritarian probing of the rule of law (disappearances without due process, defiance of courts) as a liquid testing institutional cracks. Against it he sets his own "liberal nationalism" — a civic, FDR-era story of one nation forged from many, grounded in democratic control over who gets in rather than blood and soil. He defends skilled (especially Indian) immigration with the empirical literature, attacks the restrictionist turn as racial collectivism dressed up as economics, makes the evenhanded case for gentle assimilation over both ethno-nationalism and a permanent "salad bowl," and sketches a liberal enforcement policy Democrats could actually run on.
TIER 5
Oct 28, 2024
Drawing on Zolberg's 'A Nation by Design,' Smith resolves the paradox that voters simultaneously back mass deportation and a path to citizenship by arguing the unifying principle is democratic control: a nation is an exclusive club whose members collectively decide who gets in, and illegal/asylum flows feel like violations of that sovereign will rather than xenophobia. A durable, original framework for reading immigration opinion, with the concrete prescription to abolish the asylum loophole.
immigrationasylumdemocratic sovereigntypublic opinionnation-state
TIER 4
Dec 26, 2024
Marshals the empirical literature (lottery-based natural experiments, clustering effects) to argue H-1B and skilled Indian immigration do not displace native-born tech workers and likely reinforce America's advantage as the place high-tech firms invest. The second half pivots to condemning the MAGA backlash against Indians as a racial-identity fight dressed up as economics. Strong evidence-driven case on the policy merits.
immigrationH-1Bskilled laborIndiatech policy
TIER 4
Jan 21, 2025
Using the TRUMP and MELANIA coin launches, Smith argues memecoins are a novel payment technology for plausibly-deniable bribery: buyers pump a coin the owner holds, enriching them via mark-to-market without any direct transfer, sustained by middlemen acting as exit liquidity. The framing is original and clarifying, grounding the corruption mechanism in real financial-bubble models (DeLong et al., Abreu-Brunnermeier).
cryptomemecoinscorruptionTrumpfinance
TIER 5
Feb 21, 2025
Smith offers an original framework, the 'Metternich-Lindbergh theory,' to explain Trump's simultaneous withdrawal, disarmament, and deindustrialization moves as a deliberate retreat from great-power competition in favor of an authoritarian conservative concert with Russia and China focused on crushing internal dissent. He weighs it against the alternative 'Reverse Kissinger' theory, lays out testable predictions, and argues that either way the strategy will backfire because China gets a vote and won't accept a static three-sphere world. It is a landmark synthesis tying historical precedent to a coherent read of 2025 geopolitics.
us-chinageopoliticsTrumpRussiagrand strategy
TIER 5
Mar 9, 2025
A rebuttal to N.S. Lyons's "American Strong Gods," agreeing the Hitler-as-summum-malum era is ending but arguing Trumpism cannot restore community, family, and faith because it builds nothing and is itself an atomized internet fandom. Smith's original thesis is that America abandoned the "strong gods" not because liberals overdid anti-Nazism but because of technology, culminating in phone-enabled social media that replaced physical rootedness with digital space. A landmark cultural essay tying the decline of community to the same tech entrepreneurs the right now cheers.
national conservatismsocial mediacommunity declineTrumpismtechnology and culture
TIER 4
Mar 26, 2025
Smith examines a cluster of Trump actions (threatening media as illegal, targeting law firms, defying court orders, deporting protesters and tattooed Venezuelans to El Salvador without due process) and argues that 'the power is the point' — Trump's authoritarianism works like a liquid probing institutional cracks rather than a single seizure of power. He concludes Trump's top-down ideological project is likely to fail but produce chaos along the way. A substantive, well-evidenced essay on democratic backsliding and how to recognize it.
authoritarianismcivil libertiesdue processexecutive powerTrump
TIER 4
Mar 28, 2025
Smith attempts an explanatory (not judgmental) map of New Right ideology, arguing it coalesced as an answer to an American identity crisis (Huntington's 'Who Are We?') amplified by social media, with 'Western Civilization' as its organizing story. He uses it to make otherwise puzzling administration moves (Vance's anti-Europe stance, abandoning Ukraine) legible. A genuinely useful framework for reading the administration's worldview, though the body is truncated at the paywall just as the core argument begins.
New RightideologyWestern CivilizationMAGAJD Vance
TIER 4
Apr 15, 2025
Uses the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case to argue Trump is asserting dictatorial power: by claiming courts can't order the return of anyone shipped abroad, wanting to send US citizens to El Salvador, and arresting people uncharged with crimes, he asserts the power to disappear any American without due process. Tempers the alarm by noting MAGA's 'malevolence tempered by incompetence' may still limit execution, making the analysis a substantive, sourced read on the rule-of-law crisis.
authoritarianismrule of lawTrumpdeportationdue process
TIER 4
Apr 27, 2025
Argues MAGA is a 'sterilization operation,' not a construction project: it has gutted state capacity (DOGE, science funding, the Loan Programs Office), blocked private building via tariffs and permitting halts, and built no civic or cultural institutions, distinguishing it sharply from ordinary conservatism (which does build) and likening it to Putin's extractive, non-building regime. A sharp framing of the Biden-era 'build more' consensus collapsing into Trump-era destruction.
MAGAstate capacityindustrial policyTrumpFourth Turning
TIER 4
Jun 9, 2025
Smith traces the history of US illegal immigration to explain the LA anti-ICE clashes, arguing the 2010s discovery of the asylum loophole blurred the once-clear legal/illegal line into a confusing array of quasi-legal statuses that average Americans couldn't parse, fueling a sense of lost democratic control. His core move is to reject both the far-right 'invasion' frame and the far-left 'resistance' frame as distortions of immigration's purpose. A substantive historical explainer, though it cuts off at the paywall mid-argument.
immigrationasylum loopholeICE protestsborder policydemocratic control
TIER 4
Jul 22, 2025
Smith analyzes the rise of the Trumpian Sanseito party in Japan's Upper House election as the inevitable arrival of an anti-immigration backlash, driven by real trends: post-2013 mass immigration, low fertility-induced labor shortages, and an acute overtourism/congestion-externality problem. Drawing on his own long familiarity with Japan, he prescribes immigrant selectivity, active assimilation policy, and hotel surcharges on foreign tourists. A substantive, firsthand-informed piece on migration politics.
Japanimmigrationpopulismovertourismassimilation
TIER 4
Sep 8, 2025
Smith dissects the online right's "Heritage American" concept—a graded, blood-and-soil definition of nationhood whose proponents can't even agree on who qualifies—and shows via polling that most Americans (including Republicans) reject ethnic/religious markers in favor of behavior and belief. He argues the deeper bond is shared lived culture rooted in place ("horizontal" community) versus the thin "vertical" online communities that natcons inhabit, and that immigration backlash is already receding. A thoughtful identity essay tying nationhood to the place-vs-online-community distinction.
national identityimmigrationHeritage AmericansnationalismMAGA
TIER 4
Sep 21, 2025
Smith documents the Trump administration's turn against legal high-skilled Asian immigration (the $100k H-1B fee order and the ICE raid arresting ~475 Korean workers at a Hyundai battery plant), arguing it stems partly from anti-Indian racism on the online right and will weaken US tech, alliances, and the ability to counter China. He marshals extensive research showing H-1B workers raise rather than depress native wages and boost innovation. A strong, citation-heavy rebuttal to skilled-immigration restrictionism.
immigrationH-1Bskilled laborTrump administrationUS-Asia relations
TIER 4
Oct 26, 2025
Draws an extended analogy between Louis XIV-style absolute monarchy and today's strongman leaders (Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Orban, Trump), arguing both waves were reactions to chaos unleashed by a new information technology (printing press then, social media now). The thesis is that personalist 'cures' are worse than the disease and that the new age of kings won't last, supported by data on populists' negative GDP impact. A clean, original framework piece with lasting reference value.
authoritarianismhistorysocial mediaPutinpolitical theory
TIER 4
Dec 5, 2025
Smith argues MAGA's core project is 'racial collectivism'—judging people by their ethnic group and the condition of their ancestral country—and that figures like Trump and Stephen Miller must persuade Americans to fear specific groups (Haitians, now Somalis) to win, mirroring 1890s-1920s restrictionist rhetoric. He counters with evidence that immigrants don't recreate their homelands (Indian-Americans' success, Fremont, El Paso vs. Juarez) thanks to selectivity and American institutions. It matters as a sharp framing of the individualism-vs-collectivism axis in immigration politics.
immigrationMAGAracial collectivismassimilationUS politics
TIER 4
Dec 22, 2025
Smith argues that fairness in America must be guaranteed at the individual level, not measured by aggregate group outcomes, and that the post-2014 wave of discrimination against white men in academia and media (documented by Jacob Savage) is a real injustice even though white men remain fine as a group. His remedy is aggressive, high-profile enforcement of existing anti-discrimination law to preserve trust, because the alternative is a slide into racial-bloc politics. It matters as a framework for why perceived procedural fairness, not group statistics, sustains institutional trust.
discriminationcivil rightsinstitutional trustracial politicsDEI
TIER 4
Feb 3, 2026
Smith warns Democrats not to mistake backlash against ICE brutality for public support of permissive immigration, and lays out a concrete liberal enforcement program: drop 'stolen land' rhetoric, accept that illegal immigration as such (not just criminality) angers voters, and deport humanely by fining employers of undocumented workers and closing the illegal-crossing asylum loophole rather than via raids. He also urges ending sanctuary-city obstruction and reviving Obama-era Secure Communities. A detailed, actionable policy blueprint that fills a real gap on the left.
immigrationDemocratsICEasylumenforcement
TIER 4
Feb 7, 2026
Smith's thesis: America is a nation of moderates ruled by an extremist fringe, because social media empowers the most engaged partisans (and the young, online, unelected staffers who run government) while moderates disengage. He then argues both extremes are structurally self-defeating: MAGA keeps shrinking its coalition by cycling through racial enemies (Black, Hispanic, Indian, Asian voters), while progressivism parasitizes the liberal institutions that birthed it (crime, housing, transit). A sharp, well-evidenced diagnostic of American political dysfunction.
US politicsextremismMAGAprogressivismsocial media
TIER 4
Apr 9, 2026
Smith defends assimilation as a 'melting pot / stew' - gentle, voluntary cultural blending over generations - against both MAGA ethno-nationalism (which limits Americanness to European heritage) and progressive/defensive anti-assimilationism (racial balkanization). He argues a multicultural nation cannot survive as a permanent 'salad bowl' because lasting separateness breeds inequality and breaks public-goods provision. A substantive, evenhanded take on a polarized immigration-and-identity debate.
immigrationassimilationAmerican identitymulticulturalismMAGA
TIER 5
May 29, 2026
Using a Balaji-vs-'Roman Helmet Guy' debate as a foil, Smith argues that both right-wing blood-and-soil nationalism and rootless globalism fail, and that America's best governing ideology is the FDR-era 'liberal nationalism' that forged diverse peoples into one civic nation while funding public goods. He makes the case that right-nationalism collapses on the unanswerable question of who counts as a 'real American' and that civic nationalism is what Americans actually believe.
liberal nationalismcivic nationalismimmigrationFDRnational identity
China: Rise, Limits, and the Decoupling Contest
4 tier-5 · 14 tier-4
Across these pieces Smith builds his central geopolitical preoccupation: China is the defining great power of the century — dominant in size, manufacturing, and state capacity — yet structurally flawed in ways the West misreads. He argues the "Chinese Century" will be real but comparatively poor and uncreative, traces how Beijing's subsidy-driven industrial policy breeds ruinous overcapacity, deflation, and "involution," and watches Xi Jinping's concentration of power curdle from asset into liability. He repeatedly separates China's genuine strengths (process innovation, scale, green-tech cost curves) from its weaknesses (few true breakthroughs, a state built for national greatness rather than its people's happiness), revising his own forecasts as the evidence turns.
TIER 4
Dec 28, 2024
A 2022 repost (with updates) laying out five candidate explanations for China's collapse in total factor productivity growth: hitting natural limits (catch-up exhausted, aging, end of urbanization), low R&D productivity, saturated export markets, under-consumption, and over-stabilization via real-estate-fueled stimulus. A solid, well-organized explainer that ties together China's macro story; useful reference value despite being a repost.
ChinaproductivityTFPeconomic growthreal estate
TIER 5
Jan 4, 2025
A clarifying explainer on why nominal (market-exchange-rate) GDP shows China falling behind while PPP shows it ahead, attributing much of the 'China stalling' narrative to a depreciating yuan rather than real stagnation, and weighing each measure's flaws. Smith concludes that for national power what matters most is manufacturing and military capacity, so Americans should not take complacent comfort in higher nominal GDP. A lasting reference for reasoning about GDP comparisons.
ChinaGDPPPPnational powermanufacturing
TIER 5
Mar 5, 2025
Asks whether China, despite dominating high-impact scientific publishing and incremental process innovation, has produced genuine breakthroughs, and introduces a three-tier framework (scientific discovery, prototype invention, commercial invention) to evaluate it. Finds a respectable list of Chinese commercial inventions (DJI drones, 5G, e-cigarettes) but a startling paucity of true breakthrough discoveries, hypothesizing weak IP protection and quantity-over-quality incentives (neijuan) channel talent toward fast-following. An original, framework-driven analysis of innovation that is valuable as a lasting reference.
Chinainnovationsciencetechnologybreakthroughs
TIER 4
Mar 14, 2025
Documents China's shift from FDI destination to source via greenfield investment (autos, batteries) in connector countries, while Beijing deliberately steers firms away from India, its only future rival, by blocking equipment, workers, and Chinese automaker investment. Smith frames this as strategic: China wants high-value manufacturing concentrated at home with India kept as a service-dependent backwater, and argues India's scale and domestic market mean multinationals train their own future competitors. A sharp geopolitical-economy analysis drawing heavily on Kyle Chan and Rhodium data.
ChinaIndiamanufacturingFDIdecoupling
TIER 5
Apr 17, 2025
Argues this probably will be the Chinese Century, but a fundamentally different kind than the American one: China will dominate in size, manufacturing, state capacity, and military power, yet (unlike the US) won't be the richest, won't lead culturally under censorship, will produce incremental rather than breakthrough innovation, and will provide few global public goods. A landmark original framework dissecting what 'a century belonging to a country' even means, dimension by dimension.
ChinageopoliticsAmerican hegemonystate capacitymultipolarity
TIER 4
May 6, 2025
Systematically deconstructs the 'China is the future' meme into four sources (the high-tech industrial pivot, the legacy of the real estate boom, a state charm offensive, and Trump-era Western despair), then argues China's xiaoqu urbanism, censorship, and concrete weathering make much of its futurism a fading snapshot of its recent past. The lasting point is that Sinofuturism lacks 'the promise of ennoblement' that made the American suburban model globally magnetic.
Chinaurbanismsoft powerindustrial policytechnology
TIER 5
Jun 20, 2025
Smith identifies an underappreciated structural flaw in Chinese industrial policy: by subsidizing too many competing 'national champions' in a largely insular, domestically-focused economy, Beijing forces them into ruinous price wars ('involution') that crush profit margins, deepen deflation and debt-deflation, and risk a wave of zombie firms echoing 1990s Japan. Using the EV price war as the central case, he reframes the canonical critique of industrial policy from mere 'waste' to the distinct danger of overcompetition and deflation. Original, well-evidenced analytical framework with lasting reference value.
Chinaindustrial policydeflationEVsovercapacity
TIER 4
Jul 28, 2025
Smith argues that the gap between China's potential and its likely underwhelming future traces substantially to Xi Jinping's overconcentrated power, framed through two risks: the 'Bad King' problem (an unrestrained leader making blunders like Zero Covid and unprofitable industrial overproduction) and the 'lion in winter' dynamic of an aging dictator turning inward to fend off succession threats. He suggests Xi's missteps and growing paranoia may grant the rest of the world a reprieve from Chinese hegemony. Strong synthesis of China-watching analysis, though built on familiar arguments.
ChinaXi Jinpingauthoritarianismindustrial policygeopolitics
TIER 4
Sep 15, 2025
Smith argues that since green energy will only displace fossil fuels when it becomes cheaper, and China—via subsidies plus Wright's-Law manufacturing scale—has made solar, batteries, and EVs cheap enough to plateau its own emissions and undercut coal across the developing world, China is executing the decarbonization strategy he long advocated while the US abandons it. A clear, data-rich credit-where-due piece that also reframes the polycrisis idea by noting the Second China Shock simultaneously fights climate change.
climate changeChinagreen energysolar and batteriesindustrial policy
TIER 4
Oct 10, 2025
Systematically evaluates the threats to China's likely 'Chinese century': demographics (real but slow until the 2040s), macroeconomics (real-estate bust plus 'involution'/overcapacity creating a Japan-style productivity drag), and war/internal dissent (the only plausible near-term derailment, most likely a succession struggle as Xi ages). Concludes that because China is 4x America's size, even a Japan-style slowdown leaves it dominant. A comprehensive, well-reasoned synthesis of his China analysis.
Chinademographicsinvolutionindustrial policyXi Jinping
TIER 4
Nov 16, 2025
Against influencer narratives of Chinese abundance, Smith assembles survey data, translated Chinese commentary, and macro indicators to argue that ordinary Chinese — especially the young — are working hard for stagnant returns amid a property bust, sluggish wages, and 'involution.' He frames the anti-involution campaign as growth-reducing and concludes the modern Chinese state is built for national greatness rather than its people's happiness.
Chinainvolutionreal estateyouth unemploymentdeflation
TIER 4
Dec 4, 2025
Smith frames innovation as a country-to-country pipeline (basic research to commercialization) and traces how the UK, Germany, US (Big Science, VC, DARPA) and Japan (kaizen) each added pieces, then argues China has built something genuinely new via extreme vertical integration of its research system. He marshals evidence (R&D spend now exceeding the US in PPP terms, leading high-quality STEM output, surging tech-licensing royalties) and a reading list, but the explanation of the actual mechanism is paywalled. It matters as a strong setup of the how, not just how-much, of Chinese innovation, though the core payoff is cut off.
ChinainnovationR&Dindustrial policytechnology
TIER 4
Jan 29, 2026
A repost (framed by Xi's general purges) debunking the Western myth that China is a patient, far-sighted strategic planner contrasted with the impulsive West. Smith shows the cliche rests on bad metaphors (Kissinger's Go fable, even using the wrong board game) and a litany of Chinese short-termism: the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, the overlong one-child policy, environmental neglect, and the real-estate overreliance now being violently reversed. He suggests such stories say more about what their American authors wish America were like. A persuasive, entertaining corrective to a durable stereotype.
ChinaXi Jinpingstrategylong-term planningstereotypes
TIER 4
Feb 17, 2026
Smith distinguishes three kinds of environmental harm (local pollution, global externalities, and harm to nature itself) and argues that China's vast distant-water fishing fleet is despoiling the world's oceans, with much activity illegal, unreported, and concentrated off poor Latin American and African nations. He frames the fleet as a geopolitically-motivated naval militia subsidized by Beijing, and faults Western environmental groups for going quiet on non-Western abuses out of anti-Western ideological drift. A clear, well-sourced essay on a neglected problem with a sharp meta-point about the environmental movement.
Chinaoverfishingenvironmentbiodiversitygeopolitics
TIER 4
Mar 21, 2026
Smith walks back his earlier 'Chinese Century' call, citing four factors that have made him more pessimistic: China's industrial policy hitting limits, AI agents eroding China's defensible tech advantage, Xi Jinping's early 'paranoid Stalin' phase, and military weakness exposed by US strikes on Venezuela and Iran. Framed via the 1980s Japan-boosterism analogy (Vogel vs Emmott), it matters as a contrarian update on conventional wisdom, though the body is paywall-truncated.
Chinageopoliticsindustrial policyXi JinpingAI
TIER 4
Apr 22, 2026
Smith argues the 'Chinamaxxing' TikTok trend is largely fake and forced — Westerners performing stereotyped 'Chinese' habits rather than consuming actual Chinese cultural products, with tourism to China still depressed versus Japan/Korea. The real driver, he says, is American decline ('Chinamaxxing is really Americaminning'), a critique of US affordability and public disorder more than genuine admiration of China. He closes by identifying genuine green shoots — micro-dramas (duanju), retail/food brands, and Chongqing. A nuanced, well-sourced cultural-geopolitical analysis.
Chinasoft powerAmerican declineculturemicro-dramas
TIER 4
May 13, 2026
Smith argues that US-China decoupling is real and was advanced by Trump-era tariffs, walking through and rebutting the skeptics' counterarguments (transshipment, de minimis mismeasurement, and intermediate-goods dependence). His nuanced conclusion: tariffs genuinely shifted final assembly out of China to Vietnam/Mexico/India even though component-level dependence persists, so dependence is reduced but not eliminated. A substantive, data-rich treatment of a topic he has fought over for years.
China decouplingtariffssupply chainstradeindustrial policy
TIER 4
Jun 15, 2026
Smith argues that China is repeating Japan's 1990s 'zombie company' mistake: banks evergreen bad loans to keep unprofitable firms alive, locking up labor, capital, and materials that healthier firms could use. He contends that state direction makes the problem worse, not better, because the government adds manufacturing zombies to prop up employment, and that this zombification may explain China's deflationary 'involution' and ultimately matter more to the 2020s economic story than exports.
China economyzombie companiesJapan comparisonevergreeningindustrial policy
Democrats, Progressivism, and the Abundance Agenda
2 tier-5 · 19 tier-4
These are Smith's prescriptions for the center-left after 2024. He champions the "Abundance" reframing of politics from ideology to outputs, argues blue states' degrowth instincts hurt them most while red states out-build, and sours on the neo-Brandeisian anti-monopoly movement for treating concentration as the cause of every ill while ignoring supply. He urges "combative centrism" — fight on the economy and due process, moderate on crime, immigration, and culture — defends the genuine successes of Bidenomics and the Obama record, reads the 2024 voter realignment, and works through where the next wave of progressive economics (Mamdani's NYC, rent freezes, city-run groceries) defies economic reality.
TIER 4
Nov 1, 2024
Smith makes the empirical 'deliverism' case that the Biden administration competently solved the early-2020s crises: restoring employment, defeating post-pandemic inflation (via Powell reappointment, fracking, and ending relief spending), reversing the crime wave with pro-policing Democrats, and belatedly stemming the border crisis, while launching a real manufacturing revival. A data-dense, useful scorecard of Biden-era policy outcomes.
Biden recordinflationcrimeimmigrationindustrial policy
TIER 4
Nov 19, 2024
Argues that Bernie-style class politics can't replace failed identity politics because America lacks a coherent working class: most Americans across income and education self-identify as 'working class,' mobility is high, manufacturing and private unionization have collapsed, and income is a continuous distribution with no natural class cutoffs. Concludes the only real class divide is college education, so Democrats should appeal to lower-income voters as Americans rather than as a proletariat. A clean, well-argued, fully complete essay with lasting framing value.
US politicsclassDemocratslaborsocial mobility
TIER 4
Nov 20, 2024
A detailed guest post by data scientist Dhaaruni Sreenivas arguing that Harris lost not from slippage with white voters but from double-digit losses among Hispanic and Asian voters, driven by both economic concerns and genuine values dissonance (crime, education/meritocracy, immigration realism) rather than messaging alone. Marshals precinct-level data and on-the-ground voter quotes to show the Emerging Democratic Majority thesis is dead, making it a substantive, evidence-rich election post-mortem.
US politics2024 electionAsian votersHispanic votersDemocrats
TIER 4
Feb 12, 2025
Responding to Jason Furman's 'Post-Neoliberal Delusion,' Smith defends the genuine successes of Bidenomics (strong labor market, return-to-trend growth, real factory-construction boom) while agreeing the new progressive economics overreached, especially on inflation. He argues Democrats should neither cling to the Biden paradigm nor reflexively revert to 1990s neoliberalism, but learn the actual lessons. A careful, data-rich contribution to the live intra-left economic-policy debate.
economic policyneoliberalismBidenomicsindustrial policyDemocrats
TIER 5
Mar 19, 2025
A deep review of Klein and Thompson's Abundance, arguing its core insight is reframing political economy from ideology (big vs. small government) to results/outputs, and that progressives' own 1970s-era procedural environmental laws, contracting requirements, and outsourcing are what hobble government. Smith's main critique is that the authors pull punches on the ideological fight, refusing to confront the class resentment and antitrust-obsessed left that opposes abundance. Lasting reference value as a framework piece on the abundance movement and the output-vs-input lens.
abundancehousing/YIMBYindustrial policystate capacityprogressivism
TIER 4
Mar 20, 2025
Smith resolves the apparent contradiction in polls wanting Democrats to both moderate and fight harder by showing the two axes don't align: voters want Dems to fight on the economy, due process, and Social Security while moderating on cultural issues (crime, immigration, DEI, and especially the intractable trans-rights question). He frames 'combative centrism' as a values-based defense of 20th-century liberalism, drawing the parallel to how Democrats beat Bushism. A clear, data-grounded strategy essay on the post-2024 Democratic direction.
Democratscombative centrismmoderationcultural issuespolitical strategy
TIER 4
Mar 22, 2025
Smith argues the Warrenite 'corporate feudalism' critique of abundance — that breaking up monopolies is the real path to vitality — is 'populism without popularity,' both economically mistaken and electorally inert, as Biden-era antitrust never sparked public enthusiasm. He distinguishes his own price/wage/growth case for antitrust from the Neo-Brandeisian fear that economic power becomes political power. A pointed contribution to the intra-left abundance-vs-antitrust debate, truncated at the paywall.
antitrustabundanceWarrenitesNeo-Brandeisiansprogressives
TIER 5
Mar 25, 2025
An updated repost arguing that because most development policy is set at the state and city level, progressive 'degrowth' instincts hurt blue states most — driving population loss, homelessness, and lost House seats — while red states like Texas out-build them on housing, solar, wind, and factories. Marshals extensive data (permitting, homelessness by state, renewables share, IRA/CHIPS factory siting) to tie the abundance debate to concrete outcomes. A high-reference-value synthesis on housing, energy, and the politics of building.
abundancehousingblue statesrenewableshomelessness
TIER 4
Apr 7, 2025
Smith argues Democrats are squandering a generational political opportunity by equivocating on tariffs, because Trump has seized and radicalized the anti-neoliberal mantle progressives spent a decade building, and they fear that condemning tariffs discredits their whole project. His prescription: attack tariffs bluntly on bread-and-butter terms ('tariffs bad, hence Trump bad') without ideological framing or class-warfare narratives. A sharp piece of political strategy that also doubles as an intellectual history of anti-neoliberalism.
Democratstariffsanti-neoliberalismpolitical strategyprogressives
TIER 4
Apr 30, 2025
Noah concedes he underrated libertarianism's political importance: while its theoretical flaws remain, free-market ideology was the 'Lord Ruler' holding back the right's natural Peronist impulse that Trump's tariffs now embody, and the real-world progressive alternatives (rent control, anti-housing NIMBYism, Chavez apologetics) proved worse than he assumed. A thoughtful intellectual-revision essay arguing both ideologies are needed as reasonable foils.
libertarianismtariffsprogressivismhousingideology
TIER 4
Jun 15, 2025
Reflecting on the patriotic, peaceful 'No Kings' protests, Smith argues American democracy is working: public opinion and tone-policing of rioters forced Trump to back down on immigration sweeps, tariffs (TACO), and other extreme moves, and DOGE and the 'second revolution' have largely fizzled. He develops a nuanced theory of how peaceful protest plus tone-policing present a moderate face that keeps focus on Trump's overreach, while warning Democrats still must stand for something. A sharp, well-argued read on the moment's political dynamics.
American democracyprotestsTrumpimmigrationDemocrats
TIER 4
Jun 24, 2025
Smith evaluates the economic platform of NYC mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani policy by policy, welcoming his rhetorical embrace of 'outcomes' and efficiency but arguing the substance often defies economic reality: the 200,000-unit housing plan is underwhelming and the rent freeze counterproductive, city-run groceries wasteful, while free childcare and transit would work but carry real costs. A useful applied critique of where the next wave of progressive economic policy succeeds and fails. Paywalled preview cuts off after the housing section.
Mamdanihousing policyNYCprogressive economicsAbundance
TIER 4
Jul 24, 2025
Using the failed Democratic crusade against grocery stores (which run ~2-3% margins) as a hook, Smith argues Democrats should partially return to Clinton-era neoliberalism on free trade, fiscal austerity, and deregulation, attacking Trump's tariffs as the real cost-of-living villain. But he insists they pair this with a 'development state' — industrial policy and state capacity — rather than copy-pasting the 90s. A clear, prescriptive synthesis of his political-economy worldview.
Democratsneoliberalismindustrial policytariffsabundance
TIER 4
Aug 13, 2025
Debunks the 'BlackRock/corporate landlords are buying up the housing and jacking up rents' meme with data showing institutional investors own a fraction of one percent of homes, far too little to drive the rental crisis. Goes further, citing research (Chang 2024) that corporate landlords actually lower rents and reduce segregation by converting owner-occupied homes to rentals, and argues the real culprit is supply restriction (NIMBYism). A solid myth-busting piece tying antitrust-progressive blind spots to the abundance agenda.
housingrentantitrustcorporate landlordsabundance
TIER 4
Aug 20, 2025
Surveys the political-science debate over whether moderate Democratic candidates outperform (Split Ticket vs. Bonica/Morris on 'wins above replacement'), arguing the pro-moderation side wins narrowly because turnout-based claims confuse correlation with causation. The deeper thesis is that moderation has intrinsic value beyond electability: because policy effects are uncertain, big abrupt changes are riskier, so 'do the stuff that works' is good governance (defund-the-police, oversized 2021 stimulus, and left-NIMBYism as cautionary cases). A substantive synthesis of the electability debate plus an original normative argument.
Democratsmoderationelectabilitypolitical sciencepolicy
TIER 4
Sep 13, 2025
Smith argues progressive cancel culture was never an invincible "H-bomb" but a temporary advantage from early adoption of social media, now defused as companies learned outrage was transient and many progressives decamped to the low-reach Bluesky. There they retain the habits of denunciation, purity spirals, and "ponzi screaming" while losing the tools of persuasion, organization, and compromise—isolating themselves and weakening opposition to Trump. A sharp diagnostic of the online left with several coinages (outrage entrepreneurship, ponzi screaming).
cancel cultureprogressivessocial mediaBlueskyAmerican politics
TIER 4
Jan 4, 2026
Framing himself as a French liberal in 1815 surveying a wrecked revolution, Smith offers a personal reckoning: late-20th-century liberalism scored real, durable wins (welfare expansion, civil rights, gay marriage) but progressivism overreached into anti-white discrimination, anarchic urban governance, anti-development NIMBYism, and dumbed-down education. He rejects defecting to the right and argues the core liberal ideals remain worth rebuilding. A substantive, reflective political essay.
liberalismprogressivismDemocratspolitical philosophyabundance
TIER 4
Feb 20, 2026
Smith argues that because AI makes the future of jobs, macro, and the income distribution radically uncertain, Democrats need an economic program that is robust to any scenario, built on three principles: abundance, government taking an ownership stake in the corporate system, and policies to promote human work. He first dissects why the 2010s progressive program failed (it assumed a 2009-era demand shortfall, the billionaire taxes never materialized, and care subsidies became deficit-funded make-work that raised prices). The framework is original and useful, though the post is paywalled before the three principles are fully developed.
AIDemocratseconomic policyabundanceprogressivism
TIER 4
Mar 24, 2026
Smith warns progressives against 'long arc of history' fatalism - the belief that their current positions will inevitably win, which discourages strategic compromise. He argues history is contingent and selection-biased: many movement goals (affirmative action, busing, free immigration, abortion expansion) were fought for and lost, so Democrats should moderate on unpopular issues like crime, asylum, and trans-in-sports to break the backlash cycle. A substantive political-strategy argument with good polling and historical evidence.
progressivismDemocratspolitical strategyhistorymoderation
TIER 4
May 8, 2026
A repost of Smith's 2022 case that Obama was a successful president, framed against both progressive and conservative critics. He credits the ARRA stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank as the biggest progressive domestic accomplishments since LBJ — achieved fast and against a hostile filibuster environment — while conceding genuine foreign-policy failures on Russia and China. A thorough, well-evidenced policy retrospective, though it covers familiar ground.
ObamaARRA stimulusObamacareDodd-FrankUS politics
TIER 4
Jun 4, 2026
A former antitrust proponent, Smith explains why he has soured on the neo-Brandeisian anti-monopoly movement: its monomaniacal treatment of concentration as the cause of 'every ill,' its targeting of low-margin industries (groceries, airlines, insurers), its denial that market forces exist, and its factionalist smearing of critics like the Abundance authors. He still thinks corporate power is real but wants better standard-bearers and more epistemic humility.
antitrustmonopolyneo-BrandeisiansDemocratic policymarket power
Macroeconomics: Debt, the Dollar, Inflation, and Financial Risk
2 tier-5 · 14 tier-4
Smith's macro writing is built around a handful of channels he keeps returning to: the debt spiral as interest rates normalize into an inflationary regime, the dollar's three roles and the "financial anarchy" that would follow its decline, and capital flight — the scary dollar-down/yields-up signal — as the bond market's verdict on Trumponomics. He quantifies austerity tradeoffs with fiscal multipliers, explains why voters punish inflation more than unemployment, and devotes a careful sub-thread to whether the AI data-center capex boom is propping up GDP and seeding the next leveraged financial crisis, distinguishing survivable equity busts from dangerous credit ones.
TIER 4
Oct 24, 2024
Smith ranks the risks of Trump's economic agenda: mass deportation and tariffs are modestly harmful but self-limiting (tariffs partly offset by exchange-rate appreciation), while the real danger is huge unfunded tax cuts (~$5.8-7.5T added debt) combined with pressure on Fed independence, which via the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level could reignite inflation. A clear, well-reasoned risk-assessment explainer of the debt-and-inflation channel.
Trump economicstariffsdeficitsFed independenceinflation
TIER 4
Oct 31, 2024
Smith uses fiscal-multiplier estimates (~0.6 in expansions) to quantify Musk's proposed $2T spending cuts, estimating a 2.5-4% GDP hit and up to ~4 million job losses, validating the 'temporary hardship' framing. He agrees austerity is needed given rising interest costs but argues Musk's regressive shock-therapy version—pairing cuts with tax breaks for the rich—is the wrong kind, favoring slower, more progressive consolidation. A genuinely analytical, numbers-driven explainer of fiscal austerity tradeoffs.
fiscal policyausterityMusk/DOGEfiscal multiplierdeficits
TIER 4
Nov 8, 2024
Smith argues that inflation hurt Democrats in 2024 because voters punish diffuse, uncontrollable price increases more harshly than concentrated unemployment, vindicating the Summers/Blanchard side of the 2021 American Rescue Plan debate over 'Team Transitory.' He offers a useful explainer on why inflation is electorally toxic (it harms more voters, feels beyond personal control) and warns Democrats against reflexive macro-progressivism.
inflationmacroeconomics2024 electionAmerican Rescue Planpolitical economy
TIER 4
Dec 19, 2024
Using Bolivia's currency-peg balance-of-payments crisis and China's debt-deflation as paired cases, argues that macroeconomic laws punish regimes regardless of ideology, and that the two crisis types (emerging-market currency crisis vs. deflationary depression) demand opposite policy responses (austerity vs. stimulus). A clear, instructive macro explainer that doubles as a warning about possible US policy errors under Trump.
macroeconomicscurrency crisisdeflationBoliviaChina
TIER 4
Apr 12, 2025
Smith argues that the simultaneous plunge in the dollar and rise in Treasury yields after Trump's Liberation Day tariffs is not a normal trade-war pattern but capital flight, where investors pull money out of the US entirely rather than parking it in cash. He frames this as the world suddenly treating America like a developing country, with potentially dire consequences. A clear, useful explainer of why the dollar-down/yields-up combination is the scary signal, though the essay is truncated at the paywall.
capital flightbond marketdollartariffsmacroeconomics
TIER 4
May 17, 2025
Smith establishes that the biggest U.S. wage stagnation ran roughly 1973-1994, predating the globalization era, then tests candidate causes (productivity slowdown, financialization, union decline, inflation, trade with Europe/Japan) against the timeline and finds each only partially fits. The honest conclusion is that the productivity slowdown lines up best but no single theory explains it all, leaving a genuine macroeconomic mystery. A rigorous, evidence-driven explainer that resists pat answers.
wage stagnationproductivityglobalizationunionsmacroeconomics
TIER 4
Jul 2, 2025
Smith argues Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill' is the latest stage of a bipartisan fiscal disease: it adds ~$3.9 trillion in debt for tax cuts that demonstrably won't pay for themselves, and now — with interest rates normalized into an inflationary regime — will actually raise long-term rates via inflation, crowding-out, and default-premium channels. He concludes the US must both cut spending and raise taxes on the rich (as Clinton did) to keep the fairness bargain and stay solvent. A clear, well-sourced macro-fiscal argument.
fiscal policytax cutsnational debtinterest ratesTrump
TIER 5
Aug 3, 2025
Asks whether the AI data-center capex boom (now contributing more to US growth than all consumer spending) could trigger a financial crisis, and builds a careful framework distinguishing leveraged busts (2008, dangerous) from unleveraged equity busts (dot-com, survivable). The worry is that bank-funded private credit, increasingly lending to data centers with highly correlated risk, plus exposed insurers, recreate the preconditions for systemic contagion. A rigorous, well-sourced original analysis of an emerging macro-financial risk, with lasting reference value.
AIdata centersfinancial crisisprivate creditmacroeconomics
TIER 4
Oct 12, 2025
Argues the US economy is currently propped up almost entirely by AI capex (estimates that GDP growth would be roughly halved without it), so an AI bust could flip the narrative on Trump's whole presidency like 2008 did to Bush. The key, well-developed idea is that an AI crash doesn't require AI to fail; it only needs to mildly disappoint optimists to trigger an 'industrial bubble' of loan defaults. Body is paywall-truncated but the core thesis is fully present and lands.
AImacroeconomicsbubblerecessionTrump
TIER 4
Oct 22, 2025
Dissects the web of 'circular' deals among Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, AMD and others, distinguishing illegal revenue-inflating round-tripping from legitimate vendor finance and concluding these deals are the latter. The sharp insight is that the deals mainly let AI firms diversify company-specific risk even as they leverage up the sector's overall bet on AI, so they raise systemic AI-crash risk while reducing single-firm dependency. A useful, clarifying explainer that cuts through bubble panic.
AINvidiafinancebubble riskvendor finance
TIER 4
Dec 9, 2025
Smith lays out a taxonomy of AI-bust scenarios: the Virtual Reality Scenario (AI just isn't useful, which he rejects given record-fast adoption), the Railroad Scenario (AI works but value arrives too slowly to repay debt, triggering an 1873-style financial crisis), and teases a third 'Airline Scenario' where AI succeeds but is commoditized into a low-margin business that captures no profit. The third scenario's payoff is paywalled, but the framework itself is valuable. It matters as a clear, original lens for thinking about AI financial risk.
AI bubbledata centersfinancial crisisrailroadsprofitability
TIER 4
Jan 24, 2026
Using Trump's Greenland threats and the resulting 'sell America' market move, Smith explains why rising Treasury yields plus a falling dollar signal genuine capital flight (not normal risk-off, where US bonds rally as a haven), and argues the bond market, more than stocks, is what forces Trump to back down. He warns America is primed for a ruinous capital-flight episode if investors decide American exceptionalism is over. A clear, well-illustrated primer on capital flight, with the deeper consequences section paywalled.
capital flightTreasury yieldsdollarTrumpmacroeconomics
TIER 5
Feb 1, 2026
Smith unpacks what 'the dollar's dominance' actually means by separating its three roles (payments, reserves, collateral) and argues the world may be drifting into a gold-based 'financial anarchy' that, far from being stable, would be more volatile than the dollar system because no trusted entity manages gold's price. He explains why gold (not Bitcoin) remains the safe-haven coordination point, why non-dollar payment systems are a preparatory step rather than a reserve-currency coup, and why even a yuan takeover wouldn't reindustrialize America. An exceptionally clear, original synthesis of international monetary economics.
dollarreserve currencygoldyuaninternational finance
TIER 4
Mar 7, 2026
Smith diagnoses an odd macro pattern: solid GDP, high productivity growth, but stalled job growth. Rather than AI replacing white-collar workers, he points to evidence (via Tedeschi) that the productivity surge is concentrated in manufacturing and driven by the data-center construction boom and higher capital utilization, not ChatGPT use. A clear, data-grounded macro explainer, though paywall-truncated before fully addressing the jobs side.
macroeconomicsproductivityAIdata centersjobs
TIER 4
Mar 25, 2026
Smith assesses the macroeconomic fallout from Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, concluding the US will get off relatively easy - roughly 4% inflation and growth halved for a year (per Blanchard-Gali-style estimates) rather than 1970s-style stagflation, because modern economies are far less oil-sensitive. He stresses that allies, Europe, and the global poor will bear much more pain, and that the self-inflicted shock further cements America's image as a force for chaos. A solid, evidence-grounded economics explainer.
Iran waroil shockinflationmacroeconomicsenergy
TIER 4
May 23, 2026
Smith warns that with debt above 100% of GDP and interest rates roughly double their post-WW2 level, the U.S. is now borrowing just to pay interest, creating a self-reinforcing debt spiral. He argues neither party is serious about austerity and that the only realistic remedy is to raise public alarm to force bipartisan action, as happened in the early 1990s. (Truncated preview post.)
national debtfiscal policyinterest ratesdeficitsmacroeconomics
Housing, Cities, Crime, and Urbanism
2 tier-5 · 9 tier-4
Smith's urbanism is a supply-and-order argument. He contends NYC is America's only truly dense city by policy choice, that what makes places lovable is walkable, mixed-use, shop-dense design rather than ornament, and that the YIMBY fight can be won by pushing zoning both up to states and down to consenting neighborhoods. His sharpest move is to put crime and public disorder at the center: violent crime is America's true outlier among rich nations, it fuels NIMBYism and empties transit, and good cities are impossible without the "first-world balance" of more police, foot patrols, and order — a direct challenge to progressive complacency.
TIER 4
Nov 12, 2024
Smith argues that progressive governance squandered the 1980s-2010s urban renaissance through NIMBYism, ballooning costs, and tolerance of disorder, driving big-city voters toward Trump. He proposes three guiding principles for revival: anarchy is not welfare (defend the commons), costs are bad for city government, and housing is non-negotiable. A substantive synthesis of the urban-policy critique with historical context and a clear reform framework.
urban policyhousing/NIMBYcrimeprogressivismcost disease
TIER 4
Nov 30, 2024
Argues that land acknowledgements rest on an ethnonationalist premise (land belongs to racial/ethnic groups) that leads to dark logical conclusions, and that territory should belong to institutions rather than races. Constructively pivots to how respecting Native American tribes as institutions (citing Vancouver's Squamish-led Senakw high-rise and Tesla showrooms on tribal land) could turn tribal sovereignty into an end-run around NIMBY regulation. A sharp, complete essay blending political philosophy with a concrete YIMBY/development angle.
cultureethnonationalismNative Americanshousingland use
TIER 4
May 23, 2025
Smith argues American urbanism overfocuses on residential density and neglects commercial density, contending that what makes cities vibrant is a high concentration of small shops, which Japan achieves through permissive mixed-use zoning and small-business support. He proposes limiting store physical footprint rather than corporate size, cutting red tape, and ensuring walkability and public safety, framing it as a cross-partisan urbanist agenda.
urbanismzoningsmall businessJapanwalkability
TIER 4
Aug 15, 2025
Argues that NYC is America's only truly dense, transit-rich city and that its uniqueness is a policy choice, not destiny, since other old cities like Philadelphia had earlier growth but never 'Manhattanized.' Prescribes that Chicago, Philadelphia, and others adopt NYC-style floor-area ratios, build grid-pattern transit, and reduce crime/disorder so more Americans who want dense urban life can have it, relieving NYC rent pressure. A clear, useful urbanism and housing-supply explainer.
housingurbanismNYCzoningtransit
TIER 5
Sep 17, 2025
Reposted and updated after the Iryna Zarutska train murder, Smith argues that violent crime and public disorder are a core (and under-acknowledged) obstacle to American urbanism: fear of crime fuels NIMBYism and keeps people off transit. Drawing on extensive research, he prescribes the "first world balance" other rich countries use—more police (the US is under-policed, over-prisoned), foot patrols, fare enforcement, involuntary commitment, and cameras—to make density politically viable. A comprehensive, well-sourced reference essay linking public safety to urban policy.
urbanismcrimepublic orderpolicingpublic transit
TIER 4
Sep 27, 2025
Smith argues YIMBYs' standard prescription of moving zoning authority up to the state level is sound but slow, and proposes a complementary path: pushing control down to hyper-local neighborhoods. Citing Houston's deed-restriction opt-outs, Arlington's selective upzoning, and Japan's land-readjustment consent rules, he shows that letting NIMBY neighborhoods opt out defuses opposition while pro-housing neighborhoods build freely. A useful, evidence-backed reframing of the housing-politics debate.
housingYIMBYzoninglocal controlurban policy
TIER 4
Nov 18, 2025
Using Peter Thiel's real-estate critique of capitalism as a frame, Smith argues that young Americans are actually doing well on wages, income, and wealth — except in housing, where propping up prices to boost boomer wealth shuts the young out of the asset-owning class. He positions housing as the one major economic problem policymakers genuinely have the tools to fix. (Paywalled mid-essay.)
housinggenerational wealthzoninginequalityYIMBY
TIER 4
Dec 3, 2025
Smith praises a bipartisan urban trend (Mamdani, Lurie) of cutting permits, fees, and red tape for small retail, conceding that chains are more productive but arguing small business is worth the efficiency loss because it builds a property-owning middle class, anchors a pro-capitalism constituency, aids immigrant mobility, and makes cities livable via commercial density. He draws on Japan's heavy small-business support as a model. It matters as a coherent political-economy defense of small business that crosses ideological lines.
small businessurban policymiddle classcapitalismJapan
TIER 5
Feb 26, 2026
Smith argues that on health care, life expectancy, inequality, and housing, the US is a fairly typical rich country, but on crime it is a stark outlier (murder rates 5-10x other rich nations even after recent declines). He builds the case that this high crime and public disorder is the hidden root cause of much of what makes American cities feel worse, distorting urbanism into car-centric suburbia and starving transit. A landmark synthesizing argument with lasting reference value, challenging progressive complacency about crime.
crimeurbanismAmericatransitprogressivism
TIER 4
Apr 11, 2026
Responding to Patrick Collison's claim that YIMBYs erred by ignoring building aesthetics, Smith argues that prettier facades (e.g., Haussmann styles) would barely move public support for housing, citing evidence that Americans find transplanted European styles cheesy. He contends that what makes cities lovable is urban design - walkable streets, mixed-use zoning, transit, public safety (as in Tokyo) - not ornamentation, and lays out an organic, decades-long reform agenda. A useful, well-argued contribution to the housing-abundance debate.
housingYIMBYurbanismarchitectureTokyo
TIER 4
Apr 24, 2026
Using locked-up store merchandise as proof that theft imposes real costs, Smith argues shoplifting's pain falls overwhelmingly on working-class employees and customers (via store closures, job cuts, food deserts) rather than on billionaires. He uses Piker and Tolentino's pro-'microlooting' NYT roundtable to attack situational consequentialist morality, arguing it rests on shaky economic assumptions and that society needs a rule-based social contract because individuals can't compute all externalities. A sharp economic-reasoning piece that escalates from shoplifting to pipeline-bombing and the Mangione murder.
shopliftingcrimesocial contracteconomicsleftism
Economics as a Craft: Theory, Books, Media, and Method
1 tier-5 · 15 tier-4
When Smith turns the lens on his own discipline he defends it without triumphalism. He argues the anti-economists (Cass on the right, the degrowth and heterodox camps on the left) haven't engaged econ's actual empirical wins, that Marx earns a place mainly as a cautionary tale, and that there is no science of development because growth happens too few times to study — a recurring argument for humility. The cluster gathers his Nobel and Krugman appreciations, his opinionated econ-book guide, his "why do investors get paid" pedagogy, his nerdy link roundups, his defense of federal science funding, his year-in-review index, and his "fact / opinion / analysis" theory of why Substack beats the op-ed page.
TIER 4
Nov 13, 2024
A strong post-election roundup: Musa al-Gharbi's data debunking progressive election narratives (Democrats actually gained with whites but bled non-white voters of every group), Matt Yglesias's nine-point Common Sense Democrat manifesto plus Noah's patriotism and pro-green-tech amendments, mounting evidence the AI scaling hypothesis is slowing (data exhaustion, persistent hallucination), rising US life expectancy, a paper showing China's video-game limits improved student outcomes, and Scott Alexander's solar-beats-nuclear case. Denser and more argument-laden than a typical roundup, with several durable through-lines.
US politicsDemocratsAI scalingenergyelection data
TIER 4
Dec 5, 2024
A genuinely meaty econ link roundup covering the Destination-Based Cash Flow Tax, a new model linking land-use regulation to construction-firm fragmentation and stagnant productivity, challenges to Prospect Theory and rational-expectations macro, the US post-pandemic productivity boom, evidence that pandemic inflation was partly demand-driven, and a paper showing Medicare price cuts reduce medical-device innovation. Denser and more substantive than Noah's usual roundups, with original commentary (e.g. his regulatory-heterogeneity critique of the construction paper) layered on top of the curation. Useful as a reference index to several important 2024 economics papers.
economicstax policyconstruction productivityinflationhealth care
TIER 4
Dec 11, 2024
On Krugman's retirement from the NYT, a personal and intellectual appreciation arguing he democratized econ discourse by treating ideas as a meritocracy, aired the profession's failures after 2008, launched the econ-blogging 'Macro Wars,' and popularized aggregate-demand Keynesianism via gems like the babysitting co-op and gold-price models. Closes by praising Krugman for refusing to build a totalizing ideological paradigm. A rich, reference-worthy intellectual history.
Paul KrugmaneconomicsKeynesianismecon bloggingintellectual history
TIER 4
Jan 13, 2025
Responding to a humanities professor calling economics 'fake' for not canonizing Marx, Smith argues economists do study foundational thought (Samuelson, Akerlof, Arrow on market failure) and that Marx earns a place mainly as a cautionary tale of social-science hubris that birthed catastrophic revolutions. A sharp, well-sourced defense of modern economics' methodological humility, leaning on DeLong's even-handed reading of Marx.
economicsMarxhistory of thoughtmarket failureacademia
TIER 4
Feb 1, 2025
A roundup anchored by a Collison interview (US productivity, a future liberalism agenda, YIMBY aesthetics, AI) plus genuinely substantive segments: the unstoppable solar transition driven by cost not climate, why young Americans die early (behavior and policy, not health care), the 'relationship recession' driving fertility decline, the case for mandatory standardized testing helping poor students, and AI tutoring results from Nigeria. Several items have real analytical depth despite the list format.
solar energyfertilitylife expectancyAI educationproductivity
TIER 4
Feb 18, 2025
Smith argues that legacy publications wrongly file all non-reporting writing under 'opinion,' missing a distinct third category, analysis (forecasts, assessments, theories, recommendations), which is what readers actually want and what Substack delivers better. He uses Krugman's NYT departure and his own Bloomberg experience to show how the short, polemic-oriented op-ed format stunts analysis and opens the door to independent writers. A useful conceptual framework for thinking about media and a clean explainer of the fact/opinion/analysis distinction.
mediajournalismSubstackwritingmeta
TIER 5
Feb 26, 2025
Argues Trump's second-term freeze and proposed cuts to NIH/NSF funding are an ideological anti-woke purge that will damage US productivity and national security, while conceding the right is not wrong that DEI capture of science was real and corrosive. Marshals extensive empirical literature showing federal R&D yields outsized productivity returns and, crucially, seeds startups that diffuse innovation rather than locking it inside incumbents. A thorough, well-sourced reference on the economics of public science funding.
science fundingR&DproductivityDEInational security
TIER 4
Feb 27, 2025
An annotated, opinionated guide to popular economics books sorted into good overviews, economic history, miscellaneous, "big questionable ideas" (How Asia Works, Why Nations Fail, Piketty), and an anti-reading list (Power and Progress, Graeber's Debt, Kelton's Deficit Myth, Freakonomics). Genuinely useful reference for laypeople with crisp justifications and warnings about seductive grand theories, including a defense of reading-with-skepticism.
book listeconomicsdevelopmentMMTeconomic history
TIER 4
May 31, 2025
Targeting Oren Cass and the MAGA-economics camp, Smith argues that critics who dismiss economics as 'not a science' haven't engaged its actual successful theories (auction theory, matching theory, gravity models, New Trade Theory, natural experiments). The deeper point is that econ critiques on both left and right are fundamentally political projects, but ideology can't change what tariffs actually do. A pointed, useful defense of the discipline's empirical record.
economicsOren CassMAGA economicstariffsmethodology
TIER 4
Jul 7, 2025
An unusually meaty roundup: US wages have genuinely risen (PCE-adjusted, with Gen Z ahead of prior generations); female education likely doesn't drive the last-mile fertility drop; the Potter-Syverson housing-cost paper is reinterpreted to show costs matter more per-square-foot than billed; potential crypto/AI-data-center debt as the next financial-crisis seed; econ's shift from macro to micro; a California CEQA/YIMBY win; and mass incarceration falling via the crime decline. Several items rise to genuine standalone analysis.
wagesfertilityhousing costsfinancial crisismacro vs micro
TIER 4
Jul 10, 2025
A self-described industrial-policy advocate, Smith argues anti-neoliberalism has been overcorrected, using Milei's Argentina (austerity taming hyperinflation, rent-control repeal boosting housing supply, recovery after one painful recession year) plus Poland, Vietnam, and China's reform era as evidence that market-oriented policy often works. His real thesis is anti-ideological: the best economy is a mixed one, and which policies work depends entirely on where a country starts — evolution over revolution. A thoughtful, self-aware framework piece.
free marketsArgentinaMileiausteritymixed economy
TIER 4
Sep 29, 2025
Smith reviews Kate Raworth's 2017 book, crediting its central environment-vs-prosperity "Doughnut" diagram as a useful tradeoff illustration (equivalent to a production possibilities frontier) but arguing the book fails at its real goal of replacing mainstream economics with a new paradigm. He shows Raworth misunderstands what she critiques (asset prices, QE, depreciating money, the difference between correlation and causation) and ultimately delivers a polemic that proves heterodox economics still depends on the orthodoxy it wants to overthrow. A substantive, well-argued explainer of why the heterodox project keeps failing.
economicsheterodox economicsdegrowthbook reviewgrowth and environment
TIER 4
Oct 3, 2025
A first-principles explainer answering both whether investors deserve capital income (they sacrifice consumption and bear risk, and 'fair ex ante' can't equal 'fair ex post' once the dice roll) and why the economy needs them (asset allocation directs real capital, and even index buyers cast a useful vote of confidence in business). Notes near-riskless short-term T-bill returns are the genuinely hard case to justify. An accessible, rigorous piece of econ pedagogy on desert and the function of finance.
financeinvestingriskeconomic theoryfairness
TIER 4
Oct 14, 2025
Smith's annual Econ Nobel post on Aghion, Howitt, and Mokyr, explaining the creative-destruction innovation model, the inverted-U of competition, and Mokyr's culture-of-growth thesis, while complaining that rewarding untestable cultural history pushes economics away from being a science. The committee, he suggests, may be signaling the West to reject its anti-growth turn. A solid explainer of important growth research plus a profession-level commentary.
economicsNobel Prizegrowth theoryinnovationMokyr
TIER 4
Nov 27, 2025
Smith's annual roundup of seven themes from 2025 plus a 2026 outlook, covering tariff madness, the AI boom-and-possible-bust, the Electric Tech Stack, the Chinese Century, progressivism's collapse, Trump's gangster regime, and America's identity crisis. It works as a high-density index to a year of his thinking and a compact statement of his core worldview across economics, China, and US politics.
year in reviewtariffsAIChinaUS politics
TIER 4
Jun 13, 2026
Smith attacks the degrowth movement (Piketty, Hickel, Raworth, Stiglitz et al.) as an intellectually sloppy, big-tent leftist project that functionally targets Europe alone and amounts to a program for deliberate European impoverishment. He marshals evidence that growth is unambiguously good for the poor and warns that embracing degrowth now would cripple a key economic engine of the free world precisely when Europe faces military and economic threats from Russia and China.
degrowthEuropePikettygrowth economicsclimate policy