I'm honored that @JoinColossus wrote a profile on how we're building Esmeralda from the ground up! The piece covers everything from our 5 design principles to why we spend so much time in spreadsheets & talking to civil engineers

Slavery made the South poorer because it kept the South rural -- it prevented the urbanization and agglomeration that would have enabled manufacturing.

Technological development was slow for 9,288 generations not because past humans were dumb, but prior to books & the scientific method, innovation happened at the level of societies, not people. So tech evolved gradually, not through leaps of genius, but slow cultural adaption

The graph, extended: “We find that productivity growth was zero before 1600.” Early land reforms and, most importantly, the industrial revolution introduced the first singularity for growth in human history. Reasonable to argue whether AI is the second or more of the same.

David Friedman has tons of amazing papers. His best is the one below -- a short summary in 🧵

Thus dies a beloved myth

The Conversations with Tyler content we need:

"Without Mohammed, Charlemagne would have been inconceivable." This quote summarizes Pirenne's thesis that the European Dark Ages began with the rise of Islam because it destroyed the flow of trade across the Mediterranean, ending Antiquity.

Why are warm countries poorer? Heat is an underdiscussed factor Colonization an overweighed one But there's one factor nobody's ever mentioned: mountains youtube.com/watch?v=zzcU_y…

I've had ChatGPT-5.4 Pro working away at a project I always wondered about: how lucky are you to be alive right now? Of all the ~117B humans who ever lived, only about 1.5% had a lifestyle roughly equivalently to a middle-class person in a middle-income country today, or better.

Philip T. Hoffman - Why Europe? The Great Divergence and the West's Rise to Global Predominance À paraître en août aux Cambridge UP

Roland Ennos - The Powerful Primate How Controlling Energy Enabled Us to Build Civilization Vient de paraître chez Scribner

.tylercowen 's new book on how modern economic thought developed is excellent. Very surprised I haven't been hearing more about it. Especially recommend chapter 3 on why ideas like marginalism took so long to develop. tylercowen.com/marginal-revol…

In fact, there is a strong positive relationship between current income per capita and colonial European settlement, and most of today’s income gap between underdeveloped countries and the West can be explained by differences in technological development that already existed in

Africa's nationalist leaders face a challenge - trying to overcome ethnic diversity to strengthen nation-building. Political scientists emphasise weak state capacity. I suggest that demographics make this even harder Populations have surged at very low incomes, amid weak

A really cool idea — we can get the risk-aversion of farmers a hundred years ago by using their choices of crops. Some crops have more variable yields than others. Places with larger farms were more risk-seeking.

This was one of Mancur Olson's important points in The Rise and Decline of Nations. In societies with long periods of stability, "distributional coalitions" slowly accumulate. Lawyers are his main example: they thrive on regulatory complexity, litigation, and zero-sum

This myth of Indian pre-colonial wealth is nonsense, just as stupid as the myth of looted gordillions.

Slavery didn't cause the industrial revolution. It's the other way around: the industrial revolution enabled the end of slavery. Insightful analysis by Michael Magoon. frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/did-slavery-…

Brilliant review of the The Golden Thread by the Claremont Institute's basso profondo.