“A revolution cannot be mastered until it is understood… The temptation is always to seek to integrate it into a familiar doctrine: to deny a revolution is taking place.” Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957).

AI is overhyped, and hasn’t had much real world impact. That’s what Samuel James argued in a recent Substack post, and having taken a straw poll of some friends, I reckon that a lot of other Christians agree.

This stance is misguided and quite wrong, in my view. I’m going to set out why below (feel free to skip if you know lots about AI), then discuss the potential impact that AI might have on the specific type of evangelicalism which I’m part of. Relatively few people are giving this serious thought.

Don’t stick your head in the sand

Samuel James’s article was prompted by a viral article on Twitter which was hyping up AI. Let me be crystal clear: undoubtedly, some people overhype AI. But much of the overhype is based on overconfident predictions about timescales, not the underlying capabilities of the models.

The proof that these models are extremely powerful is stacking up. They are performing well on various benchmarks. They’re at PhD level of expertise in their fields. They’re increasingly good at writing code, which has prompted frenzied excitement on Twitter. They’re increasingly autonomous in the forms of agents who can solve longer and more complex tasks. And they’re even tackling novel technical problems successfully: last Friday, OpenAI announced that their newest model had helped solve a physics problem that no person had solved.

Importantly, current advances have been predictable given increased inputs. We’re still early in this process – the returns to scaling are still high, and there are lots of other potential ways to improve models that we haven’t yet fully tapped out. And implementation has barely started. Even if AI progress stopped right now, I think the current models will have a significant impact on our economy as we work out how to deploy them effectively. I think it was Dean Ball who suggested this framing: a technology like flight is a huge deal, but it takes the construction of airports and a whole host of other changes in order to fully utilise the technology and realise its potential.

To be clear, there are some things that AI still can’t do. There is also a lively debate over just how significant the employment impact will be. But we’re well past the point of being able to argue that this technology is pure vapourware, sustained by hype only.

And the past few weeks of improvements have really struck me. I’ve been following these trends closely for the past few years, but having seen things really happen, I’m starting to feel the AGI.

I don’t think this formulation is unique to me, but it’s a good description of my position: I’m more sceptical of AI’s impact than some of the most excitable engineers in San Francisco, but I’m less sceptical than most people I speak to outside of Silicon Valley.

But is this a Good Thing?

Like any technology, AI will be used for good and bad. As it’s deployed in scientific and medical research, for business and government efficiency, ultimately growing our economies and creating more material abundance for humans to enjoy, there will be lots to thank God for.

On the other hand, lots of ways that AI could be deployed are evil. Bioweapons and other national security threats are one category. Infinite, addictive video isn’t anything to get excited about either (although TikTok means we’re already facing that challenge). Excess passive consumption on screens is a vice – on that, Samuel James and I agree.

There is no real way to get around the fact that the underlying moral convictions of people matter for how they end up using technology. There is no system so perfect that people don’t need to be good.

Challenges (and opportunities)

So what will AI actually mean for churches and Christianity?

Here I am less boosterish than you may expect. It’s been over three years since ChatGPT was released, but I’ve only seen one use of AI in any church service in that time: simultaneous translation for non-English speakers, a kind of modern Pentecost every Sunday. It certainly hasn’t transformed Christianity the way some breathless commentators have predicted.

At the end of the day, Christian religion which highly prioritises the public teaching of the Bible by humans is somewhat insulated from trends like AI. As Ross Douthat pointed out in his interview with Dario Amodei, sometimes we’ll want to choose for humans to stay in charge. Church is a great example – there are strong biblical reasons to continue to do this. These ministers’ jobs are safe from AI. Where else can you go to hear someone teach the most important truths, apply them to a congregation whose deepest joys and struggles only he knows, and sing, talk, and care for each other?

More broadly, AI probably will affect some churches a bit. Some ministers are under pressure to serve their congregants’ needs, and it will be all too easy for AI to write a sermon for you. People will accumulate teaching to suit their itching ears, so AI models who claim to fill a spiritual hole in people’s hearts will probably be popular. (There may be a natural and limited role for AI when it comes to understanding a given topic, but it should not be allowed to govern a pastor’s interpretation of the Bible, and it certainly cannot apply a passage to his own heart or others’.)

But where a church has deep convictions about what it’s doing, or traditions – think Reformed churches like mine – not much is going to change, perhaps ever. “Man gets up and explains the Bible” is very Lindy, after all, having already survived two thousand years of historical and technological change.

So in a funny way, I think AI is going to be a huge deal, but I think we should keep doing what we’re doing. Preach the gospel in season and out of season, and entrust what we know to faithful men who will be able to teach others.

Despite this pleasant picture, there are two areas where I’m more leery of AI’s impact.

One is on what AI says about Christianity itself. It’s hard to know how big a problem it will be: how many people will go to a chatbot for answers to life’s most important questions? Some will, and more will be influenced somewhat more subtly as they ask AIs other questions.

The Gospel Coalition did some interesting research into this, effectively creating theological benchmarks for AI. I’m not sure if they have the right answer to all relevant questions, but we should recognise the danger of an intellectual monoculture accidentally imposed via AI when it comes to important religious questions. The same applies in other fields of inquiry too.

I’m also mildly concerned about economic disruption for white collar workers. As discussed above, it’s at least possible that some of these people will lose their jobs over time. This could have a significant impact on the financial profiles of a lot of affluent churches in America which fund a disproportionate amount of Christian missionary activity. The job of a minister might not be affected by AI, but they still need someone to pay them. On the other hand, AI is going to create a lot of wealth, so if the winners in the AI economy go to church, then maybe the net impact is zero in the end. We don’t know the answer to this yet.

Lastly, AI offers a big opportunity for Christians.

It’s possible that some jobs will disappear due to AI. When people’s careers don’t work out as planned, or they lose their jobs, the disappointment and dislocation – even devastation – are very real. What once seemed certain may be about to turn to vapour. Christians can encourage those who are struggling and help them find real foundations to build on.

Many applications of AI are inherently task-focused, helping us to get things done faster or better. But AI can only simulate relationships. LLMs are not conscious. They cannot be truly human, they cannot truly feel. And biblical Christianity is inherently people-centric: it’s surely significant that Jesus gives the church real people to do his work. If Christianity was either purely intellectual, or purely about correctly understanding the Bible, then AI might be useful. But it’s chiefly about a relationship with God, which overflows into love and service towards those around you.

Our struggle to help AI distinguish between right and wrong, to do what seems clear to us but is far from obvious to AI, can’t help but remind me of how humans struggle to understand and obey God’s rules fully. It should remind us of our own flaws and finitude, and the wonder of the incarnation: the Creator lived, died, and rose as one of the created.

Thanks to various friends for reading drafts of this piece.

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I reviewed the book for the Irish Independent here, but I’ve been reflecting on a couple of additional points since on the topic of national security.

Values and national security

The book largely ignores national security, and Hotelling’s law makes me think that there should be a similar book which leans more heavily into this theme.

Klein and Thompson correctly argue that abundance is an attractive, positive agenda that could unite a political movement. It has an additional attractive effect, however, on our enemies. During the Cold War, it was political freedoms and the material wealth of the West which helped undermine communist governments around the world. Many citizens of those countries, especially the most high-achieving and aspirational ones, fled to the West, directly undermining those regimes.

If the West pursues degrowth, it will lose ground to its political opponents. The citizens of geopolitical foes aren’t going to move to countries where living standards are going down. Degrowth is bad for national security because it shows we no longer believe in our own values.

Manufacturing and national security

And how important is manufacturing on national security grounds? If there is a serious war in future, Western countries need to be able to supply their militaries and societies with essential goods. Increased geopolitical turmoil has raised the salience of this question.

Almost immediately, this becomes a question of which goods in particular we should make ourselves. The British government took over British Steel this year. The US government has spent billions of dollars bringing TSMC’s semiconductor foundries to Arizona. Perhaps, as Dan Wang has suggested in another of the year’s most talked about books, manufacturing one good puts you in a stronger position to pivot into another, as needs arise.

Archie Hall suggests some premises behind the takeover of British Steel. Below I paraphrase them into a more general set of ordered gates that should be cleared to justify any national security-oriented industrial policy:

1. There are appreciable odds of Britain [or a given country] landing in a large-scale, protracted hot war in the near future.

2. This war would make “friendly” supply chains from allies inaccessible.

3. British production of the good would be at a sufficient scale to make a difference in such circumstances.

4. Britain wouldn’t be hamstrung by other dependencies anyway, e.g. for raw materials like iron ore, or finished goods like semiconductors.

5. Spending on this area is justified at the margin compared to other areas, e.g. drones, cyber.

6. We should do more than minimal hedges like a stockpile of steel, or a blueprint for how to scale production in future.

Of these, I’m the least convinced by #3. It might be easier to scale process knowledge once you have a bit of it, as opposed to completely losing it.

Chris Miller, author of Chip War, also wrote about manufacturing from an American perspective. His starting point is that there are some goods that we must have domestic production of, such as rare earth magnets. At the other end of the scale, we definitely don’t need to produce our own t-shirts. In between these two poles – where most goods sit – requires careful analysis. His proposed criteria are:

1. What’s the risk a given product can be monopolized and used for leverage, like China’s done with rare earth oxides and magnets this year?

2. How shiftable is manufacturing capacity in a crisis?

3. How tightly linked are today’s manufacturing ecosystems and tomorrow’s?

4. What’s the opportunity cost?

I don’t know the right answer to these questions yet, but I look forward to reading more serious analysis in 2026. In the meantime, though, I propose a few modest conclusions.

Consider the list of reasons why it’s more expensive to manufacture goods within Western countries: wages are higher, environmental standards are higher, energy is more expensive, planning permission is more difficult to attain. Some of these are more directly under our control than others (like wages), and the precise problem no doubt varies for different goods.

For factors that we do control, we should fix them. This will make it easier to produce goods in general, helping the economy, and will help with those goods important for national security as well.

This might include some manufacturing inputs like energy (we should enable more nuclear power in particular), as well as making it easier to get planning permission for factories which are important for national security. Here, material abundance is a natural complement – removing barriers to supply will make these goods cheaper to make.

Second, we should be willing to make some painful choices in order to ensure our national security is protected. Doing this would be bad for economic growth (at least in an immediate sense): it’s inefficient overall to produce goods where more expensive inputs are required.

Voters in Western countries do not seem particularly inclined to make hard choices at the moment. They’re going to be more affordable, though, if we seriously pursue growth in other areas. National security requires that we redirect wealth into some relatively unproductive activities as a kind of insurance policy in the case of war. Those activities are easier to afford when you’re richer overall – in other words, in a state of Abundance.

Abundance is Never Enough

Ultimately, however, there is a certain shallowness to the Abundance agenda. Important and useful though its policy recommendations may be, they don’t scratch the itch of the soul. Listen to the man who had abundance:

I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves, and had slaves who were born in my house. I had also great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. I got singers, both men and women, and many concubines, the delight of the sons of man.

So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me. And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity [hevel] and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. Ecclesiastes 2:4–11 (ESV)

Ecclesiastes is an unusual book of the Bible. Its author is Qohelet, the Teacher. He is unsettling and provocative, retelling his own explorations of the meaning of life. There are twists and turns as he takes you down a winding road of observations and reflections.

I read two books on Ecclesiastes, Bobby Jamieson’s Everything is Never Enough and Destiny by David Gibson. Jamieson’s analysis of the book was new to me. He suggests that Qohelet explains things from three different levels, like three different floors of a building.

On the ground floor, Qohelet observes all of human life: pleasure, toil, wealth, food, sex, power, and much more. He pronounces them wanting, declaring that human life is hevel; breath, air, or vapor. This is the word often translated as vanity. As Jamieson notes, “The modern West’s control complex catechizes you to think of yourself as the captain of a vessel cutting a razor-straight course through life’s succession of storms. But you’re not the captain; you’re not even on the boat. In the end, you’re a fish in the ship’s net.”

Then, at several points in the book, he takes you up a set of stairs to examine the same things from a second vantage point. He concludes that all of life is a gift; receive it as one and you will know lasting joy. Why? How? Qohelet shows that these gifts come from God, our creator: “everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man” (3:13). Or as Jamieson puts it: “All wealth is loaned from God’s library. What should you do with it? Enjoy it. Share it. Remember that it’s due soon.”

Lastly, there is a third level, like a special extension of the second. Having taken you up hundreds of metres in an elevator, Qohelet entreats us to “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.” (12:13). The rest of the Bible answers the question Qohelet leaves us with: how do you rightly fear God and keep his commandments?

Reading, listening, working

With Ecclesiastes 3:13 in mind, then, what did I work on, read, and listen to this year?

I’ll limit myself to two books in particular.

The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025. Gavin and Dwarkesh have done a stellar job of capturing the moment. I will revisit the book this year as I keep learning about AI. I have a couple of friends who are very critical of podcasts as a way of learning things. They have some valid points, but if ever there was an area where this isn’t true, it’s the-ever changing, cutting edge world of AI. Reading (or listening) to Dwarkesh’s interviews is to see the leading people in the field grappling with important questions in real time.

Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers. Dane Ortlund delivers a wonderful portrait of Jesus’s character. The prose is excellent. Ortlund gets across something of the beauty of Christ and the gospel, which is part of what makes it so attractive. Even better that it’s true.

I also read a lot of Robert Caro and Stephen Kotkin this year. What is it about these New Yorker historians that makes them so peerless?

On to essays. Tanner Greer wrote a fascinating analysis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century American techno-nationalist elite. There was a lot less buzz around this piece than I think it deserved, possibly because it doesn’t touch on the hot button issues that play so well online. Instead it focuses on the efforts of the Eastern Establishment to build the United States into a modern and powerful nation:

The economic, social, and political activities of the Eastern Establishment were mutually reinforcing pillars of a larger program. Members of the Establishment used the wealth generated by new technologies to secure political influence, used that influence to sustain a national market and legal framework geared for yet more technological expansion, and then presided over a conscious effort to preserve and transmit the values of their class to future generations, ensuring that the unity and discipline they gained in shared struggle would not dissipate amid power and prosperity. Through these means, a techno-nationalist elite guided America’s development for more than seventy years. Under its stewardship, the United States became the world’s wealthiest, most industrially advanced, and most powerful nation: a true technological republic.

We face an equivalent question of similar import today: how do we build a new Western order that upholds our values and delivers for our citizens? Elites in Europe and the United States should be laser-focused on developing their own answers to this question.

If there’s one piece from earlier in the year whose thesis I keep coming back to, it’s Ross Douthat’s piece on the existential threat of modern technology. No, our phones are not going to kill us. But there is a real winnowing of much of our culture and practices as our marginal time gets spent on screens. We don’t yet know what’s going to survive on the other side. For my part, this makes me want to spend more time reading, going to church, and being with family and friends.

Speaking of Ross Douthat, his new podcast is one of the better ones of 2025. His tone is winsome, as Samuel James has articulated. I’ve also loved Stripe’s Cheeky Pint – I particularly recommend the Dan Sundheim and Dave Ricks interviews, about hedge funds and pharma respectively. Elsewhere, Works in Progress interviewed Jesus Fernandez Villaverde on the fertility crisis in their new podcast, which included some perspectives I’d never heard before.

If you want to listen to something different from all of those, why not learn about the Hutterites, a sixteenth century time capsule preserved in the Great Plains of North America today? A remarkable but sad tale.

Lastly, you can subscribe to the Progress Ireland Substack if you want to keep track of what I do in my job. After writing a paper on land readjustment earlier in the year, now I’m focused on EU policy. The EU produces a huge amount of legislation and policy each year, but there are few progress-oriented actors trying to analyse it. I’ve been focusing on environmental policy, but there are many other important areas which deserve more scrutiny. I want to encourage others to get involved here in 2026.

Travel

My most exciting trip this year was to Japan, which I already blogged about here. I loved the trip and would happily visit again. I also travelled to Brussels a couple of times, which, along with London, has some of the greatest variation between its districts, good to bad.

I’m not sure I’ll travel as much next year. China is still on my list of places to (re)visit, but I think that the UAE should be high on my list too, possibly even at the top. Japan – and to some extent Brussels – feels like a city from the past. The UAE is plausibly something newer. They are focused on AI. They are building new museums, complete with their particular historical emphasis. Rasheed says that Abu Dhabi “in a strange way, it felt more like a Western city than present day central London.” Tyler shares some observations here – don’t forget the influx of Russians.

Looking ahead

I already mentioned AI; it remains the most important game in town. I hope to read and learn more about it in 2026, a goal I partially achieved in 2025.

There was a lot of discussion of the so-called Quiet Revival this year. It’s undeniable that something is happening. Anecdotally, I know many people who are either going back to church, or more often starting to go for the first time. There might be a newfound focus on beauty and meaning in Silicon Valley, which, as I wrote earlier this year, could do with some more churches. I also touched on this a couple of years ago when discussing the trend that converts tend not to pick Protestantism (this feels less true to me now than it did then). I will blog more about these interrelated topics in 2026.

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But it was actually about Christianity. Peter Thiel gave his views on the man of lawlessness, otherwise known as the Antichrist.

It’s not an isolated event. There have been other lecture-style gatherings too, like Code & Cosmos, a 2024 event featuring Dr. Francis Collins. And this interest appears to be cashing out at least partly in some churches: St Dominic’s Church (Catholic) reportedly saw eighty converts this past Easter, a one day record in its 152 year history.

There’s a quiet revival going on among young people in Britain. Elsewhere on the Californian coast, there’s a distinctly biblical flavour to the hardtech hub of El Segundo. Is it too much to imagine that San Francisco could see growth in Christianity?

Cracks in the progressive edifice

There are wider sociological reasons to think that there’s a gap in the spiritual market in San Francisco.

If San Francisco is the apogee of progressivism, then behold what it has wrought: a hollowed out downtown, drug addicts on the streets, sky high house prices, and crime so severe that you’re better off leaving your car unlocked so that thieves don’t smash your windows to see what’s inside. Is it any wonder that some of the voices questioning progressive narratives are the ones who’ve been most exposed to the logical outworkings of progressive politics?

Change might seem unlikely in San Francisco, but consider Tim Keller’s account of his plan to start a church in New York:

In the late 1980s, my wife, Kathy, and I moved to Manhattan with our three young sons to begin a new church for a largely non-churchgoing population. During the research phase I was told by almost everyone that it was a fool’s errand. Church meant moderate or conservative; the city was liberal and edgy. Church meant families; New York City was filled with young singles and “nontraditional” households. Church, most of all meant belief, but Manhattan was the land of skeptics, critics, and cynics. The middle class, the conventional market for a church, was fleeing the city because of crime and rising costs. That left the sophisticated and hip, the wealthy and the poor. Most of these people just laugh at the idea of church, I was told. Congregations in the city were dwindling, most struggling to even maintain their buildings.

I reject a view of Christianity that is purely instrumental. And I don’t buy a model of church where it exists to solve social problems. But the positive social effects of Christianity strike me as evidence of its truth.

A healthy church in San Francisco would produce strong families, unity across races, people who help others in need even when it’s costly to do so. No government can solve these problems on its own, and few cities highlight that as clearly as San Francisco does.

San Francisco’s potential

There are positive reasons to regard San Francisco as a prime location for a church too.

First, it is a city blessed with human capital. Many of the smartest and most ambitious people in the world are drawn to the Bay Area. They work for and create the world’s most productive companies.

The ability to do Christian work doesn’t completely correlate with talents in the secular workplace – after all, God chose what is foolish in the world (a man on a cross) to shame the wise (1 Corinthians 1:27). We should expect Christians to look weak and silly. God is concerned with people’s heart, not their stature or status (1 Samuel 16:7).

However, I think there is reason to expect that people who are talented and entrepreneurial in their professional lives can turn those talents to Christian work. And arguably it’s ambition, the willingness to take on grand projects and dedicate one’s life to them, that’s hardest to teach. Imagine the ambition of the Bay Area applied to reaching those around the world who have never heard the gospel.

Second, San Francisco is a city of financial capital. This isn’t supposed to be cynical – the point of any church is to proclaim the gospel to everyone – but great work is done in other places by the wealthy using their resources, both today and in the earliest days of the church. For instance, Phoebe is described as the apostle Paul’s patron or benefactor in Romans 16:1-2. Today, Gospel Patrons is just one expression of how many Christians give generously to the work of the gospel.

The gospel shouldn’t be prioritised or preserved for the rich and influential. But it shouldn’t be withheld from them either.

Consider how San Francisco’s wealth and talent can complement each other. Talented young people, converted to Christianity, can be trained as the next generation of ministers and missionaries. The training and sending of these workers will require funding, and who better to do so than their Christians brothers and sisters in San Francisco?

Lastly, San Francisco is a culturally influential place. Along with the wider Bay Area, it has an increasingly strong case to be the most important place in the world. Their role was already significant in the tech bubble of the late 1990s, grew stronger in the 2000s and 2010s as the social media companies reshaped the way we all interact. This decade, Bay Area AI companies are building the next Manhattan Project, industrial revolution, or something even more significant.

I don’t fully buy the view that you can change culture by setting out to do so, or that that is the church’s job (it’s a natural side effect of many conversions, of course). But why wouldn’t we want more Christians working on AI, when it’s going to be so important to how we think, work, and live?

If you want anything other than the values of progressive, hyper-liberal San Francisco to be involved in the development of the world’s most important new technology – and whatever other technologies might follow AI – you should consider the influence a church could have, for the better. If you think that historic Christianity has some ethical value, then you should want a healthy, Bible-teaching church in this city.

Of course, the fundamental reason for a church in San Francisco for any Christian is that people there need to hear the message of the gospel: desperately-needed salvation freely available to all in Jesus Christ. There are 800,000 souls in San Francisco; over 7.5 million across the whole Bay Area. God promises that he has people in where you least expect Him to (Acts 18:10) – why not there too?

There just isn’t that much Christian presence in the city right now, barely a handful of evangelical churches. I’m looking for a church with a strong emphasis on reaching the local population with the gospel, building them up, then sending them out to do gospel work. A church in the manner of a St Helen’s Bishopsgate, a Capitol Hill Baptist, or a Redeemer New York. It might look different in some ways, just as there is variation between those churches, but what unites them is more important.

There are many other churches in the area which hold to other confessions and theologies, and they don’t take the Bible to be the ultimate authority. There should be churches which don’t make compromises with the world around them on issues of sexuality and gender. There should be theologically distinctive and confessional options other than a Catholic church.

One reason there isn’t such a church here already is that planting one would be a risk for any pastor. Why go to San Francisco rather than suburban Dallas, or northern Virginia? Living costs will be higher, and personal safety may well be lower.

Many of the same things could have been said to a pastor moving to New York, however, but Tim Keller did it anyway. There are people all over the world who need to hear the gospel – is San Francisco really the hardest place to move to?

Spiritual gold rush

California has always been filled with seekers, from its earliest history to today. They often turn to the occult, to Oriental spirituality. It’s the place where the counterculture started. What could be more counter-cultural today than finding fundamental, objective truth in a traditional religion – and following it?

What they’re looking for can be found in the Bible – they just need churches and Christians to proclaim it to them.

If you’re interested in talking to me about this, reply to this email, leave a comment, or send me a message here or on Twitter.

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My take on this question: it’s less important what elites studied, and more important what their underlying political views are, and how their governments are structured.

Before we get into that, it’s worth revisiting the fullest expression of the STEM in government philosophy: An Odyssean Education, Dominic Cummings’s 200+ page case for transforming Britain’s ruling elite.

Evaluating An Odyssean Education

Writing in 2013, Cummings argued the world has shifted from simple systems to complex ones; from zero-sum, hunter-gatherer societies to market-based, technological, and modern nation states. Our political leaders aren’t cut out for this. They lack the knowledge and intellectual toolkit to make good decisions in the face of multifaceted and existential challenges. They don’t know enough STEM to succeed in the information age.

Cummings’s idea is to train synthesisers who can perform better in this world. A mixture of maths, physics, and biology, plus some political economy and philosophy – his Odyssean education – would create cross-disciplinary leaders with rare insight. They could understand increasingly important scientific issues and make good decisions about them.

The long document, written in 2013, is undoubtedly prescient given all that is now happening with AI. Written several years before the crucial ‘Attention Is All You Need’ paper, and the better part of a decade before the scaling era, An Odyssean Education would have left you looking in roughly the right place for the next big technological wave. The energy section, with its focus on solar, nuclear, and batteries, outlines some of the physical constraints now facing the AI revolution.

The biology section has proven a slower burn. We enjoyed the fruits of incredibly rapid vaccine development in 2021, and the impact of GLP-1 agonists is beginning to show up in American obesity rates, but, perhaps understandably, neither are mentioned. The paper does describe the fall in the cost of genome sequencing, which is having a huge impact on medicine. Links between specific alleles and traits are being drawn, enabling embryo selection and raising the spectre of designer babies. Noor Siddiqui’s much remarked upon appearance on Ross Douthat’s podcast is the opening salvo of a much wider debate, as foreseen in Cummings’s paper.

The biggest single mistake is the paper’s critique of orthodox economics in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. Cummings predicted that ‘agent-based modelling’ would take off instead, but I’ve never heard of it (nor have the friends I canvassed). You’re still better off learning regular, orthodox economics.

The promise and peril of the engineering state

There are situations where the skills Cummings outlined would be very helpful. The Covid pandemic is the most obvious and painful example, when a simple grasp of statistics eluded some of our top politicians and civil servants. Ironically it was Cummings himself who had to grapple with the consequences of a poorly trained elite, as discussed in his written evidence to the ongoing Covid inquiry.

Wang’s Breakneck outlines the positives of engineer leaders. Towering bridges in mountainous Guizhou are developing an impoverished and isolated state. Manufacturing at a grand scale in Shenzhen has lifted millions out of poverty and might have done the most to help China’s security by enabling it to build millions of drones. A state that fully believes in itself and in the goodness of its own mission, in contrast to the unambitious and self-abasing governments of the West.

But it also shows the negatives. Jailing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs to achieve political domination of Xinjiang province. A fixation on metrics leading to the murder of three hundred million children by abortion, thanks to the one child policy. A Zero Covid obsession leading to human misery at a grand scale, and threats to the legitimacy of the regime itself.

An engineering state with the wrong values is a bit like an unaligned AI – with the wrong reward function, it can pursue a line of reasoning and a course of action that ends up destroying a huge amount of value. Like an AI, the state won’t even be able to understand the full consequences of what it’s doing, as it only recognises one important indicator, like new Covid cases, number of children per family, or bridges completed. It’s high modernism on steroids.

An engineering state with the wrong values is a terrible sight to behold, shoving every part of society in the wrong direction. Taken in isolation, Cummings’s focus on the skills of our leaders only risks the same problem. Instead, we need our political class to have better values.

Getting the basics right

Much ink has been spilled over what good political values are. Let’s keep it simple: strong commitments to economic growth, individual freedom, and national identity.

At least in Britain’s case, technology, and political elites’ understanding of it, isn’t the most pressing problem right now: houses are undersupplied, energy is incredibly expensive, and whatever one thinks of immigration, it’s effectively out of control. Simply adding technical skills to our current politicians won’t solve these problems.

We can’t change the values of our leaders once they’re in office, as if this would even be possible. The real solution is for our higher education institutions – and other elite training mechanisms – to inculcate better values. A sufficient share of the Western public can be persuaded of these values to enact political change, if we try.

In a way, this is emulating China more than putting an engineer in charge of the country would. China is a communist country, and its elites put serious importance on Marxist-Leninist ideology. We should be highly committed to the values outlined above.

A good leader can get the country building, no matter what degree they studied. Lee Kuan Yew is the ultimate example – a lawyer by training, but a political leader who turned Singapore into a prosperous city-state. He didn’t need an engineering degree, as he could delegate road construction and port logistics and the planting of trees to those with technical expertise.

China’s leaders do not understand the finer details of the industries they’ve cultivated, and they don’t need to. It’s the wrong expectation for Western leaders too.

Time to think

Along with an updated set of beliefs, Western leaders would benefit from more time to think, the better to lead their respective countries. Here I focus on Britain, the political system I know best, but the principles apply to all governments.

From the Times last week:

[Baroness Casey] suggested to the prime minister that he might emulate his chancellor in delegating to a trusted enforcer the daily grind… [and] devote his focus to the “big picture”.

As Substack In the Sight of the Unwise recently argued, the machinery of government in Britain makes it incredibly difficult to actually govern. Details are not filtered out by the time they reach the prime ministerial desk or meeting agenda. More officials, or a handful of deputies, would lead to a better signal to noise ratio in the PM’s information flow, leaving him or her time to focus on other matters.

The time won back from the system could be spent thinking. The principal political leader of a country needs to have time to zoom out and consider matters that would be lost in the day-to-day. We don’t need that leader to be able to explain the finer details of a neural net; we do need them to understand the wider significance of the scaling era. (Studying history, not STEM, is perhaps the best degree background for this task.)

The Politburo Standing Committee in Beijing – China’s top leadership – holds regular study sessions, learning about the issues du jour from top academics. These sessions are used to set priorities across Chinese government and society.

John Bew, chief foreign policy adviser to four prime ministers, has proposed mandatory reading weeks for mid-career national security officials, and the return of essays to force people to really think through the important issues of the day. Why not senior career officials across many departments?

The point is not to emulate authoritarian systems, but to recognise that our top political leaders should have a government under them who take care of the details, allowing the leaders (with a strong belief in the values outlined above) to set the overall direction of the country and communicate it to the public – whether they’re engineers or not.

I got back from my first trip to Japan a week ago. Observations below:

Urbanism and architecture

The main book I read in-depth before travelling was Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City. It’s a beautiful book of diagrams and prose explaining different archetypes of urban areas (it’s slightly let down by the overly theoretical and ideological final chapters).

Of the types of Tokyo urbanism it describes, I particularly liked zakkyo buildings, which, as Noah Smith puts it, are basically vertical strip malls for pedestrians. They’re multistorey, narrow buildings with different businesses and activities going on at each floor – I once looked up to see a barber operating on the fifth floor of one. Make sure you get out at the right stop on the elevator or you could find yourself in the wrong place!

I was also delighted by the convenience stores. If you’re the kind of person who often thinks things like: “I could maximise my time doing X at Y location if I could just pick up a snack on the way to Z” then you will like Japanese convenience stores. There are dozens of them, even in relatively low density neighbourhoods, so you can pick up a piece of fried chicken or a melonpan whenever you like, and at a reasonable price. There are lots of other unusual foods available, and the staff will often microwave the ready made meals for you. (Forget 30 seconds at 800w, this is the land of 10 seconds at 1500w using convenience store microwaves. Zap!)

Apparently 7-Eleven is struggling outside Japan, and is now subject to a takeover bid from Circle K, with a goal of building a global convenience store giant. Perhaps I can eat melonpan in Belfast in due course.

A lot of Japan’s architecture is very similar, which makes sense given much of the country was rebuilt in modern style after WWII. (This doesn’t explain why the architecture of Japanese temples is all basically the same, however.) You can get a sense of this on street view.

However, keep your eyes peeled and you can see brief instances of more intriguing architecture. Here are some of my favourites:

The Tōkagakudō Concert Hall in the Imperial Palace Gardens dates from the 1960s, and is used to host private concerts for the Imperial family. The smaller building at the front seems to be a modern reimagining of a traditional Japanese building, and the mosaic on the other part of the building was very unusual.

Kyoto and Kanazawa escaped bombing in WWII and feel different from Tokyo. The atmosphere is much less intense. There are many more hints of a prewar past, buildings and street layouts that seem much older. For instance, I spotted a couple of buildings that seemed more art deco in Kanazawa:

The second one was on was a surprisingly pretty street, almost solar punk-esque:

Back to more modern architecture, Ryukoku University in Kyoto managed to marry brutalism with greenery:

Relatedly, restoration in Japan seems to involve completely dismantling something and rebuilding it so it resembles its original purpose e.g. Himeji Castle, Imperial Palace walls. In modern Britain (and Ireland?) restoration means preserving the original even if the overall building becomes degraded and looks very different. Or, to paraphrase a friend, we’ve ended up treating buildings mainly as artefacts, sidelining the fact that they were built for aesthetic effect. (ChatGPT comments here.)

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Attention to detail

Everything in Japan is tidy. Everything works. A striking underlying feature of the country is the attention to detail. Some examples:

• On one train, the announcer said there is a carriage with the air conditioning turned up 1-2 degrees higher if people prefer that. (Is this because women prefer higher temperatures?)

• When you insert a physical ticket into the ticket gates at train stations, the ticket pops out of the machine well in front of you, so you have to walk forward through the gate to pick it up. This forward momentum means you walk through the gates and get out of the way, rather than stand still and wonder whether it’s ok to proceed, causing a bottleneck in a busy station.

• Not only are there markings on the ground at platforms to show people where to queue, they often have two lanes at once for the same platform. They are marked by symbols to show which queue corresponds to which order of incoming train, so you won’t get in the way of other commuters.

• Japan has plenty of Western restaurants. Often they make comprehensive efforts to ensure everything in the restaurant was from the given cuisine’s origin place, such as magazines or movie posters on the wall. On top of that, the food is delicious and clearly prepared with a lot more care than in even an expensive Western equivalent. (Here is one example, Tex-Mex in Takayama. My Oklahoman wife said it’s some of the best Tex-Mex she’s ever had, authentic down to the plastic cheese on the nachos.)

• Google Maps tells you which carriage to get onto for a fast exit to your destination, and which exit is best (these are poorly marked/done in London).

• The Takenaka Carpentry Museum in Kobe is a great way to see how craft and meticulous attention to detail have been expressed in Japanese woodworking, including temple construction.

• The front doors of buses are opened before the rear ones, which allows people to get off first and make room for the next set of people getting on.

• A big drawback of gravel is that it spills everywhere and looks untidy. I’d never considered using a plastic grid to keep gravel in place. Much neater!

A final example. On one of our journeys, we had an eight minute transfer between trains. Our first train was a few minutes late, so our window shrank even further. Concerned, we wondered how we would figure out the transfer in time – though well signposted, Japanese train stations can still be confusing due to their sheer complexity.

We needn’t have worried. Upon sitting down in our first train, we saw a QR code on the seat back in front of us, marked for those transferring like us. It took us to a website with a map of the station and a YouTube video walking us through the transfer.

We made it with several minutes to spare!

Demographic collapse

To my surprise, Japan’s demographic problems mostly didn’t seem obvious when I walked around. We saw lots of schoolchildren, but maybe that’s because we were often in or near tourist sites.

For context, we spent time in Tokyo, Kyoto, Kanazawa, and Takayama, arranged by decreasing order of size (We spent a couple of extra days in Tokyo at the end, and I met Bryan Caplan at random in the Imperial gardens).

Admittedly Takayama was very quiet, but it’s more of a skiing town and we were there in summer, so it’s hard to know what to put it down to.

The national fertility rate is now 1.15, the number of births falling 5.7% from 2023 to 2024. Okinawa (the top left insert on this map) bucks the general trend in Japan and has a higher birthrate:

It looks like Okinawa is still following the main trend, however, as the fertility rate in 2024 had fallen to 1.54.

(a.k.a @MoreBirths) has a Twitter thread arguing that Okinawa avoided anti-fertility messaging in the post-war period because it was ruled by the American military, not the Japanese government, and that this led to higher fertility. This sounds plausible, and I tried googling it to find out more, but there’s remarkably little discussion of this online so it’s hard to judge what’s going on. Given the demographic crisis in Japan – and the whole world – Okinawa merits more attention, much like South Tyrol.

Boom

The province defying Italy’s birth dearth

In March, the Italian equivalent of the ONS, ISTAT, reported that Italy’s total fertility rate (TFR) – the average number of children per woman – had declined to 1.2. Nobody was surprised – Italy’s birth rate has declined almost every year since 2010. In fact in 2020, the Italian population declined by 384,000. That’s like if all the residents of a town…

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2 years ago · 7 likes · Boom

More broadly, thinks that greater religious toleration is the answer to increasing fertility in Japan. I think that would be a wonderful thing, but I worry Japan won’t become religious (and if any religion is going to take root there, it’s probably going to be Christianity) fast enough to avoid some really nasty demographic outcomes.

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Cultural differences and cultural distance

The most puzzling aspect of spending time in Japan was class. The normal cues I use to infer context and ‘place’ people (for better or worse) were largely unavailable to me in Japan. Clothing, accent, names, different places – I either couldn’t tell the difference or the socio-economic implications were largely unavailable to me. People behaved similarly, everyone is nice and polite.

The subway ads were fascinating at times, and two stood out to me. One was an ad for Red Bull, a familiar Western brand, but instead of giving you “wiiings” in a cheeky manner, it’s sold as a way to get on top of your work:

Another interesting ad used cartoon animals (characters from a Japanese fable) to teach that instead of asking “Why are you in Japan?”, one should ask “What brought you to Japan?” Much more polite!

Perhaps most shocking was the nightlife.

Gaming arcades are popular in Japan and presumably are able to compete with consoles at home, which doesn’t at all seem to be the case in the West. Sometimes you see groups of young people hanging out and playing these games together, which seems good. Oddly, however, there were lots of lone middle aged men around too, wasting their post-work hours playing anime-type video games. It would be embarrassing for men their age to do that openly in the West.

Most disturbing were the young women walking around selling several hours at an entertainment bar in a zakkyo somewhere. Apparently this isn’t actually prostitution (which wouldn’t be advertised openly), but simply an opportunity to hang out with women in a bar. To me, it’s still quite seamy and, well, shameful. We even saw these services being advertised in upmarket areas, which would be unimaginable in the West.

A friend thinks that Japan is the developed country with the culture furthest away from the West. I understand what he means when it comes to people’s undifferentiated clothing, the widespread and unashamed fandoms, the relative absence of immigration and multiculturalism, the ubiquitous vending machines, even the built environment.

But I wonder whether China is more genuinely distant from us (again, excluding places that are rural and undeveloped, like parts of the Amazon and Central Asia). When visiting the Middle Kingdom, it’s advisable to get a burner phone. Most of your apps won’t be relevant anyway. It’s often hard to use your bank cards. People don’t speak English. They’re a Communist country. People stare at you in the street, and (outside of Beijing and Shanghai) you might be the first foreigner they’ve ever seen in the flesh or certainly the first one they’ve spoken to.

Public safety

One feels incredibly safe at all times in Japan, even in the busiest parts of Tokyo.

I asked a Japanese-American friend who lives in Tokyo why there is so little petty crime. “We just wouldn’t do that!” he said. Quite. (He also told me that the relatively high rate of crime in the West is regarded by some Japanese as a reason not to convert to Christianity).

Proof of the low crime rate was confirmed when I left my AirPods on a platform on my way to the airport. Despite being one of the easiest and most tempting items to steal (small and high value), they appear to have been handed into lost and found and sent to a central train station. Truly, this is a high trust society.

Food

Saving the best till last, it’s only appropriate to end with the food. Virtually every meal in our two weeks there was excellent, and at a very reasonable cost.

I’ve already mentioned the convenience stores and the excellent Western food, so here were some other highlights:

A robot brought us our food in a curry restaurant in Kanazawa Station. A friend of mine doesn’t want to go to Japan because he thinks everything will be heavily intermediated by computers, a dystopian fantasy that is perennially on the horizon but never really arrives. I can confirm that this was the only time we were served by a robot, though we ordered food via tablet computers several times, which isn’t really any different from using a screen to order at McDonalds at home.

The sheer variety of cuisines is part of what makes Japan such a great place to eat. Ramen, sushi, curry, udon, soba, and much more are available basically everywhere.

We also went to a delicious Yakiniku (grilled meat) place in Kanazawa, where we enjoyed a variety of mouth watering cuts of beef, including cheek. Yummy!

If you haven’t already concluded that this was a fascinating and enjoyable trip, let me stress that once again. Visit Japan!

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Civic Future applications are now open — you should apply! There are two really great programmes, one for those at the start of their career and one for more experienced people.

Saunderson on how to make Britain fun again. Relatedly, don’t forget how Games Workshop IP was squandered.

Sam McBride on how a failure to apply rates (property taxes) in Belfast means the city is crumbling. We should have beautiful streets instead!

Aris Rousinoss on how Britain is lost in Trumpland.

Neal Stephenson goes down a rabbit hole on Thomas More. I did not know he was a hero of the Russian Revolution!

AI & tech

OpenAI released o3 Deep Research; here is one use case. Tyler is impressed with OpenAI’s o1 pro. I suspect all of this reveals that we don’t need PhD level answers most of the time. Here is a good response from the MR comments.

Ben Thompson thinks a lot of knowledge is going to become secret.

Rohit and Dwarkesh each speculate on what the AGI future might look like.

One of the most interesting things about writing these links posts (and I’m only on my second) is that it underlines just how rapid innovation is in AI, even month to month.

ChinaTalk explains the transformer shortage, which is relevant for AI too.

Asia

Dwarkesh posted a great series of lectures with Sarah Paine. I have a couple of questions about what she said:

• What’s her stance on international law? She often treats it as a binding constraint on state behaviour, but many states flout it. And it’s not a single thing.

• Should we really consider German a great ally? It’s pretty penetrated by Russian intelligence for a start.

BBC News visits Myanmar's Shwe Kokko, a city 'built on scams'. One rarely hears about the war in Karen state.

Religion

Ross Douthat responded to my post about his CWT appearance.

The co-founder of Wikipedia has become a Christian. Many such cases!

David Brooks on how faith is nothing like he thought it would be.

Glen Scrivener responded to JD Vance and Rory Stewart on ordo amoris:

Sport

Profile of Northern Ireland sporting great Michael Dunlop.

This is a really great segment on how rugby union coaching has changed in the past few years. Points of interest: training used to be brutal but now the games are so physical training can’t be as tough. Feedback used to be extremely direct, but now players don’t want that. Similarly, in football, former Manchester United boss Erik ten Hag says modern players struggle to deal with criticism.

This seems to be a point in favour of those who argue that young people are mollycoddled. Or maybe things were just ridiculously brutal in the past? Has anyone observed this in other sports or areas of life?

Miscellaneous

Ross Douthat on the narrow path for humanity between extinction and stagnation.

Mark Koyama on the history’s f-word: feudalism.

M. Nolan Gray on the late Donald Shoup, the prophet of parking. Here is Donald Shoup on EconTalk, an excellent episode.

Incentives as selection effects. When I first read this I wanted to say it isn't true for national level public policy, but two examples came to mind:

• Some (not all) of the huge increase in disability-related welfare spending in the UK is due to people learning how to report and/or inflate their symptoms better, thus selecting into the group who receives welfare.

• The UK government is driving millionaires out of the country with tax changes, thus selecting out of the tax base.

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The Singapore story is not unlike the Ireland story. Two former British colonies with common law systems and populations in the low millions, later to become glowing economic success stories.

Looking more closely, however, there are key differences. Ireland achieved its economic miracle without a single, totemic figure in the mold of Lee Kuan Yew. Today, it’s much less self-reflective about why it succeeded.

What can the Emerald Isle learn from the Lion City? I offer three lessons based on three core Singaporean ideas.

What makes them great

Singaporeans are paranoid, in a good way: They fear of being eclipsed by others. They even have a word for this: kiasu, the fear of losing.

Every part of Singaporean society has internalised kiasu. While he was Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong said: people are always trying to steal your lunch, but you must steal others’ lunch.

Pragmatism also undergirds Singaporean society. The best course of action is identified, regardless of what school of thought it comes from. And then it is pursued diligently, even relentlessly.

What counts as best? Anything that generates economic growth, social peace, and security. (Notably, not what maximises individual freedom!)

This cashes out in many ways. Here are some examples:

• Laser-focus on results. Singaporeans want policies that they can measure as working.

• A willingness to make tradeoffs in public policy. They don’t try to solve all their problems with each policy (the fabled everything bagel). When the nascent Singaporean military was in desperate need of military training in the late 1960s, they were willing to work with Israel, even though that could have been controversial (especially with its immediate neighbours, Muslim-majority Malaysia and Indonesia).

• Strong meritocratic culture throughout society. Singapore has well-known scholarship programmes for top young students, allow them to study at the world’s top universities for free (in exchange for government service post-graduation). They’re not afraid to be elitist.

Singapore also has global ambitions. It rightly recognises that in the twenty-first century, you are competing on a global stage. You have to be aware of what’s going on around the world and figure out how you can be the best at a limited set of things.

This has generated some spectacular results: The National University of Singapore is in top #10 across multiple university rankings. Singapore is also very highly ranked in international educational measures like PISA. Changi airport is globally-renowned, often ranked best in the world. The country’s healthcare system is the regional leader, regarded as very efficient, and life expectancy is very high in global terms.

Crucially, Singapore is a very nice place to spend time – this matters a lot if you want to attract business from around the world. Tanner Greer recently pointed out that if you visit India, an aspiring world power, you have to worry about catching malaria and several other diseases. In Singapore, the foreign visitor has no such worries.

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Interlude: What we can’t learn

Although Singapore is great, Ireland shouldn’t emulate it in every way. Singaporean birth rates are very low, and have been below replacement for a long time.

It’s far from clear how they find their way out of this problem. For instance, national service, key to Singaporean security and social cohesion, means that there’s an additional 2 years of young adult life spent in a setting where you aren’t going to get married and have kids.

Relatedly, Singaporean education is too intense. There is lots of academic streaming, lots of homework, lots of private tutoring. Burnout and stress are common problems.

Anecdotally, Singaporean students admit the system squeezes the life out of them. I think this is part of why you don’t see pathbreaking founders coming out of Singapore.

Life can’t just be about GDP go up, there have to be other values. Freedom, community, family, religion…

Think at the margin

Singapore do what they do very well. Ireland shouldn’t simply copy them — in fact, this would be almost impossible.

However, Ireland can change at the margin – not a wholesale change, but smaller changes in Singapore’s direction in certain ways.

First, Ireland should be more paranoid. It’s had a great run, and is enjoying a budget surplus, but it should be looking around the corner at future threats.

Ireland should be pragmatic and focus on what works, not what sounds or feels good. Is it going to build a semiconductor fab tomorrow? Probably not. Can it build more housing? Yes. Can it get out of the way of domestic businesses so it isn’t as reliant on multinationals? Yes.

Lastly, Ireland should be unafraid to talk about being the best place in the world to:

• Get educated, e.g. get one of its university into the global top 50

• Start a startup, e.g. improving share options schemes

• Raise a family, e.g. close the gap between desired number of kids and actual number of kids

Dublin should be a world class city when it comes to transport infrastructure, housing, food scene, artistic scene, public safety, the overall vibes.

Becoming more like Singapore is a choice Ireland can — and should — make.

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I’ve added my commentary on selected parts of the conversation below.

Heavenly rewards

COWEN: In your theology, does converting me win you points? It’s not really a Catholic view, is it?

DOUTHAT: No. No, it’s not. Probably no toaster oven, but you don’t want to—

COWEN: It’s not going to lose you points.

DOUTHAT: It’s not going to lose me points. Let’s put it that way, yes. Maybe indulgence-style, it might compensate for some failings in other areas. There’re probably people who have been alienated from the truth about existence because they disliked something I said or did. Every day is a new chance to make up for those failings.

There is some variation in the evangelical stance on whether there are different rewards in heaven. All agree that salvation – entry into heaven – is not on the basis of merit in any way, but by grace alone (God gives it out of his free unmerited favour). Dwelling with God in love and harmony will be perfect.

Jonathan Edwards, New England preacher, argued in favour of different rewards, which he resolved by analogy:

Every vessel that is cast into this ocean of happiness is full, though there are some vessels far larger than others, and there shall be no such thing as envy in heaven, but perfect love shall reign throughout the whole society.

The parable of the minas (talents) in Luke 19 could be cited as supportive here.

Others are less convinced, however, or even outright opposed to this idea. I’m not sure which of these I think is correct – at a minimum I don’t think Christians should be motivated by the idea of a greater reward due to obedience, as we’re all recipients of grace.

The exclusivity of Christianity

COWEN: I just think we should look at all of Sri Lanka and figure, “Hey, these people ended up where they did because of how they grew up.” That’s fine. It’s maybe good for social cohesion, but then move on to just thinking about it more abstractly. Why is that wrong?

DOUTHAT: Well, right. This is where I’ve been saying to some of my religious friends that this is my most liberal book in a certain way, in that I go a certain distance with that argument. I do think that the diversity of religious traditions strongly suggests that some form of connection to God is available in a lot of different places. This is the official teaching of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. It’s not some radical, controversial opinion, but it is on the liberal side of potential theological interpretations.

Absent any other indication of what kind of religion you should be, what sort of religious perspective you should have, a default to the one that works in your culture is, I think, by no means, crazy.

The Bible does teach that everyone can have some knowledge of God from observing the world around them (general revelation), but that this isn’t the same as a knowledge which saves (“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” Romans 1:21).

I’m not familiar with the Catholic Church’s stance on this question. ChatGPT and Deepseek directed me to Nostra Aetate (1965):

The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself.(4)

The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men.

As well as Lumen Gentium (1964):

Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience.

Evangelicals hold to a much more exclusive doctrine than this seems to imply. Even if you just look at John 14:6, quoted above, in its entirety: Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Taking Catholicism on its own terms, the self-proclaimed one true church seems to be going out of its way to say non-Catholics can be saved without joining it.

General ‘religion’ v.s. Christianity

COWEN: Well, everyone is influenced by the views of their parents on all kinds of things. The soap I use actually is still the same soap my grandmother used when I was a kid. That’s probably related, right? It’s arguably irrational. No doubt, it’s true. But saying that happens everywhere — I don’t see how it gets you to religious faith. I just think at best, it gets you to some kind of probabilistic deism.

DOUTHAT: Well, I guess the argument in the book is that you can get beyond probabilistic deism into what I would characterize as maybe probabilistic supernaturalism. I don’t know exactly the right term. I use the term religion, as you said at the outset, as obviously a contested term. People argue about what constitutes a religion, but I think you can get somewhat probabilistically to the view that not just that deism is true but that there is a fundamental order to the cosmos in which human beings have an important or significant role to play.

There are divine or supernatural impingements on our reality that seem significant in various ways. You probably have a soul that is related to your body but distinct in some way. There’s probably life after death. I would say — and people can read the book and agree or disagree — but I think that there’s a preponderance of evidence in favor of most of those claims.

Now, I agree that even going that far, quite a bit past deism, doesn’t get you to a particular religious decision. There, I have some explanations at the end of the book about why I’m a Christian and why I think the choice to believe in, let’s just say, the significance of Jesus’s life and death and resurrection seems like a rational sequel to those initially rational ideas.

But I think there’s absolutely a reason why religious believers talk in terms of relationship. On the one hand, you’re seeking not just a theory of God but a relationship with him, or them if you prefer, but also in terms of divine grace. The relationship runs both ways. To some degree, it has to be up to the higher order of existence what your relationship to that order might be. But what I’m trying to suggest is, I think there’s a broader and thicker foundation for seeking that relationship than many intelligent people right now seem to think.

Not having read Douthat’s book yet (out on Tuesday), I hadn’t really thought through the consequences of trying to argue for religion in general – he only makes the specific case for Christianity at the end.

That’s a tough gig! He’s left having to justify, on some level, a lot of different religious experiences and perspectives. Far easier, I think, to focus on the case for Christianity, which I think is both unique and the most plausible of all religions.

I cannot be truly comfortable encouraging people to become religious in general. A criticism is often levelled at that Christianity are atheists about every religion but their own. Like Douthat, I do think there are other spiritual forces in the world, but I’m much less convinced about how many of those are God specifically.

UFOs

COWEN: Because even I would say this: UAPs have increased my probability that there’s a God because there are not many explanations for them. There’s China. There’s Russia. There’s craft of our own. There’s alien drone probes. There’s what you could call broadly supernatural. So, there’re five explanations.

DOUTHAT: Yes.

COWEN: That’s one of the five? So, it’s upped my p.

I commend Tyler on his willingness to update his priors. I don’t know what’s behind UAPs, but I think that whatever they are should lead us to update our views more generally:

• If they’re the US government, then it is more willing to blatantly lie to itself and the public than I would have guessed

• If they’re China/Russia, we are all a lot less secure than we thought

• If they’re alien drone probes… need I say more?

• If they’re supernatural, then God is indeed much more likely to exist

I hope we get to find out soon!

Cross-cultural hallucinations

DOUTHAT: But you can also see patterns in those things like near-death experiences. The range — there is cross-cultural variation in near-death experiences. If you have a near-death experience as a Tibetan Buddhist, you are more likely to see the Buddha. If you have a near-death experience as a Catholic, you’re more likely to maybe see an archangel or a Catholic saint or something. But at the same time, there are some pretty clear commonalities to suggest that people in Tibet and people in Indiana are having the same kind of experience when they die and are resuscitated and report the lights, the tunnel, all the strange things associated with those experiences.

Somewhere around here, there was a bit of a missed opportunity to discuss the phenomenon of Muslims reporting dreams of Jesus before their conversion to Christianity. I don’t know how exactly to evaluate the truth of those… but it doesn’t seem that supernatural/religious experiences have to be of your own culture.

The Pope

COWEN: Does the ex cathedra doctrine make sense to you concerning the pope?

DOUTHAT: I would say I have more questions about the nature and limits of papal authority today than I did 10 or 15 years ago, before the age of Pope Francis. I think it makes sense that, if there is a God, and if the second person of the Trinity came to Earth to suffer and die for your sins and mine, and if there was a church established that was supposed to carry that revelation forward throughout history, that institution would be protected in some way from the most serious forms of error.

No surprises that this evangelical agrees with the thrust of the question! If Pope Francis says things that conflict with the Catholic Church’s view, I think that strengthens the case for Protestantism. (Some Catholics seem to argue that he hasn’t spoken ex cathedra which may help resolve this.)

Unlike Catholicism, Protestantism doesn’t believe that there’s a single eternally correct church, so it’s able to reform itself in response to error, while the Catholic church is effectively unable to do so.

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My questions for Ross Douthat

• Why do so few intellectuals convert to Protestantism?

• Aren’t 2000s-style apologetics debates simply passé now, given people's focus on narratives and personal experience?

• What does it say about our times that you published the book with an evangelical Protestant publishing house?

• Does evangelicalism's general aversion to aesthetics limit its appeal?

• Over two years into the AI revolution, the impact on Christianity appears limited. Agree or disagree?

• Do you see hope for Catholicism in the Dimes Square / bohemian Catholic scene?

• Why do evangelicals supply so much of the GOP base yet so few of its elites?

If you’re reading, I would love to discuss them with you and post our conversation here!

Sean O’Neill McPartlin on the benefits of more specific planning rules:

Progress Ireland

Specific planning rules would make housing cheaper, more popular and more plentiful

The national debate over housing has evolved into a debate about money. The allocation of exchequer funding is seen as the most important lever for improving housing affordability…

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a year ago · 16 likes · Seán O'Neill McPartlin

Barra Roantree on Ireland procedure fetish, a nice development of the original procedure fetish critique from the United States:

How to tax and spend it

Ireland's procedure fetish

One of the things I listened to over the Christmas was an episode of Ezra Klein’s NYT podcast in which he remarked that the thing he’s changed his mind most about in recent years is…

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a year ago · 27 likes · 9 comments · Barra Roantree

Saunderson points out on Twitter that the UK has its own version of the procedure fetish.

Sam Bowman explains how to create more win-win policy solutions on the 80,000 Hours podcast. This was an excellent episode. Sam shows that well designed policies can command broad political support and achieve good outcomes. This is a good rejoinder to those who think change can only come through defeating your enemies politically.

Janan Ganesh on how the UK doesn’t really want growth:

A thousand newspaper editorials will tell you that Britain lacks a “growth strategy”. If that means policies, then Britain lacks no such thing, and almost never has. What is missing might be better called a “growth preference”: a settled view that, when growth comes into conflict with another goal, growth must prevail.

Let me come at the point from another angle. What was America’s growth strategy this past couple of decades? Under which administration was it published? Can someone send me a link?

Related: Tom Forth on why the North of England is poor (still making my way through this one).

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AI & Tech

You’d have thought the Stargate Project (OpenAI’s $500bn spend on data centres) would be the news of the month, but everyone is going crazy over Deepseek. Ben Thompson has perhaps the definitive take, worth reading even if you don’t follow every single sentence. Chinatalk is producing great and very timely analysis too. Here are various MR posts on Deepseek.

Tanner Greer says the AI labs are full of people who want to merge humanity with AI.

Jason Hausenloy argues AI is now an engineering problem, not a scientific one.

The UK now has an AI plan.

Project 11 is thinking ahead.

Solar deployment chart has an evil twin:

Material World

The Most Hopeful Chart in the World

If, like me, you’re a bit of a techno-optimist, and you hope or suspect that technology will help provide at least some of the solutions to the various quandaries we’re facing right now, you’re probably familiar with this chart…

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a year ago · 161 likes · 20 comments · Ed Conway

Christianity

Christian apologist Wes Huff appeared on Joe Rogan. Especially notable given Rogan used to rubbish Christianity. Glen Scrivener provides a summary and commentary. Wes fact checks himself.

Clement Knox argues that the loss of Britain’s Christianity has undermined its humanity and morality, even Britain itself. Many people seem to agree, but how many of them were in church on Sunday?

Maybe some of them were – there is some evidence of religious revival among young Britons.

USA politics

Peter Thiel says the Trump administration is a time for truth and reconciliation. It does indeed seem that truths will come out. We’ve already heard about the NJ drones, and the JFK files are due to be released in the coming weeks. (Why did this piece run in the FT of all places?)

Very interesting Marc Andreessen interview by Ross Douthat, on how tech shifted right (Spotify).

Great piece explaining the Trump phenomenon among young men in particular.

Tanner Greer comments:

Not representative: all the books, the drive to read about ancient times and do serious humanities studies, debating high politics, conservative authorities as family exemplars.

All that stuff is for a minority of a minority.

Ezra Klein responds to Trump’s victory and makes a prediction.

Miscellaneous

Tanner Greer has an excellent write up on his trip to India:

I wish the American right took Asia more seriously. Its peoples face geopolitical, economic, demographic, and technological dilemmas on a scale closer to our own. In a few of these countries conservative/nationalist parties have been immensely successful. Japan and India are especially interesting case studies here: both have been governed by electoral machines that consistently deliver victory to rightwing forces.

That’s just one of many interesting points in the piece. Frankly, however, I’m uncomfortable with the obvious ethno-nationalism of the Indian right in particular. Political movements of any kind in the West should reject that outright. It disappoints me, for example, that a senior BJP figure was a speaker at NatCon in 2024.

Philo at MD&A explains why smart people become married to stupid ideas:

MD&A

One Funeral at a Time

By the time of his death last year, Sam Zell had accumulated a fortune of $5 billion, the fruits of a lifetime of shrewd real estate investing. What was the secret behind his success? Well, if you believe Sam Zell, it was that he followed an analytical approach that was grounded in Econ 101: basic supply and demand…

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a year ago · 48 likes · 12 comments · Philo

Nabeel shares his principles:

Nabeel S. Qureshi

Principles

// This was originally a Google Doc where I gathered hard-won life lessons; eventually I open sourced it. It got a great response, including a shoutout from Tim Ferriss, so here it is on Substack…

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a year ago · 479 likes · 25 comments · Nabeel S. Qureshi

I really like #6, #11, #39, and #48.

However, I have a few points of disagreement. For instance, #16: “If you find yourself dreading Mondays, quit.” Much of the world would grind to a halt if this advice was taken too seriously. Even if you just focus on startups, the most successful companies are probably the ones where the employees are being pushed hard and there is some dread of Monday. See also #32: “Don’t let anyone make you feel small.”

Lyman Stone has a Substack now:

Alvaro De Menard returns with some book recommendations and anti-recommendations.

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• short and action-oriented

• strange, yet coherent

• sophisticated

Let’s explore those in more detail.

Immediacy, action

Of the four gospel accounts, Mark is the shortest and most direct. The word Mark seems to use the most is “immediately”; it’s an action-packed sixteen chapters. To be clear, lots happens in the other gospels, but in Mark there’s no Sermon on the Mount, no high priestly prayer — no sooner has Jesus healed someone or left his disciples baffled by his teaching, he’s moving on to the next town or region.

This high tempo might be because this gospel was mainly Peter’s account of Jesus ministry, who comes across as a hothead throughout the gospels. Or perhaps, as one friend suggested, Jesus was in founder mode and unwilling to be distracted from his mission: “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.” (1:38, emphasis added.)

Whatever the reason, its immediacy makes it an easy read; you can get through it in about an hour.

Strangeness

Mark isn’t as esoteric as John, but there are still plenty of downright strange episodes in it.

The start and the end of the gospel are somewhat unusual: first, Jesus bursts onto the pages as an adult — Mark feels no need to tell of his origins in Bethlehem like Matthew and Luke do. The end of the gospel is abrupt: just as the empty tomb is discovered, the narrative stops.1 You’re left wanting more, wondering what happened next.

Questions present themselves as you read. For instance, why does Jesus curse a fig tree? And why doesn’t he want to reveal himself? He repeatedly instructs people not to tell others about him.

Many of these questions are in fact answered by the text itself. That’s perhaps the most compelling single thing about Mark: how the book explains itself in complex and clever ways. (This is true of the whole rest of the Bible, in fact, especially as a whole, but that’s for another post.)

For instance, let’s take the fig tree. A couple of verses afterwards, Jesus is in Jerusalem and ejects moneylenders from the temple, judging Israel for its spiritual bankruptcy. Then he and his disciples pass by the fig tree and Jesus tells the disciples to have faith and pray for the impossible.

This context explains the fig tree. It’s a metaphor for Israel: Jesus found no spiritual fruit in the temple, so judged them.2 He then warns the disciples to have faith in order to escape judgement.

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Sophistication

This brings us to one of the biggest misconceptions about the gospels overall. Growing up, I imbibed the idea that they were a random collection of good stories about Jesus. That’s how they are regularly taught, isolated examples of great truths Jesus explained to us. He’s a great teacher, etc.

But a closer reading of Mark shows there’s much more going on. In fact, it reveals the actual point of the gospel.

The most obvious example of this is Mark’s hinge. The gospel started by saying it was all about Jesus Christ, the Son of God, but none of the other characters really understand this at the start. However, halfway through the text, 8:29, Peter declares that Jesus is the Christ, a moment you might expect to be triumphant — the disciples finally get it!

Immediately, however, the narrative takes a turn. Jesus says that the Son of Man (a name he uses for himself) must be killed. The rest of the gospel builds up to Jesus’s crucifixion, where a centurion declares “Truly this man was the Son of God!” Just a few verses later, the empty tomb underlines his divine status.

From beginning to end, then, Mark has written his gospel to tell us who Jesus is.

Or how about Mark’s use of the Old Testament? In 6:31-44, Mark strongly emphasises that the place they’re in is desolate — three times in five verses. Soon after, Jesus miraculously feeds five thousand people in this desolate place.

The whole scene points to Exodus 16, when God’s people also needed food in a desolate place and He provided it for them in the form of manna. Mark is telling us that Jesus is fulfilling the role of God in the new version of the Exodus.

And what about Mark’s sandwiches? This refers to where he arranges his material in an “ABA” structure, like in the fig tree story: tree, temple incident, then back to the tree.

Another sandwich is in Mark 6. In verses 7-13, Jesus sends out the disciples to preach to people, along with a warning about rejection. Then there is a seemingly unrelated flashback to John the Baptist and Herod, before the disciples return in verse 30. Mark is giving a worked example of the consequences of rejecting Jesus’s words: Herod was urged to repent by John, but dillydallied and lost his opportunity to do so, instead brutally executing John. The episode is stated rather baldly, but Herod’s actions makes more sense in the context of a warning about rejection — which is why Mark has included it here.

Lastly, consider the depth of Jesus’s teaching. To take just a single example, the story of the rich young man is often taught moralistically: you need to sell everything that you have to be a real follower of Jesus. This is a tall order. Jesus actually says as much: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

But he has more to say: “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.” His point isn’t that you have to sell everything you have, but a miracle of God is required in order to change people. It’s not moralism (obey the rules) that Jesus teaches, but grace (God’s free, unmerited favour).

Further resources:

• Mark Dever’s overview sermon on Mark

• Mark resources from St Helen’s Bishopsgate

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I read a total of 43 books (cover to cover) in 2024, slightly more than last year. My favourites, grouped by category, were as follows:

Business

• Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, Becoming Steve Jobs. A great rejoinder to Isaacson’s overly critical biography. Jobs learned to master his foibles, driving Apple to a position so commanding that the firm is still living off his successes today (no disrespect to the excellent Tim Cook).

Steve had assembled a group that was strong enough to deal with who he was, and autonomous enough to compensate for his weaknesses. They developed their own tactics for managing him. “It was like we had a common enemy,” says Rubinstein. Members of the team would meet regularly with one another to plan how to get Steve to authorize the decisions they felt would be best, to figure out a way through or around Steve’s more imperious or ill-considered decisions or prejudices, and to try to anticipate where Steve would steer things next. They had the sense that Steve knew this was going on behind his back. “He knew that he could count on us to make things work,” says Tevanian, “even when there was friction or problems. We faced some really hard problems, you know, and he knew he could trust us to do the right thing.”

• Michael Dell, Play Nice But Win. Michael Dell is rarely lauded like Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Bezos. But his achievements are just as impressive: his eponymous company achieving success over multiple computing eras. He’s been CEO almost the entire time, keeping things in founder mode. I enjoyed this snapshot of a CEO’s schedule:

On Tuesday the twenty-eighth it was back to the office, where I had to prepare for our annual industry-analyst conference on the twenty-ninth, an all-morning meeting with hundreds of analysts from firms like Gartner, IDC, 451 Research, Forrester, and others. For about six hours I would have to spend every minute giving analysts an upbeat view of our transformation and politely fending off what were sure to be persistent questions about the go-private negotiations. On the thirtieth I was to go to Toronto to meet with customers and our team in Canada. The next day I was to head to Washington, DC, to get together with our daughter Kira, who was doing an internship there. I would spend Saturday the first with her, then fly that night to Bangalore, India, where I was to meet with our team on June 3 (you lose a day traveling East). Then it was off to Beijing on the fourth; Chengdu, China on the fifth; then back to Austin on Friday the seventh to prepare for a Lieberman family reunion (Susan’s family) over the weekend.

History and Politics

• Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First. Superlatives are redundant when it comes to LKY. An object lesson that great things are possible with vision and fortitude. Best read along with the earlier volume of his memoirs, which shows just how difficult the situation was at independence. (The defeat of the communists alone should be the subject of a TV drama.) Birth rates in Singapore, however, suggest that there is something ultimately missing from the PAP version of the good life.

• Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. Great things have already been said about this series. The questions I’m left with are: how does Caro continually gain the trust of his interviewees when it’s clear he won’t pull any punches? And how has the electoral fraud/corrupt influence dynamic evolved over time in the United States?

Christian

• D. A. Carson, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor. Lots of Christian biographies, whether about missionaries or leading ministers, end with the subject achieving prominence and success. Sometimes this comes after decades of obscurity. Rare is the Christian book written about someone who was obscure and seemingly unsuccessful throughout their life. Crucially, though, Don Carson’s father was faithful. And that’s really what this book is about.

Never in our hearing, and certainly not in his papers, did Tom express any jealousy of or malice toward other ministers who seemed to be eclipsing him, but whether he realized it or not the way was being paved to generate in him a feeling of inferiority with which he would wrestle for the rest of his life. Compared with some of the more dramatic turns around him, his ministry was ordinary.

• Kevin DeYoung, Men and Women in the Church — clear biblical thinking on an important topic. How many people are effectively memeing themselves into a kind of complementarianism in regular life these days anyway? I particularly appreciate that he attempted to outline how masculinity and femininity can be positively expressed in people’s lives.

• J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism. This book is a century old but its skewering of liberal Christianity remains completely on target. One of the best antidotes to religious liberalism is simply to read a gospel from start to finish. Jesus isn’t saying all the things you might have expected!

In view of the lamentable defects of modern life, a type of religion certainly should not be commended simply because it is modern or condemned simply because it is old. On the contrary, the condition of mankind is such that one may well ask what it is that made the men of past generations so great and the men of the present generation so small. In the midst of all the material achievements of modern life, one may well ask the question whether in gaining the whole world we have not lost our own soul. Are we forever condemned to live the sordid life of utilitarianism? Or is there some lost secret which, if rediscovered, will restore to mankind something of the glories of the past? Such a secret the writer of this little book would discover in the Christian religion. But the Christian religion, which is meant, is certainly not the religion of the modern liberal Church, but a message of divine grace, almost forgotten now, as it was in the Middle Ages, but destined to burst forth once more in God’s good time, in a new Reformation, and bring light and freedom to mankind.

Fiction

• Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name. The former took me two attempts to really get into, but once it gets going you just can’t look away. I enjoyed the portrayal of postwar Naples and the awful scramble out of poverty — probably similar to the experience of a lot of people in Ireland some decades ago.

Podcasts

There are easily too many good podcasts for me to listen to these days. Some can be read via transcript, of course, but I’m convinced that it’s uniquely enjoyable to actually hear smart people talk through interesting questions. (Or maybe I just don’t like to be bored when I go for a run.)

The two best podcasts remain Dwarkesh Patel and Tyler Cowen. Dwarkesh in particular has gone from strength to strength this year — much like Tyler, you might think an episode looks daunting or perhaps outside your areas of interest, but when you listen it’s rarely disappointing. The best single episode was Leopold’s:

Dwarkesh Podcast

Leopold Aschenbrenner - China/US Super Intelligence Race, 2027 AGI, & The Return of History

Chatted with my friend Leopold Aschenbrenner about the trillion dollar cluster, unhobblings + scaling = 2027 AGI, CCP espionage at AI labs, leaving OpenAI and starting an AGI investment firm, dangers of outsourcing clusters to the Middle East, & The Project…

Listen now

2 years ago · 49 likes · 15 comments · Dwarkesh Patel

I didn’t listen to as many of Tyler’s episodes this year as previous years, but there were some gems in there. Stephen Kotkin’s appearance in particular was excellent. It’s a hard episode to excerpt because the best bits are the long stories he tells — there must be so many more from across his career. Christopher Kirchhoff and Benjamin Moser were also great.

Elsewhere, I particularly enjoyed Rasheed Griffith interviewing Alexander Chula on Malawi:

CPSI Newsletters

Britain's Misguided Shame

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a year ago · 6 likes · Shem Best and Rasheed Griffith

Films

Letterboxd tells me I watched 42 films in 2024. While I don’t have the sophisticated taste of some of my friends, I’m pleased with the films I rated most highly — they all speak to our times in some way:

• Dune: Part Two (2024): As Tyler likes to say, the important thinkers of our future will be religious ones.

• Children of Men (2006): I’m a real sucker for extended action sequences shot by a single camera, and this film has several terrific ones. The film’s concern with birth rates is very prescient, of course, and even the London rickshaws in the opening scene has proven rather accurate.

• Hell or High Water (2016): on some level, this is a story about unhappy rural Americans fighting back against the system. Themes: decaying regions, limited job opportunities, gambling.

Travel

There has been some discourse about travel recently. Patrick Collison tweeted:

Dwarkesh noted in his recent China post:

So what's the point of travel? What about the in person experience can't be replaced by books, travel vlogs, and Zoom calls? For me, it's something like, what becomes salient to you. I started asking questions about China I hadn't even thought to ask about America.

Both of those points are correct. In addition, travel makes you realise that things can be different. Economic development, personal safety, urban design, almost everything.

This sounds trivial, but it’s one of the most important lessons of all. Many smart people have already internalised this to some degree, but have you really internalised it enough?

For instance, Singapore really is a lot safer and more pleasant than London. Their elites really are high quality. Not every state has been as deliberate in creating their country and its elites as Singapore, of course. The UK hasn’t set out to get worse in these dimensions. But it is possible to choose to be better.

As for my own travel, as well as a few trips to the United States, I visited several places for the first time:

Singapore

I already wrote about my trip to Singapore. I’m still thinking about it. (Thank you Civic Future for taking me. I strongly recommend applying to their Fellowship if you’re an early career person in the UK.)

Malta

Definitely worth the several days we spent there; decent historical sites and Valletta is decidedly pleasant to walk around. We happened to visit on the feast day of St Paul, so saw some marching bands celebrating!

I came away thinking that the Maltese are the Ulster Protestants of the south Mediterranean; they like marching bands, they’re loyal to the British Crown (voted in favour of unification with the UK in 1956), and judging by their museum they’re proud of defeating the Ottoman Turks, the (Napoleonic) French, and the Nazis.

Madrid

I’ve visited Spain before but never the capital. I think I spent most of my time in nicer districts, so discount these notes accordingly:

• There were almost no overweight people.

• People seem quite happy — smiling and laughing in public.

• Most people seem to be quite stylish, and no one was wearing tracksuits. Overall people have a similar style (apparently strongly influenced by Zara?)

• Most buildings are very nice, if not outright beautiful.

• Medium density apartments are normal (unlike in the UK and Ireland).

• There is lots and lots of good food!

• Every major Western city has lots of immigrants, but Madrid has a bit of a advantage: their immigrants are almost entirely Latin Americans, so they speak Spanish already. I wouldn’t have even known they were immigrants except my host could identify their accents.

Marrakesh, Morocco

Overall Marrakesh wasn’t really my vibe. The city was pretty touristy. I don’t know enough about crafts to distinguish the high quality souks from the rest, and if I found them they wouldn’t really interest me.

However, there were several good aspects. It was interesting to see just how grindingly poor the old city was, and yet how it seemed quite safe (we were very soft targets for thieves but were unscathed). I particularly liked the House Of Photography Of Marrakech, especially the terrific 1957 documentary about Berbers in the Atlas Mountains. (It is online here, but unfortunately without English subtitles. A real progress studies film.)

Goals for 2025

It’s cliche to say it, but I really have to learn more about AI. Even if you’re a bit sceptical of benchmarks or the most AGI-pilled boosters, the progress in the field over the past few years has been undeniable. It’s the main thing going on, and perhaps only the birth dearth is of comparable impact.

I do think I know the basics, but there’s so much more to dig into, especially the industrial (data centres) and geopolitical angle. If you have any recommendations on this side, please send them to me or leave a comment.

In terms of reading, I was surprised by just how quickly I finished Caro’s Means of Ascent. It made me wonder whether I should focus on history books that are well-written in order to increase my throughput. Dan Schulz also has praise for this tier of history book.

To that end I hope to finish Caro’s LBJ series in 2025 — and who knows, maybe the last volume will come out soon… I’ve also started Albion’s Seed and Kotkin’s Stalin biography. I have high hopes for Ross Douthat’s forthcoming book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, and hope to review it here.

I don’t think I’ll travel quite so much in 2025, but my highest priority places at the moment are in East Asia, especially Korea and Japan. Let’s see if I make it there.

To many people, all companies look the same – meetings, laptops, fluorescent lights and bonuses – but there can be intricate structure to discover, if you look for it. Sometimes it’s revealed in a magazine profile of the company founder, other times it’s described directly, either by an interested observer or an ex-employee. Rarely by current employees!

What do the people who make up successful companies think, do, and believe as a group that is different from their competitors? That’s worth reading about, so we (Fergus and Tom) put together the following list of essays, just in time for the holidays.

What have we missed? Let us know in the comments (or elsewhere).

Palantir

Byrne Hobart: Palantir: On Business, Cults, and Politics

Cults are high-variance. You can get superior growth and focused pursuit of a variant thesis. Or you can get fraud that’s ostensibly perpetrated for the greater good. Normally, that would be a large risk, but Palantir is an unusually scrutinized company, with many high-profile and controversial projects, so if you’re looking for dirt you have lots of competition. Just by process of elimination, they seem to embody most of the positive aspects of cultish behavior.

Nabeel S. Qureshi: Reflections on Palantir

The overall ‘vibe’ of the company was more of a messianic cult than a normal software company. But importantly, it seemed that criticism was highly tolerated and welcomed – one person showed me an email chain where an entry-level software engineer was having an open, contentious argument with a Director of the company with the entire company (around a thousand people) cc’d.

Maureen Dowd, Alex Karp Has Money and Power. So What Does He Want?

Mr. Karp said he likes to think of Palantir’s workers as part of an artists’ colony or a family; he doesn’t use the word “staff.” He enjoys interviewing prospective employees personally and prides himself on making hires in under two minutes. (He likes to have a few people around who can talk philosophy and literature with him, in German and French.)

Stripe

The Generalist, Stripe: Thinking Like a Civilization

Though virtually every former and current employee I spoke to seemed, extremely, genuinely thrilled to be working at Stripe, this was a subtle leitmotif: this is a hard place to work. Working nights and weekends seems to be a common expectation and the most frequent complaint on the company’s Glassdoor page is the lack of work/life balance.

Brie Wolfson: What I Miss About Working at Stripe

There’s no way around it:the culture was demanding. I spent many late nights working. I cried more than a few times after feeling like I let a user or a colleague down. My heart would beat out of my chest before heading into an exec review. There were many times that I had to grab a colleague for a calm-down lap around the office after we decided to yet again delay the launch I was sprinting towards to get that final pixel perfect. My imposter syndrome was through the roof. Once, my manager asked me to reconsider the vacation I had been planning because my team needed me. “If you go, who will cover your work?” I looked around at my colleagues who were also regularly working 15-hour days and decided to stay put. I’m proud of that choice. Call me masochistic, but I have to admit that it felt good to care about anything that much. And, to be around people who I know cared that much too.

Patrick McKenzie (@patio11): Two Years at Stripe

Probably the single biggest change in belief I’ve had since joining is that ambition properly harnessed can be an enormously productive force in the world. This is largely informed by working with people who are extremely ambitious and yet well-grounded, both at Stripe and at our customers. There is a great, great difference between “Build a credit card processor? That’s impossible.” and “Build a credit card processor? That probably involves compliance with an enumerable set of regulations and writing a finite number of lines of code.” You want more people in your life who say the second version, probably at most margins.

Jane Street

Byrne Hobart, Understanding Jane Street

Ironically, "thinking carefully" is not the origin story of Jane Street's highly idiosyncratic decision to use the Ocaml language. The origin story is that they had a crufty system built on Excel, and hired a part-time researcher to build some analytical systems. That researcher, Yaron Minsky, chose Ocaml because he liked it, and because he didn't expect anyone else to have to maintain it afterwards. But then he decided to stick around to run a research group that used Ocaml, and a few years later convinced the rest of the company to move to Ocaml, too.

Amazon

Zack Kanter, What is Amazon?

Bezos did not meticulously assemble Amazon into the collection of high-growth businesses that it is today; he ‘merely’ designed Amazon’s algorithm. His first stroke of genius was in making it unbound; his second – the masterstroke – was devising a solution to the bureaucratic complexity that would have otherwise caused it to implode. Instead of being a bureaucratic liability, Amazon’s sprawl would become a massive surface area of customer contact from which Amazon could spawn dozens of revenue streams.

Tim Bray, Working at Amazon

So if you’re the kind of person who, for example, thinks figuring out a better way to automate detecting hot-spots in back-end clusters and re-routing traffic to cool things down is interesting work, then you’ll like working here.

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.

Anduril

Jeremy Stern, American Vulcan (Palmer Luckey profile)

“And Trae and I were joking that it would be hilarious to put dogs on quadcopters [a type of drone], like skateboarding. And Palmer was like, ’I’ve actually thought a lot about this. Here’s how you want to do it.’ He had a whole framework of how you would do it, the ethical implications of it, how it would work, and the rules of engagement. It was like a 45-minute discussion on dogs on quadcopters that Palmer had already thought about extensively. It was amazing … I mean, he’s just endless.”

Meta / fka Facebook

Facebook: Little Red Book

This sign [Sun Microsystems] came with the building—it just didn’t say Facebook yet. Instead of getting a new one, we flipped it over and painted it. The back still says the name of a different technology company, one that came before us, left as a reminder that if we fail, someday someone might replace us.

Boz, Service Oriented Organization

I call this concept the Service Oriented Organization. When someone [within your company] approaches you with a problem, simply imagine you were the CEO of your own company and that person was a client. You can’t command them to do anything, and you can only help to the degree they want your help. If you give great advice, they will come to you more often.

Dan Rose thread on Bezos and Zuckerberg

They both lived in the future and saw around corners, always thinking years/decades ahead. And at the same time, they were both obsessive over the tiniest product and design details. They could go from 30,000 feet to 3 feet in a split second.

TSMC

Viola Zhou, TSMC’s debacle in the American desert

TSMC’s work culture is notoriously rigorous, even by Taiwanese standards. Former executives have hailed the Confucian culture, which promotes diligence and respect for authority, as well as Taiwan’s strict work ethic as key to the company’s success. Chang, speaking last year about Taiwan’s competitiveness compared to the U.S., said that “if [a machine] breaks down at one in the morning, in the U.S. it will be fixed in the next morning. But in Taiwan, it will be fixed at 2 a.m.” And, he added, the wife of a Taiwanese engineer would “go back to sleep without saying another word.”

Douglas Fairbairn, Oral History of Shang-Yi Chiang

Then I began to learn his secret. If he asked you to give a presentation, he had very high expectation. He expected you will tell him the most important thing in your area and this thing is something he didn't know. That's his expectation. You probably have 30 minutes. So you began to in my-- as an engineer, I was trained when I give a paper, I began to talk about it, "Here is a problem and this is my experiment. This is my approach."

He totally has no patience for this sort of thing. So, you have to go reverse direction. You tell him, "This is the result." Then he says, "Oh." Then he thinks, "My 30 minutes already paid off." Then he will be very patient to listen to you on the details.

It passed all the criteria when the production. But when you have a large volume, we began to have a reliability problem. And we found at the last moment, after we already went to production. And then it was around the Christmas time and we immediately we tried to put the FSG back, so again we worked days and at night, no break for Christmas, no break for New Year, no break for Chinese New Year. All the way and under very high pressure, and we finally get it, it's out, and it's already late, but good. And then later on, we found that TI had exactly the same experience we had. They also used HSQ and was okay with R&D after getting the production they had a problem, exactly what we had. So, we were not alone.

Books

Private Equity (undisclosed hedge fund - probably Tiger Global Management / Chase Coleman)

Working Backwards (Amazon)

Becoming Steve Jobs (Apple)

The Little Kingdom (Apple)

Hard Drive (Microsoft)

Play Nice But Win (Dell)

The Founders (Paypal)

Amp It Up (Frank Slootman & Snowflake)

High Output Management (Intel)

Creativity Inc. (Pixar)

Softwar (Larry Ellison & Oracle)

The Nvidia Way (Nvidia, we haven’t read it yet but well reviewed here)

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The peril of champions

Running somewhat in parallel with Moses’s career was the Good Government reform movement of New York, born of wider Progressivism in the early 20th century. A loose collection of idealistic, civic minded citizens, it sought to eradicate corruption and government inefficiency. Its nemesis was Tammany Hall, the Democrat machine which, through the exchange of jobs and city contracts for votes, ran New York and maintained a stranglehold on its politics.

In Caro’s telling, Moses began his career as a genuine ally of these men and women. He fought in the trenches with them as part of the Bureau of Municipal Research. He wrote a report on how to reform the civil service, calling for a meritocracy in civil service appointments – instead of the patronage based system, where your employability was more to do with your connections and voting history.

Later, though, after Moses had tasted bitter defeat and seen his reform plans shelved, his priorities changed. But the reformers didn’t know this – they realised only too late that Moses no longer shared their priorities – in the meantime, their trust had helped place him in his new, powerful position. In Caro’s telling, Moses became focused on attaining power for its own end, and ultimately embraced the kind of political corruption he had once railed against.

Apparently German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck behaved very similarly:

[His] political career was accelerated by a group of eminent, devout Christians. He used their support for his own gain and adhered to their principles as long as he needed their support. Once he was powerful enough to do without their support, he had no issues with negotiating with Liberals, Socialists, Catholics - all abhorrent to his early patrons.

Any idealistic movement which is keen to reform government should beware who they empower and defend.

The role of the press

Moses is reminiscent of another figure oft-discussed in tech circles. Take Moses’s written analysis of the press, for example:

The power of the press, radio and television to make or break any man in public life... is awesome and often grossly unfair. The press, for the ostensible purpose of keeping it honest, has done much to make public employment dangerous and unattractive...

Many a good official has been frightened or flattered by idle gossip, random criticism or attack...

There is a type, fortunately rare, which is indifferent to the ordinary decencies and proprieties, skilled in eavesdropping, glued to keyholes, willing to embarrass families and friends, a species to whom nothing is sacred. Such reporters, if they could, would wire and violate the confessional... I sometimes wish we had a few Gorgases to keep yellow journalists off our necks so that we would be free to do our work...

Cleverly and dramatically reflecting public opinion is one thing. Planting suspicion, poisoning minds, rousing the mob spirit, quoting out of context — these are cute tricks far removed from straight honest reporting... Critics build nothing. The only excuse for a critic is to toughen the hides of his victims...

A different man, who lived thousands of miles away and also forged a reputation for Getting Things Done across a decades-long public career, said:

“freedom of the press, freedom of the news media, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore, and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government” (source)

“We allow American journalists in Singapore in order to report Singapore to their fellow countrymen. But we cannot allow them to assume a role in Singapore that the American media play in America, that is, that of invigilator, adversary and inquisitor of the administration.” (source)

Lee Kuan Yew’s remarks above are remarkably similar to the attitude of Silicon Valley founders today, like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.

They have a point; one shouldn’t be naïve about journalists. The image of the journalist in popular culture, of someone who speaks truth to power, should be balanced with a recognition of the base incentives they face.

Lee’s Singapore has good reasons to care about political stability, and the fruits of their particular political culture – which limits the freedoms of journalists – are obvious to behold. 

But Moses does show how this restrictionist, anti-journalist perspective can be taken too far. Despite heady idealism in his early days, he ended up mired in corruption, undermining the very meritocracy he once supported – like the shadow version of Lee. Public scrutiny and free speech is an important way to disincentivise this kind of behaviour.

Read the docs

This is perhaps the biggest single lesson of the book. Moses amassed power early in his career by becoming, in the words of then-Governor Al Smith, “the best bill drafter” in Albany. Smith found the young Moses indispensable as a legal and political aide, always able to get the right reform done or find a way for a new proposal to be financially viable. This was how Moses cut his teeth on getting things done in politics.

He deployed this know-how throughout the rest of his career. An early, crucial example came in 1924. Still an aide to Smith, Moses drafted laws to establish organisations that would govern parks in the state – organisations which even then he intended to lead. He subtly developed clauses and definitions, referring to old, forgotten acts and obscure yet genuine precedents, which drastically increased the power of the Long Island State Park commission: power to seize private land if an official simply walked on it and claimed it, power “to write its own laws, hire policemen to enforce them and prosecutors to prosecute them… virtually all the powers granted to the City of New York.” 

Moses concealed these implications, found useful idiots to champion the bills, and saw them pass (without any scrutiny from his Good Government allies). This allowed him to spend decades with parks as essentially his private fiefdom.

In addition, his drafting ability made him indispensable to decades of elected officials. There was already a basic political logic to their alliance with him – he offered parks, and later infrastructure, that people wanted – but his deep knowledge of legislation in New York helped them get things done.

Roosevelt and Moses hated each other, yet Roosevelt couldn’t help but rely on him:

No one knew the vast administrative machinery the Governor was supposed to run better than this man the Governor hated. To a considerable extent, the machinery was his; he, more than any other individual, had drafted the bills that had increased that system, the department consolidation and the hundreds of bills that implemented those constitutional amendments. He, more than any other individual, knew the considerations—constitutional, legal and political—that lay behind wording in those laws that was otherwise so puzzling. He knew the precedents that made each point in them legal—and the precedents that might call their legality into question. He knew the reason behind every refinement, every clarification—and every obscuration—in the laws’ final versions. When discussing a point of law with some young state agency counsel, Moses liked to let the lawyer painstakingly explain the legal ramifications involved and then say dryly: “I know. I wrote the law.” This store of knowledge, coupled with an intelligence capable of drawing upon it with computer-like rapidity, constituted a political weapon which no Governor could afford to let rust in his arsenal.

His legal acumen also allowed him to draw on disparate and seemingly inaccessible pots of money: against all odds he found $109 million to make his Westside Improvement dream into reality. One longtime associate of Moses said “RM has this mind– he can read a piece of legislation and remember every darn thing in it. He seemed to know the wording of every darn bill in Washington and in Albany that had ever been passed relating to public works.”

Perhaps the last and greatest example of his legal prowess was the power he secured for himself through the Triborough Authority, which he headed. Authorities like Triborough were able to issue their own bonds, which, as contracts, were protected by the U.S. Constitution, and that no government or other party were able to interfere with. The original law establishing the Triborough Authority said the organisation would exist for 5 years, or until all bonds were paid off (an upper limit of 40 years).

Moses drafted amendments to the original law. Buried in a subparagraph was a new provision allowing Triborough to pay off its old bonds with new ones – effectively giving it infinite runway. He also subtly added new powers, so that the Authority could work on not just bridges and the roads that approach them, but ‘connecting’ roads – arguably almost any road in New York.

His amendments went further still, giving Triborough the right to build any facility for the public ‘not inconsistent with the use of the project’. As Caro notes, ‘An aggressive Authority chairman… could well find in that phrase legal authorisation to build any type of public facility he chose anywhere along the Authority’s bridges, roads, streets, parkways… anywhere, in fact, in the city.’

Moses then linked Triborough’s new powers to the contract with the bond holders, rendering them immune from later legislative correction. The power over construction, the very physical reality of New York, guaranteed political power and financial power through contracts and services, which could make or break politicians or construction firms.

I’m not sure how repeatable this is today – can you really eke out an advantage in being the only one to read laws properly? There are some examples of this, like the British student who became an expert in Congressional procedure. Press reports suggest that people on the receiving end of new laws often feel they weren’t drafted properly. So while there might be some opportunities to eke out advantages here as a bill drafter, there are also a lot of veto points (like judicial review) which would make it hard to accrue a lot of power through any one law.

In the coming years, large language models will surely do a lot of the reading (and writing) for us, but Moses shows why it’s important to actually read the legal documents, line by line.

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Getting things done, fast

It’s extremely striking in the book that infrastructure projects were completed quickly.

Take Moses’s early triumph on Long Island:

Moses had not been given funds for his Long Island parks and parkways until the spring of 1926. By the end of the summer of 1928, in a period of less than three years, every foot of right-of-way for the Southern State Parkway was in his hands, a seven-mile stretch, from near the New York City line to and around the Hempstead reservoir, was completed. Long rows of newly planted elms and maples lined it and stone-faced bridges, every one different, were carrying crossroaders over it so that nothing should interrupt the swift passage of its users. A second seven-mile stretch, from the reservoir to Wantagh, was completed except for the landscaping. A third seven-mile stretch, from Wantagh to Babylon, was graded and ready for paving. And the fill for the Wantagh Parkway had been laid, a pavement placed on top of the fill and three of the four bridges that would carry the causeway across the bay completed.

When Moses had become president of the Long Island State Park Commission on April 18, 1924, there had been one state park on Long Island, the almost worthless 200-acre tract on Fire Island. By the end of the summer of 1928, there were fourteen parks totaling 9,700 acres. Because 6,775 of those acres had been acquired—from Hempstead, Oyster Bay and Babylon towns, the U.S. Department of Commerce, New York City and private individuals—as gifts, the Long Island parks had cost the state a total of about a million dollars. At 1928 land values, they were worth more than fifteen million.

Moses’s speed meant that the parkways and beaches could open in the summer of 1928, and the resulting public adulation guaranteed that no politician would stop the remainder of his park plans. 

On 19 January 1934, Moses became NYC’s park commissioner. Despite funding issues leading to the dismissal of half of his workers at the end of March, and a severe winter (the average temperature in February was -11.39℃), Moses’s men had completed over 1500 renovation projects:

Every structure in every park in the city had been repainted. Every tennis court had been resurfaced. Every lawn had been reseeded. Eight antiquated golf courses had been reshaped, eleven miles of bridle paths rebuilt, thirty-eight miles of walks repaved, 145 comfort stations renovated, 28 statues refurbished, 678 drinking fountains repaired, 7,000 wastepaper baskets replaced, 22,500 benches reslatted, 7,000 dead trees removed, 11,000 new ones planted in their place and 62,000 others pruned, eighty-six miles of fencing, most of it unnecessary, torn down and nineteen miles of new fencing installed in its place. Every playground in the city had been resurfaced, not with cinders but with a new type of asphalt that Moses' engineers assured him would prevent skinned knees, and every playground had been re-equipped with jungle gyms, slides and sandboxes for children and benches for their mothers. And around each playground had been planted trees for shade.

Caro records that Moses moved faster than his contemporaries expected, so we shouldn’t take him as the norm for the period. But he is a great yardstick on what is possible.

So what made Moses so fast? Certainly it was partly to do with his boundless work ethic:

Up in the morning at six or seven, he often made breakfast for his wife and brought it to her in bed. In the evenings, at the far side of twelve or fourteen hours of unbroken toil, he would head not for home but for the swimming pool. One weekend, he invited Ingraham to Babylon and told the reporter to come up to Randall’s Island Friday evening and drive out with him. Arriving at five o’clock, Ingraham found Moses in conference, and settled down in the Commissioner’s waiting room. An hour later, he was still waiting; the conference was still on. When it broke up around six-thirty, Ingraham was invited in, and Moses told him he still had a few things to attend to. He was still attending to them at seven o’clock and eight o’clock, and nine o’clock and ten. Rising finally, he said, “Let’s stop off at Earle Andrews’ place on the way out.” The “place” turned out to be Andrews’ glass-enclosed swimming pool in Huntington. Letting himself in with his own key, Moses changed, plunged into the water and began swim- ming. Watching the muscular arms windmilling endlessly up and down the pool, the drowsy reporter dozed off. Some time later, he awoke. The windmill was still turning; if anything, Ingraham realized with a start, Moses was swimming faster than before. It was, he says, “late” when the Commissioner clambered out of the water, looking as fresh as a youth, and very late indeed when the two men finally arrived at Thompson Avenue. As Ingraham climbed the stairs to the guest room, he saw the Commissioner’s broad back disappearing not into his bedroom but into his study, yellow legal note pad in hand. When Ingraham fell asleep, he knew his host was still working. And what awakened the reporter the next morning-“at some ungodly early hour”- was the smell of bacon and eggs. Hearing him stirring, Mary called up the stairs: “Come on down. Bob’s cooking breakfast.”

It must have helped that Moses was great at talent selection, as Caro attests to many times. Moses also excelled at challenging requirements, perhaps one of the most important skills of a CEO. The ability to push subordinates to justify their proposals (and knowing when to stop) prevents lower rungs of management from slowing you down:

Insisting that the engineers in charge of a project prepare a schedule showing the date on which each of its phases would be completed, Moses would move up the deadlines – by days, by weeks, sometimes by months – until the engineers felt it was absolutely impossible to meet them. And then he insisted that they be met.

Reports one associate: “Hours didn’t mean anything to him… Days of the week didn't mean anything to him. You worked when there was work to be done, that was all.” Meetings ran so late, even on weekends, that staffers longed for Moses to receive a call from his wife – the only thing that would get him to head home.

Robert Moses running a project sounds a lot like founder mode. 

More broadly, though, Moses provides a datapoint on just how fast things can be built. Patrick Collison has noted that many projects have been completed at a pace that seems absurd in hindsight. Caro, assessing Moses’s Long Island parkways and beaches work in the late 1920s, states that “In the history of public works in America, it is probable that never had so much been built so fast.”

There was also a political dimension to speed in completing infrastructure projects. Politicians fully expected infrastructure projects could be delivered within a single term, so that they could get re-elected.

Could the same be said for any such projects today in the Anglosphere? They don’t just last longer than a single election cycle, but sometimes longer than an entire career e.g. HS2 has been planned since 2009, Californian high speed rail has been seriously in the works for about three decades, and the less said about Dublin’s metro system the better. 

The UK faces a lack of physical infrastructure (in the form of houses, roads, and public transport) somewhat like New York in Moses’s day. One can’t help but suspect that even if an enterprising government was to tackle these problems in a serious way, it would take so long that the political benefits would go to someone else. Is it any wonder we don’t build things? 

To be more specific, New York governors had terms that were just 2 years long from 1894 until 1938, when it was extended to 4 years. Mayoral terms were 4 years. These are in fact shorter than the length of a UK parliament – these politicians faced even more time pressure than some politicians today.

Moses was well capable of completing even large, complex projects in just 2 or 3 years, like the first parkways and beaches on Long Island. And, crucially, throughout his career Moses built a steady stream of such projects – there was always a political win just around the corner for the politician who kept him in his various posts. 

Moses does bear correcting, however: one of his tenets was that once stakes were in the ground and construction underway, it was politically impossible to cancel a project because no one wanted to be accused of having wasted money. In 2024, the UK government was willing to cancel swathes of HS2, despite having already bought almost £600m of land required to build it, and even begun some groundwork. The cancellation itself will cost a staggering £100m.

Reflections

In a lot of ways, Moses is an excellent model of How to Get Things Done. His productivity, determination and perhaps most of all, his ambition, surely put him in the top tier of Americans ranked by achievement in the 20th Century.

Moses embodies two of the core values at my old workplace: dig deep and never settle. Digging deep means not accepting surface level answers, and instead pushing until you get to actual hard facts (pretty similar to the now-cliche “first principles thinking”).

Never settling means exactly what it says on the tin. Again and again, Moses kept working away at seemingly insurmountable problems – and, more often than not, he got what he needed.

Tyler Cowen has said that the top founders need to be an A++ in at least one skill, and have a high average across other skills. Caro shows that Moses excelled in a range of areas: legal acumen, talent spotting, salesmanship, stamina, management, leadership. He even had an artist’s eye when it came to the design of many of his projects, adding flourishes and the kind of user-friendly features that a consumer-facing product manager would be proud of.

The master builder of New York is also enjoying somewhat of a rehabilitation in reputation thanks to modern NIMBYism, as seen when American elites discuss the travails of Penn Station. If you believe it’s time to build, then you’re inevitably going to look at Moses with some admiration: here was a man who knew what it took to get desperately needed infrastructure projects done (as ably explained by historian Kenneth Jackson).

Yet we must balance that view with Moses’s morality. It’s hard to make a genuine, overall assessment given that details of Caro’s book are contested by Jackson and others, and not everyone will agree about quite how many corners should be cut when getting things done.

Perhaps at a minimum we can agree that lies are a poor foundation for public works, and result in brittle foundations for whatever you do. Fears about dishonest, Moses-like figures have seen judicial vetos proliferate since the 1970s and contributed to our inability to get things built.

Dominic Cummings has likened Bismarck to artificial intelligence gone wrong; an unbounded intelligence that freely roams and does its own will. Moses, too, took decades to reign in once he was let loose. His fixation on cars, roads, and bridges as a solution to New York’s problems, to a damaging and even absurd extent, almost prefigures the unaligned, paperclip-maximising AI – a remorseless intelligence with the wrong programming.

Learn what you can from him, but be careful about setting him loose.

Roll back the clock, however, and there is a wealth of achievement to celebrate. Belfast has a rich history in industrial and scientific endeavour – what you might dub, in a word, as progress.

Linenopolis

Belfast’s growth as a city in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was thanks, in part, to the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

First it was cotton. Belfast entrepreneur and French Huguenot descendant Robert Joy visited Britain in 1777 to find employment ideas for ‘poorhouse’ inmates. Seeing an opportunity in cotton, he copied the innovations of Richard Arkwright and began a water-powered cotton mill. The mill spun cotton thread using the power of the river, automating a process which had previously been laboriously carried out by hand. Things soon took off:

The number of cotton spinning jennies in Belfast had leaped from 25 in 1782 to 229 in 1791. The machine-spun thread was sent to handloom weavers, working in their own homes but paid by the employers; by 1791 there were 522 looms weaving cotton in Belfast… within a 10 mile radius of Belfast, £192,000 was invested in the cotton industry [around £13 million in 2024 prices], which provided work for 13,500 people. The first industrial revolution had arrived in Ireland, and it was in Belfast that it took its firmest hold.1

Belfast’s cotton peak was as late as 1825, with 21 mills employing over 3,500 people.2 They were at the cutting edge of automation and technological deployment at the time. Disaster struck, however, when a six storey mill burned down in an accident, but sensing the economic winds changing, its owners replaced it with a flax mill instead.3 Another British inventor, James Kay, invented a technique that allowed flax, the source fibre for linen, to be likewise spun by machines. Belfast picked the right time to get into this booming industry.

Only two mills spun flax by power in Belfast in 1830 but by 1846 there were 24 mills. Before 1830 all of Ireland exported not more than 4.5 million pounds of yarn a year; from Belfast alone 9 million pounds were exported in 1857 and 28 million pounds in the boom years of 1865.4

In the mid-1860s, the American Civil War led to a drop in raw cotton exports as the southern states were devastated, and Lancashire cotton mills were left unable to spin, leading to a slump in cotton production. Belfast firms took advantage of the resulting boom in linen, cotton’s nearest substitute, utilising new power looms for linen-weaving. The city had 80% of the spindles and 70% of the power looms in Ireland in 1870, cementing its dominance as the ‘greatest centre of linen production in the world.’5

The lesson of the cotton and linen industries is that Belfast can benefit from the innovations of other places, implementing and scaling them up. Railways were similarly built across Ireland at a similar time, another case of importing the best ideas from elsewhere to Belfast’s benefit.

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Shipbuilding

Victorian Belfast wasn’t just a one-hit industrial wonder, however. The nineteenth century saw an increase in the volume of global trade and the number of ships, and Britain, still in its imperial heyday, benefitted hugely, increasing demand for ships. At the same time, the shift from wooden shipbuilding to iron saw the UK’s shipping industry – previously spread across the country’s ports – concentrated in Glasgow, Newcastle, Sunderland, and Belfast.6 Shipbuilding thus took over from textiles as the city’s most important export in the late nineteenth century.

Today it’s hard to envisage the sheer scale of Belfast’s shipbuilding industry, employing tens of thousands of men at its peak in enormous drydocks and slipways. The city’s advantage in the industry was borne in large part due to cheap labour, compensating for its relative distance from coal deposits in the north of England. It was aided by various engineering work on the harbour itself, reshaping it, adding channels, docks, and quays, often aided by government support. This process even included land reclamation in 1849, under the supervision of railway engineer William Dargan.

Harland and Wolff was the leading company of its day:

H&W was born out of a small struggling shipyard… which began to trade as ‘Harland and Wolff’ in 1861. In the 30 years that followed, the growth of the company rocketed the shipyard from its original size of 1.5 acres to a new 80 acre site, while the number of employees rose from 100 to 10,000 men.7

Harland and Wolff later built RMS Titanic in 1909-1912. At that point they were the largest shipyard anywhere; as one Belfast historian put it, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was ‘indisputably the greatest shipbuilding firm in the world.’8 Along with another Belfast firm, Workman Clark, they were responsible for a full 8 per cent of global shipbuilding. Considering the importance of ships in the early twentieth century, one could put Harland and Wolff in a similar category to Boeing or Ford today as perhaps the leading manufacturer in a key transport industry. The hype around Titanic and other ocean liners, with crowds gathering to witness their launch, is somewhat reminiscent of a rocket launch today – and Belfast was the leading city for that whole industry.

Success in shipbuilding also helped seed a burgeoning engineering industry in Belfast, from stable house fittings to ventilation and fan manufacturing, and, naturally, the production of spinning and flax machinery as well as agricultural machinery.9 John Boyd Dunlop, a veterinary surgeon, invented the first working pneumatic tyre in Belfast, and started a tire brand which still exists today. The parallels to Los Angeles’s growing hardtech startup scene today – downstream of SpaceX – are obvious.

Belfast’s shipyards later faced a decline similar to those of another British imperial city, Glasgow (not to mention similar declines in Sunderland and Kent). Today H&W employs only a fraction of the men it once did, and faces financial difficulties. The twenty-first century’s largest shipbuilding companies are almost entirely based in East Asia, where other countries have used the industry as an economic stepping stone much as Belfast (and the UK) did.

The textiles lesson – importing innovations from other places – certainly applies in this shipbuilding context too. But there are others: like its cotton and linen, Belfast exported these ships abroad, making something that the world really wanted.

The success of firms like Harland and Wolff was also driven by ambitious entrepreneurs – exactly the kind of spirit behind the most fast-growing and valuable companies today. Samuel Smiles, author of nineteenth century bestseller Self-Help, cited the wealthy Harland as an example of the rewards to hard work.10 (Harland even contributed a chapter to one of Smiles’s books.)

An underlying lesson is that great things are possible; Belfast’s coastline was literally reshaped to boost the shipbuilding industry.

Science, knowledge, and small groups

Belfast’s endeavours in the Victorian era also extended to intellectual spheres. 

Take, for example, the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, founded in 1821. Its eight founding members leveraged Belfast’s increasingly international connections to begin collecting antiquities and natural history specimens from around the world. This later culminated in the opening of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society Museum – Ireland’s first purpose-built museum – in 1831, thanks to a large donation from the city’s merchants and public subscriptions.11

The Society’s members were also involved in the establishment of the Botanic Gardens in 1828. John Templeton, the 'father of Irish botany', was a key promoter of the project. An infovore who was focused on the natural world, he was the first to catalogue a range of Irish species, and corresponded with the leading botanists of his day. Later, in 1889, Charles McKimm, head gardener in the Gardens added a Tropical Ravine. Today it includes a temperate zone, with lots of ferns in particular, and a more tropical area, holding plants that wouldn’t otherwise survive in Ireland’s climate:

The collection of plants that is grown in the Tropical Ravine is based on a 1904 plant list. Some of the plants inside, for example the cycads, are over 200 years old and endangered in their native habitat. The tropical ravine is where the giant waterlily, Victoria Amazonica, was grown in Ireland for the first time in 1852 and is still planted each year. The banana stumpery has been there from the early 1900s and the bananas were used to feed patients in Musgrave Hospital during the First World War.12

The Tropical Ravine was extended with a second section in 1900. This section was kept warmer than the original ravine and used for tropical plants rather than temperate species. Another extension was built in 1902 to install a heated pond to grow the giant water lily from South America. These alterations added 76 feet in length to the Tropical Ravine.13

Plant species include the Killarney fern, orchid, banana, cinnamon, bromeliad and some of the world’s oldest seed plants.

There were many other nineteenth century societies including: the Industrial School, the Literary Society, the Cosmographical Society, the Belfast Medical Society, the Mechanics Institute, and the Female Society for the Clothing of the Poor.14 This non-exhaustive list hints that those societies which were not scholarly were instead focused on the improvement of society.

And let’s not forget the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge, founded in the late eighteenth century body aimed at the ‘collection of an extensive Library, philosophical apparatus and such products of nature and art as tend to improve the mind and excite a spirit of general enquiry.’ Today it is known as the Linen Hall Library – the oldest library in Ireland – and still operates on a partly subscription-based model.

Belfast residents happily formed these groups in an era when the average person was much less educated, and vastly fewer resources were directed towards universities and research.

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Today

In 2024, Belfast is definitely on a positive trajectory, with increasing tourism and growing employment in the financial services industry especially. There is cause for optimism.

Yet the city is some way off its peak, as the examples above indicate. There isn’t the same ferment today, a focus on improvement and development – a fixation on progress. Belfast has ample reason to be ambitious, improving on its current standing in the world by importing the best ideas and technologies from around the world, scaling them up. Its storied history shows it can be done.

If you are interested in a Belfast-based reading group focused on economic growth and scientific progress, please reply to this email, comment below, or send me a DM on Twitter.

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Observers of American culture and politics soon become aware of the Bible Belt, a swathe of southern states with a strong adherence to evangelical Christianity. Less known is that the UK has its own corresponding Bible Belt, in Northern Ireland. Its epicentre is Ballymena, my hometown.

The American Bible Belt has a high share of adults who believe in God, and a high share (50% or more) who report that religion is very important. Data for Northern Ireland in general is spottier, but anecdotally, those figures probably replicate.

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The theology in both Bible Belts is decidedly conservative and evangelical. That means that there is a strong emphasis on the Bible, the importance of conversion, the atoning work of Jesus on the cross, and a global mission of sharing Christianity with others.

Both regions also have a history of revivals, i.e. periods when there is a sudden increase in the number of Christians, often linked to large public gatherings. Going to a public gathering where someone speaks about the Bible is socially normal in the Bible Belt, but might be unheard of elsewhere.

Scale and money

The genuine differences between the two are more subtle. First, the market in churches in Northern Ireland is a lot shallower – people often simply go to the church their parents went to, or have enough ties to a church that they won’t switch. People like to live near where they grew up and don’t move away particularly often. For example, there are war memorials in the church I grew up in – the surnames on the wall are the same surnames that you’ll find among the attendees today. It’s hard to argue that a new church is needed, let alone make it work in practice.

The fact that there are fewer new churches in Ballymena means that change is much slower. For better or for worse, teaching and style of delivery can resemble what it did decades ago, and older buildings are less amenable to fancy lighting and smoke machines. This is also a question of money (more on that below).

Charismatic churches are still very much the minority in Ballymena, again partly a result of fewer new churches. There are other important factors here too though: Ulster Protestants aren’t known for their expressiveness, especially compared to Americans, so charismatic practices such as concert-like services and speaking in tongues are plausibly less of a fit than in the U.S.

In the American Bible Belt, by contrast, there are dozens of new churches. For whatever reason – shallower family roots, consumer mentality, social changes, ambition, moving home – Americans are generally happy to switch between churches, so there is a ready constituency who will happily go along to a new church. Growing sunbelt cities have been a great opportunity for new churches, with Rick Warren’s Saddleback church one of the most prominent examples.

However, the most important single difference between the two areas is money. There is significantly more wealth in the U.S. than in Northern Ireland. In a church context, this is worked out in the size of church staff (effectively always multiple full time staff members), the size of church buildings, staff salaries, and the general wealth of each church.

In the U.S., while this money often goes to evangelistic work or foreign aid (as it does in Northern Ireland), it also gets spent locally. For example, one of the bigger churches in Tulsa, Oklahoma – a leading city in the U.S. Bible Belt – recently bought an office building for $35 million.

Megachurches are quite common in the U.S. too. With attendees in the multiple thousands, they tend to have concert or broadcast levels of production and media, and their pastors are often very influential in American Christianity. Joel Osteen’s church, for example, hits 45,000 visitors a week.

In Ballymena, churches have enough money, but their attendees are not particularly well off. There are few rich businesspeople who can sustain extremely ambitious projects, despite generous giving by the rank and file. As a result, the churches tend to be small (500 attendees would be on the larger end), and don’t tend to have more than one staff member.

The megachurch model doesn’t work in Northern Ireland. One Ballymena church tried to do this – it built a large, brand new building at the edge of a town, partly funded by a growing congregation but also by the family of the pastor, who ran a profitable manufacturing business. However, they eventually ran out of money, haemorrhaged attendees, and seem to be struggling to complete the building.

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Alike in dignity

Perhaps the most important underlying similarity between the two regions is, in fact, the people who live there. The distribution of Scots-Irish overlaps with the U.S. Bible Belt, a population that was drawn from Ulster in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. These Scots-Irish, like their cousins in Northern Ireland, have an honour-based culture, where personal insults are often resolved through physical violence. They might be more Baptist than Presbyterian nowadays, but the underlying theology remains evangelical in character.

This brings us neatly to contemporary politics. The Bible Belt states voted for Trump in 2016 (see the map) and 2020, and will do so again in 2024. For what it’s worth, the affection for Trump is replicated in parts of Northern Ireland too:

Northern Ireland has its own religious-political complex, but it’s worth noting that in both countries, politics is as much a cultural competitor with religion as it is an expression of it.

Take J. D. Vance, Trump’s VP pick. He’s from Kentucky, and explicitly acknowledged his Scots-Irish ancestry in the opening of his memoir. Aaron Renn recently dug out this 2016 comment by Vance:

Vance: The second thing is that we tend to think of these areas as the Bible Belt, where everyone is going to church and everyone is actively involved in religious community. That’s not that true.

If you look at the statistics and see some of the things I’ve seen, you recognize that these people, despite being very religious and having their Christian faith as something important to them, aren’t attending church that much. They don’t have that much of a connection to a traditional religious institution.

Religion is important. That conception is right. But religion is quirky, and it’s not traditionally practiced in religious institutions.

Religious adherence might be deep in the culture, but not in the modern practice of Americans in the Bible Belt. Politics helps keep religion salient as a form of identity in Northern Ireland, but that might change too.

Fundamentally, both groups are unhappy by disposition, happiest when they are complaining (I cherish this curmudgeonly attitude, which I personally share. It’s accompanied by personal warmth and hospitality). The American Bible Belt has, for better or worse, found a champion fit for the 21st century in the form of Donald Trump. He expresses their discontent. Their cousins in Northern Ireland, as yet, have no equivalent. 

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I recently visited Singapore, in part to test that thesis.

State competence

First, Singapore’s reputation for incredible state efficiency is well-earned. Take transport and infrastructure: any service I used in public worked, ran on time, and was clean, from the MRT to road infrastructure. I tried quite hard but couldn’t identify a single pothole anywhere I went.

The big picture political situation in Singapore helps with this. The system is very stable, and political leaders feel comfortable making decisions which will pay off in the long run. They (or their handpicked successors) will be around to reap the rewards of doing so.

For example, there is a multi-decade plan for land reclamation off the south eastern coast of Singapore. The language is surprising similar to Western infrastructure projects: the government is consulting “stakeholders” including businesses and the local community. The work is going in to make sure people are willing for this to happen (though one does suspect that there is less legal scope for NIMBYism than in the UK).

One advantage of these long term, stable plans is that people can plan their entire careers – and lives – around this work. When it comes to infrastructure in particular, this means the state knows it’s worthwhile to retain or develop expertise internally rather than rely on consultants. The Transit Costs project cites lack of civil service capacity and excessive/poor use of consultants as a driver of high infrastructure costs in certain countries (pp24-25 here).

Singaporean competence isn’t limited to the private sector, of course — it’s evidenced across their government. I met a range of Singaporean government officials, and they were uniformly excellent.

It’s very tempting to see the state as solving all of Singapore’s problems, which then makes one yearn for state competence and execution in the UK. To take a simple example, the chain of command in Singapore is clear. Singaporeans are willing to contact their politicians when something goes wrong for them. For example, seeing a rat in your (government-run) housing block might prompt you to contact your local MP.

This superficially resembles the UK, where people are very happy to complain to elected officials, except it’s not even clear who you should speak to: your MP? Councillor? Mayor? MEP? Minster? Secretary of State? All of these people have overlapping responsibilities, and often don’t know themselves which levers to pull to change the system.

Meanwhile, in Singapore, the MP and political system largely know how to address people’s concerns and solve their problems. They speak to the right people and make sure things get fixed – that’s how the PAP retains popular support and political power.

Excessive focus on the chain of command, however, obscures a simple fact: the whole of Singaporean society has bought into the state’s vision. It’s a team effort; great thinking at the top doesn’t automatically lead to clean streets and trains that run on time.

In practice, this means that the population is supportive of the PAP, works hard, and even prays for FDI and national productivity.

Cultural questions

All of this means that culture is actually at the heart of Singapore: it’s the special sauce that gets everything to work. As a friend put it:

When you come to Singapore[…] having read much Lee Kuan Yew in advance — it felt oddly natural to think of this place as something above and beyond, as existing outside the normal way of the world, as something cyberpunk, as something novel. While obviously not the “Orient” in the traditional and romantic way, I had inchoately wondered whether it would offer an alien experience.

But it didn't. It seems in general to be running the same software as everyone in the developed world, just with a special degree of polish and in an Asian context. Less Disneyland with the Death Penalty so much as Canary Wharf in a Sauna.

The secret is that there is no secret; Singapore simply tries. It applies Western methods of government with a genuine focus on competence and results i.e. meritocracy. And it works!

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An important additional question after meritocracy is that of commerce. Singaporeans really believe in it:

So when Peranakan culture was combined with the British Enlightenment model of governance in the 19th century, the result was truly unique. A set of cultural institutions characterized by positive attitudes towards commerce, innovation and globalization was combined with robust political economy in the form of strong rule of law, property rights and free trade.

The wealth that results from this heady mix of culture and political economy helps to cover a multitude of sins – consider the land reclamation above: it’s an incredibly expensive way to deal with rising sea levels, but considering the actions of other countries, it’s actually the only option. Good thing Singapore can afford it.1

I’m not sure how this should this make us feel. Optimistically, if Singapore is different because they actually try, then it should be easy for us to get back to that kind of excellence; it doesn’t require wholesale changes to our governmental structure or society. We are already supposed to believe in competence over rule by divine right.

On the other hand, if they have the same form of government from us on the surface, then maybe there really is something deeper that drives their good outcomes – and that might be harder for us to change, perhaps even impossible.

The Singaporean state’s excellence shouldn’t just be an excuse to sit back and criticise the government, however. Instead we should get up and solve our own problems. For example, if someone dumps waste in one’s locality, maybe one should just clean it up rather than wait for the government to do it? Or if you don’t like local schools, maybe you can band together with others and set up a free school? Communities in the United States have a strong tradition of solving their own problems — in other words, building — and there’s no reason the rest of the West can’t start to do the same.

I am a Protestant, so this disappoints me. I can think of a few reasons why Protestantism struggles among intellectuals, especially in contrast to Catholicism:

Anti-intellectualism: Protestantism often has a reputation for being anti-intellectual. This has very much not been my experience, but sadly it is true of some people and churches. By contrast, Catholicism has a strong intellectual culture – perhaps at times too strong – and it’s not seen as intellectually questionable to adhere to it.

Lack of ‘woo’ in Protestantism: this depends heavily on the kind of Protestant church you go to. Some charismatic churches have people speaking in tongues and music close to that of a concert. However, mainline and conservative churches tend to have a very strait-laced service, with few bells or incense and a focus on the content of the sermon. If you are looking for a sensory experience when you go to church each Sunday, this ain’t it.

Secularism: many Catholics blame Protestantism and its intellectual descendants for the Enlightenment, and therefore identity politics and all the things they don’t like about the modern Left. There are lots of progressive Protestant churches, which seem to confirm this thesis. There are also plenty of counter-examples, though, especially among conservative evangelicalism. 

These differences aren’t limited to Protestantism – if you read a few Ross Douthat columns, it seems there are plenty of conservative and non-conservative factions with Catholicism.

Relatedly, Protestantism largely embraces modernity, and many right-leaning intellectuals are decidedly against it. In Protestantism, family sizes are often smaller, ministers can get married, democracy is ok, individuals can interpret the Bible themselves rather than needing the church to do it, transubstantiation doesn’t happen, and more. Catholicism, by contrast, often involves significant changes in opposition to modern culture on all of those fronts (though not on every single front; they have often encouraged innovations like workers’ rights).

Aesthetics and high culture: Catholicism embraces images and has a strong view of high culture; it has a strong visual culture to draw on and lots of music. Protestants eschew images almost entirely and instead focus on the words of the Bible; high culture isn’t very high status and there isn’t loads of culture in general that’s decidedly Protestant.

There are a few things that can cut either way: family ties often pull people back to a religion, but plenty of intellectuals come from Protestant backgrounds. Catholicism is so counter-cultural as to be cool for some people, but there are plenty of people online who act like being Protestant is trendy too. Scandals have beset both Protestant and Catholic churches in recent years (it’s difficult to judge whether other religions have had similar problems). Ceremony is another attraction to Catholicism, but there are plenty of Protestant denominations who offer liturgical or even ‘high’ church practices.

Geography is a mixed bag. Most intellectuals are based in large cities, especially New York, Washington D.C., and London. The reality is that there simply aren’t loads of healthy Protestant churches there – they are most common in non-urban, non-coastal areas. There’s a reason that Tim Keller moving to plant an evangelical church in New York City was such a big deal at the time. But there are definitely some Protestant churches if you look for them, because those cities are big enough that there is demand for virtually every religion. They might just be harder to find.

Politics aren’t very explanatory here. You could say that conservative evangelicals are tainted by Trump, but most of these people aren’t exactly progressive even before they convert!

I’ve mainly focused on the comparison with Catholicism here, because I’m most familiar with it, but the LDS church is in some ways more modern than Protestantism and they rank higher on Tyler’s list. I don’t know loads about contemporary Judaism, but the existence of the state of Israel perhaps gives the religion a bit more of a temporal feel. Eastern Orthodox feels like a more mystical, iconographical version of Catholicism in this context, but its footprint in the West feels very light. None of these three are strong forces in the UK or Ireland and personally I don’t know any converts to them.

Even though different Protestant denominations compensate for at least some of the possible downsides I outlined above, neither Charismatic, Reformed (conservative evangelical), nor mainline churches seem to have gained many converts from the intellectual classes. These denominations are thriving in the non-Western world among ordinary people, by contrast.

Having said all that, I have to admit this post speculative. I’m more familiar with evangelicals ‘deconstructing’ and leaving church altogether than I am with non-religious people finding God. So if you’re a religious convert, I’m keen to hear what I’ve missed…

To make this happen, NI needs a lot more private sector activity. Dynamic economies are driven by successful businesses, not government spending. 

However, a thriving private sector will have consequences, and one of those is the hyper-rich. The owners of successful businesses, especially the founders of startups, are liable to become very well-off as their firms grow.

These billionaires are a consequence of modern economic development, so it’s no surprise that Northern Ireland has hardly any of them right now: only Lady Ballyedmond, who owns pharmaceutical giant Norbrook, and Stephen Fitzpatrick, CEO of UK retail energy company Ovo, fit the bill (and Fitzpatrick lives in England, so he only half counts).

Some rough statistics: with a population of around 1.9m, Northern Ireland has one billionaire for every 950,000 people. The rest of the UK has around 175 billionaires and a population of about 65m, so they have a billionaire for every 370,000 people or so – 2.5 times more billionaires per capita.

The mainstream perception of billionaires is generally quite negative; they are variously described by the media as the source of the world’s ills, from fascism to climate change. Perhaps their greatest perceived sin is their very existence, which itself generates economic inequality. One might argue, then, that billionaires are an unfortunate, unhelpful consequence of economic growth. Almost everyone wants a booming economy and more jobs, so we have to accept the existence of the hyper-rich.

No. A new class of billionaires would be great for Northern Ireland for a whole host of reasons – and it’s worth specifying why.

Employment

One of Northern Ireland’s biggest economic problems is productivity, i.e. the average output per hour worked. The stats here are fairly grim: NI is the UK’s worst region for productivity, lagging far behind the UK average, but also significantly behind the Republic of Ireland:

What does this actually mean? On average, when someone from Northern Ireland works, they are generating less economic value than people in the rest of the UK. Their wages are therefore lower, and people are poorer.  

Billionaires would help here. They typically conduct economic activities that generate more high paying jobs; anything from interior designers to corporate lawyers, from construction to high end concierge services. (They will also spend money on services like restaurants, which aren’t bad but won’t improve productivity figures – those jobs are less likely to be paid above average salaries.)

As mentioned, billionaires’ wealth is typically built through the creation of new businesses – startups – or the expansion of existing ones. It’s hard to build a new billion-pound business that’s premised on paying its employees a bad wage – in fact, startups and big businesses are often where people can go for some of the best compensation available for their work. What’s more, many billionaires are serial entrepreneurs and use wealth made from one business to build the next one – that means more jobs.

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Tax receipts

In addition to the tax revenue generated from new jobs billionaires create, they will also pay taxes on their own incomes. This is extremely significant in a progressive tax system (i.e. where those with higher incomes are taxed at a higher rate than those with lower incomes), as rich people pay a greater share of overall tax receipts than poor people. As the UK government notes, ‘The 10% of income taxpayers with the largest incomes contribute over 60% of income tax receipts.’

Of course, billionaires don’t necessarily have high incomes, they have high wealth, which is taxed differently. There are other ways of taxing wealth, such as capital gains tax. However, the tax receipts on the money that billionaires do spend, such as VAT on a fancy new car or yacht, also provides revenue for the government.

Admittedly Northern Ireland doesn’t benefit directly from taxes it collects, as they go to the UK government, which then sends back government funding. In 2021 Northern Ireland’s government had overall tax revenue of £16.6bn, and expenditures of £34.6bn; in other words, NI is dependent on the UK. More billionaires can help us cut that huge deficit.

One might argue that billionaires are insufficiently taxed overall, and pay lower effective rates, especially when they construct complex financial schemes in order to minimise their tax bill. This might be true, but even if it is, more billionaires paying any taxes would increase the tax receipts of the government and allow them to lower taxes on the poorest people. (Check out this list of what the UK’s top taxpayers actually pay.)

Investment & innovation

Northern Ireland already has a startup scene, and investment in it has risen in recent years. However, it’s striking that the majority of the funding comes from outside the country. Startups won’t stick around in Northern Ireland, or get started, if there is no funding for them! They will want to move closer to venture capitalists (who can fund them), talent pools (that they can hire from), and larger markets (that they can sell in). NI will never be ‘best in class’ on all those fronts, but there’s no reason it can’t take steps to be as good as possible.

As mentioned at the start of this essay, billionaires are a consequence of a growing economy. But they can also help the economy to grow more; more billionaires in Northern Ireland means more people who will set up VC firms and fund new companies via angel investments. This won’t create Lough Silicon overnight – there are other helpful policies that could be adopted, like tax incentives – but it will help the scene keep growing.

More subtly, the proximity of billionaires will help raise the aspirations of local talent – if you can see a billionaire in the flesh, perhaps even see how they work, some will realise that they can do that too. 

There are plenty of small countries with strong tech scenes. Israel has 9.4m people and Singapore has 5.5m, but the best comparison is Estonia, with only 1.3m people but around 300 active angel investors and 8 VC funds, resulting in 10(!) unicorns. And to their disadvantage, they have a large geopolitical enemy right on their doorstep. A strong tech scene is definitely doable for Northern Ireland!

It’s worth noting that startups are also responsible for a lot of the innovation in society. It was OpenAI who released ChatGPT, Uber who got us ordering taxis on our phones, Monzo who got us banking on our phones, Airbnb who got us staying in houses not hotels, etc. More startups means we should see more innovation like this – and if they start in Northern Ireland, the benefits of that innovation might go to us first. Imagine if Northern Irish hospitals were the first to use a pioneering new cancer treatment? Or the world’s first small modular nuclear reactor?

More broadly, it’s new ideas that generate economic growth and wealth for everyone. The world will benefit if we can get more startups going in Northern Ireland, and more billionaires will help.

Philanthropy & culture

Billionaires don’t just invest their wealth, they also give it away. Bill Gates is perhaps the most prominent example of this, though many other wealthy elites have signed the giving pledge.

I want to focus on two examples from the US of what philanthropy can look like locally. There is lots of need around the world, but it’s fair to say that need exists locally too, so I would fully expect that billionaires would engage in philanthropy in their locality too, especially if they’re from the area.

The Walton family, based in Northwest Arkansas and owners of Walmart, are worth some $200bn. Founder Sam Walton’s daughter, Alice, established the Crystal Bridges Museum, the first new major art museum in the US since 1974. Her overall donations to the museum have topped $300m. And it’s free to enter! Walton has also donated millions to food banks, healthcare initiatives, and other art-related projects.

The wider Walton family are engaged in various philanthropic efforts both in Arkansas and further afield. They haven’t signed the giving pledge, as far as I can see, but it’s great that they’re doing something. The family foundation website even has a theory of change for how they are going to build Northwest Arkansas into a place of real opportunity. I can say with confidence that the only theory of change people have in Northern Ireland is birth rates. A sprinkling of billionaires would help inculcate the kind of ambitious projects necessary to change NI for the better. More tourist attractions like the Titanic museum would also help to put us on the map.

Nearby, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, George B. Kaiser was one of the first people to sign the giving pledge. His family have been active in philanthropy in the city for some time, as Trevor Klee notes:

The Tulsa Community Foundation (or, more specifically, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and, to a lesser extent, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation, as TCF is just a house for these family foundations) have spent enormous amounts of money trying to make Tulsa a better place to live. They’ve built multiple beautiful parks (including one incredible one called the Gathering Place), a children’s museum, revitalized downtown, launched scores of programs to improve the lives of Tulsa’s underprivileged children, created Tulsa Remote (which offers $10k and relocation assistance for any remote worker to move to Tulsa for one year), and funded a bunch of different business assistance programs. And all of this is just off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s a lot I don’t know about.

It would be great if someone created Derry Remote, paying people with high-paying jobs to move to Northern Ireland’s relatively impoverished and underserved second city. Or how about birthright trips for people born abroad with a connection to Northern Ireland? The Republic of Ireland has done a great job of tapping into its diaspora, but Northern Ireland has barely even tried.

Along different lines, it would be interesting to see a bunch of rich people get involved in local sports leagues and invest in them. The owner of Larne F.C. offers a great example. Imagine if more local football clubs like Ballymena United were able to produce a really compelling product so that attendance increased. I suspect the impact on the economic fortunes – in fact, even just the vibes – in these small towns could be vastly improved by having a thriving sports scene. It might even help us stop bowling alone (or watching Netflix).

Shared benefits

Few people would oppose a thriving private sector for Northern Ireland, but it’s actually the second order effects of that which are perhaps the most exciting. The new wealth generated by these firms – much of it directed and reallocated by billionaires – could help make Northern Ireland a great place to live. Let’s embrace that opportunity.

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Buildings

If you love gentle density you will love Amsterdam. There are miles and miles of city streets like this:

There wasn’t much architectural variation across the city though — if you walked around for a while you definitely had the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that it was all kind of the same. Edinburgh, though beautiful, is a bit like this too.

Cologne was similarly uniform, except the buildings there are much more drab, and at times ugly. The city was completely flattened by RAF bombs in WWII and rebuilt afterwards.

Perhaps few cities can match the architectural variety of London? Antwerp might come close. Happily, it is willing to build a large block of apartments or offices in the middle of the city, even adjoining more traditional buildings. The pale colours somehow make me think of Miami or maybe Beirut.

Cycling

Dutch people love to cycle — crossing the street is a great test for your peripheral vision. However, in Amsterdam in particular, it was far from obvious where people were actually cycling to. There is no central business district, and the low density distributed housing means that there aren’t even any obvious office blocks. The ratio of people outdoors to indoors was never quite right; there were always more people cycling than the busyness of shops and restaurants would imply. Perhaps young idle Dutch are paid to cycle around the city and make it look bustling for tourists…

My casual impression was that Dutch people tended to be quite fit and healthy; there were few overweight people. When you actually look at the statistics, though, Dutch people are not actually significantly less obese than British people (29% in the UK vs 23% in the Netherlands), and both countries are on a similar trend line.1

Energy

Rooftop solar panels seemed pretty well deployed in the Netherlands, easily spotted on farm roofs. Around 20% of households (1.5m of 8m) in the country have solar panels, and the Dutch are rolling it out rapidly. Belgium lags somewhat with 7% of households, but the UK is a rather poor 3-4% of households. Latitude does matter of course, but much of southern England has similar irradiation to the Netherlands:

However, it was on wind that Belgium really put the UK to shame. Antwerp has a riverfront which is absolutely dominated on one side by a wind farm:

Clearly they don’t see this as incompatible with the city being pretty or liveable; they are redeveloping a section of the waterfront which is well in view of the turbines. The port’s history and economic importance (Europe’s second largest container port after Rotterdam) may help its case here.

The contrast with the UK is stark. New wind turbines are de facto illegal in England, and it’s scarcely imaginable that a bunch could be built so close to a city. ‘Landscape and visual impact’ concerns can be used by local governments (or even lone individuals) to kill projects.

Walk further down the river and you’ll see various other port industries, including a gas flare on the far left:

Dan Wang has written on how China’s strong emphasis on the physical aspects of technology are in sharp contrast to the West, where social media companies rule and the lived environment has largely stopped changing. New skylines in the UK would be one indication that its economic prospects are improving.

Misc.

A tour of the underground fortifications in Maastricht was a particular highlight. I’ve been to plenty of medieval castles and Roman sites, but I can’t recall visiting anything from the Napoleonic era. Wandering through the actual structures from the 18th century is pretty cool.

Also recommended:

• Cycling from Maastricht to Valkenburg

• Walking around the Jewish district of Antwerp. A window into what many parts of Europe were like before WWII. The main industry is diamonds, and there is clearly some inter-ethnic competition with newly arrived Indian jewellers.

• Cologne Cathedral. Took six centuries to complete.

• Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts (recently renovated). Organised by theme. The Brueghel paintings are particularly good.

Food

For some reason Australian ice cream seems to be very popular in Belgium?

The most exotic food I had was rijsttafel, a colonial Dutch dish made up of multiple small dishes:

Belgian and Dutch food is broadly similar to British food: lots of potatoes, beef, root vegetables. I was particularly intrigued by bitterballen, essentially lumps of stew that are refrigerated, rolled into balls and fried.

Croquettes mashed into bread were also very nice (if not very aesthetically pleasing):

There has to be an opportunity to bring these to the UK and Ireland. It’s hearty food that you might enjoy on a winter’s day, and it’s not really that different from what British/Irish people are used to. Bitterballen could be rebranded as ‘deep fried Irish stew’…

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Separately, I’m now spending more time working on the Fitzwilliam, thanks to a generous grant from Emergent Ventures. Pitches are very welcome, either in my Twitter DMs or via email: fergus@thefitzwilliam.com. Or just say hello!

The Fitzwilliam

New ideas for Ireland

By Fitzwilliam Staff