AI does not need to reach AGI (which is at least 20 years away, not 2029) to be transformative; its value lies in being flexible, cost-efficient, scalable and 'good enough,' which is already collapsing hiring—e.g., a bank that hired 500 graduates to end with 20-30 will progressively hire 100 to get 10, then 50 to get 2.

Universal basic income, supported by figures like Musk and Sergey Brin, is not a giveaway to make people lazy but a 'compensation for irrelevance'—a necessary mechanism to maintain aggregate demand and customers once technology has displaced human labor.

America's high productivity and competitiveness come bundled with brutal social outcomes—citizens living 5-7 years less than peer developed countries, infant mortality 2-3x higher, maternal mortality 6-8x higher, and incarceration rates ~50x higher (comparable to Turkmenistan, Cuba, Nicaragua)—raising the question of whether such 'deaths and blood' are the necessary price of that productivity.

A 1937 compilation of ideas from Mussolini's, Stalin's and New Deal economists shows that across communism, fascism and the New Deal the consensus had shifted from 'whether to plan' to 'how to plan'—and the same is true today: regardless of label, all systems now agree government must become far more involved.

Volcker's true legacy is creating the modern financial world: the ratio of financial instruments to GDP rose from roughly 1-1.5x in Volcker's era (when velocity of money was stable, as Friedman assumed) to ~2:1 by the Greenspan put, 3:1 under Bernanke, 5:1 under Yellen, and ~6:1 today—an understated figure ignoring unfunded liabilities and ~$30 trillion of private capital.

Neoliberalism has died and discredited itself, and as government becomes more involved in directing capital, the differences between Western economies and China are shrinking; the modern political spectrum is no longer freedom vs slavery but how much freedom to sacrifice—so in effect 'we are all socialist now,' the right merely more nationalistic and exclusive than the left.

Markets assign the US (and India) a low equity risk premium because investors reward structural strengths—sound economy and corporate sector—while discounting dysfunctional politics, whereas Europe gets a high risk premium because investors penalize its structural weaknesses without crediting its offsetting strengths.

The choice of New York's young, charismatic socialist mayor (Mamdani) over the traditional Cuomo, with everyone under ~45 voting for him and over-45s for Cuomo, exemplifies the generational shift toward acceptance of price/rent controls, free buses and state-supported grocery stores.

The younger generation born from roughly the early 1990s onward are far closer in values to their great-grandparents (Depression/WWII survivors) than to baby boomers—wanting community and support, willing to sacrifice rights, skeptical of democracy—and will become electoral majorities around 2025-2032, at which point they will get the policies they want, as boomers eventually did.

The difference between deindustrialized Detroit (now one of the poorest US cities) and deindustrialized Melbourne (now rivaling Sydney in wealth) is not race but policy: Australia introduced compulsory superannuation, single-payer Medicare with private options, government-funded forgivable education and TAFE vocational training—so caring for pensions, health, education and trades keeps people less angry and avoids polarization.

Per a McKinsey estimate, the information age affects roughly 300 times the 'waterfront' of areas the industrial revolution did, and proceeds about 10 times faster, yielding an overall impact roughly 3,000 times that of the industrial revolution.

The information age can be dated precisely to 1971 with the first usable computers and the first Intel chips, but it did not propagate until the early 1990s and only became truly disruptive in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

Computers and modern finance were both 'born' in the 1970s (finance freed by the end of capital controls) but did not meet until the late 1990s, when their marriage produced new instruments like ETFs.

The next decade or two could be the most transformative period the human race has experienced since the agricultural revolution, because unlike prior industrial or mercantile revolutions we are changing nearly all relationships—industries, sectors, personal and social relationships—simultaneously rather than just one or two sets.

AI as a general-purpose technology will move beyond manipulating data to transforming the physical world via robotics, automation, 3D printing and biotech—e.g., printed houses in 24 hours for $10-20k displacing 5-10% of the construction labor force, printed aircraft parts replacing 'one factory of the world' (China) with 30,000 distributed factories at very low marginal cost.

Historically, the most disruptive 'world on fire' periods occur when technology and finance change simultaneously alongside other stressors (climate, pandemics, demographics); when all these forces converge in a short period—as in the 1920s-30s and today—the disruption becomes nearly unavoidable.

No general-purpose technology that transforms the world ever progresses without a financial bubble; bubbles are a necessary condition for such technologies to scale and reshape the world.

Technological revolutions follow a U-shaped multifactor-productivity curve: when a general-purpose technology arrives, productivity rises in a few niches but the rest of the economy 'dies one cut at a time,' so aggregate productivity falls; only after businesses and society adjust does productivity eventually mushroom across the economy.

Because human self-worth is based on how others perceive our value, and technology is steadily reducing the marginal utility and marginal cost of human labor, this drives a long-term decline in average human economic value that is a recipe for polarization, social dislocation and unhappiness within and between countries.

The boomers' insistence on perpetual growth and wealth creation regardless of productivity could only be accommodated by relying on asset prices and borrowing—pulling future consumption to the present—so blaming central banks for post-2008 distortions is misplaced: the public demanded it and politics delivered it.