Hoover Institution Policy Review
Peter Thiel writes the coolest apocalypse story that I have read in a while. It draws the opposite conclusion from Paul Seabright’s The Company of Strangers, but from pretty much the same observations. The observation common to both - globalisation has provided amazing boosts in human wealth, but the resulting complexity has also made holistic understanding impossible, leaving blind optimism as the only motivating factor. That lack of understanding, according to Seabright, lends a certain robustness to the dynamics, whereas Thiel claims that it perches the world on a cusp dividing utopia from apocalypse, an unstable point from which the smallest deviation would bring either eternal paradise or the terminal abyss.
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I imagine the suspicion that international macro finance is an elaborate fraud to be a natural response from those aspiring to take charge, but who reach the bridge and find no controls available. Those with responsibility act regardless of ignorance, and the great power exerted by central banks is often done with little certainty as to the consequences. Steve Waldman on Interfluidity writes
Each central bank, while trying to stabilize its own bit of the world, found itself with little choice but to support and expand unsustainable financial flows on a scale so massive they have reshaped the composition of every major economy on the planet.
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Corporate entities and government agencies are agents too, but more rational and with less risk adversity. That is one thing that doesn’t percolate up too well, I guess.