Competition against a common enemy sharpens focus, motivates hard work, and binds disparate people together.

Races between nations have always driven technological progress and nation-building. Early industrialization was fueled by international rivalries and Great Humiliations. Wars led to radar and penicillin, and the cold war led to both nuclear bombs and nuclear energy.

We want the benefits of international competition without the horrors of war. So rather than channeling our competitive energies into arms buildups and combat, I propose that the US kick off a series of Great Power Races: Competitive, ambitious, positive-sum competitions with other countries.

What makes for a good Great Power Race?

1) An ambitious project, that will take years and require mobilization of a significant part of the economy to meet. The entire nation should be bought in.

2) It has to sound cool. Whether that’s because there’s obvious upside (e.g., curing a disease) or because the outcome itself is just awesome (going to Mars)1.

3) Conceptually clear win conditions. First to achieve X, eliminate Y, or deploy Z technology. A country needs to be able to credibly claim victory at a certain point2.

The heuristic here is: If Trump can tweet about the race, and even people who don’t like Trump would say “yeah it would be cool if we did that”, then it’s a good race.

Some Potential Great Power Races

We’ve only had a handful of true Great Power Races in history. The Space Race worked. You could potentially count the development of COVID vaccines. The Human Genome Project vs. Celera was a race, though not between countries.

But there are tons of projects we could get fired up about and pursue as races. Some examples:

• Curing Alzheimers

• Racing to get a human on Mars

• Creating a nuclear fusion power plant

• Drilling down to Earth’s mantle

• Carrying the post commercial passengers on supersonic flights by 2030

• Creating the first space elevator

The important thing would be framing these ambitious projects in the language of competition (“we’re going to do this BEFORE China/Russia/Europe, because our country is the best!”).

Case study: Curing Alzheimers

Imagine tomorrow, Trump makes a post:

The NIH starts institutes more funding for Alzheimers research, and the FDA creates a framework for trials at scale and accelerated approval pathways. Prizes are offered for specific milestones, visas for top neuroscientists are fast-tracked. States update their science curriculum to emphasize how great the US is at curing Alzheimers, and the White House starts pumping out propaganda materials.

Chinese state media then responds:

While some countries talk loudly, China works diligently. Americans have forgotten the value of discipline and education. We have not. China will cure Alzheimer’s first—for our people and for the world.

The CCP proceeds to make offensive videos of forgetful and overweight US scientists studying Alzheimers, and fills their public billboards with inspirational videos of young Chinese students studying brain scans of patients with dementia.

Over the course of 3 years, both countries announce big milestones in terms of funding, scientific breakthroughs, clinical results. In year China conclusively comes up with a treatment that halts the progression of dementia. The next year, the US creates a pill that prevents Alzheimers altogether. Both countries say that they won the race, Americans and Chinese are both proud of their superior systems, and the whole world benefits from new disease treatments.

But what are they good for?

Kicking off Great Power Races would benefit the US in a few different ways:

• National purpose: The language of competition would foster a sense of pride in country, and sense of contributing to something bigger than yourself (even if just through your tax dollars).

• Locking in commitment to important projects: By publicly committing to defeating other countries in an arbitrary contest, leaders of countries would be locked in to putting their money where their mouth is.

• Shared urgency: Fear of losing to a rival is a great excuse to cut through bureaucratic red tape related to, e.g., permitting, clinical trials, science funding.

• Positive-sum outlet for nationalism: Perhaps by allowing nations to compete on one dimension, they will be less likely to compete in violent ways.

The last point is quite speculative. But since it seems unlikely that international rivalries will ever totally go away, it feels well worth it to explore avenues like Great Power Races that will harness these rivalries for good, rather than ill.

that humans have been on the earth. And still

we’ve only just begun to understand

some basic features of our universe.

In fairness to our ancestors, they were

mostly concerned with finding food and warmth.

Our learning has accelerated since

the scientific revolution when

some men with means and curiosity

developed the techniques to grow our knowledge

which drove explosive growth in industry

and knowledge over the past two centuries.

But still there is so much for us to know.

We use the words “dark energy, dark

matter” to refer to ninety-five

percent of all mass in the universe.

This is code for “we don’t really know

what a majority of existence is made of.”

One of the biggest fundamental questions

that many of us ponder looking up

at night is “are there others out there like us?”

There is not a soul on earth who knows.

Even basic questions I want answered,

like “Did Tyrannosaurus Rex have feathers?”

or “Is it true that dolphins were the vectors

who brought tuberculosis to Native

Americans centuries before Columbus?”

cannot be answered yet.

Three hundred thousand years lived in the dark.

Four hundred years of scientific method.

We’ve only just begun to venture out

into the light.

In Gifts of Athena he makes the case that around 1800 there was a phase change in our ability to generate “useful knowledge”1.

I think it’s quite a compelling take. In this post I try to make this argument digestible.

1.

There are two types of knowledge:

• Ω = propositional knowledge. In everyday language, we call this type of knowledge “facts”. For example “fire is hot”, “iron comes from the ground”, “the earth is a sphere.”

• λ = prescriptive knowledge. This is the knowledge of “how”, these are techniques and technology that get things done. The ability to rub sticks together to make fire, to smelt iron ore, or to navigate using the stars are all examples of λ-knowledge.2

2.

λ-knowledge is often based on Ω-knowledge. Techniques can be generalized more effectively when grounded in understanding of underlying principles.

But any technique’s basis in propositional knowledge can be narrow (based on only very tenuous understanding) or wide (based on extensive knowledge)3.

3.

λ-knowledge can also create new Ω-knowledge. Practical technology generates new understanding of the world.

4.

This is great! Since learning more facts (Ω) lets you build more technology (λ), and new technologies let us discover more facts, then we should be able to create a self-sustaining positive feedback loop.

5.

A self-sustaining feedback loop between Ω and λ is not automatic.

Medieval and ancient peoples invented things all the time, but we did not see rapid and sustained economic and technological growth until the 1800s. Discoveries don’t always kick off consistent, self-sustaining growth4.

This is because societal conditions can hinder the ability of Ω and λ to generate each other.

• Lack of consensus on grounds for knowledge: If people don’t agree on methods of producing knowledge (e.g., if some think knowledge comes from experience while others think it must come from divine revelation), Ω-knowledge won’t be accepted or spread.

• Lost knowledge: If knowledge isn’t written down or codified, it can die with its owner.

• Lack of access: If access to useful knowledge is limited (e.g., through limited literacy), it won’t diffuse broadly.

• Norms: If there aren’t norms and resources incentivizing understanding why a technique works, λ-knowledge stays narrow and disconnected from Ω.

6.

The industrial revolution was a result of a phase change in the generation of useful knowledge.

In the centuries preceding the industrial revolution, the right institutions and culture developed, allowing the feedback loop between Ω and λ finally became self-sustaining in the late 1700s.

Mokyr emphasizes a few forces here:

• Epistemic consensus: Scientific societies established shared standards for how knowledge is produced and validated, so Ω-knowledge could spread with authority.

• Knowledge preservation through institutions: Universities, publishers, and laboratories gave knowledge a permanent home, and the “Republic of Letters” ensured that learnings were shared across borders.

• Access to useful knowledge: Encyclopedias, printed manuals, public lectures, and correspondence networks dramatically lowered the cost of accessing both Ω and λ knowledge.

• Industrial Enlightenment Norms: A cultural shift in which educated elites began taking technology seriously as a subject of scientific inquiry, creating norms that incentivized understanding why techniques work.

Conclusion

We are the beneficiaries of this feedback loop. The accumulation of Ω and λ - continues today, and is the basis for our absurdly high material standard of living.

It’s up to us to keep it up. When thinking about every institution, norm, or policy, we should ask the question: “Does this make it easier or harder for knowledge to compound?”

In the long run, few things matter more.

• Some this is due to institutions.

• Some this is due to culture.

Obviously these things are related to each other.

It is clear is that population-level genetics is not a major driver of skill differences in the vast majority of fields.

Which is great, because while you can’t change your genes, you can opt into a new culture, or seek out new institutions under which to flourish.

And it also clear that the downsides of discriminating against people on the basis of genetics are so insidious, that it is worth having a strong cultural taboo against this kind of discrimination.

Several of those arguing that Anthropic should submit made reference to the thinker Carl Schmitt.

I had never heard of Carl Schmitt until yesterday. He was a Germany political theorist who joined the Nazi party. Per Wikipedia, “Schmitt's doctrine helped clear the way for Hitler's rise to power by providing the theoretical legal foundation of the Nazi regime.”2

It seems like Schmitt was an important thinker. Some of his ideas—like politics as fundamentally friend vs. enemy—seem useful for explaining contemporary political dynamics. And in general it can be valuable to grapple with strong systemic thinkers, even if you disagree with them.

But if you are engaging in a debate…

…trying to persuade others to your point of view…

…and the strongest thinker you can muster to your side is a Nazi…

…then you might want to reconsider the merits of your position.

I’ve got a reverse Uno card for you here. My Chinese mother-in-law is blogging about trips she’s taken to the US over the past decade.

Her blog series is called 说说我心中的美国, which translates to something like “America from my perspective”. Here are of my favorite excerpts from her observations2.

“America’s declining industrial heartland”

Hilariously blunt observations throughout.

New York is “a tired city, with dirty streets, dark subways… and different psychopaths you encounter every time you go outside”.

She thinks her daughter’s roommates are “academically stressed and physically ill” and “probably a little autistic.”

But her harshest words are for 2014 Berkshire County Massachusetts.

In the evenings, we stayed in Berkshire, a dozen kilometers away from our school, to experience America’s declining industrial heartland. The county seat should have a lot of residents, with hotels, restaurants and supermarkets, but the whole city doesn’t have much energy, and it looks very dead. At some of the former factories, the walls were filled with beautiful graffiti, but the interior was empty. My daughter told me that this was the city’s effort to save the old town with art. She appreciated it, but now it seemed that these measures would not be able to revive an old American town.

When a Berkshire county official offered to help her find parking, she took this as a sign that the county was in desperate need of tourists.

Nice Americans and cold courtesy

Her overall impression of Americans is quite positive.

That was my sister’s first trip to the United States. Throughout the trip, she was repeatedly amazed by the courtesy and warmth of the Americans… I had also been treated so kindly: at the New York airport, the girl who took me directly to my destination after I asked for directions; at the airport, the ground staff who greeted me in Chinese and pointed me to my gate; at the hotel, the staff member who repeatedly helped me with my itinerary for the next day; the B&B owner who drove me to explore the countryside...

…We went to America with preconceived notions, thinking it was an arrogant country…

America is nothing special; the people of that country are no different from the Chinese—most are friendly and trustworthy. We really can’t label a country or a people based on a single quality.

Heartwarming. Pretty standard observation when visiting a new country. “Maybe we aren’t so different, you and I.”

More to my surprise, was that she specifically praised the “efficiency and flexibility of the Americans”.

She describes my family as “comfortable, stress-free, and having slightly cold courtesy”. Basically, “midwest nice through a language barrier.”

“No need to worry about a collision”

She was quite impressed with the orderliness of US roads.

Although we can clearly see the vehicles coming across the road, the barrier in front of the middle is open and there is no need to worry about a collision.

In a similar vein:

I spent three days in Williams. What impressed me most during those three days was that whenever we stood at one end of a zebra crossing, the cars on the road would stop and wait for us to cross before they continued.

Now, on my travels to China, I have never observed the roads to be particularly disorderly. But my mother-in-law’s baseline was probably set in the much-more-chaotic early 2000s when she learned to drive.

“Chinese culture is creeping into New Yorkers’ lives”

Her first observation of New York is a classic one:

It’s the worst city because it can destroy you instantly to nothing, and the best city because there are so many opportunities.

The garbage is not disposed of on time in her NYC hotel. She is alarmed by several interactions with strangers. And she is impressed out how quickly her daughter knows to walk away when a commotion breaks out on the street.

Heavy blows come for the New York Subway, which is sensible if you’ve ever ridden the clean and well-ordered subways of Suzhou.

The New York subway, in particular, which doesn’t have a bathroom at all, is a terrible experience3.

I love my home, Suzhou, a city where you can close your eyes on the subway.

And she is struck by the Chinese influence in New York.

The Chinese language that can be seen everywhere in New York, the popular Chinese restaurants, the Chinese songs that can be heard on the subway, and the roads that can be asked in Chinese anytime, anywhere, is the true cultural invasion! Chinese culture is creeping into New Yorkers’ lives.

Overall: “Life in New York was tense.”

Same.

Conclusion

It’s fun to see your home and culture reflected through the eyes of others.

These posts have also helped me build my perspective on the value of travel.

It’s easy to make fun of people who take a trip to another country, and then think they understand it at a deep level4.

But traveling definitely teaches you something. I wouldn’t trust my mother-in-law to predict future geopolitics on the basis of her visits, but I do think she has a pretty good feel for what American culture is like, and the ways in which Americans are different from and similar to Chinese.

After reading these blog posts, I’m marginally more bullish on how well you can understand a country by taking a trip or two as a tourist.

Travel more!

My internet history is a similar story of stops and starts, full of half-consumed and mostly-forgotten wikipedia pages, youtube videos, and reddit threads.

I love learning about the past. I’m a great admirer of humanity, and never get bored with trying to wrap my head around the place and time we occupy in the grand sweep of history1.

But I am also incredibly forgetful. After finishing a book, podcast, or article, I rarely retain much. Like a statue of Ozymandias, my knowledge crumbles, and I’m left with nothing but a memory of a name, or a sense that some city was important.

I’ve long envisioned having a visual archive to make my knowledge of history sticky. A vague dream of some kind of an ever-growing timeline into which I could codify my knowledge2.

I’ve tried journaling, using spreadsheets, and various online tools. None have worked well enough.

So since software is free now, I decided to build it myself.

Stone, Paper, Silicon is a personal archive for hobby historians. It is NOT a complete timeline of humanity, but rather a basic and flexible framework into which you can use to slot in historical knowledge as you learn.

It has three main features: Timeline, World Map, and Quiz.

Timeline: This is anchor. You can see the framework of history laid out before you.

You can add timeline entities here for states, religions, cultures, and events you learn about.

World Map: Explore the rise and fall of states, nations, and empires throughout history, year by year. If you see a state you want to learn more about, click on it, and add it as an entity to your timeline.

Quiz: Quiz yourself on historical events that have been added by all users.

—

For now I’ve built very basic multi-user functionality. You simply enter your name when you land on the site. Any timeline entities you create will appear under your profile and will be publicly available to others.

But enough of my words. Give it a try, and let me know what you think!

Between say 800 and 1300, the number of Europeans tripled. And the percent of people living in towns went from 2%→8%.

Much of this social change was driven - if not in full, then at least in significant part - by the development of new technology1.

The diffusion of the heavy plough between 800-1000 allowed for easier farming in climates with heavy, wet soil. But 6-8 oxen were required to pull a heavy plow, which was far more than a typical peasant owned. Higher capital needs helped drive village nucleation and tilling in adjacent strips of land rather than in isolated hamlets.

The adoption of metal horseshoes in the ~900s greatly increased the usefulness of horses, which had a variety of effects. My favorite of these was described as follows:

The ox moved so slowly that peasants using oxen had to live close to their fields. With the employment of the horse both for ploughing and for hauling, the same amount of time spent going to and from the fields would enable the peasant to travel a much greater distance… Even a slight increase in the distance which it was convenient to travel from the village to the farthest field would greatly enlarge the total arable which could be exploited from that village. Thus extensive regions once scattered with tiny hamlets came to be cultivated wilderness dominated by huge villages…which in architecture and even in mode of life became astonishingly urban2.

This horse-driven-agglomeration is particularly striking to me, because it’s like an inverse mirror of what was to come with the automobile: When people got horses they moved in to the villages, but as people got cars they moved out to the suburbs.

Heavy armor and the stirrup were adopted between 700-1000, which helped enable an entirely new kind of horse-mounted soldier: the knight. An appropriately skilled and armored knight required a high level of investment: A lifetime of training, advanced weaponry and armor, the best horses. So “a gulf appeared between a warrior aristocracy and the mass of peasants.”

—

I by no means want to imply that the technologies listed above were the only factors in social changes in the middle ages. Other institutional, religious, climatic, and demographic factors were obviously also at play.

But technology definitely had an important effect, and in ways that can be hard to predict and take years to play out. It’s not obvious ahead of time that horses would contribute to the development of villages, and that the plow would drive collectivization.

And it’s worth keeping in mind that medieval technological (and social) changes were tiny compared to those to come with the industrial revolution.

With that perspective, medieval Europe looks technologically and socially static. But in reality, it wasn’t, and history never is. We never reach equilibrium.

Right now we are in the midst of3 an AI boom, and look to be accelerating faster than ever. It may just be continual technological and social change from here on out. And our descendents in 200 years might live with a pace of change so fast that our own era may appear almost static by comparison.

On the topics it covers, it’s quite thorough. I want to extend the argument to cover some additional points related to high-skilled immigrant assimilation1.

From an economic perspective, it is clear that the US as a whole greatly benefits from high-skill immigration. Talent Maxxing helps the US economy. But immigration is about culture too, and the culture of immigrants have a lot of people worried.

To be clear at the start: I think “we will lose our culture” is a valid type of concern to have. It is not necessarily a sign of bigotry to be worried about losing what is distinctly American.

I lived in Kenya for four years. It is hard to live as an alien in another culture, where people don’t speak your language, share your values, reference the same culture, or celebrate the same holidays.

So I understand why people hesitate at the prospect of their country changing so quickly that it no longer feels like home.

We are lucky that - for the most part - high-skill immigration does not recreate the kind of cultural alienation people worry about2.

Here is the tldr before I go into a bit more detail on each point below3.

If you are worried that Talent Maxxing will lead to too many people who…

• …don’t speak English → don’t be.

• …will not put America first → don’t be.

• …do not share commitment to American values → don’t be.

• …lead to less cultural homogeneity → some validity here.

• …are not white → I’m not sure I have much to say to you.

English

I haven’t found great data on English skills of high-skilled immigrants specifically, but it seems clear it’s quite high. Some back-of-the-envelope math with ChatGPT estimates 90%4.

Patriotism

Surprisingly, there isn’t tons of great data on how patriotic immigrants are. But indications are they are at least as patriotic, if not more, than native-born Americans.

American values

The Hamilton Society debate on high-skilled immigration opened with an argument from the anti-immigration side that immigration “threatens to destroy the foundation of this great nation by injecting massive quantities of alien subjectivities into the very constitution of the American polity.”

A few points here that I believe are worth mentioning:

• Half of tech unicorns are founded by immigrants. This is often trotted out as a economic argument, but it is also a cultural one. Skilled immigrants are often deeply capitalist and committed to innovation.

• There is selection bias in terms of the immigrants who come here. We get the most individualist, ambitious, and capitalist ones. People who love China’s social cohesion or Europe’s social safety net do not typically move to the US.

Cultural homogeneity

One opponent of immigration at the Hamilton Society debate pointed out that recently he has seen fewer Christmas lights and less trick-or-treating, and that this is a result of immigrants who do not celebrate American holidays. In fact, the market for Christmas lights seems to be bigger than ever, and the decline in trick-or-treating seems driven by a variety of factors that have little to do with immigration.

In general, I think we should be skeptical towards arguments of the form “something that I like is disappearing from the culture, and it must be because of the immigrants.”

But to take a more generous view of this argument: Immigration skeptics here are pointing to a sense that a certain kind of cultural cohesion gets lost when new people enter a society. Which is fair to some extent; there have been some studies that back this idea up.

To the extent you think cultural cohesion is extremely important, you might justifiably be worried about having too many immigrants in your neighborhood who don’t assimilate.

But it is also important to keep in mind that people had the same kinds of worries about cultural cohesion 130 years ago when it was southern European Catholics and Eastern European Jews who were immigrating to the US. Many of these groups have assimilated into the US to the extent that they aren’t even thought of as foreign anymore. Culture is malleable5.

Of course there is always…

…bad old-fashioned racism. Not everyone who is worried about culture is racist. But racists almost always do talk about culture.

The racist objection to high-skilled immigration is not one I will cover here.

Conclusion

Just to end this on a classic and hopeful image of the US as a melting pot. Talent Maxxing means getting the most talented people from to bring their ideas, music, food, and traditions here. And then to assimilate and to pursue their work and life in a distinctly American style: optimistic, capitalistic, bombastic, free, and individualistic.

The American values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are powerful because they are universal.

The economic literature is clear on the benefits of agglomeration. High-skill workers produce more when they cluster in cities, in top universities, and in the best companies. And the benefits of improved productivity spill over to society at large.

This leads to a clear conclusion: The US should be Talent-Maxxing.

We should attempt to collect within our borders all of the most talented scientists and technical minds, in the world1.

Talent-Maxxing means doing two things:

1. Deeply investing into developing American talent. This is something basically everyone agrees we should do in theory. It’s not a topic to which I feel I have much to add, other than to say we certainly can and should do much better than we are now.

2. Acquire all the best non-American talent in the world. Not everyone agrees that we should do this, and this post will focus on arguing that we should. But it should be remembered that #1 is equally if not more important.

So why should the US try to hoover up all the world’s best scientist and technologists? In short, because we can put them to work making life better for Americans and for the world.

Attracting top talent is a big a win for us US citizens. The most talented immigrants:

• Build great companies that benefit the public. Better access to talent improves firm performance, which drives economic growth. The 62% of Americans who own stock are the beneficiaries of this growth.

• Create jobs for Americans. Studies find skilled migration increases employment of native Americans on balance2.

• Contribute wealth towards the US treasury. The average college-educated immigrant contributes on the order of $1M to the US treasury over 30 years.

• Generate positive externalities for all Americans. When an immigrant scientist develops a life-saving drug or an immigrant engineer builds a better product, the benefits spill over to everyone who uses them.

In fact the spillover effects from improved medicine, scientific advancements, and new technology do not end at our borders. When the state of the art advances, the entire world benefits.

Now you might be worried that trying to attract all the most talented people in the world would mean that the rest of the world is left talentless. Don’t worry.

1. The supply of talent is elastic. Talent comes as a result of investment into human capital. Often when people have opportunities to move abroad, they invest more in education, which can have positive talent spillover effects in their country of origin.

2. Other countries will continue compete with us for talent. If the US invested more heavily in obtaining all the world’s top talent, other countries would step up their game. They would improve incentives to immigrate, easing visa barriers, and improve policies. The net result being better global options for the world’s best talent3.

3. The migrants do not always stay in the US forever. The general finding is that “between 30% and 60% of migrants will likely return to their home country within ten years.” When they return, the bring new skills, and US connections that benefit their home country.

This is not even to mention the fiscal benefits that accrue to family and friends in origin countries as a result of remittances (typically 10-15% of immigrant earnings). In general we should not be worried about brain drain.

And of course, making the US more attractive to global talent benefits those talented individuals themselves4.

What would Talent-Maxxing actually look like? Some initial thoughts:

• Be unapologetic about the fact that we want the world’s most talented people to come to the US and become American.

• Reform our immigration system to focus on skills. Much has been written about specific policy proposals here. Wage-ranking the H-1B would be a great start5.

• Build the critical talent infrastructure to allow public and private actors to identify, evaluate, and develop global talent in the US interest.

We are lucky enough in the US to have culture, ideals, and an economy that many around the world aspire to. We have our pick of who we let in, and we should let in the people who will clearly benefit American citizens.

So let their people come, and let them serve out people.

This was an incredibly fun event. It was raucous, it was heated. Someone got kicked out. People tried and failed to follow parliamentary procedure1.

And it was also thought-provoking. Not all arguments put forth were legitimate, and not all were good. But as someone strongly in favor of more high-skilled immigration, I emerge from the evening with a better understanding of why someone would oppose it.

There were several opposing arguments that I think are worth taking very seriously2. To put them in my own words:

1. Obvious problems with the H-1B taint skilled immigration overall. It’s been well-documented that outsourcing companies use the H-1B to essentially replace US workers. If implementation of current skilled visa pathways allows such abuse, then why would we think any future program would be better?

2. Skilled immigration does not exist in isolation, but is a piece of a larger, broken system. You may have heard: There are millions of undocumented immigrants in the US, and people are not happy about this. Emotionally and optically, skilled migration cannot be separated from larger debates on who comes into the country.

3. Immigration is about culture, not just about economics. What kinds of communities do we want to build? What is our shared vision of the future of our great nation? Just showing that immigrants drives GDP growth or firm success won’t cut it.

When I arrived at the event, I had planned to speak, making some points in favor of high-skilled immigration. I was politely told that my arguments weren’t very strong, and after observing the debate, I see why. My points were based on imagined objections to high-skilled migration, not the actual concerns people have.

Now as it happens, I think there are extremely good responses to all of these objections3. They were made with varying degrees of forcefulness by the pro-high-skill-immigration side of the debate.

But the value of debate is having these arguments surfaced and made in their full force before you. Coming face-to-face with the actual argument of the opponent, not the foe you have imagined. Thank you to the Hamilton Society for putting on this debate, and I look forward to attending participating in the next one.

The first is The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. In this book, a computer wedded to Asimov’s three laws of robotics becomes God. Its near-unlimited power and single-minded devotion to its laws leads to many horrifying and unintended consequences.

The second is Robert Caro’s four1-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson These are about how LBJ ruthlessly accumulated political power in a corrupt and democratic society. And then he wielded it as he pleased, for good and for ill. Enriching himself, passing the Civil Rights Act, launching the Great Society, and miring the US in Vietnam.

Caro mentions almost offhandedly in an afterward of one of the books that “[LBJ] never went so far as assassination. Because he stayed in the lanes of what is acceptable in democracy.” Nobody in the US has immunity from committing murder. However much power LBJ accumulated, if he had had a political rival assassinated, he would have been caught and convicted. And that would be that.

The startlingly simple take-away for me is that of the importance of checks and balances.

When thinking about the good society, one of our principles worries should always be to avoid giving any person or institution too much power.

A surprising number of apocalyptic scenarios really just boil down to “X will get too much power, then use it to harm us.” This includes AI labs, the US president, the CCP, a global government, or a single AI itself.

Seems like a good case for just sticking to the tenets of classical liberalism. Too much power should not be stored in one place. Not in any individual. Not in any given government, or branch of government. Not in a company or an industry.

No matter how noble, no matter how wise that person or institution may seem.

Power should be checked and balanced.

When I first joined BCG I was excited by the impact I would be able to have. BCG does a lot of work with the Gates Foundation, and I was optimistic that I could get on one of those projects and help solve global poverty or something.

But I quickly realized two things:

1. Those projects were incredibly competitive to get onto. My odds were not good.

2. Even if I did get on a project, I would know that had I not been assigned to it, someone equally-capable would have been on it. If I vanished, the slide deck would still ship, the meeting would still happen, the world would not notice.

I was a cog in a machine, and ultimately extremely replaceable.

This is just one example of a feeling I suspect others may share. A melencholy about the fact that if we were to disappear, our work would go on without us. Though our would be sad of course, overall the world would be unaffected by our disappearance1.

But replaceability is the price we pay for resilience. Human societies are flexible, adaptive systems that do not depend on any one member. If a person disappears, work gets rebalanced and the ship keeps sailing.

Imagine that you really were indispensable to the functioning of your town, or nation. That you were the bolt holding the entire artifice together. How crushing would that feel?

I for one am happy to be redundant rather than indispensable.

It is noble to be part of a flexible system - where none of us individually are ultimately mission-critical, but where all of us collectively can achieve great things.

1. The midpoint of history is 1300. And 10% of history has occurred since 2000.

2. Historically new technologies have taken decades to diffuse throughout the economy. AI will be the same1.

3. Politicians are not attuned to policy details in immigration. And these details matter2. This issue is not unique to immigration.

4. The lesson of history is to have low expectations.

5. I am so much better off than a lot of people. And there is no moral justification for this state of affairs.

6. Your solution to any given problem probably isn’t the right way, and definitely isn’t the only way. Constantly, constantly expose yourself to new ideas, and new people who will push you. Relatedly, if you aren’t talking to your customers, you aren’t learning.

About myself:

1. I’ve had a step change in my quality of life since getting married. Would recommend!

2. My semi-constant sense of hurry is self-imposed, and an obstacle to getting actual work done, and to being warm and outgoingness.

3. I no longer optimize for impact as much as I used to. It’s not clear it was that effective anyways.

4. I am not nearly as other-focused as I wish to be.

This post is me trying to rationalize why I and many others spend so much time and energy on paperwork that doesn’t directly produce anything of value.

It’s a commonly-observed and annoying part of modern life that we have so much paperwork. But an inevitable part of having a social contract of any complexity is that some things have to be spelled out in contractual terms. This means you need lawyers, analysts, and inspectors ensuring that contracts are being followed, the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

Paperwork, generally, produces compliance. Industrial safety compliance, HR compliance, compliance with financial, employment, and immigration laws. And compliance at a company level leads to trust at a systemic level.

Right now things are as good as they have ever been in large part because we can live without constant fear of being poisoned, exploited, or defrauded by the companies we trust with our money. I can in general, trust that a set of rules are being followed.

In my field specifically, a well-functioning US immigration and border system builds trust with the public that the 1 million people who enter the US each day do so with legitimate reason, and in an orderly fashion. Immigrants have to know that when they arrive in the US, they will be accorded some basic rights. And employers need to know that they can hire foreigners without fear of arbitrary deportation1.

Trust is an essential output of the immigration system. And in general, trust-producing industries are crucial to our society’s functioning.

But we should not tolerate compliance for compliance’s sake. Systemic trust, not compliance, is the end goal. And trust, like any good or service, can be produced efficiently or inefficiently. I for one, do not think we should be required to physically print out and mail in visa applications2.

I wanted to understand the data on human settlement a bit better. Here’s what I found1:

Some takeaways:

• The entire first decile2 of human experience was lived almost exclusively nomadically.

• By about 1,000 BCE, settled civilization was in full-swing globally, and the great majority of people were settled.

• However, a decent chunk of humanity remained nomadic till the 1800s when people around the world adopted3 settled life.

• Urbanism exploded in the 1900s, and since 2001 over half of human experience has been lived in cities.

Cool. So what?

I suspect that seeing charts like this either moves something in you, or it does not.

I find great drama in the grand sweep of human history. I find it exciting to reflect on the fact that half the kids no longer die, and that a majority of people live in urban environments that hardly existed 300 years ago.

I also find that reflecting on these facts gives me a lot of peace. When I’m stressed out about my city life and first-world problems, I take great comfort in being reminded that most of human experience has been lived in circumstances utterly foreign to me.

Every single person’s life has immeasurable value, and most of those lives are not very much like mine or yours at all. Rejoice, for this means that your problems are utterly incomprehensible to the vast mass of humanity that has gone before us.

By “large” I mean controlling the most people-years. Taking this approach, here are the top 5 largest empires in history, in order of the total amount of human experience that has been lived under each one1.

It’s possible you could find different population numbers that would switch the order of the Qing vs India. But there isn’t really another country or empire in history that is close to breaking this top 5.

Our top 5 empires are massive in the course of human history, accounting for about 17% of all of human lived experience2.

Obviously, these are all recent empires that - with the exception of Ming - benefited from massive population growth over the past 200 years. 3 of the 5 empires are China, and the other 2 are (essentially) India.

My advice to all you people looking to build enormous empires throughout history: Do it in the modern age, and in Asia.

But what about Rome? The Ottoman Empire? The Mongol Empire? How do these empires stack up?

Some of these were long-lived, some ruled over large swathes of the earth, but none of them are even close to the top 5 in terms of the magnitude of human lived experience.

But even our top 5 empires are tiny in comparison to the number of years that have been lived by nomadic people.

If you decided to make a “composite empire”, made up of all the stateless nomadic people who have ever lived3, then your empire would account for 20% of all human lived experience.

What’s the point of all this?

There are lots of reasons to study the empires of history. To understand where our current cultural and political institutions come from. To challenge our norms of what a functioning society should look like. To appreciate the richness of human experience.

But one reason to study history is to build empathy for the lived experience of our fellow people - past and present. And empathy should be accompanied by a sense of proportion.

If you want to understand how the largest chunks of humanity have lived their lives, you need to learn about modern China and India. And most of all, you need to learn about nomadic people.

This exercise always leaves me exhausted, and all too aware that I will ever know a fraction of what I wish to.

For example, here is a short sampling of questions I have about Egypt:

• How did hieroglyphics develop?

• What was the impact of Egyptian technology on ancient Greece?

• To what extent did Egypt maintain its identity during rule by successive empires?

• How did “Egyptian” become synonymous with “high-quality” in cotton?

• Also, I’ve heard Egypt has pyramids. What’s up with those?

One can spend a lifetime studying any one of these questions and still have more to learn. And this is a tiny subset of the questions that I have about one civilization along one river in one corner of one continent.

Multiply this by every country, every era, every field of knowledge, and I’m confronted with an insurmountable vastness. My need to know will never be satisfied.

But lately, rather than seeing this vastness as overload, I’ve started to view it as a bounty.

The world’s unfathomable richness is laid out before us like a banquet table ten miles long. There are heaping platters of history and politics from every culture that ever lived. There are fresh crisp piles of science and mathematics. There are sharp, hot dishes—religion, philosophy, and centuries of courtly intrigue. And there are bright desserts: candied shards of literature, music, theater, and film from all places and times.

Each of our lives is a single meal from this banquet. We will be full to bursting before we have sampled even one percent of one percent of what’s in front of us.

Some of us select one dish we really like and eat until we’re full. There’s nothing wrong with a single-course meal!

Others of us are more methodical, trying to sample as many dishes as possible, perhaps specializing by cuisine (“I’ll try all the Lebanese options!”) or dish type (“I want to compare all the soups.”)

You only get one seat at the feast. You’ll never see, much less taste, all of the options spread before you, but it’s pretty amazing to be invited at all.

Dig in!

High-skilled immigration is one of the most powerful levers the US has to drive technological innovation, economic growth, and global competitiveness, but our current immigration system doesn’t prioritize it.

Jeremy Neufeld has a very helpful chart that clearly illustrates this point. Only ~7% of green cards are allocated on the basis of employment.

I wanted to double-click Jeremy’s data and see which laws enable which categories of green cards, to get my head around what legislation actually drives our high-skilled immigration.

Our immigration system has been kludged together by laws passed over the past three-quarters of a century. Here are the key ones:

• 1952: The Immigration and Nationality Act had strict quotas and allowed very little immigration from most of the world, but spouses and children of US citizens could get green cards and were exempt from quotas.

• 1965: The Hart-Cellar Act amended the 1952 act to get rid of national origin quotas, and dramatically increased immigration from non-European countries.

• 1980: The Refugee Act currently governs US refugee policy.

• 1990: The Immigration Act of 1990 significantly expanded employment immigration, and added a diversity visa.

• 2000: Trafficking Victims Protection Actcreated slots for victims of human trafficking and victims of certain serious crimes who assist law enforcement.

Here’s my best shot at a visualization about the effect of each of these laws on immigration in 20232.

To put this another way, depending on how you get your green card, here is the rule of law you are subject to3:

The biggest takeaway for me here: The oft-discussed Hart-Cellar act from 1965 is the foundation for family-based migration, but actually didn’t do too much for employment-based migration.

The U.S. has a long history of welcoming immigrants in general—but only a short history of systematically enabling highly skilled ones.

The great migration waves of the 1800s and early 1900s weren’t bringing the world’s best engineers or scientists—engineering barely existed as a field. The typical immigrant was a German farmer heading west or an Italian laborer bound for a city factory.

From 1965-1990 onwards, immigration policy focused on family reunification, not on attracting people with the most skills.

Only since 1990 have we had an immigration system that (to some extent) rewards highly-skilled workers. The change in 1990 was in the right direction. But 1990 is a long time ago now, and we can do a lot better.

Ultimately, a better high-skill immigration system will make the American people better off. This will require a change in legislation. As intractable as the legislative status quo might seem right now, it will not last forever.

At some point change will come, and it’s up to us who care to work to ensure the change is for the better. This work starts in understanding where we are, and where we’ve come from.

I spent 5 days in Beijing in July, and was in Washington DC last weekend. Seeing the two back-to-back made certain contrasts stand out.

Architectural persuasion

Beijing and DC both have grand architecture, impressing you with the power of the state. Viewing the grandeur of the capitol or the forbidden city is to witness a visceral argument: “We are in power.”

But in architectural terms, the source of that power’s legitimacy is framed very differently in Beijing vs. DC.

The center of Beijing is the forbidden city and Tiananmen, an ancient heavenly gate. Just south of Tiananmen is Mao’s Mausoleum.

China has a long and illustrious history of incredible cultural achievements. The people chose Mao and the communist party to lead them, thus conferring on the CCP the legitimacy of the thousands of yeas of Chinese history.

The visual image of this linkage is the enormous picture of the Chairman that sits on Tiananmen itself.

The argument for governmental legitimacy goes: “The CCP is has been chosen by the people, assumed the mandate of heaven, and will continue the glory of Chinese civilization.”

Compared to China, the US is an infant nation. In the US, legitimacy comes less from a long historical tradition, and more from the grand ideals of democracy and freedom.

The center of Washington DC is the capitol building. The very locus of democratic government - where democracy actually happens. Classical and grand, its very design is a statement: legitimacy flows from democracy, not dynasty.

“America stands for democracy, freedom, and participatory government.”

The stories told in museums

Chinese history is told as a single long thread. Beginning with Emperor Yao and running up until the present, the Chinese museums tells a story of the Chinese people through 5000 years and over 30 dynasties. At every exhibit you follow this thread from dynasty to dynasty, seeing how Chinese culture, institutions, and technology have evolved as the civilizational story of China is spooled out over the centuries.

American history is the weaving together of many short threads. The American History Museum had exhibits on the revolutionary war, the civil rights movement, experiences of various immigrant groups. You’re allowed to sit with a tapestry of different colors and textures: sometimes fitting tightly, sometimes frayed, but generally becoming stronger and more durable over time.

Harmony vs dissent

DC was full of protest art against the current government. No Kings. Free DC.

You don’t see this kind of public expression in Beijing. I found it notable that you have to go through a security check to get to Tiananmen Square, while you can just want right onto the National Mall in DC.

—

The US is young and values freedom and diversity. China is old and values harmony and order.

These are obviously the most common stereotypes about the US and China. And of course, when you are a tourist, to some extent you see what you expect to see.

What struck me most was how deliberately each government shapes these impressions.

In both places, propaganda isn’t just in posters—it’s built into the city itself.