Dinosaurs ran this planet for 550x longer than humans have existed. One asteroid ended it in an afternoon. Turns out permanence is the thing you’re least allowed to assume. New essay’s up on my Substack, using Jurassic Park to make the case. #econsky

convenience is a loan. you pay it back with dependence. #econsky #philsky

friction never gets eliminated. it gets moved. every seamless experience you have means someone else absorbed the mess, usually someone with less leverage than you. #econsky #philsky

the first marketplace was probably a campfire. a place you brought what you had and left with what you needed, and the real product was knowing who could be trusted. #econsky #history

Left vs right is a fight over slices. Nobody’s touching how the pie gets built. By the time you vote, the menu was written upstream. Defaults set. Systems designed. You pick from what’s left. Power moved upstream of choice. Politics is still down here arguing about leftovers. #econsky #capitalism

Every marketplace, like every ecosystem, builds the same five layers. producers, aggregators, distributors, a money layer, and the recyclers who handle what fails. The catch: each one can go extinct. I wrote about what kills them on Substack. Check it out. #econsky

“The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments." -Thich Nhat Hanh If we want to save human autonomy from predictive systems, we must consistently, consciously, and congruently reclaim the present moment. #econsky #philosophy #buddhism #zen #capitalism

You are the story your brain tells to explain itself to itself. #philosophy

97% of human history ran on legal slavery. We’ve had 3% without it, and even that’s generous: ~28 million people are in forced labor globally right now. It never actually ended. It just kept changing its name. My latest essay on Substack. #econsky #polisky #history #academicsky

Most of what gets called laziness is just accurate accounting. People are refusing trades that don't pay enough. The hustle crowd calls it a motivation problem. It's a pricing dispute, and the workers are usually right about the price. #econsky

What makes a good life for a human? A good life is probably one where your time, attention, and energy aren’t being extracted by systems optimized for something else entirely. We built efficient systems for stuff. We forgot to build systems for actually living. #econsky

The market doesn't reward value. It rewards position. Value is what the positioned tell everyone else to keep producing. #econsky

AI didn’t make neurodivergent thinking obsolete. It made one half cheap and left the other half as the scarcest skill in the knowledge economy. New essay from me on Substack. #econsky

Old systems demanded your obedience and left your evenings alone. New systems demand nothing and take the evenings. #econsky #philosophy

The Beggar and the Billionaire. At the end of the day, they spent the same amount of time. #econsky #philosophy

The airline figured out the seat isn't the product. Your discomfort is. Legroom, boarding order, sitting next to your own kid. They didn't add value. They subdivided suffering and put a price tag on each piece. #econsky

The market doesn't reward value. It rewards position. Value is what the positioned tell everyone else to keep producing. #econsky

In 2024, S&P 500 companies spent a record 942 billion dollars buying back their own stock. The bill to bring American roads, bridges, water, and transit up to good repair is about 3.7 trillion. The money exists. It would just rather move a share price than fix a water main. #econsky

They stopped selling you things and started renting you the feeling of owning them. Look at your bank statement. Count the subscriptions. That's the new economy. #econsky

The door is open. It's the hallway that keeps getting longer. #econsky #capitalism #philosophy

Exhaustion is the receipt for costs no one itemized. #econsky #philosophy #capitalism

AI is coming for the office jobs first. The analyst, the coordinator, the report-writer. What it can’t touch is the work that lives in your hands. And those are the exact jobs we spent 30 years telling kids to skip. New essay on Substack: the eight roles every civilization runs on. #econsky

You owned nothing before and will own nothing after. In between, the lease is shorter than the marketing suggests. #econsky #philosophy

A still mind wants less. This is inconvenient for an economy built on the opposite, which is why stillness now has to be defended passionately. #econsky #philosophy

The self is a slow conclusion. Interrupt the reasoning often enough and a person never quite finishes becoming anyone. #philosophy #econsky

Markets were built to give you what you want. Somewhere along the way, they got good enough to decide what that is. Then designed the environment to make you think you did. This phenomenon is what I term: Predictive Capitalism. Read more on my Substack: open.substack.com/pub/quyma #econsky

Do not ask how much wealth exists. Ask how much is moving, and who has stopped moving it. #econsky

Whoever can wait owns whoever cannot. Most of modern finance is this sentence with paperwork. #econsky

In 1977, five thousand steelworkers showed up to work and were told to go home. No laws broken. Just incentives followed precisely. Fifty thousand jobs gone. Population down sixty percent. A city’s circulatory system, collapsed in a decade. My latest Substack essay is about how we fix it. #econsky

The paradox of American finance can be stated in a single sentence: the country has never been wealthier, and the fiscal situation has never been worse. These two facts are the same fact, seen from different angles. #econsky #capitalism #america

Freedom is not the absence of coercion. It is the presence of time, attention, and autonomy that no system has already spent on your behalf. #econsky

Housing costs have outpaced wage growth so consistently that shelter now functions as a tax on existence. #econsky

Knowledge is infinite. We just change its direction. The best thinkers aren't the ones who discover. They're the ones who find the tools to bend what was already flowing. To aim it somewhere new. You're not the source. You're the curve in the river. #econsky #philosophy #knowledge

Knowing is a process that produces more of what it consumes. The more you understand, the larger your surface area of ignorance. #econsky #philosophy #knowledge

Hayek proved no central planner could ever gather enough info to run an economy. He was right. Then platforms did it from the bottom up, reading your behavior before you act. The thing he said was impossible got built anyway. His argument’s still correct. The premise just died. #econsky

“What are bills and checks? Mere promises and orders. What are they based on? Principally on two sources human energy and the productive earth. Humanity and the soil they are the only real basis of money.” —Thomas Edison #econsky

Currency is just agreed-upon fiction. So what makes one fiction worth trusting over another? #econsky #philosophy

America stopped building. Instead, we started making money off money. Wall Street grows. Roads crumble. The grid fails. Financial growth ≠ economic growth. One fixes the scoreboard. The other fixes the bridge. Take the money from the bean counters. Give it back to the builders. #econsky

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” —Frederick Douglass #econsky #history #philosophy

Every form of money humans have ever used is really just a way of storing and transferring energy. #econsky

Facebook didn’t get worse. It got comfortable. That’s the whole Ibn Khaldun story. Comfort replaces the binding force. Administration replaces purpose. He called it asabiyyah. A 14th century Arab historian figured this out in 1377. #econsky

Predictive capitalism is what happens when markets stop responding to what you want and start building the environment before you arrive — based on what they predict you want, from what you've already done. If you want to read more, here's my essay on it. #econsky #philosophy #history #markets

The price of everything is visible. The cost of everything is not. #econsky

“Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility." — E.F. Schumacher #econsky

Friction never disappears. It just moves. Globalization didn't eliminate tollbooths. It relocated them somewhere the beneficiaries didn't have to see. New essay on Substack on who built them, who pays them, and what's being installed right now. #econsky

Six powers have successively worn the world’s reserve currency crown: Portugal (1450–1530) Spain (1530–1640) The Netherlands (1640–1720) France (1720–1815) Great Britain (1815–1944) The United States (1944–today) Every single empire eventually lost it. What does the seventh look like? #econsky

Nature runs variation, selection, and time without intention. We run it with a point of view. That's the entire human contribution. #econsky

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. What differs is how many of them you actually own. #econsky #philosophy #life

Just hit #49 Rising in Philosophy on Substack. I write about philosophy of markets, power, and the invisible systems running behind civilizations and daily life. If that sounds like your kind of thing, come find me there. #econsky #philosophy #politicaleconomy #history

The Fed has had one inflation tool for a hundred years. Game developers built a dozen — because when their economies broke, players left and games died. Central banks face no equivalent pressure. #econsky