These are questions that I think about often and have been thinking about for a long time.

  • What causes differences in wealth outcomes between people? Communities? Nations? Moments in time?
  • Same question for quality rule of law?
  • Why is it so much harder to hard complicated things?
  • What is it about America that makes it so, so special? How much of that is enduring? how can we make more of that?
  • Under what circumstances do norms in commerce emerge?
  • How different are states from mafias? Do force-wielding organizations just sit on a spectrum? What does their "animal kingdom" look like?
  • How are rules and norms enforced?
  • America is much better than almost any other place at encouraging opportunity, and organizing to create and realize totally new ideas at a massive scale. What is it about America that enables this?
  • At the same time, America has perhaps the cruelest poverty of any country with its magnitude of wealth. Are these two outliers connected? If no, how do we have a place that produces so much wealth but gives so little support (and oftentimes is downright predatory) towards people who don't have much?
  • Sincerity Traps
  • How does moral reasoning differ across time and across space?
  • Same for what is valued, what people strive towards, what virtue looks like (to a New Yorker in 1900? to a Viking in 1100? to a Babylonian?), what melody sounds novel and catchy, what traveling a mile looks like, just about anything.
  • Are there ways to measure the efficiency and efficacy of a government, or really any collective human effort?
  • Many minds in technology have pondered what the division of labor between people and machines will look like as tech progresses. But what will the division of labor across people? Across peoples (plural)? What happen does work look like in a world where it can travel very, very far from the place it's needed?
  • How bad could the 2008 recession had gotten?
  • Have Americans ever been as unified as they have been when they rallied around a common enemy?
  • Similarly, how unified was the American political spectrum in the 10 years before vs 10 years after 9/11?