Questions

Some questions I'm thinking about. Pointers to readings welcome.

• (After reading Lee Kuan Yew's memoirs) What are the major lessons from Singapore's economic and social transformation? What combination of structures, policy, and institutional design enabled such rapid growth?
• (After reading Team of Rivals) What elements of Lincoln's personality and leadership contributed to his success in navigating the Civil War and preserving the Union? His storytelling ability? His optimism?
• How do we best measure human flourishing? What metrics capture wellbeing beyond GDP? How can we embed these into the social & financial infrastructure?
• Why does innovation thrive in certain ecosystems (Silicon Valley, Stockholm, Nairobi) and languish elsewhere? What are the emergent phenomena that characterize innovation hubs?
• How do we distinguish true value creation from rent-seeking? What would an economic system optimized for human flourishing actually look like?
• Where is the moral line for markets (especially in private prisons, childcare, healthcare, etc.)? Are some human needs too fundamental to commodify?
• Why is virtuous leadership so rare? What prevents powerful individuals from cultivating and embodying virtue?
• Aristotle called politics "the highest science" because of its unique capacity to enable human flourishing. Why has it evolved into a domain of control rather than rigorous study of systems that promote wellbeing and virtue?
• Why does power tend to corrupt? Are there institutional designs that can preserve integrity in high-stakes roles?
• How does trust emerge at scale? What conditions enable or destroy it? What makes reputation systems work or fail?
• If progress = mass × energy × coordination, how do these interact across nations? Why do some societies advance faster than others?
• What makes "generous tit-for-tat" and cooperative strategies so robust in game theory iterative game simulations? How do we design incentive structures that reward long-term cooperation and automatically punish free-riders / exploiters?
• How do societies adapt to exponentially accelerating technological disruption?
• Is human life in equilibrium with Earth possible? What does sustainability actually look like a hundred years from now?
• How much of genius is innate vs. cultivated? How do nutrition, sleep, deliberate challenge, and stress shape cognitive capability?
• If material scarcity is eliminated, what provides meaning? How do we avoid hedonic collapse in a post-scarcity world?
  • Howard Marks' "Is It a Bubble?" memo discusses this to a degree in the postscript starting on page 16.
• In a world where energy is increasingly becoming the de facto currency, what are the economic and geopolitical implications? Also, how do we solve and commercialise fusion?
  • Elon Musk & Nikhil Kamath interview transcript explores this topic.