But This Time It’s Different is an ongoing project about how systems evolve, and what this evolution reveal about power, coordination, failure, and meaning.
It examines markets, technology, geopolitics, and institutions as overlapping architectures that shape how societies function, what they value, and what they can no longer hold together.
The focus is on structural diagnosis: How incentives shape institutions, how technical choices become political outcomes, and how systems failures appear long before they are publicly acknowledged.
What you’ll find here
Essays, notes, and conversations that trace recurring patterns across:
financial systems and market design
technology and regulation
industrial policy and defense ecosystems
institutional failure modes
the epistemology of “expertise” at scale
Some pieces are arguments, while others are exploratory. All are written with the assumption that the reader is capable of holding complexity of multiple things being true at the same time!
The podcast with Alex Chalmers is one expression of this work. The writing by Sinead O’Sullivan is another. Over time, the archive is intended to serve as a body of thought, not a current affairs newsfeed.
Why subscribe
Subscribing gives you access to the full archive and ensures new work is delivered directly, without algorithms or ads.
More importantly, it signals support for a mode of writing that is increasingly rare:
slow and structural!
About the author
Sinéad O’Sullivan is a space and defense economist and investor. She has worked across academia, policy, and finance, including roles at Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management.
Her work focuses on institutional design, industrial strategy, and the limits of market-based coordination under conditions of geopolitical and technological stress.
