Last night, NASA launched four astronauts toward the Moon; the first crewed lunar mission since 1972, fifty-three years. If all goes well, Victor Glover will become the first Black astronaut to travel beyond low Earth orbit and Christina Koch the first woman. They are out there right now, coasting through deep space, further from Earth than any human beings since Apollo 17.

The crew played cards before boarding, which got a little coverage. The launch aired on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and YouTube. Donald Trump congratulated them on Truth Social and moved on to the war in Iran, and the astronauts said it was an amazing opportunity.

And… yeah. So what?

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I’ve been trying to understand why I don’t care, because I work in the space industry. I’ve spent my career in and around lunar missions — I’ve even designed one. I know how hard it is to do what those four people did last night, what it costs in money, in years, in the institutional willpower required to keep a program alive through budget cuts and technical failures and political administrations that each have different opinions about whether any of this is worth doing. I know it is extraordinary.

And yet…

A few months ago, a friend who covers space for the Wall Street Journal sent me an episode of How Long Gone, a podcast by two guys in Los Angeles who talk about culture. One of them said, offhandedly, that space is boring and that Neil deGrasse Tyson content puts him to sleep. The other agreed immediately. So did I.

I do TV interviews on space for SkyNews, and when I was in the studio earlier this week to cover the Artemis launch, I was dreading the inevitable question, because I’m a terrible liar with no poker face: “What will the impact of this launch be for kids and generations to come?”

Little to none.

The Colosseum Problem

I was thinking about this when I was in Rome last fall for a space economics seminar.

The morning before it started, I went to the Colosseum. I stood in front of it for less than two minutes and felt very little other than being overwhelmed by what had become a social media backdrop for people in haute couture. I took a photo because it felt like something I should do, and immediately left to escape the tackiness of it all.

The next morning, my friend and I drove past it on the way to a wine bar (yes, morning). She was holding a box of famous pastries we had traveled far to find, and I took a photo of her with the pastries and the Colosseum slightly out of focus behind her. This is my fond memory of the Colosseum.

The first photo has the Colosseum in sharp focus and means nothing to me. The second one has it as an accidental backdrop to a moment about friendship and food and being in Rome with someone you like.

In fact, space has exactly the same problem. We’ve been positioned as tourists; as consumers of far-away-galaxies-as-screensavers; audiences for other people’s (celebrity?) three-minute-zero-gravity missions. You cannot change those vibes by making the screensavers higher resolution.

Going back to the Colosseum for a moment. The building only means something when it connects to a story you’re already inside. If, say, you’ve studied Roman history, or if you understand what it meant that fifty thousand people gathered in that building to watch other people die, or you’re really into Paul Mescal in leather. Then yes, standing there does something to you. The ruins are evidence of something you already care about.

But most of us don’t have that relationship with Rome anymore. And almost none of us have it with space.

Artemis II launched last night and I could not identify anything in my life that will be different when it splashes down on April 10th. And that’s considering that I even work in the space industry, I spent time on NASA’s Mars architecture studies, and I know what went into putting those four people on that rocket! Sure, the mission will test systems for the wider Artemis program, and if it succeeds, the next test flight becomes possible, and eventually, years from now, maybe a landing. Somewhere in that chain there is presumably something that matters to someone, but I cannot find where it connects to the world I actually live in.

Incidentally, this is not how I feel about AI. Actually, I don’t even have to try to care about AI, because it’s a technology with an in-built warning siren: it is coming for my industry, my students’ careers, and all of our assumptions about what expertise is worth. It is unpredictable in ways that keep smart people up at night. I am unsettled by it, absorbed by it, unable to look away from it. It is the opposite of Artemis II.

You see, space is complicated but not complex. It’s an enormous engineering challenge with largely knowable parameters, and when it succeeds, the world is more or less the same world it was before.

Fuck, I’m more curious about deep ocean mapping than about a lunar flyby, which has at least the possibility of new species, unknown chemistries, and ecosystems that have never seen sunlight. These things tell me something about life on the planet I actually inhabit. Artemis II will tell me whether Orion’s life support system performs as designed. And yes, I hope it does, but I can’t make myself care that it did.

What Meaning Actually Looked Like

To understand how space lost a narrative that anybody cared about, you have to see what it looked like when it had one. Now is an appropriate time in an article on spaceflight to travel back in time…

In 1944, a painting of Saturn appeared in Life magazine. The planet rose above a jagged landscape on Titan, and its rings stretched across the sky in a pale arc. The ground in the foreground looked rough and cold; a place where a person might one day stand and look up.

The now infamous painting was by Chesley Bonestell, and what set it apart was that it was built from calculations. You see, Bonestell had trained as an architect before moving to astronomical illustration, and he had a dogged commitment to getting the physics right: the angle of Saturn’s rings as seen from Titan, the color of the light, the geometry of the horizon, all of these he calculated himself and were correct. In doing so, his paintings became actual places! Places that existed, that waited for us, and that could (in principle) be reached.

What made Bonestell’s work important wasn’t the beauty alone, because lots of people can paint stunning depictions of our solar system. Rather, it was who these paintings were talking to. The perspective was a human being standing on a distant surface and looking outward is different from a telescope image, a satellite visualization, or a God’s-eye view from nowhere. A person, standing somewhere, looking at something, says: this place exists, it is reachable, and you (yes, YOU!) are part of the species that will reach it. You will go here.

Importantly, it did not say: you will watch someone else go here.

But a destination without a plan, however beautifully painted, is just a poster.

That’s where Fred Freeman came in. Freeman was an illustrator who worked with the infamous aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun on a series of articles in Collier’s magazine in the early 1950s in an attempt to answer, in public, the question Bonestell’s paintings raised: how would you actually get there?

Freeman’s images looked nothing like Bonestell’s, as there were no dramatic skies or alien horizons. Instead he drew rockets opened up in cross-section so you could see the fuel tanks and engine bells and structural frames, orbital mechanics laid out as sequences of diagrams, the interior of a capsule with wiring exposed and pressure vessels labeled. He drew astronauts performing tasks with tools that looked like actual tools, in conditions that looked like actual conditions.

A reader could trace the path through Freeman’s pages: Earth to orbit, orbit to translunar trajectory, translunar trajectory to the lunar surface. Step by step, system by system. It wasn’t a promise that any of this would actually happen, obviously, because only the US government could make that promise, but it showed people that arriving there was physically possible. That someone who understood the problem had thought it through, and that the numbers worked.

Together, Bonestell and Freeman’s importance in inspiring the Apollo era grew because of one key thing: they were published side by side. In the same magazines, the same articles, aimed at the same reader. You couldn’t look at Bonestell’s gorgeous destination without also seeing Freeman’s engineering; the ugly, specific, credible work of how you’d actually get there. And you couldn’t look at Freeman’s engineering without seeing what it was for, depicted by Bonestell.

The person telling you what to visit in space and the person showing you how to get there were collaborating, and neither one could get away with bullshitting because the other one’s work was right there on the next page.

That combination, of ambition checked by engineering, and engineering motivated by ambition, were both answerable to the same audience. And this is what made mid-century space culture feel like it meant something. It wasn’t the paintings alone, of course, but that the paintings came attached to real plans, and the plans came attached to real reasons with government financing, and all of it was addressed to you as someone who would eventually be involved.

The great science fiction writers, incidentally publishing around the same time, worked the same way: Arthur C. Clarke was a radar technician, and Isaac Asimov had a PhD in biochemistry. They could reason about what was physically possible because they had the authority to do that. The fiction was downstream of that reasoning, and the stories felt real because the people writing them knew what “real” entailed.

Today?

Compare that to a Midjourney render of a Mars city. Or a SpaceX CGI flythrough. Or a Blue Origin promotional video. The AI generating the render doesn’t know whether the pressure vessel is sized correctly for the atmospheric conditions, whether the habitat makes structural sense, or whether the landing pad is oriented correctly relative to prevailing winds. It knows what looks plausible to a human eye trained on prior images of space.

A CGI Mars city looks like a Mars city that has been drawn. It does not look like a Mars city someone has worked out from any engineering sense. And there is nobody standing next to the person who made the render saying, actually, that’s wrong, the atmospheric pressure on Mars is 0.6% of Earth’s and your windows would implode. The engineering check is gone. The ambition floats free from any commitment to actually making anything happen.

(In fact, the closest to a Freeman today that I’ve come across is a Space Architect called Jeffrey Montes, with whom I worked on a project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on an asteroid mission. While he is not an “artist” per se, his work is excellent).

Indeed, two years ago, Christie’s auctioned Bonestell and Freeman originals for significant sums. Myself and Alex MacDonald, NASA’s Chief Economist and a consistent agitator on my Substack articles, threw our hats into the ring in an attempt to acquire the works (Alex is a huge collector of space art and went after the Bonestells, while I preferred the Freemans).

The pieces eventually moved from one private collection to another, and sadly to neither Alex’s or mine. But it’s probably worth mentioning that the painting that once said “you, citizen, will go here!” now says “this is worth $180,000 and belongs to a venture capitalist”.

A Bonestell being sold at Christie’s feels like little more than a failed prophecy with a shocking price tag. The future Bonestell depicted sadly never arrived.

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The Five Eras

But how did this happen? How did “let’s go to space” end with “let’s pump and dump space stock”?

Think briefly about what Bonestell and Freeman were actually doing in those now-vintage Collier’s magazine pages, because every era of spaceflight since then can be understood as a different answer to the same question:

Are the people explaining the what about us going to space and the people figuring out how to get there still working together, still accountable to each other, still talking to the public as if the public is part of the plan?

For each Space Exploration Era, there is an answer to this.

The Romantic Era (~1903–1957). Tsiolkovsky doing the mathematics of spaceflight alone in a provincial Russian town, Goddard launching a spindly rocket from a farm in New Mexico, Oberth and the German amateurs testing small rockets on a disused ammunition dump outside Berlin. There were no institutions, almost no money, and these people were frequently mocked. I mean, the New York Times published an editorial explaining that rockets couldn’t work in a vacuum. The researchers kept going because they believed the species was meant to leave Earth, and that belief was sufficient to keep the hope alive. The visionaries and the engineers were the same people; a handful of obsessives who could describe the future and do the math. But a handful of obsessives can’t get to space on their own. They had coherence in imagination, but no power.

The Heroic Era (1957–1972). Sputnik to the last Moon landing. The era the space industry has been trying to recreate ever since, and the one it least understands. What made it work wasn’t the money, although there was plenty. It was that the visionaries and the engineers were inside the same institution, reporting to the same leadership, working toward the same goal on the same deadline. The goal was the Moon. The date was the end of the decade. The people at NASA who told the public why this mattered were down the hall from the people figuring out how to do it, and both groups could call each other out. A grand promise that couldn’t be engineered got killed. A piece of engineering that didn’t serve the mission got questioned and eventually dropped. That mutual accountability is what produced Apollo.

The Institutional Era (1972–~2004). The Shuttle, the contractor model, the slow migration of actual engineering work outward to Boeing and Lockheed while NASA kept the budgets, the public face, and the speeches. The people explaining why space mattered and the people building the hardware gradually ended up in different organizations with different incentives. NASA made the case for space while the contractors built the machines, and because they answered to different bosses, neither group could effectively check the other. The speeches stayed grand while the engineering started cutting corners (private equity, woo!). The Challenger is the defining moment: Feynman’s O-ring in a glass of ice water at a press conference, proving in thirty seconds what the agency had spent years not confronting. The engineers at Morton Thiokol had said the O-rings were a problem, but NASA management launched anyway, because the people who knew how the hardware actually worked had lost the ability to overrule the people managing the story. Seven people died.

The Commercial Era (~2004–2018). It deserves credit before I criticize it. SpaceX arrived with the correct diagnosis (that the problem holding US spaceflight back was institutional, not technical) and for a while it genuinely put the visionaries and the engineers back in the same room! Musk in the early years could describe the Mars civilization with real intensity on Monday and identify a manufacturing defect in a turbopump on Tuesday, and the people around him knew both things were real. The ambition was checked by the engineering, and the engineering was motivated by the ambition, and they were accountable to each other because they reported to the same guy. The first propulsive landing of an orbital booster in December 2015 produced a feeling spaceflight hadn’t generated since Apollo. I watched it, and like many of my colleagues, I felt it.

The Grifting Era (~2018–present). Hmmm. What the Commercial Era accidentally proved is that grand visions of space are worth a lot of money on their own: they attract investors, recruits, media attention, regulatory goodwill, and they are much cheaper to produce than actual rockets. A Mars city render costs less than a working engine just as a founder’s TED talk about the multiplanetary future costs less than a successful orbital launch. And once the market figured this out, the business model became obvious: sell the vision, pocket the money, let the engineering fall behind (because we’re never actually going to these places, and by the schmucks figure that out, I’ll have passed the hot potato to someone else!).

Virgin Galactic announced suborbital tourism in 2004 and flew Richard Branson to the edge of space in 2021 — seventeen years later! — for thirty seconds of weightlessness in a vehicle that will have no measurable effect on human civilization. The SPAC era produced dozens of variations on this theme, most since fallen 80 to 95 percent from their peaks, with the retail investors who bought the vision holding the loss.

And then there’s SpaceX, the visionary company I just praised two paragraphs ago; the one that actually built the rockets, that made you feel something when the booster landed, that for a decade really did have the visionaries and the engineers in the same room checking each other’s work.

Here is what that company looks like now: Musk has quietly deprioritized Mars, the entire stated reason for the company’s existence, at the same time that he announced the company’s IPO, something he had long said he would never do. That IPO was confirmed yesterday, on the same day as the Artemis II launch, at a valuation of a trillion dollars. Meanwhile, NASDAQ has proposed narrowing the holding window for S&P 500 inclusion from 365 days to five, which would mean SpaceX stock gets absorbed into index funds and effectively backstopped by pension money almost immediately after going public.

This matters beyond the obvious obscenity of it, because it means we will probably never find out whether space is a commercially viable enterprise. The question of whether you can build a real business getting things and people off this planet (a question that deserves a serious answer) will be buried under the same toxic retail investment slop that ate meme stocks and crypto. SpaceX’s value will be set by index-fund mechanics and momentum trading, not by whether Starship actually works or whether anyone is willing to pay to go to Mars. The company’s fundamentals will be as irrelevant as its mission statement to regular people. Plus the fact that SpaceX has merged with xAI, folding in X, Musk’s failing social media company, so that the whole enterprise is now a conglomerate whose relationship to getting humans to Mars is, at best, performative. The guy who identified the turbopump defect on Tuesday is now buying social media companies while high on ketamine, valued at a trillion dollars on the strength of a Mars mission he has deprioritized.

This is about as far from the original promise of spaceflight (a public mission, collectively owned, addressed to everyone) as it is possible to get. Even where the engineering is real, and even at SpaceX, the dream has become a financial instrument. The mission is the story you tell to support the valuation.

So yeah… There have certainly been better and more inspirational Space Eras than the one we’re currently trudging through.

Three Visions, None of Them for You

But wait, it gets worse.

Because beyond the actual companies, there’s the small the matter of why.

Space currently has three dominant visions and, sadly, none of them include you. I don’t mean that unkindly, but I do mean it structurally: none of them address an ordinary person as a future participant the way Bonestell’s paintings did, and all three position you as an audience. Back to the Colosseum.

Jeff Bezos has been passionate about space since he was five, and he says so openly, so I don’t doubt it. But I want to ask a question nobody in this industry seems willing to ask: why haven’t your dreams changed? You are one of the wealthiest people in human history, you’ve watched the world transform beyond recognition through the internet, smartphones, genomics, climate change, and AI, and the dream is still the one you had before you could read? Bezos’s vision is an expensive nostalgia project. It is little more than a childhood dream that was never required to update itself, because the person who had it became rich enough to never have to.

Musk is a different and stranger case. His philosophical underpinning is what’s sometimes called TESCREAL, a bundle of tech-optimist philosophies including transhumanism, cosmism, and longtermism… frames humanity as pre-programmed to die unless it escapes Earth. The Mars vision isn’t humanity expanding into the cosmos in any recognizable sense that, I dunno, normal people might think about. It’s quite literally a backup drive (or an in-orbit data center) for civilization, populated eventually by what Musk has suggested could be trillions of AI beings.

This is not a vision that includes you. It’s a vision that replaces you. The people who hold this worldview share something important: they do not particularly like life on Earth, which they consider to be a fragile rock we need to escape before it fails us. Musk’s vision is not about going somewhere, it is about leaving somewhere. You can feel it in the renders, the speeches, the consistent framing of Earth as a lackluster origin point rather than a civilizational home.

And… Why would you follow someone somewhere they only ended up because they couldn’t stay?

NASA is the third and most sympathetic case because it is genuinely trying to do science, and some of that science is extraordinary. The Webb telescope has returned images of the early universe no human has ever seen (more screensavers, woo!). The planetary science divisions (Voyager, Cassini, Curiosity) do specific, publicly accountable work where the people explaining the mission and the people building the instruments still overlap, still check each other, still produce things that are real.

But NASA as a whole has become so disconnected from civilian life that its missions carry no narrative weight outside the community already invested.

Artemis II launched last night and nothing in your life will change when it lands. People, including me, forget that this wasn’t always the case! I mean Apollo mattered to ordinary Americans and it wasn’t because they were more patriotic or more interested in science in pre-social media days. It was because whether the US or the Soviet Union dominated space had real consequences for the kind of world they’d live in. The Cold War was not a metaphor; people understood, at a gut level, that the geopolitical contest playing out above their heads would shape the political order they’d inhabit on the ground, in the same way that people in the Middle East right now understand that the outcome of the war around them will determine what their daily lives look like for decades. That’s skin in the game. And nobody watching Artemis II has skin in the game. If it succeeds, your life is the same. If it fails, your life is the same. The mission is disconnected from any contest whose outcome you’d personally feel, and that is the consequence of fifty years of the people who talk about space and the people who build for space drifting into separate worlds.

So sadly, none of these three visions talk to you the way Bonestell’s paintings did. None of them say you will go here, because all of them say watch this content, you tourist. Bonestell could paint from the human vantage point because the space program’s promise was genuinely collective, and that promise has been replaced by something much smaller: this is what extremely rich men are doing with their childhood dreams and their exit philosophies, and you are welcome to watch, and buy stock in the vision, but certainly never complain about it.

And I think the reason the visions are so small despite the vast wealth, despite the engineering talent and the rockets that actually work, is that the people behind them are not very… interesting.

This sounds like a petty observation but I mean it very seriously! Bezos and Musk are men whose imaginative lives were shaped almost entirely by a handful of science fiction novels read before adolescence. Asimov, Heinlein, Tolkien, the usual. And who never moved past them. They are not readers, they are not curious about Earth’s own strangeness, its history, its literature, the depth of what’s already here. They find this planet boring, which is why they want to leave it, and that boredom shows in everything they build. Their visions of space are thin because their experience of life is thin.

You cannot paint a compelling future for humanity if you are not particularly interested in humanity, and you cannot ask people to follow you somewhere new if your entire reason for going is that you found where you were tedious. The collective imagination that made Bonestell’s paintings work; the sense that the future was a shared human project — required people who actually gave a damn about the species as it currently exists, on the planet it currently inhabits. What we have instead are men who read the same five books at twelve and have been cosplaying the protagonists ever since, and the futures they imagine have exactly the depth you’d expect from that.

STEM: Someday They’ll Explain the Mission

The institutional response to the whole “oh no, space is boring!” is STEM outreach: robotics competitions, coding camps, maker spaces, the whole apparatus of yelling at young people that science is exciting, and pointing them at careers in the space industry.

For the obvious reason that I am female, I am constantly asked to do STEM related talks, conferences, mentoring, etc etc. And I always say no for the exact reason that I always really hope nobody on live TV will me about the multi-generational impact of Katy Perry floating in a sky capsule for three minutes: I’m bad at lying and I’m even worse at pretending that any of this matters.

(FWIW, I was actually asked this question about Katy Perry on live TV after they played her long monologue about just how “connected to love” she felt after her quick trip, and was actually speechless. The news anchor had to prompt me twice for a response).

But back to STEM. All it actually does is train people to build rockets and then point them at an industry that has no credible answer to the question of what the rockets are for. STEM produces technically capable people and puts them into organizations whose dominant visions don’t include them, and whose cultural signatures of SPACs, retail investors holding losses, seventeen years of Virgin Galactic promises, is increasingly recognizable to the public as grand language used to move money.

You can train engineers without a mission, but you can’t make them feel the mission means something when no institution is willing to commit to one.

And indeed, when executives and space agency folk realize that STEM isn’t working either, the industry’s next response is always the same: find better storytellers, better photos of a milky way, a more compelling narrative, a founder who can communicate.

But better storytelling doesn’t fix this because storytelling isn’t the problem. The Webb telescope has produced more beautiful and more technically accurate galactic photos than anything Bonestell ever painted, and they feel like endlessly boring content that you may find stuck to the roof of your dentist as the drill comes out. So the problem is not what photos to show, it’s that no one is standing behind them with a credible plan, saying: this is what we’re doing, this is how we’ll get there, and you are part of it.

Bonestell’s paintings worked because they were accurate, and the accuracy was verifiable, and someone was standing right next to them. Freeman, von Braun, eventually NASA itself saying: yes, this is real, here’s the engineering, here’s the timeline. That required the people with the ambition and the people with the expertise to be in the same room, answerable to each other and to the public, and when that arrangement exists the storytelling means something. When it doesn’t, you get content.

The question nobody in this industry is asking is not how to tell a better story. It’s how to rebuild the arrangement, with real skin in the game, where the story and the engineering are accountable to each other — where the people explaining why we should go and the people figuring out how to get there work together closely enough that neither can bullshit, and both of them talk to ordinary people as future participants rather than spectators.

That is not a communications problem. It is a political and institutional one, and it is exactly the kind of question that gets crowded out when the people who own the narrative of space are a man who has had the same dream since he was five, a man whose dream involves you not existing, and an agency whose budget is being cut by the administration that briefly congratulated its astronauts last night before moving on to the war.

This week Marc Andreessen sat down on the Founders podcast and said two things:

The first: “I aim for zero introspection. Move forward. Go.”

The second: that Elon Musk is “maybe the greatest manager of our era.”

For people with even minimal intelligence, these two things (no introspection and Musk’s celebrated management) are clearly related. And Marc’s second claim just so happens to be what this paper is about.

In short: the Silicon Valley management gospel (cult?) has a specific epistemology: first-principles thinking beats domain expertise, and the founder who acts without overthinking will outperform the institution that pauses to evaluate. Andreessen actually said the seldom-discussed part out loud: introspection is the enemy; don’t question the model. Just… go forth, wreck havoc, and let someone else deal with the fallout later.

The problem with Silicon Valley’s epistemology, though, is that it is correct in exactly one environment, and catastrophically wrong in every other.

Why? Well…

The infamous first-principles thinking is a cognitive tool optimized for complicated systems: things with many parts but knowable, stable relationships. Like, for example, a rocket engine or a battery cell. Or anything where physics stays constant while you think about it.

But most of the systems that matter, like manufacturing at scale, platform governance, government, healthcare, regulation? These are are complex: their relationships are dynamic, emergent, and change in response to your intervention. You cannot break these things down without destroying the thing you are trying to understand.

This paper introduces a formal model, called the correction window, that explains why the same Elon Musk management playbook produces self-correction at SpaceX, brand erosion at Tesla, false vindication at Twitter, and institutional collapse through DOGE.

As you’ll see, the variable throughout these examples is not leadership quality, but in fact the feedback loop and architecture of the system being managed.

Every organization has two clocks that matter:

1. The first measures how long it takes to find out a decision was wrong.

2. The second measures how long before the damage from that decision becomes permanent.

At SpaceX, the first clock is fast: a rocket fails, and you know within days. And the second clock is slow: engineering knowledge is well-documented, you can rehire, you can rebuild a team. There’s a wide window between discovering the mistake and losing the ability to fix it.

At the US federal government, though, the clocks are reversed. It takes years to discover that firing mine safety inspectors or drug approval staff was a mistake. But the institutional knowledge those people carried disperses within months: they find new jobs, the relationships dissolve, the system reorganizes around their absence. By the time the damage shows up, the window to fix it has already closed.

The gap between those two clocks is the correction window. When it’s wide, you can afford to move fast and break things. When it’s narrow or negative (when the damage becomes permanent before you even detect it) the same approach doesn’t produce bold leadership but irreversible institutional failure.

The federal government lost 317,000 workers in 2025, while spending went up by $248 billion. In this case, thanks to the Musk Management Ideology, the correction window was negative before the first person was fired!

To conclude, Andreessen’s “zero introspection” is not a personality quirk. Very sadly, it is the anti-intellectual foundation of a management method that has now been exported from rockets to government. The paper makes the case that this export is not bold; it is a structural error with a formal mathematical proof.

Read the full paper here →

This article draws on two working papers: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures: Adaptive Bandwidth” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Both develop the formal models and cross-domain evidence summarized here. Available on request: s@sinead.co

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In Parts I and II, I argued that culinary history is an economic story of crisis and response, as most economic stories are. More specifically, that chefs emerge when something upstream of dining breaks, whether it’s supply chains, labor markets, institutions, or meaning; and that their real job is to diagnose and repair whatever the prevailing economic system has become most broken about eating.

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I traced this pattern of culinary history through feudal banquets, Escoffier’s industrial kitchen, postwar austerity, nouvelle cuisine, molecular gastronomy, and the current Western exhaustion with Michelin (which is very, very real). And I ended Part II with the claim that the current structural problem is existential: we have more food options than any civilization in history, everything tastes good, and the thing that’s broken is meaning itself.

(Apologies to the people who told me this was the most depressing thing they had ever read).

So now, Japan. Because the Japanese food system has been solving this exact problem, of how to create meaning under abundance for centuries. And the way it got there illuminates everything about where Western dining is headed next, which is really what I want to figure out!

How Japan Got Here

Meaning First

The Western culinary arc I traced in Parts I and II followed a consistent pattern that a structural crisis appears, and that a chef responds. The solution to the crisis is what creates new institutions, which will eventually calcify, break, and produce the next crisis. The whole history is a sequence of being broken and being fixed, much like our “regular” economy.

Interesting, however, Japan’s culinary history does not follow this pattern.

Because where the Western arc is defined by breaks, the Japanese arc is defined by continuity, and this difference is genuinely structural. It is the reason the two systems produce such different relationships between food and meaning; a difference that is so enormous that even someone without an interest in the culinary economy will feel it after a day or two in Tokyo!

Ok so let’s start with the origin point:

The Western restaurant emerged from urbanization; as industrialization pulled people into cities, household kitchens shrank, and a new institution was needed to solve an entirely practical problem: how do you feed a rapidly growing population of urban strangers, reliably, outside the home? The restaurant answered this question. And as I discussed in Part I, the restaurant immediately created a second-order problem (that of coordination) which Escoffier’s brigade system then solved by industrializing the kitchen.

Now consider that Japan’s high culinary tradition emerged from a completely different place. Kaiseki, the formal multi-course cuisine that sits at the top of Japan’s culinary hierarchy, grew out of the tea ceremony, which is itself a ritual technology for producing attention and presence. The tea ceremony was not trying to solve a logistics problem, it was trying to solve a spiritual one: how do you create a bounded space in which every gesture, every object, every flavor is saturated with deliberate meaning?

The “meal” which ensued was an extension of that project. As in, food existed in service of consciousness! Not the other way around; whereby in the West we have tried endlessly to retrofit consciousness onto food.

This means that Japan’s culinary tradition began from meaning and worked backward toward formal techniques, while the West began from logistics and has spent four centuries slowly arriving at meaning. The two systems are converging on the same point, but from opposite directions, and… clearly, Japan got there first!

The Shokunin

The figure who embodies this tradition is the shokunin, the master craftsman, who is the Japanese counterpart to the Western chef-celebrity. And actually, you could probably say that the shokunin is very nearly the inversion of a Western celebrity.

A concept of a shokunin is the antithesis of what we do in the West; they might spend ten years learning to make rice, or fifteen years cutting fish. In fact, an entire career dedicated to a single preparation! Consider that the word itself carries connotations that “chef” does not: duty, spiritual discipline, the moral obligation to pursue mastery regardless of recognition.

There is a famous Japanese concept, shokunin kishitsu, which roughly translates as “the craftsman’s spirit” and describes the obsessive, almost religious commitment to perfecting a single form over a lifetime.

The interesting question now asks what institutional conditions produced this model, which is so different from ours, because it didn’t emerge from some mysterious Japanese reverence for craft. As always, these things emerge from specific economic structures and incentives that made this an entirely rational strategy.

I’ll start with the za, Japan’s medieval guild system. (I should add, by the way, that a lot of my pre-Japan history around this came from this excellent podcast, Isaac Meyer’s History of Japan).

The za were monopoly organizations that controlled production and trade in specific crafts, granting exclusive rights to designated artisan groups in exchange for obligations to powerful patrons, including temples, shrines, feudal lords. So if you belonged to a za, your livelihood depended on maintaining your position within a defined domain. Meaning that you simply didn’t diversify, and you certainly didn’t innovate laterally, but rather you deepened your mastery within the boundaries that the guild had drawn for you, because those boundaries were the source of your economic protection.

This further intensified under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), which imposed a rigid four-tier social hierarchy: (1) samurai, (2) farmers, (3) artisans, and (4) merchants. And since mobility between classes was largely impossible, this meant that if you were born into an artisan family, the outcome of your economic life was fixed; you could thankfully not move down to become a merchant, but nor could you move up to become a samurai.

In fact, the only vector for advancement and the only way to accumulate social capital, reputation, and economic security, was to go deeper within your inherited craft, given that breadth was structurally not possible. Depth was the only option.

And so this is the political economy of the shokunin: a labor model produced by closed markets and impossibly rigid class structures, in which mastery of a single form was the rational response to a system that punished deviation while simultaneously rewarding fidelity.

Thus, the shokunin ethic is an adaptation to a constraint that was subsequently culturally kept even long after the original constraints were lifted. Obviously, the Tokugawa class system was abolished a long time ago in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, but the craft culture it produced and the structural worship and reverence for depth (plus a suspicion of novelty!), had by then become so deeply embedded in Japanese institutional life, and connected to moral standing, that it continued.

Now, that was the ideology. But how did this filter through society?

The transmission mechanism was the ie, known as the household system, which kind of designated this craft knowledge as an intergenerational inheritance, so to speak (and we kind of see this in the West as well, with intergenerational family businesses).

But the ie shouldn’t be confused with “a family”, as it was more of an economic unit in which the business, the techniques, the reputation, and the social identity were all inherited as a single package. Today, obviously, we’d call this “corporate synergies and brand values” and something Brooklyn Beckham recently had a lot to say about lolz.

So, this means that the sushi master’s counter is not his personal achievement, but the ie‘s productive asset, held in trust across generations. The apprentice does not aspire to open a competing restaurant with a different vision; the aspiration is to become the master, to inherit the counter, to reproduce the form with greater fidelity than the generation before. It is a reproductive model much more than a competitive one.

Compare this with the Western chef’s path, which Escoffier’s brigade system made feasible. In the Western kitchen, you start as a commis at a junior station (vegetables, cold prep), work your way through the stations, and if you’re good enough you eventually reach saucier, which is the most prestigious position before sous chef and chef de cuisine. Once you’ve peaked at a restaurant, you leave, open your own place, develop a personal style, and build a brand. The incentive structure rewards ambition, movement, differentiation, and eventually individual expression.

The whole trajectory is a competitive career ladder that terminates in self-prominence.

The Japanese system has no equivalent ladder! There is no moment of liberation, no break from the inherited form, and absolutely no assertion of individual voice against the institution.

And this maps onto broader structural differences between Japanese and Western capitalism: the keiretsu networks that emphasize long-term institutional relationships over market competition; the relative absence of hostile takeovers and disruptive entrepreneurship in traditional industries; the cultural suspicion of the founder-hero narrative that dominates Western business (which, honestly, we should probably all find suspicious by now).

The shokunin and the Western chef-celebrity are both products of their respective economic systems, and those systems reward fundamentally different things.

This is why the shokunin’s excellence through repetition is genuinely structural, and why you will find no signature dish, no personal brand, and no deviation. The ego and the culinary form are the same, which feels non-differentiated, and the only thing that remains is the form of culinary technique itself, executed with a precision that only decades of repetition can produce.

Actually, you could even go further to say that the shokunin is actually liberated by constraint (!). And that the inherited form is the freedom, because it eliminates the entire burden of originality and replaces it with depth!

And this is enormously relevant for understanding the generational crisis I’ll discuss later, because what is at risk today, in Japan, is not simply the loss of skilled individuals, but the collapse of the ie as a transmission mechanism.

Because when a young person declines to enter a ten-year apprenticeship, they are not just choosing a different career. They are breaking the institutional chain that produced the shokunin model in the first place. You are not losing a chef, you are losing the economic structure that made that kind of chef possible. And as I saw in Japan myself, this is a very, very, very real problem.

Seventy-Two Seasons

If the shokunin provides the labor model, and kaiseki provides the template from which all of this was derived, the thing that binds the entire Japanese food system together is a relationship to time that has no real Western equivalent.

(And yes, I am sober as I write this…)

As if the world is not already complicated enough, the Japanese calendar traditionally recognizes seventy-two micro-seasons, called shichijūni kō. This is not some kind of marketing language that you might expect from a weekly menu change at Noma or the French Laundry. It is a very real calendrical technology, rooted in Shinto and Chinese naturalist traditions, that pre-determines what can be cooked, when, and why.

So: each micro-season basically lasts roughly five days and describes a specific natural phenomenon: “East winds melt the ice.” “Hibernating insects open their doors.” “Paulownia trees produce seeds.”

(In fact, maybe French Laundry should steal some of this)

Meaning that a kaiseki menu in early March is structurally different from a kaiseki menu in late March, because March has moved. The cherry blossom that appears on a plate in the first week would be completely, embarrassingly erroneous in the third week. And the fish that defines this five-day window will be replaced by a different fish in the next one. The menu is a function of time itself. It is time. The menu is a technology in the same way that a watch is a technology.

So, I was in Japan during the last week of January and the first week of February, which turns out to sit on one of the most significant hinges in the entire calendar! The micro-seasons I ate through were:

• “Ice thickens on the streams,”

• “Hens begin to lay eggs” (the final micro-season before the calendar year turns),

• “East wind melts the ice,” which marks Risshun, the official beginning of spring on February 4th.

The plates reflected this: In late January I was in deep winter: fatty kanburi (cold-season yellowtail, at its richest because the fish have fattened migrating south through cold water), fugu, winter tuna, daikon, yuzu.

By early February, the first butterbur sprouts had started appearing, signaling that the calendar had moved. The menu in the first week of February could not have been the menu I ate in the last week of January, because January and February are different worlds.

This produces something that the Western culinary system has struggled to achieve: genuine non-repeatability!

Every meal is temporally indexed because it belongs to this moment and cannot be reproduced next month, because the season will have shifted, the ingredients will have changed, and the entire framework that structured the meal will have moved on. The non-repeatability I identified in Part II as the new luxury (experiences that cannot be replicated or repurchased) is, in Japan, simply the default condition of cooking well.

The Western Michelin system, by contrast, rewards exactly the opposite: consistency!

A starred restaurant must deliver the same level of excellence every time an anonymous inspector arrives, which means the ideal Michelin dish is time-invariant. In other words, it should be as good in June as in October, and for many multi-starred Michelins, this involves having many of the same dishes to perfection.

Japanese Smallness

One more piece of institutional inheritance matters for understanding where Japan is today, and it’s the one that strikes every Western visitor most immediately: the restaurants are tiny.

Six seats. Or eight seats. The chef works in front of you, often alone, and there is one service per evening where there is one “menu” which tells you that you will eat what you are given.

This is typically discussed as an aesthetic choice; as an expression of Japanese minimalism or cultural preference, but it is actually an economic structure, with very old roots.

The Japanese tradition of counter dining evolved from yatai (street food stalls) and kappo (chef-driven cooking performed in front of guests), both of which predate the Western restaurant concept. These formats never needed to solve the concurrency problem that defined Western dining, as there was no moment equivalent to European urbanization where a sudden population boom required feeding hundreds of strangers simultaneously.

The problem that produced Escoffier’s brigade system (“how do you serve many diners, ordering differently, all expecting the same result”) simply did not arise in this way.

So the kitchen never industrialized, and the chef never needed Escoffier’s brigade. The management apparatus that defined Western fine dining for a century was totally unnecessary in Japan because the structural decision, passed across generations, was to serve fewer people.

This smallness also meant that the relationship between chef and diner remained personal in a way that the Western system very sadly abandoned early. At a six-seat counter, the chef knows who is eating and the meal can be adjusted in real time. (Those of you reading this with kids, particularly picky ones, will know this).

The experience is conversational and there is no front-of-house team mediating between kitchen and table, no choreography of service, and no separation between production and consumption, which is where the hierarchy between chef and patron is entirely created in the West.

Where Japan Is Today

Toyosu at 5am

On one of my first mornings in Tokyo, after trying and failing to beat jet lag, I decided at 3am to get up and go meet some fishermen. Eventually, I found myself in the Toyosu fish market at 5am watching the tuna auction, feeling overwhelmed by the smell of fish, raw and cooked, being served up to those finishing their night shifts.

In a literal sense, Toyosu is a wholesale fish market where Bluefin tuna are laid out in rows, with chefs and buyers inspecting tail cuts with flashlights, as an auctioneer moves through the lot at a dizzying speed.

But what struck me was how little the scene resembled a commodity market in any Western sense. There was no negotiation or haggling, and the prices that morning encoded something that Western commodity markets do not: this tuna was caught this morning, in this water, at this temperature, at this point in the season. Tomorrow’s tuna will be a different animal, literally and economically. The same cut from the same species will cost wildly different amounts next month, because it will be a different month.

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The first bonito of the season (please forgive me for saying this, but bonito = dried tuna flakes that are put as often as salt and pepper into Japanese food, and is indistinguishable in taste for me from fishfood) carries enormous cultural and economic value precisely because it is the first, and because it marks a temporal threshold that the entire food system recognizes.

When the season for a particular fish ends, it ends. The supply chain does not route around this fact. There is no FedEx workaround as with many global Michelin restaurants. The constraint is as absolute as time (because the menu, again, is time!).

The Toyosu auction is, in other words, the seventy-two-season system seen as market infrastructure. Prices, menus, commodities, and time are all the same thing here, viewed through different lenses!

The tuna is expensive because it is January, and it is on the menu because it is expensive, and it is expensive because this particular fish exists only in this particular five-day window of cold water and migration patterns. Remove any one of these variables and the others collapse. This is very much the opposite of the globalized Western supply chain, which is organized to defeat entirely the natural seasons and ensure that nothing is ever unavailable. In the West, this means that price is a function of logistics costs; and menus are a function of customer preference. Time is, very strangely if you think about it, irrelevant to both.

Adding quickly to this as a sub-note, I also spent some attempting to understand Japanese wine while I was there, which is genuinely interesting (and unfortunately tastes as good as you suspect it might taste…). Japan obviously has no natural advantage in winemaking and produces wine anyway, at small scale, with obsessive local specificity. It would be cheaper and objectively easier to import. But I suppose Japan is a culture that defaults to locality and temporality even when efficiency argues against it!

What The Experience Actually Feels Like

Right. So… describing the inherited system is one thing. Sitting inside it is another beast entirely.

At a great omakase (“to entrust”) counter in Tokyo, the experience is roughly this: you arrive, you sit, there is no menu or choices, and the chef places a piece of fish in front of you. You eat it, and he places the next one. The pacing is entirely his, just as the sequencing is entirely his. The peak of the meal (the moment of greatest intensity) arrives when he decides it arrives, not when you are ready for it.

This is the movie-director model I discussed in Part II, pushed to its limit. The chef controls timing, sequence, pacing, and emotional arc with total authority. The diner’s role is to receive. And the act of surrender; to give up the very human instinct of choice and preference, turns out to be inseparable from the pleasure.

This solves the attention problem I identified in Part II with an almost embarrassing directness. I argued that the modern Western diner is cognitively overwhelmed, that everything competes with a feed, and that dining must justify three hours of full presence against the entire internet. At a six-seat counter where the chef is working eighteen inches from your face, this problem vanishes entirely! You cannot scroll your phone when someone is personally slicing fish for you while making eye contact. The architecture forbids distraction; and anyway, the restaurant’s physical design produces the presence that Western restaurants are increasingly desperate to manufacture through theatrical interventions, phone-locking pouches, and elaborate multi-sensory experiences.

The status dynamic is different too, considering that the scarcity at a six-seat restaurant is genuine because, well… there are literally six seats. You cannot buy your way past this constraint by knowing the manager (who is the server and also the chef). This is scarcity as a byproduct of craft, and it is completely different from the manufactured scarcity of a members’ club!

Where It Breaks

It would be easy to romanticize all of this into a narrative where Japan represents some kind of culinary paradise untouched by modernity’s problems. That would be wrong. Japan’s food system has its own crises, and they are genuinely serious.

The first is what I would call Michelin-ification. When the Michelin Guide arrived in Tokyo in 2007, it awarded the city more stars than Paris, which caused a brief and delightful Franco-Japanese diplomatic incident.

Of course, (French) critics questioned whether Michelin was being too generous to gain acceptance with Japanese customers and help its parent company sell tyres in Japan. (How dare you equate yakitori grills with grand Parisian establishments like La Tour d’Argent!!).

But the deeper problem was structural. Consider that the Michelin framework is designed to evaluate restaurants that optimize for consistency, legibility, and reproducibility. Japanese restaurants that optimize for intimacy, temporal specificity, and the disappearance of the chef’s ego into tradition do not map cleanly onto this framework. The star actually does little more than create a different kind of pressure: unwanted international visibility, tourist demand, and reservation scalping.

Some restaurateurs actually asked Michelin to revoke their stars because of this! And in fact, I experienced this myself first hand. When I found myself in a remote part of Japan’s north island close to Russia, many restaurants there were extremely unwilling to let me in; at one stage even pretending to think that I was trying to buy the dining table when I pointed at it at dinner time, instead of acknowledging that I wanted to be fed, and just saying no!!

The second crisis is generational. The shokunin model obviously depends on apprenticeship pipelines that are disappearing. The economics are brutal: a young person must commit to a decade or more of low-paid, physically demanding work, mastering a single form, in an economy that offers vastly more comfortable alternatives.

The number of young Japanese willing to spend ten years learning to make rice is declining! And this is an existential threat to the entire system, because the economics of smallness depend on a labor supply of people willing to accept the terms of craft mastery. Verifying this, the chefs I worked with in a European 2* that had worked in similar Tokyo establishments, spoke of twenty-hour days of never-endingly brutal labor to… make rice.

This rice, by the way, is entirely impossible for us mere Westerners to properly even taste; I would consider myself to have a very strong palate given my adventures in food and wine, and it all tasted identical to me (again, sorry!).

The third crisis is the Uniqlo problem, which I teased in Part I. Uniqlo solved a version of the same question that has defined Western culinary history: how do you make quality accessible at scale? The answer was to strip away everything that didn’t contribute to function, standardize production, and distribute globally. This produced genuinely excellent basics at democratic prices, which is a remarkable achievement.

Applied to food, this logic produces conveyor-belt sushi! It is good, it is everywhere, and it coexists with the six-seat counter where the chef has been cutting tuna for thirty years, in the same way that Uniqlo coexists with a Kyoto tailor who makes three kimonos a month by hand.

The question is whether the small-scale system can survive alongside the industrialized one indefinitely (especially when people like me can’t taste the difference?); or whether the economic logic of scale will eventually consume it.

Japan’s food culture is, in this sense, a live experiment in whether craft and mass production can coexist within the same economic system without one cannibalizing the other. The vibe on the ground suggested, unfortunately, that perhaps not.

What the West Is Borrowing

The most interesting Western restaurants I discussed in Part II (Ultraviolet, Freixa, Gohar, Tuna Fight Club) are all independently reinventing pieces of the Japanese model:

• Smallness

• Sequencing

• Non-repeatability

• Meaning through constraint.

They are arriving at these solutions through intuition and experimentation, often without explicit reference to Japanese precedent.

Freixa seats a handful of strangers at one table; the entire restaurant is a dinner party. Tuna Fight Club fits thirty people in a basement with one fish; this was essentially restaurant standard practice in Japan. Ultraviolet has ten seats and sequences the room itself around the diner. These are conscious design choices made by chefs who have independently arrived at solutions that Japan embedded in its restaurant architecture generations ago.

Incidentally, my neighbor in London has been trying to get us tickets for Tuna Fight Club (which, again, is around the corner from us), for quite some time. Could I now feel OK with paying $450 for one meal, that I had every day in Japan for $15? I’m not so sure…

But the institutional need beneath these experiments is fundamentally different, and this difference will ultimately determine how far the convergence can go.

Japan’s culinary meaning is embedded in deep cultural infrastructure that has been borne from the Shinto’s seasonality as a temporal framework. The Buddhist ideology, too, lends everything a philosophical orientation toward impermanence and absolute restraint. And of course, centuries of craft lineage provide the labor model. Then, the tea ceremony provides the original template that led to all of this.

The meaning, therefore, comes from outside the restaurant, from a long-standing civilizational context that the meal draws upon and expresses inherently, and often implicitly.

The West does not have this infrastructure. Western culture is optimized for scale, novelty, content production, and individual expression. (Yes, if ever you thought we sounded like dumb Americans, this is it). A Western chef who wants to create a meaningful dining experience must build the entire meaning architecture from scratch, inside the restaurant, in a culture that will immediately try to content-ify it, scale it, and strip it for parts before selling it to Private Equity.

While Japan’s challenge is sustaining an inherited system of meaning under the pressures of modernity; the West’s challenge is constructing one without any inherited infrastructure to build on.

The Netflix Problem

Which brings me to something I have been thinking about since I started writing this series, and which connects to a much larger observation about Western life.

The West has built a food system that mirrors Netflix, with infinite options, frictionless access, and algorithmically surfaced recommendations. The billion-dollar industry of restaurant reviews, ratings, rankings, lists. You can eat anything, anywhere, at any time. The supply chain is global, while the information is both total and totalitarian. The dominant experience, the one that defines how most people interact with this abundance, is paralysis.

You scroll, you compare, you read the reviews. You look at the photos and you check the price. And finally, after all of the above, you second-guess the entire meal away about whether the other place would have been better. This is the decision-fatigue problem applied to eating, and it is identical in structure to what seemingly happens these days in dating, which has undergone an identical structural transformation.

The apps provide infinite choice, frictionless matching, and total information. And the dominant experience, as my friends who use them tell me, is complete exhaustion. Endless scrolling through human beings, comparing options, keeping alternatives open, wondering whether someone better is one more swipe away.

What people actually want, visibly and desperately, is to be chosen. They want omakase in their lives; to be decisively told: “Here. I choose you, and only you!” and for the scroll to stop. People want the omakase to surrender their preferences to someone who is serious about the craft of paying attention, and to sit back and trust the sequencing.

Because, you see, endless choice turns out to be a surprisingly effective mechanism for destroying enjoyment.

Japan’s food system is the structural opposite of Netflix. It is closer to someone handing you a single film and saying: this is what we’re watching tonight, because it is March, and this is what March means, and you’ll do it without your phone or any other distraction, beginning to end. The constraint is the product. And the relief of not choosing is itself the luxury.

What I Could Not Read

I should be honest about something, though, because the experience I just described; this constraint as a luxury, is the experience of someone who can read the system.

I… Could not.

What I actually found in Japan was, embarrassingly, paralysis. I walked into restaurants and could not tell if they were extraordinary or ordinary, because they all looked the same to me.

The menus, where menus existed, were indistinguishable. The meals were indistinguishable. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner frequently felt like the same plate of fish and rice served three times a day in three different rooms, and all I could taste was bonito (aka fishfood for people like me, the unlearned). I could not figure out if one sushi counter was better than another, because the differentiation that a Japanese diner reads effortlessly (e..g this chef’s rice is superior, or this particular piece of yellowtail is exceptional because of where it sits in the migration cycle) was something I simply could not perceive.

In short, I lacked the cultural literacy to decode any of it. And without that literacy, the entire system collapsed into sameness and boringness. I went the whole way to Japan, and felt starved of the excitement of a culinary explosion I was anticipating!

This turns out to be the most important thing I learned in Japan, because it proves the argument from the other direction!

The meaning in Japanese dining is not in the food itself; it is in the cultural infrastructure that surrounds the food: the seasonal knowledge, the craft literacy, the ability to perceive micro-differences that only generations of embedded dining culture make legible. Strip that infrastructure away and you are left with a tourist (me) eating what appears to be an identical meal on repeat, unable to distinguish the extraordinary from the competent, completely paralyzed by the absence of all the Western differentiation signals. Different menus, different cuisines, different price points, different atmospheres… all the things that I have been trained my entire life to navigate by.

Thus, the Japanese system’s greatest strength is also its greatest barrier to entry.

“Meaning through constraint” only works if you can read the constraints. And this is exactly why Michelin’s arrival in Tokyo was so structurally disruptive: it offered to make Japanese restaurants legible to outsiders by imposing Western markers (stars, rankings, categories), and in doing so it began to erode the very qualities that made them work for insiders.

So yes, when the first Tokyo guide launched in 2007 as I mentioned, the system that was supposed to recognize excellence had, in practice, made excellence harder to sustain.

And perhaps this is the deeper point behind the entire series.

The chef’s job has always been to solve what the prevailing economic system has most recently broken about eating. And what is broken now, in the West, is the capacity to choose meaningfully from infinite abundance. In other words, we have more options than any civilization in history and less ability to commit to any of them (which is clearly not just a food problem!).

The Japanese food system suggests, however, that the answer is counterintuitive. They say: build structures that make choice unnecessary; create constraints so embedded in time and place and philosophy that the question of “what should I eat?” disappears before it is asked. The meal arrives, and it is exactly what this moment requires, because the chef, the season, and the architecture have already decided.

But those structures only work if you can read them. And most of us, trained by abundance, trained by Netflix, trained by the scroll, cannot. My pal, a movie critic, sent me a message a few days ago discussing the term “algorithmically trapped”; which is horrifying and, perhaps, for people like me, true.

The restaurants that will define the next era will be the ones that solve this from both directions. Japan and the West have converged on the same question, despite arriving from opposite sides: how do you build constraints understandable enough for outsiders like me to read, without destroying the depth that made them worth reading in the first place?

The future of dining, it seems to me, is therefore the end of the menu.

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Hello!

I’ve been quiet recently for several reasons (like a fractured back, a new war, the list goes on…). But also because I’ve been working on something new! Or, rather, something old.

Firstly:

It occurred to me when I had a meeting recently that none of my professional, academic or research work is posted anywhere. I’ve never really thought about it before, because who cares, right? But as I started recently to go through the many years worth of ideas, papers, consulting projects, frameworks, it seemed outrageous that I have not even attempted to archive some of this stuff even for myself!

Secondly:

Some of the people who have been reading this Substack (and I’m so grateful for that, thank you!), have asked me several times: what exactly is it that you work on?

The smorgasbord of topics I write about here aren't always the same ones I study formally, but I don't really have a switch between the two modes. The same frameworks and structures that have shaped my formal research work, and indeed shape how I think about everything else, means they end up in everything I write here too.

So I figured I may as well post some of that, too.

What is my research, anyway?

In short, I apply complex systems thinking to real-world problems around industries, economies and the financial markets. Most of what I do is research through a novel lens of “architecture”, or in more simple terms, understanding the interactions between systems or institutions, where “outcomes” are usually produced, be it technologies, industries, policies, financial returns.

I do this by creating mathematical models about how dynamical systems work; I then apply these models to problems that I find, most of which are in the space and defense domain, whether through industrial policy, finance, fiscal institutions or technology commercialization.

So this could be:

• Why can’t Europe convert its defense spending into military capability?

• What do multi-domain military economics mean for the future of warfare?

• Why do central bank rate decisions fail to transmit evenly through the real economy?

• Why do some countries industrialize and others, with similar endowments, don’t?

• Why does geopolitical realignment produce economic fragmentation faster than institutions can adapt?

So:

To that end, I have decided to archive and post my research and my day-to-day work on my Substack, under “Foundations”.

For most of my career, I have thought about how best to communicate academic ideas to the Real World™. I experienced first hand that in academia that you can write many papers on a topic and have zero Real World impact; and simultaneously change policy overnight with a single satire piece written for the Financial Times that included a cat meme.

I’m not saying these briefs will be entertaining enough to contain cat memes, but thankfully nor will I be posting 80-something pages of illegible nonsense either.

TL;DR, I’m really not sure what the best way to present formal work is, yet. However, with the goal of at least archiving my work for myself and not trying to entertain the masses with industrial dynamics, I have decided to do the following:

1. Translate my work into “mainstream” briefs of a few pages long (but removing confidential data and in some cases generalizing where I am/ have been under NDA).

2. Update the data, figures, thinking into today’s numbers and apply to relevant scenarios today.

3. Post and archive them here, in case anybody is interested in reading them (big “if”, I know).

4. Give people the optionality of emailing me for the full paper, including the formal math models, data, etc.

5. Find a better way to do this in the future, if I decide that it’s worth it!

And… that’s it! Please reach out if you see anything that you find compelling enough to want more information on, and I’d be only too happy to discuss it in more detail with you!

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If you have a mortgage in Ireland, it means that you either:

(1) Are incredibly (un)lucky that you have been able to buy one of the few, overpriced houses on the island, and (2) that your Irish mortgage is probably a “tracker mortgage”, in which case you already know what I’m about to write in your bones.

Between 2022 and 2023, the ECB raised interest rates by 4.5 % :

• An Irish household on a tracker mortgage saw their monthly repayment rise by over €600.

• A German household on a fixed-rate mortgage paid around €35 more.

Same central bank but radically different outcomes to households.

Most commentary on this framed it as an Irish problem; insert something about mortgage culture, boom-era recklessness, the failure to fix themselves. But that framing is wrong, because this is not just an Irish issue!

Last year, I did a deep dive into the Irish Central Bank’s institutional architecture, in terms of how it’s structured, what it can and can’t do, and where the real constraints on Irish monetary policy actually sit. What came out of that work was a much bigger question:

Why do some EU households absorb ECB rate decisions immediately, while others barely feel them at all?

The answer is structural, and incredibly important (even if a little boring).

Consider that Irish tracker mortgages transmit ECB rate decisions almost perfectly, meaning that Irish people feel the impact of interest rate changes with near-zero lag.

German fixed-rate mortgages, on the other hand, are sitting on some sort of bond infrastructure that dates to Prussian land finance law of 1769 (I know), which insulate households almost entirely.

So, while neither Germany nor Ireland chose this, both inherited the systems that are either very lucky, or very unlucky, depending on where you live.

And the unlucky part? It’s because, if you’re in Ireland, you’re actually redistributive. Meaning that Irish households pick up the cost of inflation such that other countries, like Germany, don’t have to.

In other words: Irish and Spanish households doing more demand-destruction work per basis point is part of what allows the ECB to stop raising rates sooner.

Indeed. German households get the benefit of lower inflation and a stable currency without their mortgage bills having moved! While the ECB’s work was done disproportionately by households in Dublin and Madrid. So while the reward of fighting inflation is shared across the EU, the cost is not.

This structural subsidy (from high-transmission to low-transmission economies) cannot be resolved by market forces, or by anything the Central Bank of Ireland has the power to do.

This paper explains why, and what it would take to fix it.

Read the full paper here →

The frameworks applied here, of architecture lag, premature markets, coordination architectures, are developed formally in two companion papers by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Available on request: s@sinead.co

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The NATO 5% spending target has consumed much attention since Trump appeared for Round Two of his Presidential Era. Given that pressure, Europe is spending more on defense than at any point since the Cold War.

But when the first real test came to deliver one million artillery shells to Ukraine by March 2024, Europe managed 520,000.

Turns out, Europe doesn’t have the industrial architecture to convert money into output. Ooops…

And that gap is the actual European defense problem, not the NATO 5% shenanigans.

In short, NATO’s GDP target measures financial inputs, not capability outputs. The assumption embedded in it is that if you spend enough money, military capabilities will follow. But this has *checks notes precisely zero empirical basis and substantial evidence.

You see, defense (or any!) capability emerges when three architectures co-evolve: technical (weapons systems, interoperability standards), industrial (production capacity, supply chains), and institutional (procurement governance, command integration). You cannot pour unlimited capital into an industrial market that doesn’t exist. (Or, you can, but this is egregiously bad fiscal policy!!)

So, the controversy:

Spain is being called a free-rider for refusing to commit to 5%, and actually last weekend at a dinner party this came up in conversation with my American counter-intel pal. Which means it’s both topical and a sore point.

But Spain's argument that more spending "would only reinforce our dependence" is… architecturally correct. For under the current procurement framework, hitting a higher target means buying faster, and buying faster means buying American.

So Spain's objection isn't to spending more, it's to spending more through a system that routes the money out of Europe. In short, that NATO GDP metric says nothing about where the money goes. And in its current system, the industrial dynamics mean that increased spending does the opposite of what Europeans need it to do (and what Trump says he wants it to do!).

So, today: 60-70% of European defense procurement currently flows to American contractors because European producers can’t deliver at scale, which is a result of fragmented procurement across 27 national systems. And this fragmentation persists because there’s no institutional architecture for European defense market integration.

The spending surge? It’s flowing straight into this trap, and creating another generational-cycle of dependency on American industrial policy.

The two papers below lay out the argument in full: why the metric is wrong, where the money is actually going, and what an architecture-first approach would require instead.

Read Part 1 → Why NATO’s Spending Target Measures the Wrong Thing

Read Part 2 → Europe’s Defense Buildup Is Reproducing the Problem It’s Trying to Solve

This series draws on two working papers: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Available on request: s@sinead.co

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Ireland is rich!

It ran a €42 billion budget surplus between 2022 and 2024. But, it only spends a miserly 0.2% of GDP on defense, which is the lowest rate in the European Union. In fact, it’s lower than that tiny island of Malta, and even lower than Luxembourg which is not really even a place.

Ireland’s own military has formally stated, in its own documentation, that it is “not equipped, postured, or realistically prepared to conduct a meaningful defense of the State.” Womp, womp, womp.

It probabaly seems normal then, that the political debate about this situation is overwhelmingly a debate about neutrality:

Should Ireland abandon it?
Reform the Triple Lock?
Or even… gasp!… Join NATO?

These questions dominate the airtime, the op-eds, the Dáil (parliament) debates.

And yet… the country could resolve the neutrality question tomorrow and still wake up the next morning with no radar, no air defense, naval vessels with no functioning main armament, a military at a fifty-year personnel low, a fragmented intelligence architecture unique in Europe, and a secret dependency on the Royal Air Force that nobody in public life will name out loud!

So the standard framing, that this is an ideological problem and that if Ireland just sorted out its relationship with neutrality the defense capability would follow, is wrong.

And it’s wrong in a very specific way:

My research shows that the real constraint isn’t ideology, as always, it’s that Ireland’s entire institutional system has been built around the absence of military capability.

You see, neutrality isn’t a policy choice layered on top of an otherwise normal state apparatus; it’s the premise around which the state was designed. Because eery layer of the system reflects that design:

• Political architecture (no dedicated defense ministry, no national intelligence agency),

• Legal architecture (the Triple Lock, a president who is constitutionally Supreme Commander and yet publicly opposed to the military’s existence!),

• Cultural architecture (seventy-five percent public support for neutrality as an identity commitment, not just a policy preference),

• Personnel architecture (a private’s salary that can’t compete with Dublin tech salaries),

• Procurement architecture (a system designed for routine sustainment, never for building first-generation capabilities from scratch).

This is what I unsurprisingly call an architecture problem, and it’s categorically different from a spending problem or an ideological problem.

The short answer from my research is that capability (military or otherwise) requires the co-evolution of three distinct architectures:

1. Technical (the hardware and systems),

2. Market/Industrial (the procurement pipelines, supply chains, workforce), and

3. Institutional (the political, legal, and administrative frameworks that coordinate everything else)

When these don’t co-evolve because one is missing or misconfigured, money and political will don’t convert into outcomes. Ireland has the money, and it has (albeit in fits and starts), the political will. What it lacks is the institutional architecture to convert either into military capability. And that architecture gap is, if anything, widening.

The paper applies this framework to Ireland specifically: the LOA framework the Commission on Defense Forces developed, the EU Presidency security test coming in July 2026 (spoiler: Portugal’s military gendarmerie provided drone defense during Zelensky’s visit because Ireland couldn’t), and the question of whether Ireland could actually industrialize militarily, or whether confusing engineering talent with institutional readiness is exactly the mistake the framework is designed to prevent.

Read the full paper here →

This article draws on two working papers: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures: Adaptive Bandwidth” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Both develop the formal models and cross-domain evidence summarized here. Available on request: s@sinead.co

Companion articles in this series: “Power by Other Means,” “Europe’s Defense Problem Isn’t Spending,” “How Do You Pay for Rearmament?” and “The Chips Race Is a Systems Race.”

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Companies have never been better equipped to understand geopolitics. Today’s multinational corporation includes Chief Geopolitical Officers, political risk subscriptions, scenario planning workshops, blah blah. The corporate intelligence industry has exploded over the past decade.

I add to this that when I moved from MIT back to Harvard, the reason was to bring geopolitical expertise into the Institute for Strategy, because the demand for this new type of intel from CEOs and boards was overwhelming.

And yet… The strategies it informs keep failing. Friend-shoring stalled; the CHIPS Act fabs got announced but ecosystems may never materialize; European hydrogen strategies produce roadmaps but not markets (I mean, it is Europe…).

So the standard post-mortem blames bad forecasting or slow execution, usually in long-winded reports that never get read, by a team that has been fired. But, my research actually shows that this common diagnosis is wrong.

The problem isn’t misreading the political environment or moving too slowly, it’s trying to execute strategies that are actually really good into markets whose supporting architectures don’t yet exist! In other words, that technical readiness (the capability to actually produce the desired thing) has outrun both market readiness and institutional readiness. The gap between strategy and outcome is structural.

I’ve spent several years at Harvard working on exactly this problem: why breakthrough technologies fail to become industries, and what the missing piece usually is.

The short answer is that market formation requires the co-evolution of three distinct architectures:

1. Technical,

2. Market, and

3. Institutional

And importantly, when one races ahead of the others, you get what I call an architecture lag, wherein the technology works, but the surrounding economic system doesn’t yet exist to support that technology.

This piece applies that framework to industrial strategy; the geoeconomic strategies companies and governments are currently betting on (friend-shoring, the CHIPS Act, European hydrogen) and asks what governments, boards, and investors should actually do differently when the problem is architectural rather than informational.

Read the full paper here →

This article applies the architecture-lag and coordination-architecture frameworks developed formally in two companion papers: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Available on request: s@sinead.co

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Every military briefing you’ve seen in the last five years says the same thing: multi-domain operations are the future. Air, land, sea, space, cyber, electromagnetic. More is more. Integrate everything, overwhelm the enemy across all dimensions simultaneously.

And this strategy is genuinely compelling because a military force that can see, decide, and strike across six domains at once should dominate one that operates in one dimension.

But… there are tradeoffs! And what few people seem to be asking, is:

What does that actually cost?

Not the price of the platforms, because the F-35 costs what the F-35 costs.

But what I have been researching for over a decade now is: what does it cost, technology-wise and fiscally, to make all of these systems actually talk to each other in real time, under fire, across national boundaries, with fifteen-second decision windows?

Because multi-domain integration isn’t free.

If you do the math, every domain you add doesn’t just add capability, it adds complexity. And that complexity multiplies far faster than the capabilities do! Simply because of the number of interfaces that must be synchronized:

• Two domains = one interface;

• But six domains = fifteen pairwise interfaces, each with its own data links, identification protocols, timing synchronization, and rules of engagement.

And then there’s the cost inversion that very few defense economics strategists are properly accounting for:

• The integrating force pays the full coordination cost across every interface.

• But the disruptor (the adversary with a $500 drone or a GPS jammer) only needs to find one interface that fails.

Ok, so a Shahed-136 drone costs roughly $30,000. The Patriot interceptor that kills it costs $4 million. That’s a 133:1 cost ratio… and importantly….

Before you account for the coordination architecture that made the intercept possible.

This last part, the coordination architecture cost, is overwhelmingly large, and nearly always dismissed in military planning and strategy.

This is the boring stuff; the architecture that connects the radar, the command node, the launcher, and the identification system across a multinational coalition. It is also where the real expense lives.

This paper does three things:

1. Puts real numbers on the cost exchange between attackers and defenders across seven engagement types, and shows the ratios are structurally catastrophic for the integrator

2. Traces how coordination load has increased monotonically across every major coalition air campaign since Desert Storm through more threat types, more domains, less decision time, while friendly-fire incidents track coordination complexity, not technology vintage

3. Shows that only 7% of defense budgets are explicitly allocated to the coordination architecture that determines whether multi-domain integration actually works or collapses into expensive fragmentation

The punchline: multi-domain superiority is real but it is not a platform property, it is an architecture property. And architecture has a cost curve that the current defense-economic framework does not adequately measure, manage, or even see.

Read the full paper here →

The frameworks applied here — coordination cost, architecture lag, adaptive bandwidth — are developed formally in two companion papers by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Available on request: s@sinead.co

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In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last year, Europe says it has committed €800 billion to defense. And most commentary around such large financial pledges have been geopolitical:

• Who (or what) is the threat?

• What weapons will be bought?

• Is this the end of the peace dividend?

• Will this mean the end of three-month-long European summer vacations?

However, almost no one is asking the extremely exciting (I kind of joke) operational question:

How does the money actually move?

Because between a Brussels communiqué and an actually delivered fighter jet sits an entire chain of slow, shitty, boring institutional plumbing that actually “does the work” of “defense financing”:

Political authorization → Legislative instrument → Bond issuance → Treasury allocation → Procurement contract → Industrial delivery

Money can flow from capital markets to treasuries in weeks, but turning that money into signed contracts takes months to years. And as many people know, turning contracts into delivered capability takes years to decades!

It is becoming increasing important, though, for policy-makers and financiers in the defense space to understand these mechanisms for precisely the following reason:

My research around large, governmental financing programs for space and defense, and particularly last year my work on European defense, shows that the binding constraint on European rearmament is not political will, nor a lack of technologies, it is procedural capacity.

So, if we can figure out and innovate on how “defense financing” actually happens, we can finance defense better and faster!

This paper traces the full chain end-to-end, using Germany as a worked example, and breaks down:

1. Where the €800B actually comes from

2. How sovereign bond markets absorb defense issuance

3. Why borrowing costs diverge across Europe

4. How EU-level instruments like SAFE are created

5. Why procurement, not finance, is the actual source of stasis in the system

Basically, I show that until Europe builds a unified defense finance architecture that pools risk and connects capital markets directly to continental procurement pipelines, the plumbing will determine the pace, not technological progress.

Essentially, my paper that I summarize here explains how rearmament is a capital markets event, not a geopolitical one!

Read the full paper here →

The frameworks applied here, of architecture lag, premature markets, coordination architectures, are developed formally in two companion papers by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Available on request: s@sinead.co

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India spends roughly eight times more on defence than Pakistan (about $86 billion to Pakistan’s $10 billion). On paper, that gap should settle almost any question about relative capability, right?

But the 2025 aerial exchange over Kashmir showed something more structurally interesting; that Pakistan was able to contest the air domain credibly despite chronic fiscal distress and repeated IMF bailouts!

How? Through its industrial architecture.

More broadly, Pakistan is part of a rising class of mid-tier defence producers (à la Turkey and South Korea), whose military systems are “good enough,” entirely sovereign, and economically… cheap?

These producers are obviously not competing at the technological frontier, but where they can compete extraordinarily well is on coordination, integration, and resilience.

I’ve spent about a year getting stuck deep into mid-tier defense production and capabilities, and this research on Pakistan’s JF-17 was an outcome of the time I spent with the Pakistan Air Force last year, mapping in great detail the Pakistani industrial strategy.

In short, the 2025 India-Pakistan episode did not overturn the regional balance of power. But… it did shift the analytical lens. Military capability is increasingly an industrial property; an emergent function of how institutions, suppliers, and doctrine align over time.

Read the full paper here →

This article applies the architecture-lag and coordination-architecture frameworks developed formally in two companion papers by me, Sinéad O’Sullivan: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Available on request: s@sinead.co

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Europe is spending more on defense than at any point in decades, which is a very good thing. In fact, EU spending reached nearly €400 billion last year, a 63% increase since Trump and Covid and the Russians scared the shit out everybody a few years ago.

Additionally, the ReArm Europe plan aims to mobilize €800 billion by 2030. It’s all happening now! Germany alone has extraordinarily managed to unlock roughly €400 billion in additional borrowing capacity for defense.

So, the will to spend, and the need to do so, is very real. And yet the system receiving this money, the EU defense industry, is structurally incapable of converting the absolutely ginormous amounts of capital into defense capabilities.

Consider that Europe fields more than five times as many variants per weapon category as the United States, and has three separate European fighter programs that have together produced roughly 1,861 aircraft.

(Don’t tell the Europeans, but the US’s F-35 program alone has generated 3,556 aircraft).

So the issue here is not spending, which we know Europe can do no problem; it’s a dangerous level of fragmentation that is currently compounding in realtime across logistics chains, spare parts, training, maintenance, and ultimately cost.

If you are a European who thinks the US DoD takes the piss when it comes to the price of an defense-rated screw, please sit down, because I’ve got bad news for you…

You know that the founding raison d’être of Europe was to have a single market? For the purpose of military and peace? Well, defense is one of the only markets where this concept breaks down entirely: the EU’s defense market is actually is comprised of twenty-seven national procurement systems, which collectively fail to generate consolidated demand. And without aggregated orders, production and manufacturing of European defense hardware remains subscale. And you guessed it: without scale, unit costs remain high. Ultimately, without competitive pricing and delivery speed, governments default outward.

So €800 billion poured into Europe’s currently fragmented system will only buy one thing: more fragmentation. Thus, the binding constraint in Europe is not capital, which we’ve (somewhat) unlocked. It is whether twenty-seven nations can construct a single institutional architecture that can convert convert €800 billion into deterrence.

Read the full paper here →

The frameworks applied here, of architecture lag, premature markets, coordination architectures, are developed formally in two companion papers by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Available on request: s@sinead.co

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Have you heard the latest, that space launch is cheap now?!

SpaceX fixed the space launch business, because Elon is a genius. Reusability works. The cost curve is falling. Competition will follow. Access to space is being democratized.

Except… not quite.

SpaceX’s price to launch a payload isn’t a market price, it’s a transfer price set by a vertically integrated company whose largest customer is checks notes — itself.

To rewind: In 2024, 89 of 134 Falcon launches carried Starlink; by 2025, SpaceX flew 165 missions, which is more than twice China’s entire program and roughly half of all global launches.

That cadence is insane in every possible way. But most of all because of how it impacts the economics of the launch industry, which is driven by volume! Fixed costs (by which I mean factories, pads, workforce, mission control, etc) essentially disappear at ~165 launches per year.

Which is great for SpaceX, of course.

However, fixed costs do not disappear at 7 launches a year (Ariane 6’s 2025 output).

So, who cares? Well, for the last three years, but especially in the last year, I’ve been working with governments and the private sector to figure out how, exactly, non-SpaceX’ers can become space launch companies, too. And therein lies a really important question: how can we increase domestic European or national competition in response to SpaceX? Why, for example, does Europe not have a SpaceX, too?

Cue the usual responses about Europeans being lazy, or … insert a million reasons … that essentially boil down to, because nobody has an IQ that can match Elon’s.

But here’s the BIG issue that outweighs every single other issue… In the global launch industry, competitors to SpaceX aren’t benchmarking against a market price; they’re actually benchmarking against a demand curve that they will frankly never achieve. Because SpaceX relies on induced customer demand from itself! Because the “space launch market” … doesn’t actually exist.

This is when people (including myself!) usually start muttering in low tongues about the P-word (procurement). But for a moment, consider what today’s procurement mechanisms actually do:

• Governments award on lowest cost (to SpaceX).
• Every contract to SpaceX reduces cadence for everyone else.
• Reduced cadence worsens unit economics for everyone that’s not SpaceX.
• They lose the next contract too.

The cycle is self-reinforcing, so what looks like market competition is actually the very opposite! It’s deep architectural asymmetry, meaning that long-term dependencies on SpaceX are created , which eventually, get priced accordingly.

Read the full paper here →

The frameworks applied here, of architecture lag, premature markets, coordination architectures, are developed formally in two companion papers by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Available on request: s@sinead.co

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Yay! Europe has found the political will to spend money on defense!

A lot, actually… €800 billion by 2030. Meanwhile NATO targets are slowly rising to 3.5% of GDP and beyond and budgets are doubling across much of the continent.

But spending is not the same as financing, which is what I discuss in this paper, the topic of which I spent much of 2025 working on in the European context.

In particular, there are specific structural issues within the EU system which mean, despite the newly found political ambition to de-couple from the US, actually driving defense spending may be harder than initially thought.

Consider the following:

• The national escape clause expires in 2028;

• SAFE is debt, not grants;

• Germany’s debt brake reform is permanent, sure, but only for Germany.

• Five member states carry debt above 100% of GDP (!)

• Defense now competes directly with dying trees and dying old people

Emergency mechanisms exist to fill the temporary spending needs, but permanent financing structures do not yet exist, meaning that in a couple of years, Europe may not be able to spend money on defense at all!

And if no durable financing architecture is built before 2028, the EU’s rearmament strategy will collides very forcefully with the same fiscal rules that constrained it for two decades. So back to square one…

Read the full paper here →

The frameworks applied here, of architecture lag, premature markets, coordination architectures, are developed formally in two companion papers by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Available on request: s@sinead.co

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Every few years, a battery chemistry emerges from a lab that is genuinely better than anything else on the market. Higher energy density, faster charging, longer life, safer materials, etc etc. The kind of step-change that should reshape the industry.

Yet… it almost never does?

Even when the chemistry works (or so the CEO says), the company doesn’t scale. The usual story is some combination of: the executives built the wrong factory too early, ran out of cash chasing automotive customers that take five years to say yes, got undercut by Chinese incumbents on price, or put proprietary technology in the wrong jurisdiction (read: into Asia) and lost control of it.

Once again, the problem isn’t the science or the technology, but that there is no good playbook for turning a breakthrough battery chemistry into a functioning company. And especially not in 2026, when the US policy environment, the geopolitical landscape, and the state of the industry are all moving at once and in different directions.

This paper is an attempt to write that playbook. It came out of deep strategy work I have done with exactly the battery companies navigating what I think is the most dangerous and most promising window in the battery industry in thirty years, where demand is at an all-time high; the policy tailwind is the strongest it’s ever been; and yet the industry is simultaneously falling apart.

The paper works through why the real bottleneck isn’t chemistry or capital but something much more mundane. Why the obvious first customer is the wrong first customer. And why the single most consequential strategic decision facing any US battery company right now is one that most of them are getting wrong.

Read the full paper here →

The frameworks applied here, of architecture lag, premature markets, coordination architectures, are developed formally in two companion papers by Sinéad O’Sullivan. Available on request: s@sinead.co

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I’ve spent the last few years watching the same thing happen over and over and over again:

A technology hits an extraordinary milestone. Like, I dunno, fusion holds plasma longer than ever, or quantum computer solves something that should have been impossible, or a lab grows a protein that didn’t exist in nature. The press coverage is breathless and a new VC fund is obviously raised in an attempt to stake a claim to this unfolding future.

But then… nothing.

The standard explanation for the lack of commercialization of these types of technologies is that they are “early.” In other words, if you give them time and let the costs come down, the private sector will eventually figure it out. And by “it”, I mean the whole commercialization thing.

But given all the time in the world, for some reason the “it” never happens. Why? Well, I suspect because the problem is not actually that the technology is early at all.

This paper introduces the core framework that I call architecture lag, which much better outlines the issues holding back commercialization across these novel technologies.

I won’t regurgitate the paper here, but I will say: if you’ve ever wondered why phenomenal technologies that clearly work keep failing to become industries, this paper outlines why. And it has important implications for how most governments currently spend their innovation budgets, as well as for how VCs intend to generate returns.

Read the full paper here →

This article draws on a companion academic paper, “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem,” which develops the co-evolutionary architecture model, formal viability criteria, and cross-domain evidence in full. Available on request: s@sinead.co

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So here’s a question for you…

The honest answer is that it depends entirely on what you think the competition is.

If it’s a race to fabricate the most advanced chip by way of the smallest transistors, the most cutting-edge manufacturing, then the US and its allies are winning comfortably, and it isn’t close. Mostly because export controls, equipment restrictions, and the TSMC alliance have kept China roughly a generation behind at the frontier. Washington knows this, and it’s the basis of the entire chips strategy.

But here’s the thing... I keep looking at industries where one country has the best technology and another country has the best system around that technology, meaning the supply chains, the workforce, the procurement architecture, the demand coordination. And the country with the best system keeps winning.

It doesn’t happen overnight but over time, the country with the stronger surrounding system internalizes and scales the technology. By contrast, technological superiority on its own almost never overcomes systemic weakness.

This semiconductor paper applies that logic to the US–China chip rivalry. Don’t worry, I don’t re-hash the export-control debate. Instead, I ask a totally different question: what happens when the competition itself changes? Specifically, as AI shifts from frontier model training to mass deployment, what if the decisive advantages are no longer the ones the US dominates?

No spoiler alerts! drumroll… But researching this work over the space of two years reshaped how I think about what “winning” actually means in a technology contest, and left me far less certain that policymakers in Washington are framing the competition correctly.

Read the full paper here →

This article applies the architecture-lag and coordination-architecture frameworks developed formally in two companion papers by me, Sinéad O’Sullivan: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Available on request: s@sinead.co

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Development economics has a theory of everything, it seems, except economic development.

These economists can tell you, with impressive precision, why rich countries stay rich: Secure property rights, predictable legal systems, constraints on political power… measure these, rank them, and you will get a strong predictor of long-run prosperity.

The research is influential, has won many Nobel Prizes, is widely cited, and largely correct about what it describes.

Except… It just can’t explain how countries actually get rich.

A quick clarification: when economists refer to “institutions,” they don’t mean organizations like the World Bank, the Federal Reserve, UN, etc. They mean the underlying rules and structures that govern economic life. Boring stuff like property rights, legal frameworks, regulatory agencies, procurement systems, financial regulation, civil service architecture, blah blah. In short, the apparatus through which a society coordinates economic activity.

“Good institutions,” in this sense, mean stable rules, enforceable contracts, and predictable governance.

Yet Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore (and later China) industrialized at extraordinary speed under arrangements that diverged sharply from this template! Instead of relying on free capital markets and rule-bound minimal states, they deployed state-directed credit, managed competition, bureaucratic discretion, and iterative policy experimentation. These were not not just eency teency deviations from the model; they were the growth strategy itself.

At the same time, many countries that inherited or adopted Western-style legal and administrative frameworks (e.g. parliamentary systems, codified property rights, professional civil services) failed to industrialize. The usual explanation from the economic development crowd is that these countries lacked institutional quality. I argue something different: they had institutions, but ones designed for a different problem.

This puzzle motivates the paper. The core claim is simple: we have been measuring the wrong thing!

The standard approach treats institutions as static “rules of the game” and evaluates their quality. I propose instead that institutions are better understood as coordination architectures; as systems that align investment, standards, infrastructure, finance, and governance toward structural transformation.

What separates countries that transform from those that stagnate is not institutional form, but something that I label adaptive bandwidth: the speed and flexibility with which coordination systems update when technology, markets, and governance fall out of sync.

High-bandwidth systems experiment, adjust, and reconfigure. Low-bandwidth systems, on the other hand, prioritize stability; which is valuable in mature economies, but constraining in developing ones.

This framework explains East Asian industrialization without appealing to culture or regime type, as most economists tend to do. Similarly, it explains post-colonial stagnation without resorting to institutional deficiency narratives. And it clarifies why formal convergence with Western institutional models so often fails to produce transformation.

The piece lays out the framework, the evidence, and its implications for industrial policy, productivity, and state capacity.

Read the full paper here →

This article draws on a companion academic paper, “Institutions as Coordination Architectures: Adaptive Bandwidth and the Dynamics of Economic Development,” which develops the formal model, empirical mapping, and full theoretical structure. Available on request: s@sinead.co

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Anyway! If you haven’t read Part I, go do that first. But to briefly recap: I argued that culinary history is not a matter of aesthetic progress driven by genius chefs, but an economic story of crisis and response that is as old as time itself. In short, I reasoned that chefs emerge when something upstream of dining breaks, whether it’s supply chains, labor markets, institutions, meaning, etc; and that the real job of a chef is to diagnose and repair whatever the prevailing economic system has most recently broken about eating.

I ended Part I with a question that the essay had been building toward: if chefs are no longer needed to recover ingredients, guarantee quality, or standardize excellence (i.e. if the old problems of how to feed us to high standards have been substantially resolved), then what human problem is dining supposed to solve now?

Let’s jump in!

Michelin Stars are Exhausted

The annual Michelin awards were held in Dublin last week, and I got to chat to some of my chef pals in person who were still morbidly hungover a few days after the event. Who got a star, who lost a star, and who kept their stars.

My general sentiment about the whole affair is that the newly awarded Michelin stars are boring, bankrupt of culture, and… honestly? I tried the food of one of this year’s new awardees with a bunch of my pals from culinary school earlier this year, and I didn’t think the food was especially good!

But more on that later. First, let me defend le Michelin for a moment, because it gets dunked on a lot.

An ultra-short history lesson for those not in the know: The Michelin Guide began in 1900 as a marketing pamphlet by the famed tire company. The Michelin brothers printed maps, gas station listings, and hotel recommendations to convince people to drive more and wear out more tires, a surprisingly capitalist move from Europeans. It started awarding stars to restaurants in 1926, and by 1931 it had formalized the three-tier hierarchy that still exists today:

• One star = worth a stop;

• Two stars = worth a detour;

• Three stars = worth a special journey.

All judged by anonymous inspectors evaluating the plate alone. In other words, Michelin was itself born from a structural constraint of “how do you build demand for automobiles?” and evolved into an institutional technology for solving a different one.

And credit where credit is due, this whole Michelin system took a genuinely hard problem of: How do you measure culinary excellence? How do you standardize refinement? How do you reward reproducibility? … and built a system of precision, consistency, and prestige hierarchies that gave fine dining a framework for both chefs and diners. So if you were a serious chef in 1985 or even in 2015, the star system told you what to aim for, and it told diners what to expect. That was genuinely valuable.

But here’s the problem. The very thing Michelin optimizes for, which is consistent technical execution under scarcity, is no longer… scarce.

You can now get good butter anywhere (although I’ve never tasted better butter than in Ireland). Global ingredients are a FedEx delivery away, even if every restaurant under the sun claims to use local produce only. Fermentation knowledge lives on YouTube (I just choose to ignore it). Pastry science is taught in community colleges. Molecular tricks are on TikTok. Sous vide precision costs $80 on Amazon. (Yes, even I can sous vide my own dinner parties! And in fact the challenge now is for top chefs to not sous vide their menu!).

Technique has effectively been democratized, like every other thing in our lives since the early 2010’s. (Remember when we tried to democratize democracy and we got the Arab Spring?) Similarly, precision has been industrialized and ingredient sourcing has been globalized. There’s nothing left to do! Everything that once required a 3-star kitchen to access is now available to you and I. In December, I had my own restaurant pop-up in London, where I served a seven-course, one-star menu with wine pairing. If I can do it, anybody can!

So in this way, Michelin isn’t wrong per se (or should I say Per Se?!). It’s just optimizing for a problem that was already solved a long time ago.

This is the exhaustion that industry insiders and critics are feeling. It’s not that the Michelin system is broken, but that it’s kinda useless now, because the scarcity it was designed to streamline no longer exists.

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The New Constraints

So now we get back to my core framework from Part I. If chefs arise when systems break, what has broken today?

Post-internet, post-globalization and especially post-social media, it’s definitely no long supply chains or culinary techniques. In fact, what has broken is the give-a-shittery of life. Or more politely, meaning.

And this no-longer-giving-a-shittery manifests in four specific ways that are worth getting into the weeds about:

Attention Scarcity. Duh. The modern diner (the modern person) is cognitively fucked. Totally, utterly, fucked. Everything is content, everything is photographed, everything competes with a feed or an endless stream of live, updated data. So dining must now justify something extraordinary: three hours of full presence, complete surrender from technology, genuine engagement. That is a much higher bar than “food must be delicious” because delicious is Uber Eats in your pajamas. The question today is whether you can compete with the entire internet for someone’s sustained attention. Most restaurants cannot, and increasingly the ones with the white table clothes in a hushed setting which increasingly feels like a mental asylum for GenZ onwards.

Status Fatigue. In a world where everyone (on an instagram feed, at least) flies business class and posts tasting menus, constant luxury is visible and massified. Status through consumption is way less differentiating than it used to be, and in fact, might now even be considered tacky.

Memory. What is unforgettable, in an era where in a single week we had the US President kidnap a foreign head of state, threaten to take over Greenland’s penguins, and try to steal oil from Venezuelan-turned-Russian oil tankers? You see, we’ve already forgotten about all of these events; a good lobster ravioli dish stands no chance! Taste alone doesn’t anchor our tiny human memories, which is an unfortunate neurological fact. Stories that impact us personally, however, do. On a recent trip to Madrid, I actually chose not to go to the very famous three-starred DiverXO in favor of something way more low-key but relaxed and fun, which was the booziest and most entertaining afternoon I’ve had in years, with many stories that will follow it… And? Zero regrets.

Identity. Look, we can consume anything at any time. But what is increasingly hard is feeling like we belong anywhere. And in a consumption heavy world, alignment and immersion with values, philosophy and narratives is way more valuable. The Southern Californian restaurant that says “we are farm-to-table” is not just describing a supply chain; it’s offering an identity (and yes, we all know the annoying people whose identity is just this). The Scandinavian chef that says “we forage everything within 20 miles” is making a precise post-modern logistical claim: they’re inviting the diner into a small and self-contained worldview to experience something novel. Restaurants like this have shifted from being a product to a participatory system (I wrote a whole book about how Taylor Swift does this with music too. I suppose I should suggest people read that, at some stage!).

So, if Part I showed that chefs have always been solving structural problems, Part II here argues that the current structural problem is existential. Not: how do we eat well? But: why should we eat here, like this, with these people, in this room?

Chefs as Worldbuilders

So the chef’s role mutates again, as it always does.

The chef is no longer primarily a logistics manager (Escoffier), or a rebel (nouvelle cuisine), or a novelty engineer (Adrià). Today, the chef must become something else entirely. And the best word I can find for it, even though it sounds gimmicky, is worldbuilder.

Let me define that properly, because I don’t mean it as consulting-speak.

Today, the restaurant is an ideology, because every part of its ingredients, sourcing, ESG, labor practices, are politics-adjacent decisions. The most interesting restaurants I’ve visited recently are not trying to serve you the best version of a dish you already understand, they’re trying to immerse you in a system of meaning that holds together for two or three hours before it dissolves entirely when you leave. Music does this, and movies do it too.

This means, therefore, that the dining experience is increasingly becoming a theatrical experience. The best restaurants now choreograph silence, control pacing, manipulate expectation, and create an emotional arc. A great tasting menu in 2025 has more in common structurally with a well-paced film than with a traditional dinner service.

And a quick note on this! Whilst in Japan I spent several days with a celebrated movie director, who talked about the hardest project he’s ever done: A short movie that was displayed on a wall so large that the viewer could only see part of the screen at any moment, essentially turning the “movie” into a “photograph” medium. With a movie, he told me, the director is fully in control of timing the narrative; the viewer can only sit there and enjoy (or endure) the arrival of meaning. With a photo, the opposite is true. Control over when and how meaning is generated is entirely out of the hands of the director, and the viewer decides whether or not to look now or later.

This allocation of control is true in restaurants, as well! A tasting menu is a movie, in which the chef sequences the courses, controls the pacing, and decides when the emotional peak arrives (usually with the fourth glass of wine tasting for me). And an à la carte menu is a photograph in which the diner chooses what to look at, in what order, for how long. The best chefs inherently understand this; but it’s immediately clear to the diner when they do not.

The most interesting restaurants right now are the ones playing with exactly this tension! They are giving you enough structure that the experience has some arc, but enough openness that you feel like a participant rather than a boring, white-clothed dinner audience member. Where a restaurant sits on this spectrum (in terms of the chef’s control, how much the diner is given) turns out to define almost everything about what kind of experience it can create, and what kind of broken thing it can solve. (Here’s a fascinating and funny podcast discussing this somewhat in terms of US and European Michelin restaurants).

There are four super concrete examples of what this looks like in practice that come to mind, and they also give us an idea of why the next wave of great chefs cannot be reduced to a single trend!

Ultraviolet, Paul Pairet’s restaurant in Shanghai, is the most literal version of dining-as-cinema. Ten seats at one table, where every course is synced to controlled projections, scent, and sound; the room itself shifts around you as the meal progresses. Just hope you don’t suffer from vertigo! The chef here is a director in the most precise sense in that the diner relinquishes control entirely and is sequenced through his emotional arc. You cannot check your phone because this would be like checking your texts during a movie.

Laila Gohar is at the opposite end of this spectrum because she doesn’t run a traditional restaurant at all. Actually, she stages edible worlds inside fashion shows, gallery spaces, and brand “environments”. Think about food as ornaments, architecture, or even performances. This is some sort of “hospitality meets hunger”, and it represents something structurally fascinating; that fine dining has leaked out of restaurants and into culture. So Gohair solves for both status fatigue and visual sameness by refusing the dining format entirely. The world’s first Michelin-starred runway food?

Ramón Freixa in Madrid is actually a culinary highlight that I’ve experienced and recommend heavily! It has two Michelin stars (don’t hold this against it!), a small tasting room, limited seats, and tight sequencing. The scarcity here is, interestingly, social. The entire restaurant is essentially a dinner party with total strangers at the Chef’s Table; and its proposition is simple: you cannot mass-produce presence and making new friends. Everything that makes the experience valuable is precisely what cannot be replicated at volume.

Tuna Fight Club is right around the corner from my house and a total fucking scene. It’s a ticketed event, but you can’t get tickets online. There’s a Whatsapp number that sometimes, only briefly, appears on their instagram page, and you text to ask for an invite to the Tuesday night affair. It’ll be you and a few other tech bros in the basement of a very strange miniature supermarket called Supermarket of Dreams; and the chefs will unload an entire tuna fish from a van, before wheeling it downstairs. The entire event (which is probably the price of a 2-3 star) is about five hours long, and the chef cuts up the raw tune and dishes various parts of it around the room while a DJ and copious amounts of champagne keep you occupied.

So pretty much the only thing that these four have in common is that they structurally mutate the dining experience. Each is solving a different broken thing (e.g. attention collapse, cultural sameness, loss of intimacy, social fragmentation), and each requires the chef to become something Michelin’s framework never anticipated. Pairet is a movie-food director. Gohar is a food sculptor. Freixa is a dinner host. Tuna Fight Club’s orchestrators are something closer to barbaric-fish-enthusiasts.

But none of them are Escoffier-type managers optimizing for consistency, and the entire Michelin system that was built to reward consistency has no language for what they are actually doing.

What Luxury Actually Means Now

Luxury has mutated, and most of the industry hasn’t caught up, sadly.

It is no longer about ingredient cost, complexity, or visible labor. The old markers of luxury like wagyu, truffle, gold leaf (sorry, Marchesi!) still exist, and they certainly function, but they function as signals of a system that used to mean something. It’s tired.

The new luxury operates on three different axes entirely.

Non-repeatability. This is true scarcity, and it’s far more powerful than material scarcity because it’s existential rather than economic. Every “members only” restaurant will eventually let you in as they go broke. But you cannot buy back the evening of March 14th.

Insider access. You feel initiated. Not in a gross, velvet-rope, exclusionary sense (although some of that exists too, obviously), in the sense of proximity to excellence. You are close enough to see how it works. You can literally touch the tuna and choose your cut from the animal itself as the sushi chef gets to work. You sit at Freixa’s table while he explains, to you and only your table, why he made this dish this way. The knowledge transfer is the luxury. You don’t just consume the expertise, you witness it, and you leave understanding something you didn’t understand before about a place, a tradition, a technique, a philosophy.

Transformation. You leave fully altered. Something has shifted in how you think about food, or place, or season, or a memory. This sounds abstract, but when it happens, it’s unmistakable. It’s the reason people have reported cried at Asador Etxebarri in Spain, and it has nothing to do with the price of the beef.

Today, western elite dining is no longer about how good it tastes because everything tastes good; but about who you become by being there, what story you temporarily inhabit, and what part of yourself the experience activates. It is trying desperately to help us escape the content generating capsules that Michelin restaurants have become in a secular and overstimulated civilization.

We live in a world of almost infinite abundance and almost zero meaning. Of course, this is a problem that goes far beyond restaurants in terms of solutions. We have more entertainment than any generation in human history and fewer occasions that genuinely mark time. The restaurants that understand this and that recognize dining’s potential to function as an ideology for people who don’t believe in anything anymore will genuinely define the next era.

And this brings me neatly to Part III, where I’ll dig into Japan, because the Japanese food system has been solving this exact problem (of meaning under abundance) for centuries, and in ways that the Western system is only now beginning to replicate.

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Not in their outcomes, obviously, because one gives you fourteen types of oat milk and the other gives you a long bread line. But consider that in their structure and in the mechanics of how they break, they are actually kinda similar. Consider that both begin with moral and ideological framing: capitalism = freedom, and communism = equality. Both are defensible at a dinner party with enough wine. And both, given enough time and enough scale, turn into something that would horrify their original architects.

That’s the resemblance that interests me.

Because if two systems built on opposite ideals end up concentrating power in structurally similar ways, then the variable that matters is not the ideology, but the mechanism.

So the question that’s been rattling around in my head for quite a while is not whether they fail; that’s hardly controversial in 2026 as we live through the horrors of late-stage capitalism. The question I’m more interested in is actually why they fail in the same direction.

Why do economic systems built on moral ideals drift toward dominating themselves into oblivion as they scale? What is the structural mechanism that turns “freedom” into broligarchy and “equality” into autocratic and centralized control? What, precisely, is the thing that breaks when these things break?

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I came to this question as I tend to have a habit of doing, which is to say sideways. I stumbled across a Substack on medieval Islamic trade finance (which I have since tried obsessively to relocate and failed) and read it expecting mild historical curiosity. Actually, it forced me to think about the systems architecture of non-Islamic finance in a new way, and it seemed to be answering a question I hadn’t even thought to ask myself properly about the nature of our own political economy.

But before I get to that question, I want to better outline the failure of economic systems to preserve their founding ideals once they expand beyond a small scale.

The answer, I suspect, lies in how systems behave under expansion.

Economic systems do not fail because of bad ideals, which is incidentally similar to what I’ve said before about coordination systems, which do not fail because they are unjust or unfair.

These systems fail because of their inherent dynamics which are amplified when you scale the system. And as we’re seeing, scale radicalizes these systems because of the fact that incentives compound whilst power concentrates; which is true of both capitalism and socialism. So what begins as balance between power and capital ends as a system enforcing dominance of both.

The Compounding Problem

Capitalism has a very specific mechanical pathway to dysfunction, and it goes something like this: profit leads to reinvestment, reinvestment leads to compounding, compounding leads to capital concentration, and capital concentration leads to Elon Musk jumping up and down on a presidential rally stage in a MAGA hat with a flamethrower. Meanwhile, on a parallel track: competition leads to market consolidation, which leads to monopoly, and monopolies monopolize everything, creating a financial abstraction which detaches the entire system from the thing it was originally supposed to be doing, which is producing stuff that people need.

Blah. This is dizzying.

If I attempt to be neutral about this, interestingly, none of what I’ve just outlined requires a villain or a bad guy (it just so happens that we live in an age that is filled with such characters). You don’t even need particularly greedy people to end up at a greedy conclusion, although they certainly help the dynamics to move along in that direction faster. You basically just need a system that is structurally designed to magnify accumulation, and then you need to give it time:

• The “ideal” of freedom evolves into unequal bargaining power

• The “tool” of ownership becomes insulation from accountability

• The “market form” of competition evolves into concentration

And when capital compounds faster than any constraint you put on it via regulation, taxation, public outrage, angry op-eds, and a ton of really incisive Substacks, capital becomes the de facto ruling mechanism. Because it doesn’t need to capture the state if it can simply become bigger that it.

And so here’s where it gets interesting, because communism has the exact same problem, just through a slightly different lens.

Central planning creates information bottlenecks, as I outlined before here. Those bottlenecks require massive bureaucratic expansion to manage. But… that expansion requires enforcement. And in turn, that enforcement requires a highly coercive apparatus. And suddenly you have the Stasi, which nobody planned for on day one, but which was arguably inevitable by day ten thousand.

So in this way, communism does not begin as a tyrannical mechanism. However, it does become tyrannical as coordination costs explode, and economic planning requires surveillance, by an administration that becomes concentrated through authority. And when coordination requires total visibility into every citizen’s life, the state becomes ultimate decision-maker, in the same way that capital does under the other system. Again, this is not through ideology, but through mechanics (although this ideology of course suits certain power-hungry leaders).

I realize this is depressing to read. But stay with me.

The Moderation Trap

Now, the instinct of every reasonable person reading this is to say: “Well, obviously, the answer is somewhere in the middle. Some markets, some regulation, some freedom, some safety net. A sensible blend.”

And I understand why this is appealing, because this was my go-to retort for many years, especially through the regulatory work I did at MIT, during which the term “guardrails” was my favorite. In fact, this middle-ness is what most Western democracies have attempted for the last eighty-odd years. Consider the Nordic model, and the social market economy, or New Labour’s Third Way, which Tony Blair sold us unashamedly. Insert something about Obama doing the same.

But here’s the problem with moderation as a structural strategy: you cannot scale moderation if the underlying dynamics of the system radicalizes outcomes, no matter what! You can buy time, yes, but you cannot change the principles!

Third ways fail, and they have, repeatedly, from Giddens’ “Third Way” to the various flavors of stakeholder capitalism that briefly trended and then disappeared altogether, because they soften outcomes without removing the scaling dynamics. In other words, they moderate incentives without limiting the one thing that pushes them to the extreme: the compounding nature of these systems.

They blend “freedom” and “equality” without ever addressing power directly. Imagine putting a speed bump on a five-lane motorway. It might slow things down momentarily (and cause huge traffic), but then the car accelerates again, because the car was always going to accelerate. That’s what cars do! You haven’t changed the car, and yu haven’t changed the road. You’ve just made the ride slightly bumpier for about three seconds.

This is, incidentally, the same structural critique I’ve made of venture capital and of the MBA industrial complex in previous pieces: that tinkering with the visible outputs of a system while leaving its underlying dynamics intact is not reform, but it looks good enough to momentarily satiate our desire for change.

So the real question is not “how do we take capitalism or communism, and have a balanced version of them?” The real question is: does any system actually change the scaling mechanism itself? Does anything alter the engine, rather than just tapping the brake?

Which brings me, somewhat unexpectedly, to Islamic economics.

A Different Architecture

Interestingly, as I have learned through the history of Islamic finance, the Islamic economic tradition does not attempt to balance freedom and equality. Actually, it attempts to prevent either from becoming absolute. And this is a genuinely different proposition; one that really got my mind tinkering with these structural mechanics in depths.

Here’s the distinction and a classification that matters enormously to how we can think about this problem of regime extremism: capitalism and communism are both incentive-first systems. They ask: “What behavior do we reward?” and then they build structures around the answer.

Islamic economics does not do this at all, because it is constraint-first. It asks: “What behavior is not allowed, regardless of how efficient it might be?” and then it builds structures around that answer instead.

This might sound like a trivial semantic difference, of course, but actually it is not, because of the reason that I’ve just outlined: incentives in these systems scale exponentially. Constraints, on the other hand, scale absolutely.

If you build a system that rewards accumulation, then every success becomes fuel for the next success. Profit leads to reinvestment which leads to larger profits which lead to greater leverage, economically and politically. The system doesn’t just reward accumulation; it actually accelerates it. So what begins as a small advantage in one area becomes a structural advantage everywhere, removing competition entirely.

So, an incentive to accumulate compounds over time, in the same way that interest compounds, which is (not coincidentally) exactly the mechanism that Islamic economics prohibits.

On the other hand, constraints work differently. A constraint does not grow., and nor does it accelerate or compound. It sets a boundary and holds it, absolutely.

This is, I think, one of the most structurally interesting ideas I’ve encountered in economic theory in quite a while. And I say this as someone who has spent an embarrassing amount of time reading about quantitative easing, so my bar for “interesting” is admittedly skewed.

How Constraints Change the Dynamics

I want to walk through the specific mechanisms, because the details are where this gets genuinely compelling.

First: blocking compounding channels

Instead of allowing accumulation and then trying to correct for it afterward (which is essentially the entire Western welfare state model), the Islamic system:

• Prohibits interest-based extraction outright.

• Mandates redistribution as obligation (I have a magazine piece about this soon!)

• Forbids hoarding.

• Limits speculative gain that is detached from real productive activity.

In other words, this system does not wait for excess in the form of million-dollar monkey jpegs being bought and sold by politicians with laser eyes before it decides things have gone too far. It actually attempts to block the channels through which this type of excess compounds in the first place.

This is a fundamentally different model with regards to timing. Most economic interventions are reactive, in that they redistribute after concentration has already occurred. The Islamic model is preventive. And if you’ve spent any time studying complex systems (or, I dunno, if you’ve ever tried to clean a kitchen after a dinner party versus during one), you know that where you intervene in a feedback loop matters enormously. Intervening upstream, before amplification, is orders of magnitude more effective than intervening downstream, after the damage is structural. (Husbands, please internalize this for your wives).

Second: conditional ownership

Under capitalism, property is the most important asset you can own; and especially in the US, it is the foundational right from which all other economic rights derive. Under communism, property is abolished, because the state holds everything in trust. Under the Islamic model, property exists under a stewardship model. Ownership is legitimate, and it is productive. But it is morally conditional. So here, you can own things (and indeed you should, there is no asceticism mandate here), but your ownership carries obligations, and if those obligations are not met, the moral (and in some cases legal) basis for your ownership erodes!

In other words, don’t be a greedy landlord asshole!

This is a remarkably elegant solution to one of capitalism’s most persistent structural problems: the transformation of economic power into political insulation. But when ownership is conditional on meeting defined obligations, like redistributive duties or prohibitions on exploitative gain, asset accumulation is never fully self-validating. Thus, the system already contains a way to limit extreme concentration without requiring a revolution.

Third: distributed redistribution

This is the part that I find most fascinating from a systems design perspective, and the part I suspect most Western economists have never seriously engaged with, because it doesn’t map neatly onto any of our existing categories.

Centralized welfare systems scale poorly. Think about it: they require enormous bureaucracies, they create dependency, and they are vulnerable to the political capture that has made “welfare reform” an unfulfilled campaign promise in every democracy I can think of. Voluntary charity, on the other hand, fails at scale because it relies on individual goodwill, which is unreliable and unevenly distributed and tends to spike after natural disasters but not, crucially, on ordinary Tuesdays when ordinary people are struggling boringly.

What mandatory decentralized redistribution creates is something like a set of horizontal stabilizers across the entire economy. It’s not top-down and it’s not bottom-up; it’s sideways. Let’s call it “peer-to-peer” for those who work in tech and have strong opinions about blockchain. This is a form of redistribution that manages to avoid bureaucratic and even surveillance explosion. It also avoids the political capture of redistribution that plagues every welfare state I can think of. And because it’s distributed, it scales without requiring exponential growth in the administrative apparatus. (And this is, if you recall, exactly the failure mode that kills communist systems.)

Fourth: norms as an enforcement mechanism

Large systems break down when enforcement becomes too expensive. This is true of empires, corporations, legal systems, and every other complex institution that has ever existed. As Ray Dalio outlines nicely in his book The Changing World Order, Romans didn’t fall because they ran out of soldiers, but because the cost of policing their borders exceeded the economic value of what those borders contained.

So as we know, the cost of monitoring and punishing non-compliance scales with the system, and eventually that cost becomes prohibitive, at which point the system either becomes authoritarian (communism’s path) or simply stops enforcing (capitalism’s path, which we politely call “deregulation” or, “market liberalization”, or “Trumpism”).

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The Islamic model historically addressed this through internalized accountability, using tools such as moral constraint instead of legal punishment, and community enforcement before institutional enforcement. Under the Islamic rules, people don’t avoid riba (interest) because they feared a fine, but because it was haram, and because your community would notice, and because the entire moral framework within which you understood your life told you it was wrong.

When compliance is propagated by culture, scale simply doesn’t need surveillance. This is the core scaling argument, and it is, in my view, the single most compelling structural advantage this system has over either of its secular competitors (and what I am writing about in this upcoming magazine piece).

It is also, of course, the most fragile, because such norms depend on cultural transmission, and cultural transmission depends on legitimacy, and legitimacy depends on the people at the top not being hypocrites, which is a very tall order for any species, but especially ours. And especially now.

Where It Breaks

Now, I am too cynical to write a utopian essay that pretends structural elegance is the same as practical success. So let me be very clear about where this breaks!

This Islamic system fails in several situations, including:

• When moral authority loses legitimacy

• When religious institutions become politicized and self-serving

• When the people enforcing the constraints are the same people exempting themselves from them (a pattern so universal across human institutions)

• When elites exempt themselves from the constraints that bind everyone else (which, yes, is the same failure mode as every other system)

• When norms erode faster than enforcement can compensate.

Which is to say: it fails culturally before it fails economically.

This is the vulnerability, and it is an enormous one. Because cultural coherence is not something you can legislate or engineer, purely because it is emergent, fragile, and subject to all the same pressures as everything else. You can design the most beautiful constraint architecture in the world, and it will still disintegrate if the people living inside it stop believing in those very constraints. I think of this as the “beautiful cathedral” problem: the architecture can be extraordinary, but if no one shows up on Sunday, it’s just a building.

And frankly, the historical record is mixed. Islamic economies have, at various points, been extraordinary engines of innovation and stability (the following deserves entire books, not just a byline mention: the Abbasid-era trading networks, the Ottoman waqf system, the medieval financial instruments that predated European banking by centuries). But they have also, at other points, succumbed to exactly the same corruption and elite capture that plagues every human institution. Thus, the model’s structural advantages do not make it immune to human nature. Nothing does.

This tells us that the binding constraint on economic systems is not, ultimately, structural at all. It’s human. Which is both obvious and somehow perpetually forgotten by economists, who continue to build models that assume people will behave rationally, or at least predictably, despite all available evidence to the contrary.

Not Middle, But Orthogonal

So if you’re still following, here’s where I want the takeaway to be.

The usual framing of economic systems places capitalism on the right, communism on the left, and everything else somewhere along the spectrum between them. This framing is, IMO, fundamentally misleading, because it implies that the relevant variable is degree (more market or less market, more state or less state) when actually the relevant variable is kind.

Capitalism’s end state is capital-as-king: markets subsume everything. Communism’s end state is state-as-king: the state subsumes everything. The Islamic model’s intended end state is moral-law-as-king: markets exist, states exist, but neither is absolute, because both operate under constraints that are derived from neither markets nor states but from an external order predicate on social norms.

This is not a middle position, it is an orthogonal one, and the reason it challenged my thinking on political economic structures is because it operates on a completely different axis.

So where capitalism radicalizes accumulation and communism radicalizes control, this model attempts to cap excess before it compounds, replacing the problem of “incentive escalation” with what I’d call “constraint equilibrium”. And the elegance of this is that it doesn’t require you to solve the impossible problem of “how much freedom is the right amount of freedom?” or “how much equality is the right amount of equality?”; both questions that we struggle with enormously in an era of DEI, redistribution, and oligarchy. Instead, it asks a much simpler question: “What must never be allowed to happen, regardless?”

I find this framing extraordinarily clarifying. It obviously doesn’t solve all of our problems, but it does reorient the entire conversation away from debating “how muchness is too muchness” and toward questions much more important, of architecture.

This matters right now more than it might have at any point in the last fifty years, because we are living through a period in which the existing structures are visibly failing and eroding public trust. The housing market is a casino. The financial system is a series of increasingly creative fictions (or nightmares). The welfare state is stretched to breaking point. And the response from most serious economists is to propose, essentially, better calibration of the existing outcomes. More regulation here, or less taxation there, with a new oversight body, a task force, or even dare I suggest… a strongly worded report.

And this brings me back to the beginning.

If capitalism and communism appear structurally different but ultimately drift toward the same concentration of power, then perhaps what they share is more important than what divides them. Perhaps the common failure is not ideological but architectural. Both systems allow their primary coordinating dynamics (accumulation in the former , administration in the latter) to expand until it becomes dominant.

The big question that is left in my mind now is whether this idea of a constraints-led system can endure expansion and scaling without eating itself up, as other systems are doing. And whether the dynamics of restraint can survive contact with the dynamics of growth.

If capitalism and communism are the same in how they radicalize under expansion, then the real divide is not left versus right, or market versus state. It is between systems that amplify dynamics because they lack limits, and systems that attempt to impose one.