American social capital is concentrated at the top. The result is gerontocracy and a generational succession failure.

The market society frames transaction as liberation, even renting and selling women’s bodies. But the future lies with those who cultivate non-transactional interdependence.

Socialist Chile’s Project Cybersyn prefigured the cybernetic economic planning now used by capitalist giants like Amazon and Walmart. But the future of cybernetic planning can either empower workers or enslave them.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has failed to build state institutions to guarantee his country’s sovereignty. Now, amid a moment of weakness, Moscow is stepping in.

America has insisted that its allies converge on liberal democratic values. This is increasingly untenable in a world of multipolar competition and faltering confidence in liberalism.

India’s recent TikTok ban is just one part of its digital sovereignty plan. Like the U.S. and China, it is converging on a strategy that uses markets to create national champions.

The most powerful members of our society work in predictable ways. So do those who join them.

Early Singapore’s authoritarian competency is a model invoked by leaders from China to Rwanda. But its rise was complex, messy, and the result of long factional battles. There are hard limits to how far it can be exported.

The Great Steppe of Eurasia has variously been a bridge and battleground between civilizations. But one thing is now certain: it will be China that will shape the Steppe’s future and the future of those living along its vast plain.

Harvard prides itself as the training ground for American elites. But that goal has given way to striving managerialism, myopic career goals, and a stunted appetite for risk.

The consolidation of industrial labor in the 19th century and the rise of the consumer-citizen in the 20th introduced a new moral paradigm of work that has now become fake, leaving workers alienated and loyalties betrayed.

Putin’s Russia is reconciling Stalin, Orthodoxy, and the modern state by crafting a new historical narrative. Beneath the seeming contradictions, the Kremlin is building the first Russian nation-state.

The Apollo Program took an impossible goal and achieved it within a decade. Charles Fishman has written an invaluable history of how social engineers, institution builders, and political deal-brokers made it happen.

The knowledge and practices needed for civilization to flourish are commonly lost. Thinkers in the Late Zhou dynasty of ancient China recognized the decline of their era and attempted to overcome it.

Chinese President Xi Jinping believes in inevitable laws of history and makes sure that his government does too. China’s path of peaceful development depends on his continued belief in globalization and the rise of developing economies.

The U.S. pandemic response was undermined by buck-passing and bad judgment at every turn. Tech giants outperformed it thanks to lessons from the past and better incentives for the future.

Universities face a moment of decision for the upcoming fall semester, but instead of embracing fully online content or just throwing the doors wide open, they can develop a serious Green Zone plan to effectively handle the COVID-19 crisis.

Singapore has been held up as a model of governance. But with American political culture threatening its institutions, China’s digital sovereignty may be the strategy that endures.