The Green Road to Serfdom

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Deciding who has been the worst British prime minister of the 21st century (so far) is tough, but Theresa May (2016–19) strengthened her strong claim to this title shortly ahead of her ignominious departure from office. Desperate to secure a “legacy,” she saw to it that Britain became the first major country to legally bind itself to reaching net-zero greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. That is, the nation committed itself to releasing no more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than it removes. Quite how this ambition could be fulfilled or what fulfilling it would cost was unclear, but no matter: This potentially enormous commitment passed into law with support across the political spectrum, astonishingly little scrutiny, and a great deal of self-congratulation. The 2050 target date reflected a widely held view that this is what it would take to contain the increase in the average global temperature since pre-industrial times to a more or less bearable 1.5 degrees Celsius.

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Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco

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Helmuth von Moltke (1800-91), the greatest of Prussia’s nineteenth century generals, so the old (unreliable but enjoyable) story goes, laughed only twice in his life. Once when told that a certain French fortress was impregnable and once when told that his mother-in-law had died.

He would surely have at least permitted himself a smile at the over-confidence with which the EPA is attempting to reorder the American automobile industry….

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Remembering the Nameless

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If there were to be only one symbol of the Holocaust, it would be of a concentration camp dedicated solely to industrialized killing. A total of 2.7 million Jews were murdered at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, and, within the Auschwitz complex, Birkenau. The extermination camps were the logical endpoint of Nazi genocide, a “solution” that was not only final but also efficient and, to a degree, out of sight…

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AI: Corporate Governance – Who’s in Charge?

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In last week’s Capital Letter, I wrote about the drama at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company and creator of ChatGPT which has the eventual goal of designing an AGI (artificial general intelligence), an automated system that could reason as well as Homo sapiens, before, presumably, overtaking us all. 

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AI: A Coup, a Cult, and Corporate Governance

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On Friday November 17, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was fired. OpenAI is the artificial intelligence company formed to engineer an AGI (artificial general intelligence), an automated system that could reason as well as Homo sapiens, before, presumably, overtaking the old dullard. Ambitious! 

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Closely examined lives

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For years now, I have been grateful for the brief warnings that conclude New York Times film reviews. Brutal violence. Check. Nudity. Check. Smoking. Book that ticket. Not far into Danzy Senna’s sparkling foreword to the new edition of Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding, I read this:

“Sensitivity readers, be warned: the protagonist of this novel, Elliot Weiner, is cruel, racist, fat-phobic, homophobic, and deeply, deeply petty.”

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Rooms With No View

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Sitting in the lobby of Moscow's Metropol hotel at some moment in the mid-'90s, a client and I (I was working in finance at the time) gazed at those wandering by—hard-looking men involved in who-knows-what business, sleek women involved in we-knew-what business, some wealthy "new Russians" sporting haute couture and ostentatious disdain for Soviet drabness—all stock characters in Weimar Moscow. The two men deep in conversation at a neighboring table were under investigation in a financial scandal then making headlines in the U.K. "What is this, Casablanca?" asked my client, who had never been to Russia before. "Pretty much," I replied.

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The War on Growth

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The industrial revolution is not yet canceled, but it has become “problematic.” When delegates arrived in Glasgow, Scotland, for Conference of the Parties 26, the 2021 edition of the U.N.’s climate jamboree, Britain’s then–prime minister, Boris Johnson, welcomed them with a speech in which, after some by-the-numbers apocalypticism (crops withering, locusts swarming, wildfires, cyclones, Miami underwater), he turned his attention to the industrial revolution: “It was here in Glasgow, 250 years ago, that James Watt came up with a machine that was powered by steam, that was produced by burning coal. . . . We’ve brought you to the very place where the doomsday machine began to tick.”

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Imperial Tender

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When reading Ekaterina Pravilova’s original, fascinating and meticulously researched “The Ruble” it is a good idea to keep in mind its subtitle: “A Political History.” For Ms. Pravilova’s multi-layered account of the evolution of the paper ruble from its inception in the mid-18th century until the post-revolutionary reforms in the early 1920s goes beyond the merely monetary. “The biography of the ruble,” explains Ms. Pravilova, “is a history of the Russian state, written in the language of money.” Regardless of the type of political system in place, she writes, “money does not simply reflect an existing (or imagined) social and political order but creates it; it is not a consequence or an attribute but an integral and constitutive part of any regime.” Ms. Pravilova, a professor of history at Princeton, shows that the ruble has been, above all, a symbol and an instrument of centralized, autocratic and imperial power.

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