The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Ecology Matters More Than Economy An evolutionary perspective on modern economics. Written by Martin Štěpán. My interest as of late has been in the dubious assumptions of mainstream economics. As far as I can tell, the entire job of economists is to figure out ways to maximise some measure that is supposedly good in itself, while ignoring more fundamental human needs. It’s not that I see nothing valid in the field; it’s that practically all economists carry some ideological premises with them—almost invariably liberal, universalist and utilitarian. Even Marxism is basically just a liberal heresy that never disagreed with those premises. Here I want to address specifically how economics runs afoul of evolutionary biology. The first issue is: what is the economy actually for? Most economists believe it’s ultimately for satisfying people’s preferences. But they often treat preferences in a naïve or frankly bizarre way. Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy devised a theory of “rational add...

  So It Goes, Zuckerberg A Tralfamadorian day at sea Constantin von Hoffmeister In the first days of August 2026, a strange scene unfolded off the coast of Alaska. Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht Launchpad was moving through Farragut Bay when a six-meter Hewescraft ran out of fuel nearby. Two women, a child, and a dog sat helpless in the small boat while the cold grey sea stretched around them. The contrast might have come fromKurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five : one group sealed inside comfort and machinery, another exposed to chance, with both occupying the same moment but almost different worlds. The Coast Guard sent repeated calls for assistance over the emergency frequency. Vessel tracking showed that Launchpad was close to the stranded boat. The yacht slowed near the mouth of the bay, equipped with radar, helicopters, small boats, and every device money could buy. Yet the distance between wealth and need remained greater than the few hundred meters of water between the two boats....

  Are You Ready for the “Rogue AI” Psy-Op? Kit Knightly The AIs are breaking free, that’s the story. It started two weeks ago, when OpenAI reported one of their “agents” had escaped its testing area and got loose on the internet to launch an “unprecedented cyber attack” . This was clearly meant to be scarier than the public response indicated, because a few days later OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was on the Invest like the Best podcast , asking why it didn’t cause more panic: “I’ve been a little surprised that more people don’t feel it so viscerally” In one of the most hilariously obvious propaganda manoeuvres of the year, just the day after Altman said that, CNN headlined: The OpenAI lab leak was more extensive than we thought “That thing you weren’t scared of? Well it was even SCARIER than we said it was! Are you scared now?” We weren’t. But the lack of public panic didn’t stop another AI going rogue a few days later, Anthropic’s Claude model this time. And then OpenAI reporting two fu...