The Neuro-Metaphysics of Ruin
How the Modern World Learned to Mistake the Map for the Territory
Economics
The Choice Engine.
Adam Butler on trade policy, political economy, and the structural forces shaping American life.
Recent essays
10 of 10The Convergence
The following account is reconstructed from documents I obtained in 2022 from a former employee of Prometheus Research Group, a machine-learning laboratory incorporated in Delaware in 2017 and dissolved, per state filings, on 11 March 2021.1 The documents incl…
The Strip-Mining of Trust
The Growth Model of Manufactured Distrust
The Trade Deficit Is "Made in America"
The Greatest Trick Capital Ever Played: Convincing America the Trade Deficit Was China's Fault
The Realist Blind Spot on China
Why industrial and State Capacity "Trump" Military Power Projection in the Competition for Global Alignment
The Prisoner’s Dilemma of Voluntary Taxation
How Game Theory proves libertarian fantasies collapse at scale.
The Trade Deficit Is a Profit Margin
How U.S. Corporations Built a Machine to Import Deflation and Keep the Change.
Addendum: The Autopsy of the Ideal Family
A More Robust Attempt to Compute the Precarity Line
The Bureau of Missing Children
How America Measures Inflation—and What It Cannot See
Coming soon
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