2026

hE MADE THEM SHEEP:

Crypto Is Pointless. Not Even the White House Can Fix That. (Ryan Cummings, Jared Bernstein, 3/01/26, The New York Times)

In our role as government economists, we initially kept an open mind about crypto’s potential merits. From 2021 to 2022 we sat in dozens of meetings in which crypto firms and their backers assured us that the blockchain, the technology underlying crypto, would do everything from increase access to the financial system to replace the internet as we knew it.

Yet when we asked independent experts about these claims, we encountered sharp pushback. If this technology was that revolutionary, why weren’t any of the giant tech firms using it? Were they too shortsighted to see the technological revolution unfolding before them? Or was the technology — which we learned was essentially a painfully slow and expensive database — just not that special?

As economists of the Council of Economic Advisers, we aired our concerns in the 2023 Economic Report of the President. Crypto is, at best, a form of private money, which has a long history of ending up in financial ruin. At worst, it is a speculative and highly volatile asset with almost no practical use, whose backers were (and still are) constantly trying to embed it into the financial system, both to increase its adoption and, should the market nosedive, stick taxpayers with the bill.

THAT WAS EASY:

MIT’s New 3D Printer Can Print a Working Motor, Complete With Moving Parts: “This is a great feat, but it is just the beginning.” (Victor Tangermann, Mar 1, 2026, Futurism)


The tech behind 3D printing has come an extremely long way. The additive manufacturing technique, which generally involves depositing one layer at a time, has gone from relatively crude rapid prototyping in industrial settings to high-end fabrication of detailed parts in a growing list of fields, from medical implants to the construction of entire neighborhoods and rocket engines.

Now, MIT researchers have devised new tech that can 3D print entire complex machines with moving parts in a matter of hours. As Gizmodo half-jokingly points out, it brings us one small step closer to being able to “steal a car” by downloading it from the internet, as suggested in the slogan of the much-derided anti-piracy ad from the early 2000s.

THE RESENTMENT OF THE iDENTITARIANS:

Anger or Hatred?: The dark passions that threaten liberal democracy (Joshua L. Cherniss, February 23, 2026, Commonweal)

Galston’s latest book opens with a concise definition of the politics he defends: “Liberal democracy is limited democracy.” Privacy, legal rights, and constitutional procedures protect individuals from the will of the majority. Power is limited and divided. Authority is chastened: governments are the servants of those they rule, and their power is open to questioning and revocation. Following thinkers from John Stuart Mill to Isaiah Berlin, Galston links liberalism’s protection of individual conscience and pluralism to the conviction that no one side in a dispute possesses a monopoly on truth or virtue. Indeed plural, sometimes conflicting values lie at the heart of liberalism itself: it prizes both liberty and equality, while recognizing that each must be moderated to preserve the other.

Because it involves tension and balance and imposes limits on political actions that slow down, qualify, or block the achievement of desirable goals, liberal democracy is frequently frustrating. Galston has long stressed that liberalism neither expects nor aspires to produce a nation of saints but depends on citizens exhibiting certain virtues. Indeed, liberal democracy, “more than any other form of government, requires restraint and mutual forbearance,” and “comity”—a mutual respect that prevents us from seeking to completely defeat, dominate, humiliate, and exact vengeance against our opponents. Sustaining liberal democracy also calls for a “rigorous realism,” a sober sense of responsibility, and the fortitude to sustain political action despite awareness of the impossibility of complete, lasting victory over human evil. […]

The heart of Galston’s book is composed of chapters on each of the titular “dark passions.” The first two, anger and fear, are inescapable, evident in human beings from infancy onward; rare is the individual so saintly, or insensate, as to be free from them. They are also politically powerful. Galston supposes that “antipathy may…be the dominant political sentiment.” He revealingly catalogues anger’s triggers: injury, deprivation of something good, humiliation. The last is often the most enraging: loss of face can provoke more unappeasable fury than loss of property. In this regard, liberal democracy may make anger more likely. It creates expectations of being treated as equals, in contrast to earlier ages’ acceptance of “natural” hierarchies.

At the same time, the liberal tendency to view people as individuals runs up against the human proclivity for “sympathetic identification” with collectives. National injury provokes especially intense, widespread, and organized rage. Anger, furthermore, can live on as simmering resentment, which may be stirred up at any moment. Galston notes that while resentment may be justified, it also tends to exceed reasonable demands for just rectification, spawning unlimited hunger for revenge. He does not quite articulate an additional source of danger: it feels good to regard oneself as wronged, lending an element of righteousness and providing a dramatic script in which one exchanges impotent spluttering for the role of avenging hero. Furthermore, while anger is a negative emotion, for many it is preferable to grief, the other natural response to being wronged.

EARLY DAYS:

AI vs 100,000 humans: Which wins the creativity contest? (Dr. Tim Sandle, March 1, 2026, Digital journal)


A large study, comparing more than 100,000 people with today’s most advanced AI systems, has delivered a surprising result: Generative AI can now beat the average human on certain creativity tests.

Models like GPT-4 showed strong performance on tasks designed to measure original thinking and idea generation, sometimes outperforming typical human responses.

IKE’S ONE UNFORGIVABLE SIN:

Finding and Losing Train Culture (Bruce Frohnen, February 27th, 2026, Imaginative Conservative()

And train culture itself helped integrate communities into the larger, state, and national society in a way that left local autonomy intact. The nice thing about trains is that they bring people and things to your community and take them from your community to the wider world without erasing your actual community. Trains come in at one or two points, and leave by those same points, on a more or less regular, but distinctly limited schedule. Even the train suburbs of our cities, when they existed, had an actual character of their own that is not duplicated by suburbs on the beltway (just compare Philadelphia—a tough town with vibrant suburbs, to Los Angeles, an extremely pleasant collection of communities in the early twentieth century that has been transformed into a literal concrete jungle).

Transportation by train is a distinct event, or series of events, rather than the constant flow that automobile traffic tends to be. Of course, change was a constant on and near the frontier as people passed through on their way West. But the train had a more direct, concentrated, and so geographically limited impact than our current web of “free”ways. This is not to say that roads do not both integrate and exclude communities. When Eisenhower insisted on that massive public works and nationalization program that became our freeway system, his engineers made a number of towns into large cities by putting them on the main freeway route—and destroyed many more by bypassing them.

WE’LL TEACH YOU TO TAKE HOSTAGES!:

Trump’s Enormous Gamble on Regime Change in Iran: A few paths to success, many to failure (Tom Nichols, February 28, 2026, The Atlantic)

This is not a preemptive war. It is a war of choice, a discretionary war. It is a war for regime change. Many of Iran’s 92 million people want the regime removed. But it is far from certain that this will be the outcome.

To think about the possible courses of this war, we should start by clearly understanding three realities: First, Iran is a terrible regime that deserves to fall. The regime recently murdered thousands of its own citizens who were seeking freedom from their oppressive rule, and no one should be shedding tears for the mullahs hiding in their bunkers.

Second, “success” is not impossible—if by “success” we mean the fall of the ayatollahs and the rise of a better, more humane, pro-Western government that does not seek to destabilize the Middle East; dominate Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen; and eradicate Israel. But the path to that success is exceedingly narrow and mined with significant hazards. Destroying the regime’s capabilities is relatively easy, but nothing permanent—as Americans learned in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is achieved by bouncing rubble and piling up bodies. Destroying the regime itself is a far trickier business; dictatorships have a high pain tolerance, especially when the hapless citizens, not the leaders, bear the brunt of that pain.

Third, the president has not offered a strategy, or identified any conditions that would signal that U.S. goals have been achieved. Yes, he has vowed to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, but beyond that, he seems to be arguing for just inflicting military damage on the regime, on the assumption that enough ordinance on enough targets will weaken the grip of the ayatollahs. Once the theocrats are on the ropes, the thinking seems to go, the people of Iran will finish the job of regime change for us.

We’ve mishandled the regime for nearly 50 years now, especially post-9/11, when they begged to be let in out of the Cold. But the reality is that the American people would even support nuking Iran. Donald would have had no trouble getting Congressional approval for an operation based around regime change.

TRUMPISM DOESN’T WORK:

The Post-Liberal Laboratory: Sixteen Years of Orbán’s Hungary (Kaiser Bauch, 2/25/26, LEO)

[I]t is important to acknowledge that the period between the financial crisis and COVID was a great economic time for the whole East-Central European region, propelled mostly by advantageous global conditions. The post-communist EU member states were all growing rapidly—on average about 3.2%.

While Hungary grew above the average and was among the top performers, the problem is that Hungarian growth was driven primarily by rising employment and hours worked. ‘Orbánomics’ was based on attracting foreign capital investment into factories, mostly but not exclusively in automotive, to create jobs. In this, Hungary was successful, yet this growth model—which economists call ‘extensive’ rather than ‘intensive’—started to break down around 2019, before the COVID crisis hit.

It is a model that requires more and more capital and more and more additional labor every year to maintain economic growth. Yet the Hungarian labour force is declining and the country started to experience labour shortages. Moreover, if one looks at labour productivity growth measured as GDP per hour worked in the same period (2013-2019), Hungary was among the worst performers in the region—growing 1.7% on average while the regional average was 2.3%. It also had by far the biggest mismatch between labour productivity growth and GDP growth—meaning that this growth was not sustainable unless the labour force (or working hours) continued to expand. But more on that later.

Since COVID, things have only gotten worse.

At the End of History, there is no viable alternative to liberalism.

THE GLORY OF THE WEST:

The Last Speech: “A Thing Called Civilization” (Sir Roger Scruton, February 26th, 2026, Imaginative Conservative)

What is Civilization?

Let’s leave aside the idea of Western civilization. After all, it depends which way you’re going around the globe whether it’s West or East. Look instead at the idea of civilization. What is it? What is a civilization? It is surely a form of connection between people, not just a way in which people understand their languages, their customs, their forms of behavior, but also the way in which they connect to each other, eye to eye, face to face, in the day-to-day life which they share.

This is something which has ordinary dimensions in the workplace and in the community, in our day to day. But also it has a high culture built upon it, works of art, literature, music, architecture, and so on. These are our ways of changing the world so as to be more at home in it.

I think that is the distinctive feature of Western civilization, that it is a comprehensive civilization constantly giving us new ways of being at home, ways of being in relation to each other, which bring peace and interest as the primary bonds between our neighbors.

It is the universalism that distinguishes us and, effectively, makes the West the only civilization.

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

India Built the World’s Back Office. A.I. Is Starting to Shrink It. (Steven Lee Myers and Paul MozurVisuals by Saumya Khandelwal, Feb. 27, 2026, NY Times)]


For a quarter century, India has made itself the world’s back office, providing an educated, English-speaking work force to do tasks more cheaply than in the United States or Europe. The industry today employs more than six million people and is worth nearly $300 billion, more than 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Now, A.I. threatens to do to India what its outsourcing model did to the rest of the world: replace hundreds of thousands of office workers.