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The 1980’s proceeded as expected with strengthening individualism and weakening institutions. The GI Generation Heroes began to depart from the scene. This steady, cautious, risk adverse generation that built American industry and finance were being pushed into retirement by the Baby Boomer Generation.

The delusion of the American populace cannot be underestimated. Their worshipping at the altar of materialism and adoration of Hollywood created pop culture was crucial to the societal delusion.

A country that had once produced its way to world domination degenerated into a paper kingdom run by Harvard MBAs, lawyers, tax accountants and central bankers.

The result was that the Crisis that arrived in 2005-2008 will be more painful and possibly fatal for the United States. The multiple wars of choice, immense housing bubble, stunning government deficits and unaddressed unfunded liabilities have created a nation weakened and unprepared for the harsh reality ahead. The Empire of Debt has reached epic proportions.

Americans are slowly coming to the realization that unbridled greed is not the same as capitalism.

Russia’s current labor force is already considerably less productive than that of other industrialized nations

Russia is starved for capital because of its infrastructural needs, security costs, chronic low economic productivity, harsh climate and geography.

Russia is looking to import the capital, technology and expertise needed to launch Russia forward 30 years technologically

Russia has traditionally lagged behind Western nations in the fields of military, transportation, industry and technology but has employed periodic breakneck modernization programs

Russian leaders would throw incredible amounts of human labor at the modernization, not caring if it crushed the population in the process

this push for modernization requires the importation of highly qualified people who have trained for years, if not decades.

GURGAON, India

In Gurgaon, economic growth is often the product of a private sector improvising to overcome the inadequacies of the government. To compensate for electricity blackouts, Gurgaon’s companies and real estate developers operate massive diesel generators capable of powering small towns. No water? Drill private borewells. No public transportation? Companies employ hundreds of private buses and taxis. Worried about crime? Gurgaon has almost four times as many private security guards as police officers.

Gurgaon was widely regarded as an economic wasteland. In 1979, the state of Haryana created Gurgaon by dividing a longstanding political district on the outskirts of New Delhi. One half would revolve around the city of Faridabad, which had an active municipal government, direct rail access to the capital, fertile farmland and a strong industrial base. The other half, Gurgaon, had rocky soil, no local government, no railway link and almost no industrial base. As an economic competition, it seemed an unfair fight. And it has been: Gurgaon has won, easily. Faridabad has struggled to catch India’s modernization wave, while Gurgaon’s disadvantages turned out to be advantages, none more important, initially, than the absence of a districtwide government, which meant less red tape capable of choking development. By 1979, Mr. Singh had taken control of his father-in-law’s real estate company, now known as DLF, at a moment when urban development in India was largely overseen by government agencies. In most states, private developers had little space to operate, but Haryana was an exception. Slowly, Mr. Singh began accumulating 3,500 acres in Gurgaon that he divided into plots and began selling to people unable to afford prices in New Delhi.

Mr. Singh had become the company’s India representative after befriending Jack Welch, then the G.E. chairman. When Mr. Welch decided to outsource some business operations to India, he eventually opened a G.E. office inside a corporate park in Gurgaon in 1997. “When G.E. came in,” Mr. Singh said, “others followed.”

Ordinarily, such a wild building boom would have had to hew to a local government master plan. But Gurgaon did not yet have such a plan, nor did it yet have a districtwide municipal government. Instead, Gurgaon was mostly under state control. Developers built the infrastructure inside their projects, while a state agency, the Haryana Urban Development Authority, or HUDA, was supposed to build the infrastructure binding together the city.

From computerized control rooms, Genpact employees manage 350 private drivers, who travel roughly 60,000 miles every day transporting 10,000 employees.

The city’s residential compounds, especially the luxury developments along golf courses, exist as similarly self-contained entities.

“We pretty much carry the entire weight of what you would expect many states to do,” said Pramod Bhasin, who this spring stepped down as Genpact’s chief executive. “The problem — a very big problem — is our public services are always lagging a few years behind, but sometimes a decade behind. Our planning processes sometimes exist only on paper.”

Not all of the city’s islands are affluent, either. Gurgaon has an estimated 200,000 migrant workers, the so-called floating population, who work on construction sites or as domestic help.

Meanwhile, with Gurgaon’s understaffed police force outmatched by such a rapidly growing population, some law-and-order responsibilities have been delegated to the private sector. Nearly 12,000 private security guards work in Gurgaon, and many are pressed into directing traffic on major streets.

Sudhir Rajpal, the wiry, mustachioed commissioner of the new Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon, has a long to-do list: fix the roads, the sewers, the electrical grid, the drainage, the lack of public buses, the lack of water and the lack of planning. The Municipal Corporation was formed in 2008, and Mr. Rajpal, having assumed the city’s top administrative position a few months ago, has been conducting a listening tour to convince people that government can solve their problems. It is not an easy sell.

“The drains are broken and accidents are happening,” shouted one man. “Yet no one is answerable! There are problems and problems. Whatever water we get is dirty, but we have nowhere to complain.”

“Every day some agitation is taking place,” he said, shouting above the din of traffic. “People are not satisfied.” If people should be satisfied anywhere in India, Gurgaon should be the place. Average incomes rank among the highest in the country. Property values have jumped sharply since the 1990s. Gurgaon’s malls offer many of the country’s best shops and restaurants, while the city’s most exclusive housing enclaves are among the finest in India. Yet the economic power that growth has delivered to Gurgaon has not been matched by political power. The celebrated middle class created by India’s boom has far less clout at the ballot box than the hundreds of millions of rural peasants struggling to live on $2 a day, given the far larger rural vote, and thus are courted far less by Indian politicians.

For too many Nigerians, life is a Hobbesian, zero-sum game that adds up to an aggressive, predatory system of survival of the fittest. Nigeria is a place where life is too often a matter of who can intimidate whom. Indeed, war, crime and thuggery are the province of young males, and Nigeria's population is composed of many of them.

Nigeria is an assemblage of several British-ruled territories: specifically a Muslim north that the British governed indirectly through traditional rulers and a non-Muslim south that the British ruled directly. The tension between the different parts of Nigeria has dominated political life for decades, leading to coups and counter-coups and significant periods of democracy characterized by exceedingly high levels of corruption, which is, in turn, part of the spoils system that staves off civil war.

a Muslim-dominated north of desert and semi-desert, which produces the Hausa officers' corps that for decades has dominated the military and, by association, politics for significant periods

a southwestern region dominated by the Yoruba people, which contains the commercial capital of Lagos

and the southeast where much of the oil is located, dominated by the Igbo tribe.

Abuja, to no one's surprise, is less the capital city than the point of arbitration for a weak and sprawling empire otherwise known as the state of Nigeria. Abuja is where the economic spoils are distributed -- the benefit of upwards of 2.5 million barrels of oil pumped daily.

Ignored for decades and violently intimidated during the 1990s, the Ijaw in the 2000s waged an increasingly militant campaign to assert their presence. Pipeline sabotage and bombings of oil facilities effectively held the country's economy for ransom. The Ijaw were accommodated in 2007 and were rewarded with the vice presidency, in exchange for curtailing the sponsorship of militant groups like the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND.

Indeed, Nigeria attests to the triumph of naked power and geography over the realm of ideas. Nigeria's strength is evinced in the fact that its peacekeepers have successfully led intervention forces in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and in the fact that Nigerian businessmen are all over West Africa playing pivotal roles in local economies.

Nigeria and South Africa both should be imperial powers in West Africa and southern African respectively, helping to stabilize places like Mali and the Congo. But they clearly are not due to their own internal weaknesses.

It is a maxim of Western elites that economic development and global integration will lead to civil societies in places like Nigeria. There is an important element of truth in that, but such a truth has severe limits. Economic growth also leads to wider disparities as well as more spoils to fight over.

What Stockman is most worked up about is that for almost a century, economic policymakers have ... um ... made policy, and that's led to cheap money, high indebtedness, and econo-moral turpitude.

Stockman insists that the market should work out its failures without all these meddlers trying to fix them (there must be "a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy"); no government investments in industry; central banks shouldn't mess with the money supply, and so on.

The reader gets tons of invective against interventionists from FDR to Obama, but never a compelling explanation as to why America would have been better off if we did nothing to lessen the economic pain caused by the Great Depression or the Great Recession by applying Keynesian stimulus. Nor is there any analysis of why mainstream economics is wrong to believe, based on decades of empirical evidence from economies across the globe, that such stimulus, both fiscal and monetary, actually works.

If you want to get rid of central banks, you'd better come up with some other stabilizing mechanism a whole lot better than gold buggery. And I'm quite certain that would lead you right back to independent central banks.

Stockman never explains how a market failure such as underinvestment in such sectors would be overcome by simply not having the government help directly by subsidizing research and development or backstopping credit to offset the high risk premiums investors would otherwise demand.

Each week, we have a pretty good idea of where the ships will be, based on geopolitical patterns, strategies and developments. But surprises -- and they do happen -- allow us to challenge and re-evaluate our positions.

The map contains only publicly available, open-source information. We're not publishing any secrets; we're compiling available information and applying it to an easy-to-use, actionable graphic for our analysts, subscribers and clients.

The choice to build the bridge is a choice between this bridge or that skyscraper as well as any other alternative use of those resources. Each alternative use would have different benefits (and unseen costs).

This is not a mere question of engineering the strongest or even the most cost-effective structure to get across the Hudson, this is a question of what is the strongest or most cost-effective possible future version of New York City.

“We are building the world’s 20th search engine at a time when most of the others have been abandoned as being commoditized money losers. We’ll strip out all of the ad-supported news and portal features so you won’t be distracted from using the free search stuff.”

“Our goal always has been to index all the world’s data.” Talk about anemic goals, come on Google, show some ambition!

Our gut might first tell us that it is technical.

Sure, all this data is now hanging out in one place for free, but to make a useful index you need to determine how much people value different data. We need data about the data.

The data resources are not rivalrous

Search used to be really bad. Why? Because search companies were using either (a) content-producer willingness to pay for indexing, (b) mere keyword search or (c) some combination of editorial centralized decision-making to organize lists of sites.

If 999 other websites linked to one website about ducks, you can bet that most people think that this site is better at explaining ducks than a site with only one link to it (even if that link was horse-sized).

So Google uses the decentralized Hayekian knowledge of the masses to function. Why does this mean we’re all Hayekians?

Amazon customer reviews are how we find good products. Ebay feedback is how we find good individual sellers. And, moreover, whole brick and mortar services are moving to a crowd-sourced model, with sites like AirBnB for lodging and RelayRides for car rental.

the giant firms of tomorrow will be those that empower people to freely share their knowledge and resources in a vibrant marketplace.

Today, the central challenge for a firm is not to develop careful internal management but rather the non-trivial task of building marketplaces and forums to encourage decentralized knowledge production and cooperation.

By taking advantage of new decentralized technologies and living as cheaply as possible, people might be able to increasingly just opt out of capitalism and consumerism entirely.

All resources become the common heritage of all of the inhabitants, not just a select few.” This arrangement is made possible by aggressive use of advanced technologies to create an abundance of resources and thereby negate the need for any sort of rationing.

put money directly in people’s hands so they can spend it and keep the market economy going. The main difference is that instead of making the income unconditional, Ford advocates doling out money according to an incentive scheme that encourages behavior society desires.

if we can find a way to directly upgrade human minds—such as through the use of brain-computer interfaces—then workers would be able to keep pace with technological change and readily adapt to new jobs and industries as quickly as they crop up.

they push for a series of common sense policy fixes, such as fixing education to better prepare people for STEM fields or reforming the patent system to mitigate drags on innovation.

Therefore we should try to accelerate technological progress by whatever means necessary so that we can make the painful transition as short as possible—much like tearing off a bandaid.

Yes, there will be less jobs available, and certainly people’s incomes will suffer, but technology will simultaneously bring down the cost of living at a fast enough rate that people will survive just fine without the need for government invention or economic restructuring.

Once AGI arrives we will have much bigger issues to contend with, such as will the human race survive being displaced as the most intelligent beings on planet Earth?

As I'll explain below, regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset can be the foundation on which you build a compelling career.

Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that's both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101.

They start by painstakingly developing rare and valuable skills—which we can call career capital. They then leverage this capital to gain rare and valuable traits in their career. These traits lead to a feeling of passion about their working life.

The reality I'm proposing is less glamorous. It argues that passion takes time and hard work—harder work than most people naturally invest in their jobs. It's also less certain in the sense that you cannot predict in advance the details of the compelling career you're cultivating. But it compensates with clarity.

That reasoning power may be effective when attacking rival truth claims, but it does not perform well in establishing it's own claims concerning matters of fact.

On the contrary, she often responded with intense hostility to criticism. Typical in this respect was her response to Sidney Hook's review of To the New Intellectual. Instead of responding to Hook's criticisms point by point, Rand insisted that Hook should be publicly condemned. Because Leonard Peikoff and Barabara Branden were students of Hook, they were were given a pass; but everyone else, including even Rand's friend John Hospers, were expected to take part in the public condemnation.

she had very little conception of the manners and morals of professional academicians: they can get along well and even be friends, while disagreeing strongly with one another on rather fundamental issues.

But for Ayn this was a betrayal. It almost cost us our friendship. In the end she attributed my attitude to the misfortune of having been brainwashed by the academic establishment, at least with regard to their code of etiquette.

What Rand failed to appreciate is that the "code of ettiquette" that Hospers writes about is the glue which holds together communities of truth-seeking intellectuals. If everyone began publicly condemning those they disagreed with, that community would break down and all that remain would be a loose assemblages of ideological factions crying anathema against each other.

Telangana, the Andhra coastal plain and the interior Rayalaseema region.

The area that will become Telangana is sandwiched between the Godavari and Krishna rivers and sits on the Deccan plateau, west of the Eastern Ghats mountain range. Though the mostly barren north suffers from acute power shortages, has a high rate of poverty and is a hotbed for Naxalism -- India's Maoist militant movement -- its geographic boundaries include Hyderabad, one of India's most vibrant economic regions.

The new plan to divide Andhra Pradesh would have the residual non-Telangana parts -- coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema -- form the state of Seemandhra.

Telangana is poised to join a long list of states that have been created since India's independence in 1947. Before Telangana, the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttaranchal were carved out of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, respectively, in 2000. Goa defined its state boundaries in 1987, while Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram in the country’s far-flung northeast grew out of Assam in the same year. Manipur and Tripura earned their statehood in 1972, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh were carved out of Punjab state in 1966 and Bombay state in 1960 was divided along linguistic lines into Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and the father of the Indian republic, quickly realized that the three-tier division the British Raj used to divide and administer India's governorships and princely states was ill-suited to the new country. In 1953, he launched a commission to figure out how to reorganize the country. Controversial political questions naturally emerged -- whether to redraw states along lines of linguistic and cultural unity, as well as how to preserve geographic continuity and financial viability. Leaders worried about the precedents any action could set in a country that speaks hundreds of languages and dialects and is beset by overlapping boundaries and economic interests.

The creation of a new state that affects Hyderabad, a major economic hub home to a number of multinational corporations, is going to be a messy affair. And the statehood question is being addressed at a time when the government is desperately trying to attract and retain long-term foreign direct investment to help it cope with the global economic crisis.

Unless domestic consumption expands dramatically, China can continue growing rapidly only by increasing investment well beyond what is economically useful or by forcing larger trade surpluses onto a reluctant world.

Many reasons have been given for low Chinese consumption -- demographics, Confucian culture, skewed tax incentives, amateurish marketing, the sex imbalance, the tattered social safety net, etc. If Beijing takes administrative steps to address the correct cause of low consumption, so goes the theory, it will automatically rise.

The other, smaller (but rapidly growing) school of thought argues the model itself prohibits high consumption: growth is high because consumption is low.

Contrary to conventional thinking, the Chinese have no aversion to consuming. They are eager shoppers, as even the most cursory visit to a Chinese mall will indicate. The problem is that Chinese households own such a small share of total national income that their consumption is necessarily also a small share.

One option might be for Beijing to engineer a huge shift of state wealth to the household sector through, say, a massive privatization program.

Another option, and ultimately the only sustainable path forward, would involve reversing the subsidies that generated such furious growth.

Unfortunately, the longer China waits to make the transition from this model of growth, the more difficult the transition will be.

The sooner China begins the difficult transition, the less costly it will be, but in no circumstance is it likely to be easy. They key will be to get consumption to grow quickly relative to GDP, and China might simply not have the time to do it by reversing the wage, currency, and interest-rate subsidies paid by the household sector.

the Turkish core is the same territory as the core of the Byzantine Empire that preceded it, namely, the lands surrounding the Sea of Marmara.

Such lowlands ease the penetration of peoples and ideas while allowing a central government to spread its writ with ease. One result is political unity; rivers radically reduce the cost of transport, encouraging trade and thus wealth.

In terms of political unity and agricultural production, the region’s maritime climate smoothes out its semiarid nature.

It may not be a large, unified, well-watered plain — split as it is by the sea — but the land is sufficiently useful that it is certainly the next best thing.

In terms of trade and the capital formation that comes from it, by some measures the Sea of Marmara is even better than a navigable river.

Establish a blocking position in Anatolia. Expand up the Danube to Vienna. Develop a political and economic system to integrate the conquered peoples. Seize and garrison Crimea. Establish naval facilities throughout the eastern Mediterranean.

if the Turks turned inward, that would restrict trade between Asia and Europe, virtually inviting a major power to dislodge the plug.

the Turks had little interest in grabbing all of Anatolia early in their development; the cost simply outweighs the benefits. But they do need to ensure that natives of Anatolia are not able to raid the core and that any empire farther afield cannot use the Anatolian land bridge to reach Marmara.

A secure block on Anatolia starkly limits the ability of Asian powers to bring war to Turkey, which can use the entire peninsula — even if not under Turkish control — as a buffer and be free to focus on richer pastures within Europe.

First, at only 350 kilometers (220 miles) away from the Marmara, it is the closest major river valley of note.

Second, there are no rival naval powers on the Black Sea.

Third, the Danube is a remarkable prize. It is the longest river in the region by far and is navigable all the way to southern Germany; ample tracts of arable land line its banks.

The first lies in modern-day Bulgaria.

The second point is where the Black Sea nearly meets the Carpathians

The third point lies in the Danube Valley itself, on the river where modern-day Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria meet.

The final — and most critical — defensive point is the city of Vienna, located at a similar gap between the Carpathians and the Alps.

This, along with reaction to the Russo-Georgian war, led investors to take more than $130 billion — nearly 11 percent of Russia’s foreign investment stock — out of Russia in the last quarter of 2008.

These tremors in the Russian economy undermined the Kremlin’s confidence in its ability to hold its consolidated state and periphery in the long term.

in the late 1980s, then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced Perestroika, which allowed Western influence and technology to flood the country. This was a major component of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

In order to entice foreign businesses and money back into the country — especially those with modern technology — Russia has had to do some restructuring to make itself more attractive for investors, yet it must stand its ground in certain areas to prevent a flood of foreign influence.

To do business in Russia, one still has to be on the Kremlin’s good side. The political, regulatory and judicial environments in Russia remain restrictive, and the regulations are still convoluted to the extent that the Kremlin, regional or local governments decide what to enforce and how. The changes are intended more as confidence-building measures aimed at firms who want to enter (or return to) Russia. The legal shifts also make it easier for foreign firms and investors to comply with domestic and international laws on investing abroad.

This is what Facebook is about, and ultimately what capitalist realism is about: life as reducible to one giant hot-or-not contest, with adverts.

There is a certain type of nerd entitlement that is all too easily co-opted into a modern mythology of ruthless capitalist exploitation, in which the acquisition of wealth and status at all costs is phrased as a cheeky way of getting one's own back on those kids who were mean to you at school.

The protagonist is invariably white and rich and always male -- Hollywood cannot countenance female nerds, other than as minor characters who transform into pliant sexbots as soon as they remove their glasses -- but these privileges are as naught compared to the injustice life has served him by making him shy, spotty and interested in Star Trek. He has been wronged, and he has every right to use his l33t skills to bend the engine of humanity to his purpose.

In crude political form, this Whiggish inclination toward progress was encapsulated in the functionalist view retailed by Norman Angell around the turn of the last century, which held that countries that traded with each other would develop economic self-interests too intertwined to justify war.

If markets had come to play a more prominent part in the industrial West, it was not because markets had just been invented. It was because social and political systems had evolved in which powerful elites were willing to tolerate institutions that diffused economic power and weakened the state at the expense of private enterprise. This was the core meaning of liberalism in its original formulation.

The Crash of 1929, the subsequent economic slump and, particularly, the duration of the Depression took most contemporaries completely by surprise. Indeed, the uniquely severe catastrophe of the 1930s is so unusual that modern analysts should be cautious in drawing lessons from it.

Conventional wisdom tends to treat President Hoover as a clueless advocate of laissez faire who refused to stimulate the economy in the dramatic downturn. Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, was the heroic leader who both saved the day and transformed the American economy through his promotion of the New Deal. Conventional wisdom is still very much with us.

Hoover did not advocate “do-nothing” policies.

Roosevelt’s interventions were neither as thorough nor as systematically revolutionary as they have often been portrayed.

Above all, FDR’s worst policies were animated by a desire to repress business, by distrust of competition and a general disdain for the market. Those were, of course, precisely the qualities that made his policies extremely popular. FDR’s economic policies scored mixed successes at best, but his political strategy succeeded by any measure long before U.S. entry into World War II, and subsequent generations have not ceased to conflate the former with the latter.

So thoroughly has the West taken for granted the triumph of the more abstract liberal nation-state that its denizens must remind themselves how fragile its origins were and how little emotional loyalty it has commanded.

Even in America, where visceral support for individualism and self-reliance remains strong, this has always been so. In good times, economic systems are supported by inertia and utilitarian compromise that appeal to the broad center. In hard times abstract convictions tend to melt away. The American preference for the free market is neither as common nor as “American” as many suppose.

Seen as a reversion to older habits, the odd mix of regulation, make-work, intervention, protectionism, nationalism and (as in Germany and elsewhere) anti-Semitism that characterized the Western policy response to the Depression suddenly seems less like an incoherent flaying in all directions and more like elements of a uniform retrenchment in social relations.

It seems odd that humans in their day-to-day interactions think of buying or selling as the most natural of activities, recreating markets unprompted in the most dismal of circumstances. Yet there is something about the ideology of a market system, or of any generally decentralized order, that seems inconceivable to most people.

Economists have a hard time dealing with nationalism.

A severe economic crisis implicates the entire system of political economy, regardless of how narrow the source of that crisis may be. Thus those with long-simmering fears and resentments—as well as those with more venal or ideological motives—see crisis as an opportunity to strike out at the system.

Anti-market movements, whether pushed by Populists or Progressives in the United States or the various forms of socialism in Europe, took for granted that vigorous political action was the only way to impose order and bring social harmony to an unfettered market economy. But the specific remedies and the zeal with which reformers sought to repudiate the past belie ideological origins more than technocratic ones.

He had mastered the politics of trust.

Roosevelt deserves credit for largely resisting these ideological enthusiasms. On balance, he dealt with the crisis pragmatically and forthrightly.

If FDR had left out the high-flying rhetoric and only pursued an attenuated New Deal—namely the financial policies that economists now agree truly helped us out of the Depression—would he be as celebrated a figure as he is today? Not likely.

The end of World War II furnishes still more evidence that political images leave a wider trace in historical memory than actual policies.

Thanks to Truman we were once again moving in the direction of a competitive, open-access market economy. Had there been a lingering recession and a continuation of older, harmful regulations into the 1946–48 period, Truman, not his predecessor, would have been blamed. Yet Truman’s stellar reputation today owes nothing to his economic achievements, which most of those who today praise his foreign policy acumen know nothing about.

In any event, we would do well to bear in mind how important, yet also how unnatural, the modern system of impersonal finance and trade really is. If we would preserve that system as a basis for our prosperity, we must recognize that many of the regulatory solutions we apply to our current crisis may themselves induce responses that can generate new crises. History suggests, too, that fears of the market and the political pressures it generates will wax and wane as crises deepen or ease. Patience and prudence are, therefore, the best watchwords for government amid the many trials and errors we will surely endure in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.

large-scale systems based on anonymous exchange were a recent phenomenon.