One Battle After Another (2025)

The movie has some nice cinematography by Michael Bauman. It has some nice scenes, by DiCaprio and Del Toro mainly. But it is ultimately a satire, which, by nature of the genre, targets a small niche audience. The movie is an old story retold in the target audience's lingo of the moment, which changes every four–five years.

All character arcs are flat. All characters are cardboard cutouts. (Some are well-cut ones.)

Powerful members of society (which, in a democracy, includes the common man) hold beliefs that the elites know to be wrong. Norms have developed according to which the elites and their allies are supposed to pander to some of these wrong beliefs but not to others.

Babylon (2022)

A free society accommodates a gamut of misfits. In a free society, one does not compete with everyone else; one competes within the domain of chosen peers.

Pre-Code Hollywood of the 1920s and early 1930s was free: free from Broadway, free from the stifling norms of the East Coast, free to innovate. Then it fell victim to its own success. It paid to conform to the prevailing prejudice in order to retain and grow the audience that Hollywood initially won through rebellious innovation. People continued to be free, but often on the fringes, lacking the comforts furnished by a truly free society.

The movie's protagonist is a society. The character arc is not that of an individual but that of a society, which evolves as it passes through eras, some of its own making. The arc is flat. It reveals lessons. These lessons are not acted upon by—and probably are not even revealed to—the society itself, though, and are ever more poignant for it.

"Washington: A Life " by Ron Chernow (2010)

The Founding Fathers have devised the spectacular game that the United States Constitution describes. This game has multiple equilibria. The singular accomplishment of George Washington was to coordinate his contemporaries and successors alike on a particularly beneficent equilibrium, the equilibrium that he thought it wise for future generations to play.

The character of the Founding Fathers affected the character of the country. Individuals and their character matter.

The American colonies rebelled when Britain betrayed its British values and stopped treating equals equally. A system that does not treat equals equally does not survive. The system that treats equals equally is a meritocracy.

Chernow is obsessed with Washington's sex life and slaveholding. The former obsession is particularly odd, for Washington's sex life is poorly documented. So, avocationally, Chernow resorts to armchair psychoanalysis.  

Chernow's interest in slavery is understandable, but his analysis is economically illiterate. For instance, there is nothing odd about Washington's desire to restrict the importation of slaves in order to drive up their prices and then profit from the sale of his own slaves. (Restrictive building codes serve the same purpose.) Washington may have entertained multiple contradictory ideas on slavery (thereby passing F. Scott Fitzgerald's test for first-rate intelligence), but restricting the slave trade while hoping to sell his own slaves were not among them.

"The Quartet Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789" by Joseph J. Ellis (2016)

A republic built on a three-branch government was the product that the Founding Fathers sold to the peoples of America. The product was new (no one had thought of the separation of powers before) and, once adopted, it propelled the American people to the top of the world. In the tradition of Steve Jobs and Peter Thiel, the Founding Fathers did not conduct market research. They conceived of something that people did not yet know that they wanted (and maybe would not grasp that they wanted for a generation).

How the Founding Fathers managed to sell the product to the American people is somewhat of a mystery and motivates the book. The colonies that fought against a government were persuaded to join in government. And yet, there was no buyer's remorse. This is because the seller's motivations were pure. The Founding Fathers believed that their interests would be best served if they put people's interests first. This idea of serving the people rather than the king is truly American and is as integral to the American project as the separation of powers. In American companies, the ethos of serving the people rather than serving the king lives on as the concern for the flourishing of one's subordinates at the expense of seeking to gratify one's boss.

The Founding Fathers shifted the focus away from the states' parochial interests and towards the common concerns of repaying the national debt and settling new territories.  

The genius of the Founding Fathers consisted in not trying to sell a compromise solution to the disparate American states. What was sold instead was a mechanism for resolving a conflict and reaching a compromise. (The mechanism has worked rather well, albeit not without hiccups. There was the Civil War, after all.) The United States Constitution is a mechanism for conducting debates; the Constitution is not a list of solutions. For instance, the exact balance between the Federal and the state powers is not circumscribed. The status of slavery was also left unsettled.

The Bill of Rights was an afterthought, and a fortuitous one at that. The Bill provides an explicit check on the powers of the government. Both the government and the gilded elites are held in check by the prospect of the people running around while freely speaking their minds and wielding guns. 

Exceptional times called for exceptional characters. Both Britain and France shaped some of the characters whose values transcended the institutions of Britain and France and who joined in calls for something entirely new: first, the free colonies, and then the United States of America.

Collapsing populations make nations vanish. The population of American Indians imploded naturally, and much of their land was taken with little fighting. Will Americans similarly vanish? The U.S. population may implode, perhaps because people prefer to consume goods and services instead of having kids. Could it be that this very consumption will preclude the collapse? For instance, the consumption of AI services may spur the development of AI and, under the optimistic scenario, lead to unprecedented prosperity. 

America is full of exceptional people. Will these people start something new elsewhere, where America's ideals will be built upon and live on? Will America find a way to prosper without a frontier?

The book's author is not concerned with the question marks above. Instead, he concludes with the admonition that the heroes of his book lived in a pre-modern world, and that we are therefore not supposed to understand them. First, it is not entirely clear what exactly it is that one is supposed not to understand. Second, is it not the author’s job to explain how to understand?

Perfect Days (2023)

 Grad Life.

"Poor Charlie's Almanack" by Charles T. Munger (2023)

The book is a compendium of Munger's talks. The final talk summarises it all. The remaining talks are incomplete drafts thereof. The omissions do not constitute a bug. When addressing a restive audience, it is wise to say less. As Munger observes in a Q&A session after one of the talks, he criticises psychology without saying how exactly psychology should be done because any such revelation would do little for the listener. The lesson will stick only if the listener stumbles upon it himself. Munger's only job is to make the audience curious and sceptical.

These are generalists who succeed in business. Extrapolating from this, Munger finds it hard to understand specialisation in academic departments. Specialisation is liable to generate economies of scale from working on the same topic and favours a status hierarchy that persuades academics that they are better off being paid with status rather than cash. This is a great deal for society. Munger is right, however, in that most students are not going to become academics and, therefore, would benefit from a more generalist perspective than that which universities nudge them into.

Munger is also right about the diminished role that social status plays in social science: economics, politics, and psychology. The final talk in the volume summarises what else is missing from academic psychology. The greatest omission, though, is the lack of a unifying, general-equilibrium theory.

"1923" Seasons 1–2 (2022–2025)

1923 is a soap opera tempered by the dignified presence of Harrison Ford. The story has two subplots, which are never destined to connect. This is an opportunity missed. In one subplot, white man steals land from Indians. In the other subplot, a rich man steals land from a rancher. Parallels could have been explored (and characters could have been intertwined across the subplots), but they never were.