Remembering Robert Trivers

Robert Trivers, who died on March 12, 2026, was arguably the most important evolutionary theorist since Darwin. He had a rare gift for seeing through the messy clutter of life and revealing the underlying logic beneath it. E. O. Wilson called him “one of the most influential and consistently correct theoretical evolutionary biologists of our time.” Steven Pinker described him as “one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought.”

I was Robert’s graduate student at Rutgers from 2006 to 2014. Long before I knew him personally, however, he had already established himself as one of the most original and insightful scientists of the twentieth century. In an astonishing series of papers in the early 1970s, he changed forever our understanding of evolution and social behavior.

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The next year in 1972, Trivers published his most cited paper, Parental Investment and Sexual Selection. Here he offered a unified explanation for something that had puzzled biologists since Darwin. Writing perhaps the most famous sentence in all of evolutionary biology—“What governs the operation of sexual selection is the relative parental investment of the sexes in their offspring”—Trivers threw down the gauntlet and revealed a deceptively simple principle that reorganized the field. From that insight flowed one of the most powerful and falsifiable ideas in modern science: the sex that invests more in offspring will tend to be choosier about mates, while the sex that invests less will compete more intensely for access to them.

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Each of these papers spawned entirely new research fields, and many have dedicated their careers to unpacking and testing the implications of his ideas. As Harvard biologist David Haig put it, “I don’t know of any comparable set of papers. Most of my career has been based on exploring the implications of one of them.” Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that his ideas gave birth to the field of evolutionary psychology and the whole line of popular Darwinian books from Richard Dawkins and Robert Wright to David Buss and Steven Pinker.

To know Robert personally, however, was to confront a more uneven and less orderly organism— to use one of his favorite words—than the one revealed in his papers. The man who explained the hidden order in life often struggled to impose order in his own. “Genius” is one of the most overused words in the language, with “asshole” not far behind, and I have known few people who truly deserved either label. Robert deserved both. He could be genuinely funny, extraordinarily generous, and breathtakingly perceptive, but also moody, childish, and needlessly cruel.

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I used to joke that one reason he was so good at explaining behaviors the rest of us took for granted was that he was like an alien visiting our planet trying to make sense of our strange habits—why we invest in our children, why we are nice to our friends, why we lie to ourselves. He told me that conflict with his own father was part of the inspiration for parent-offspring conflict and one of the observations that led to his insight into parental investment came from watching male pigeons jockeying for position on a railing outside his apartment window in Cambridge.

Robert also had a respect for evidence and for correcting mistakes that I’ve rarely seen among academics, a group not known for their humility. He cared more about truth than about his reputation and retracted papers at great cost to himself and his career when he thought there were errors. He also knew that he was standing on the shoulders of the giants who had come before him. 

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He was a lifelong learner with a willingness to do hard things. After his astonishing early success, he could have done what many academics do: stay in his lane, guard his territory, and spend the rest of his career commenting on ideas he had already had. Instead, in the early 1990s he saw that genetics mattered and spent the next fifteen years trying to master it. The result was Genes in Conflict, the 2006 book he wrote with Austin Burt, which pushed his interest in conflict down to the level of selfish genetic elements. Few scientists, after making contributions as important as he had, would have had the curiosity, humility, and stamina to begin again in an entirely new area.

Trivers was a great teacher, though not always in the ways he intended. He often asked dumb questions—’What does cytosine bind to again?’ in the middle of a genetics seminar and made obvious observations—’Did you know that running the air-conditioner in the car uses gas?’ But as he liked to say, ‘I might be ignorant, but I ain’t gonna be for long.’ He could also be volatile and aggressive and there were many times when he threatened to kick my ass. I may have been the only graduate student who ever had to wonder whether he could take his advisor in a fight. Once, over lunch at Rutgers, I asked about a cut on his thumb after he had returned from one of his frequent trips to Jamaica. He matter-of-factly told me that he had just survived a home invasion in which two men armed with machetes held him hostage. He escaped by jumping from a second-story window, rolling downhill, and stabbing both men with the eight-inch knife he carried everywhere he went. He was 67 at the time.

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One of the last times I spoke with Robert, a fall had left his right arm nearly useless. He described it as “two sausages connected by an elbow.” He was a chaotic and deeply imperfect man, but also one of the few people whose ideas permanently changed how we understand evolution, animal behavior, and ourselves. Steven Pinker wrote that “it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that [Trivers] provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.” That seems just about right to me. His ideas are some of the deepest insights we have into human nature, animal behavior, and our place in the web of life. The mark of a great person is someone who never reminds us of anyone else. I have never known anyone like him. I’ll miss you, Robert. You asshole.

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The fascinating Insights Of Robert Trivers

Trivers was one of the most—perhaps the most—influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. His work should be much more widely known in social and behavioural sciences, in particular in economics, as Trivers’ intellectual approach is very much in line with a game theoretic understanding of social interactions.

It is hard to overstate the importance of his work. Einstein famously published four groundbreaking papers in 1905, a year often referred to as his “Annus mirabilis”, during which he revolutionised physics. Trivers might be said to have had a “Quinquennium Mirabile” for the five years between 1971 and 1976, during which he produced a series of ideas that revolutionised evolutionary biology.

Reciprocal altruism - 1971:

The human altruistic system is a sensitive, unstable one. Often it will pay to cheat: namely, when the partner will not find out, when he will not discontinue his altruism even if he does find out, or when he is unlikely to survive long enough to reciprocate adequately. And the perception of subtle cheating may be very difficult. Given this unstable character of the system, where a degree of cheating is adaptive, natural selection will rapidly favor a complex psychological system in each individual regulating both his own altruistic and cheating tendencies and his responses to these tendencies in others. As selection favors subtler forms of cheating, it will favor more acute abilities to detect cheating.

Parental investment -1972:

Since the female already invests more than the male, breeding failure for lack of an additional investment selects more strongly against her than against the male. In that sense, her initial very great investment commits her to additional investment more than the male’s initial slight investment commies him.

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Critics of evolutionary theory sometimes argue that it does not make any predictions that can be tested and that it only rationalises what has already been observed. Trivers’ work is one of the best examples disproving this accusation. In his paper on parental investment, Trivers argues that the differences in behaviour between males and females should reflect the degree of asymmetry in their parental investment. As a result, animals with more parental investment asymmetry should show greater asymmetry than those with less, and if we ever find animals with role reversals, we should also observe reversals in strategies. And indeed, we observe that in animals with less asymmetry in parental investment, like swans, the differences between males and females are less noticeable. In the rare cases where male investments are larger, like in seahorses, where the females literally place their eggs in the belly of the male who incubates them, we observe a role reversal, with females courting males and competing for access to them.

Parent Offspring Conflict - 1974:

The offspring can cry not only when it is famished but also when it merely wants more food than the parent is selected to give. Likewise, it can begin to withhold its smile until it has gotten its way. Selection will then of course favor parental ability to discriminate the two uses of the signals, but still subtler mimicry and deception by the offspring are always possible.

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Obviously, overall parents tend to love their children and children tend to love their parents, but Trivers showed—with a theory now largely supported by empirical research— that the whole picture is more complex, because there are always also elements of conflict in parent-offspring relations.

Self-deception - 1976:

In the preface to Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, Robert Trivers proposed a solution to this problem: our tendency to self-deceive, to think we are better than we are, may serve as a mechanism that enables us to deceive others more effectively. He wrote:

If … deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray – by the subtle signs of self-knowledge – the deception being practiced. —Trivers (1976)

Commenting on this assertion, psychologist Steven Pinker remarked, “This sentence... might have the highest ratio of profundity to words in the history of the social sciences”

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In a 2011 paper with Bill von Hippel, Trivers developed this idea further, listing how self-deception can help. When trying to deceive, people may face cognitive load (the cognitive work required to make sure a web of lies does not have glaring contradictions). Given that lying is a betrayal of trust and is sanctioned when it is found out, it is risky, and people can get nervous about being found out, possibly showing signs of nervousness. Finally, people might try to mask signs of nervousness, thereby also behaving in a way that indirectly suggests lying. Self-deception, by inducing people to believe in their own lies, so to speak, can eliminate these possible clues while leading others to believe the preferred story of the person self-deceiving.

Trivers’ theory of self-deception has been supported by empirical research (including research I have contributed to). It explains what seems to be one of the most irrational patterns of human behaviour as emerging from strategic incentives.

Trivers has been one of the most influential evolutionary biologists, and his papers are still worth reading today. His insights, published more than 50 years ago, are fascinating. They often align very well with economic theories of behaviour, and it is therefore regrettable that his ideas are not more well-known in economics, and in particular in behavioural economics.

A key feature of Trivers’ take across these contributions was to see that beneath the world of social interactions we observe, there are deep structures in terms of incentives that shape the game we play. Understanding these games and their structures helps us make sense of the seemingly endless complexity of human psychology and social dynamics. In several key contributions, Trivers helped lift the veil on the underlying logic of human behaviour.

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No-Technological-Solution Problem

Bingo! What an insight!

We sapiens fucked things up, are still fucking things up, and promise, to continue fucking things up in future. 

Changing their mind and behavior is not in the equation but my species is planning to  innovate the fuck of technologies to clean up the mess they created while they continue to fuck things up. 

Hmm, god bless my species. 

Wonderful, wonderful interview with Dan Brooks about his new book A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century:

Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. 

This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. 

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That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

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One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation.

 

Global Water Bankruptcy

Published on the occasion of UNU-INWEH’s 30th anniversary, and ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference, this flagship report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, argues that the world has entered a new stage: more and more river basins and aquifers are losing the ability to return to their historical “normal.” Droughts, shortages, and pollution episodes that once looked like temporary shocks are becoming chronic in many places, signalling a post-crisis condition the report calls water bankruptcy.

The report makes the case for a fundamental shift in the global water agenda—from repeatedly reacting to emergencies to “bankruptcy management.” That means confronting overshoot with transparent water accounting, enforceable limits, and protection of the water-related natural capital that produces and stores water—aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, and glaciers—while ensuring transitions are explicitly equity-oriented and protect vulnerable communities and livelihoods.

Crucially, the report frames water not only as a growing source of risk, but also as a strategic opportunity in a fragmented world. It argues that serious investment in water can unlock progress across climate, biodiversity, land, food, and health, and serve as a practical platform for cooperation within and between societies. Acting early, before stress hardens into irreversible loss, can reduce shared risks, strengthen resilience, and rebuild trust through tangible results.

- More Here

Via 

What water bankruptcy looks like in real life

In financial bankruptcy, the first warning signs often feel manageable: late payments, borrowed money and selling things you hoped to keep. Then the spiral tightens.

Water bankruptcy has similar stages.

• At first, we pull a little more groundwater during dry years. We use bigger pumps and deeper wells. We transfer water from one basin to another. We drain wetlands and straighten rivers to make space for farms and cities.
• Then the hidden costs show up. Lakes shrink year after year. Wells need to go deeper. Rivers that once flowed year-round turn seasonal. Salty water creeps into aquifers near the coast. The ground itself starts to sink.
• That last one, subsidence, often surprises people. But it’s a signature of water bankruptcy. When groundwater is overpumped, the underground structure, which holds water almost like a sponge, can collapse. In Mexico City, land is sinking by about 10 inches (25 centimeters) per year. Once the pores become compacted, they can’t simply be refilled.

 

What Is The Question?

Finding the question can be fun, as in thinking of a cartoon caption. But it can also be extremely difficult psychologically. Scientists are often expected by the public to know it all, and yet, “feeling stupid” is a common mode of operation for us. Science is the art of dealing with things we do not know enough about. As Wernher von Braun, the father of German and US rocket programs, phrased it: “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” Science is humbling in this way. For young scientists, it is often very difficult to understand that it is perfectly normal to not know the answer—or even the question. Learning to embrace this uncertainty is part of our maturation as scientists.

Uri Alon has an intuitive image to describe the process of re-finding our questions. Given what we know about a given topic “A,” a researcher predicts that it should be possible to arrive at point “B,” a scientific destination that seems interesting—a hypothesis. However, the plot inevitably thickens over the course of the research project, and new hurdles force the scientist into a meandering path. Soon, the researcher is lost, having lost sight of the start point (which suddenly seems shaky) and end point (which appears unreachable). Uri calls this “being in the cloud”—you have lost your original question, but the reason why this has occurred is strange and thus potentially exciting and itself worthy of study. From inside the cloud, the situation may seem desperate, but Uri sees the cloud as the hallmark of science: if you are in the cloud, then you might have stumbled upon something non-obvious and interesting. “I’m very confused” a student would tell Uri, to which he would reply, “Oh good - So you’re in the cloud!” Eventually, a new question that arose inside the cloud may lead the way to an unexpected destination “C.”

Embracing uncertainty

The scientific method is often perceived as a simple sequence that leads from a problem to an answer, possibly through long iterations of modified hypotheses. But our reality is much less structured: it often starts with a topic and some observations, leading to the finding of patterns and questions about those patterns, possibly long before we have any explicit hypothesis or any direct tests. And even if a project starts out with a very specific hypothesis, in our experiences, it still generally arrives at a very different point than expected.

In some way, then, night science may be most productive when it has no agenda, when there are no particular questions it is trying to reshape or resolve. When the scientist does not have a hypothesis, she is free to explore, to make connections. In some sense, any kind of expectation on how things are to behave—a hypothesis—is a liability that could obstruct a new idea that awaits our discovery. Once night science elucidates and reframes this question, the researcher can use the full power of day science to solve it. In this sense, a major discovery is typically both the solution and the problem.

Much of basic, curiosity-driven science is exploration, and night science is a fundamental part of that; yet funding bodies often demand that research must be hypothesis-driven. But while some part of night science can be done with the help of an armchair and some good coffee, other parts require the exploration of large and complicated data sets. If no funding is provided for such endeavors, the generation of new questions may be stifled, hindering scientific progress: in science, the problem that is eventually solved is often not the one that was initially sought out.

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Richard Alley - Predicting Future Sea-Level Rise

Members of our broader research group are working extensively in the field. This especially involves the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, the major project to learn what is going on in the most vulnerable part of the most vulnerable ice sheet in the Antarctic, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which includes the Thwaites Glacier. After seasons lost to Covid, a major expedition will be traversing down Thwaites, using radars, seismic sensors and more to characterize the ice and its bed.

Other groups are working farther downstream, extending work that has been done on the ice shelf and in the ocean beyond. Thwaites is vast, larger than the state of Florida. It is some 80 miles across, making it arguably the widest glacier on Earth. Since the 1990s, scientists have reported on the increased velocity of its movement and the doubling of its contribution to sea-level rise. Its collapse would trigger meters of sea-level rise in the decades and centuries to come, hence its popular nickname in the media, Doomsday Glacier.

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What are the challenges in predicting how much warming will ultimately cause the Thwaites Glacier to break apart?

Some of this is really difficult, especially where fractures are involved. Think about ceramic coffee cups dropped on hard floors. Sometimes the coffee cup just bounces, or the rim chips, or the handle breaks off, but sometimes the whole thing shatters. Scientists can accurately predict the average behavior of a lot of coffee cups dropped on a lot of floors, if you tell us the height of the drop, the type of floor, the type of cup and a few other things. But predicting the exact behavior of the next cup dropped is really difficult, in part because the behavior depends on whether there are small cracks buried deep in the material of the cup, among others. Predicting exactly how much warming is needed to break parts of Thwaites will be harder than predicting coffee cups.

Sounds like there’s still a lot of uncertainty here. How should policymakers cope with that?

First of all, the uncertainties are not our friend. There is basically no way that sea-level rise can be notably smaller than expected. When we make the climate warmer, the ocean warms up. That makes the water expand, which raises sea level. That’s relatively easy.

The glaciers in the mountains are doing what we projected decades ago: They really are melting. That takes water that was ice out of the mountains and puts it into the ocean, and that raises sea level. Those are fairly easy predictions. There are not large uncertainties in those. The uncertainties are: Will the ice shelves break off, will the flow of the big ice sheets change a lot, with the potential to drive these very large, rapid sea-level rises. So the uncertainties are on the bad side.

In other areas of our lives, we tend to invest a lot to avoid the possibility of a catastrophe, even if we are not sure it is going to happen. The example I like to use is highway safety. We have highway engineers, we have crumple zones in the car, we have airbags and antilock brakes and seatbelts and we have police out there trying to stop drunken drivers. We are not very likely to get killed by a drunken driver, but the catastrophe would be so bad if it happened that we invest a lot in heading that off.

What would make sense may be to think about sea-level rise and our response to it with the same sort of lens: There are things we can do to better understand why it happens and what the causes are. Next steps might be communities taking steps that reflect scientific findings, which of course have economic as well as social benefits.

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Real Evil - Inheritance

This is so wrong, massively wrong.

The pain and suffering of billions of unborn kids who will be losers of the birth lottery will be massive and immense in a scale that humanity has never seen. 

Without coming up with a way to control this stupidest idea of automatic inheritance, lot of problems in the world cannot be fixed.  In other words, this is one of the very few fundamental problems in the world. 

Just because A fucked B and C was born hence C gets everything A & B worked hard for in their entire life while C did zilch in life is wrong. This will be one of the the primary root causes that capitalism is failing and might cause democracy to decline in future, 

To state the obvious:

1. We need to segregate the process of defining and understanding a problem vs finding a solution. I am defining a problem here. I have no idea how to solve this problem. I think most of humanity will agree this is a problem. But disagreements come when you start confusing solutions with the process of defining the problem. 
2. Identifying this as a problem doesn't define me nor anyone as a communist or socialist. Fuck communism and socialism; its is proven over and over again as bad ideology not even close to a solution for any problem in the world. 
3. This is the time most people should start understanding this problem and agree that we have to find solutions to this issue. 
4. Solutions might not come for years or decades. 
5. Implementing the solution after #4 might take years or decades. 
6. So good luck sapiens. Max and I will not be alive to see what unveils. 

I have seen a few academic papers but not even is writing or talking about this a fundamental problem. I have been screaming about this for over two decades now. The birth-lottery a.k.a inheritance is the cancer which has potential to destroy democracy. Beware.

Gen X and Millennials Will Inherit Trillions in Real Estate Over the Next Decade - and this is just real estate (this doesn't include cash, 401K, investments et al.). 

Baby boomers and older Americans have spent decades amassing one of the largest concentrations of private wealth in history. Now, that wealth is starting to be passed down to the next generation—and it’s having a ripple effect across the high-end property market.

Over the next decade, roughly 1.2 million individuals with net worths of $5 million or more are projected to pass down more than $38 trillion globally, according to a new report from brokerage Coldwell Banker Global Luxury reviewed exclusively by The Wall Street Journal.

Real estate is poised to play a significant role in the great wealth transfer. Gen Xers and Millennials are set to inherit $4.6 trillion in global real estate over the next 10 years, according to the report, which incorporated data from research firms Altrata and Cerulli Associates. Nearly $2.4 trillion of that property is located in the U.S.

Real-estate brokers, attorneys and family offices say they are already seeing profound changes in who buys luxury homes and how purchases are structured. High-net-worth families are bringing children into conversations about inheritance earlier and making high-stakes real-estate decisions sooner.

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In Manhattan, for instance, family money is accounting for an increasing share of major transactions.

“The price points have just gone wild,” said Ian Slater, a Compass agent who works with ultrawealthy families in New York. “I used to commonly see people buy $3 million to $5 million apartments for their 25- to 30-year-old kids. Now I see people buying $15 to $30 million apartments for their kids.”

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Americans with a net worth of more than $5 million are expected to pass down about $17.3 trillion over the next decade. Centimillionaires—those worth more than $100 million—hold roughly 43% of that wealth, according to the Coldwell Banker report.

With so much at stake, many families are preparing their children by starting conversations early.

When Bobby Castro, 58, began planning how his money would one day pass to his children, he said he was driven primarily by fear that the fortune he and his wife built would be squandered.

“I read there’s over a 70% chance Gen Two—meaning my children—will wind up blowing all the hard work that the creators of Gen One, my wife and I, did,” he said. “And that is a scary stat.”

As a result, he and his wife, Sofia Castro, 54, who live in a sprawling waterfront home with a private dock in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., began building what they call their “100-year legacy plan.” Bobby made his money by founding and later selling a financial-technology company called Bankers Healthcare Group and using the proceeds to amass a real-estate portfolio along the way. The family is now worth about $500 million, he said.

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In cases where multiple siblings inherit one property, things can get complicated, particularly if a plan isn’t put in place before a parent’s death, Cole said. 

“Kids have kids, spouses get involved and complexity becomes more of an issue,” he said. “One wants to keep it because there is sentimental value, one wants to sell it because they want the capital out. There’s a lot to untangle.”

Omnipresent Ingratitude

Since Max was a puppy, I have heard this reasoning when something bad happens - "Hey, this always happens; everywhere." 

That drove me nuts.  I phrased a term for this - "consoling the conscience."

Then I reminded myself of this Adam Smith quote from his least read book Theory of Moral Sentiments (remember, he wrote only two books):

If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

People don't give a flying fuck about anything else other than themselves and their families but yet, what they love depends completely outside of that circle. 

I would calm myself, and go play frisbee with Max. Max made a freaking little better living being. He was wiser than I will ever be. 

I was barely out of my teens when Manmohan Singh and Narsihma Rao changed the destiny of India. 

Of-course I have no idea on the profound implications of their wisdom. All I saw was Coke and Pepsi was available in India and Aamir Khan's Pepsi ad's were phenomenal. 

And then my prefrontal cortex developed a little. Slowly, I understood their wisdom. I started developing not only gratitude but tremendous wisdom not only for their actions but they were able to pull this off in a country like India. 

Then I read Margaret Mead's wise sentence: 

Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

Then I read Taleb insight of Minority Rule. 

What happened in India during 1991 was a ridiculous minority of three people (Green revolution happened because of Norman Borlaugh and most Indians don't know his name - god bless my species). 

(Hey a good human from the future: If you are reading this after I am long gone - don't give up animals.

Keep up your good work. Change will come. 

Love from Max and I will always be there for you. 

Remember no one will remember you but that is the ultimate victory for you. Why would you want these fucked up being to remember you? 

You will be one of those longest hours in the "Deep Time" when billions don't even make it micro-milli-second.) 

Samir Varma's wonderful and insightful piece how fucked up and ingratitude Indian memory is: 

The real reasons for the forgetting are deeper. And they’re not unique to India—they’re human. Which makes them harder to fix.

This is the deepest explanation, and it’s not Indian—it’s universal. It’s baked into how human memory works.

You cannot feel gratitude for something that didn’t happen.

The 1991 reforms prevented:

- Soviet-style economic collapse (remember what happened to Russia in the 1990s?)

- Possible mass famine (India was weeks from being unable to import food).

- Political fragmentation of a nuclear-armed state (India could have Balkanized).

- A generation of deeper poverty (another decade of 3.5% growth would have been catastrophic).

- The humiliation of permanent dependency on foreign aid.

- The brain drain accelerating until no one capable was left.

But because these didn’t happen, they’re not real to anyone. You can’t photograph the famine that didn’t occur. You can’t interview the refugees from the civil war that wasn’t fought. You can’t quantify the poverty that wasn’t endured.

The plane that didn’t crash. You don’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster. You can’t point to a specific moment and say “there—that’s what they saved us from.” The counterfactual doesn’t have photographs. It doesn’t have victims whose stories can be told. It doesn’t have monuments or memorial days. It’s just... absence. An empty space where catastrophe would have been.

This isn’t an Indian problem. Americans don’t celebrate whoever prevented the 2008 financial crisis from becoming Great Depression II—assuming anyone did, assuming it wasn’t just luck. They barely remember Paul Volcker taming inflation in the 1980s—an achievement that made possible two decades of American prosperity. They’ve already forgotten the pandemic response that prevented millions more deaths. This is how human memory works. We remember disasters. We forget the people who prevented them.

[---]

Here’s an irony: the reforms succeeded so completely that they became consensus.

Every government since 1991 has continued them:

- BJP under Vajpayee: accelerated privatization

- Congress under Singh: continued liberalization

- BJP under Modi: GST, Make in India, further opening

When policy becomes consensus, it stops being anyone’s achievement. It’s just... what we do now. The way things are.

Nobody campaigns on “I will continue the reforms of 1991.” They campaign on what comes next. The foundation becomes invisible because everyone builds on it.

Success erased the memory of who created it.

Indian mythology celebrates:

- Suffering: Ram’s fourteen-year exile, the Pandavas’ humiliation

- Sacrifice: Bhishma’s lifelong celibacy vow, Karna’s tragic loyalty

- Martyrdom: Gandhi’s assassination, Bhagat Singh’s hanging

- Dramatic confrontation: Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield

What does this template not include? Competent technocrats who quietly solved problems and went home.

Singh didn’t suffer publicly. Rao didn’t sacrifice visibly. Ahluwalia just... did his job well. They made it look easy. They didn’t create drama. They prevented drama—which is the opposite of what heroes do in Indian narratives.

They don’t fit the heroic template. In India, that’s not a hero. That’s a bureaucrat.

There’s a deeper cultural explanation, and it connects everything.

The successful prevention of catastrophe is the most thankless achievement in human history.

Rao, Singh, and Ahluwalia prevented a disaster. They did it so well that the disaster became unimaginable. And the unimaginable cannot be remembered.

That’s why India forgot them.

And if you are thinking this is history - think again. 

Its only because of steadfast minority refuses to live under totalitarianism that we don't live under totalitarianism. (via)

Fed Chairman Powel statement from yesterday. 

Thank you sir for your courage. Minority Rules!

via MR - Alex Tabarrok

Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.

What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.

 

Another word I hate most is "Legacy". I know so many morons who talk about their legacy. These   morons are people I know personally.

What freaking legacy? Just do the right thing.  And if you do the right thing, there is high probability very few people will remember you and thank you. That is just a second order effect. 

Our life is to do the right thing and stand up for truth. That should be a basic and decent categorical imperative. 

Guyana - The Only Country To Achieve Self Sufficient Food Supply!

The revelation comes from groundbreaking research published in the journal Nature Food, which analysed 186 countries to determine how well each could theoretically feed its population from domestic production alone.

The study’s results were stark: Guyana alone achieved self-sufficiency across all seven essential food groups – fruit; vegetables; dairy; fish; meat; legumes, nuts and seeds; and starchy staples.

Walk through any market in Georgetown, the nation’s capital, and the picture is clear: stalls stacked with local rice, root vegetables like cassava, fresh fish, fruit and other produce, much of it sourced from within Guyana’s borders.

Guyana hasn’t closed itself off from the world; it still trades like any modern nation. What sets it apart is that the country uniquely possesses the capacity to meet all its citizens’ nutritional needs from its own soil and waters.

[---]

And what makes this accomplishment even more remarkable is Guyana’s approach to conservation. It has achieved food self-sufficiency not by destroying its natural heritage but by maximising its limited agricultural land. Whereas deforestation ravages much of South America as countries clear land for farming and cattle ranching, Guyana has preserved more than 85 per cent of its original forest.

“The climate in the coastal region of Guyana makes it highly suitable for crop production,” explains Nicola Cannon, professor of agriculture at the Royal Agricultural University in Gloucestershire, UK.

The numbers bear this out: the country sits between one to nine degrees north of the equator, blessed with year-round warmth, plentiful rainfall, high humidity, and, crucially, fertile clay soils deposited by the Amazon River system over millennia.

[---]

While much of the world’s farmland is dominated by monoculture – single crops grown in vast, uniform fields – Guyanese farmers take a markedly different approach to cultivation. They intercrop – growing two or more crops together in the same field, with each occupying its own niche and drawing on resources at different times.

It’s a practice that most industrial agriculture abandoned centuries ago, but in Guyana it remains central to farming success. Coconut farmers plant pineapples or tomatoes between young trees as they mature. Corn and soya beans use the same soil: the beans ‘fix’ nitrogen naturally, while the corn draws on nutrients at a different point in the season.

When done right, the benefits can be substantial. Intercropping requires careful planning – pairing crops that naturally complement each other rather than compete – but when farmers get the balance correct, it can improve soil structure, enhance fertility, and help control pests without major chemical intervention. It also spreads risk across the growing season: if one crop struggles due to weather, pests, or market fluctuations, another can still thrive.

[---]

Guyana seems to have avoided this trap through sophisticated practices now known as ‘regenerative agriculture’. Livestock is integrated into cropping systems, while erosion is kept at bay by ensuring living roots remain in the ground year-round. These methods actively rebuild soil health as well as prevent degradation.

“Living roots not only physically hold the soil together, they also secrete [carbohydrates] which encourage microorganisms,” explains Cannon. “This helps keep soils alive and aids residue decomposition.”

The result is a virtuous cycle where healthy soils support diverse crops, which in turn feed the soil biology that maintains fertility. It’s a system that could, theoretically, sustain itself indefinitely.

- More Here

Why Aren't The Rich Fighting Against Autocracy (Anymore)?

Elites no longer have the incentive to fight for the rule of law at home. They can buy it abroad.

- More Here

India’s Northeast Reveals A Path Beyond Factory Farming

India is a good example because it has states with human populations as big as some countries, and many of these have transitioned away from small-scale, extensive chicken production. While about 35% of chickens in India are still raised in small backyard flocks, most are now kept in indoor commercial systems. Large-scale free-range broiler farms and cage-free egg farms are very rare.

For their analysis, the authors looked at factors linked to intensive chicken farming, including the state’s wealth, human population density, level of urbanization, and local feed production like maize and soy. To spot the outliers, they checked for states whose actual intensification levels were far below predictions. Then they explored whether state policies could help explain this discrepancy.

The authors found that several states in Northeast India, especially Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Sikkim, have much lower levels of chicken intensification than expected, given their income levels. For example, Sikkim has the second-highest income per person in India but less than 1% of its chickens are raised on commercial farms. In these states, chicken production remains reliant on smallholders, unlike most of India where commercial farming dominates.

One possible reason for these outliers is geography, as the mountainous, forested terrain of the Northeast makes large-scale farming difficult. Another reason could be the region’s lower human population densities, meaning that the market might not be large enough to encourage commercialization.

However, in the authors’ view, the most compelling reason is strong policy choices. Sikkim became the world’s first 100% organic state, banning hormones, growth regulators, feed additives, and antibiotics. Similar organic farming regulations exist in Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, and Meghalaya, with support from an organic agriculture program launched by the national government. These states also promote self-sufficiency in egg and chicken meat production through organic farming, and Sikkim has even invested in high-yield indigenous chicken breeds to improve productivity while keeping backyard systems.

The role of these organic policies is highlighted when considering Uttarakhand, a state with similar geography and population density to the Northeastern states but with high levels of chicken intensification. This suggests that the difference is less about physical conditions and more about policies shaping farming practices.

- More Here

How Iran Got To The Point Of Water Bankruptcy

I think we will hear more and more in every geography these two words "Water" & "Bankruptcy" in pairs. 

God bless my moronic species; it's a miracle how we got here. 

During Thanksgiving week,  there was a question about what are you thankful for. I said water and people were like ...  water? 

So even after reading about the Iranian situation nothing is going to change: 

Fall marks the start of Iran’s rainy season, but large parts of the country have barely seen a drop as the nation faces one of its worst droughts in decades. Several key reservoirs are nearly dry, and Tehran, the nation’s capital, is facing an impending “Day Zero” – when the city runs out of water.

The situation is so dire, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has revived a long-debated plan to move the capital from this metro area of 15 million people.

[--]

Iran’s escalating water and environmental problems are the predictable outcome of decades of treating the region’s finite water resources as if they were limitless.

Iran has relied heavily on water-intensive irrigation to grow food in dry landscapes and subsidized water and energy use, resulting in overpumping from aquifers and falling groundwater supplies. The concentration of economic activity and employment in major urban centers, particularly Tehran, has also catalyzed massive migration, further straining already overstretched water resources.

Those and other forces have driven Iran toward “water bankruptcy” – the point where water demand permanently exceeds the supply and nature can’t keep up.

[---]

The country needs to start to decouple its economy from water consumption by investing in sectors that generate value and employment opportunities with minimal water use.

What I've Been Reading

I cannot remember the last time I laughed out so loud while reading a book :-) 

This is a master piece with around 10 minutes of reading time. 

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla.

• Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. 

• Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. 

• Law 3: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. 

• Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. 

• Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Disavowal vs. Denial

The biggest disavowal trait is not climate change but killing animals. 

Interview with Alenka Zupančič, author of new book Disavowal

And it’s a very interesting concept, because we are used to this other concept, which is simple denial. You know, denial of climate change, denial of this or that.

But disavowal functions in a much more perverse way. Namely, by first fully acknowledging some fact—“I know very well that this is how things are”—but then going on as if this knowledge didn’t really matter or register. So in practice, you just go on as before. And I think this is even more prevalent in our response to different social predicaments than simple denial.

[---]

They are doing perhaps more damage. Or, what is even more important, they are entrapped in this kind of pas de deux with the direct deniers, because they present themselves as much more rational. They say, “Look at these stupid people. They just don’t believe in climate change. But we are enlightened. We know all about it.” But in the long run, nothing really happens. The practices remain just the same. You organize a couple of climate conferences, but growth still remains the principle of social functioning, and so on. So I think, not only is it more dangerous because it is more prevalent—I mean, there are many more people who are into this kind of disavowal functioning—but it’s also dangerous because there is this dance between the two.

The Obscenity of India's Wealthy

Listen. 

Don't weep nor get angry. 

Think and change yourself and the ones around you. 

The Future of Climate Change Is on Mauritius - People's Home vs Traveling Morons Paradise

I am going to put in simple terms: 

This "travel" disease almost all humans have is the new imperialism.  

This destroys ecology, animals, economy, health and god knows what else. It's sheer stupidity. 

The simple explanation (or causal reason) behind this disease was described aptly by Pascal centuries ago. 

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Thanks Eat, Pray, & Love book and the movie, add women in upper case to that Pascal's quote. 

This beautiful paradise of an Island named Mauritius has already been decimated by nothing but traveler's diet and shit. 

Read this piece, weep, reflect, and eradicate this disease from your system. 

The United Nations Development Program said our beaches have shrunk by as much as 20 meters in the last few decades, that the loss of tourism could cost us over $100 million per year by 2060, if nothing is done to save our coastline.

December 2022. Our November rains are expected in mid-January. Our reservoirs are 3 percent full. It’s the worst drought since the early 2000s.

There’s nothing to do but swim. We listen to the radio for jellyfish warnings: “Explosion” is the word of choice experts use to describe the creatures who’ve smothered every coastline. Manifestations of a sick ocean, they spawned due to warmer temperatures, overfishing, changing weather patterns.

Today the sky is postcard-perfect, the sea devoid of jellyfish, the beach packed with tourists. 

I think of the carbon emissions of each plane that lands here. The emissions of each of our 106 hotels. Air conditioning units struggling to cool rooms in peak season. Tourists pouring themselves a bath, cleansing themselves of their 12-hour flight. Ignorant that the rest of us have to live on only four to eight hours of water flowing through our taps most days in high summer. Tourists, their sunscreen-coated bodies plunging into the lagoon, leaving a film on the water, poisoning corals. Tourists, delighting in our bathwater lagoon, look it’s so crystal-clear you can see the bottom, a dead zone framed in buoys, cleansed of most of its creatures.

[---]

There were only four Mauritius kestrels in 1974; they are endemic to Mauritius, and were, at the time, the most endangered bird of prey in the world. Colonialism had quite a lot to do with their decline, practically from the moment the Dutch set foot here in the early 18th century: the colonists shrivelled our forests, brought rats on their boats. Three hundred or so years later — after the French and English colonial administrations had their go, pillaging the environment; after they’d driven species to extinction; after Mauritius claimed its independence and multiple economic booms and further, consequential ecological devastation — the kestrels were left with almost no homes. By 2009, however, they’d flourished to around 600 individuals, thanks to the work of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation and other organizations. They are beautiful animals, though I’ve never seen one in the wild before. Their fluffy white breasts are spotted with brown, as if they’d been dotted over with a thick brush. We have 1 percent of our natural forests left and they live there, up in the Bambous mountains and in the Black River Gorges National Park.

[---]

I read books written mostly by white men in supremely rich countries on how to think about climate disaster. Some concepts I understand in my body: global warming as a hyperobject, heat like honey glistening all over my skin, so viscous that showering won’t remove the stickiness.

I read books that trace the contours of my lifeline. The statistics that predict our future, that suggest the manner of our deaths, the stages and degrees at which our bodies will gradually shut down.

“Recently, researchers estimated that by 2050 as many as 150 million people in the developing world will be at risk of protein deficiency as the result of nutrient collapse,” writes David Wallace-Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth. “138 million could suffer from a deficiency of zinc, essential to healthy pregnancies; and 1.4 billion could face a dramatic decline in dietary iron — pointing to a possible epidemic of anaemia.” I’m already borderline anaemic, like many women in my country and their mothers. In the ministry of health’s Health Statistics Report 2021, 38 percent of all Mauritian women who received antenatal care in public hospitals were reported as anaemic.

“Sudden rainfall shocks — both deluges and their opposite, droughts — can devastate agricultural communities economically, but also produce what scientists call, with understatement, “nutritional deficiencies” in foetuses and infants, writes Wallace Wells.

Trade, Trees, and Lives

This paper shows a cascading mechanism through which international trade-induced deforestation results in a decline of health outcomes in cities distant from where trade activities occur. We examine Brazil, which has ramped up agricultural export over the last two decades to meet rising global demand. Using a shift-share research design, we first show that export shocks cause substantial local agricultural expansion and a virtual one-for-one decline in forest cover. 

We then construct a dynamic area-of-effect model that predicts where atmospheric changes should be felt – due to loss of forests that would otherwise serve to filter out and absorb air pollutants as they travel – downwind of the deforestation areas. Leveraging quasi-random variation in these atmospheric connections, we establish a causal link between deforestation upstream and subsequent rises in air pollution and premature deaths downstream, with the mortality effects predominantly driven by cardiovascular and respiratory causes. 

Our estimates reveal a large telecoupled health externality of trade deforestation: over 700,000 premature deaths in Brazil over the past two decades. This equates to $0.18 loss in statistical life value per $1 agricultural exports over the study period.

- Full Paper Here

How Nostalgia Ruins Economies

For years, I have been stating nostalgia is evil. I mean, pure evil. When everything changes, and everything is a child to impermanence, nostalgia puts shackles on motion of life in vain. 

Now people are talking about the implications of this evil in economies: 

Nostalgia is a killer. The term, originally coined in the late seventeenth century, described an illness that came in response to change and dislocation. Symptoms included fever, appetite loss, and heart palpitations. The prognosis, if left untreated, was death.

Today, society no longer sees nostalgia as a disease. Instead, it is thought of as a fuzzy, seemingly benign feeling about an idealized past. But the profound economic disruptions of the last few months might push analysts to revisit the idea that nostalgia is a grave, even life-threatening condition. American policies based on the premise of restoring past greatness—the mythical and opaque “again” of Make America Great Again—have worsened lives both within and outside the United States.

Read the whole thing. 

The parasite of nostalgia starts from each individual head and the diseases envelops him or her and rapidly spreads, 

Every cell in my body is not the same as it was when Max took his last breath. My cells are different but my love for Max hasn't changed. It doesn't mean, I eschew my responsibilities for Neo, Fluffy, Garph, Saroo and Blue and brood and kill myself over the past time over Max. That is not the lesson Max taught me. Max taught me to live in the present, and I try to do that every moment. 

The Elemental Foe - Poverty

Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. Most of humanity lacks a sense of what we are escaping everyday. 

We abuse and torture all animals in the name of protein, waste so much food every time we eat, waste so much water, electricity and zillion other material things. 

Next time you do any of the above and/or forgot gratitude, remember these lines from this important post: 

Even now, having escaped true poverty, you walk through your days with no consciousness of how closely it stalks behind you. Remember the last time you had to go an extra hour without eating? Remember the gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach, the red fog that seemed to settle over your brain? You are always just a few hours away from that. You will never outrun it. Humanity as a whole is only a few days or weeks away; if the elaborate and fantastically expensive food supply and distribution system we’ve built were to suffer an interruption, we would be reduced to the level of starving wild animals in short order.

[---]

It is industrial modernity — our single weapon against the elemental foe. It took centuries of blood and sweat to build, centuries of sacrifice by our sturdiest workers, our most brilliant inventors, and our most visionary leaders. And it is fantastically complex, far beyond the ability of even the most brilliant individual to understand in full; only collectively, at the level of society, do we shore up its fragile walls and keep it from collapse every day.

[---]

And to us also falls the task of reminding the world that growth must be sustainable. If we burn the walls of our fortress to throw a party in the moment, there will be nothing left to protect our descendants, and the foe will devour them. It is tempting to believe that manmade climate change is not real, that natural habitats can be razed without consequence, and that the world’s waters represent an infinite safe dumping ground for pollution. These are all just more unaffordable daydreams.

Part of this task is to remind the world of the importance of technological progress. Without newer and more sustainable sources of energy and materials, our choice would be between degrowth and environmental destruction. Technology built industrial modernity, and technology sustains it, and only technology can extend it into the indefinite future.

But most of all, it falls to us to extend the fortress’ protection to every human on the planet. As you read these words, there are still billions of humans living outside the sheltering walls of industrial modernity — still grappling hand to hand with the foe. Less than half of humanity lives on more than $10 a day. Almost two billion live on less than $3.65. Two billion lack access to safely managed drinking water. Every day, 190 million people go hungry in India alone.

[---]

If you want to understand the principles that underlie my political leanings, this is the key. Humanity is at war — a war so old, so terrible, and so all-consuming that even World War 3 would be a minor skirmish in comparison. Whether or not we remember it, we are always on death ground. 

We need to innovate to eradicate elemental foe, and eradicate pain and suffering of all living beings.

• Perceptually educate kids on this. 
• Work on turning this into an omnipresent awareness. 

Because as usual in the history of humanity, only a handful of humans will rise to the task and make this a reality. 

And yes, rest will be complacent. We cannot afford to keep complaining about the complacent 99.9% of humanity. 

Focus on lifting those handful of humans who act on it. 

 

Albert Hirschman's Strategy of Economic Development

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman is one of my all time favorite books. 

In a world where economists live and die in an ideologically driven parochial view; Hirschman's micro economic solutions are based on his experiences and reality - they will outlive all of us and hopefully make this planet a little better place for all living beings. 

If you haven't read it (you should) then check out Oliver Kim's summary of Hirschman's timeless wisdom:

Hirschman, however, was not so easily impressed. Having seen firsthand the difficulties of getting things done on the ground—and the arrogance of foreign planners—he was skeptical of the grand promises made by the balanced growth theorists. During his fellowship at Yale, he worked furiously at a rebuttal–a project that eventually became his 1958 classic, The Strategy of Economic Development. In it, Hirschman set out to slay the dragon of the Big Push, and replace it with a theory more grounded in reality.

Hirschman’s main critique of balanced growth stems from a simple observation. “If a country were ready to apply the doctrine of balanced growth,” he writes, “then it would not be underdeveloped in the first place.” The capabilities needed to successfully kickstart the “modern sector” in one go–the systems of organization, the scientific and technical knowledge–are precisely the ones that need to be nurtured by the development process. In other words, balanced growth theory provides the correct but unhelpful diagnosis that a country’s failure to modernize stems from its lack of modernity.

Rosenstein-Rodan’s Big Push tries to solve the problem by starting the modern sector all at once, grafting it like foreign tissue onto the traditional agrarian economy. But even if the graft somehow sticks, Hirschman observes that the results can be quite unpleasant. A common outcome is a dualist economy, which you’ll still often see today around the world—a gleaming modern sector of skyscrapers and shopping malls, next to a traditional agrarian sector that remains desperately poor. Further examples are the persistent gulf in Latin America between indígenas and mestizos, and the foreign-owned plantations that are islands of “modernity” surrounded by seas of poverty.

[---]

The solution Hirschman proposes is unbalanced growth. Instead of trying to solve all problems all at once, policy-makers should push forward in a limited number of sectors, and use the reactions and disequilibria created by those interventions to inform their next move.

Take the example of an industrial district. With limited resources, a policymaker may have to choose between building the actual factories, or laying down the highways and power-plants (what he calls Social Overhead Capital) to supply it.

[---]

Hirschman formalizes this insight with his famous notion of backward and forward linkages. Backward linkages are the demand created by a new industry for its inputs, like steel for an auto plant or milk for a cheesemaker. Forward linkages are the reverse—the knock-on effects of a new industry’s outputs on the firms it supplies. Backward linkages, Hirschman goes on to explain, are better at spurring growth than forward ones. Rather than plopping down a steel factory somewhere, with no customers assured, it is far easier to build the auto plant first, sourcing the car parts from other countries as needed, then gradually entice local producers to enter the market. Instead of a Big Push across all industries at once, Hirschman calls for the Targeted Strike–choose the sectors with the most potential to create demand for other inputs, and support those.

Ahead of his time for economics, Hirschman also argues that the “nonmarket” responses induced by a policy change may be just as important as market ones. If, say, the factories in the industrial zone face a shortage of trained workers, the locals may clamor for new schools. Or if the trucks congest their neighborhood roads, they may pressure their local officials to improve the highway. Politics cannot be separated from economics when thinking about developmental choices.

Hirschman’s theory of unbalanced growth is rooted in empiricism, allowing policy makers to test and gauge the reactions of the specific context rather than applying some universal formula. It recognizes that development is naturally a chaotic, messy process, much closer to a “chain of disequilibria” than the result of a master plan. To paraphrase another important development thinker, Hirschman’s unbalanced growth is the modest call to cross the river by feeling the stones, one intervention at a time.

[---]

Far too many Wisdom of the Ancients pieces—those op-eds that claim Adam Smith had it all right, if only you hadn’t dozed through The Wealth of Nations; or Marx saw it all coming, it’s just all in the endnotes to Capital Volume III–end up wringing their hands in despair, bemoaning what their chosen prophet would think if they saw the state of economics today.

But not so with Albert Hirschman.

Since Krugman wrote his 1995 essay, development economics has undergone another intellectual upheaval. Highly formalized growth models are still around, but the center of gravity has shifted decisively towards randomized control trials (RCTs) and micro-level evidence—a more Hirschmanian approach if there ever was one. The 2019 Nobel Prize to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer was, in a sense, just a belated recognition of this de facto intellectual triumph.

The methodological switch to RCTs has not been without controversy; I’ll leave that whole debate aside for another time. But the randomista revolution remains underrated in one crucial respect. Running RCTs has forced a whole generation of economists to leave their desks, go to the countries they study, and talk to the people who live there. In Chris Blattman’s words, we’re all Hirschman now—tramping through fields, collecting our own data, trying our best to not let theory obscure the evidence of our eyes. It’s not hard to see Hirschman’s ghost wandering through the Busia offices of Innovations for Poverty Action, nodding his head in wry approval.