Jimmy Carr nailed something a lot of us feel but can’t explain. We’re living better than 99.9% of humans who ever walked the earth, hot showers, modern medicine, endless entertainment, kids that actually survive infancy, yet so many of us feel miserable. He calls it “life dysmorphia.” We get used to how good we have it (the hedonic treadmill), then compare ourselves to everyone else and tank our own happiness. As he puts it: happiness = quality of life minus envy. Marcus Aurelius put it perfectly: “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.” When was the last time you caught yourself feeling unhappy despite objectively having it pretty damn good?

"The pie is fixed. The Earth is a closed system. You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet." I hear this constantly, and it's delivered like a law of physics — case closed, only a compromised economist could disagree. It's wrong. And the mistake is revealing, because it isn't in the physics. It's in the economics smuggled inside the physics.

What’s one book that you would make mandatory for all high school students?

"A Moral Case for Jeff Bezos’s Wealth" nationalreview.com/2026/06/a… "True public goods may justify taxation under clearly defined rules. They do not justify an ownership claim over every enterprise that uses them."

I find the political focus on inequality in this kind of work strange - as if one could make the poor better off just by making the rich worse off. Inequality can sometimes have negative consequences that we should care about, but it's ethically confused to care about equality as an end in itself. We should care about abundance, freedom, tolerance, beauty, knowledge, innovation, fairness, etc. - and only care about inequality when it threatens these other things.

A British biologist looked at 200,000 years of human history and found that the entire reason humans broke out of poverty was not intelligence, not language, not even agriculture, but one mechanism so simple a 6-year-old could explain it. His name is Matt Ridley. He is a zoologist by training, an evolutionary biologist by career, and in 2010 he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that quietly argued the most important fact about human progress had been hiding in plain sight for the entire history of economics. Naval Ravikant has been telling people to read everything Ridley has ever written for the last 15 years. The reason is the argument inside this one book. For 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. Same skull size. Same neural architecture. Same raw capacity for language, planning, and abstract thought. For roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. Generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on the chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent. Then it exploded. The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. What changed. It was not the brain. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language, which had existed long before the takeoff. It was not even agriculture, which arrived only 10,000 years ago and was actually preceded by the upward bend, not the cause of it. What changed was that humans started trading with strangers. This sounds too small to be the answer. Ridley argues that it is the answer to almost everything. The moment one human exchanged a useful object with another human from a different group, something happened that no other species on earth had ever done. Two ideas that had developed in isolation came into contact. The flint knapper learned what the spear maker had figured out. The fisherman from the coast learned what the hunter from the forest had figured out. The two pieces of knowledge fused into something neither side could have produced alone. Ridley calls this ideas having sex. The phrase sounds frivolous and it is meant to. The point is that ideas, like genes, get better when they combine with other ideas from different lineages. An idea sitting inside one head, no matter how brilliant the head, eventually hits a ceiling. The same idea exposed to ten thousand other ideas does something genes do under sexual reproduction. It mixes. It recombines. It produces offspring nobody planned. The cleanest proof of this argument is the most uncomfortable case study in the book. Tasmania. Around 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island, with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains. The same language. The same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural experiment was now running. What happened next is something no economist or geneticist had ever predicted. The mainland Australians kept inventing. Boomerangs. Spear-throwers. Fishing nets. Bone needles for sewing fitted clothes. Watercraft with paddles. Their technology compounded slowly across the centuries. The Tasmanians went the other way. They did not just fail to invent the new tools their cousins were developing. They started losing the tools they already had. Fishing was abandoned within a few thousand years. Bone tools disappeared. Fitted clothing disappeared. They forgot how to make fire from scratch and started carrying lit firebrands from camp to camp instead, relighting their fires from a neighbor's whenever their own went out. By the time European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the simplest toolkit of any human society ever recorded. Their material culture had gone backward for 8,000 years. The archaeologist Rhys Jones called it a slow strangulation of the mind. Joseph Henrich at Harvard later proved with formal mathematical models that there was nothing wrong with Tasmanian brains. There was something wrong with their network. A toolkit requires a critical mass of people exchanging skills to maintain itself. The act of teaching a skill is imperfect. Every generation loses a small percentage of what the last generation knew. If your population is large enough and trading widely enough, those losses get caught and corrected by someone else who still remembers. If your population shrinks below a certain threshold and stops mixing with outsiders, the small losses compound until entire technologies disappear. This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026. Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers. The thing your ancestors needed in order to break out of 190,000 years of stagnation was not better brains. It was better connections between brains they already had. The implication for any individual is direct and uncomfortable. If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected. The most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They are the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They are talking to more people from more disciplines. They are in the rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other. Ridley ends the book on the line that sounds optimistic but is actually a warning its this "The future will be invented by people who connect ideas, not by people who guard them."

I will soon be introducing a bill to give the public a 50% ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America. This would guarantee that the trillions created by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — and block oligarch decisions that harm the American people.

My report below shows why progressive lawmakers have never - after all these decades - been able to turn their single-payer and M4A rhetoric into a real, specific proposal that could be implemented. manhattan.institute/article/…

Point out where austerity touched you on the chart

MAGA hates working people. It’s a disgrace that nearly 20 GOP states still have a $7.25 minimum wage. In California, it’s $25 an hour for an entire sector of workers! As it should be.

Zucman manipulated the stats you show below to make them fit his political story. In 2018 he published a dataset that inadvertently revealed the real tax rate paid by the top 0.001%. It hovered around 40% in recent years - nearly twice what his 2019 chart claims to show.