The New Atlantis (as part of “How the System Works series): “Farming is one of our species’ oldest activities, dating back roughly 13,000 years. About six thousand years ago, farmers began using draft animals — horses, oxen, and so on. For millennia after that, what farmers did in their fields changed little. But in the 1960s and 1970s, in what is called the “Green Revolution,” research scientists, government agencies, agricultural businesses, and farmers themselves put together a new, strikingly more productive version of agriculture — Farming 2.0, if you will. Today, Farming-2.0-style agriculture — which began with innovations in field crops like wheat but spread to other parts of farming, such as cattle ranching and chicken-raising — is by almost any measure the world’s most critical industry. It is directly responsible for our daily bread. But despite its overwhelming importance, Farming 2.0 is in many ways unknown to most of us, because it has been so smoothly successful that we have almost no picture of the underpinnings of the vast system that provides us with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Too few have any sense of its scope, what brought it into existence, and in what ways it will need to change.”
Bloomberg obit: “[Lou] Gerstner slashed costs and sold off unproductive assets, including real estate and IBM’s collection of fine art. He fired 35,000 of the 300,000 employees, who had become accustomed to a culture of lifetime tenure based on principles established by former CEO Thomas Watson Sr. in the early 20th century. He stressed company-wide teamwork to replace the tradition of loyalty to various divisions, and he pegged compensation to corporate performance rather than individual results. To meet performance goals, he emphasized regular accountability rather than waiting for yearly performance reviews. “People do what you inspect, not what you expect,” he said.”
Hilton Root: “This review essay engages Two Paths to Prosperity (Greif, Mokyr & Tabellini, 2025) and develops an alternative, mechanism first account of the Europe-China “Great Divergence.” Two Paths to Prosperity explains Europe’s ascent through cultural-institutional coevolution, where corporate forms internalized values that enabled impersonal exchange. This essay reframes that account, using instead a comparative historical model of mechanisms. It argues that the Europe–China divergence hinges on how belief was translated into enforceable cooperation—through distinct architectures of authorization, selection, diffusion, and sanction (ASDS)—rather than on differences in religious and moral creeds alone. The framework reveals a recurring contrast: Europe’s plural corporate ecology scaled trust via lateral incorporation, while China’s lineage–state compact stabilized order via vertical accountability. The result is higher causal resolution and a set of testable implications across regions and regimes.”
Activate Signal: “If 2024 was India’s AI awakening, 2025 was the year the world woke up to India. Hyperscalers committed $80 Billion+. Frontier labs began opening offices. Government compute went live at scale. And in February 2026, India will host the Global AI Summit — a signal that India is no longer just participating in the AI era, but helping shape its global agenda. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: despite all this momentum, India still lacks a single homegrown hyper growth native-AI company clocking $100M+ ARR. And this is when the country is now ChatGPT’s second-largest market, Anthropic’s second-largest by usage, ElevenLabs’ second-largest by enterprise revenue and Perplexity’s largest by user base. The question for 2026 isn’t whether India matters to global AI. The question is whether Indian companies can capture the value being created, or whether it concedes a lot of that to US-based frontier labs and big-tech.”
