Such institutional selection theories are completely wrong.

Corporations don’t evolve through natural selection. That requires heritable variance under differential fitness. The culture, technical knowledge, and structure of organizations is captured by personnel not bylaws.

Unless personnel persists, corporations have nearly no heritable variance. This is perhaps a case for why we should clone exceptional employees but has nothing to do with organizational structure.

The origin of successful companies lies with exceptional founders who know how to assemble these organizations. These founders are the inventors of relevant social technologies.

Does this mean creative destruction doesn't have a role? No, not at all. The personnel and machinery in dysfunctional institutions are indeed wasted. They should be reallocated to functional firms. Everyone is better off when they do!

But it is a conceptual and empirical error to think this is the mechanism that creates such firms in the first place! It isn't.

Regardless of the particular measure we use, exceptional institutions do exist, but they are rare. Most things fail. Things that exist have avoided failure—so far. Institutions that we do see are functional enough to persist.

Those who aren't capable of social technology invention are at best making photocopies of functional organizations. The mistakes they make far outweigh any learning. Failure doesn't teach that much.

Dead organizations of the type Dwarkesh is describing make decisions by committee and try to iterate towards local optima. Live players who found and run functional institutions are capable of seeing, considering, and working toward a much broader range of outcomes and working toward novel global optima.

First principle companies lead by live players like SpaceX will *always* outperform bureaucratic or committee driven organizations like Boeing. We've seen this in hundreds upon hundreds of company case studies at @bismarckanlys.

In fact Apple is an instructive case. It is more profitable than ever. It faces no competition. Remember under perfect competition profits fall to zero. Yet, after the death of Steve Jobs it simply and persistently failed to innovate at the same level. Its vast profits are a market failure not a market success: they represent vast misallocation.

It is in fact a dead player, and a slowly decaying functional institution can keep on winning—until it breaks. Which Apple will one day. Unless taken over by a live player.

No committee ever appoints a live player if they can help it, simply because that's how committees work. It has to be somewhat of a hostile takeover like what happened to old Twitter when Elon took it over or what Carl Icahn did back in the day.

What does this mean for politics?

It is precisely because the stakes are so high, and because there is no inherent check on the sovereignty of great powers, that we must work very hard to avoid dysfunctional and extractive institutions in government.

It means we should have much much more creative destruction in politics. Because in politics too machinery, personnel, and, yes, territory are distributed inefficiently. Here too we should embrace first principles thinking and live players.

Great nations and the peoples of countries like the United Kingdom, France, and Germany are today misgoverned in a way very reminiscent of Boeing or RTX or Lockheed Martin or a dozen other companies run on the "portfolio theory of the firm." Those companies and governments are not at all like Nvidia, OpenAI, Anduril, or SpaceX.

And the world is poorer, less technologically advanced, more violent, and less free because of it.

Let's fix all dysfunctional institutions, be they private or public. Out with the portfolio theory of government! In with first principles thinking. Some further recommended reading on this topic:

samoburja.com/functional-ins…

samoburja.com/institutional-…

brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-apple-pa…

It really is looking like the Russia-Ukraine war permanently knocks Europe out of the running as a 21st century power. Europe was set on track to be there 2005-2008. Even for much of the 2010s it was plausible it would recover from the 2008 financial crisis after a lost decade.

If you believe in GDP your intuition should be that Americans are much richer than Austrians AND that Austrians are much richer than Japanese. Per capita GDP:

United States 86,601
Austria 58,669
Japan 32,859

Asiapoors. I'm originally from Slovenia. An Eastern European country.

It's GDP per capita recently surpassed that of Taiwan and Saudi Arabia.

Slovenia 34,544
Taiwan 33,234
Saudi Arabia 32,881

Hungary is a developed liberal democracy that has been continuously ruled by populist, nationalist conservatives for 15 years.

Yet despite this, they have surprisingly not meaningfully changed the country's trajectory.

Read the new, very long @bismarckanlys Brief! (link below) Long-time Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party have turned repeated large electoral victories since 2010 into institutionalized power.

Orban skillfully empowered parliament over the courts, making it possible to reform Hungarian society by passing laws.

The fertility discourse is almost always automatically gendered.

I don't think this is right. Both women and men are seeing fertility preferences drop massively.

I know about equal numbers of couples where the man or woman are against reproduction. We should listen to women on why they don't want children. Not just surface but deeply and reflect on the said and unsaid.

Men want fewer children as well (data shows this) and we can and should ask them to get a second answer without ignoring the first.

Sony Group is Japan's most valuable consumer technology conglomerate.

It famously led global innovation in electronics for decades. Succession failure has made it less than the sum of its parts.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief:


1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/sony-suggest…
Sony is the world leader in image sensor semiconductor manufacturing, the largest video game company by revenue, the second-largest music publishing company, and the fourth-largest film studio.

2/n

Intel, the leading U.S. chip designer and manufacturer, missed multiple major technological opportunities.

Its recent pivot to contract manufacturing is heavily backed by the U.S. government.

Read the new publicly-available @bismarckanlys Brief:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-attempt-…
The vast majority of Intel's business is designing and manufacturing central processing units (CPUs) for personal computers and servers.

These are all based on Intel's proprietary x86 instruction set architecture, long giving Intel a global quasi-monopoly in PC CPUs.

2/n

This remains one of the best essays on the practice of rationality. Warmly recommend reading it!

paulgraham.com/identity.html Taking this essay seriously has only yielded benefits over the years. It is the main reason I've refused to join or identify with a movement for the last decade.

People who implore you to join one, point to the benefits of group strategies.

99% of smartphones and mobile devices rely on processors using the designs of one semiconductor company: Arm.

But the British firm, now owned by SoftBank, faces a long-term tradeoff between profits and viability.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/arms-long-te…
Arm is a small company with a big role. It designs central processing units (CPUs) using the ARM instruction set architecture, patented intellectual property which it also widely licenses.

Over 280 billion chips have been shipped using ARM architectures.

2/n

The storied U.S. defense firm Raytheon builds everything from long-range radar installations to guided missiles.

But today it is just one of a few distinct subsidiaries in a dead player's portfolio.

Read the new public @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/🧵brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/raytheon-is-… Since 2023, Raytheon is no longer an independent company, but a subsidiary of the newly-named RTX Corporation.

Raytheon is one of the company's three distinct "business units": aircraft components manufacturer Collins Aerospace, engine maker Pratt & Whitney, and Raytheon.

The Google subsidiary Waymo has deployed self-driving taxis in multiple American cities.

Neither regulators nor hardware costs are likely to impede its slow but steady progress.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/google-leads…
Waymo's technology relies on reference mapping and a suite of expensive sensors including lidar. This limits the vehicles' operational areas.

This is a contrast to, for example, Tesla's self-driving which focuses on mimicking human vision with machine learning on cameras.

2/n

U.S. manufacturing is in deep trouble because modern U.S. executives treat firms as financial products rather than firms.

Artificially balanced "firms" optimized to look good on financial metrics do not sustain traditions of knowledge nor infrastructure. They are dead players. The theory of the firm by Robert Coase nicely explains how a for-profit company can be a functional institution.

In contrast the amorphous corporation that does everything and nothing, cannot even in principle solve either component of the succession problem.

Heavy subsidies have made wind turbines a growing share of electricity in developed countries.

But since wind cannot meet the needs of modern industry, it will contribute to deindustrialization.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/wind-cannot-…
From the physical fundamentals, wind is not suited for powering modern cities or industry, which require continuous, predictable power on land.

Wind is highly variable and reaches its highest natural speeds over the seas and oceans. Unsurprisingly it was used for sailing.

2/n

Earth's mass is 5.972 × 10^24 kg. So almost six billion trillion metric tons. There are unimaginable quantities of iron, aluminum, copper, and so on.

We have a mere eight billion humans.

Why do we have any material scarcity at all?

1/5 One answer is that it takes a lot of energy to extract and process these resources.

But our first planet isn't just a chunk of metal and rock, it is very hot. There is nearly three thousand times more thermal energy in the crust than there is chemical energy.

2/5

More market mechanisms will not solve the problem of a political economy oriented towards extraction and stagnation.

There is no way to re-industrialize Western countries or accelerate technological growth without changing the political economy to something that favors them. This is why there can't be a conservative solution, or even a thoughtful incrementalist solution.

This is why conventional economists might as well be silent, they are either conservatives or ignore questions of political economy.

They bore me, they should bore you.

The U.S. military estimates that drug cartels now control around 30-35% of Mexican territory.

But overall, the drug lords bolster rather than undermine government elites in the country.

Read the new publicly-available @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/mexicos-drug…
Since 2006, the Mexican military has participated in domestic law enforcement duties against Mexico’s drug cartels.

Mexico's homicide rate has more than tripled since 2007 due to violent intra-cartel disputes and battles with the police and military.

2/n

Boeing is the flagship of U.S. airpower and aerospace. But in recent years, its planes have fallen out of the sky. Why?

Boeing is decaying due to succession failure in engineering and on the factory floor.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-decay-of…
There are only two companies in the world capable of building and exporting the largest type of civilian aircraft, the "jumbo jet": Boeing and Europe's Airbus.

Since 1992, Boeing has gone from enjoying 70% market share to falling behind Airbus in orders and manufacturing.

2/n

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, U.S. and EU sanctions aimed to collapse the Russian economy.

The sanctions have failed primarily because of China's vast, increasingly advanced manufacturing base.

Read the new @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/nbrief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/sanctions-on… In April 2022, both the IMF and S&P Global forecasted an 8.5% annual decline in Russia's GDP.

Biden administration officials predicted that, due to the sanctions, Russia would go back to "Soviet style living standards from the 1980s."

This has obviously not happened.

2/n

The CIA's venture capital arm funds startups with tools and projects near completion that could be useful to the U.S. government.

This goal has made it unusually effective at government procurement.

Read the new public @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/n brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-cias-ven…
In-Q-Tel is both an intelligence outpost in Silicon Valley and a software outpost in Northern Virginia.

Its most high-profile investment is probably Palantir. But it also invested in what would become Google Earth, as well as GitLab, MongoDB, Wickr, and Databricks.

2/n

The revolutionary weight loss drug Ozempic/Wegovy is the result of decades of basic science at the now-$500B Danish company Novo Nordisk.

It probably won't be the company's last advance.

Read the new publicly-available @bismarckanlys Brief here:

1/nbrief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/ozempic-prob… Novo Nordisk is unique among big pharmaceutical companies:

It is scientifically specialized around a single area: insulin, diabetes, and endocrinology.

The research on what is now Ozempic began in the 1990s!

2/n

This isn't the case because Romans employed Hellenistic Greek experts they employed made use of exact mathematical models to describe the natural world.

Heron isn't the contemporary of Plato or Aristotle, rather he stands on the shoulders of Archimedes and Eratosthenes.

https://twitter.com/n00rdung/status/1747929254237495550

And the technological fruits of this theory are apparent:

Roman and Greek engineers did make use of pistons!

https://twitter.com/n00rdung/status/1747933878826774865