aroonwithaview

Category: Uncategorized

  • I would walk 250 more

    It’s hard to feel patriotic for a country that celebrates its quarter millenium since founding with an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight, but one must separate the mud from the meadow. There is something historically unique about the American experiment – in the same way as early Greece – which by…

  • The infancy of AI

    Like seemingly every other person on the planet today, I grapple daily with the implications of rapid advances in AI. I was too young during the internet age to know how people felt then, but my conjecture is that this feels like a much more profound shift. In more ways…

  • Exceptionally American

    Inside America are two wolves. Depending on the zeitgeist, one of the two wolves comes out of hibernation to snap its powerful jaws around the public’s neck. The evil wolf bites in the name of the powerful – Andrew Jackson, Richard Nixon, Donald Trump – while the good wolf bites…

  • Choking hazard

    What is the purpose of a government? There are many theories of state, from regulating violence to coordinating economic activity. The most salient for me in recent years has been the idea that the state is an instrument to address market failures. For a variety of well-studied reasons, individual optimizations…

  • Renegotiating the social contract

    Violent revolutions are a particularly stark way of renegotiating a strained social contract. Democracies seem to have done surprisingly well by providing less stark ways of renegotiation, but they seem to be fraying at the seams of late. To me, there are three broad aspects contributing to this trend: rising…

  • Democracy(?) in America

    With yet another election season of watching the United States stare into the abyss coming to a close, things seem more grim on the eve of the election than they were the last two times. The first time, you could have excused it as a risky gamble or protest. The…

  • The victor of the spoils

    Nothing riles up the populace like a good old royal wedding, and if the Ambanis are not the archetype of modern Indian royalty, the term might as well be meaningless. Of course, the vast majority of Indians, even the vast majority of Indians with any access to information on the…