Why a richer developing world is in everyone’s interest In 1990, about 2.3 billion people lived in extreme poverty. By 2025 that figure had fallen to roughly 830 million (World Bank, 2025), even as the world added more than two and a half billion people along the way (UN World…
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Or: what we actually mean when we say “AI” in 2026. In November 2022, ChatGPT reached one hundred million users in two months, faster than any product in history. Today, that chatbot is the simplest thing AI does. When most people picture AI, they picture a chat window: type a…
Comments closedThe architecture of risk and reward. In 2015, Beijing published a document called Made in China 2025. It named ten industries: advanced manufacturing, aerospace, biotech, new-energy vehicles, AI hardware, robotics, and several others. It set targets, timelines, and financing. It coordinated ministries, state-owned enterprises, banks, universities, and provincial governments around…
Comments closedIntroduction to a new series on AI and its ecosystem I mentioned in a recent note that I was working on a new series on the AI ecosystem. This is the first post. It is an introduction: what the series is, what it is not, and why it is worth…
Comments closedA Boeing 787, an ore-testing lab, and the chemistry behind half your dinner. Three things held up by villages of expertise no country could replicate — and what happens when one thread breaks. Bernard Philippe Markowicz May 16, 2026 In March 2021, a fire broke out in a single building…
Comments closedIt’s the topology, not the geography Post 4 of a series on globalization, concentration, and strategic de-risking. On July 19, 2024, a flawed software update from a single cybersecurity vendor, CrowdStrike, took roughly 8.5 million Windows machines offline in about two hours: Hospitals turned away patients. Delta cancelled thousands of flights and…
Comments closedHow Countries Make What They Make The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) holds roughly seventy percent of the world’s mined cobalt, a metal essential to lithium-ion batteries, aerospace alloys, and a growing share of medical devices. It does not refine most of it. The ore leaves the country in trucks, crosses into…
Comments closedWe have always traded across distances. The hard questions are not whether, but on whose terms, and for whose benefit. Post 2 of a series on globalization, concentration, and strategic de-risking. See the first post on Substack here. Early on… Archaeologists found obsidian tools at Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in central…
Comments closedInterdependence is inescapable. Pretending otherwise may make things worse. On Friday, April 17, U.S. crude oil fell 11.4 percent in a single day. The trigger was one sentence from Iran’s foreign minister: the Strait of Hormuz, closed since February’s conflict, would briefly reopen to commercial vessels. The next day, Iran…
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