Policy and Critique

Every oil-rich nation faces the same dilemma: be friendly to attract investment, or be tough to capture value. Norway chose both – and became the world's most successful petrostate. Here's how they did it.

Military spending looks like a black hole for taxpayer money. But economic analysis of the Swedish Gripen jet reveals a counter-intuitive truth: the civilian spillovers were so valuable they paid for the entire program – and then some.

Examines how digital platforms follow a predictable three-stage decay lifecycle from user-centric value creation to shareholder extraction, using Google's internal DOJ memos as the primary evidentiary case.

A two-part forensic analysis of enshittification — the structural decay of digital platforms — tracing its mechanism, its institutional enablers, and the legal scaffolding that makes perpetual extraction possible.

Examines how digital platforms follow a predictable three-stage decay lifecycle from user-centric value creation to shareholder extraction, using Google's internal DOJ memos as the primary evidentiary case.

Most climate policy focuses on what we burn. The Density Dividend examines where we live — and demonstrates that the layout of cities generates carbon obligations that technology cannot easily fix. The Urban Carbon Leverage Factor reveals the structural carbon cost of urban form choices made decades before any car was manufactured or any power plant was built.

Analyses why EV deployment in car-dependent suburbs cannot resolve the Urban Carbon Leverage Factor, and what structural urban transformation would be required to approach the per-capita emissions performance of Vienna or Tokyo.

Compares Vienna, Singapore, Amsterdam, and Tokyo to demonstrate that cities with 40–70% lower per-capita transport emissions share a common structural explanation: urban density, transit investment, and mixed-use zoning.

Documents the 1945–1975 American suburbanisation project and the federal policy machinery — mortgage guarantees, highway funding, exclusionary zoning — that created the planet's largest per-capita transport carbon obligation.

Applies Urban Carbon Leverage Factor analysis to low-density versus high-density residential environments, establishing that urban form generates carbon obligations that no vehicle technology can eliminate.