Timmy's House of Sprinkles

Mark Twain

2026-10-29T21:28:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder what it is with me and long pieces of media. I claim to prefer shorter, denser and more focused pieces, but somehow I seem to end up playing 100+-hour RPGs and reading 1000+-page books.

The latest whale I've landed is Mark Twain, the recent-ish biography from Ron Chernow. I've been a fan of Chernow's since I read his majestic Alexander Hamilton biography way back in 2004 - I still have a signed copy from when I saw him at a Rainy Day Books event in Kansas City. Since then I've read most of his older and all of his newer books. What's kind of funny is that Hamilton is the only subject I was highly interested in prior to reading the book. For everyone else, I've thought of the subject as somewhat boring and only picked up the book because it was written by Chernow. In every case I've come away fascinated by the subject and with a much deeper appreciation for their role in history.

Mark Twain has mostly continued that trend. Looking back, I read a fair amount of Twain in elementary school: I'm pretty sure I read Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and probably a few short stories. I don't think I've read anything from him from high school on, though. This was somewhat crystallized in college, where my American Literature professor (who I eventually chose as my advisor) admitted that he disliked Twain's writing, I think because of his frequent use of dialect in prose. The professor skipped over Twain entirely, and instead we read the much more obscure (but very good) novel "The Damnation of Theron Ware".

So, overall I've been aware of Twain's stature as a giant in American literature and one of our most recognizable and influential writers, but I think I've absorbed that criticism of him not being a very good or enjoyable writer, so I've never felt particularly interested in returning to those books or exploring other things he's written. He mostly existed in my mind as a caricature popping up in Gilded Age settings, chomping on a cigar and dispensing witty aphorisms.

Which, in some ways, is pretty close to the truth! This book was filled with quippy quotes from Twain, things he wrote or said to others. Early on in the book those quips tended to leave me cold: I could tell that they were meant to be humorous but they didn't hit me as amusing. That changed, though, and the book as a whole ended up feeling really funny entirely due to all the Twain-isms woven into it, nestling between the frequent darkness of his life. I'm not sure if I appreciated those quotes more because I got more familiar with and in tune with his voice, or if it's just because he actually got funnier as he got older.

Over the years I've gotten the vague impression that Twain had a dark and pessimistic outlook, and that's definitely true. Some of that seems to be due to his nature, and some due to his upbringing, but a lot of it is probably due to the trajectory of his life, which is kind of a rags-to-riches-to-rags story. His parents were originally fairly well-to-do and owned slaves, but they were downwardly mobile throughout his life, frequently moving in search of better work and opportunities, eventually selling off all their slaves.

Samuel Clemens eventually strikes out west, gets some local fame as a humorous newspaper writer, parlays that into some national fame, gets funding to take tours to exotic locales and write about it. He falls in love with Livy, an heiress to a large coal-mining fortune, and they marry and have several children. From a relatively early point in his life, then, he has a pretty perfect situation: a career as a widely beloved and influential author, living in a luxurious mansion attended by servants, raising three charming daughters.

And he isn't content: Twain isn't happy to just be rich, he has to be the richest. So he keeps investing in hare-brained schemes, falling for swindles, doubling down on sunk costs. Worst of all, he throws his wife's money into the pit as well, not merely frittering away his own earnings but hocking her inheritance. The decline is a gradual process, with Twain always convinced that he's on the brink of a massive business success that will catapult him into the highest ranks of wealth. They can continue to float their extravagant lifestyle for several years, but eventually he has to admit that his bets won't pay off and declares bankruptcy. This is a hugely humbling experience for them - especially his poor wife, who grew up in luxury and would have easily stayed there if not for Twain's spending of her fortune.

While you can see why Twain was so well liked, with his sparkling wit and adventurous spirit and deep insight, he also comes off extremely poorly in many ways. The most striking for me was his inability to admit fault: any time something bad happened, he always found someone to blame and heaped all of his scorn on them. When he made a bad investment, he couldn't admit that he was bad at business: he must have been deceived by someone else, or failed by a partner, or customers were too stupid to recognize the superiority of his offering. As Chernow observes, this adds a flavor of Greek tragedy to his life: he was always the cause of his own downfall, due to his inability to learn from his mistakes and admit that he wasn't as good a businessman as he thought he was.

Family tragedies continued to pile up as the years went on. I won't unpack all of it in this post, but the situation with his two surviving daughters felt particularly poignant. Clara was ambitious, and chafed at living under Twain's shadow: she wanted her own independent identity as a musical artist, to make her own mark. (Though, she did depend almost entirely on Twain for financial support, and frequently used her status as his daughter to drum up publicity for her performances, only to then scold reporters for asking her about Twain.) While she wanted independence, Twain would show up and embarrass her, driving her further away. On the other hand, Jean, his youngest, suffered from epileptic seizures. He sent her off to a series of asylums and camps and group living homes. She badly wanted to be with Twain and spend more time with him, but he was uncomfortable witnessing her illness and deliberately avoided her as much as he could. Very late in life they finally reconciled and he regretted their time apart - but, again, he never blamed himself for this, instead villainizing others who he had appointed as her caregivers.

So, given all that, it's very unsurprising that his views darkened even more as he grew older. Much like how Hamilton seemed to come unhinged and increasingly erratic after Washington died, Twain spiraled into greater controversy after Livy died: both of them had lost trusted, reserved, thoughtful people who could temper their worst impulses. Where he had always poked fun at authority and questioned conformity, he came to believe that life itself was inherently terrible and meaningless and filled with suffering. And yet, he said so in very funny ways! People are interesting.

I found Twain's views very interesting. They did evolve over time: most strikingly, as a boy in rural Missouri he absorbed his family and social class's values, in particular generally being pro-Union but also anti-abolition, and he even briefly served in a Confederate-aligned battalion. From early life experience, though, he gained a profoundly deep empathy towards black people, came to abhor slavery in all of its forms, and would eventually emerge as a full-throated supporter of Reconstruction. In general his attitudes for the time seemed to be progressive and iconoclastic: he fervently supported universal suffrage for women, when that was considered a "crazy" idea, and he was deeply skeptical of not just organized religion but religious faith broadly. And yet, in some ways he was extremely parochial and conservative, reflecting the Victorian values of his time. He was very squeamish about sex, both personally and in his writing. He and Livy were aghast when, say, Clara (as a woman in her twenties) would visit men without a chaperone, or wear a striking hat in the incorrect function. He chided Jean whenever her letters seemed insufficiently happy. Overall it's really hard to categorize Twain. Politically he identified strongly with the "Mugwump" movement, which grew out of the Republican party but would support reform-minded Democrats over corrupt machine Republicans. Sometimes it seems like he was being ornery for its own sake, but it also seems like he did have consistent values, even if it's difficult to map those values onto our current landscape.

Some minor criticisms: Chernow constantly places "[sic]" after misspellings in quotes, which are very frequent, and I found this annoying and thought it broke up the flow. I don't recall that being an issue with his earlier books, but I can't remember if he didn't do that or if those subjects were just better spellers. I would have been fine with all misspellings being preserved as-is without comment, or obvious ones being silently corrected, but it doesn't add much to my experience for each individual misspelled word to be pointed out separately.

The book as a whole seemed to be less well edited than his earlier ones. There are quite a few places where he'll make an observation, and then make that exact same observation a page or two later. That would be helpful if he was recalling things discussed many chapters ago, but it just felt like a waste of time as done here.

I've now read six of these large (often thousand-plus pages in hardcover) biographies, and it's interesting to see Chernow's repeated interests throughout his subjects. They often broadly examine racial justice through their eyes, the treatment of African-Americans in particular, and usually some sidebar on the subjects' attitudes towards Jewish people. Twain comes off really well here, significantly evolving from his received racist attitudes and becoming a full-throated defender of racial equality. Twain's aims in this area seem great, though the execution doesn't always land well by modern standards. "Huckleberry Finn" does a great job at portraying the slave Jim as a real human being, and accurately portrays the speech patterns of the black and white characters in the book, but that same language makes it almost impossible to teach in schools before college level today. Twain also strongly opposed anti-semitism, both and home and abroad, throughout his life, culminating in him warmly welcoming a Jewish man to marry his daughter. But while singing the praises of Jewish people he could end up perpetuating stereotypes, like claiming that they were all above average intelligence and never fought in battles.

I enjoyed seeing "crossovers" with Chernow's other biographies. The biggest one is definitely Grant, where we see a strong and evolving relationship. By the end of the Civil War, Twain was a strong supporter of the Republican party, but he loathed the corruption swirling around Grant's administration. But he consistently admired Grant's military leadership, and after meeting him in person several times Twain came to deeply revere Grant's personal character. Twain praised Grant in many public settings, and eventually convinced him to publish his autobiography with Twain's new publishing company.

I don't recall any direct references to Washington or Hamilton, but I was intrigued to see Twain spending time in Bermuda at the Hamilton Hotel in the company of a Schuyler - I am very curious if there is any relation. Rockefeller isn't directly mentioned, but his fellow Standard Oil executive Henry Rogers becomes a major and extremely beneficial figure later in Twain's life. J. P. Morgan himself is only very briefly mentioned, but the Morgan family is noted for their presence at some of the high-society New York City functions Twain enjoyed performing at.

Twain's path as a man who worked in humor while delving into politics, social issues and occasional psychological turmoil feels striking, and at the same time familiar. I realized while reading this biography that you can see the sort of court-jester / truth-speaker / insightful-comedian as a recurring archetype in American letters. It might have started in an embryonic form with Ben Franklin, with his witty sayings and trenchant calls for revolution. Twain defined and dominated the form during the Victorian Era. In the twentieth century, the names that immediately come to my mind are James Thurber and Dave Barry, though now that I'm writing this The Onion and Jon Stewart certainly qualify as well.

Overall I enjoyed reading Mark Twain, though I think it's on the bottom half of my personal ranking of Chernow books. I was going to rank them all here, but I realize now that there's still one major biography I'm missing: The Warburgs, which seems like a good companion to The House of Morgan, as well as a collection of essays called The Death of the Banker. That gives me some good mid-term reading, and I'll return eventually with that final list!

Yes On 40, No On 41 And 42

2026-10-21T18:33:00.000-07:00

I'm putting up this voting record post slightly later than usual for me. For the first time in the decade-plus I've been voting by mail in California, I did not receive my mailed ballot. More concerningly, it sounds like nobody else on my street did, either. It's weird! We aren't sure if there was a mixup at the post office, or if someone removed ballots from mailboxes or what. Fortunately it was quick and easy for me to request a new ballot, and I still got it in plenty of time to vote early, but still. Weird.

As I'm sure is the case for many voters, for high-profile races I've known for a while how I plan to vote, particularly so for our Top Two November elections with winnowed state and federal candidates. But for lower-profile races and measures, I need to do some additional research to decide. For me this often involves looking to trusted sources for endorsements: a combination of mainstream media outlets, established politicians I admire, political groups that share my values, etc.

This year I found a fantastic resource for this: bayballot.com. This open-source and non-partisan site lists every single item on the ballot and, for each race and measure, gives a high-level summary of the total number of endorsements for and against the item. You can drill down into each one to see exactly what groups/outlets/etc. supported or opposed it, along with brief snippets explaining their reasons and links to the original editorial/endorsement. I found this to be incredibly valuable: I could quickly see where there was universal consensus, where all of "my guys" agreed with something, and where there were split opinions, and then go off and read those third-party analyses. What once required a half-dozen open browser tabs has become a lot smoother and more comprehensive. You can even select or unselect which of the 100+ registered sources to feed into the site, such as hiding labor union endorsements if you are anti-union, or only selecting Republican or Democratic county parties.

I do have to say that, for the 20+ years I've been voting in California, the single best indicator for me is the Howard Jarvis Tax Foundation: 100% of the time, whenever they make a recommendation, I will always pick the opposite.

Anyways, here is how I voted!

Governor: Xavier Becerra

Lt. Governor: Fiona Ma

Secretary of State: Shirley M. Weber

Controller: Malia M. Cohen

Treasurer: Eleni Kounalakis

Attorney General: Rob Bonta! :-D

Insurance Commissioner: Ben Allen

I wish there were more legitimately interesting top-two races in November. My reasoning from the primary still holds.

State Board of Equalization 2nd District: Sally J. Lieber

US Representative 12th Congressional District: Lateefah Simon

State Assembly 18th District: Mia Bonta

Like A Million Justices: "Yes" for all

State Superintendent of Public Instruction: Richard Barrera

Peralta Community College District Trustee, Area 5: Cindi Reiss

AC Transit District Director, Ward 3: Adriana Valencia

Proposition 1 - Housing Bonds: No

Proposition 2 - Increase Rainy Day Fund: Yes

Proposition 3 - Maintain extra high-income tax for schools and health care: Yes

Proposition 4 - Repeal prohibition against publicly funded elections: Yes

Proposition 5 - Change recall elections: Yes

Proposition 37 - Loans for new home buyers: No

Proposition 38 - Medical research bonds: No

Proposition 39 - Voter ID requirement: No

Proposition 40 - Billionaire Tax: YES

Proposition 41 - Sneakily undo Prop 40: NO

Proposition 42 - Sneakily undo Prop 40: NO

Proposition 43 - Require 2/3 approval for local taxes: NO

Proposition 44 - Requires community health clinics to spend 90% of revenue on program services: No

Proposition 45 - Reform CEQA: No

This was one I had to do a fair amount of reading on. CEQA is a well-intentioned but antiquated law that currently is mostly used by wealthy landowners to block new housing, bike lanes, mass transit and other beneficial projects. I was initially inclined to vote "Yes" on this as it seems to streamline some CEQA approvals by limiting the review time. After some more reading, though, I landed on "No". The state legislature recently made some low-profile amendments to the law that already improve CEQA for new housing construction and transit. This proposition specifically excludes High Speed Rail from expedited CEQA reviews, so the likely impact would be less review for e.g. freeway widening projects, without helping the issues that have been most harmed by CEQA.

Measure RTM - Fund transit: Yes

Measure EE - Amend Oakland city governance: Yes

Measure FF - Close loophole on transfer taxes: Yes

Mayor: Barbara Lee 1st, none others ranked

City Council District 2: Charlene Wang 1st, Nate Adams 2nd

I was a little torn on this. Charlene Wang has been in office for less than a full term, and seems to be doing well so far. I do really admire the work the East Bay DSA is doing, and generally believe that districts which can support openly socialist candidates should elect them. I ended up voting for Wang, but it would be exciting if Adams wins.

City Auditor: Michael C. Houston

School Director District 2: Jennifer Brouhard 1st, Arielle Fleisher 2nd

That's it! I was going to drop off my ballot in a drop box, but that felt Inconvenient, so I just dropped it in the mail today. Hopefully it has a more successful journey back than it did to me!

A Cold, Dark, And Very Gentle Place

2026-10-20T20:29:51.461-07:00

Phew! I have finally finished Dark Souls 3. I probably should have squeezed an intermediate update in there - my first post was at about 20 hours in to the game, with much of the time spent getting acclimated to the setting and gameplay. I've wrapped up the game, including the DLC at just a bit over 70 hours. It's been a long journey! I think part of why I didn't report in during the interim is because of how amazingly opaque the story is. I can't really say "This is what's happening, and what it means, and how I feel about it!" because I don't really understand what is happening or why, and all I feel is a combination of curiosity and dread.

I might focus on the mechanics for a bit up top, then gesture vaguely towards the story in spoilertown.

As I mentioned previously, I fell in love with the Claymore, and I continued to use it for pretty much the entire rest of the game. It isn't necessarily the "best" weapon, but that's a subjective category anyways, and I think people end up being drawn to particular weapons based on how they feel. The Claymore feels just perfect: I always 2-handed it, which gives a great amount of range; I can "poke" an enemy with an R2 attack, with a surprisingly large range, or give a quick slash with an R1, which has a wide arc that can hit multiple enemies.

I never invested time into learning how to properly block with a shield, and just carrying a shield doesn't do anything, so two-handing the claymore was all upside for me. A really nice benefit of this for greatswords in particular is that when you two-hand them, you gain so-called "hyperarmor" during your attacks. This protects you from getting interrupted if an enemy lands a blow on you while you're in the middle of your swing or thrust. Flipping the same concept around, a fast slash can sometimes stagger an enemy if you can hit them while they're winding up their own swing. After many hours playing the game, I got a great sense of distance and speed, and could time a powerful charged R2 to "poke" an enemy as soon as they got into range, usually before they get close enough to attack me.

Later in the game I started trying out backstabs. They are really fun! This started becoming viable after I lightly trawled the wiki and learned about the Slumbering Dragoncrest Ring, which was a game-changer for me. It silences your footsteps, so enemies only become aware of you when you are in their field of vision, making it possible to sneakily sneak up on them. When in position, a single tap of R1 will initiate the backstab, inflicting massive damage and sending the enemy tumbling to the ground. Best of all, you're completely invincible during the entire maneuver, making it safe even if other enemies are nearby. Second best of all, it takes a couple of seconds for backstabbed enemies to regain their feet. If you feel like cheesing (and I usually do!), you can sprint away and hide behind a wall or something, leaving a perplexed enemy just standing there, and vulnerable to future backstabs. One very minor frustration is that not every enemy is vulnerable to backstabbing, and it isn't always obvious who will or won't be; in general, humanoid enemies can be backstabbed and non-humanoid ones cannot, but unsurprisingly given the unsettling art style of this world there are an awful lot of enemies who look ambiguously humanoid. But if an enemy can't be backstabbed, a fully charged R2 attack is also highly effective.

While I'm two-handed during combat, I do carry a talisman in my off-hand. I had originally planned to play as a Faith/Priest type but I gave up when I wasn't able to beat the first boss in the game. A "Priest" only starts with a Heal spell and a (non-damaging) Force kinetic blast. From wiki research, I've since learned that you don't get access to damaging "Miracles" until very late in the game, so I think a pure Priest would probably only make sense for a New Game Plus type of run.

But magic still has great utility as a minor, secondary investment. I eventually got enough Atunement for 2 spell slots. I rotated through a few spells over the course of the game. Homeward is a great get-out-of-jail-free card that will warp you back to a Bonfire, which is terrific for long explorations, since you don't need to preserve your Estus to stay safe. The Homeward Bone item does the same thing as the Homeward spell, and I probably should have just used those instead since I had a bit stockpile, but psychologically I'm more inclined to use the replenishable resource over the limited one. Late in the game you get access to a permanent-use equivalent of the homeward bone, freeing up that spell slot for me.

Also early in the game I used Regeneration, which gives a slow and steadily ticking healing effect, letting you preserve Estus at the cost of some FP. Here too, later in the game I found a ring that gives a constant small regen effect, although later in the game I ditched the ring as well; standing around and waiting for it to tick up my health pool isn't very fun, and I'd rather explore and progress in the meantime, even if it means more bonfire visits.

Caressing Tears is a stituationally fantastic spell. It instantly eliminates a bunch of nasty status effects like Poison and Bleed; a single cast of this (cheap) spell can outweigh multiple healing Estus flasks and keep you moving forward without waiting for your debuff gauge to expire.

At the end of the game, the two spells I usually had loaded were Blessed Weapon and Deep Protection. Blessed Weapon boosts your weapon damage (I think by 10%?), gives a ticking healing regen, and prevents skeletons from resurrecting, although by the time I found this spell I was past all the skeleton-heavy areas. Deep Protection is an all-purpose spell that gives additional attack power, elemental resistance, defense and stamina regeneration. I would typically pop both of those right before stepping through a fog wall, or Blessed Weapon if I found a challenging enemy in the landscape.

Along the way, I also dipped into some Pyromancy spells. These typically require Intelligence in addition to Faith, but the overall requirement level is much lower than Sorcery, and you can get a lot of bang for your buck for a minimal investment. To support this crossover, the catalyst I carried was usually the White Hair Talisman, which can cast both schools of spells. So I usually two-hand my sword, then if I see a battle coming up I will one-hand it to make the talisman accessible, cast one or both spells, then two-hand again and charge on in.

Of the pyromancies I used, Flash Sweat gives a major boost to Fire resistance, which helps a ton when facing off against dragons or when in a hellish cavern filled with lava. Profuse Sweat gives a decent boost to a broader range of resistances, and is a good all-purpose buff if you aren't sure what you're facing. Carthus Flame Arc adds fire to your weapon, giving it extra attack power; I found this quite a bit earlier than Blessed Weapon, and the Flame Arc also lasts quite a bit longer.

I never cast any Sorcery spells in this game, but perusing the shops, I was a bit surprised at just how many utility spells are in there; in my memory from Elden Ring, sorcery was almost entirely focused on dealing damage, where it seems more versatile in this game. Spook is a spell that completely negates fall damage and makes you silent. Chameleon is another spell that transforms you into an object from the environment. A lot of these spells have fairly low requirements, so I think it would be valid to carry a second catalyst in your left hand, at the cost of some extra weight and more competition for atunement slots.

For stats, here is a snapshot from near the end of the game. As noted earlier, I focused early on in boosting my Vigor and Vitality, with enough Endurance to wear the equipment I wanted. I had enough Atunement for two slots and enough Faith and Intelligence for the spells I wanted to cast. I mostly focused on Strength up to 35 (40 with the Knight Ring), also boosting Dex to be able to wield bows and a few swords, then switched to boosting Dex as well. My plan was to eventually switch from a Heavy Gem to a Refined Gem; I think that above a certain level you get better returns from evenly leveled Strength and Dex on a weapon that scales with both of those compared to maximizing a single stat with a single-scaling weapon. But by the end of the game, my Heavy was still outperforming a Refined, so I eventually used a Pale Tongue with Rosaria to reallocate my stats, putting surplus Dex back into Strength and Vigor. (I actually did this twice - the first time I took my Dex too low and didn't realize for a while that my damage had cratered because I could no longer properly wield my Claymore.)

In terms of combat: against weaker enemies, I usually engaged them at a medium distance, attacking before they could get too close. For stronger enemies, I would usually try to get up in their face, roll past them when they try to attack, land a few hits against their backside, and repeat. Of course, each enemy type has their own different style of movement, attack, aggressiveness, danger and so on, so each encounter is a little different. After a few battles, dealing with them would basically become muscle memory.

Throughout the whole game, I continued to be amazed by the level design. I just low how contiguous everything is: Lothric Castle and environs is this huge, weighty space that you physically move through, without teleporting or warping. It feels really thrilling to pop outside and realize that you're getting a fresh perspective on a site that you've seen many times before.

While amazing, the design is also pretty dark and very gross! I felt mesmerized by the game and kept wanting to play it, but it also felt very macabre for many stretches. There's a gross area filled with bugs and slime. A surfeit of poison swamps. All sorts of gross creatures that ooze, suck, evert, rupture and scream. Flightless bird-like enemies that are hostile but sound so pathetic that it's hard not to feel sorry for them.

I was glad that there aren't quite as many infinitely-respawning skeletons as in Elden Ring. Here they're mostly confined to a single area, and you can pretty easily run through them once you have the map figured out.

Once the game opened up, around the Road of Sacrifice area, I almost never felt stuck on something for too long. If an area felt hard, I had another zone I could work through for a while, leveling up and eventually coming back. I imagine that, like in Elden Ring, the hardness probably comes down to build: some things that were challenging for me as a melee fighting might have been a lot easier for a ranged sorcerer, and vice versa. There were a handful of times where I whipped out a bow and arrows to plink away at bad guys from a safe distance. It takes forever (at least with my DEX) so it isn't something I do often, but it is good to have multiple tools in your box.

MEGA SPOILERS

Like in Elden Ring, I'm amazed at all of the secrets that people were able to find. One of the biggest is the Dragon gesture. If you use it on a cliff near Ithryll Dungeon, you will enter a trance and be teleported to a totally new, huge zone with multiple bosses and significant treasure. I usually find out about these types of secrets via a wiki, but this is also an area where I think the multiplayer aspect of the series works really well, thanks to the messages left between worlds. I'd played Elden Ring entirely offline, which protected me against PC invasions but also hid all messages. (For better and for worse. In Dark Souls 3 there are a few "try finger but hole" missives among the gems.) I came to really appreciate the system of messages. You do need to keep an eye open for trolls, but most of the time they're pointing the way towards something easily missible and letting you play through, instead of needing to come back later after consulting an out-of-game guide.

Actual invasions were annoying but not terrible. I always died but usually acquitted myself decently, and it wasn't too punishing. I think I had a total of maybe four invasions throughout the game, the first two before I understood how the mechanic worked. After that I was very mindful of being Embered and would zoop back to Firelink Shrine and spend down my big souls after a boss fight, and then usually try to take on another boss or other major thread while I was still Embered instead of my typical deliberate exploration.

Story-wise, I was really bummed by the Pilgrim / Anril plotline. I don't think I would have figured out how to avoid the "spouse" outcome without looking at a wiki, and by the time I did that it was too late to change the path I was on. It is a kind of interesting variation from Elden Ring, where a similarly dark plot line requires you to do a lot of very obscure and easy-to-miss things.

It is interesting how language seems to get corrupted in this game. When Yoel and Yuria call you "Lord" it sounds like a very positive and good thing, and it isn't until much later that you get a sense for how sinister it is. "Spouse" sounds joyful and loving, while what happens here is anything but. (But still coming with the sense of tying together and committing.) Even "Humanity" seems to have a dark sheen to it. While not 100% reliable, it is striking how many of your allies look haggard, dark and furtive, while many of your greatest foes look beautiful and even angelic.

Possibly the hardest boss fight for me was Lothric the Two Princes. I died a ton to him, even when bringing along both NPC summons. (Despite not being a sorcerer, I bought all of Orbeck's scrolls just so I could bring him along.) Very soon after that comes the final battle against the Soul of Cinder, and I beat them on my very first try (albeit also with NPC summons). I did kind of like that though, it reminds me of a JRPG where the final boss's third phase is usually weaker than the second.

I did get the edition with both DLC. I poked my head into Ariendel as soon as it became available from the Chapel, and quickly got mauled by wolves, but I periodically returned as I progressed through the main game and gradually got further into that. After beating that, I was planning to also go through The Ringed City before beating the main game, but I saw some online posts suggesting that story-wise it can work a bit better to beat the base game before the DLC, as the very end of the DLC acts as kind of a capstone to the entire Dark Souls trilogy. I did that, and I think narratively it works decently well, though I could see going either way. With the main game you do get a nice cinematic and rolling credits, and continuing the game (without New Game Plus) does mean that the world state you're experiencing is out of step with what happens in the ending. But it's also true that the ending to The Ringed City puts a nice wrapper around everything, and also provides a hint at some continuation of things, perhaps not in this universe but in one being painted into being.

I can't claim to have 100% beaten the game. I knew that the Nameless King and Darkeater Midir are notoriously hard fights that even seasoned players can bounce off of, so I never really even tried either one. I was surprised by just how hard Slave Knight Gael proved to be for me. Typically after a few deaths I have a good sense for a boss's movements and can reliably get into the final phase, and with enough Embered attempts I'll eventually be able to squeeze out a win. But that just wasn't true with Gael, I probably died to him a good twenty times or more. I finally gave up and did something I've never done before: asked for help.

In addition to messages and PVP invasions, Dark Souls also allows for friendly summonings, where some players can offer their services and others can accept them. Gael's boss fight doesn't have any NPC summons available but it does have a bonfire antechamber. I embered up and lingered around for a minute or so until I saw a summon sign glow. I summoned Marcus, we bowed to each other, and jumped in. The fight immediately felt a lot better - we were both sword-wielders and could take turns drawing aggros, attacking from behind, evading and healing. I had some Rotten Pine Resin that I applied to my sword for a bit of bonus damage. We made it to the final phase, where I got a bit too greedy - I'd only lasted a few seconds there in my solo attempts and wasn't familiar enough with the lightning-exploding-ground mechanic. In retrospect I probably should have just hung back and let Marcus handle it; as it was I bled out when Gael had just a sliver left.

I quit, and calmed down, then fired it up again. This time I saw two summon signs, and I greedily plucked both of them. I forget now who they were, one was s sorcerer-looking guy with a shrunken head and a crown, the other an agile knight. We jumped into the fray. This was an exhilarating fight. The difference between three people and two people wasn't as big as the difference between two people and a solo, but it did still help to have more bodies. This time around the fight felt a lot more mobile, and I'm not exactly sure why, but I felt like I spent a lot of time sprinting towards Gael and getting in leaping attacks, unlike my previous dodge-roll-evade-attack loop.

I was slightly more familiar with the lightning storm phase this time around, and also more cautious, so I was careful to stay out of the AOE and maneuver the long way around. Whenever I started to get dinged too much I switched to evading entirely until I lost aggro and could heal back up - I'm sure that my allies wanted to win the fight as well. After Gael got down to a sliver it took us a good minute or so to actually put him down for good, but we eventually did it! I bowed to my saviors, and jumped for joy, and they faded into the mist.

Thinking about it more, I increasingly like the unusual but thoughtful way Dark Souls handles multiplayer. I can imagine someone playing who has beaten the game, possibly multiple times, and is feeling a bit bored, and would love to replay a fun and exciting boss fight, and get a unique and rare item as a reward for doing so. And of course people like me who need an extra hand would be grateful to receive one.

I'd previously peeked at the wiki so I knew what (little) was left to do: picking up another Titanite Slab, some ashes, and a final bit of cryptic, intriguing dialogue from the painting girl above the Chapel of Ariendel. I'd been wondering for a while what her "cold, dark and very gentle place" referred to. "Cold" immediately makes me think of Ariendel, but it isn't particularly dark, and it definitely isn't gentle. The world as a whole becomes dark, and probably cold, if you let the First Flame extinguish, so maybe she is hoping for that ending to the game; I wouldn't think of it as "gentle" but maybe it is. But I really like the idea that this is an entirely different world that she is painting into existence, possibly some future From Software game.

And, this just now occurred to me, but it's interesting that the girl is herself inside the Painted World, making this a second-order act of creation. This sort of thing always makes me really interested, evoking Neal Stephenson's Anathem with The Wick, possibly also Expedition 33 and other worlds-within-worlds. Of course, there is zero reason to believe that the "main" Dark Souls game itself is the "prime" reality - in fact, we know it isn't, because it's a work of fiction that we're playing within our own world. Anyways! Fun to think about!

END SPOILERS

So, yeah! A few years ago I wouldn't have imagined I'd even try playing a Dark Souls, and look at me now, I beat one (with a little help from my friends)! Right now I'm feeling like I'll probably stop here, I don't feel super-compelled to dip back into the earlier Dark Souls or other spinoffs like Sekiro or Bloodborne. But who knows, after Elden Ring I also thought I was done, so I still might get the itch at some point.

All in all, Dark Souls 3 was exactly what I thought it would be: a visually amazing and original world, with incredibly good-feeling and very difficult combat, tied together with one of the most opaque stories I've encountered in a lifetime of reading and playing very opaque stories. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to everyone, but I will also note that as someone who doesn't think of himself as a player of hard action games, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this.

Enkindled

2026-09-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

I'm shocked to find myself playing a Dark Souls game. I've thought of them as games for Serious Hard Core Gamers, who love dying a lot and have a masochistic determination to play the hardest games possible. Several years ago I entered into this world through Elden Ring, which is from the same developer and shares many characteristics but isn't technically a Souls game. I ended up really loving it a lot, so much so that I decided to step back in time and try one of the preceding games. From some light online research, it sounded like Dark Souls 3 (stylized as Dark Souls III) is the most accessible of the main series. Amazingly, despite being 10 years old now it still sells at full price and only rarely goes on sale, so I kept it on my Steam Watchlist for nearly a year before a sale finally popped up. And then, after playing Esoteric Ebb, I started it!

I'm currently about 20 hours into the game, my sense is that I'm well less than halfway through, perhaps a third or even a quarter. I've defeated a few bosses, including one of the Mega Bosses that seem closely tied to the main storyline of the game. I wanted to write this post to share my impressions so far.

Coming at it from someone who previously only played Elden Ring, there are a lot more similarities than I expected. The "Souls" mechanic is identical, the attributes are identical, the defenses are identical, the overall loadout (weapons, ammunition, spells, armor, rings, tools) are identical, the combat is basically identical. It even extends to the setting and appearance and monsters. The first time I saw some froggy enemies, I immediately thought "Oh no, those guys are dangerous!" It took a little while for me to remember why - as in Elden Ring, they do Death damage, which can instantly kill your character. Blue-eyed skeletons have the same endless resurrection mechanic. Elevators work the same, and can have the same sorts of secrets. And on and on. I think that if you just saw a brief 1-minute clip of either game, you probably wouldn't be able to tell which was which.

The biggest difference so far between the two is the open-worldedness of Elden Ring versus the massive but ultimately constrained environment of Dark Souls. I think that I finally understand why the large boss zones of Elden Ring are called "Legacy Dungeons": they are "Legacy" in that they feel like Souls areas. Basically, if you were to take all the Legacy Dungeons in Elden Ring and smush them edge-to-edge, you would end up with something like the Dark Souls 3 map. You lose the big landscape separating those areas, as well as most of the hidden little dungeons and settlements and things. Along with those, you also lose the horse for traversing those large open areas.

One thing I loved about Elden Ring is its non-linearity. There's very little direction in where to go after the tutorial dungeon. In a lot of games like, say, Divinity: Original Sin, enemy difficulty acts as a soft set of guiderails, urging you to follow a certain progression. In Elden Ring, though, it's very feasible to get on your horse and then just Ride Really Fast past the scary landscape monsters and get to where you want to be. And even most of the game's big bosses are skippable: you need to defeat a certain number of them to beat the game, but if one is giving you trouble, you can just leave and go do something else for a while and come back when you're stronger, or never come back at all.

Dark Souls 3 is much more linear, although it becomes less so over time. It's particularly striking when you fight your first boss, Iudex. I think I died to him a good 30 or more times. In Elden Ring, you similarly fight a tutorial boss, but are kind of expected to die to him and just pop out on the other side to continue the story. In Dark Souls 3, though, you must continue to throw yourself at him until you eventually Git Gud. Unlike the rest of the game, there isn't even the option of grinding for Souls and leveling up your skills and equipment: those mechanics aren't unlocked until after you get past that first boss. It's hard! I do respect the developers for doing that; in particular, you'll hit that boss while within the Steam Refund window, and can have a serious talk with yourself about whether you'll actually enjoy playing this type of game before you've sunk too many hours into it.

Once you're past that first boss, the game progresses mostly linearly for a while, but it doesn't feel like it's on rails. There's a lot to explore in each area, some side quests, some stuff that you need to come back to later after you've found a key or talked to an NPC. This also opens up the possibility of grinding out more Souls to make your character stronger. As in Elden Ring, any time you rest at a Bonfire all non-boss enemies respawn, so if you want you can keep plowing through them again and again. I never specifically did this to grind, but I did periodically revisit earlier areas to look for more hidden items and stuff, which ends up having the same effect.

Going forward, it seems like some but not all bosses are skippable. In particular, you can progress past the end of the second major zone without defeating the boss there; as far as I can tell, you do need to kill the major boss at the end of the third zone to progress into the fourth. But once you're in the third zone, multiple progression paths open up. I think that at least one of these is from a DLC I bought with the game, but the others feel like part of the base game. I'm enjoying reaching this part of the game, as it cuts down on the "stuck" feelings. If I'm bouncing off something too many times, I can put more effort into chatting with friendlies back at Firelink Shrine, or poke my head into another area for a while. The early part of a later zone can well be easier than the later part of an earlier zone. And of course all this depends on what build you're running.

Speaking of which: that's another major change for me in this game. In Elden Ring I played as a Sorcerer: I relied heavily on magic from my staff. I'm taking a very different approach in this game. I originally wanted to do a Faith build and started as a Cleric; this was fine for the tutorial area, but after enough deaths against the first boss I decided it wasn't for me. Based on some later online reading, it sounds like Faith-focused builds can be fun in New Game Plus, but the key weapons and spells for Faith builds don't become available until closer to the end of the game. I started again from scratch and this time rolled a Knight, which is a fairly balanced class but leans more towards Strength and Vitality, and also has a really nice set of starting armor (which I'm still rocking all these hours later). The boss was still really hard, but I was eventually able to beat him with my sword.

When leveling up, I prioritized Vigor early to increase my maximum HP, enough Vitality to carry my load (wearing a few rings) at 70% or less, and pushed a lot into Endurance to increase Stamina. As in Elden Ring, I find Stamina incredibly powerful: if you can just keep mashing Attack enough and are staggering your opponent with each hit, you can stun-lock and kill them provided your Stamina outlasts their Health. I've been adding just enough Strength to wield the equipment I want: in particular, a Claymore that I found relatively early on and have since fallen in love with. I put a Raw Infused Gem on the Claymore since my stats are still fairly low, and instead am upgrading that Claymore as much as I can.

Once I reached a comfortable level around my stats, I started dipping a bit into Faith. I don't know how much I'd invest in that area, but I'd been jealous of the Miracles in Elden Ring and have long wanted to experience them for myself. So far it's been very useful. In particular, one Miracle will clear any status afflictions, which is incredibly useful in an area where you need to navigate a poison swamp. I'm looking forward to future Miracles to augment my weapon strength and/or defenses. Overall I have a vague idea of becoming a sort of Paladin, primarily a martial warrior but also with divine magic to buff myself.

I've just recently started to put a few points into Dexterity as well. From what I can read online, this is usually called a "Quality" build in the community: basically, a warrior who equally distributes between Strength and Dexterity rather than fully committing to one. This opens up the widest variety of weapons to use, which in turn increases the likelihood that you'll be able to exploit an enemy's weakness against a particular damage type. Several weapons also scale their damage against both Strength and Dexterity, so for everyday weapons you continue to increase in damage when leveling up either stat.

Luck and Intelligence will likely be my dump stats, though I might put a handful into Intelligence since there are a few spells that use that along with Faith. I haven't yet put anything into Attunement, I probably will eventually but I'm not sure yet how much I'll need. I'm kind of imagining that I'll just buff myself outside of fog gates, and I think most beneficial spells last around a minute, so I'm unlikely to need to repeatedly cast between bonfires if I'm mostly relying on my sword for damage.

While the game systems are mostly identical to Elden Ring, my gameplay experience is significantly different. As a Sorcerer, I felt like the game was mostly about resource management. I had a certain amount of FP, which I could replenish a certain number of times with my flasks before beating the next boss or reaching the next bonfire; that FP translates into magical damage against enemies, making it a numbers game of having enough FP and Stamina to nuke them down before they can whack me to death. Playing as a melee martial build now is totally different. I don't really need to worry about resources at all; or, rather, the one resource I have is Health, which again I can refill with Flasks. The game is much more active now, with me focusing on dodging enemy attacks, looking for openings, striking and withdrawing or driving in for the kill. I'm getting to learn most monsters' attack patterns pretty well now, whereas for my Sorcerer build that mostly only applied for bosses. I'm glad that I had some grounding in this game series before playing as a melee character, this would have been much more challenging as my first experience but as it is I'm having a blast.

This is where I would typically drop in some notes about the story and my progress so far, but... as usual for the series, the plot is extremely opaque. Which is part of what I love about it: it's very subdued, ambiguous, taciturn, with rare fragments of dialogue that take on extra weight because of how rare they are. The game also assumes that your character already knows everything and so never bothers to define, like, what Unkindled means or who the Hollows are or any of the other terms thrown around. As with Elden Ring, I'm mostly avoiding any walkthroughs or guides; I think there has been one or two times when I've looked something up when I haven't been able to progress. I've started keeping a slight eye on the Side Quests part of the wiki; it looks like I've already accidentally failed a couple of them, which is fine.

That's it for now! I feel like I have a good amount of momentum on this game and will probably continue cruising along for some time. I'll probably have one more post here when I'm all wrapped up, but might do something in the interim if the journey is looking longer than I currently expect.

Tax Planning

2026-09-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

I recently picked up a new personal finance book through a new-to-me channel: a recommendation from a coworker. In a company meeting there were some announcements about changes to our 401(k) plan, and afterwards we got to chatting about our own strategies around retirement savings. I was delighted to hear that she is familiar with the Bogleheads - I think this is the first time I've met someone in real life who is also familiar with that community! Though, to be fair, I don't ever initiate conversations about Bogleheads in particular or finance in general, so there could very well be More Of Us around.

She described a book she was making her way through, Tax Planning To and Through Early Retirement. I've been aware of FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) for some time; when I first heard about it, the movement was strongly associated with "Mr. Money Mustache" and an ethos of extreme frugality. Early retirement isn't really compelling to me; I'm lucky enough to have a job in software development that pays pretty well and that I enjoy doing; if I were to retire, I'd probably keep on developing software just for fun, so as long as I can keep getting paid for it I'll probably keep doing that. But the FI part of FIRE is attractive to me. I associate financial independence with security, confidence, opportunity and flexibility. Moving closer to that goal has been beneficial to my overall well-being and happiness.

Anyways, this book is primarily aimed at the RE part of FIRE, so I'm personally not exactly in the target audience, but I still found it very useful. Even early retirees eventually become regular retirees, so we all end up at the same place eventually. And it's helpful to have a unique focus to a finance book: in this case, it's almost entirely about taxes, and doesn't waste time on other topics like budgeting, investments and so on.

Like most personal finance books I read these days, I didn't get a whole lot of brand-new information from this book, but I did get a lot of reinforcement about best practices, as well as a deeper understanding of why things work. And I did learn a few things that were actually brand-new to me. One specific topic that I was researching just a couple of years ago is how RMDs work when you have multiple retirement accounts. The authors explain it very clearly in this book. RMD rules are actually different depending on the type of the account. For traditional IRAs, all IRAs are pooled across all accounts (even from multiple custodians) when determining how much RMD is required and how it is taken. So, if you have three IRAs, you can satisfy your RMD by withdrawing from all three accounts, or withdrawing the total required amount from a single IRA. But the rules are different for defined contribution plans like 401ks and 403bs. For those, each account has its own separate RMD requirement. So if you have three 401ks, you need to take a separate RMD from each one of them; if you take a larger amount from a single 401k, it doesn't satisfy the need to withdraw from others. This situation is further reinforcement for the general recommendation that on retirement workers should generally consolidate all of their 401ks and 403bs into an IRA.

One of the central points of this book is what they call The Compelling Three: ideally, employees should generally try to maximize their traditional deductible 401k (or 403b, etc.) contributions, and also build up a Roth IRA and a taxable brokerage account, prior to retirement. That's what I've ended up doing, and reading this was very validating and reassuring. They get into the details of why and how this is helpful. The upshot is that it lets you shape your taxable income in retirement. In some years, you might want more taxable income, to fill up the lowest income tax brackets or avoid Medicaid eligibility. To achieve that income, you want to withdraw from a tax-deferred account. In other years, you might want to get more income for life expenses but want to keep taxable income low to retain eligibility for ACA credits or other benefits. In those cases, drawing from a Roth would be good. And if your income is low, you can sell appreciated stocks in a taxable brokerage and pay 0% long-term capital gains, which in turn could be used to fund a Roth.

Years ago, my 401k started offering a Roth option. I was undecided on whether to do it, so for a while I was splitting contributions 50-50 between the Roth 401k and the regular pre-tax deductible 401k. After about a year or so I switched back to having it all be pre-tax traditional contributions. The authors of this book strongly agree, and I really like the simplicity of their message: "Pay tax when you pay less tax." Essentially, during our working years, we're usually in higher tax brackets, and every dollar we can deduct is deducted from the highest marginal tax bracket (like 24%). In retirement, though, we're starting from an income of $0, and every dollar we withdraw from our tax-deferred accounts goes against the lowest marginal tax brackets (like 10%, 12%, etc.). Saving 24% on tax today is far better than saving 12% on tax decades from now.

They directly address a lot of the concerns other people have. One common question is what will happen to tax rates in the future, and a widespread assumption that they will go up as the US struggles with an increasing federal debt. They have a very data-focused way of looking at this. First they describe the unlikelihood that future tax increases would fall on seniors, given what a politically powerful bloc they are, and they show how seniors have received increasingly favorable treatment over the last 30+ years even as our debt has continued to climb. But they also say, "Well, what would happen if tax rates did go up 50%?" They create hypothetical scenarios as a sort of pressure-tested extreme outcome, and show that even in these extremely unlikely cases the person who made traditional contributions during their working years would come out ahead over someone who contributed to the Roth 401k.

Another concern is the so-called "Widow's Tax Trap." This is the scenario where one spouse dies; the surviving spouse's expenses will likely drop somewhat but not by half, but they will start to file as a single instead of married and thus may be elevated to a higher tax bracket. Here too, they run the numbers and show that while it is a disadvantage, it isn't nearly as bad as people fear. Even with this "penalty" the widow is still almost always better off than she would have been contributing to a Roth 401k; and, they point out, that isn't even considering the larger context, which is that this couple likely already had decades of highly advantageous tax rates, and the surviving spouse will often only have a few years of single filing. They eventually land on a scenario where the widow does end up in a worse position: but, they emphasize, this scenario required the 80-year-old widow to have $20 million in wealth. As they say, she is rich! Her lived experience doesn't suffer from needing to pay 32% tax instead of 24% tax on the last $10,000 of her income.

As the authors say from the start, they wanted to avoid any kind of fear-mongering in this book. Many books and articles about retirement seek to alarm people and make them feel like they'll fail if they don't do specific things. The authors do have recommendations, but they continually show how even sub-optimal strategies still have decent outcomes. As they keep pointing out, this is because our progressive tax system is actually very generous to retirees, and has become even more so over the years.

As I read more about finance, I start to recognize that sometimes two authors are describing the same concept or phenomenon through opposite perspectives: they seem like two different things, but are really two sides of the same coin. One of the first times I recognized this was reading William Bernstein after Thomas Piketty. Essentially, Piketty writes "Increasing the rate of return on capital results in further concentration of wealth among current owners of capital [derogatory]", while Bernstein writes "Increasing the rate of return on capital results in further concentration of wealth among current owners of capital [complimentary]". In this new book, the authors repeatedly state that they prefer to hold US equities in a taxable brokerage account, primarily due to the current low dividend yield of stocks. Which makes sense, but... the current low dividend yield of stocks is basically the same phenomenon as a historically elevated P/E ratio. Most of my reading has focused on this as a negative: eventually, there will need to be a return to the long-term historic mean, which predicts a significant fall from today's high asset prices. But these authors see the current situation as a positive: you can hold a large store of wealth without being forced to accept a large amount of taxable ordinary income.

All in all, I would probably place this book solidly in the second tier of recommended reading for personal finance. It's most helpful for someone who already has clear goals in mind and a basic grasp of the fundamentals. It's nicely focused on a particular topic, taxation, that is important but not the end-all-be-all of a retirement journey. The knowledge it shares isn't esoteric: at the heart, it's just urging most people to save as much as they can in their employer's 401k or similar plan, and supplement that with a Roth IRA and a taxable brokerage. But their focus lets them dive into the details, showing with numbers and tables why and how things work the way that they do. This is the sort of book that would help someone transform that goal into an actionable game plan. All in all, a valuable option to have!

Low Ebb, High Tide

2026-09-05T16:15:05.630-07:00

After wrapping my Belgium campaign in Victoria 3, I'd planned to jump into Dark Souls 3, but ended up deciding to play Esoteric Ebb instead. It's pretty rare for me to actually buy a game in the year it releases, especially one that isn't a sequel to a franchise I already like. I'd been hearing a lot of good things about EE through a variety of sources, and since it sounded like a narrative-heavy RPG I thought it could be good to play through it before getting exposed to spoilers.

It is a really great game. I just beat it, and at the very end the creator thanks the makers of Disco Elysium, Planescape: Torment and The Secret of Monkey Island. If you can picture a Venn diagram of those three games, Esoteric Ebb would be smack dab in the middle. It has Disco's delightfully broken protagonist, a cacophony of interior voices chiming in on your situation, skill-check-centric gameplay, wide array of stat-modifying equipment, and steely-eyed view of political ideologies. It has Planescape's D&D rules, fantasy races, sense of longing, metaphysical and philosophical interests. And it has Monkey Island's zany humor, lovably inept hero, forgiving gameplay, colorful setting and outrageous characters.

MINI SPOILERS

While built on D&D rules, this game has a completely original setting, which I think is called "The Esoteric Coast" or something similar. I don't know if I 100% follow it, but in the history of this world, there have been various ages with different regimes, including a period when powerful magicians named Arcanists controlled everything. The world itself was created by a being named Jor, himself a powerful wizard, and everything that happens in there is ultimately attributable to him; there are occasional references to "Jor's Strings", essentially fate.

After the Arcanists were overthrown, human beings were hunted nearly to extinction. This game takes place in the coastal city-state of Norvik, one of the few places that still have a significant human population. The city was founded long ago by the god Urth, who brought the surviving humans and a large contingent of laboring dwarves together.

Fast-forward many generations, and Norvik is on the precipice of a new age: its first-ever election. This has been primarily instigated by a group known as the Freestriders, a coalition of democratic mercantilist states from a nearby area known as Reeds. The dawn of democracy heralds a transition from the aristrocratic and hereditary rule of Norvik; but it's also complicates, as the Freestriders are full-throated free-trade capitalists, and they stand to significantly dominate business and ultimately daily life in Norvik.

The election is a major side-plot to the game; you can ask pretty much anyone you meet (including enemies and animals) what party they are planning to vote for, and can also announce your own intention. There are three major parties contending. The Nationalist Party is the traditional party, upholding the religion of Urth, and aligned with the aristocrats and with humans; they are widely favored to win a majority of votes, with the real competition for second place. The Freestriders are a classical-liberal-democratic free-trade party, with its power base in the business owners, merchants and traders in the city, also appealing to people from cosmopolitan backgrounds. And the Azgalist Worker's Party is aligned with the Dwarven guilds, and are concerned with basic economic issues such as rent prices, as well as generally supporting the workers. Smaller parties include an Agriculturalist farmer's party and a rump Arcanist party. You as the player character can announce what faction you support, or can declare that you will be voting for yourself as the supreme leader, or can annoyingly say that you are far too intelligent to support any political party: you see, you are apolitical.

It takes some time for you to get a handle on your character; like Disco and Planescape, you have a very specific story background, but you can also go through a regular character creation process to customize your stats. You are canonically a Cleric, which in D&D tends to be a high-Wisdom character; but you are specifically an Arcane Cleric, who has a spellbook and can memorize mage spells. You can take your character in any direction you want: you could be high Strength and Constitution and very low Wisdom if you wanted a beefy brawler. And, in addition to the mechanics of your stat allocation, you can also declare your class to people you meet, and it doesn't have to make sense: you could insist that you are a Rogue despite having very low Dexterity, or say you are a Barbarian while only having 6 STR. (Which, again, feels very Disco.)

There is combat in this game, but even combat happens entirely through the dialogue interface and skill checks, not traditional attack rolls. It feels a lot like a pen-and-paper D&D table experience: the narrator will describe what you are facing, you may roll to notice certain things, then you are asked what to do. You might, say, roll WIS to try and understand what your opponent is doing; or roll DEX to rush towards them; or roll CON to weather their blows. You take HP damage in combat rounds, but defeating an enemy happens through the story: typically you will advance through rounds, then need to succeed in a roll (typically one of several choices) to defeat them or otherwise end the fight. All that being said, there isn't a strong mechanical necessity to either follow or avoid any particular stat allocation.

Like Disco, your character's stats also have a profound impact on the experience of the game: each of the six classic D&D stats has an associated persona that you'll hear from frequently. When facing a choice, they'll weigh in on which you should choose; when learning information, they'll react and process. The character creator does a good job at explaining them, but I'll go ahead and summarize as well:

STRENGTH is very masculine, dominating, commanding, self-controlling. Strongly associated with the Nationalist party and the Fascist ideology.

DEXTERITY is humorous, greedy, interested in money whether it comes from thieving or business, pleasure-seeking. Associated with the Freestrider party and free-trade ideology.

CONSTITUTION is quiet, stolid, reserved, blunt, self-aware. Slight association with the Agrarian party.

WISDOM is feminine, empathetic, insightful, self-effacing. Strongly associated with the Azgalist party and a de-facto socialist ideology.

INTELLIGENCE is arrogant, opinionated, self-promoting. Associated with magic and the Arcanist party.

CHARISMA is manipulative, perceptive, scheming, sensual.

My Cleric was very high WIS and high CHA, and dumped CON.

If you were to munchkin the game, a few things to consider: DEX is used for pickpocketing ("trifling"). I avoided it early on, but if you can get away with it (including save-scumming if you aren't averse), it doesn't have any downsides: there is no "karma" or hidden consequences. Pickpocketing is especially useful because quite a few characters have potions that will permanently boost a main attribute by 1 point, which in turn will help all dice rolls associated with that stat. Characters also have equipment that you can pickpocket; most pieces will lower one stat and boost one or two other stats, and you can freely swap equipment outside of dialogue, so, say, stealing some DEX-boosting gear will let you swap into a pickpocketing outfit that will help you steal even more stuff.

The other thing to be aware of: equipment slots are a bit different in this game. There are just a handful of designated slots: one helmet, one weapon, one book. Then there are multiple "trinket" slots. A "trinket" is anything else, which might be a shield, an ioun stone, boots, a Bag of Holding, etc. Trinkets have the biggest overall effect on your stat modifications. You gain one additional ability point each time you level up. Whenever a main stat hits 20 without any modifications (no equipment, no potions), you can an additional equipment slot. I was... hm, I think maybe level 6 at the end of the game. All that being said, if you want to munchkin your build, you might want to push one or two stats high during chargen, and focus on boosting your highest stat to 20 while leveling up, as adding a new equipment slot is much more powerful and flexible than a static point allocation.

You can pick different backgrounds for your character during chargen that come with their own stat boosts (like +1 STR and +2 WIS); as you eventually learn over the course of the game, all of the background descriptions canonically apply to your character, so this choice is more about what you focused on and what is most meaningful to you.

Once the game itself starts, it plays very much like Disco, with almost everything happening through the dialogue interface. You can walk around and explore as much as you like; time only advances during conversations. You have a time limit in the game, as the election is coming up in five days and you are supposed to wrap up your main quest by then. I think this is mostly for narrative urgency; I followed a very completionist path, doing nearly every side-quest and exhausting every dialogue tree I could find, and still had most of a day left by the end of the game. The main constraint is resting. A Long Rest lasts 8 hours and completely heals your character, removes all Exhaustion, and refills all your spell slots. A Short Rest lasts 1 hour and returns 1 random spell slot; I think it also removes 1 Exhaustion and gives a good chunk of health. I eventually found myself very grateful for the consumable items you come across. For health in particular, there are tons of food items and potions that can heal you up between encounters. A little more rare, but still widely available, are consumables that refresh spell slots. In terms of time management, I think it's best to use consumables to keep your character going as long as they can; after they've been awake for too long, they start getting massive Exhaustion, and that's the cue to take a Long Rest.

Exhaustion seems to be a new mechanic for this game (though I'm not super-familiar with current D&D rules). Any time your Health drops to 0, you start rolling dice to save against Death. I think that a 10+ succeeds and 9- fails. If you fail three times, you die and the game ends. If you succeed three times, you get back 1 HP and also 1 point of Exhaustion. Each point of Exhaustion lowers your Max HP by 1, and more troublingly, adds a -1 malus to every single die roll you take. Even a single point is painful, and it can get crippling once you get too high. Unlike HP and spells, there don't seem to be any consumables to remove Exhaustion, so you'll need to do a Long Rest; it's very much worthwhile to stay topped up on HP at all times to avoid getting any Exhaustion.

Damage can come from a variety of sources: combat and traps, but also failed skill checks (falling from a tree, stubbing your toe) and, especially in the early points in the game, psychic damage from embarrassing situations, admissions and confronting painful memories. You can literally die of embarrassment in this game, which again feels very Disco.

In my playthough I mostly avoided skill checks that seemed challenging, either opting for alternate checks or skipping those branches altogether. In retrospect I should have done more of these. I think that in many cases you can "fail forward": failing a check might cause some minor damage, but will still allow you to progress a plotline. In other cases, the check will lock after you fail; but you can retry these checks after leveling up, and you can also spend a consumable "Shard of Jor" item to retry any check. These shards turn out to be plentiful, I had dozens by the end of the game. I was somewhat chagrined to realize that, by avoiding a Challenging Strength dialogue choice early on, I missed out on recruiting an optional companion who could have helped quite a deal during some combat-oriented parts of the game.

One other mechanics note: there are so-called "Feats" in this game, which work very differently from the D&D flavor. They aren't tied to your level progression: instead, whenever you finish a major quest, you can allow that quest to "Take Root" in your mind. This will kick off an interior dialogue between the various attribute-personas in your mind, as they debate the implications of what you learned from the quest and your choices in it. This will conclude with the option to pick one of several mutually-exclusive feats. For example, you could choose between one that gives a +50% bonus to any coins you pick up, and one that automatically regenerates some HP every hour. Or you could choose between gaining Advantage in skill checks with dialogue with male characters, or Advantage in skill checks with dialogue with female characters. These choices sound like they make strong judgments about your character, but as far as I can tell they are strictly mechanical, and your choice won't affect the story or other characters' reactions at all.

You have a maximum of 4 Feats. The first 4 times you let an idea Take Root you will automatically pick up the corresponding Feat; starting with your fifth, you would need to unselect one Feat before you can pick the next. You can re-select a feat again, though the interface says you can only do so after sleeping. You cannot switch your choice between feat options once one has Taken Root (that is, if you opted for Advantage with Male Characters, you can't later swap that for Advantage with Female Characters).

The economy is actually pretty good in the game. Coins feel precious early on, you'll want to spend some for advancing quests but may need to be cautious in buying items. I think all shops can be found relatively soon, so once you know what all is available it becomes easier to make purchasing decisions. Again, I would personally prioritize buying stat-boosting Potions before pretty much anything else. Also note that some (not all) merchants can be pickpocketed from, with no in-game negative repercussions from successful thefts. Later in the game there are some possibilities to get large amounts of money, which would free you up to buy everything if you wanted.

Oh, some more on spells: I think all the spells in this game are D&D spells, and work like you'd expect. You start with very few and can pick up a ton over the course of the game. You instantly memorize any scrolls you find without needing to roll or take time. You are limited to Level 3 spells; this is tied in to the setting of the game, as magic has become less potent and common in the world since the passing of the Arcanists (the "Esoteric Ebb" of the title). You can change your memorized spells pretty easily by visiting an Altar. You cast Sorcerer-style, so if you have, say, 3 Level 1 spell slots and have memorized Charm and Heal Wounds, you could cast either spell three times or one spell once and the other one twice. There's no limit to the number of spells you can learn, but the number you can prepare is determined by your level and your Intelligence.

Spells can be very effective in this game so they are a great resource. I tended to avoid healing spells, as you can easily heal out of combat. Grease is shockingly effective: it can shut down opponents in a fight, and could also help you get past an iron door. Some spells like Comprehend Language and Speak with Animals unlock huge chunks of content, granting access to large dialogue trees you wouldn't otherwise get to see. There are quite a few Concentration spells, and personally I think the best one is Enhance Abilities, which lasts for hours and gives a bonus to every single die roll you take regardless of the stat.

You can also learn some Cantrips over the course of the game. While D&D cantrips include one-shot abilities, all of the Esoteric Ebb cantrips are essentially toggleable modes for exploration. "Dancing Lights" will illuminate the area around you; in dungeons, this might cause your character to notice some things that would otherwise be hidden. "Druidcraft" reveals some minor earth spirits who usually have consumable items to offer. "Thaumaturgy" shows secret information points that explain the history or magical influence of an area, and give you buffs (healing, spell slots, curing exhaustion) when clicking on them.

A few technical notes before dipping into the story:

The UI is very well designed and feels very personal. I especially loved the notes from the game designer that appear when continuing a saved game, summarizing your progress thus far in an authorial voice. It's one of many touches that makes this feel like a D&D campaign played at a table.

The in-game artwork feels amateurish; not offputting or ugly, but like it was drawn by a talented child. It's visually creative and interesting. I was a bit nonplussed at first but warmed to it over the course of the game.

The music is really nice, with a few simple character-driven themes that repeat over the course of the game. It's a bit soft and pleasant, a nice accompaniment that adds texture to your adventures without distracting from them.

Okay, finally on to some story:

You are Ragn, a Cleric of Urth employed by the city of Norvik. You are an only child, a man of twenty-seven years old; as you will eventually learn, you still live with your mom (and admitting this deals 2D4 of psychic damage). You have been tasked by the city with investigating a tea shop that exploded a day before the game starts. As it is Election Week, the city leaders want to make sure there are no threats that would interfere with the process.

Immediately before the game starts, you die: you are pushed into the river, then are fished out and sent to the morgue, where the mortician is able to revive you. You've lost some short-term memories, and I think this caesura helps justify why you the player need to have so many in-world basic concepts explained to you (again, much like Disco).

Pretty early on, you meet your first and main companion, the goblin Snell. He somewhat plays the role of Kim in Disco, although they have different personalities. Snell is opinionated but reserved, very loyal to his goblin clan and a realist about how power works in the city. In fights, Snell attacks with a sling, and has pretty good aim.

There's a slight tension in your loyalties. Your superior for this operation is Coinlord Darrow, one of the Magistrates who administers the city. But authority is being shared with the Halfway Bridge (Goblin) Tribe, who own the tea shop property. Lady Sageleaf is also very interested in this case, and wants to make sure that no blow-back impacts her concerns.

Much like Disco, you can proceed with investigating the main mystery, but there is also a ton of other stuff to do, and you can easily spend multiple in-game days exploring the city, chatting with people, learning about history and having political discussions, dungeon-crawling and so on. As noted above, the main other part of the plot is the incipient election, and probably more than half of the quests are in some way related to that: various factions vying for influence or agents of the factions trying to promote their own agendas.

You can very roughly divide the game map into half, with the town above and the dungeon below. Again, there is a lot of content, so you could spend days in the town without ever dipping your toe into the dungeon. The dungeon is more dangerous, as there are traps and monsters down there; but there are also some really great rewards. In general, most of the early items you find tend to be nearly net-zero: maybe +1 or +2 to one stat and -1 to another stat. Later in the game you can find more items that are more like a straight +3 or a +1/+2 to multiple stats. I'm not sure what the best overall progression is, but I think if I had done some dungeon-diving on the earlier side the gear I found could have helped with city stuff.

There isn't a ton of actual choice-and-consequences roleplay in the game. You do get a good variety of options in reacting to people, a lot of which are very funny. For example, your character is canonically unsuccessful with the ladies. When someone inquires about your lovelife, you might have choices between changing the subject, stammering awkwardly, making up an outrageous lie, or staying silent and breathing heavily. There won't be any option to be a cool person (though your STR and CHA will encourage you to be cool!). There are a few places where you can make impactful decisions, such as deciding whether to let a witness leave town or force them to stay. The biggest ongoing opportunity for roleplaying comes with the repeated opportunities to align with one of the major political parties, or announce that You Are Apolitical. This strongly reminded me of the Disco ideological alignment storylines.

MEGA SPOILERS

Ultimately, the two main plotlines do converge. Near the very end of the game you learn that the tea shop blew up due to the machinations of Lord Gorm, a Paladin of Urth. He became aware of a plot among the aristocrats to hobble the current leader of the city, casting a Feebleminded spell on him, once they learned that he intended to hold an election in Norvik, overseen by representatives from the clerics and from the Azgal trade unions. However, Gorm was unable to prove this, and despaired of being able to prevent it.

He hatched on an ambitious, terrible scheme: apparently a ritual exists that could resurrect the dead god Urth. The price: twenty-seven innocent lives. To accomplish this, he arranged to purchase a Necklace of Fireballs: a fairly commonplace item in, say, the Forgotten Realms, but almost unheard of in the relatively low-magic world of Esoteric Ebb. His scheme was to detonate it under the Temple of Urth on Election Day to claim the required lives, resurrect his god and restore the city.

The scheme went awry when his agent, an elf, arranged to meet early in the tea shop with a former friend of hers, a hagling. I forget the exact details of what went wrong: the necklace of fireballs exploded, but I don't recall now if it was just an accident or if something else provoked the explosion. In any case, the explosion killed the elf and destroyed the tea shop, though fortunately no other lives were claimed.

All of this is laid out when you meet up with Lord Gorm himself in the Beyond, a sort of afterlife that is also reachable by entering Jor's Pillar. He's surprisingly sympathetic in his description of his motives; following the example of all my favorite games, I talked him down and he offed himself rather than pursue his bloody path. After that, you get to chat with Urth himself, which is really cool: meet the man who became a god. He's really humble and wise and self-effacing; the game does a great job at challenging him, though, in particular letting Snell call him out on his genocide of the goblins and the near-erasure of their culture.

The game ends like how I want it to, with you getting to chat with most people you've met during the course of the game, get some closure or progression to their personal stories, and a few final words from the DM before the closing credits. In this he acknowledges the major decisions you made and the impact you created.

I completed virtually all of the quests. I deliberately didn't do the Freestrider pamphleting quest because I didn't want to give them an advantage in the election; the election results aren't part of the endgame, though, so I'm guessing this wouldn't make a difference. I never finished the quest related to the Halflings and their incipient slaughter at the hands of the Celestials; there are a few dialogue items related to this, but I must have missed some plot point to advance it.

As mentioned before, I resolutely advanced the Azgalist cause whenever possible, and talked them up whenever the opportunity arose. I had them publish the expose on Freestrider/Magistrate corruption, but also spread it to multiple papers to increase the impact for the election. I also had Modissa temper her message; I felt kind of bad doing that, as in real life I feel like the left is far too obsequious towards the supposed political center, but given the historical situation in Norvik I thought this approach would be more effective than vanguardism.

I was resolutely The Cleric. I do love that you can call yourself whatever you want, regardless of your actual stats, which again feels like a pen-and-paper quirk for A Certain Kind Of Player.

I became a demi-lich, mostly so I could stop needing sleep.

I was pretty friendly with the unspeakable nameless ancient horror at the bottom of the city, but rejected the opportunity to become a warlock with he/it as my patron. Oh! There is another interesting plot thread here - it turns out that creature is behind the plot to murder me, apparently due to some prophecy that I will play a part in returning higher-level magic to the world. Nothing in this game seems to directly address that, which makes this feel like a possible hook for a potential sequel.

I turned in the teenage assassin to her dad and didn't cut her any slack.

I was really friendly with Snell through the whole game, and we had some good interactions at the end.

I was able to get a sort-of date with Moongore, and also a potential date with Ettir. Way to go, Ragn!

I made the tea shop owner bird stay in town, and gave his papers to Lady Sageleaf. Overall I was much more aligned with Sageleaf than with Darrow. It was cool to learn that she's secretly a dragon; it might have landed even more emphatically if the HWBT had been kobolds instead of goblins.

END SPOILERS

I had a blast with this game. According to Steam my total playtime, on an almost-completionist playthrough, was a bit over 25 hours, which is a pretty sweet spot for RPGs. I think this game is a must-play for anyone who enjoyed Disco Elysium, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't played Disco but enjoys being in the Venn diagram of games that are narrative-driven, humorous, and use D&D rules. It's also really exciting to see that Disco wasn't just a one-off but has opened up a door for other games to come through.

Sierra Mountain High

2026-08-23T19:08:00.000-07:00

It's been far too long since I've used these tags on this blog! I recently returned from a very special backpacking trip in the High Sierras with my dad. This is my first backpacking outing since 2019! COVID paused all my plans for a while, and since then I've had (good) lifestyle changes that have made it a bit more convoluted to plan a week-long off-the-grid outing. My dad recently suggested planning some sort of outing, and after some discussion we zoomed in on the idea of a multi-day backpacking expedition leveraging huts/camps at one of the great national parks. I had three on my list: Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and Glacier. I had previously backpacked Yosemite and the Grand Canyon with my tent, and had been thinking for a while about making use of the wilderness lodges they provide. I hadn't backpacked in Glacier and was intrigued by that as well. We resolved to enter all of the various lotteries as they opened up until we eventually won one, and then do whatever trip that ended up being. We lucked out and were able to grab some slots from cancellations of Yosemite for 2026; that is, people who had entered the lottery in 2025 for 2026 stays, and subsequently canceled their plans. I was really happy by this: all three parks would have been exciting, but Yosemite is my favorite, and I had been particularly interested in the High Sierra Camps.

As a side note, I'm a little astonished to realize that I apparently don't have a blog post for my 2010 backpacking trip in Yosemite, especially since I usually think of that as my favorite wilderness trip. I think that at the time I had published a lengthy PicasaWeb photo series with tons of captioned photos that laid out the entire trip, and also a shorter Facebook post with lots of pictures. Ah, how transient the Internet has proved to be! Google has continued its terrible track record of destroying its services that I used to use and love; it's probably only a matter of time until Blogger itself shuts down. And I closed my Facebook account for good in 2024 after ghosting on it much earlier. I still have the actual photos, and I think the captions are part of the metadata, so perhaps one day I will reconstruct that particular journey.

Back to 2026! In my time of backpacking, I came to realize that the physical act of carrying a heavy load is not appealing to me: rather, I love backpacking because it gives me ground-level access to amazingly beautiful, remote, special, wild places. The heavy backpack is just the price of admission to reach those places. Which is why the High Sierra Camps sounded so appealing: these remote camps provide basic sleeping accommodations, along with a hot breakfast and supper each day. This significantly reduces the amount of gear you need to bring: you still want a sleeping bag and snacks, but don't need to carry a tent, camp stove, or nearly as much food. The High Sierra Camps are each about a day's hike apart, and you can chain them together into a large loop. This ended up being somewhat like my experience with the Hiking Huts in the New Zealand Great Walks.

I didn't just feel lucky that we got the cancellation, I felt lucky that they were open at all. While the camps have operated almost uninterrupted since they opened in the 1920s, including through World War II, they have only been opened four times in the last ten years. Some of those closures have seemed reasonable - most particularly, the COVID-19 pandemic, and also a particularly heavy snow year that significantly damaged the camps. However, as we learned while chatting with more fellow hikers on this trip, the most significant factor is their current management. While the National Park Service oversees the actual park, collecting entrance fees and managing wilderness permits, all of the commercial operations within the park are handled through a single franchise agreement. For many years this was granted to the private company Delaware North, who built a fantastic reputation for high quality, service and value. In recent years, though, the contract has been taken over by publicly traded Aramark, a multinational conglomerate. As one hiker observed, Aramark makes most of its money feeding prisoners and elementary school kids, so that's the standard they're used to providing. The High Sierra Camps are very special, but given their extremely limited size, very short season (usually only open from June through early September), remote location and unique requirements, Aramark doesn't really want anything to do with them so will take any excuse they can find to keep them closed. This has had a particularly rough impact on the staff - in one year, they only learned on June 1st that the camps would be closed and they would all need to find new jobs. Many of the old hands who had spent years or decades running the camps understandably left for new jobs, and so when the camps have reopened they have had an inexperienced (though enthusiastic) staff.

That sounds like a lot of complaining, so I should note here that my personal experience on this trip was fantastic - I loved the accommodations, the settings, the staff and the meals. But at the same time the hikers who had done the loop before Aramark took over said that it used to be even better.

On to the trip itself! I was able to use almost all of my existing gear from my last trips. I did finally replace the Aqua Mira water treatment kit that I've had since 2008; there's still some left, but I figured a fresh kit would probably be safer. I also got some new bug repellent to replace a much older one. Fortunately, I never needed to use either thing - I had enough water for each leg of the journey without needing any refills in the wild, and we were blessedly free of mosquitoes through the entire trip.

I have a standard checklist in Google Sheets that I use to pack. It's a sort of "master sheet", and I won't bring everything on every trip, based on what I expect to encounter. On this one I was able to forego my cooking supplies and stuff; but I did pack a paperback book, notebook and pen, which I often omit for my solo trips.

My dad flew out to the Bay Area and we had a few good days here, meeting up with cousins and exploring the area. We left on a Thursday morning. I was planning to take 120 all the way into the park, and was aware that 140 might be a better alternative depending on traffic. Traffic was great, though, and we reached the park itself within 4 hours as opposed to the 5+ I'd been planning on.

We entered the park in the early afternoon and drove down through the tunnels into Yosemite Valley. It was really hot this day, with a high of over 100 degrees. We ate lunch in the shade near the Merced River, watching some other families and couples wade and swim in the water, and got some great views of El Capitan. We then drove to the east side of the park and did a little hike up through Happy Isles. I'd imagined this as a short out-and-back, but we ended up going up a mule trail to the Mist Trailhead, then down to Vernal Falls and back down the John Muir Trail to the valley. It was a hot hike, but we had good shade for almost the whole way, and it felt good to move our bodies.

We then left the valley and drove up Tioga Road to the Tuolumne Meadows Lodge, which took a little under two hours. There was fantastic scenery for most of the drive up, great forests and mountains all around. At the lodge we checked in and were assigned the first of many tent cabins we would stay at during our trip. Each cabin is built over a concrete slab; in the winter, they are able to disassemble the entire tent so it isn't crushed by the snow, then reassemble it in the spring. Instead of walls, they have thick canvas, held up by sturdy metal beams. They have a couple of simple rope-pulled "windows" built into the "walls" that you can open to let air and light through - but no bugs, thanks to the screen. Each cabin has a wood-burning stove with firewood, matches and kindling. It was so hot the whole time we were up there that the idea of lighting the stove sounded ludicrous. You also get a little closet-type space with a couple of hangers and two low shelves; the later tent cabins in the High Sierra Camps had one of these per bed, but the cabins in the Lodge only had a single one per cabin. The beds were simple but good, elevated with springs, a mattress, a coarse wool blanket, a soft comforter, pillow and pillowcase. The beds at the lodge had a sheet, the ones at the camps did not, hence the use of a sleeping bag. The cabins also come with a simple card table, a folding chair, and some rechargeable LED lanterns.

Bear safety is very important through Yosemite, particularly the storage of food and other scented items. At all of the sleeping areas, trailheads and major pullouts, you'll see large bear bins. These are sturdy metal contraptions that keep bears out. They're large enough to hold a good-sized cooler. Most of them are first-come first-served, and I never had trouble finding room for stuff. At the Lodge, there are also smaller cubbies for each cabin near the restrooms, intended for toiletries but also fine for smaller quantities of food.

After settling into the cabin, we munched on some homemade sandwiches near a pleasant creek running past the lodge, and then took off on a short hike along the John Muir Trail. This crossed the Dana Fork of the Tuolumne River before reaching Twin Bridges, which spans what I believe is the "main" Tuolumne River. This was a really pretty area, with a nice babbling creek, peaceful meadow and views of mounains. We lingered for a bit, and headed back to the cabin as dusk fell.

I'd assumed that I could keep my car parked at the Lodge since we were both starting and ending the trip there, but parking is actually very limited and only overnight guests are allowed in the lot. Fortunately there's lots of other parking nearby, and the desk clerk helpfully provided a sheet with a list of options. They recommended the Lembert Dome parking area since it's the shortest distance to Glen Aulin; after consulting my map, I opted instead for Parsons Lodge. It's about the same distance from Glen Aulin, but would be a slightly shorter return on our last day. It would also take us directly through Tuolumne Meadow and through the Soda Spring, which I hadn't previously seen. There was plenty of parking at this trailhead, along with plenty of bear box space, so we ditched the now-empty cooler in there, hoisted our packs, and started hiking!

Immediately we were confused. There was massive construction along the north edge of Tioga Road. We would learn later that they were replacing the water system, but in the meantime the main trails were inaccessible. Fortunately, we saw another hiker walking along a berm, so we were able to follow him until we got to the main trail.

The walk across the Meadows itself was lovely. Nice and flat, perfect for getting acclimated to the elevation and our packs. We could see forest above us, and when we looked back we could see large mountains. It was going to be a warm day, but so far it was nice and cool in the morning.

We reached Parsons Lodge, a historic site. There's a visitor's center there that doesn't open until 9am, but we were able to check out the structures and historical markers. The most interesting thing here is Soda Springs, a natural spring that emits fizzy carbonated water, like La Croix from the ground. According to the nearby plaque, scientists still aren't 100% certain what causes it, but it seems likely that alkalis enter the ground from a great distance, react with minerals in the water and produce pressure that pushes the bubbly water up and out. This water is apparently perfectly fine to drink, and a favorite of thru-hikers.

Continuing on to the edge of the meadow, we picked up the Tuolumne River and followed it into the rockier areas to the north and west. We walked through some forest and increasingly along rock, getting periodic views of the nice blue water.

One of the appealing aspects of starting the trip with the Glen Aulin leg is that it's a net descent, dropping from 8700 feet to about 7900. But, while downhill can be less tiring than uphill, it can also be more challenging. There are downward slopes, stone stairs, mixes of pebbles and gravel, and some particularly tricky stretches that are like rounded cobblestones. I found that my mountain-goat tendencies came back to me pretty easily and I was able to hop along without too much trouble. My dad, hailing from the flatlands and with no previous backpacking experience, didn't fare as well, and over a couple of particularly steep stretches found himself tugged down by his backpack. Later on we realized that a set of straps were too loose, causing the top of his pack to sag back behind him and pulling back his center of gravity even more; after tightening those, the pack sat closer to his neck and the overall balance was way better. I felt bad about not doing a thorough inspection or anything before we headed out; I've always been a solo backpacker, and don't even consciously think now about how I'm walking, so I ended up doing the unhelpful "Oh, you should have done that" instead of the proactive "Oh, you should do this."

We paused for a nice lunch near a powerful waterfall through the granite east of Glen Aulin, finishing the last of our sandwiches. We had some more steep descent into Glen Aulin, crossed several cool bridges and entered the camp.

I checked in with Tony, the very tall and friendly camp manager. He told us that we'd probably have a tent cabin to ourselves this night, which was a pleasant surprise. We unpacked all of our stuff and changed out of our hiking shoes into comfy camp footgear. I have a small day-light pack that clips on to my main pack, and whenever we got to a camp I would detach that so I'd have an easy way to carry my water bottle, book, and anything else I wanted.

Glen Aulin was super-pretty, and may have been our favorite camp of the entire trip. It's right next to a waterfall, and we had that really pleasant white noise throughout the entire stay. The waterfall plunges into a crystal-clear pool right next to the camp, and people enjoyed swimming and wading in the pool. While we didn't do any long day hikes from the camp, a short way down the trail to Waterwheel Falls you see a lovely side canyon with a series of waterfalls and dramatic peaks rising to either side.

All of the camps have running water and have historically offered showers, although we'd been warned that due to maintenance issues not all showers were operating. I wasn't planning on taking any showers during this trip, mostly because I've never had the opportunity on previous backpacking trips and it seemed superfluous; but since we had plenty of time and I was curious, I ended up giving it a try. The facilities don't look at all fancy, but it's an engineering miracle to get water at all out there, and I was glad to have the opportunity to wash the trail dirt off me.

I was expecting the meals to be similar to the ones I'd had at the Phantom Ranch canteen, and that proved to be pretty accurate. Everything is served family-style, with people choosing their own seats and big containers of food coming out to share. At Glen Aulin the cook had baked some homemade bread, which was really delicious; it had raisins in it and was soft, dense and just a little moist. There were also some really nice roasted vegetables, including some really delicious sweet potatoes. The entree was pork chops, and we had some chocolate cake for dessert.

While I've historically enjoyed the solitude of wilderness backpacking, in my more recent trips I've conversely come to enjoy the loose camaraderie that comes with getting to know people in the back-country. You're sharing trails, meals and sleeping space with people, and it does feel fun to strike up conversations and get to know people. Folks come from all sorts of places and walks of life, but pretty much everyone is here because they love the outdoors, and it feels good to know we have that in common. On our first night, we sat with an older pair of men from Orange County who had been hiking in this area for decades. We learned that they like to spend two nights at Glen Aulin and then two nights at May Lake, which I now think is a fantastic idea: after the heavy weight of hiking in with a full backpack, you can just grab a lighter daypack and do day hikes for the next day while you recuperate. It's also inspiring to see and hear how many people keep coming back to these hikes despite knee or ankle problems. Despite the discomfort, they find ways to adapt and continue doing the things they love instead of stopping altogether.

After the meal, Tony gave a few words to all of us; he was pretty funny. He introduced the cook, a relative old-timer who has been working in Yosemite since 2015. Apparently this was the first time he had baked the bread, and he was pleased to hear it had turned out well. He gave us a history of the High Sierra Camps, noting in particular that Glen Aulin will turn 100 years old in 2027. He then pulled out a ukulele and played and sang "You're Welcome" from Moana - a funny thematic choice so far away from the ocean, but also a super fun experience!

The staff let us know of a good nearby spot to watch the sunset, along that same path to Waterwheel Falls. It was beautiful, with a really nice orangey color. Tired, we returned to the cabin and fell asleep to the sound of the waterfall.

Breakfast the next morning was a bit more casual. I think they set out coffee around 7:00 and started serving around 7:30. We each got a bowl of oatmeal as we came in, and I think got bacon and pancakes as well. It was yummy food, and I made myself eat it. I know from experience that my appetite tends to wane as I do more physical activity, and I also know that I really need to make myself eat a lot more calories than usual when I'm backpacking. We sat next to a young couple from Reno Nevada and had a great chat with them, swapping some hiking experiences but also just chatting about our lives and interests.

Packing back up was pretty easy; it's an advantage to having such simple accommodations and carrying literally everything in one backpack. We hiked out and on our way to May Lake. This day would see a larger rise in elevation, but overall it felt much more comfortable than our first day. I think a lot of things were going well for us. The biomes were very varied, including a lot of nice forested dirt paths, which were easier on our feet and kept us cool. It was a bit less warm overall, and would continue to cool more with each day. We had also been at elevation for several days now, and our lungs had grown better acclimated to the thin atmosphere. We were more dialed in to our packs, noticing when things were off and straps needed adjusting. Dad had gotten more used to his walking sticks, using them more for balance and not pushing off them. And we had had a nice hearty breakfast with a lot of good fuel to start off the day.

So we were feeling well and moving well throughout the day's journey. We agreed early on to make ourselves stop and rest every hour to keep up our energy; we made more frequent breaks when going up steep inclines, finding shady spots to sip water. Fortunately we got some good cool breezes throughout the day, which significantly increased our comfort and mood.

There's often a tradeoff when hiking through areas like this. When walking through a shaded forest, the actual hike is very comfortable, but there usually isn't much of a view other than the trees. When walking through rocks, the hike tends to be steeper and less comfortable, but you can also get amazing views of the surroundings: there, that included mountain ridgelines, rivers, distant lakes and winding trails. I loved the variety we got through all four days of hiking; it never felt like we were doing one thing all day long, instead we would duck in and out of various biomes as we made our way towards each new camp.

The hardest part of this day was a climb up an exposed mountain face. Once we made it through there, we re-entered a forest and made our way to May Lake. There's a slightly misleading sign that reads something like "May Lake: 0.2 Miles". While that makes it sound like you're almost there, the actual May Lake Camp is quite a bit further ahead: not a huge deal, but for people with nearly depleted stamina, it can mean a lot!

We walked past the titular May Lake on our way into the camp. It's absolutely beautiful, another snow-fed alpine lake with a striking peak rising behind it. The wind was very calm this day, so we got to enjoy the mirror-like reflection of the peak in the water.

We checked in, and got placed into a six-person tent cabin. Coincidentally, we were placed with the men we had eaten dinner with and the couple we had eaten breakfast with at Glen Aulin! That was a fun coincidence. It started to rain just a little after we checked in, and it felt really peaceful to lay on our beds and hear the raindrops splat against the canvas roof. Throughout the afternoon there was very little rain, but some pretty dramatic sounds of thunder. We spent a good amount of the afternoon inside the main office/dining/recreation area. I believe that back in the Delaware North days this space would operate as a canteen like Phantom Ranch does, open to campers and backpackers and thru-hikers to buy a beer or candy bar or postcard or just sit at a table to play some cards, journal or whatever. Anyways, we found a Scrabble box here, and played a couple of fun games; we realized after the first round that it was missing "Q", "Z" and a blank tile.

Supper this night came with some brocolini, mashed potatoes, and "Shepherds Pie": this was a single big stainless-steel pot with layers of ground beef, cheese and mashed potatoes. It was super-yummy, maybe one of my favorite things I ate for the whole trip. Dessert was some kind of a cranberry biscuit thing.

After dinner the staff made a campfire in a firepit near the lake. This hadn't been allowed in Glen Aulin, due to park regulations forbidding fires below 8000 feet. It was nice to sit and chat with some of the staff and fellow hikers. The cook came out to join us for a bit; I forget his name, he had cool and interesting looped hair. People discussed the conditions of the other camps, including Lake Merced and Vogelsang which still have not reopened since the pandemic. We also heard about yoga at Lembert Dome, and complaints about frozen meatballs that were served in previous years. It was all relaxed and nice.

The next morning we got to see... not the literal sunrise, but the beautiful effects of the sunrise on May Lake and the mountain behind it, which turned such a wonderful series of colors with the passing minutes. After coffee and breakfast, we packed up to head out. The young couple had already taken off, getting an early start to maximize the cool part of the day. The older gentlemen were going to spend another day at May Lake, and in the meantime would get a better position within the tent cabin.

We'd been warned that this third day, from May Lake to Sunrise, would be the most difficult: while you start and end at around the same elevation, there's a big descent to Lake Tenaya and Tioga Road before another big ascent back up to Sunrise. But this day still felt better to us than the first day did. It started with a short mile-and-a-half hike to the trailhead. May Lake is "famous" for having the shortest required hike of the High Sierra Camps, making it also one of the most popular: it can be a good choice for a single night in-and-out for more casual hikers, as well as for people who need to get a later start in the day. After a brief confusion in the trailhead parking lot, we found the right trail just past the mule staging area. Or I should say "trail"; this was actually the old Tioga Road, originally built in the 1880s, largely by Chinese laborers, to improve access to a silver mine that promptly went defunct. Yet another interesting hiking surface, this had some stretches of blacktop but was mostly eroded down to dirt. There was another stumble here in the uneven road, which felt a bit humbling to me: on a multi-day long journey, we are taking hundreds of thousands of steps, over countless roots and patches of scree and uneven steps and loose pebbles and who knows what else, and all it takes is a single bad step to put us at risk of toppling.

The rest of the path down was quite and uneventful, and came with periodic pretty views of Lake Tenaya, which we had passed on our initial drive up Tioga Road. It felt odd to come into range of the road and begin to hear the sound of traffic again after several days without it. We scooched across the road, and then came to a sign puzzlingly labeled "TRAIL JUNCTION". That was it: no description of what trail went where. (It was even more baffling on first sight, when I thought it read "TRAIN JUNCTION".) After consulting my handy map, we figured it out and pressed on.

We had a brief stay at Lake Tenaya, enjoying the pretty blue of the water, and the sight of people enjoying watersports on it; there were a few inflatable rafts and boogie boards and things in there. We headed back to the trail and pressed onward: there was going to be a lot more climbing on our way to Sunrise Camp.

The way up was pretty steep, but again we were good about taking frequent short rests for shade and oxygen on our ascent. It was around lunchtime when we reached the intersection with the trail towards Cloud's Rest continuing south and our path to Sunrise to the east. We ducked a little to the west and nibbled on our sack lunches. Each of the camps offers a lunch that you can order the night before. We had been told that these would be offered for $20, and everyone was surprised to learn that they were actually provided for free. There were a few different options each day. I think that the first day I got a turkey wrap (in a flour tortilla), the second day was a pastrami sandwich with jack cheese, and the third day I got a PB&J. Anyways, it felt good to once again remove our packs and relax while refueling and enjoying the scenery.

I scouted a bit ahead in this western direction, along an unmarked but fairly prominent social trail. The gentlemen we had previously shared a cabin with had told us that this led to a really striking view of Yosemite Valley, and I determined that they were correct: after just a few minutes down the informal trail, you can see a straight shot down Tenaya Canyon to Yosemite Valley, including a particularly cool view of Half Dome. I snapped some shots, returned to my dad, and we went down for some more selfie action.

Back on the trail, we passed the Sunrise Lakes. I had learned the previous night that, unlike May, the Sunrise Camp isn't near its titular lakes, so we spent a little extra time enjoying looking at the water, and Dad got to dip his feet in one. Apparently all the lakes were fairly warm, as the snow had melted some time ago and, being relatively shallow, they are well-warmed by the sun.

We had a bit more climbing past the lakes, passing through yet another entirely new biome: deeply sandy, this stretch looked a bit like a dessert. I am very curious about how these areas turn out the way they do: what combination of elevation, geological age, sun exposure, rainfall patterns, and flora cause different parts of the trail to turn out so differently?

The final approach into Sunrise was mostly a descent. Each of the camps we stayed at had its own unique character; we had learned previously that each camp's staff lives there for the summer, so they kind of develop their own culture. An early striking thing about Sunrise was the colorful hand-drawn signage, pointing the way to fresh water, to toilets, and so on. We hiked through the backpacker's camp and past the spread-out tents before finally reaching the main office. This was a bit different as well: while it seems like Glen Aulin planned room assignments in advance, at Sunrise it seems like we got assigned upon checkin.

We turned out to have a pretty fantastic assignment: Cabin 3 was on the eastern edge of the camp, and just past a boulder to a fantastic outcropping that oversaw a sweeping view of a meadow and the surrounding mountains. We were soon joined by our cabin-mates, a pair of ladies from the San Diego area. They had come in on a grueling hike from the Cathedral Lakes trailhead, but like many other hikers were going to spend two nights in this camp before heading back.

Sunrise also had the nicest showers of any of the camps we stayed at: large, clean, and blissfully warm. We later learned that they have large black water bladders on the roof of the bathroom, which soaks up sun throughout the day and warms the water. Conversely, this was the one place we stayed at that did not have flush toilets, instead an elevated solar-composting toilet. This was smelly, but perfectly fine.

Supper was a nicely-seasoned trout, which was my second-favorite entree of the trip. We had the same cook as at Glen Aulin: apparently one of the cooks had gotten sick, so the remaining cooks needed to stretch themselves thin to cover them. He gave another great little talk to the guests after dinner. It was fun to recognize how many of us had been on this three-day journey together, and to see him connecting with new folks as well. Our roommates were delighted to realize that he had been their cook at Vogelsang in 2018, one of the last times before that camp closed.

After supper, pretty much everyone came out to that rocky overcrop to watch the sunset while we chatted. It was once again beautiful, with a pinky glow gradually suffusing the mountains. We woke up early enough the next day to watch the sunrise, coming up over the mountains as we watched. We had thought we might see some wildlife in the vast meadow during dusk or dawn, but it stayed quiet. In general there were fewer animals around than I would have thought. My dad saw a mule deer on our drive up, we didn't see many animals at all for our first day or so, then eventually saw a few cute little birds, an osprey, some marmots and chipmunks, and finally some deer near the end.

Our last breakfast was biscuits and gravy, along with oatmeal and, hm, maybe toast. My dad jokingly asked when they would bring us some carbs. Interestingly we didn't have any eggs during any of our breakfasts; I'm curious if this is a cost thing, or if they're too fragile to carry up the trails, or if they don't work well for the large servings they provide.

We'd been warned that the leg out would be long, but fortunately it was mostly a descent for us, starting at 9400 feet and ending around 8700. The hike out of Sunrise is glorious, along that beautiful large meadow. We steadily drew closer to the Cathedral Peaks, which I think were my favorite feature from my 2010 backpacking trip. It was so cool to get various looks at them as we approached and eventually passed them.

We paused for a nice long stay at Upper Cathedral Lake, yet another stunningly beautiful lake. The water was perfectly clear, and we got to see a trout happily swimming around and around a rock. We hiked further down, then took a side trail to Lower Cathedral Lake. That was my favorite camping spot in 2010, and it felt so special to be back there 16 years later with my dad. We ate lunch there, and my dad got to go for a proper (short) swim.

As we hiked further back, we passed more and more people: we were back within range of day-hiking, but also chatted with some people who were on weeks-long treks along the John Muir Trail or other very long expeditions.

Eventually we got back to the trailhead, picking up the JMT to bypass Tioga for the last bit. Along the way we were passed by a mule train, which was pretty fun: mules supply all of the camps, and we had been very grateful for their hard work.

Actually getting back to the Parsons Lodge trailhead was mildly deflating, as the water-pipe construction project was in full force, so we hear lots of CLANG THUD POW BAM CLANG sounds, instead of the peaceful nature sounds we'd been accustomed to over the previous days. But it was fine. We got back to our car, and I was pleased to see everything still intact, just slightly more dust than usual. In a few minutes, we were back at the Lodge and checked in for our final night!

This ended up being slightly different. When I initially got our cancellation, I was able to get the camps and the lodge for the day after our trip, but at the time there were no openings for the day before. I'd been keeping an eye open for availability, since they recommend spending the night before the trip at the higher elevation to give your body more time to acclimate. I was eventually able to get that cabin; but it was considered a "regular" reservation and not part of the High Sierra Camp loop. But our return night was part of that itinerary. This meant that as with the camps we would be sharing a cabin; but it also meant that we would get a free meal as part of our stay.

At the cabin, we were happy to see that we had been placed with the two gentlemen we had previously lodged with at May Lake. It was fun to swap stories with them; they were pleased to hear we had followed their instructions for the "secret" view of the Valley, and we enjoyed heading about the hiking they had done near May Lake on their second day.

At dinner, we were seated with a couple who were just about to head out on the same loop themselves. They were a really fun couple, great story-tellers, and we were able to bond over some shared family experiences.

Later that night, we attended a ranger talk at the fire pit outside the Lodge dining room. This was a free-flowing chat, where people would ask any random questions they had and the ranger would do her best to answer. We talked a lot about bats, which reminded me of a long-ago trip to Mammoth where I first learned that bats eat mosquitoes, at which point I decided that bats are awesome. I still feel that way! There were also chats about bighorn sheep, bears, ranger lodgings, winter hiking, and much more.

After that, many people drove up to Lembert Dome, where the same ranger gave a star talk. The Perseids were active, and it seemed like a larger-than-usual turnout as many people were hoping to see some of them. The ranger had a green laser pointer that she could use to point out constellations. It had been clear earlier, but partly clouded over around this time, so we could only see a few constellations. Still, we got to see the Big Dipper, Scorpio, Cassiopeia, and I think one or two others. I got to see a shooting star, so that was pretty fun!

This was definitely the latest night we stayed up; it still wasn't super-late, but most days we were in our cabins shortly after the sun went down. We slept pretty well. The next day we woke up a little early, and retraced the same hike as our first day, down the John Muir Trail to Twin Bridges. Here we got to watch the sunrise, which once again felt magical: next to a babbling brook, looking at a wide open meadow with mountains rising in the distance. It's such a beautiful place.

Back at the lodge, we ordered breakfast and ate with a couple from Munich who had come to the States specifically to hike in Yosemite. They weren't doing the High Sierra Camps but had already done a lot of great hikes in the valley floor and were looking forward to more in the Tuolumne area. They were going to visit San Francisco before flying home, and I enjoyed getting to share a few suggestions for fun ways to spend their time there.

Heading out, we stopped by Olmsted Point on our way out of the park. This is a fantastic scenic overlook right off of Tioga Road that has commanding views down into Yosemite Valley and out at the many mountains in the higher Sierras. I learned that Frederick Law Olmsted was one of the first commissioners of Yosemite Park after it was established by Abraham Lincoln; he also designed New York's Central Park. And, I learned from my dad, he also was instrumental in in designing Chicago's Lakeshore park! (Edit: Whoops, it was actually Jackson Park - thanks for the correction!) It's cool to see such a range of wild and urban lands thoughtfully considered by this one man, and so great to have grown up in a world where earlier planners thoughtfully set aside these green spaces for us to enjoy.

There's a short but rocky descent from the parking lot that brings you to an even nicer viewpoint, so we spent a little more time there, snapping a couple of final selfies. And then, up and out of the park!

This was such a great trip, and a fantastic return to backpacking after my seven-year hiatus. Nicely challenging but never scary or painful, it lived up to my hopes of a slightly more comfortable hiking experience that also let me fully inhabit these beautiful, remote, wild spaces. It was also really special to have my first-ever experience backpacking with someone else, swapping solitude for good conversation and company. I hope that the High Sierra Camps continue to operate and improve, and that others get to experience this really special opportunity.

This Is Your Brain On Money

2026-08-22T15:13:09.941-07:00

I've been poking away at a reading list of Boglehead-adjacent people writing on financial topics. My most recent entry is "Your Money & Your Brain" by Jason Zweig. I was interested in the topic, and even more interested in reading Zweig - he is highly regarded in the circles I frequent, with his columns often quoted as gospel in relation to current economic trends and investment fads to beware. I don't subscribe to the Wall Street Journal so I haven't directly read his columns, but I've been impressed by the guest pieces I've seen from him elsewhere and from a few appearances at Bogleheads conferences.

As you can guess from the title, the book is about the psychology of investing, adjacent to behavioral economics. I loathe the subtitle of the book: "How The New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich." I strongly suspect that subtitle was driven by the publisher and not the author, as this is not a get-rich-quick book and in fact warns against that kind of mindset. This was a rare book that I bought as a physical paperback rather than checking out from the library, and I was kind of embarrassed to show the cover while reading in public lest onlookers believe I am some sort of greedy fool.

The actual book is great, though! It's much more science-based than I imagined. Somewhat like The Wisdom of Crowds, it's mostly directly based on published academic research and interviews with leading scientists, supplemented by some of Zweig's own reporting and experience as a personal finance journalist. By far the most frequently quoted source is Daniel Kahneman, the author of the fantastic book Thinking Fast and Slow. I found there to be a great deal of overlap between the two books: TF&S is a lot longer, but does spend a surprising amount of time on discussing investments, and I don't think there's a whole lot of actionable information in YM&YB that you wouldn't find in TF&S.

Interestingly, while Kahneman was a psychologist and Zweig a journalist, YM&YB goes much more into the biology of psychology than TF&S does: it describes major areas of the brain, like the amygdala, including what it looks like, where it's located, what function it serves and how it has behaved in different experiments. This sort of in-depth biological analysis continues throughout the book. It's kind of cool, but at the same time felt somewhat useless to me; I can't really do anything with that knowledge. The overarching idea is that the way we think about money is rooted in biological processes that evolved over millennia, which is helpful for us to keep in mind, so we don't overly moralize others' decisions or excessively criticize our own, and so we can recognize and respect why these forces in our brain are so powerful and hard to overcome. This additional level of detail builds credibility for this perspective of seeing our brains as fundamentally suspect organs built for a different world than the one we deploy them in; but personally I already believed that perspective.

The prose in this book is really punchy. I can tell that Zweig is a columnist: he uses lots of striking metaphors, pop-culture references, and surprising sentence constructions. In small doses I found this really engaging, but for me it could feel like a lot at book length, and I started kind of glazing over some of the subject matter introductions after I'd been reading for a while.

Many parts of the book seem at first to be contradictory. One section writes about how we're attracted to new and novel things, so we tend to naturally be drawn to flashy, buzzy products like internet stocks over boring things like utility bonds. Another section writes about how we tend to trust things we're familiar with, so people tend to invest in the company they work for instead of ones they're less familiar with. Those two observations seem contradictory (preferring novelty vs. preferring familiarity), but both are true, and I think it's helpful to recognize both forces at work. Some sections write about how we're drawn to risk and the promise of a big payday, others how we're risk-averse and fear losses. Again, both are true, and can be true of the same person of the same stock, at different points in that stock's trajectory: we're overly elated when buying a new stock that we believe will keep soaring up, and overly distraught when that stock takes a plunge. Taken as a whole, things like this explain why most people have a natural tendency to buy high and sell low.

Most of this book seems to be geared towards people who buy and sell individual stocks. I've never been one of those people, and I wonder how many of them are out there. I know that was a huge thing during the late-90s and early-2000 tech bubble, which Zweig was present for. My impression is that these days most investors use mutual funds, primarily index funds, possibly with tilts for various factors (US versus international, small cap versus large cap, value versus growth, perhaps some sector concentrations, etc.). But I don't know if that's actually true; maybe I've been in the Boglehead bubble for too long! Wall Street Bets definitely proves that there's a big group who likes investing in individual stocks (with leverage!), so maybe there's still a big group of stock-pickers out there, just one I don't think about much.

My favorite part of this book was the late chapter on Happiness. I don't think I necessarily learned anything new from it, but it might be the best-written piece I've read on the topic of money and happiness. People always want more money, no matter how wealthy they are. If you're destitute, more money does increase happiness, but the effect quickly wanes beyond a fairly low point. The anticipation of getting something (money, a car, a home improvement) is greater than the pleasure of actually getting it; and the pleasure of getting it is much better than the pleasure of having it. But experiences tend to get better over time: we remember a vacation more fondly than we actually felt while on that vacation, for example.

As with Thinking Fast And Slow, Zweig highlights the importance of optimism. It helps everything in life: it makes our moment-to-moment and day-to-day experiences more pleasant, but it also tends to lead to stronger relationships, business success and other external markers of improvement. One new thing that I did learn from this chapter is that older people tend to be happier than younger people, and based on research, it appears that this is because older people are better at blocking unpleasant thoughts and images from their mind: even if they experience the same distressing thing as a younger person, it tends not to be as activating for them.

Like some other books I've liked, including The Wisdom of Crowds and Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, this book was written during the years after the dot-com bust and before the 2008 financial crisis. It always feels so weird to me to revisit financial writing from that period, as it inhabits a very specific mindset that doesn't feel like anything before or after. There's some hard-won world-weary wisdom coming out of the Internet bubble crash, and as readers we know about this other big wave that's coming but the authors are oblivious.

All in all, I think Your Money & Your Brain is a really helpful book, presenting the findings of behavioral economists in a really direct and digestible manner; the lessons and advice it gives are far more helpful than, say, tips on sector tilts or bond maturities. That said, I think for someone like me who has already immersed themselves into writing in this space, there isn't a whole lot of brand-new information. But as with most things in investing, it's always helpful to re-center ourselves and recommit to the actions that we know will lead us to success, even when our lizard brains are insisting we go another way.

The Dawn of Everything

2026-07-20T20:49:00.000-07:00

I've just wrapped up a particularly fascinating, meaty, and provocative book: The Dawn of Everything, by David Wengrow and the late David Graeber, is a very ambitious book about the history of, well, us: the society of human beings. My friend Dan recommended it, and it dovetails in some ways with Nexus, a similarly fascinating historical/anthropological/psychological exploration. This book covers a lot of ground and it's hard to do justice to it, but I'll give it a shot!

As background: human beings as a species have existed for about 200,000 years, and for basically that entire time we've lived in communities: so-called "bands" or "tribes" that extend beyond the immediate family unit. However, we only have written history for about 5,000 years. So the question is, what were we doing for the 195,000 years before we started writing about what we were doing? And that in turn dovetails with a question that philosophers and sociologists have been asking for the last three or four centuries: what is Mankind like in a "state of nature"? That is, what is our default, "pure" form like, before we invented agriculture, cities, kings and all the other trappings of what we now call civilization?

They identify two main answers to that question. The first, which they attribute to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is that originally humans were egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Being nomadic, we didn't have any need to "own" land, and didn't have any possessions beyond what we carried. This was an idyllic time, cooperating with one another to hunt woolly mammoths or to pick acorns to eat. When we invented agriculture, we "ran towards our chains", giving up our freedom and shackling ourselves to specific pieces of land, at which point we needed ownership and defense and laws. These permanent settlements gave rise to compounds and cities, at which point we could start accumulating more property, which needed "protection", and we ended up with the hierarchical system we have today. This school of thought has tended to be associated with leftist thinkers.

The alternative explanation is associated with Hobbes, with the infamous idea that in a state of nature the life of Man is "nasty, brutish and short." Mankind practice pure dominance, might-makes-right, with the strong taking whatever they can from the weak: their food, their tools, their women and children. In this view, we willingly subordinate ourselves to authority (chieftains, police, etc.) in order to protect ourselves from our brutal fellow men. In this telling we exchange our freedom for safety, instead of for property, and civilization is a clearly superior progression, while the Rousseauian view is more ambivalent about the change. This Hobbesian school of thought is associated more with conservative, right-leaning thinkers.

But neither Roueasseu nor Hobbes were arguing from any sort of evidence: they said at the time that these were thought experiments, illustrative tales of how things might have happened. Now we have a lot more knowledge. The authors are an archeologist and an anthropologist, taking a very broad look at the actual discoveries we have made that shed real light on what we actually used to be like and how we changed. Unlike most practitioners who are extremely granular in their research and don't connect the dots, these two recognize larger trends (or contradictions) in the evidence and present a higher-level view, backed up by evidence, that is very very different from how we thought things were. The book does sometimes have a bit of a speculative flavor, but they are careful to call out what evidence they have; and, they remind us, the conventional wisdom is itself rarely evidence-based, so at a minimum we should think about why we believe certain things to be true.

So, were Hobbes or Rousseau correct? Neither one, and the actual picture is far more complicated and multi-faceted. To grossly summarize, there is no one "state of nature", and throughout history and around the world, there have been all sorts of different societies and civilizations observed. There's no linear progression from foraging to farming to civilization, and no progression from anarchy to dominance. One of the most remarkable findings is that even within a given year bands would move back and forth between different modes. One tribe might spend their summers in a village, leisurely trading and crafting, and then spend their winters in tighter hunting bands under the authority of a leader. Another tribe might do the opposite: part-time village life with police and chieftains, then during the hunting season cooperating in more egalitarian bands. That turns into one of the biggest questions of this book: how did we lose this flexibility that we used to have to move between different modes of political and cultural organization? We seem to have "gotten stuck" in history, where we are now permanently locked into systems of dominance and exploitation: capitalism, patriarchy, nationalism.

We do still feel some echoes of those ancient rhythms in our modern lives. For 11 months out of the year we are all told to work hard and to consume; but around Christmas time, suddenly all of the brands are advertising that it's better to give than to receive, that it's important to spend time with family and loved ones for the holiday. And in Europe it's common to take a month in the summer to leave the city and spend that time in the countryside. Both of these feel like faint remnants of the sort of flexibility we once had. Travel itself is an ancient practice for us: around the time of the last Ice Age people would roam around entire continents; it's been far more recent for us to stay stationary in our river valleys and coastal settlements.

Archeological records indicate that many pre-historical groups were able to supply all of their food needs with about two days' worth of work a week, which left all of the remaining time for other activities like dancing, conversation, artwork, long travel for fun, and so on. This is opposite the view that was actively promulgated during the Victoria era, which said that in ancient times people had to toil long hours merely to subsist. As we have "advanced" as a species, we have tended to work more hours, not less, which is the opposite of what we are promised. This has only very recently begun to shift back towards leisure (specifically in Europe in the last 80 years or so), and is still far beyond what our ancient ancestors apparently enjoyed.

Agriculture and farming is usually depicted as an ineluctable force: once we discovered farming, its advantages were so great that it out-competed all other modes of subsistence. But again, the actual record says otherwise. Tons of societies around the world were aware of farming and had neighbors who practiced it, and could have successfully raised crops in their own land, but they chose not to do it, instead pursuing foraging or hunting or fishing or other modes. They weighed the pros and cons and decided, "Nah."

This is one thing I really like about this book: it emphasizes human choice and agency, much more in line with Thomas Piketty than with Karl Marx. Technologies and ecologies can open possibilities, but we as humans decide what to do, we aren't driven by physical forces to always do one thing. As the authors repeatedly point out, politics and culture are huge. As a sidebar, think of all the dumb self-destructive things we do in the US: eat food that we know will make us sick, use a confusing measurement system instead of a simple one, drive cars that are expensive to fuel and hard to park. In most cases, we do those things to differentiate ourselves from another group: at least we aren't the French or the Canadians or the Californians or whatever. The Dawn of Everything includes copious examples, such as native Californians versus Northwest Coast tribes, where "schismogenesis" occurs, and two groups of people increasingly emphasize their differences by adopting radically different ways of life, even when it seems to be to their material disadvantage (such as the puzzling reluctance of the Californians to exploit their bountiful fisheries, instead focusing on collecting acorns). Especially after the last Ice Age, as populations grew more distinct, there grew a stronger sense that "We are the sort of people who eat with chopsticks, not who eat with forks" or "We are the sort of people who eat with spoons, not with chopsticks."

Going back to agriculture: the authors find that, when agriculture does appear, it doesn't automatically dominate. It often ends up being another side-project, an option, not a replacement. They use the term "play farming" and compare it with gardening. These early gardener/farmers seem to have been motivated by the joy at making things grow, and maybe enjoying some new flavors (or stimulants or colors or whatever else a given plant had to offer). They would fit farming/gardening into their lifestyle, not re-orient their lifestyle around farming. For example, members of a tribe might casually scatter seeds into a floodplain as the river receded, migrate on to hunt, then swing by later to collect the growths, then re-plant in a totally different place. The Davids also note that there is strong evidence that this work was primarily performed by women, and the overall male-centeredness of the field of archeology has tended to over-emphasize male-dominated activities and dismissed female-oriented ones.

The book is mostly organized thematically, but generally follows a forward progression through time, and near the end continues into the era of recorded history. This includes Mesopotamian sites like I learned about in high school "world history", but also contemporary cities in other areas like China, India and the Americas. Here too, they show that old assumptions are simply not supported in the archeological record. For centuries our idea has been that centralized authority arose in nomadic societies and early farming, and that authority was necessary to establish cities: "of course" we need someone to organize collective efforts and make sure that work is done through systems of bureaucracy and administration. But that doesn't seem to be true - at least not universally.

You can't prove a negative, and we can't say for certain that a given city didn't have a king, but it's always very obvious when a city does have a king, and those signs are simply missing from some cities, or from early eras in other cities. So what were cities like? It depends! In some cities, like Ukrainian mega-sites, it seems like everyone is on a level, with similar dwellings throughout the area. Other times it does seem to have differentiations, like temples or a higher elevation where a certain caste dwelt; but even in these cities we have evidence that decisions were arrived by communal consensus through the entire community rather than top-down commands. They point at more contemporary examples like Basque cities that were organized around a "wheel" design, where responsibilities rotated between households. This example disproves the long-held assumption that you can't organically get societies of larger than 150 people. Which is significant, because that's been an axiom that many people take as a given when trying to interpret historical evidence.

This is a bit of a tangent, but at one point the authors state that recent science has determined that most of the time we as human beings aren't really thinking: we spend the vast majority of our daily life on autopilot. When we do need to think, we tend to do it in short bursts to solve a specific problem or deal with an unexpected situation. On average this lasts for just seven seconds (!!), and then we switch back to autopilot. I hadn't heard that particular statistic before, but it sounds very much in line with Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow". The Davids say that the one time we can consistently keep our thinking brains engaged for longer than 7 seconds is when engaged in conversation with someone else. This is why, when we're trying to solve a challenging problem, we often "talk to ourselves" inside our mind; it's a hack for keeping our thinking engaged.

When Europeans first encountered natives in North America, their journals report them being very impressed by their skills at debate. It does seem like these natives were more "advanced" in their rhetoric and thinking, even as Europeans were more "advanced" in their physical technology. Contemporary Enlightenment thinkers often explicitly attributed their ideas on individual liberty, democracy and freedom to those expressed by native Americans. Since that time we tend to dismiss those attributions, saying that those writers were romanticizing or exoticizing those cultures, or putting impermissible thoughts into the mouth of an "other" beyond the reach of their European kings. But it's pretty condescending to believe that we haven't learned from those cultures, and it's weird to insist so when the Enlightenment writers themselves said those cultures were sources. While it's appropriate to be skeptical of writing, we should at least consider the possibility that people were telling the truth: that native cultures were socially very advanced, and that many of their ideas influenced the Enlightenment and ultimately the founding documents of the United States of America.

Near the end of the book they return to the question of how we got "stuck" in our current way of being. They identify three essential freedoms that humans have had throughout almost all of our history: the freedom to move around, the freedom to disobey orders, and the freedom to create new forms of social relations. Opposite that, they identify three forms of authority that collectively create what we might call "the state": control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic politics. Early societies would dabble with those forms of authority, and then seemingly draw back. As there is no writing we don't know exactly what happened, but they can at least chronologically track how in places like, say, Cahokia Illinois or woodland Austria we see increasingly dense settlements, signs of mass executions and violence... and then a dispersal back to seemingly freer, less hierarchical societies. Many of the native North American legends could be interpreted as a kind of counter-programming to avoid modes of domination in the future. Several indigenous cultures (in the Americas and elsewhere) had essentially "play chiefs", who could give orders but couldn't compel people to obey them. Much like with farming, people could play around with certain roles, often as part of a mystical or ritual ceremony, and then lay them aside. Once the sun rises, you don't need the chief any more.

While they never give a definitive answer to how we got "stuck", they do suspect that the logic of patriarchy and the logic of society domination are closely linked. Both share a language of "caring violence": "I'm doing this for your own good," "I'm hurting these people to protect you," "I know what's best for you." The most intimate relations become corrupted by violence. Women, and then commoners, lose their autonomy, their freedom to defy orders, and become locked into these rigid systems. After enough generations, we've lost the capacity to imagine different ways of being: even our language makes it difficult to imagine living any other way.

But, the hope of this book is that we will be able to regain that long-lost flexibility. The first step is just recognizing that it's possible: freedom and equality isn't some ambitious dream for the future, it's how we existed for most of our time as a species. The various advances we've made should open new doors, not close old ones. It's a very ambitious and starry-eyed project, but one that sounds very thrilling.

United Neverlands

2026-07-17T19:31:00.000-07:00

So, I think this might be a first for me: I've actually officially finished a Paradox Grand Strategy Game! I've been playing these games for well over a decade, and feel like I've "won" quite a few of them; but typically you get to a point where you're the Undisputed Lord Of Everything, and it gets too tedious to just run out the clock until you reach the artificial end date.

Victoria 3 has a few advantages in this regard. It is objectively a "shorter" game, "only" covering the 100 years from 1836 to 1936 as opposed to the centuries of Europa Universalis or Stellaris. My total Steam time on the game is currently 150 hours; that includes my training Sweden runs, an early aborted Belgium run and some time left idling on the pause screen. I'm pretty sure this game ended up north of 100 hours, but that's still much less time than a completionist Europa Universalis campaign would take.

Besides the shortness, I think some of the mechanics of Victoria 3 keep things feeling more engaging in the end-game. Stellaris kind of does this with the Crisis, but once you beat the Crisis there's even less motivation than before to keep going. Victoria 3 doesn't necessarily pull you into a Great War (although that's certainly a possibility), but the dynamism of the game meant that, at least for me, I had to keep on my toes and not get too complacent. Smaller powers are still at the mercy of larger powers. If you are a large power, you're extremely unlikely to have actually conquered a large chunk of the map: rather, you may have grown your direct territory somewhat, but most of your influence is in the form of "soft power" through political alliances, power blocs, economic imperialism, control of markets, and so on. You do not directly control all of these things. So, for example, in my game I might see, say, France trying to conquer Madagascar, which is an independent nation but a part of my Trade League. I could decide to just let that slide, or threaten to escalate that conflict into a major war to keep the nation and its natural resources available for my own capitalist enterprises.

Internal dissension is also a compelling factor. For me, early in the game these felt more fraught, as when monarchists threatened a civil war or when the labor unions organized against our adoption of a laissez-faire economy. Later in the game I was mostly facing indigenous uprisings by native Africans in my colonies. These are far less of a threat to the nation as a whole, because they are tiny; but it does still require a response. In the short term this means marshaling troops, in the longer term checking the causes of the uprisings to try and prevent future ones. In my case, while these populations were doing extremely well by indigenous standards, they were also significantly poorer than the average standard of living in my country, which fed immense discontent. So the solution is to make them richer - not just employing people in rubber plantations and oil fields, but also making automotive factories, art academies and glassworks.

This particular mechanic was really interesting to me. For much of the game I used Colonial Exploitation in my African colonies, and for many decades the situation seemed fairly stable. I reached a point where I was having a hard time increasing my extraction industries' productivity: these states had a ready supply of laborers, but too few mechanics and engineers. As colonial wages were low, people in the metropole were reluctant to migrate there for jobs. So I started constructing local Universities to increase the Qualifications of the locals so they could take those jobs. That seemed to gradually help a bit. I eventually realized that as these (completed) colonies were all Unincorporated States, they didn't actually get any of the advantages from my Institutions, particularly Public Education. So I started the process of incorporating them. This increased education access, which increases their literacy... and literacy, in turn, increases their expected standard of living. So, basically, they were learning more about the world, and realizing how much better they could have it. Anyways, I just love this kind of dynamism in the game. More education and literacy is good - it increases innovation and qualifications, helping your technology spread and productivity - but it also potentially increases social unrest, which can destabilize a region or entire country. It's complex, just like history! I love it!

For a long time I thought I was way ahead in tech and worried that I would run out of things to research, maintaining expensive universities for little purpose, so I stopped building additional universities once I maxed out a stack of 50 in my capital and had an additional one per state for qualifications. I ended up getting nearly all the techs but not quite, with I think 5 undiscovered at the end, 1 which I was researching and 2 which were spreading to me. From some light online research, it sounds like the meta-strategy is to accept the "ahead of time" penalty and omit researching tech from earlier tiers while you focus on later tiers. This helps you avoid getting into the situation I encountered, where I would go for long stretches without any Tech Spread because I already knew everything everyone else did.

This does raise a recurring issue I've encountered with playing Paradox grand strategy games: the core mechanics for these games change significantly over time, so any time I Google for strategy advice or mechanics explanations, even if I find something that was accurate at the time it was written, it's very likely to have changed by now. This ended up being particularly impactful for this game because they had just released a brand-new update, "The Great Wave", that includes a DLC (which I haven't bought) but also a major reworking of naval combat and minor updates for many other things. Even when reading contemporary information on Reddit about, say, the ideal composition of ships in a fleet, that information would be based on bugs in the current game, which were patched during the course of my playthrough, tossing that initial analysis out the window.

But one silver lining is that in 2026 it does seem like it's easier to find info in text-based venues like Reddit, the Steam Community and the Paradox Plaza forums. A few years ago when researching EU or Stellaris it seemed like most information was buried in YouTube videos, which I am never going to watch.

Going into my actual campaign:

I think my last post ended in the early 1900s. The last few decades generally felt a bit slower than the start of the game, as I was larger and had my finger in more pies, but as noted above it did generally feel "faster" than EU or Stellaris. After forming the United Netherlands I mostly focused on expanding my African colonies, picking up a few minor powers in Europe to join my Trade League but for the most part ignoring continental politics.

I had a couple of dust-ups with the United States. They declared on me to seize the Panama Canal, and there were multiple wars where they would declare on Mexico; Mexico would then call in Great Britain and myself and absolutely mop the floor with them. During our last war, a Proletarian Revolt broke out in the US so they were fighting (a second) civil war while also fighting the entirety of Central America, South America and Europe. The Proletarians were able to win the civil war, whereupon they immediately capitulated in the world war so they could focus on their new worker-oriented nation. So it ended up being almost exactly like Russia turning into the Soviet Union during World War 1, just with America this time. I thought that was pretty neat! We stayed friendly after that.

Near the end of the game I started taking subjects in Africa from diplomatic plays. Typically I would oppose a European power that was trying to subjugate an Unrecognized power in my Trade Union, and as a condition for joining the Play I would demand their colony or transferring an African subject. I also did this with the United States and Liberia. The colony transfers (like taking the rest of Angola from the Portuguese) went smoothly and let me get some complete states. Subject transfers proved trickier: subjects seem to be pretty terrible at managing internal revolutionary movements, secessions and uprisings, so every few years you're dragged into putting down a rebellion. The AI might be able to handle it on its own, but not always, and it's always fastest to send your own army to the front.

In, say, Europa Universalis it's almost always better to let subjects manage their own affairs, as they accept local cultures and will face fewer uprisings. That may be true at the start of Victoria 3 as well, but by the end-game I had secured hard-won legislative victories to enact Multiculturalism and Total Separation, which respectively significantly lower the cultural acceptance maluses from different ethnic backgrounds and religions. If you combine that with my significantly richer economy, welfare, and being a human being who knows how to play the game, I now think that I should have tried to integrate those late-game subjects ASAP instead of playing whack-a-mole for them.

I've mentioned in previous posts that I had shifted from always promoting left-wing parties to instead alternating between the Socialist and Conservative parties in power. This helped with getting the specific laws passed that I wanted, like Laissez-Faire from the Conservative union; I also made a multi-party alliance with the Intelligentsia specifically to pass Total Separation. But by the end of the game I had settled back into just pumping the Socialist party as much as I could and keeping them in power. Single-interest-group parties have a big advantage by not having ideological differences. Even if, say, the Conservatives got 50% of the vote and the Socialists got 40%, the Socialists would inevitably have much higher Legitimacy, so I'd rather the Socialists get 45% than the Conservatives get 55% since I end up with a higher Legitimacy at single-IG 45%. Even if a multi-interest-group party manages to align on ideology, there's a very high chance that a new leader will take over an interest group during their term, which causes your Legitimacy to instantly drop.

Other than the occasional Diplomatic Play and even more occasional shooting war, my gameplay in the last few decades was entirely focused on construction and economic expansion: I had all the laws I wanted, was diplomatically secure and only used diplomacy to try and finagle independent nations into my Trade League. My rough (government) building priority level looks like:

Expand Construction Sectors if the Private Investment Pool has untapped capacity.
Addressing Market Access issues - building at-capacity Railroads and Ports, or making cheaper goods that are inputs to those.
Expanding Government Administration to collect available taxes.
Expanding at-capacity industries that produce Government or Military goods that are currently expensive; or making cheaper the input goods to these that keep those buildings from hiring.
"Starter Package" for new colonies: Trade Center, University, Railroad, Power Plant, Art Academy, one food-producing Arable Resource.
Addressing starvation or low standard of living by building food or job-producing buildings.
Only if running a consistent surplus: More construction sectors or military or universities.
Strategic investing in specific foreign nations that I am trying to coerce into my Trade League.
Expanding the highest-Productivity at-capacity buildings, up to size 50.
Expanding lower-Productivity at-capacity buildings or starting new industries if all domestic ones are at 50+ size already.

When building in foreign nations, I focus on raw goods (crops and resources) and local services (railroads, ports, trading centers and electricity). My thinking has been that once that nation is in my market, I want my own pops to be making the high-value finished manufactured goods, and I want their pops to be supplying cheap natural resources. I want to buy their cheap stuff and sell them my expensive stuff. I haven't crunched the numbers or researched that strategy, though. In particular, it is common for industry buildings to be significantly more profitable than resource buildings, so if my primary goal is to get enough influence to drag them into my trade league, it might make more sense to, say, build three factories instead of ten farms.

While dipping into the community, I've seen Victoria 3 repeatedly described as a "Line Go Up Simulator." I chuckle at that - it's very true! For me it's very satisfying to see wealth, population, literacy and more steadily ticking up in response to your gardening of the nation. I've also heard people say that the game is called Victoria because she is the final boss. Again, that's pretty apt. The game is named that for the Victorian Era, but also she is the monarch of Great Britain for most of the time, and Great Britain starts as the overwhelming #1 greatest power. Unlike Europa Universalis, where Ming starts off as #1 but is doomed to fall off, or Stellaris, where the Fallen Empires start off very powerful but are doomed to stagnation, in Victoria 3 Great Britain is almost certain to advance in power, expanding its influence even more around the globe. All that to say, while conquering the world in this game seems like a very tall and not-very-fun order, outperforming Great Britain is a fantastic goal.

And, I did it! In the last decade of the game I eventually surpassed Great Britain as the #1 Great Power in the world. We actually switched places back and forth a few times. I think this is because, when I was at war I would mobilize my armies, which would add to my Army Power Projection enough to push me above them, then drop back when when we demobilized. But I kept chugging along, eventually surpassing one BILLION pounds in GDP and permanently securing my position on top.

So, yep! This game was a lot of fun. I don't have immediate plans to replay, but also the idea of replaying this feels far less daunting than Europa Universalis (or even Hearts of Iron). As with EU it could be fun to just set a specific achievement challenge, like turning the UK Anarchist or forming Yugoslavia. But I can also see myself doing another "completionist" campaign with a less easy start than Belgium - starting in Southeast Asia or South America or something could be pretty entertaining. We'll see if and when I revisit!

Dual Mandate

2026-06-28T15:54:24.132-07:00

In the last couple of years I've enjoyed watching the YouTube videos of the annual Bogleheads conference. As I've blogged before, one thing I love about Bogleheads is how boring they (we?) are: the principles are very simple, and the whole point is to ignore the news and tune out the noise while staying the course. That said, the conference is good at reinforcing those simple rules; and, because a lot of the active members are very smart, curious and engaged, the second-order conversations they spark tend to be fascinating. In particular, in the last couple of years authors have joined the conference and presented on books that cover historical financial and economic topics.

I was intrigued by the presentation from Carola Binder, an economics professor, who spoke about the recent bout of high inflation in the US. I've since picked up her book "Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy". It's been a really gripping read. In some ways it reminds me of the other recent book I discovered through the Bogleheads, Mark Higgins' "Investing in US Financial History". Both of these books are primarily historical, starting in America shortly before independence, and chronologically walk through time up to the present day, examining long-run trends and specific incidents that shaped the economy.

Of course, Binder's book has a more particular focus on prices and inflation, which intersects with but doesn't always overlap with other economic developments. In addition to history, Binder also examines the legal, political, economic and social dimensions of prices, in roughly that order of focus. There's a particular focus on the evolving legal decisions around what powers the government does and does not have related to influencing prices; among other things, this demonstrated how big an impact Supreme Court appointments have had for our entire history, as in multiple incidents the court established a ruling in one direction, and then a few years later reversed it after new appointments were made.

One specific legal area that repeatedly receives focus is contracts. There's language in the Constitution that the federal government cannot interfere in private contracts, and the 14th Amendment extended that restriction to state governments as well. This covers more ground than you might assume. For example, if the government sets a minimum wage, that restricts the terms of contract that an employer can offer an employee, and it potentially interferes in existing employment contracts by forcing a higher wage than was previously agreed on. Today there is broad acceptance that this is a legitimate government power, but there was significant disagreement over it for much of history. Similarly, for a long time purchase contracts would specify that a buyer would need to pay their debt in gold specie currency, as opposed to paper money or other forms of money. The government had a strong desire to make paper currency equivalent with specie and force people to accept them equally, but again, that potentially changes existing contracts between private parties, which is arguably unconstitutional.

As an aside, I was somewhat surprised to read a book that covers this country and time period and never mentions JP Morgan - I think that's a first for me. (But the book does frequently reference Bernard Baruch, which made me irrationally happy: I only knew that name as a punchline in Rocky & Bullwinkle.) While JP Morgan was a towering figure in finance and the economy, he didn't do much to influence prices. The biggest echo I see here has to do with the ongoing effort to get on, remain on or return to the Gold Standard during the 19th and early 20th century. In particular, this book describes how the US stretched itself during the interwar period between WW1 and WW2 to help the UK rebuild the gold reserves necessary to rejoin the standard. House of Morgan tells a great, more narrative story about the personal relationships and characters that drove that (mostly ill-advised) effort on both sides of the Atlantic.

On the other hand, this book had a lot more to say about farmers than any of the other economic books I've read covering this period. Which makes a sense: the US has primarily been a nation of farmers for most of its existence, and even up to the current day we continue to be a major exporter of food products; this was true even early in our history, when Europe was comparatively more industrialized and faced more frequent disruptive wars. I was fascinated to learn about the origins of the Grange Movement: I've been in a Grange Hall and vaguely associated it with rural agriculture, and loved learning about how it started, as a political force organizing against monopolistic price-fixing by railroads, and pushing for more accomodative monetary policy.

Zooming out for a moment: as I've learned from other books (most particularly Katarina Pistor's The Code of Capital), there's an inherent tension between debtors and creditors, and whatever helps one group necessarily harms the other. This includes topics like bankruptcy law and inflation. When inflation rises, it diminishes the real value of nominal debt and thus tends to benefit debtors and hurt creditors. For most of the US's history, while we were on the gold standard, deflation was a bigger specter, which harmed debtors and helped creditors. In general, farmers tend to be debtors: they borrow money to purchase land and buy seed, then pay back those debts after the harvest. So they are particularly sensitive to inflation. In fact, most of the major panics/depressions/recessions in our history have been triggered by economic pain in the farmland, to the extent that you could predict the month a recession would start based on the planting and harvesting schedule.

So this dynamic has played out many times, from the original Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian dynamic between Wall Street lenders and yeoman farmers, through the 1820s and 1840s land rush, through late-19th-century struggles against the railroads, and on into the modern day. Farming has shrunk as a share of the national GDP, but remains a huge business, and has retained an outsized influence thanks to our senatorial and electoral college representation, as well as an enduring cultural reverence towards farming as a profession.

In the 1910s people were surprised to discover that prices under the gold standard fluctuated based on the quantity of gold. But that's exactly what Adam Smith was writing about in The Wealth of Nations 150 years earlier! And Alexander Hamilton wrote about the impact of the quantity of precious metals in his first report as Treasury Secretary. As in Investing In US Financial History, I'm struck by how we as a society can learn stuff, and then even the experts forget it after a few generations and are amazed to rediscover these facts... which weren't even obscure facts but are in our foundational texts.

Somewhat similarly, there's been a lot of angst in the last two decades over the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program (QE), and the Bogleheads forums and other online financial spaces I follow have been aghast at how the Fed has abandoned its traditional tools of the discount rate. But from what I've read now in Shock Values, it sounds like historically the Fed used similar tactics when they were first founded: they initially managed the money supply by purchasing government securities and private bonds, even before they created the Discount Window and began the modern process of influencing inflation and prices via interest rates. The system used to be all based on the Fed regional banks choosing to buy up government debt or to sell it, and so you could say that QE is a return to the Fed's roots and not an unprecedented shift.

Throughout the book, Binder describes different high-level approaches that the government has taken to try and manage price stability. I mentally sort these into three buckets: monetary policy (controlling the amount of money in the economy), fiscal policy (taxing and spending), and controls (directly mandating prices). The forms have changed over the centuries, but there are lots of similarities between different attempts, which I think is a big part of why Binder was inspired to write this book, as the debates of the last few years have very strong echoes of actual experiments we've conducted in the past.

On the monetary policy side: back when we were a colony, Britain forbade trade in pounds, so the only hard currency Americans held were foreign coins, which we then sent to Britain to pay taxes. During the Revolutionary War and the Civil War the government deployed paper currency, Continentals and Greenbacks respectively, to expand the monetary supply. These days monetary policy is primarily conducted through the Federal Reserve, which is the main focus of the last third or so of the book. By requiring banks to keep a certain amount of money in reserve and encouraging or discouraging lending, the Fed can grow or shrink the amount of money in the economy.

On the fiscal front, increasing government spending and cutting taxes tend to increase economic activity and are generally inflationary. Raising taxes and cutting spending does the opposite. The early US federal government had a very minimal footprint in the economy: it only raised revenues through tariffs and excise taxes, and outside of wartime it had very minimal spending. Over the years the scope of the government has steadily grown, and today it can make a major impact in the economy through its decisions. This drove one of the major recent debates, whether the spending in recent stimulus bills was responsible for the large rise in inflation.

Controls are regulations around acceptable prices that sellers can charge in the private market. Sometimes they are straightforward, like declaring that you can't charge more than $4 for a gallon of gas or pay a wage less than $7.25 per hour. Other times they have been more nuanced, like limiting the amount of profit a seller can make, pegging prices to the average or maximum in a historic range, or limiting the rate at which prices can increase.

All of these three levers have been used since the Revolutionary War. The various discussions on controls were probably the most interesting to me. As noted above, these are a form of the government "interfering" in private contracts, and thus have come under constitutional scrutiny. While various courts have ruled various ways in various cases, we've ended with a system where the government tends to have significant latitude in controls during emergency situations like wars or natural disasters: anti-gouging laws (which are state and not federal laws) punished people who jacked up gasoline prices after Hurricane Katrina or who overcharged for PPE in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as Binder writes, we've also come to increasingly rely on "emergencies" - the average "emergency" now lasts for 9.6 years - and this can have distorting effects on markets. In a laissez-faire system, high prices would send a signal for more sellers to enter the market, increasing production and lowering prices. If supply falls and prices can't rise, shortages almost always result, leading to long gas lines in the 1970s or empty supermarket shelves in 2020. As she notes in a grim aside, many people spent longer time in markets searching for N-95 masks, and thus were exposed to the virus and died.

Price fixing was originally tried in the Revolutionary War but wasn't very effective - the state wasn't strong enough to enforce it. It wasn't even considered during the Civil War as the earlier memories were strong. There were some attempts at it in WW1, and a very strong push in WW2. It's interesting to see how it played out. Early on industry was on board with price controls a show of patriotism. But it's inherently hard to manage: different companies have different expenses, and you can either control profits or prices but not both. If you control prices then you will drive some companies out of business. The administrative state enabled enforcing prices, but the FDR administration also rolled out a broad-based distributed network of civilian volunteers, who monitored, educated and reported on pricing activities in their own community. It sounds a bit like the Gestapo, but benevolent.

The book also shows how the parties have grown less ideologically diverse over the years. Particularly during the stretch from the Civil War to the Roaring Twenties, party positions on topics like protectionism, tariffs, the gold standard, free silver, etc. tended to be driven much more by the biases of party leaders than the party membership, so it could radically swing from one election to the next, or have cases where a trifecta would disagree or a divided government would push something through. There's a quote along the lines of "People aren't Republican because they are protectionist, they are protectionist because they are Republican." Party loyalty was big, and (as in our time) economic issues, especially technical ones, tended to play second fiddle to social issues, so people would tend to go along with the direction of their party, even when it changed.

The Federal Reserve has what is called a "dual mandate", to maintain price stability and to pursue full employment. Price stability wasn't initially an explicit goal of the Fed, and over the years bills were proposed to make it an explicit or sole goal. In the short term there is a tension between these two goals, because tighter monetary policy will be deflationary but hurt economic growth and thus employment. However, over the long run the goals do align. As we learned during the Great Inflation, once inflation expectations become unanchored and it becomes self-reinforcing, inflation harms budgets (consumer, business and government) without giving any benefit to employment.

When there is a sudden change in the price level, it's usually due to either a supply shock or a demand shock, and Binder makes a nuanced point about the asymmetry of these types of shocks. If demand spikes, prices will tend to increase; if demand collapses, prices will decrease. Supply is more complex. If there's a shortage, that good will tend to be more expensive, but it can have ripple effects through the economy. If there's an oil shortage, then gas gets more expensive; but there may be less demand for cars, so those will get less expensive. Fed reserve actions are very effective at managing demand shocks, either cooling down overly enthusiastic growth or calming fears. But it's much less effective for supply shocks. Monetary policy is a powerful but very broad tool, and can't be targeted at a specific good. These days the Fed tries to "look through" supply shocks: they will do some damage but conditions will right themselves, because markets will signal sellers to enter or leave the industry. Trying to address a recession due to high oil prices might cause inflation elsewhere without really helping oil prices, for example. Actually addressing supply shocks is better handled by Congress or maybe the Executive: trade treaties, fiscal stimulus or taxation.

In the last chapter covering the Greenspan years and beyond, Binder introduces the phrase "Techno-populism". I tend to think of a continuum from populism through representative democracy to technocracy. But recently the technocratic institutions and populism have become more aligned, bypassing democracy. One example she gives is direct appeals from technocratic bodies to populist goals, as in the "Fed Listens" series. It seems benign in this case, making the operations of these important bodies more transparent. But broadly it's concerning. The direct appeal to populism reflects declining trust in democratic bodies, a perceived or real inability for democracy to fix problems, and a weakening of our constitutional order and separation of powers. Article 1 of the constitution gives Congress the ability to control the currency; that authority has been delegated to the executive, and from the executive to an independent body. There are reasons for that independence, but it's also at tension with our rule of law, and feeds discontent with the broader political system.

There's a quote on page 274 that I really liked: "American policy makers' and institutions' attempts to stabilize prices have reflected, shaped, and sometimes come into conflict with our political values. As American political values are neither homogeneous nor static, the legitimacy of a wide variety of state interventions in prices has been litigated and relitigated in the courts and the courts of public opinion". Things are complicated! Political movements have risen and shifted over time, and actions that once seemed unthinkable (setting a minimum wage, leaving the gold standard) now are our normal. There is no natural law when it comes to the economy: it's us, our opinions and actions, that shape it. We can and often do change over time.

Near the end Binder mentions her own preferred approach of targeting the Nominal GDP (NGDP) instead of the inflation rate. So if the long-run desired inflation rate is 2% and the real GDP growth rate is 2.5%, the Fed could target an average annual nominal GDP growth rate of 4.5%. One appeal of this is that it explicitly focuses on both sides of the dual mandate: if there is a recession and the GDP drops (or seems likely to drop), the Fed would pursue looser money and more inflationary policy until it is back on track. She's an economist and I'm not; on reading this, my mind goes to a few places. First, from my understanding, a long-term real GDP rate of 2.5% feels ambitious for a fully developed economy. The real GDP rate tends to be the population growth rate plus the productivity growth rate, with productivity largely dependent on advances in technology. My understanding (which may be wrong) is that since 1820 or so the long-run per-capita growth rate in the most advanced economies has tended to be near 1%. So you take that and add any population growth you can get. I'd be curious to hear if Binder's thinking has changed in the last two years; if the US continues to pursue an anti-immigrant agenda, we're likely to see flat or even declining population over the long term; if we continue our anti-science and anti-higher-education agenda, we'll probably start to lag the 1% per capita real GDP growth. That might mean pursuing a 4% annual inflation rate instead of 2% over the long term. Which might be fine, as long as that expectation stays anchored, but I think the expectation behind targeting NGDP is to accommodate short-term and temporary shocks rather than long-run changes in real growth.

Anyways! This book was even better than I expected. Even though I've read a decent amount of economic books covering this era, most of the information was new to me, and I really appreciated the focus in the writing. It deepened my understanding of inflation specifically and price levels more broadly. This book fits in nicely alongside some other ones: where The Code of Capital focuses on private law (contracts, trusts, bankruptcy, etc.), Shock Values focuses on public law (statutory law and court challenges to private laws). Where The Birth of Plenty looks at the reasons for growth, Shock Values looks at the reasons for price changes. Where Investing In US Financial History details events in the stock market, Shock Values details events in the currency market. I'd definitely recommend this book to any money nerds like me, and it could also be a good entry point to anyone who has a particular interest in learning more about why we had that large inflation a few years ago and what history tells us about efforts to combat inflation.

Glassworks for Gelre

2026-06-26T19:58:00.000-07:00

I continue to be obsessed with Victoria 3. I recently was on vacation for nearly a week, and for most of the time I caught myself thinking about my current campaign, hearing the music in my head, plotting strategy and reviewing previous decisions.

I'm now well into the 20th century. This game does a fantastic job at depicting the enormous changes that occurred in the world within the span of two generations: from a predominantly peasant-based agricultural society to one with telephones, airplanes, power plants and more. As well as an explosion in new ideologies and movements, including Communism, anarchy and fascism.

I'm mostly writing this post to jot down a few notes. I plan to play through to the 1936 end date - if so, it will be the first time I've ever actually finished a Paradox game!

One new mechanic in V3 is Expeditions. There are various options, like searching for the source of the Nile, mapping the American West, being the first to the South Pole, etc. The mechanics for this are fairly simple. You appoint a General or Admiral to lead the expedition, and pay a monthly fee to support the expedition costs. Each month, there's a chance of an event firing, which generally describes some scenario your expedition has encountered (suspicious natives, illness, rockslide) and lets you make a choice. You're trading off Progress and Peril: you want to fill your Progress bar before your Peril bar fills. Based on my experience, it seems like the best strategy is to avoid Peril whenever possible: it's better to pick a choice that makes Minor Progress and no Peril than one with full Progress and Minor Peril.

I'd successfully done a few African expeditions and thought I had a handle on them, then started the Tibet one, which turned out to be significantly different. This one doesn't have a Peril bar, and instead you're basically racing against the clock: you need to reach Lhasa and negotiate with the leader before your commander dies or war breaks out. At one point a Diplomatic Play triggered, and I got pretty confused. I went down a rabbit hole of demanding them to become a subject; they were Fearful but never backed down. When the war started, there was nothing to do: no Front ever appeared. I went so far as to write a post on the official Paradox forum to try and figure this out - I'll have more details below, but the upshot is that this expedition probably shouldn't have even been possible for me since I didn't share a land border with Tibet, and is likely one of the many wonky things that have cropped up in the wake of the Great Wave update.

I was able to reload a save game from just before the Diplomatic Play - fortunately V3 is more forgiving than other Paradox games and you can still get Achievements without Ironman enabled. The Diplo Play fired again. At first I tried to drag it out as long as possible - each time you add a War Goal or call another party into the conflict, the timer pauses for a bit, so I was hoping I could complete the Expedition before it fired. Tibet stayed Fearful for the entire time, but still wouldn't back down. I eventually let the timer proceed into the last phase, and this time they did back down. I think that it's because this time I had a very benign Primary War Goal - I think it was just Humiliation or maybe a small monetary fine - while my Secondary War Goals were more major, like subjecthood and lots of forced goods transfers. (I was trying to pick as many War Goals for as little Infamy as possible.) I think that, basically, they did the math that just giving in would be relatively harmless, while fighting and losing the war would be much more painful; in contrast, the first time around my primary goal was incredibly painful and I didn't have any secondary goals, so they didn't have anything to lose from war.

After they backed down, the expedition ticked a few more times and I completed it. The writing in this, like all of the events, is really good: the short vignettes are really powerful at setting atmosphere and stakes in just a sentence or two. The writing style reminds me a lot of Failbetter Games' writing; I know Alexis Kennedy helped with writing on Stellaris and am curious if he helped with V3 as well, or if Paradox has just learned good lessons from those games.

At the end of this I had Tibet as a subject, which is cool and all, but not all that helpful. Again, they're a distant, land-locked nation. They immediately demanded that I give them control of their own market; I initially refused, then realized that they did need it, since they had no way to access my own market.

This gets back to the issue I had before with no Front. In Victoria 3, you can sign treaties with other nations for Military Access and/or Transit Rights, which respectively allow you to march armies through a nation's territory and to trade through their territory. Conceptually, I feel like if I have a treaty for movement through China, then I should be able to land troops in China and march them through to Tibet; or I should be able to trade from Tibet through China and out to my market via the ocean. As I've learned, though, this is not the case. You can't "land" troops or trade directly into a foreign nation, whether or not you have a treaty with them: they only allow you access starting from land you yourself own. This is where "treaty ports" come into play: these are small, single-province territories that generally have very few resources or arable land but do give you strategic footholds into distant lands. So, long story short, I should be prioritizing getting Treaty Ports if I want to conduct military operations on another continent. For trade, my general preference is to get a coastal nation to join my trading Power Bloc and then work my way inland; unfortunately, in east Asia all of the nations are insular, isolationist and xenophobic, so it's incredibly difficult to get the necessary Influence advantage. I'm still trying to figure out how to connect to Tibet.

Moving on to politics: I mentioned in my last post that I was having a hard time passing the Laissez-Faire law. The only interest group that ordinarily supports it is the Industrialists, and they were very unhappy with me due to my strong pro-labor positions, and had low clout due to my Universal Suffrage voting, and seemed particularly reluctant to join larger parties; when they did, the ideological incoherence tended to make those parties non-starters for forming government. I did eventually get to pass the law; I forget now whether that's because a Market Liberal became a party leader of another interest group, or if the Industrialists were finally able to make it into government. The Trade Unions were incensed that I was even considering the law, but I had banked a lot of approval with them from my earlier laws; I think I was able to neutralize their opposition by promising to pass Workplace Safety Protections or similar, so I was glad to still have that bargaining chip up my sleeve.

My private sector has grown a lot since adopting Laissez-Faire. I don't usually pay a ton of attention to it, it just grinds away in the background building stuff, and I'll pick up the slack for any necessary goods it under-develops. Every once in a while I'll peek into the Private Construction Queue and see what it's up to. One time I did that and burst out laughing. It had queued up twelve Railroads in Timbuktu. Timbuktu had a single railroad, which, granted, was running at capacity and earning a respectable profit; but still, it was a massive overinvestment into a remote backwater. I'm sure that the "dumb" AI just saw the current profit and decided to jump on board. But the thing that cracked me up is, that is exactly what happened historically with railroad constructions! The mid-to-late 1800s were filled with ventures where multiple competing railroads would pour into an area, overinvest, overbuild, and be left with too much infrastructure that was earning too little to be profitable. That story has cropped up in House of Morgan, Goliath, and more. Anyways, it just cracks me up that one thing can both seem like a really dumb AI bug and an accurate historical representation of our real-life stupidity.

It's been interesting to see how politics have shifted. In the monarchial days, I tended to have high Legitimacy with a power base that included the Intelligentsia and some other IGs, so I was able to generally progress through reforms I wanted. Once we switched to a democracy, I put a strong thumb on the scales for a Trade Union / Intelligentsia party; this had fairly low legitimacy, which I partially offset with low taxes and concessions. Over time this party grew very strong, and I finally started to have more Loyalists than Radicals due to the continued high legitimacy. More recently, the Catholic/Conservative party has consistently been stronger. Now that I no longer need to pass particular laws, I've shifted my strategy from boosting my preferred party to instead checking what party is in the best position at the start of an election, and then taking all the choices to further boost their vote. This ensures that they take office with a high Legitimacy; I've been able to run High Taxes while also maximizing my Loyalists for a couple of decades now. High Loyalists keeps all the Interest Groups in the neutral-to-happy zone (except the Landowners, but screw them).

I think that the reason the conservative party has been stronger lately is because of my advancement and wealth. I've been shifting to more advanced production methods, which has more demand for skilled labor and middle-strata jobs; I think this results in a shift to a populace that proportionally is more likely to favor the Petite Bourgeois over the Trade Unions. Historical materialism, baby!

I've been really happy with the shift to Laissez Faire, which as hoped has turbo-charged my economy. The budgets have gotten really weird: for the first decade or so, I persistently ran a large deficit, and yet my treasury was usually near the max. I think this is because the private sector keeps buying government-owned buildings, which impacts the treasury with one-off transfers but doesn't show up in the budget. I slashed taxes and still had a hard time staying under the maximum reserves, until I eventually grew my military large enough to eat up the surplus.

Speaking of armies: as I mentioned in my last post, I've had a few wars against the Netherlands. I've surpassed them with my tech, economy and military, but I've had to be strategic in my wars so they don't call in too many powerful allies; in particular, I've tried to wait until Great Britain is tied up in a half-dozen conflicts. I eventually conquered their continental holdings, seizing the remainder of Gelre and all of Holland and Friesland. However, I did not take Luxemburg, which I now hugely regret. I'd been friendly to them, supporting their independence, and had a vague idea that I might be able to diplomatically annex them. That isn't a thing in Victoria 3, though. They did break free of the Netherlands, but were just their own state; I could guarantee their independence, but again, that wouldn't actually add them to my territory. This was a bummer because I just needed their province to be able to form the United Netherlands, one of my few concrete goals for this campaign.

They got gobbled up by the German Empire, which then prompted me to shift my entire diplomatic outlook. I ended my campaign-long rivalry with Russia and boosted my friendship with France, hoping that one of them would start a war that I could join against Germany, who I was no longer appeasing. I also seriously cranked up my military. I'd had far more than enough for the Netherlands, but not nearly enough for Germany; worse, Germany was allied to Britain, which is friendly with me but has the world's largest army and an even larger navy. I'd been neglecting military techs for most of the campaign, but made a concerted effort to try and get a generational advantage in my ship designs.

The actual war for Luxemburg was huge. I secured an alliance with France and declared on Germany specifically for that one teeny tiny province in German Wallonia. Britain joined Germany, and so did Russia. Britain was fighting a bunch of other wars at the same time and never landed troops in the continent, but I had to play hide-and-seek with their navies: I would sink supply ships and blockage ports around the North and Baltic Seas, then scurry back to Holland once Britain's stack of 120 Modern Ironclads appeared on the horizon.

The war was a slog - I had an advantage in quality, but Germany and Russia had infinite manpower to throw in front of me. I made gradual progress on the front along the Rhineland and Alsace-Lorrance, but no progress in Wallonia. I eventually set that as a Strategic Objective, which I think may have prompted my generals to change their focus along the front. I feel like they should have done that anyways, as getting the War Goal is so essential for victory. Once I did have it, I switched my generals' orders from Advance to Defend and waited a few months for the war enthusiasm to drop low enough. At last - tada! - I had my United Netherlands.

A little while after this, France somewhat surprised me by launching their own war against Sardinia-Piedmont. I shouldn't have been surprised, France has been fairly war-hungry for the whole game; now that I have Luxemburg I think I'll probably gracefully drop that alliance. But it ended up working out pretty well. Portugal answered Sardinia-Piedmont's call to arms, and in exchange for my own support I was able to make a secondary demand of Portuguese Angola. This is adjacent to my huge colonial holdings in the Congo, and covers a ton of coastline and adds significantly to my stock of potential rubber plantations (and, just as importantly, removed non-Belgian rubber from the World Market). Russia was also pulled into the war, with France making some nonsensical demand for like a regime change in Chechnya or something.

I was feeling good about this war, but was shocked to realize that all of my battalions were at 0% Organization, hamstringing their effectiveness. The UI for this was very unhelpful, claiming that there was a supply shortage and the "supply ships" were delivering 0 supplies. I eventually realized that it was due to a shortage of radios in particular. Which is weird, since I hadn't discovered radios yet - weirder yet, nobody on the planet had! I think that I had discovered a more advanced unit type (probably Mobile Artillery or something) and upgraded my battalions to that type, but that type apparently requires radios, even if they don't exist. Annoying. I think the game should warn you if you're trying to research and/or switch to a unit type you can't actually use. (Ideally the Radio tech would be a prerequisite for techs that require Radio, but I don't think they currently have any way to manage dependencies between the Production, Military and Social tech trees.)

So I switched up my research plans to drop everything and discover Radio. This took about 9 months; in the meantime, I was able to completely take the totally undefended Angola despite 0% Organization. I had a lot of troops along the Rhone front, I set them all to Defend and let France do all the heavy fighting. (Hey, they started the war!) Eventually I discovered Radio, was able to switch my existing Electrics Industries to start building them, and gradually get my forces Organized again and eventually assigned to advancing the front. Once we were all pushing together, we were able to take down Sardinia-Piedmont.

They surrendered, but the war continued. I'm still getting used to the Victoria 3 system of war. You can't negotiate a peace unless all parties in the war agree to it, including co-belligerants; but anyone can Capitulate at any time. If you do this you leave the war, but co-belligerants stay in it. S-P gave in on all the War Goals against them, but I still didn't own Portuguese Angola, because that goal was against an ally.

I shifted my focus to invading Iberia. I would have loved military access through Spain, but Spain hates me for reasons I no longer recall. So I did my first, and so far only, Naval Invasion. I think this is another new feature from the recent Great Wave update. I didn't have any Marines or anything, but I had a good-sized army of about 54 Infantry and Artillery, and a big Transport fleet to get them to Iberia. Portugal's armies teleported back from the Rhone, but they were pretty small. I was able to get a toehold, then could transport the rest of my armies there regularly. Before long Portugal surrendered and I got my Angola. As I write this Russia fights on, which is pretty funny - they don't have any War Goals assigned to them, so there doesn't seem to be any point, other than maybe inflicting pain on France. I don't really care about anything else in this war so I've preemptively demobilized my troops and am letting France do what it wants, which at the moment seems to be launching doomed naval invasions of Karelia.

That seems to be a good place to pause this update and jump back into the game! I don't have any other conquests planned on the horizon, and I think that once I end my alliance with France I should be free from getting pulled into or being targeted by other wars. The one other thing I'd kind of like to try and get is Multiculturalism, which seems to be even harder than Laissez-Faire since none of the Interest Groups support it, nor any of the major ideologies in Belgium/United Netherlands like Liberalism or Radicalism. It looks like I might need to trigger some sort of revolt or uprising to get it. Anyways, that's another system for me to try and learn; in the meantime, I'm having a blast just growing my economy, increasing my GDP and literacy rate and standards of living. Fun times!

Our Town is a Company Town

2026-06-22T20:47:00.000-07:00

I've had Company Town by Madeline Ashby on my list for a while now. I think I was originally drawn to it via a warm recommendation from Charles Stross. I wasn't sure what to expect, as I wasn't familiar with the author and wasn't even sure exactly what genre it was. It ended up being a fun, exciting and thought-provoking read.

MINI SPOILERS

Like many of my favorite books in speculative fiction, the worldbuilding in Company Town is almost all implicit: nobody sits you down and says "This is How Things Are and How They Got To Be This Way". Over the course of the book, though, you gradually figure out the setting, in parallel with getting to know the characters and the actual plot.

So, laying down my impression, which is much more linear than the actual book:

Company Town is set in the mid-future: I'd guess a couple of generations from now, not multiple centuries. Nations still exist, but mostly as geographic descriptors, not political entities. This book takes place in what used to be Canada. The titular town is a massive offshore oil rig. Its primary economy is extracting oil, but there's a whole town that has grown up around that industry, which is larger than the work itself.

A few years before this book opens, a disaster occurred that killed many people in the town. They were able to rebuild, but at enormous expense, which has resulted in the town being sold to the Lynch Corporation. This is a wealthy and comparatively benevolent family concern, headed by the elder Lynch who has been pursuing life-extending treatments and so is overseeing multiple generations of his progeny.

The overall technology of this world is recognizable, with a few particular innovations standing out to me. Genetic screening and modification have recently become widespread and socially accepted, so parents will select their childrens' traits in advance. People are also significantly augmented, with bio-engineered limbic upgrades and eye enhancements and such. And speaking of eye enhancements, most people participate in a sort of shared augmented-reality version of the world: they select what image they want to project to others, and decide what images they want to receive. In general this allows people to edit out parts of their vision that they don't want to see or replace it with something more palatable.

The protagonist, Hwa, is kind of an oddity in this world. She was born near the tail end of non-genetically-selected humans. She has a birth defect that would horrify some people, except that since everyone else has selective vision, they don't see anything wrong with her. And she has, out of pride or poverty, rejected implants, making her way through life with just her own strength.

It took me a while to realize that Hwa is also a high-schooler. She comes across as significantly older in the opening chapters. One of the major industries in the town is prostitution, and Hwa is a bodyguard who escorts the escorts, picking them up from clients and making sure everything is consensual and safe. Many of the characters in this novel are prostitutes, and overall it seems to be pretty sex-work-positive, although there's also a lot of danger shown in the profession.

For most of the novel, Hwa's job is protecting the young Lynch scion, putting her bodyguard skills to use protecting him from an unknown enemy; they also attend class together, collaborate on science projects and go to a dance. Hwa also grows closer to Daniel, a protector/enforcer for the Lynches, which turns into a pretty great slow-burning romance.

MEGA SPOILERS

The brutal murders continue to pile up as the novel progresses. There's a pretty fun twist near the end, when you realize that all along the killer has been trying to stop Hwa, not murder Joel Lynch. I was surprised by who the killer actually turns out to be, although we've spent fairly little time outside of the main cast and so I struggled to remember what we knew about him.

The book definitely seems to set up a sequel when it ends, particularly with the revelation that the killer(s) were not the entity that had sent the threatening notes about Joel. I have no idea what to make of that.

END SPOILERS

I really enjoyed this book - I read it during a vacation, and it was a great place to lose myself during long flights and while nestled in quiet spaces. As far as I can tell it doesn't look like there's a sequel, but the author has written several other books and I'll likely be looking for them in the future. Overall it was a fun read with good action, some really witty dialogue, nicely twisty plotting, and an intriguing world to reveal.

What's So Great About the Great Books

2026-06-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

I like reading books, and I like writing about reading books, and I like writing about reading books that write about reading books!

I just finished "What's So Great About the Great Books?", the latest book and first non-fiction book from Naomi Kanakia. It's a great, thoughtful, gently persuasive case for the seemingly-daunting task of reading through "the classics", the received-wisdom (but surprisingly amorphous) list of the greatest books ever written. She roams around a bit, looking at the contents of the books themselves but also directly addressing the many reasons why people may be reluctant to embark on such a time-consuming project.

For the last few years I've followed along with this project through her blog Woman Of Letters, which launched as a Substack in part to promote this book's project, and since then has also become a place to read intriguing short fiction (as well as some really fun and occasionally catty inside-baseball glimpses of the literary fiction world). Some topics from this book have been previously discussed on there, such as the importance of taste and the value in reading authors from diverse eras as well as diverse cultures. I liked how everything came together in this volume, each chapter is nicely focused but the book as a whole coheres and can easily refer back to previous points.

While this isn't exactly a memoir, it does draw on a lot of autobiographical material, both the overall course of her life and specific meaningful moments within it. This doesn't feel at all gratuitous: the book aims to show how reading the Great Books can change your life, and shows that in a concrete way. She also shows how her own understanding of the Great Books has changed: when she started reading them, she was an aspiring science-fiction author, and assumed that all writers and publishers were immersed in the Great Books. Only many years later did she realize that most writers have not seriously studied these books, either in school or outside of it, and that today that classics have only marginal influence inside academia.

I like how Naomi keeps restating the premise of the book - she uses different language at different points, but the overall thrust is that reading the Great Books is a good use of your time, because it will help develop your sense of taste. It does this by exposing you to very well-written literature, and literature from cultures unlike our own, so being exposed to this greatness helps you recognize greatness. Having this taste won't directly transform your life: it won't make you more employable or popular, but it can improve the quality of your life and make you more thoughtful. In her own experience, she can't say "Reading X helped me do Y", but the overall experience of reading Proust was profound, and reading about the struggles of characters in eighteenth-century novels gives language for us to describe our own situations.

The book spends a lot of time considering the intersection of politics and the Great Books. Historically, the Great Books as a concept started as a middle-class American invention in the post-WW2 era. This was a time when the elite institutions like Harvard stopped requiring Latin and Greek, so there was a desire to still share those ancient stories to a larger audience. Academics thought that people reading these great books would help make the populace more educated, thoughtful, better citizens. Encyclopedia Britannica sent its salesmen door-to-door selling subscriptions to the Great Books; their direct goal was profit, and the vision they sold was that people would be able to raise their social and cultural capital by learning to speak about these great books. Interestingly, this was especially effective in many African-American homes, and you can still see a lot of Great Books on the bookshelves of older black peoples' homes. In a survey Encyclopedia Britannica commissioned to study who was buying the books, they found that they tended to be weird, loner nerds, who loved books but felt awkward in high society, and saw the books as a potential gateway to entering that world.

Today, interest in the Great Books in America tends to be aligned with Christian, traditional, conservative groups. The classics tend to be either ignored or viewed with suspicion by progressive or liberal readers, which includes most of secular academia and the publishing world. Naomi seems to be primarily writing to this latter group, and many chapters consider the objections people might have. Are these books racist? Do they harm society? Can reading them trigger you and cause psychological damage? She takes these concerns seriously, looking at the reasons they are raised and what valid arguments could be made, but continually concludes that the benefits outweigh the risks. In some cases, these books are great because they swim in murky and uncomfortable waters. Or we can learn to see the beauty of their art and not be distracted by the author's prejudices.

I have to say that I think I personally lean more towards the perspective of Naomi's wife, who questions the company that these books keep. I mentally sort art as inferior to politics: beauty is wonderful, but survival is more important than beauty. That said, What's Go Great About the Great Books? comes at politics-and-art from a slightly different angle. I'm used to arguments about, say, whether we should praise and study works like "Triumph of the Will" or "Birth of a Nation" that are impressive artistic achievements with horrendous messages. Naomi, though, sees art as inherently individualistic. Experiencing a work of art doesn't mechanically move you in a given direction. If it moves you at all, the effect will depend on your own private history, culture, community, prior beliefs, concerns in life, and so on. As one example, Anna Karenina is beloved by many people who identify as leftist, even though the novel is explicitly about traditional morality. Reading Anna Karenina won't mechanically transform you into a traditional moralist.

Or to directly quote from the book:

To reduce the Great Books to politics is to make a fundamental mistake about the nature of reading. A book does not make us do or think anything. In reading the book, we might alter our own beliefs, but we changed ourselves - the book does not change us. So, to say certain books are bad is to, as its core, make an assumption about free will: to assume that books can act mechanically on human beings, such that human beings are helpless to judge or resist them. But if human beings can determine their own beliefs, then books cannot be pernicious; they can only be better or worse tools for achieving whatever purpose the reader intends for them.

Then a footnote adds:

An exception to this statement is books that lie. These are books that make arguments that are easily disproven, using either surface-level logic or empirically attained evidence.

Reading that, my mind immediately goes to books that have had a pernicious effect on civilization: the Turner Diaries, the Malleus Malleficarum, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The latter two books definitely lie, the former is a novel. What does it mean for a novel to "lie"? And does it matter that most people believed the lies? To be fair, I don't think any of these books or books like them are part of the Great Books canon, but still, I think there's a gap between our ideal vision of a noble reader thoughtfully and sensitively communing with a work of literature, and the actual measured impacts that some books have caused in generating murders.

Naomi says that books with "perfect politics" can't be Great Books, because they're too flat, missing the complexity and contradiction that reflect real life and are present in great literature. Emile Zola has complicated politics, Upton Sinclair has perfect politics, but The Jungle isn't a good book, because its protagonists are too perfect. I agree that complexity is essential for greatness, but I also think that you can have good complexity or bad complexity. George Saunders might be my Platonic ideal of good complexity - his characters are messy and flawed, but there's a keen moral voice at work in his work. You can still wrestle with a hard problem and its rough edges while always being within a bounded moral area. Would Saunders' stories be better if they earnestly espoused racism or homophobia? They'd be more "complex" but worse.

I'm reminded of recent discourse on and about Bluesky - there's a recurring charge that it's an "echo chamber". Which is kind of funny, because there's nonstop heated argument and debate on there. But on Bluesky it's mostly leftists arguing with liberals. Would the discourse be elevated if the Bronze Age Pervert and Matt Walsh and Curtis Yarvin were a key part of the discourse? I think not - it would be more "complex", but wouldn't elevate worthy ideas above their current exercise. As in the Brain-Dead Megaphone and Nexus, adding more information does not always and mechanically bring us closer to goodness or truth. It has to be good, true information to begin with.

But again, I think all this is somewhat orthogonal to Naomi's thesis. We aren't talking about the Turner Diaries, we're talking about Huckleberry Finn and Aristotle and Nietzsche. These are specifically great books, written by people who died a long time ago and were writing to and about a world that no longer exists. There are good things we can get out of those books, and we shouldn't let our present concerns prevent us from their goodness.

Shifting topics a bit: Kant comes up several times during this book. I haven't read him, but I really like the idea presented here that we can know an object or truth through intuition, not through reason. Logic and reason let us communicate ideas, but those ideas only exist within our minds; actual objects do exist, but we cannot discover them through reason. But art can be a way for us to directly experience and understand those things which cannot be explained. This reminds me a little bit of Kierkegaard, who I have read and enjoyed, and similarly draws a strong boundary between logic and faith: faith isn't necessarily less valuable or important than logic, but exists independently of it.

The appendix to the book includes the list of Great Books that Naomi has been following. As she explains, while plenty of people are eager to extol the virtues of The Great Books, they tend to be very cagey about exactly what books are on or off the list. A handful are indisputable (no list would omit The Odyssey or Shakespeare), but when you start deciding who is in or out you'll inevitably get drawn into arguments. So it's mostly coincidental that this is the specific list she's followed.

Anyways, I like lists too! Just for fun, I noted below which of these Great Books I've read. Ones I mark with a * are cases where I've read only part of a book (typically a collection of poems or essays). Like Naomi, I count books that I know I've read even when I don't remember them well. I think I read The Mayor of Casterbridge for English class in either my junior or senior year of high school, but I couldn't tell you anything about it today.

I read a lot of these books in high school or in college: I was an English Literature major, so many were very relevant! I more clearly remember the ones I've read since then as an adult. I am not counting plays that I've seen but not read, and obviously not adaptations like movies.

Anyways, I have read:

The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous

The Iliad by Homer

The Odyssey by Homer

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Antigone by Sophocles

The Histories by Herodotus

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

The Birds by Aristophanes

Protagorus by Plato

Phaedo by Plato

The Aeneid by Virgil

* The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Prince by Machiavelli

The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part 1 by Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part 2 by Shakespeare

Hamlet by Shakespeare

King Lear by Shakespeare

Macbeth by Shakespeare

Othello by Shakespeare

The Tempest by Shakespeare

* Selected Sonnets by Shakespeare

* Selected Works by John Donne

Discourse on Method by Descartes

Paradise Lost by Milton

* Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

* Second Treatise of Government by John Locke

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

* Basic Documents in American History by Thomas Jefferson and others

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

Kubla Khan by Coleridge

Pride and Prejudice by Austen

* Nature by Emerson

* Selected Essays by Emerson

The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne

* Selected Tales by Hawthorne

* On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

* Short Stories and Other Works by Edgar Allen Poe

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Walden by Thoreau

Civil Disobedience by Thoreau

The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels

Moby-Dick by Melville

Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville

* Selected Poems by Whitman

Madame Bovary by Flaubert

Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky

* Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson

Huckleberry Finn by Twain

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Ulysses by James Joyce

The Trial by Kafka

The Castle by Kafka

Brave New World by Huxley

The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner

* Short Stories by Hemingway

Labyrinths by Borges

Dreamtigers by Borges

Pale Fire by Nabokov

Animal Farm by Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell

* Collected Poems by Auden

The Plague by Camus

The Stranger by Camus

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez

Looking through this list, the biggest surprise for me is my lack of Dickens - he has a lot of books on this list, I've read some of his work but nothing on the list. The list and Naomi's recommendation also reminds me that I want to read more of the great Russian novelists - Crime and Punishment was an incredible book, and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain exposed me to a lot of great short stories from Russians. I'm pretty sparse on poetry and drama, and feel fine about that; most poetry leaves me cold, and I'd usually prefer to see a staged performance of a play than read the text.

What's So Great About the Great Books? was a treat. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect when I picked it up, and I'm still not sure how best to describe it (a manifesto? an essay? a memoir?), but I know I enjoyed it. I've been a lifelong reader, but definitely an aimless one, veering between authors and subjects based largely on whims. I admire the dedication and earnestness in pursuing such a daunting life-long project to read through all these Great Books. As Naomi says, not everyone will, can or should follow this path: some people are too busy curing HIV to read Proust. But for those of us with the leisure time and attention spans to read, we can get a lot from these old, great books.

Belgian Again

2026-06-05T18:20:35.346-07:00

Okay, I'm back on my Paradox saddle again! I've been doing almost nothing for the last month other than working and playing Victoria 3; when I remember, I try to also sleep and eat. Now that I've gotten at least someway up the learning curve I'm having a blast. I keep thinking "I should write a blog post about what I've done and learned!", and then just play more Victoria for a while. Now that I'm finally starting to write this post, it will likely take me at least a week to finish. It is what it is!

Let's see... my last post was the end of my Sweden "training run". I planned to do Belgium next, based largely on the Paradox wiki indicating that it's one of the easiest countries and one of the best to learn with (along with Sweden). I got some ways into the game, felt like I was doing well for a while, but reached a point where my economy seemed to be permanently spiraling downward. After a patch update, I realized that Paradox had made a huge change to the game: previously, Political Concessions would add more influence to the faction which granted them, but now they also cost around 100-150 Authority per concession... including ones signed on previous savegames! There was no way I would ever be able to recover from this. But I was already planning on restarting to apply the various things I had learned, so I appreciated the nudge to get a blank slate.

I'm playing as Belgium again, and as I write this I'm now up to... hm, I think I'm in the 1860s or so. (Update: Nearly 1890!) I have fairly warm relations with all the major western European powers, although Prussia / North Germany / German Empire are making me a bit nervous. I've signed and maintained a Defensive Pact with Sweden, that hasn't come into play but I think it helped discourage a potential Netherlands conflict early on. I'm probably friendliest with France, which is the one major nearby power to have ejected its monarchy.

In my very first Sweden game I'd joined the British Empire Power Bloc, then mildly regretted it as it seemed to only offer downsides. In my first Belgium game Britain made overtures and got mad when I rejected them. This time I avoided too many entanglements with Britain while still remaining friendly with them. I considered joining the French Free Commerce Committee, which at least seemed to offer some benefit, but decided it would be interesting to try and create my own Power Bloc. I ended up making my own Trade League, and it's been a lot of fun to grow it. I started off getting a lot of unrecognized African nations into it, which doesn't really help at all with Mandate but is economically beneficial and got me used to the recruitment mechanics. I made a big play for Brazil, which was a big help, and since then I've gotten almost all of South America and most of Africa to join, including regional and major unrecognized powers. Now that I have Mandate and Principles ticking up I'm really seeing the benefit. Power Blocs remind me a lot of Federations from Stellaris, which are one of my favorite mechanics from that game, although Victoria Power Blocs at least are a lot less militarily oriented.

I've also been making a big colonization play in this game. Getting an Interest in Equatorial Africa was super hard, I tried to do it in my first Belgium game but never was able to do it. Kongo is the only centralized state you can interact with, and it's basically impossible to reach the required 1000 Influence with them to start colonizing. In this game I made every single treaty with them that I could that would increase interest, and eventually sent my navy down there to project power to push me over the threshold. Once I did have a high enough interest to create a colony, that made enough interest to keep it going. I did maintain the Kongo treaties to get all the way up to 2500 Influence for the Establish Missions decree.

As a side note: I mentioned in my previous post how I really like how colonization is visually depicted in this game, as "decentralized nations" that you are essentially invading rather than the "blank spots on the map" of Europa Universalis. The mechanics are a bit different as well. In EU, there is a "native uprising" progress bar that generally slowly ticks up over time as your colony progresses. You can manage this in various ways, like having a strategy of Native Appeasement (or whatever it's called) to slow down the progress rate; or station troops in the territory to suppress them; or just let it fire and reset. In EU4 a native uprising will wipe out some number of your settlers, but in some cases that might be preferable to permanently stationing a military force on the other side of the planet. I think that in EU3 an uprising would actually spawn a military unit in the territory that you would need to defeat, although it's been a while and I may be mis-remembering. Anyways, in Victoria there is a "Tension" meter that rises with nearby decentralized nations. It ticks up each time you expand a new province, and very slowly decays over time. If you are aggressively expanding (with a very high Colonial Affairs office and possibly an Establish Missions decree and/or focusing all your expansion on one or two colonies), then Tensions will very quickly rise to the maximum. But... at least in my game, this never had any consequence. According to the game, it should create a Diplomatic Play in the area as the decentralized power tries to shake you off; if you defeat them, you get a big boost to your expansion for some number of years; and like all other Diplomatic Plays, any other powers in the area can intervene, so what started as an indigenous uprising could expand into a global conflagration. But again, this never happened to me, despite me being at 100 Tension with many nations throughout Africa. I'm not sure if this is because my military was strong enough to dissuade them (it isn't that strong), or because I'm playing on an easier difficulty setting, or if it's some bug in this patch.

I mostly have Equitorial Africa to myself, except British Senegal has carved out some land and is currently killing itself in the Severe Malaria states. The other European powers (British, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Portugal) have all been competing on the Ivory Coast. I was originally planning to exclusively focus on inner Africa, but from peeking at the wiki I realize I need to secure some Oil supplies for the late game, and Sarahan Africa seems like my best chance for that. I made good process for a while, but got boxed out by France and my nemesis the Netherlands. So that was a good incentive for my first intentional war!

I started a Diplomatic Play to take the colony. My professional army was about 3x the size of theirs; they had conscripts to fill out the numbers, but I was pretty sure my army quality was better. The Netherlands did have a much larger navy than me, but I was pretty sure that navy was mostly busy in the Dutch East Indies and wouldn't be of too much concern to me. I felt good about fighting in the African colonies and in the Low Countries, and didn't have other interests overseas to defend.

There was a bit of a curveball when Spain decided to back the Netherlands - in the UI preview of the play it looked like nobody was open to being swayed, I'm curious if the Netherlands were able to call in a favor or if something else in the calculus changed to convince Spain to join. I did slightly expand my Diplomatic Maneuvers to demand Gelre as well - this is a "split state" that is mostly controlled by the Netherlands but with a decent slice in Belgium.

I do really like the overall shape of war in Victoria. Everything starts as a Diplomatic Play, and it's fairly common for them to be resolved before war - if a huge power declares on a tiny one, the tiny one will often give in rather than endure the expense and uncertainty of war. At some point you have to decide to start mobilizing your forces. As in the real-world 1800s, war is VERY expensive, so hopefully your economy is already on a solid footing before it starts. The actual progress of the war is fairly abstract: you have large Armies and Navies, each controlled by a General or Admiral, assign them to a Front and give them Orders (generally to Defend the front or Advance the front). The battles all happen automatically - you can click into them to see how they are progressing, but you aren't manually initiating them like in Europa Universalis or Stellaris. It feels a lot closer to Hearts of Iron, but with not as insane a level of operational detail.

In my case, I'd split my army into two parts, and moved a very small force into Africa so I could take the colony. This took ages! Apparently another effect from this recent patch is a total change in how the navy works, previously each ship could carry one army unit, but now my fleet of 12 ships could only carry 2 units at a time. So prior to the war I spent months ferrying back and forth. In retrospect I would have been totally fine with only 1 unit down there since the Netherlands didn't have any military in their colonies.

The larger armies remained in the Low Countries. As I'd hoped, my professional military basically wiped the floor with the conscript-heavy Netherlands forces. I was lucky that Spain mostly stayed at home and stared at us - they had a few battalions on the ground but not nearly enough to turn the tide. I did feel somewhat pleased by my going-in-blind strategic choices. I completely abandoned the Flanders front and focused my entire army on Luxemburg. They were crushed swiftly, wiping out the Luxemburgian (sp?) forces as well as their contingent of Dutch soldiers. That made my southern border completely secured and let me completely focus on the northern front. They hadn't had time to take many provinces, and once I arrived en masse we easily won nearly every battle, eventually pushing them back to the sea.

After exterminating the Dutch troops I was hoping to cash out for a nice payday - getting that African colony, but maybe also freeing Luxemburg, humiliating the Netherlands, and so on. I came to realize, though, that there's a key difference in warfare in Victoria 3 versus other Paradox games I've played. In order for a war to end, all parties must agree to it. In this case, the Netherlands had given up, but Spain hadn't suffered many losses and still had huge reserves, so they were more than willing to keep going. This is pretty different from, say, Europa Universalis or Stellaris where the War Leader can just make unilateral decisions. But I can kind of see the benefit of the Victoria approach - it's annoying when, say, the AI agrees to give away your territory in a peace deal, or if they white-peace out when you're steamrolling towards a total victory. And, on the other-other hand, Victoria 3 does allow for concessions on both sides, unlike other games where there is only one "winner" who can receive spoils. (Victoria is much more accurate to how wars in history have concluded!)

Unlike the other Paradox games, you also can't create separate peaces with multiple enemies: it's all-or-nothing. Fortunately, there is still a rough equivalent of a ticking war score, so once I had conquered both the colony and, uh, the entire Netherlands, each week both parties grew more and more willing to deal with me. I wasn't quite able to get everything I wanted, but I did manage to end the war taking the entire state of Gelre in addition to the colony. Gelre had been the runt of my three states, and I was pleased to see that the Netherlands had actually developed their larger share of it quite thoroughly.

Just from looking at the map, this seemed like a stupid war - the Dutch colony was so small - but it was 100% worth fighting over. I was able to start colonies on the other side, into Timbuktu and then into the Sahara. With my focused colonizing I was able to outflank the growing French colonies, and as I write this I have the entirety of inland northern Africa at my disposal. Which means that I'll be able to tap that precious, precious oil!

Other than that, I've avoided wars for the most part - I get tempted to jump in when Britain or France bullies one of my tiny African partners into their power bloc, but it just isn't worth the conflict at this time. Maybe one day I'll get them back. I do have a feeling that by the late-game I'll end up in a big war against someone. The German Empire seems the most likely, as they have claims on Wallonia; I also might want to eventually take a crack at Britain, as they are the 800-pound gorilla squatting on the #1 Great Power in the ranking charts.

Politically, Belgium starts off as a Monarchy, but a fairly progressive one with periodic elections. I've been loving the political aspect to this game, proposing laws and fighting to get them passed, cutting deals with interest groups and shaping the economy to produce the kind of electorate that will be conducive to my vision. I've focused on the law changes that seem to have good in-game benefits, particularly public education and graduated taxation. I used to also push for neutral-ish laws that didn't seem to have much of an in-game impact but that are personally appealing to me, like workers' protections and social programs. I now think that it might be better (from a realpolitik perspective) to hold off on those as they might be options to persuade recalcitrant interest groups to support other laws that they would ordinarily oppose, in a "If you give me X I'll pass Y" kind of way.

One of the most white-knuckle parts of my game so far was the transition to a Parliamentary Republic. I'd previously made some changes to the voting structure and stuff that went relatively smoothly, so I was not prepared for the intense reaction: a strong Monarchist movement swiftly appeared and began agitating against the law. This hurt its chances of advancement, created unhappy radicals in the population, and, judging from the tool-tip, was on its way to creating a full-fledged civil war. And alarmingly, the Monarchist movement was largely supported by the Armed Forces, so not only would there be a civil war, but an extremely challenging one.

I pulled out all the stops for this one: I slashed taxes to increase my government's Legitimacy, cut deals with every group I could to support the legislation, spent Authority to suppress the Monarchist movement (this didn't pause it but at least slowed its growth a bit), and used every Advance to boost my chance for success instead of society-wide benefits. At last, in the final Voting stage, the RNG handed me a Debate with a killer of a choice. The initial vote had failed, but an angry mob had stormed the palace and taken King Leopold prisoner. I could arrest the mob and insist on doing things the right way, giving a big boost to legitimacy and prestige but postponing the final vote by another three months. Or give in to the crowd and commit regicide.

I winced. Every bone in my body wanted to follow the legal system and ensure an orderly, bloodless transition. But... that Monarchist Movement was up in the 90s, and in just a few weeks that dreaded civil war would trigger. How could I hold one life against that of the tens of thousands who would be killed in a devastating internecine struggle? Even the life of a king? I gave the nod, a sickening "thwick/chunk!" sound effect played, the monarchy was ended and the United States of Belgium were born.

I came to recognize that this is a common shape to the major social and political upheavals depicted in Victoria 3. While we were debating the monarchy, tensions were incredibly high and society stood on the edge of a knife. But once it was decided, the tide swiftly turned. The monarchist movement gradually abated and eventually disappeared altogether as the final remnants of monarchism were stamped out. Traditional supporters of the monarchy like the Landowners moved on, and everyone adapted to the new republican order. I've seen similar things play out since, such as an incipient Communist uprising triggered by my (eventually defeated) attempt at implementing Laissez-Faire Economics, and a near revolt among indigenous communities when I enacted Women's Suffrage. Getting things done is really hard, but once they're done, the Overton window moves, the status quo updates, and you start to forget that things were ever any different.

Here are some random notes on things I've learned over the course of this game:

As the tutorial helpfully informs you, you don't need to worry too much about deficits. There's no intrinsic benefit to having money in your treasury, other than the ability to run future deficits (such as a protracted war). And deficit spending can grow your economy and put you on a much better footing. Overall, I usually try to keep my weekly expenses and income roughly equal.

I have noticed that the reported surplus/deficit will often swing strongly positive, like -6k one week, then +1k the second week, then -6k the third week. I think this happens when you're completing construction on a building, probably because you aren't paying for the full amount of Construction Goods that week. But when I would see that green number, I would go "Great!" and expand my construction sector or buy income-losing buildings like Universities, but then my deficit would immediately swing back into the red. Now, I'll usually wait for multiple consecutive weeks of budgetary surpluses before I switch to expensive investments. In the meantime I'll usually queue up some quick and profitable buildings like Logging Camps.

Construction units are (at least currently) split 50-50 between the public and the private sector, but I've belatedly learned that if one sector isn't building, the other sector will be able to take more units (but not all of them). I'm not sure what the exact formula is. When I had 40 total construction points and the Private sector wasn't building anything, I would get 24 units for public building. That's another thing that would throw off my budget, since your government expenses will jump up and down with the number of sectors you have. Now I track it more closely, but also I'm now constantly building both public and private buildings so I don't see that variation as often as I did earlier in the game.

In my Sweden game the private sector was building a ton from the beginning, but in my Belgium game it was really sporadic. They would take ages getting funds to start a single project, would finish it and then need to wait a while before their second project could kick off. I'm not 100% sure, but I think this might be because I had my tax rate set to Very High at the start of this game, which probably limited the profits that owners could add to the investment pool. Once the investors do start building, they quickly snowball, as the more buildings they own the more money they get to add to the pool to build more buildings. There's always a full queue now and I don't think they'll ever exhaust their investment pool.

As a side note, judging from the release date of this game it was probably being designed during the European Austerity regime, and I think in a lot of ways you can view this game as a specific rebuke to that perspective. You can see visually how the expanding bar of your nation's GDP is more important than the sliver of debt inside that bar - the sliver that will shrink in proportion over time. Getting out of a funk requires more investment, not less.

That's just one of the many, many parts of this game that gets into broader economic and policy discussions, which were very relevant during the 19th century and continue to this day. Higher taxes do impede growth and slow down the expansion of the private sector. But higher taxes can also harm the wellbeing of pops, particularly in a regressive tax system. This will make working-class pops more radical, which can cause obstinance and harm productivity. So there are cases where raising taxes could theoretically limit long-term revenues, and lowering taxes could raise them, as the private sector grows faster and generates a larger tax base, in addition to employing more pops who then pay income taxes, and use their salaries to buy goods that fund consumption taxes and spur additional employment and investment for the goods they want.

In this "learning" Belgium game, most of my decisions are driven by warnings: "silver" expensive goods, "gold" expensive goods, and shortages. Based on the description, shortages are the most serious of the three, as the price will rapidly rise in addition to imposing a penalty on the output. So if I saw a shortage for, say, Motors, I would order the construction of more Motor Industries and move it to the head of the build queue. After a few weeks the shortage would go away, even before the building finished. I would go "Huh, that's weird", and let the building complete. Then a year or so later the cycle would happen again.

I eventually clicked into the actual building, and saw that my Level-3 Motor Industries could support a workforce of 3000 laborers, and had a grand total of 7 people actually employed. Yikes!

After watching it more closely, I think that this happens when you have a very limited or intermittent need for a good. If nothing needs the good and there isn't demand on the world market or trade capacity for it, then nobody will buy the good, so the factory doesn't want to make any of the good and will gradually lay everyone off. Once an order does come in for, say, One Engine or One Explosive, then at first that good might have a price of something like 3 pennies. That isn't enough for the owners to justify making them; their potential laborers are probably making higher salaries over at the full-capacity Iron Mine. The shortage is created here.

The price of Engines or Explosives will gradually tick up. The factory owners will look to hire, but not find laborers willing to take the job. Over weeks the owners will gradually offer higher wages, until eventually they are high enough to persuade peasants to leave their subsistence farms or existing workers to switch careers. Then the employees will build One Explosive, then there will be no more demand, everyone will be laid off and the cycle starts over again.

Now that I know how this works, whenever I see a Shortage warning I'll first make a sanity check to see if I already have at least one building that Makes The Thing, and if so, what its employment looks like. It's almost always nearly completely vacant. If it was a capacity shortage, it would have shown up as an Expensive Good long before becoming a Shortage Good.

In practice, I'll usually just wait a few weeks and the shortage will resolve itself. It does mean some unnecessary expense that has a slight cascading effect through the economy, but The Invisible Hand Of The Free Market will eventually take care of it.

I did recently experience a larger-scale version of this that gave me pause. Some time previously I discovered Rubber, and began creating some Rubber Plantations (in Africa, and the Belgians do). But I didn't have any real need for Rubber, so the plantations stood mostly idle. Some time later, I discovered Vulcanization, which unlocked Machined Steel Tools in my Tooling Workshop. This finally gave me an application for Rubber, and would give a significant boost to these buildings' productivity. But all of my Tooling Workshops were so huge that changing even one to demand Rubber would create a Rubber Shortage. I knew (or hoped) that it would eventually be filled; but I would need a lot of Rubber and didn't know how long it would take.

I rolled ahead with this approach, switching my smallest (but still large) Tooling Workshop over, eating the Shortage for maybe a month or so. The larger workshops were a smoother transition: the jump from, say, 100 Rubber to 300 Rubber is much gentler than the jump from 0 Rubber to 100 Rubber. Rubber got expensive, but not to a shortage level.

But anyways, I realized after the fact that this is probably the perfect use case for Subsidies. This is an option where the government will make up the difference between what the private sector is willing to pay and the wage that will ensure full employment in that building. I could have started Subsidizing my rubber plantations, or at least a single one of them, to bring up the supply, and then turned on the demand for rubber, then turned off the subsidy once the market had become self-regulating. Which, now that I write it out, is at least in theory what subsidies are often for in the real world as well! When you think of things like renewable energy or EVs, it can be really hard for market forces to get a new industry off the ground even when it is superior; once it is established, it can easily pay its own way.

Topic shift: As I've mentioned before, the political aspect of this game might be my favorite part. I've mostly been doing everything to promote my preferred Interest Groups. Very roughly speaking, for me this looks like:

Best: Intelligentsia > Trade Unions
Neutral: Armed Forces
Situational: Industrialists > Devout > Petty Bourgeois > Rural Folk
Nope: Landowners

So usually, when election season rolls around, I'll do everything I can to boost the groups/parties high on the list and shiv the ones below. This yields inconsistent results: my beloved Intelligentsia usually have a tiny share of the vote, so if they're in a party by themselves, even giving them every available boost still leaves them with very little support. And there's a lot of randomness in the Momentum that starts each election. If the odds start off in my favor, I can turn a victory in a landslide; if not, I might turn a defeat into a deadlock.

But after experiencing several election cycles and passing a ton of laws, I now think that it might make sense to alternate between parties in power, rather than trying to keep the same party in power but with varying levels of mandate. The specific example I'm thinking of at the moment is that I mostly want policies pushed by the Trade Unions, but I also really want Laissez-faire, and it's really hard to implement that. I can't even start debate on it since none of my preferred factions support it. And on the other hand, when I try to implement the 5th law in a row supporting workers' rights, the opposition is utterly irate at me, making enactments an uphill battle.

If I pursued more of an alternating-parties strategy, I could let the bloc with the Industrialists into power, and use their term to implement Laissez-Faire. During their term the conservative groups' disapproval would gradually diminish as memories of past legislation cooled. Then once the left came back into power, I could mount a fresh push for the sixth law supporting workers' rights, with hopefully more tepid opposition. This would also keep all the parties busy during their terms. I'm at a point now where I've passed all the laws that I've unlocked that I want to and can pass; I don't want to implement Council Republic or No Migration or anything like that.

I briefly mentioned Power Blocs before, but going into a bit more detail: it's been a really fun part of the game. I like how it gives a sense of expansion without requiring conquest: I'm expanding my influence throughout the globe, but doing so based on my economic and political power instead of through military dominance. (Although merely having a large military does add to power projection, which adds more weight to your political power!) My general approach is:

Identify a target. I'm looking for someone who is still Unaligned, and is fully independent without an Overlord. Hovering over my Leverage in that nation's screen will show how much Leverage other Power Blocs have. Ideally nobody else has too much influence already.
If I don't have at least a Level 2 Interest in the Strategic Region, start working on that. A lot of this will come naturally through the following steps, but it might also be necessary to Improve Relations with some other countries or take other steps to bump it up.
Start Improving Relations with my target - as I learned early on, merely having the required Leverage isn't enough to make them join your Bloc, they need to like you as well. Improved relations will get you ready for that final step, and also make them more likely to agree to treaties with you.
Sign treaties. I'm looking for ones that they will agree to (Ideally 100% chance, I might try at 70%+ but also might wait for relations to increase). While details vary, usually I'll start off with an exchange of Trade Privileges. This works well as a pair, as they'll usually have a slight malus in giving privileges and a large bonus in receiving privileges.
I'll offer a Power Bloc Embassy - this automatically gets canceled after they join the Bloc, so it's even more temporary Diplomacy points than the others.
The biggest one I want is Investment Rights. This gives a good amount of Influence and Leverage by itself, and also lets my expansion-hungry private sector start constructing buildings in their land for even more Leverage. Depending on their situation, I might be able to get this right off the bat, but often I'll need to wait: I need to get to Level 2 Interest in the Region, and they need to like me better if they don't need the investment.
Around this time I'll check in again on the Leverage preview. The popup shows the current and projected leverage, and how quickly it is ticking up. For small countries I'll likely be on track already for the necessary 200 point advantage, so I'll shift my focus and wait for it to tick up. For larger countries, ones with more leverage resistance or other bloc competitors, I'll need to push it up more.
Guaranteeing Independence, and later maybe even offering a Defensive Pact will give a huge amount of Leverage, and countries will almost always agree to these. So far I haven't gotten pulled into any wars as a result of it.
Funding Lobbies is a good option. Sometimes I do this even on the tiny countries: it's super-cheap for them, and if it speeds up their admittance, it also means I'll be able to dial down my investments more quickly.
This is usually plenty for almost everyone. The powers I ran into in my game where it wasn't immediately sufficient were Egypt and Persia, huge and relatively wealthy and powerful unrecognized powers. In this case, I'll start to directly invest in buildings in their country through my government construction queue. It's expensive and takes a while, so if the projected gap is more than 10-20 points or so, I'll call it quits here and move on.
Eventually, you'll get the notification that you can invite them. If you've been improving relations from the start they will agree to join, otherwise you might need to offer them a Favor or wait longer for their opinion to tick up.
After they accept, turn off Fund Lobbies. Turn off Improve Relations if it's still going. Power Bloc Embassy will automatically cancel.
Whenever the treaties expire, Withdraw from them. There's no penalty to this, and you usually have plenty of Influence and Leverage through their Bloc membership to keep them in the Bloc and your Interest high enough in their Strategic Region. The one treaty I keep is Investment Rights - it's cheap, and will ensure their loyalty over time.

I've lost a handful of Bloc members - if a revolution overturns the government, the new nation will usually exit, though you can get them back through the above steps if you want. A couple of times they've just left for seemingly no reason. Occasionally they've been conquered, usually when African unrecognized coastal nations get defeated by European colonizers. I've been tempted to weigh in on the Diplomatic Plays here to defend the nations but haven't done it yet. I might get to a point where my military is strong enough to scare opponents into backing down, or I may reach a day where I want the excuse for a war against European frenemies, but for now it just isn't worth it: there are plenty of fish in the sea, for every nation I lose I'm gaining another 5-10.

A few final thoughts before I wrap up this post:

The music is awesome! I've hit that point that I generally reach in Paradox games where it's running through my head all day long, even when I'm away from the computer. This music has a distinct sound, occupying a separate space from Stellaris's orchestral splendor, Europa Universalis's frenetic heavy-metal driving force, and Hearts of Iron's nostalgic mid-century tunes. I've recognized quite a few Victoria melodies as coming from hymns, while others are rousing marches. Overall the music tends to be very pretty and pleasant, which is great because I'm listening to it a lot!

I'm really enjoying the "tall" gameplay of this particular game, with my core homeland of Belgium just being 2.5 states in Europe while I'm still getting involved in sprawling global webs of economic dominance, colonization and power-bloc shenanigans. While I'm sure that a "wide" game would be more complex, I also am getting the sense that it wouldn't be as complex as a wide game in Stellaris or EU. In particular, you have a single national Construction Queue that defines what your nation as a whole is building, unlike Stellaris where each planet has its own queues and EU where each province has a queue. If two countries are equally rich and advanced, they'll be building the same amount of stuff, it's just that a smaller country will be building lots of things in a few states while a larger country will be building fewer things in more states. And because your nation shares the same market, to some extent it doesn't matter a ton either way - you'll be making glass, whether it's all in Gelre or scattered across multiple continents. The thought of playing Great Britain still sounds overwhelming, but I think I'd be up to try playing, say, America or Spain or something.

All right, that's it for now! I'm enjoying this game so darn much, and it feels like it's flying by. I think the game runs 1836-1936, so I'm already more than halfway through. I don't think I've ever actually finished a Paradox game (unless you count blowing up the galaxy when I Became The Crisis in Stellaris), but so far it's feeling like things shouldn't get too sloggy in the endgame, so this may become a first for me!

Primary Colors

2026-05-26T20:10:00.000-07:00

New year, new county, new ballot!

This was an interesting one, with a high-profile wide-open governor's race in the top spot, and lots of lower-profile positions that I needed to educate myself on. While details vary, I find that my California November ballots generally have very easy lesser-of-two-evils or good-versus-bad choices, while the spring primary can be a lot more fraught, often with my heart and mind tugged in opposing directions. While researching, I also noticed that these days I have fewer trusted sources for endorsements. When I first moved out to California my first stop for election guidance was usually the major newspapers' editorial boards; but these days all media has been corporatized and homogenized, and I usually don't even think to check them, outside of very local minor races.

With no further ado, here's how I'm casting my ballot!

Governor: Tom Steyer (!!!!)

I know, I'm at least as shocked as you are. I came into this election with a strong preference for Katie Porter, who built a fantastic track record in Congress taking on evil megacorps and championing the smallfolk. But I've been very soured by her embrace of "slopulism" in this race, with a good-headline-but-terrible-policy promise to eliminate all income taxes under $100k of income. I could write a whole blog post on this, but it's so terrible on multiple levels. Fundamentally we need to return to an ethos of collective vision, us as a society investing in our nation, creating a civil state that works for us. Moving to an oligarchal system that's exclusively funded by the wealthy will alienate the majority of citizens and place the real power in the hands of the elites who Porter has traditionally questioned.

I can't believe I'm voting for a billionaire, but Steyer is the best of the major contenders. I was moved by the support from Rebecca Solnit and the California DSA (!!!).

Lieutenant Governor: Oliver Ma

Secretary of State: Shirley Weber

Controller: Malia Cohen

Treasurer: Anna Caballero

Attorney General: Rob Bonta

Bonta is probably my favorite person in California politics at the moment. I'm a little surprised he's staying in this position instead of angling for something else, but he's been doing fantastic work, and I'll enjoy seeing him continue, especially in these critical coming years.

Insurance Commissioner: Ben Allen

California's insurance market is another thing that could merit an entire blog post. This is a pretty wide-open race, I feel the most optimistic about Allen in actually navigating the difficult road ahead of us.

Insurance Commissioner is also such a weird race. I think people get elected by denigrating and attacking insurance companies, but when in office the most important job is working productively with them.

State Board of Equalization 2nd District: Sally Lieber

Sally's great!

12th Congressional District: Lateefah Simon

18th Assembly District: Mia Bonta

Superior Court Judge Office #13: Cabral Bonner

Superior Court Judge Office #19: Selia Warren

State Superintendent of Public Instruction: Nichelle Henderson

County Superintendent of Schools: Alysse Castro (uncontested)

District Attorney: Ursula Dickson

Measure A (Peralta community college property tax): Yes

Oakland Measure C (tax exemption for small businesses): Yes

I'm very conflicted on this one! It feels bad to hand out tax cuts while the city struggles with a budget deficit. Every reputable source I could find is endorsing this, so I'll jump on board.

Oakland Measure D (modernize an obscure and mostly defunct retirement system): Yes

Oakland Measure E (property tax): Yes

So, that's that! I hope that the angst around the governor's race this year finally convinces California to adopt ranked-choice instant-runoff voting at the state level. The Top Two primary system has served us pretty well in the last couple of decades, but we've entered a phase now where it's cynically manipulated by leading Democrats to boost Republicans to ease their own elections. The now-fading specter of an all-Republican general election race for Governor will hopefully be enough of a warning call for the state and the party to fix this and get us a more democratic system that lets people vote their conscience instead of keeping an eye on strategy.

IKEA

2026-05-11T17:09:41.235-07:00

Another (hopefully) little post on Victoria 3. I've finished my first "training" run. With any new Paradox game, I assume the first game (or three, or five, or ten...) will be a learning experience: I'll make some dumb decisions, belatedly realize why they were dumb, see whether they're recoverable, and get an overall rough sense for how the basics of the systems work. I think I've reached that point in my Sweden run. From the start in 1836, I've played nearly twenty years, through the Year of Revolutions and many other significant events. In that time I think I've done a decent (not perfect) job at growing my economy, and I have radically reformed the laws of Sweden. It's all ended up in an amusing conflagration, though: after losing one war against Russia to defend a breakaway Finish republic, I'm now losing a much larger war against Russia and Prussia for Finnish independence (despite the best effort of my allies Great Britain and the Netherlands), and furthermore, a monarchical revolution has broken out in central Sweden, leading to me fighting on like six different fronts. I'm doomed, but it's fun!

Backing up a bit: as I mentioned before, one thing I really love about Victoria is that it is primarily focused on the economic and social aspects of grand strategy games, which (along with technology) are the parts I enjoy most; in other games I'll often grumble when I "have" to fight a war. There's a lot going on in Victoria, but I think the core of the game is trying to make your GDP as large as possible. That directly increases your Prestige, and also allows you to, say, operate a larger military, fund lobbies to increase your involvement, fully fund your social safety net and university researchers, and so on.

As I figured out how the economy worked, I started to smile: it's exactly like The Wealth of Nations! You're basically encouraging the specialization of your nation's workforce, coaxing peasants to leave their homesteads and take jobs in large farms or buildings in the cities. They become laborers who start earning higher wages, which they use to buy goods and services, which raises demand for more products, which creates more job openings, and so on.

There's also an element of Thinking Fast and Slow. As your country industrializes, your population's wealth will increase and their standard of living will rise. However, this won't necessarily lead to happiness! If someone was a peasant and starts to work as a laborer, then their income has increased, and they will be a happy pop: loyal to the regime, working hard, increasing their birth rate. But if someone was a clergyman and had to become a laborer because the administration is now secular, they will earn the same wage, but they will be unhappy, and more likely to become Radical.

A big part of the mechanics of the game is based on building. You, acting through the government, decide what buildings to create and where - a new Iron Mine in Svealand, a Trade Center in Gotland, a Textile Mill in Scania. However, there is also a "private construction" queue. I think the way this works is, as pops in your country gain profits (aristocrats from farms, capitalists from factories, etc.), they create an "investment pool", and then use that money to construct buildings on their own. This runs autonomously of the government. In practice they seem to focus on making profitable buildings and not necessarily ones that follow your own strategy; but these are always good regardless, as they create more jobs, provide more goods (thus lowering market prices), require more inputs (thus creating demand for other goods and stimulating production), and hopefully generate more profit, allowing the private sector to create still more buildings.

An interesting wrinkle is requesting or offering "investment rights" with another country; for example, you could allow Great Britain to build in your own country, or you could get permission to build in the Kongo. This leads to a situation where a building is in Country A, giving it the benefit of job opportunities and producing goods for its market; but the profits go to Country B. Depending on your perspective this is either symbiotic or exploitative, and there are valid reasons to pursue or deny such investments. This aligns with one of the veins of Thomas Piketty's writings in Capital in the Twenty-first Century and Capital and Ideology, and is generally a big subject of discussion through to the present day, and I love seeing it represented in the game like this.

I really dig the technology system in this game. Technology passively spreads to you, I think if you have one or more neighbors who have researched it, and more than half of my discoveries have come that way. You can also focus your research on a specific technology; if you already had some passive spread then you will be part of the way there already. Some techs seem to take around 3 years to research, others 10 or more; I focused on the shorter ones in this case, prioritizing ones that provide passive benefits over ones that unlock new equipment or building configurations. Anyways, I like the combination of focusing and driving your priorities while also never worrying about falling too far behind in, say, military tech.

I also like how colonizing is presented here. In Europa Universalis colonizable land looks empty - there are technically "natives", but visually it's just blank space. Here they are "decentralized" territories, each led by a "chieftain". The game is still depicting the historically accurate European domination over indigenous lands (by this time period primarily African territories), but it's also very clear that there were already people there with their own society, culture and leadership, not empty lands waiting for settlers to arrive.

That said, I never figured out how to colonize in my game. I enacted a law and started a Colonizing Institution which should let me colonize overseas provinces. The thing tripping me up seems to be that you need to have an "interest" in a region to begin a colony there. I was able to get some "interest" by signing various economic pacts with some African states like Kongo, Gaza and Natal. I think that I somehow need to bring "interest" to an even higher tier, but I was never able to figure out how to do that in this game. Which isn't terrible, I didn't necessarily want Sweden to become a colonizing force, but that's the one mechanic I'm aware of that I wasn't able to engage with in this game.

While construction is probably the most satisfying part of the game for me, politics is the most exciting. This seems to generate the lion's share of events, as things will occur during election season or while debating a new law that will require you to make a decision. The system here is strong: it's primarily oriented around "interest groups", such as Rural Folk or Armed Forces. Each interest group has its own ideology, describing the laws they would favor or dislike; each interest group also has "clout", describing the total amount of power they wield.

Early in the game, the "Landowners" interest group is very powerful and tends to run the government. Let's say that, long-term, you want to put the Trade Unions in charge. This is a non-starter: while they are plentiful, they are very poor and have almost no power. However, the Industrialists and the Petite Bourgeois are interested in, say, moving from Landed Voting to Wealth Voting. You can pursue a law change to the franchise, which will shake up the factions' clout. Now the Landowners are less powerful, the Trade Unions still don't have power, but the Industrialists and Petite Bourgeois do. This can crack open the door for some other reforms, like more equitable taxation or a public school system, that will materially improve the lives of the working class. This allows them to generate some wealth and improve their standard of living, letting them get a foothold in the Wealth Voting system. Then you might be able to move towards Census Suffrage and eventually Universal Suffrage. The whole system makes sense, is historically accurate, and is basically quoting The Communist Manifesto, hence I love it!

Okay, that's it for now on the Sweden game. I think that next I'm going to try Belgium, one of the other recommended "learner" countries. Wish me luck in the Low Countries!

Victoria 3

2026-05-04T18:53:56.482-07:00

I'm in a short-ish-blog-post kick lately, so let's keep that going! I just started my first game of Victoria 3, the latest in a long line of gifts generously given by my brother. Victoria 3 is yet another grand strategy game from Paradox, the makers of Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, Stellaris, Crusader Kings and other games of that ilk.

Starting a new one of these games is always an interesting experience, as certain elements will feel very familiar, but there is still a huge learning curve for the game as a whole. While I may revisit it one day, I was never able to really get into Hearts of Iron IV - I love the idea behind the alternate-history and minor-power scenarios is apparently offers, but the actual gameplay never really clicked for me. So far I'm feeling better about dipping my toes into Victoria - it still feels daunting, on the verge of overwhelming, but for whatever reason I'm finding it a gentler onramp.

One reason I've been looking forward to Victoria is that its time span, the century from 1836 to 1936, happens to be the era I've been most interested in for the last decade or so. It was the birth of the modern world, of industrialization and capitalism and socialism and railroads and telegraphs and airplanes and electricity. It's the setting of The Birth of Plenty and Against the Day and The Communist Manifesto.

Just launching up the game, I can immediately tell that it's more modern than my mainstays of Europa Universalis IV and Stellaris. It feels slow to boot up the game and launch, but it's very pretty. Yes, you're still panning over a map of the world and looking at Excel spreadsheets, but they are pretty spreadsheets. And the event-style interactions that pop up here are very attractive, often with some parallax that brings a feeling of depth and motion to what's still a static image. As with the popups in EU4 the images don't always match the text - I would see, like, a group of men in turbans while reading about Swedish industrialists - but I'm not complaining, they still add great atmosphere.

From what I've seen so far, the laws and technology look a lot like what Hearts of Iron has, an almost Civilization-style tree where you follow from prerequisites to unlocked techs, unlike the more abstract single-pathed advancement of EU4. Unlike EU4 but like Stellaris, Vic3 also has "pops", discrete representations of the people populating your empire, which in turn drive systems like factions, ideologies, needs and so on. But so far the Vic3 pops seem to be presented pretty differently in the UI: in Stellaris you could directly see individual pops on your planet, in Vic3 I've only see the rolled-up summaries of overall numbers.

Following the game recommendation, I'm starting off with Sweden, which seems like a great choice: they're at peace, are pretty friendly with their neighbors except Denmark, are decently large but nowhere near as sprawling as Britain, have a decent existing base of infrastructure and a ton of choices for growth. I'm finding the tutorial very helpful; I particularly like the buttons "Tell Me How" and "Tell Me Why", that patiently walk through the series of buttons to click to find a particular switch to toggle, and also explain the game concepts that are impacted by this mini-mission.

So far my focus has been getting a handle on the economy; another thing that's attracted me to this game is the idea that industrial, technological and social advancement are more prominent than military conquest, which aligns with my preferred activities in these games anyways. The economy here seems pretty different from the other Paradox games but I'm digging it so far. There's the overall national economy, which you can slightly influence over the long term but don't directly control: people are automatically finding jobs, migrating, setting prices for things, achieving a certain standard of living, etc. Then there's the smaller sphere of public spending which you can immediately impact through things like adjusting the tax rate and setting public salaries. So some stuff you can immediately act on but has only a minor effect, while other things take a long time to organically grow but ultimately have a far bigger impact.

The game seems to actively discourage budgetary surpluses, which I found really interesting. There's a cap on how many reserves you can store in your treasury, and exceeding that amount won't benefit your nation. This violates my normal gaming instinct of "Make Number Go Bigger", but it does make sense, both gameplay-wise (spending money today will grant your nation immediate benefits, while saving it will postpone those benefits into the future) and historically (the indebted nations like Britain were the most powerful nations). I'm at a point now where my people are still considered poor, but I can't spend all the money my treasury is taking in even after slashing taxes and boosting spending. Not the worst problem, I guess! But peeking ahead, future laws and reforms will unlike things like educational systems and health care, which I'm eager to fund with my socialist Scandinavian krona.

Not much story-wise to share just yet. I've researched Railroads, built a few farms, made friends with Prussia, adopted Private Schools and Church Hospitals, and recently adopted Wealth Based Voting, which makes my constitutional Monarchy considerably more dynamic. In general I'm trying to boost the Intelligentsia, and maybe some Industrialists and/or Trade Unions and/or Petite Bourgeoisie, to unlock some more interesting-looking Laws; but in the meantime the Clout is dominated by Landowners and the Church, so I'm trying to maintain overall societal stability while managing a transition.

If my other Paradox games are an indication, I'll probably keep poking away at this Sweden game for a bit while I get a handle on the interface and at least some understanding of the main systems, then will embark on a "real" game at some point. It's early days yet, but so far I am enjoying them!

Clowning Around

2026-05-03T07:27:58.275-07:00

Just a quick post on a relatively quick and fun read: I devoured Dave Barry's memoir Class Clown over the course of about a week. I've been a fan of Dave's humor writing since I was a kid. Growing up, my family had a collection of his books, which I would read and re-read and return to over the years. My favorite was "Dave Barry Slept Here", a satirical textbook history of the United States, and to this day I still remember a ton of it, including The Monroe Doctrine ("1. Other nations are not allowed to interfere in the Western Hemisphere. 2. But we are. 3. Ha ha ha!"), the Hawley-Smoot Tariffs, "We all go heppin down the wiff-bane", the French and Indian War (which America didn't realize it was supposed to be involved in until several years in, by which time the confused French and Indians had started fighting one another), and so on. It's one of those things along with Weird Al where as I've grown older I've belatedly come to understand the full joke behind something I already thought was funny.

He was also a columnist, writing for the Miami Herald but syndicated nationally. I don't recall whether his columns were reprinted in our local paper or not, but I definitely know that in the years since then I've always enjoyed his "year in review" wrap-ups along with any other pieces I see from him.

The memoir is written in his voice and is very funny. He does touch on some sad elements related to his parents early on in the book; despite the limited space available in a book, he gives a fully rounded view of them, emphasizing their love and amazing actions and enormous influence on his humor, while also unflinchingly sharing the struggles they endured and ultimately succumbed to. Other than that and a brief mention of how much worse the political and media landscape has become since the 2016 election, this is a consistently upbeat and amusing book. As he says, and I have no reason to doubt him, he's been lucky to have one of the best jobs in the world.

Dave liberally quotes from columns throughout the book. When he experienced some major event, like appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or writing for the Oscars with Steve Martin, he definitely got a column out of it, and he'll excerpt from that column here. Probably 90% of those were new to me; there were a few I recognized from one of his books or some other writing, but those also made me chuckle. I think the hardest I laughed during this book was his description of attending a French sommelier competition, which I don't recall having ever heard about before.

I got a big kick out of this book, and definitely recommend it to anyone who already enjoys Dave's writing. It's amazing to see how sharp and funny he is today years after officially retiring. It also reminds me that he's written a lot of books since I was a kid, none of which I've read before now, so there's an unexplored trove of light, hopefully fun and funny books out there for me!

Solstice

2026-05-02T17:48:15.366-07:00

And, just to put a bow on it, I've wrapped up Heart of Winter, the ancient expansion to Icewind Dale. In some ways this feels similar to Tales of the Sword Coast in that it's an expansion that can either be played as part of the main campaign or at the end. But this experience is a lot more locked-in, and tells a focused story while you're in it as opposed to the more wandering feel of TotSC.

On the whole, it feels like a literal "expansion" to Icewind Dale, in that it continues forward the feel and gameplay of the main entry as opposed to changing flavors. You're still in the icy North, visiting tiny hamlets, exploring large lairs and fighting enormous armies of baddies.

One thing I neglected to mention in my previous post is that these games have reminded me of just how much I love (and miss) 6-person parties in RPGs. It makes the game feel much more tactical and not just strategic: you can build a proper front line, need to manage your space, try to block out encroaching enemies, and scramble to adapt if you get flanked. I went with a pretty standard loadout for these campaigns with three frontliners, two missile fighters and one useless bard. I know from experience that you can run many other types of parties - in Baldur's Gate 1 it can be fun to run with six archers and nuke down all the enemies from range. I do really think we lost something when RPGs moved to smaller parties; each character gets to shine with more powerful individual abilities, but we've lost the sense of space and positioning and the "shield wall" from those older games.

I was fairly impressed by the graphics in this expansion, which seem really good for the era. There's one particular cave where creepy eyeballs appear out of nowhere, blink ominously and then fade away. Throughout the game we get various ghostly apparitions, along with the very colorful spells that Infinity Engine did so well.

For my playthrough, I chose to start a new Heart of Winter campaign from the main title screen, importing characters from my final save from Icewind Dale. This proved to be slightly tricky, as the Level 1 NPCs I rolled for the start of Icewind Dale also appeared in the party-selection menu and it wasn't very easy to differentiate the inexperienced from the veteran versions. It took just a little trial-and-error to get the whole party set up. Everything imports pretty cleanly, including inventory and spells, with the notable exception that all containers are removed: gem bags, potion bags, Bags of Holding. For the most part I didn't miss the items in those containers, but losing the containers themselves was slightly annoying as I had to do some old-fashioned inventory wrangling. One thing that did bum me out was losing my Potions of Wisdom that I'd been carefully stocking; in the expansion I eventually learned the Limited Wish and Wish spells, but never found any Potions of Wisdom for loot or sale and so my high-level mage wasn't able to safely cast them.

MEGA SPOILERS

The specific reason why I disliked losing my containers is because I got zapped to the Luremaster's castle almost immediately after starting the expansion. This is just random bad luck, if I had happened to wander east instead of north I would have hit some shops before visiting the tavern and been able to get new containers. The Luremaster segment is good story-wise but mechanically it felt rough to be immediately thrown into it without any option to back out (short of loading an earlier save - if I had been underleveled and hadn't kept multiple named backups, it could have been a permanent game-over for me). The Luremaster section seems to have harder enemies than anywhere else in the game. Besides not having access to things like Gem Bags for managing loot, it also doesn't sell many consumables like magic arrows and bullets, and despite coming into the expansion with a huge armament I was nearly empty by the end with no hope of restocking.

All those gripes aside, I did really enjoy how unique the Luremaster experience was. It's easy to compare it to Durlag's Tower and Watcher's Keep in that it's a fairly large, optional, stand-alone crawl with its own separate story. But Luremaster brings some big differences: unlike the others, you're locked into the experience from the start and can't dip in and out. The antagonist is especially interesting, and it's cool to gradually get to learn his story: he's an adversary but not necessarily a villain. The puzzles feel decent for this era and game engine.

By the time I beat the Luremaster, I officially had a Very Powerful Party, and didn't feel very challenged for the whole rest of the game. A big turning point had been getting Iron Skins and Stoneskin on two of my front-liners. There's some magical attacks in this game, so they don't block everything, but the vast majority of attacks are physical and your ranged attackers can usually interrupt enemy spellcasters, so while I wasn't reckless I also didn't feel much need to buff before fights. Looking back, I think the hardest fight in the whole game for me was Yxunomei near the end of... Chapter 2, maybe? That was the only battle where I really needed to do a lot of buffing and laying out some cheese.

The actual story is cool, though. The backdrop is a tense standoff between the native "barbarian" tribes of the North and the Ten Towns, settlers from the south who have built a small set of trading villages. I think the game pretty overtly references real-world tensions with indigenous people's ownership of land being usurped by powerful outsiders, and how that gets more complicated many generations in to a dynamic.

As you eventually learn, there's an even older dynamic at play: the great ice dragon Icasaracht originally ruled these lands before being defeated by humans, and has seen descendants of those same humans being displaced by invaders. The sword that originally killed her kept her soul from being reborn, but the sword was removed at some point. Her spirit merged with that of Wylfbane, a respected chieftain of one of the northern tribes, and brought him back from the dead. Due to the ancient animosity between the tribes and the dragon, the hybrid Wylfbane claimed to have been possessed by the spirit of Jerrod, a legendary hero we've learned of from the original Icewind Dale.

Wylfbane calls the tribes to a council. The Ten Towns are nervous, anticipating an attack. As traders and craftsmen, they don't have a military to defend against the tribes should they choose to fight. You enter the game around this point to try and negotiate a peace with the tribes. You eventually learn Wylfbane's true identity and reveal it to the tribes. Most of them rebel against her, though the Dragon Clan remains loyal. You eventually hunt down the dragon and kill her. Along the way you've met a woman known as The Seer who helps you, and you eventually realize that she's the one who is narrating the animated scenes between chapters, much like Belhifet narrated the main campaign.

END SPOILERS

Heart of Winter ended up being longer than I expected, I got nearly two weeks of gameplay out of it. I was going to say that I recommend picking it up, but I think it comes for free with any copy of Icewind Dale you can buy in 2026, so definitely play it as part of the game. For me it worked well as an expansion past the end of the main campaign, and I think the difficulty is tuned to this level, but in the unlikely event I replay Icewind Dale I'd at least try it during the course of the main game. More snow, more ice, more monsters and weapons and XP, along with some juicy Level 9 Mage Scrolls: What isn't there to love?

Rosy

2026-04-30T21:10:00.000-07:00

As was foretold, I have finished Philip Pullman's latest trilogy, The Book of Dust. The final volume The Rose Field is the longest entry yet. A lot happens in it! Let's jump right into some

MINI SPOILERS

The Rose Field picks up immediately after the end of The Secret Commonwealth, without a time-jump like there was between the first two books. We're pretty firmly in Lyra's world throughout the whole trilogy, primarily following the story of Lyra and Malcolm, but an increasing number of ancillary characters pop up, along with returners from The Secret Commonwealth and a few cameos from His Dark Materials.

This book felt more like The Golden Compass. The Secret Commonwealth had more of a focus on the mundane-ish world of universities, business, politics and religion, while The Rose Field had more monsters and mythical beings, as well as the return of witches and angels and other supernatural elements.

In particular, there's a great long-running side-plot about griffins: we meet some individual griffins, learn about their society and ambitions. This eventually leads into a fantastic assault on a sorcerer's fortress built into a volcanic mountain. This story feels pretty stand-alone, but the characters in it are all very well-drawn, as are the factions and rivalries and things.

I was slightly surprised by how rarely the people in this book referenced the events of His Dark Materials. There are a couple of times when Lyra mentions how she "went north", but she shares (and thinks) almost nothing about the other worlds she discovered. It seems like a really huge deal that The Authority was killed in The Amber Spyglass, but it doesn't seem to have made any impression on Lyra or the Magisterium. That isn't necessarily shocking or a huge problem - I interpreted Lyra's reaction as a PTSD walling-away, and the Magisterium might be cruising along on institutional inertia - but it felt odd to not even reference it in these books.

MEGA SPOILERS

I'm not complaining that the trilogy ends here, but as I was getting to the last 50 pages of this book I started to assume that we were in for a fourth novel. It felt like there was way too much stuff to wrap up, and a bunch of new things that dropped immediately before the end of this book, most especially the discovery of the Rose world. It does end, and a lot of stuff isn't wrapped up or explained. It's fine not to know, but to me this felt more like a Neal Stephenson ending where the author runs out of pages, as opposed to a Murakami novel that is peppered with deliberate lacunae.

I won't recount all the loose ends here, but a few that stand out to me include the Asian research station. We get a nice little story over a few scattered chapters about the survivors, the rebuilding, reconnecting with someone who went to the Red Building, an attempt to sell the station, and.... nothing. There's Alice's second life in London as a disavowed Oakley Street spy passing on secret messages; but I don't think we ever learn what those messages were about, or anything that Oakley Street has actually done since passing on the writing stones. There are intriguing insinuations that Thuringa Potash has been involved in the corruption of the Rose World, but their exact role is very unclear. I also was expecting to better understand exactly how the Red Building was staffed: were the guards from the other world maintaining a sort of embassy in Lyra's world, or was this an ancient Lyra-world operation that reached into the other world? And what exactly did Ionides and his lady-friend do in the Rose World? It seems positive, but there's zero indication of what actions they took, and what impact if any that will have on traffic between the worlds.

This book and The Secret Commonwealth seem to have been teasing a Lyra/Malcolm romance. It seems like it gets ejected at the end of The Rose Field, which I'm happy with. There's a suggestion that Malcolm reunite with Alice, which makes me much happier, especially given their bond in La Belle Sauvage. I do wonder what the point of this romance-suggesting was, though. I thought it just made the reader feel uncomfortable and it didn't seem to resolve into anything meaningful.

It was weird to have Bonneville kind of redeemed at the end. He was a very pathetic and put-upon character throughout this book, which had made me feel some sympathy towards him even though he still seemed like a terrible person. It seems like Ionides set him up to be a very effective assassin. I suppose it's never too late for people to turn to good.

Speaking of the assassination, it felt extremely anti-climactic for the Magisterium to lead an army of all of Europe across half of Asia and then never do anything with that army. After all that logistical maneuvering, a couple of soldiers blow themselves up and Delamare gets shivved, The End. There's so much deception swirling around Delamare and I'm still not completely clear on what the purpose of the army was: did he intend to invade the other world? It seems like huge overkill to just blow up the opening when a handful of soldiers have managed all the other portals.

END SPOILERS

There's kind of an explicit wrapping-up of values near the end, but even to the characters in the book it seems a bit tenuous and tentative. The idea of "Imagination" has loomed large over the last two volumes, with characters struggling to even define what it means, to understand why it is important, where it comes from and why it might disappear. I think that, between this trilogy and His Dark Materials, we're left with an impression that as humans we need a combination of imagination and rationality, that the interplay between the two are key to being complete people.

I did enjoy reading this series. It's been a while since I read the first trilogy; I didn't like this one quite as much, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to the books themselves and how much is due to myself. My favorite was La Belle Sauvage, which works really well on its own. Taken as a whole, these do a good job at further fleshing out Lyra's world, adding more mystery and ideas and some great adventurous tales peppered with some almost cinematic scenes. Not a must-read, but a good read.

Firegust Glen

2026-04-21T18:39:44.624-07:00

I've been enjoying a bit of a blast-from-the-past lately. I finally picked up the Enhanced Edition of Icewind Dale. This game originally came out around the same time as Baldur's Gate, and along with Planescape: Torment was part of a cluster of AD&D Infinity Engine games from different companies that shared the same underlying game system but had significantly different approaches to game construction. As I've belatedly come to think of it, it's like having three very different Dungeon Masters offering you seats at their tables.

I've been aware of Icewind Dale for decades, but haven't been very interested in it. It has a reputation as a combat-heavy game, mostly focused on builds and tactics. There aren't recruitable party members and very little freedom in the story. Those were the aspects I loved most about Baldur's Gate and Planescape, and I figured I'd be frustrated by the lack of those elements.

However, over the years I've heard many positive things about Icewind Dale. In particular, that its combat is far more entertaining, and that the art and music are some of the best of this era. So when the Enhanced Edition recently went on sale during the Steam Spring Sale, I decided to pick it up and check it out. I'll note up top that I agree with the overall impression of the community: while lacking in the story-oriented aspects of roleplaying, its fights tend to be more interesting, and a lot of the visual design and the score still hold up really well.

The game starts right off the bat with a bit of a wall to climb: chargen. I can easily spend 15 minutes or more rolling a character, and with Icewind Dale, you are rolling six of them. While I was getting up to speed I followed a very helpful gamefaq which guided me in my choices. My overall party was:

Samantha was the leader. The only single-class character in my roster, she was a half-elf Skald Bard. As with my original Bhaalspawn Cirion, she almost never fought, and just hung in the back while strumming on her harp. She did have some buffing and summoning spells, though, and would occasionally charge up the party prior to an encounter. She wielded a longbow that she never fired, and a scimitar that she never swung, but some of the scimitars give pretty decent bonuses just for holding them, such as to Luck or AC.

Cora was an elf, multi-classing as a Ranger and Cleric. She could use a Flail, but mostly wielded a Sling from the back-row. Her spells were oriented around buffing the party: Bless, Chant, Prayer, Recitation, Protection from Evil, and so on.

Tessa was another half-elf, and a triple-class Fighter/Mage/Thief. You don't need many Thief abilities, and still level quickly enough even splitting XP three ways. I maxed out Find Traps early on, which is the only really important skill. I maxed out Pick Locks next, which is only very occasionally useful. By the end of the game I had close to 80 in both Move Silently and Hide in Shadows, which would have been useful if she was a backstabber, but since she was primarily an archer it didn't really matter. She had an eclectic mix of spells, including disrupting spells like Magic Missile, some debuffs like Sleep and Web, and some protective or utility spells. Mostly she was a very effective archer, getting in lots of powerful attacks from a distance.

Everyone else was a dual-classed human. First was Doris, who was a Kensai through Level 9 before dualing to Druid. Druids regain XP pretty quickly for lower levels, so I felt comfortable waiting a bit longer before dualing. Kensais are notoriously squishy, so I focused on her Dex and gave her any AC-boosting items I could find that she could wear (there are not many). She mostly wielded Scimitars, sharing hand-me-downs with Samantha. I didn't get a ton of utility out of her Druid spells, but more Heals are always convenient. Barkskin helped a bit early on, and Ironskin helps enormously later.

Then was Mary, a Fighter through level 7 and then a Mage. Mary wielded a long sword with a shield, and eventually swapped her full plate for mage robes. Mary's spells tended to focus on ones that helped her combat, including Stoneskin, Magic Mirror, and more.

Finally was Trixie, a Fighter through level 7 and then a Cleric. Trixie swung a mace with a shield, and got to keep her full plate. Like Mary, she focused on spells that directly helped her in combat, such as Strength of One, Draw Upon Holy Might, Holy Power, and so on.

I was definitely doing some munchkin-ing in this game. I avoided any plot spoilers, but did carefully plan my party in advance. One thing that threw me off were the comments about "sitting out" levels. Basically, if you were originally a Fighter and later became, say, a Mage, then every time you Level Up you get the normal Mage spell slots and stuff. If you get a Weapon Proficiency as a Mage, then you can only spend it on weapons Mages can wield, like Daggers or Quarterstaffs. After you regain your Fighter abilities, though, you can spend weapon proficiencies from your Mage level-ups on Fighter-only weapons like Two-Handed Swords. Anyways, I noticed that online guides would remark about "sitting out" levels even after you had raised your second class high enough to get back Fighter abilities. I eventually realized why this is - even if you can put a pip back in, say, Long Swords, the game won't let you put more pips into that specialization than you could if you were a Fighter of the same level. Basically, you can't become a Grandmaster at a lower level dual-class than a single-class Fighter. It all works out in the long run, and you earn XP much more quickly later in the game, but it did mean running with slightly weaker characters for longer than I'd planned. I was glad to slightly stagger my duals, with Doris remaining a Fighter for a few more levels, and Mary and Trixie coming back into their martial strength while she was Druiding.

As I often and cheerfully complain about, 2nd edition AD&D feels like a really clunky and unintuitive system. If I hadn't cut my teeth on these games, I probably would find them impenetrable. Beyond the complexity, though, I did find myself longing for the modern quality of life improvements we've gotten over the years. One major example is magic and healing. In these games, by far the best way to heal from damage is to use healing spells; sleeping for 8 hours will only restore 1 HP, or a few more if you pay for a room at an inn, while a healing spell can heal far more. But you don't really want to be casting healing spells in the heat of battle, you want damage and buffs. So there's this whole rigamarole where, if my party is injured, I will:

Erase all of my cleric's memorized useful spells.
Fill up all the slots with healing spells.
Rest for 8 hours to memorize those spells.
Cast the spells on my party.
Repeat steps 3-4 as necessary.
Erase all the healing spells.
Restore my original useful spells (from memory).
Rest for 8 hours to re-memorized the useful spells.
Continue questing until I'm banged up enough that I need to heal again.

That did ease up a bit later in the game; you get to a point where there are enough spell slots that you can just walk around with heals, and I'm fine with resting a couple of times. But it did feel like an annoyance early in the game. But, again, maybe that's on me - plenty of players will cheerfully have their characters sleep for weeks until they are fully healed, which is ridiculous from a storytelling perspective but actually significantly faster in real-world time.

I should mention here that, unlike Baldur's Gate, I never encountered any ambushes while traveling between map regions. I'm guessing they just aren't implemented in this game, though it also might be something that happens on difficulty levels above Normal. I usually avoided resting in areas with enemies around, but I think I did get ambushed once or twice that way.

Speaking of travel: the travel distances in this game are very long, often encompassing multiple days, unlike the hours of Baldur's Gate. But I think that the game assumes you rest while traveling, while BG assumes that you don't. So that was a difference: in Baldur's Gate you'll sometimes arrive at a new area with an exhausted and sleepy party that needs to rest immediately, while in Icewind Dale they'll be chipper, albeit at the HP and spells that you left the previous map with. I'm really glad you don't get exhausted, because there are a few places with scripted fights at the very entrance to a new region, before you can even save your game.

MINI SPOILERS

The characters are pretty decent, less compelling than those in Baldur's Gate but a bit more colorful than I'd been expecting. The voice acting is pretty good. I'm pretty sure they shared some of the voice actors with Baldur's Gate; one of my PCs sounded a ton like Imoen, and others also seemed familiar. A few key NPCs have fully voiced dialogue, which worked out pretty well and didn't overstay its welcome. Some of the villains have really over-the-top, campy, scenery-chewing deliveries, which can be fun if you're in the right mood.

I did love the look of this game. I'm pretty inured to the standard fantasy tropes of forests and castles, so it was really compelling to see the snowy and icy expanses in this game. Even the interiors felt pretty unique. The Severed Hand is a really interesting structure that you climb up in, unlike the descent into dungeons that tend to define these games, and it splits into a variety of separate towers near the top. Dorn's Deep was probably my favorite visual area of the game. It's a bit like the Mines of Moria, but filled with streams of lava, which gives everything a great red glow.

The chapters of the game each start with a storybook, which was a pretty nice presentation. In general these sorts of graphics have aged far less well than the in-game sprites have, but I think it helps that the FMV is just showing static pages in a book, illuminated with a flickering candlelight. Overall it seems a bit blurry but not bad.

One mechanic of Icewind Dale that changes things up is the random loot generation. I haven't read too in-depth on this, but from what I understand, instead of a certain boss dropping a certain item, in some cases he/she/it will have, say, a 25% chance of dropping one of four different items. Or you might roll from a random table to find what specific item you get. This means you may never see a specific weapon in your game; and it also might mean you get duplicates of the same item. Going in pretty blind, I was happy with how things worked out, though I can see how this could be a source of frustration on replays. For example, I never came across any Elven Chainmail, and I later read that it's only available as a random drop in one specific encounter, so most players will make a hard save before entering that area and reload until they get it.

Overall I felt pretty powerful once I finished my dual-classing. My overall setup was three melee dual-classed Fighters in the front line, variously protected with things like Mirror Image and Iron Skin, while I had two ranged fighters and spellcasters in the rear, and Samantha uselessly strumming her harp. (Okay, okay, the Skald Song is actually really good and I'm glad that I have it.) But by the end of the game my mages only got to about the 5th circle of spells, while I think my divine casters got to the 6th. I think that even single-classed wouldn't have gotten much further as the total amount of XP for the fighter class levels is less than a single later caster level. I haven't yet played the Heart of Winter expansion, though, and I'm curious how high up I'll go. There's also a mode called Heart of Fury that significantly boosts enemy strength and also the XP they grant. From what I gather, veteran players will import their end-game party into a new Heart of Fury game as a sort of New Game +, so it's probably good that there's new power levels to look forward to with that setup.

MEGA SPOILERS

Again, this game doesn't really have any branching plotlines or choice-and-consequences. There's the typical Baldur's Gate choice between "I'll help you because I'm nice!" or "I'll help you if you pay me!". And there are some cases where you can choose between showing mercy, tricking an opponent or killing them. But the storyline is pretty static.

Here's my overall impression of what happens:

As we learn in the prologue, many years ago there was a war between the native barbarians of Icewind Dale and the human settlers who were moving in. During that war, one of the leaders opened a portal to the Abyss and demons began pouring out. The two sides stopped fighting each other to face their common foe. One of the humans, a cleric of Tempus, sacrificed himself to close the portal. This led to an uneasy peace.

Some time later, elves and dwarves created an alliance against their common foes the orcs. The dwarves made high-quality equipment, and the elves enchanted it. The dwarves wanted to sell the equipment, but the elves forbade it. A drow trader was able to break into the vaults, stole some equipment, and sold it to the orcs. This caused the elves to believe that the dwarves had betrayed them. The two sides grew estranged, and orcs overran both of their respective fortresses.

An ancient demon, Belhifet, has been struggling for a while with another extraplanar entity, Yxunomei. They both want an ancient artifact called the Heartstone Gem, which has been wielded by a druid in Kuldahar to hold back the cold and support a comfortable environment for human settlement. Yxunomei manages to steal the gem, and starts using it for Reasons that I never really understood. Belhifet is plotting to get the gem and use it to reopen the portal to the Abyss: this will cause the world to be overrun by demons and fuel the Blood War.

As part of Yxunomei's machinations, people start getting kidnapped from villages, goblins are seen roaming around, and the winter is getting worse due to the gem being stolen. This is where the game starts. Your group of adventurers agrees to join an expedition to discover the source of the trouble.

You kill Yxunomei and take the gem, but Belhifet murders the druid of Kuldahar. You then travel to the Severed Hand to see Lyssan, the ancient elf who commanded the garrison before being driven insane. He reveals that the secrets you seek lie in Dorn's Deep. You travel there, where you learn that someone known as Brother Pelquin, supposedly a priest of Ilmater, has been building up an army and turning the resources of the dwarves to war. You defeat his lieutenants but discover that his main army has marched on Easthaven and destroyed it.

Teleporting back to Easthaven, you rescue the villagers and confront Pelquin, who is revealed to be Belhifet. This is a really long fight! And really annoying! He clears any buffs you have at the start, and the battlefield is littered with traps, so anywhere you step you'll take damage and dispel any buffs you have gotten. He also has two Iron Golems with him, who hit hard and fill the field with poison gas clouds. He can only be hit with +3 weapons, hits like a truck and has a buttload of HP.

Eventually you (hopefully) defeat him, which leads into the final storybook sequence showing the triumphant heroes carrying the day. The narrator grows increasingly agitated, and you gradually realize that the narrator is, in fact, Belhifet himself. Pretty fun twist!

I never looked up any strategy or anything for the last fight. I stayed laser-focused on Belhifet, but if I were to do it again, I think I would try and take down the two Iron Golems first, after which I think it would be much more feasible to kite him around with a melee fighter while my ranged fighters and casters engaged him from a distance. I might also see if it's realistic to have the thief detect and disarm the traps on the map - it feels like there are a hundred of them. If you could clear them, though, you could bring up buffs during combat, which would be a huge game-changer.

One pretty major difference in game rhythm from old-school to modern games is how side quests are handled. There are very few side quests in general in this game. A lot of them are immediately opened and closed: you'll talk to someone, they'll say to fight the monster in the basement, you go into the basement, fight the monster, and return for your reward. But on the other extreme, there are a bunch of quests related to a dilapidated garden in the Severed Hand. You're supposed to fetch various things, including pure water and seeds and animals, to restore the garden. All of these are in future maps. When you find one, it is a LONG journey back to the Severed Hand and up through the labyrinthine maze to the garden again, just to drop off the item and get some XP and make the long and convoluted journey back again.

Even more annoying, several of the required items are in what turns out to be the last region of the game. I was planning to finish clearing Dorn's Deep before returning to the Hand to drop off my goods; but the last encounter of the Deep zaps you all the way back to Easthaven, and you can't re-enter the world map from there and must proceed to the final boss. Having this experience gave me a fresh appreciation for why modern RPGs give a clear signal of passing the "point of no return" - it wouldn't just be a matter of reloading for me, I would need to redo huge chunks of gameplay if I went back to finish those side-quests.

END SPOILERS

Despite my various gripes, I did have a blast playing Icewind Dale. The combat is satisfying and the unique setting kept me engaged. The EE also comes with the Heart of Winter expansion, I'm looking forward to playing that next!

Or, What Is The Same Thing

2026-04-18T08:53:00.000-07:00

All right! It's been a long journey, but we've finally come to the end of The Wealth of Nations. This post covers the fifth and final book, "Of the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth". In my edition this was relatively brief, taking us from page 650 to 900. I'll share my understanding of this final section, some (many) quotes that particularly struck me, and close with some vague and underdeveloped impressions of the book as a whole.

Near the end of Book IV Smith cleanly delineated the separate responsibilities of the private sphere of business with the public sphere of government. Book V looks directly at the operations of government and, linking back to economic concerns, how those operations have been and should be funded. I was struck that the overall shape of the book reminded me in many ways of books written in the last few decades from diverse authors like Thomas Piketty, Mark Higgins, William Bernstein and John Bogle. Like these authors, Smith spends most of the book examining historical events, drawing empirical data from them, and presenting compelling theories that explain the data. And then, in the last part of the book, offering their opinions on how to best address contemporary problems, applying the lessons learned to the major issues facing us today. By this point in the book we've built up a lot of trust in the author, understand their thought process, and can more easily be persuaded by their recommendations. The difference, of course, is that Smith was writing 250 years ago and speaking to specific situations that no longer exist; but, as I'll describe below, that ends up being a pretty freeing and helpful situation to analyze.

As a refresher, Smith had identified three important roles for government: defending the nation against external threats, providing internal security and justice, and supporting certain public works. The most elemental duty is national defense. As with his earlier writing in reviewing the historical evolution of merchant burghers in the feudal system, he provides a historical overview of how a nation's relationship with national defense will change over time.

In societies primarily composed of hunters, such as the natives of North America or Africa, the economic skills of the society are the same as the skills of the warriors. The vast majority of men are used to roaming, to following their leader, to fighting and taking down their target. So no particular expense is needed to support this nation/tribe in war: everyone is already trained and equipped. Likewise, in societies primarily oriented around herding, like the Tartars or Arabs, societies are migratory and oriented towards following their leader. Herders are used to violence in defending their flock against threats like wolves, and herders also have ample time to practice skills like archery and swordfighting even while at peace, without neglecting their flocks. So here too, no particular expense is needed in attacking or defending another tribe/nation; and a successful skirmish or war can enrich the tribe by seizing cattle, tools, or more grazing land.

As civilization evolves and basic farming begins, a new dynamic begins to emerge. Societies are less migratory and more rooted to specific areas. Primitive farmers do still have a lot of leisure time: they work hard while sowing, and again while harvesting, but the rest of the time they are fairly free. So, in a feudal-type system, it's fairly common for a lord to summon their farmers to fight during the summer. As long as they make it back in time for harvest, they haven't really lost out on any economic activity. And farmers grow their own food supply, so the lord may not even require much additional expense to feed their army.

But if someone is a crafter, tradesman or merchant, every day they spend in the army is a day of lost income for them. They don't have crops growing underground regardless of their actions, they only gain their wages or profit by active and constant effort. Whereas a more primitive society might have 1/4 or 1/5 of the population available to serve as warriors, a more modern society may only have 1/100. Now, when the country goes to war, the sovereign must take on the expense of maintaining the army. One approach is to compensate those who are drafted into service, to replace their lost wages. A better approach is to hire and pay professional soldiers who fully focus on the art of war.

Smith is a big fan of professional armies. He essentially argues that a professional army will always defeat a militia, thanks to their better training and discipline. But he also notes that when a militia fights together for a certain amount of time, they essentially evolve into a professional army; conversely, if a professional army grows complacent (as in the declining years of the Roman Empire), they essentially devolve into a militia. He also notes that, while primitive societies may have better discipline thanks to their familiarity with following a known and respected leader, modern technology provides the societies of tradesmen an insurmountable advantage over their less advanced foes. Modern nations with specialized workers can produce firearms, cannons, defensive fortifications and other weapons of war that even the bravest people equipped with bows and spears cannot overcome.

The second major duty of the government is to provide systems of justice. Here too he takes a historical and empirical look, seeing how different nations have funded their justice systems and how those have functioned. In early European kingdoms, the petitioner would give a gift to the king or whoever was responsible for dispensing justice. This system was self-funding since it was paid for by the people using it; but it was also deeply and inherently corrupt. You could sway the "law" in your favor by offering a larger gift. Interestingly, there was competition in England between different systems of courts, as they vied for jurisdiction over certain types of civil cases. This competition led to an improvement in overall standards of behavior.

Ultimately, we want justice to be impartial, which both means separating the judicial from the executive, and publicly funding the courts to remove the temptation of bribes. This does require additional expense, but the expense is trivial, particularly compared to the cost of something like a standing army. The office of a judge is already an honorable and a desirable one, so the government doesn't need to offer an extravagant salary to get qualified people to serve in it.

The final area of responsibility for government is funding certain public works. When he first brought this up in Book IV, he mentioned that this should cover cases where there is a significant public benefit but it does not generate a profit, and I'd been very curious to see what he considered as an appropriate expenditure. After reading his full examination in Book V, I'm left thinking that Smith doesn't have an overarching philosophy here, and instead looks at each possibility on a case-by-case basis, looking at the facts and evidence before deciding whether that particular venture is better in private hands or in public hands.

As a first example, he thinks that roads are best maintained by local governments, not by private landlords nor by the national government. Roads can be privately funded by toll, which removes the need for additional taxes to support them; but toll roads have a very negative impact on inland commerce, and worse, landlords often have little incentive to actually use toll money to maintain the road. If a road is the only way through, people will have to pay the toll, no matter how terrible the road is. Smith also looks at countries where the national government is responsible for maintaining roads - I think France? In this case, certain famous and high-profile roads are very well-kept, immaculately maintained and ornamented: the roads the sovereign travels on, that foreign diplomats would ride to reach the capital, and so on. But the vast majority of roads in a country are local byways, and these almost always suffer, being totally neglected unless some local person has enough power and influence to persuade the government to maintain it. So anyways, at the end of the day Smith thinks that the local municipality is best equipped to maintain roads in their region, as it is their people who use the roads most. If the municipality charges tolls on the roads, at least those tolls will tend to be well-spent in maintaining the roads; or they could be funded through other means.

For some other larger and more complex work like canals, it might be more appropriate for a private corporation to undertake the work. In this structure they get a charter from the government, spend their private money to build the canal, and then collect private tolls to repay themselves. Unlike the case of roads, these people are well incentivized to keep the canal in good condition: a poorly maintained road is still a road, a poorly maintained canal is nothing. And a private company is more likely to have the technical know-how and expertise to maintain a complex system than the bureaucrats in the capital. But even this has limits. On page 691 he writes:

These companies, though they may, perhaps, have been useful for the first introduction of some branches of commerce, by making, at their own expence, an experiment which the state might not think it prudent to make, have in the long-run proved, universally, either burdensome or useless, and have either mismanaged or confined the trade.

So even though private enterprise may lead to innovation and genuinely useful creations, the private sector isn't reliably good at maintaining those creations: they may atrophy further development, limit its spread, or drive their own finances into ruin. This makes me think of modern telco companies, as well as various utilities, Internet companies and others who create valuable and useful things but then turn bad. So it may make sense to transfer those responsibilities to the government, or into other and more capable hands. I don't recall if Smith makes a specific recommendation here, but I get the impression he would favor an anti-trust type of approach, breaking up de jure or de facto monopolies, or just ousting bad leadership.

Smith later goes on a long, tangential rant about education. It seems like he has some major axes to grind! He complains at great length about how many terrible teachers there are, and basically accuses them of being paid to sit around and do nothing. He seems to think that teachers should be paid directly by their pupils to give them an incentive to teach well. He believes that professors with tenure will naturally be lazy because they get paid the same no matter how much effort they put into teaching. From page 718:

It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does, or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as interest is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit. If he is naturally active and a lover of labour, it is his interest to employ that activity in any way, from which he can derive some advantage, rather than in the performance of his duty, from which he can derive none.

I find it interesting that he seems to single out teachers in particular: in the whole rest of the book, I don't recall him asserting that, say, judges or soldiers or other salaried workers will automatically be incentivized towards shiftlessness without an immediate pecuniary incentive for each specific task they are asked to perform.

He also goes on a long tangent about religion. While he doesn't 100% make this analogy in the book, I thought his description of established religion parallels his description of monopolies. In his telling, a new religious movement starts with fervent adherents who must make new converts through persuasion, using arguments and passion and good deeds to convince newcomers to join the cause. Eventually, this new faith becomes dominant, and they petition for official recognition and support from the sovereign. The sovereign is usually reluctant to grant this, as it reduces his own power, but he must eventually acquiesce because the whole body of the clergy touch on more lives than the king does, so they are too powerful to cross.

But once the clergy's position is secure, they no longer need to persuade, and so those skills atrophy. They become spiritual rent-seekers, collective monetary tithes and earthly privileges, but they are not actively contributing to their flocks. This provides an opening for new religions or new reform movements to spring up. When this happens, the establishment clergy tries to use the powers of the state to crash the upstarts: banning the sect or taking away their property or imprisoning them for sedition. In this dynamic, it is the upstart sects who now have the powers of rhetoric and persuasion, seeking to work on hearts and minds, while the establishment seeks to clamp down with brute power.

Smith looks longingly at Pennsylvania as an example of an alternative. The Quakers are the most numerous sect there, but there is no established religion. He thinks that the results in this state are far better than anywhere in Europe. Each church must actively practice what it preaches and seek to persuade followers. Nobody can rest on the laurels of official government support.

Smith also shows how the path of the clergy paralleled that of the noble landlords during the transition from the middle ages into the modern age. Most people paid their tithe to the clergy "in kind", sending them food or cattle or clothing. The priests and monks couldn't possibly consume all of this by themselves, so they would give most of it away. As a result the church became the major source of charity for the poor, passing on food from those who had it to those who did not. Interestingly, they also provided homes to itinerant knights. Landless knights would ride around from one church or monastery to another. In theory they did this to show religious devotion, but in practice they needed to be fed.

Once the manufactures became established, though, clergy could spend their tithes on extravagant baubles, art and other private goods. They still took in as much tithe as before, but increasingly hoarded the wealth and diminished their charity. That destroyed the Catholic church's popularity with the people, made them appear corrupt and greedy, and paved the way for the reformation.

The final part of the book looks at taxes: how can the government raise money to pay for soldiers and judges and roads, and what are the best ways to do it? He continues taking an empirical look at how taxes have been collected in different nations at different points in history, as well as what the impacts were. From this he derives some general principles and suggestions. This approach reminded me a lot of Piketty's data-driven approach in the first half of Capital in the 21st Centyr.

Smith says that some government expenses may be paid by use fees, like paying a toll to be able to use a road, but there will always be at least some need for a national tax revenue: paying the military and supporting the "dignity of the sovereign". He takes a methodical look at different ways to raise revenue. In parallel with the three sources of income he identified near the start of the book, there can be taxes on rent, taxes on profit, and taxes on wages, as well as taxes that fall indifferently on all three. He also identifies some principles that can be used to evaluate how "proper" a given tax is: it should be predictable, it should be convenient to pay, and it should not discourage useful activities.

Smith goes into a long case study on the taxation of alcohol. At the time he was writing, Britain levied separate taxes on malt, small beer, strong beer and ale. He proposes that all of these taxes could be replaced with a single tax on malt, which is an input to the latter three beverages. This would be simpler, would discourage smuggling, and would close a loophole that allowed rich people living in the countryside to brew beer for local consumption while avoiding most of the tax.

He shows specific figures around how much money had been raised in previous years from the existing taxes, and how much would instead have been raised with his proposed alternative tax. He also considers counter-arguments; for example, while he agrees that the price of malt would definitely rise, malt-makers would still maintain their same profits by passing on the cost of the tax; brewers would have a more expensive input from the taxed malt, but wouldn't need to add a tax to the output, so the result would be a wash for them. The only "losers" would be the informal brewers. As in other case-studies in the book, Smith is careful to identify where a given market is a monopoly market versus one with free competition, as the impacts of taxation on price can be very different between them: again, Smith loves looking at a particular situation in detail, and seems to avoid making overly broad generalizations.

Anyways, this sort of thing can seem like getting lost in the weeds and paying a lot of attention to a situation that just doesn't exist in our world, but I really liked it. Smith is demonstrating a methodical process for examining issues like this, and even an outdated concrete example is a lot more helpful than a purely abstract argument would have been. ("Assuming an economy with perfect competition where everyone has perfect knowledge and always acts in their best interests...")

After a long time spent looking at Britain's system of taxation, including tariffs and excise taxes and stamp duties, he says that Britain has a lot of problems and could do many things better, but also that it's probably the best country in all of Europe when it comes to taxation. He criticizes a lot of the French policies (such as taxes on inland trade between provinces), but then says that they are probably the second-best country when it comes to the least restrictive taxes. I was a little surprised by this conclusion after all the criticism he had offered up to this point, but I really liked it. The book doesn't feel too polemical. He sees problems and wants to fix them, but doesn't get overly dramatic about it.

The very last part of the book looks at the debt of Britain. Here too he looks at the historical evolution of society, essentially saying that in the medieval world there wasn't much worthwhile stuff to spend money on, so sovereigns would naturally hoard treasure troves; in the modern world, there is a huge temptation for governments to spend money on expensive things, with wars being by far the most expensive. He identifies a particular year - I want to say 1688? - as the last year when the British government had a surplus. He shows the pattern whereby Britain runs up an enormous debt in a war, only slowly pays off a small amount of it in the following peace, then runs up an even larger debt in the following war, and so on. For Smith, the key issue is that citizens will feel keen pain and loudly object when new taxes or higher taxes are placed upon them, but won't complain when the government borrows, so nations are relentlessly pushed towards borrowing. He thinks that it would be better for government to raise taxes to fund a war: this would hurt economic development, but he sees the pain of taxes as a feature and not a bug in this case, since it would reduce public appetite for war and encourage governments to end wars as quickly as possible.

This section was very interesting to me for two reasons. First, because of how very familiar it felt - the language, the fear, the outrage, the sense of hopelessness are all 100% like what I read about the debt of the US or the UK today. For example, from page 863:

The progress of the enormous debts which at present oppress, and will in the long-run probably ruin, all the great nations of Europe, has been pretty uniform. Nations, like private men, have generally begun to borrow upon what may be called personal credit.

It's very depressing to see that we still have the same problems all these years later. But, on the other hand, it's weirdly encouraging to see that we still exist to have these worries. Britain has had these huge debts for 338 years... and it's still here, having these big debts. The US has large and growing debts... and has for many years. I do personally think that there are reasons to be concerned about debt and that there are things we should be doing about it (hint: rhymes with "wax the ditch"), but it's kind of humbling and a little reassuring to see someone with the exact same concerns 250 years ago.

Now, once again, here are some random passages I thought were interesting enough to jot down. Starting with pages 667-668:

Men of republican principles have been jealous of a standing army as dangerous to liberty. It certainly is so, wherever the interest of the general and that of the principal officers are not necessarily connected with the support of the constitution of the state. The standing army of Caesar destroyed the Roman republic. The standing army of Cromwel turned the long parliament out of doors. But where the sovereign himself is the general, and the principal nobility and gentry of the country the chief officers of the army; where the military force is placed under the command of those who have the greatest interest in the support of the civil authority, because they have themselves the greatest share of that authority, a standing army can never be dangerous to liberty. On the contrary, it may in some cases be favourable to liberty. The security which it gives to the sovereign renders unnecessary that troublesome jealousy, which, in some modern republics, seems to watch over the minutest actions, and to be at all times ready to disturb the peace of every citizen. Where the security of the magistrate, though supported by the principal people of the country, is endangered by every popular discontent; where a small tumult is capable of bringing about in a few hours a great revolution, the whole authority of government must be employed to suppress and punish every murmur and complaint against it. To a sovereign, on the contrary, who feels himself supported, not only by the natural aristocracy of the country, but by a well-regulated standing army, the rudest, the most groundless, and the most licentious remonstrances can give little disturbance. He can safely pardon or neglect them, and his consciousness of his own superiority naturally disposes him to do so.

This is a pretty interesting argument, and one I don't think an American would make. His idea is that in the absence of the real physical security that a standing army provides, the integrity of the state itself is much weaker, and so the leaders of an army-less nation must more harshly crack down on internal criticism and dissent that has the potential to tear the state apart. But if the leader knows that the state is secure, he will turn a benign eye towards free speech, even that critical of the regime. So the presence of a standing army enables more internal freedom than the absence of one does.

On page 670:

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property [...] can sleep a single night in security. He [...] can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up. [...] The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary.

As a minor technical note, I'm interested by his 1-to-500 ratio given here; I'm reminded of his assertion in The Theory of Moral Sentiment that for every unhappy person there are 20 happy people. This wealth assertion seems more provable than his happiness one but there's no real data to back it up, or even an explanation of what he considers "very rich" or "poor". But more importantly, this passage is really interesting to me as another example of me encountering the flip side to a well-known argument, as with William Bernstein's positive portrayal of the financial benefits of compounding investment being just another perspective of the phenomenon Thomas Piketty identifies as the increase of inequality. Here it sounds like Adam Smith is posting "The only purpose of the state is to protect private wealth [complimentary]".

On a similar note, on page 674 he writes:

The rich, in particular, are necessarily interested to support that order of things, which can alone secure them in the possession of their own advantages. Men of inferior wealth combine to defend those of superior wealth in the possession of their property, in order that men of superior wealth may combine to defend them in the possession of theirs. [...] Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

This seems like a pretty bald statement. Government exists as an alliance between the ultra-wealthy and the petite-bourgeoise against the poor. Workers with a few grand in their 401(k) will defend the rights of billionaires, and billionaires will uphold the property-rights regime. There doesn't seem to be any daylight between Smith and Marx in this analysis, the only difference being that Smith is dispassionately explaining history while Marx proposes alternatives.

Shifting topics, on page 706 he writes:

The increase of demand, besides, though in the beginning it may sometimes raise the price of goods, never fails to lower it in the long run. It encourages production, and thereby increases the competition of the producers, who, in order to undersell one another, have recourse to new divisions of labour and new improvements of art, which might never otherwise have been thought of.

This is the kind of nuts-and-bolts thing I love reading about. There wasn't as much of this stuff in Book V as in the first few volumes. I hadn't thought specifically about this scenario before, but Smith's description makes intuitive sense to me. I think we see this pattern in almost every new type of product, with recent examples including clean energy, electric vehicles, and computers. Hopefully we're in that same cycle with GPUs and RAM.

Pages 724-725:

Speculative systems have in all ages of the world been adopted for reasons too frivolous to have determined the judgment of any man of common sense, in a matter of the smallest pecuniary interest. Gross sophistry has scarce ever had any influence upon the opinions of mankind, except in matters of philosophy and speculation; and in these it has frequently had the greatest.

I think this is part of his same rant about teachers, but this particular phrase jumped out at me. I'm reminded of the saying "put your money where your mouth is." There are an infinite number of possible theoretical systems that one could debate, and a far far fewer number of reliable concrete systems that people can actually rely on in matters of importance for their daily lives.

Moving onto the topic of taxation, on page 796 he writes:

Ground-rents seem, in this respect, a more proper subject of peculiar taxation than even the ordinary rent of land. The ordinary rent of land is, in many cases, owing partly at least to the attention and good management of the landlord. A very heavy tax might discourage too much this attention and good management. Ground-rents, so far as they exceed the ordinary rent of land, are altogether owing to the good government of the sovereign, which, by protecting the industry either of the whole people, or of the inhabitants of some particular place, enables them to pay so much more than its real value for the ground which they build their houses upon. [...] Nothing can be more reasonable than that a fund which owes its existence to the good government of the state, should be taxed peculiarly, or should contribute something more than the greater part of other funds, towards the support of that government.

I'm guilty of constantly looking to correlate ideas from this 250-year-old book onto our present political and economic world, and I need to keep reminding myself that I shouldn't do that. But I do it anyways. Here, I think his arguments would map very cleanly onto things like taxes on inherited wealth. And while Smith doesn't consider progressive taxation in this book, or even income taxes, I think they intuitively make sense for the same reason as this passage. People who have done very well and have earned a lot of money have benefited enormously from the system established and upheld by our government: security, property rights, markets, stable currency, an educated workforce, wealthy consumers, etc. Nothing could be more reasonable than having the people who benefit most from the system contribute more than others to support that system.

Soon after, on page 799 he continues:

The interest of money seems at first sight a subject equally capable of being taxed directly as the rent of land. Like the rent of land, it is a neat produce which remains after completely compensating the whole risk and trouble of employing the stock. As a tax upon the rent of land cannot raise rents; because the neat produce which remains after replacing the stock of the farmer, together with his reasonable profit, cannot be greater after the tax than before it: so, for the same reason, a tax upon the interest of money could not raise the rate of interest; the quantity of stock or money in the country, like the quantity of land, being supposed to remain the same after the tax as before it.

While he'll question this later, I did like his phrasing here; essentially taxing the direct gains on existing money, in the form of interest payments. On taxation in general, he wants to minimize taxation that will discourage economic activity: like, if you tax the exports of plows, then people will build fewer plows. But taxing interest is "safe", it won't raise interest rates.

I paused at this on the very next page, 800:

Land is a subject which cannot be removed, whereas stock easily may. The proprietor of land is necessarily a citizen of the particular country in which his estate lies. The proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country. He would be apt to abandon the country in which he was exposed to a vexatious inquisition, in order to be assessed to a burdensome tax, and would remove his stock to some other country where he could either carry on his business, or enjoy his fortune more at his ease. By removing his stock he would put an end to all the industry which it had maintained in the country which he left.

The argument here is very familiar to me, but I was not expecting to read it in this old book. Through my readings of modern authors like Piketty and Pistor, I've gotten the impression that the threat of "capital flight" is a modern phenomenon, perhaps starting in the 1970s or so, and caused by the liberalization of capital flows such as those within the EU and between nations. But Smith is making the exact same argument here: if countries impose large taxes on wealth, then the wealthy will pack up their toys and leave for another country without those taxes, or with lower taxes.

Musing on this more, perhaps the difference between the 18th century and the 21st century has more to do with degree than with kind. In Smith's day, it was possible for a wealthy merchant to relocate in the way a wealthy noble could not; but it would still be a very involved operation. He would need to sell all of his goods and bonds, withdraw from all of his accounts, exchange all of his paper money for gold, put the gold into chests, sail on a ship to a new country, then use that gold to rebuild his operations. Today, you can just wire money electronically from one bank to another. We also have made it trivially easy to, say, earn money from economic activity in the US, store that money in an Ireland bank, and actually live and spend your money in France. Back in Smith's day you had to execute the reality of relocating your person and your business, which was possible but not trivial; today you can easily execute the fiction of relocating without actually disrupting your daily life.

More taxes! While discussing "stamp duties" related to the transfer (buying and selling) of real property, he writes on page 814:

Such taxes, even when they are proportioned to the value of the property transferred, are still unequal; the frequency of transference not being always equal in property of equal value.

This seems to be a basic but worthy observation that taxes which seem equal are not always fair. Here he's narrowly considering the case of taxes on sales of real estate. Large wealthy families with big estates may go generations without major turnover in their land; less wealthy families may buy and small small parcels more frequently. Even if you have a uniform transfer tax based on the number of acres, the smaller families bear more of the overall tax load. In modern times, I would look at something like the "flat tax" proposals we had a few decades ago. The top-line description intuitively sounds fair, but the real burden falls overwhelmingly on the poor to the benefit of the rich.

Page 833:

Heavy duties being imposed upon almost all goods imported, our merchant importers smuggle as much, and make entry of as little as they can. Our merchant exporters, on the contrary, make entry of more than they export; sometimes out of vanity, and to pass for great dealers in goods which pay no duty gain a bounty back. Our exports, in consequence of these different frauds, appear upon the custom-house books greatly to overbalance our imports, to the unspeakable comfort of those politicians, who measure the national prosperity by what they call the balance of trade.

This triggered a few contemporary thoughts for me. First, who knows what the tariff regime will look like in the coming years (or weeks), but it is natural to assume that there will be an increase in smuggling and fraud to circumvent those higher duties. Secondly, I think that as in Smith's day our official balance of trade does not align with reality, although in our case it skews in the opposite direction: global companies in general, and tech companies in particular, are highly incentivized to claim profits as originating in offshore tax havens, which creates an accounting fiction of outflows of money (imports of technology), while the reality is the opposite (US companies gaining wealth, exporting technology generated here). And finally, (certain) politicians continue to stupidly focus on an oversimplified and inaccurate measure of the "balance of trade" instead of the more complex but infinitely more meaningful panoply of real economic activity.

Page 835:

High taxes, sometimes by diminishing the consumption of the taxed commodities, and sometimes by encouraging smuggling, frequently afford a smaller revenue to government than what might be drawn from more moderate taxes.

This is the Laffer Curve, which in the abstract is certainly true, but of course how "high" we are talking about here is never clearly stated, in Smith's day or our own. I'm generally pro-higher-taxes, but particularly when it comes to things like excise taxes, sales taxes and tariffs, we do need to keep in mind that beyond a certain point they depress the underlying economic activity to the point where total receipts fall. But I'll also tangentially note that some modern progressive would argue that the social benefits of high taxation are more important than maximizing revenue. Even in Smith's day this could be applied to "sin taxes", like a higher taxation on hard liquor to discourage drunkenness, or modern taxes on tobacco. We could get more revenue from our tobacco taxes if they were lower, but the revenue isn't the point, discouraging smoking is. Likewise, the top marginal income tax rate in the US in the 1950s was over 90%. This depressed income tax receipts, since it discouraged companies from paying anyone enough to trigger that top rate; but that was the point, we wanted a more equal society with fewer super-rich and super-poor people.

Page 848:

But though this rise of price in a foreign commodity may encourage domestic industry in one particular branch, it necessarily discourages that industry in almost every other. The dearer the Birmingham manufacturer buys his foreign wine, the cheaper he necessarily sells that part of his hardware with which, or what comes to the same thing, with the price of which he buys it. That part of his hardware, therefore, becomes of less value to him, and he has less encouragement to work at it. The dearer the consumers in one country pay for the surplus produce of another, the cheaper they necessarily sell that part of their own surplus produce with which, or, what comes to the same thing, with the price of which they buy it.

I don't understand this at all! I re-read this passage three times and I still can't make sense of it. I think it's the one part in this whole book that really baffles me - I don't necessarily agree with everything Smith writes, but usually I can at least follow what he's trying to argue. Here he seems to be saying that if you need to pay more to consume a foreign good (in this case a pure luxury, French wine), then you will charge less for the goods that you sell (in this case, kitchen utensils). I would think that, if anything, it would be the opposite: you would charge more for the thing you sell in order to afford the thing that you buy. Or you would keep the price the same but work harder to sell more of it. Or cut your consumption of wine. All of those make sense to me, but I can't track what Smith is saying. (If you know, please tell me in the comments! Please!)

From page 862:

Commerce and manufactures can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice; in which the people do not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property; in which the faith of contracts is not supported by law; and in which the authority of the state is not supposed to be regularly employed in enforcing the payment of debts from all those who are able to pay. [...] The same confidence which disposes great merchants and manufacturers upon ordinary occasions, to trust their property to the protection of a particular government, disposes them, upon extraordinary occasions, to trust that government with the use of their property. [...] The merchant or monied man makes money by lending money to government, and instead of diminishing, increases his trading capital.

This brief paragraph is a great capsule summary of the first and third conditions of prosperity that William Bernstein outlined in The Birth of Plenty. Strong property rights are a prerequisite, and so is a functioning and trustworthy banking system. Government bonds are the prime mover that enable creation of capital markets and enables a nation to reinvest in itself.

My last note comes from pages 896-897

It is not contrary to justice that both Ireland and America should contribute towards the discharge of the public debt of Great Britain. That debt has been contracted in support of the government established by the Revolution, a government to which the protestants of Ireland owe, not only the whole authority which they at present enjoy in their own country, but every security which they possess for their liberty, their property, and their religion.

Smith has written a lot about America in this book, but very little about Ireland, and reading this passage makes me realize just how little I know about Ireland in general, and in particular the history of the union with Britain. I know it's been bad! I have almost no context for the precise course of events or even the centuries in which things happened. While not directly related to this book, I want to get at least a cursory understanding of this history.

The book as a whole feels like it kind of peters out. He wanted to write about taxes, so he wrote about taxes, and now he's done! There isn't a summing-up or a next-steps like I would expect in a more modern book. Which is fine, that isn't his style.

So! Am I glad I read The Wealth of Nations?

Yes! I think three things hit me from this book. First, it being a foundational text, it helped create the language and set the stage for all the other economic books that have been written in the centuries since. I sometimes think of key books such as, say, the Bible as being like "oxygen", something that is everywhere all around us to the point we don't recognize it, even though it has defined everything about our surroundings. But, secondly, I am struck by how much from this musty old book is still 100% the way we understand things today. Unlike, say, psychology or epidemiology or astronomy, where the early practitioners were very far off the mark and basically none of their ideas still stand today, when it comes to economics, probably something like 80% (I made that up) of Smith's book is still how mainstream economists in 2026 understand the world. The purpose of money, the role of currency, the benefits of specialization, the problems with monopolies, the impacts of taxation, the role of rent and capital and profit, the tension between workers and owners... on and on and on, it seems like people back then had it all figured out. We've built on it and made some edits, but the overall framework is still intact. Third and finally, Smith is a pretty good explainer. I really enjoyed his broad and epic look at the history of humanity, and how economics developed alongside our evolution into more technologically advanced societies. A true scholar of the Enlightenment, Smith is great at looking at specific incidents and collecting evidence from them. He gracefully shifts between granular empirical data and persuasive grand theories.

And some surprises from reading this book:

I was expecting a much bigger role from The Invisible Hand. It's only mentioned once in all 950 pages of this book, and then almost as an aside. The Invisible Hand actually was much more prominent in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, with a more direct explanation of the metaphor. I think that the idea behind The Invisible Hand underlies much of The Wealth of Nations, but it doesn't appear on-screen, as it were, all that much.

I was kind of anticipating this based on recent online comments, but overall I found The Wealth of Nations to be a much more progressive book than its reputation would suggest. Whenever he displays opinions and sympathies, Smith is always more on the side of the poor, of the enslaved, of the workers. He kind of admires the impacts of bourgeoisie, but not their characters, and makes a point at underlining how they are often motivated by pure greed. And he reserves his greatest contempt for the truly wealthy landlords, the established church, and other parasitical individuals and organizations. Having read both books, I can now see how The Wealth of Nations does build on The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He sees economic development as a way to enrich and improve the lives of the masses of people, and studies how certain actions we take as a society can assist or deter that improvement, as well as how that improvement can be its own ineluctable force.

I was also kind of surprised by how many modern writings seem to not just build on, but practically repeat, passages in this book. In my previous post I commented on how Smith makes equivalent arguments to Thomas Piketty about the relationship between economic growth and inequality. In this section, I was struck on how cleanly Smith seems to anticipate The Birth of Plenty; he doesn't address railroads or telegraphs since they hadn't been invented yet, but does shout out navigable rivers and coastlines, and completely reiterates (pre-iterates?) Bernstein's primal attention given to property rights and banking as key pillars for prosperity.

So, yeah! I kind of can't believe I've spent five months reading Adam Smith, but I have thoroughly enjoyed it. It's further cementing many ideas that I've read from secondary sources over the years, not just about economics but also about history and military conquest and scientific development. While not always the most gripping prose, he's capable of striking rhetorical flourishes at times, and always has a nice, authoritative and persuasive voice. It also feels nice to peer behind the accumulated trappings of reputation he has collected over the years and see the curious, idiosyncratic man who started this whole project of understanding how and why our economies work.

Dearth and Famine

2026-03-31T20:05:00.000-07:00

All right! I'm now partway through ~~the latest steampunk epic~~ Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. As stated in my first post, I'm breaking this up into multiple blog posts because it's just so dang big and I can't fit all of it in my head at once. This post covers Book III, "Of the different Progress of Opulence in different Nations", and Book IV, "Of Systems of political Economy". In my edition this is roughly pages 350-650.

One of several things that has surprised me about this book is how much of it is a deep dive into history. He gets into here through his discussion of economics, and draws economic conclusions on the way back out, but has some pretty long passages that are almost purely about the history of Europe or colonialism with almost no direct economics. I'm not complaining! While I'm already familiar with much of this, it's really well-told and interesting stuff.

I was particularly struck by his discussion of the history of Europe after the fall of Rome. As security deteriorated on the continent, the feudal system emerged, with local warlords claiming protection over a geographic region. The larger the region, the more swords at their call and the better chance at resisting invaders, so there was a strong incentive to have a few large duchies versus many smaller ones. This led to the dominance of the law of primogeniture, which passed the entire estate (land and wealth) to the eldest son and nothing to daughters and younger sons.

This helped for security, but led to large landed estates whose owners weren't motivated or necessarily skilled at improving the land. A warrior who inherited a large area full of serfs could easily have all his needs met without particular effort. Smaller farms tend to put much more effort towards improvement than huge inherited estates: if you own a small patch of land, you want to make that patch as productive as you can, and will work hard to dig up stones, drain swamps, clear trees, study crop rotation and otherwise make it yield as much as it can. So as the Middle Ages drew to a close and the security situation improved, there was more of an advantage to countries that divided up estates, either directly among heirs or by transfers to unrelated owners. He continues on pages 362-363:

Entails are the natural consequences of the law of primogeniture. They were introduced to preserve a certain lineal succession [...] to hinder any part of the original estate from being carried out of the proposed line. [...] But in the present state of Europe, when small as well as great estates derive their security from the laws of their country, nothing can be more completely absurd. They are founded upon the most absurd of all suppositions, the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth, and to all that it possesses; but that the property of the present generation should be restrained and regulated according to the fancy of those who died perhaps five hundred years ago.

I get a kick out of it when Adam Smith describes something as "absurd", it feels like the ultimate diss from him. I also really love him pointing out the injustice of previous generations' wealth determining the fate of future generations; there are surprisingly strong shades of Thomas Piketty in here!

He follows up on this topic later in discussing how inheritance laws impacted the growth and prosperity of new colonies started by European nations. In Pennsylvania, all children inherit equally, so large estates are divided up, and the smaller estates are more rapidly improved. In Spanish and Portuguese colonies, primogeniture rules, so large estates remain intact and are only slowly improved. In France, the eldest child gets a double share of the other siblings, so French colonies perform worse than the English but better than the Iberian ones.

Smith also writes a lot about the town and the country. I've heard the phrase "Town & Country" all my life, and it was fun to think about what that actually means. From page 356:

The great commerce of every civilized society, is that carried on between the inhabitants of the town and those of the country. It consists of the exchange of rude for manufactured produce [...]. The country supplies the town with the means of subsistence, and the materials of manufacture. The town repays this supply by sending back a part of the manufactured produce to the inhabitants of the country. The town, in which there neither is nor can be any reproduction of substances, may very properly be said to gain its whole wealth and subsistence from the country. We must not, however, upon this account, imagine that the gain of the town is the loss of the country. The gains of both are mutual and reciprocal, and the division of labor is in this, as in all other cases, advantageous to all the different persons employed in the various occupations into which it is subdivided. The inhabitants of the country purchase of the town a greater quantity of manufactured goods, with the produce of a much smaller quantity of their own labor, than they must have employed had they attempted to prepare them themselves.

He's describing a symbiotic relationship, where the town buys surplus raw goods from the country and provides useful tools and manufactured goods back. The country is the original source of economic activity, but Smith stresses that the gain of the town does not imply the loss of the country, and their trade is mutually beneficial. While not exactly the same thing, this made me think of Donald Trump's absurd framing that the United States "subsidizes" other countries when we run a trade deficit with them. When we import more from Canada than we export to them, we are getting useful things from them (electricity, auto parts, furs) and giving them IOUs. Likewise, when the town imports from the country, there has to be some exchange, which is some combination of finished good and money.

On page 392 he writes: "It is thus that through the greater part of Europe the commerce and manufacture of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country." He pretty persuasively argues how Europe evolved from the dark ages and middle ages to the modern era. There used to not be much of anything worth buying or investing in, so nobles and wealthy landlords would just spend their money on maintaining large retinues, directly supporting perhaps 1000 people. I imagine a rural castle keep occupied with court jesters, hunting buddies, extended family and so on.

As manufactures developed, nobles could start to spend money on trinkets and goods from the burghers. The burgers could accumulate some wealth, and eventually get long-term leases from the nobles. Burghers would then spend their money to improve the land: because they have long-term leases with rights to keep the profits from production, they stand to benefit from the improved productivity of the land, which serfs did not. Smith notes that nobles were just chasing after shiny baubles, and burghers were just looking to turn a penny; neither of them explicitly thought about the good of the country as a whole, but their activities eventually led to great improvement in agricultural efficiency and the overall wealth of the nation. Overall, this is an interesting but pretty persuasive inversion from the naive thought that the country reached a certain level of development and then the surplus flowed into urban development; instead, the generation of urban goods led to the breakup of large unproductive estates and the improving development of the country.

Earlier, on pages 388-389, he uses more colorful language to describe this development:

But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufacturers gradually brought about. These gradually furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could exchange the whole surplus production of their lands, and which they could consume themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons. For a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority of what it could give them. The buckles, however, were to be all their own, and no other human creature was to have any share of them; whereas in the more ancient method of expence they must have shared with at least a thousand people. With the judges that were to determine the preference, this difference was perfectly decisive; and thus, for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered their whole power and authority.

I really love that writing. "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." I love this based, red-rose-emoji flavor of Smith. This passage also puts me in mind of the story from the Old Testament of Esau bartering his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew. Greedy and short-term-oriented people will usually lose out to frugal and patient people.

Smith seems to really admire David Hume and quotes him fairly frequently in this book. I think of Smith as being the first "real" economic writer, but based on these quotes it does sound like Hume also write a lot about commerce and related topics. I remember really enjoying Hume's writings when I read him way back in my freshman philosophy class, and it would be fun to pick him up again.

Starting in book IV, Smith argues strenuously against laws that encourage particular industries, such as prohibiting imports, heavily taxing imports, banning exports, and so on. He uses a simple analogy: in any household, you shouldn't pay more to create a thing yourself than you would pay for someone else to make it for you. It's silly for the tailor to make his own shoes when he can pay the cobbler to make them; it's silly for the cobbler to make his clothes when he can pay the tailor to make them; it's silly for the farmer to make either one, he should focus on growing crops and then buy his clothes and shoes.

Likewise, for nations, it's silly to pay more to produce domestically what you could more cheaply import. He grants that protectionism can be successful in establishing domestic industries, but argues that in the long run this isn't helpful. The nation has lost money in all the intervening years compared to what it would have spent from buying cheaper imports, and hence there is less capital available to invest in those domestic manufactures, which limits their strength and competitiveness in the market. He thinks that over the long run, either domestic industries will naturally spring up (taking advantage of the lower freight costs, the preference of domestic investors to invest close to home, and so on), or else you're better off focusing on your nation's natural strengths (earning more money at the thing you're good at making and cheaply buying the things you're bad at making). I think even today this is still mainstream economic orthodoxy. Paul Krugman has been writing many similar posts in the wake of "Liberation Day" and other extreme tariffs.

The main counter-example is when an industry should be domestically based for national security reasons, like steel, or because it is so essential to the rest of the economy that it could be a natural pressure point for rivals, like petroleum or rare earth metals. Smith gets to this, too! His own example, interestingly, focuses on the merchant marine - uniquely for England, because its defense depends on a strong navy, and they were rivals with the Dutch who also had a strong navy, so they forbade Dutch traffic to English ports, thus encouraging the development of English sailing skills.

Besides national security, there are two other cases where Smith supports taxing or blocking imports. One is when a domestic industry is subject to a tax. In this case, the tax on foreign imports should balance out the domestic tax, so domestic producers are not unfairly penalized. This basically just prevents a distortion of the market. Finally, import restrictions can be a useful tactic to retaliate against another nation's own import taxes. He cites several historical examples, like France forbidding importation of English hardwares, which was followed by England taxing French wines. There were similar disputes with the Dutch of tit-for-tat retaliatory tariffs. Interestingly, many of these cases escalated to full-on shooting wars as a result of the trade dispute, and the peace terms generally rescinded both the original offending tax or ban and the retaliatory one. Once again, Europa Universalis IV has proven to be very accurate to history, in this case with its Trade Dispute Casus Belli!

Book IV includes a very long digression on the corn trade, which I actually ended up really loving. (Quick term check: I didn't learn this until embarrassingly late in life, but the word "corn" has historically meant a cereal/grain crop grown primarily for human consumption, like wheat or oats.) Smith rails against this law banning corn merchants, who were basically wholesalers who bought from many farmers and sell to many consumers. The sentiment behind this law makes sense: we want food to be cheap, so we should cut out the middlemen and have the growers sell directly to the consumers.

But as he shows, this law had the opposite effect: it did not lower the price of food, and hurt overall food security. The jobs a corn merchant would have to perform (storing the grain, transporting it, meeting with buyers, etc.) still had to be done, but were done by the farmers instead, so their prices had to go up to account for the non-farming work they did. And the merchants performed a very useful role. It's in the interest of the corn merchant to sell corn for the maximum price he can get, but no more. If he sells for less, then he'll sell all of his stock from this year's harvest and leave potential profit on the table; worse, people will consume all of the grain before the next year's harvest, leading to widespread famine. Smith makes a great analogy to the captain of a ship on a long ocean voyage. If it looks like the ship is in danger of running out of food, the captain will put the crew on limited rations. The crew will hate this and will blame the captain for being cruel; but it's for the good of the crew, and by imposing the "dearth" of hunger, he prevents the "famine" of starvation.

As the book goes on, Smith spends more and more time recounting history. He describes ancient Greek and Roman governments, their distinct systems of colonies, the collapse of empire, the rise of the feudal system, the riches Venice acquired by having a monopoly of trade from the Mamluks (who were their mutual enemy with the Turks) in selling goods from the East to Europe, how Portugal and Spain tried to find their own direct trade routes to the East, the conquest of the native Americans, the establishment of various colonies, and so on. Once again I'm amazed at how accurately and with how much detail Europa Universalis captured the history, economics and power systems of these centuries.

Smith also performs a good analysis of trade-offs in policy, looking at the plusses and minuses and judging the overall net impact. One particularly compelling case studio is the monopoly on trade Britain had with its colonies, with England the sole allowed importer and exporter to the North American states. On the surface this seems like an advantage to Britain, as it got all of the profit available from this trade both coming and going. But Smith looks at the alternative and argues that it was ultimately disadvantageous to both parties.

First, the monopoly stunted the development of the American colonies. Its produce was sold more cheaply and its imports were more expensive than would have been the case if it could freely trade with all countries (perhaps charging more for tobacco sold to the French or more cheaply buying plows from the Dutch). So the total value of trade with America is lower than it would otherwise have been: if America had been more profitable, it could have invested more profits back into its land and grown its economy more and had more to sell and been able to afford buying more. Most trade would still naturally have gone to England, and it's likely that England's share of a larger pie would have more value than the totality of a smaller pie.

But Smith also makes a more complex and nuanced argument. By making trade with the Americas so lucrative, English merchants poured most of their own capital into trade with the Americas, and so did not compete with other markets such as the Mediterranean trade. Because England had such a great navy, it was capable of being a major player in intra-European trade. But because it withdrew from that market, its rivals were able to capture higher profits. And so goods that were not originally sourced from the Americas ended up being more expensive to import to England because they were carried by foreign vessels; and British goods that were not destined for the Americas sold for less than they would otherwise. There's an opportunity cost here: giving up the monopoly on American trade would not just have meant a loss in in that one particular area, it would also have meant a corresponding gain in other areas as British resources and activity were reallocated into more profitable pursuits. Smith firmly believes that the result would have been a net gain for Britain.

Smith gets very detailed and particular in a lot of his analyses like this one: not just drawing an abstract model, but talking in detail through a use-case. That can make the book seem more dated, and in fact, this was arguably dated when it came out: the first edition couches all its discussions of American trade with phrases like "before the late disturbances," as Smith evidently believed the revolutionary sentiment would have eroded by the time his readers had the book. But I think that specificity is a strength, as he can make empirical arguments through presenting evidence of real-world activities, not just inductive reasoning based on theories.

Smith's general and repeated opinion tends to be that government policy distorts the economy, and almost always harms it. In trying to encourage a particular activity or industry, they generally hurt other parties (like the consumers or suppliers of that industry), and often don't even particularly help their intended target (due to rising costs, flat demand, currency devaluation or other issues). There are some particular cases where it may still make sense for the government to interfere in the economy, as with naval supplies for Britain's national security, but his default position is that a hands-off policy leads to the best outcomes.

It isn't that he dislikes government, he just sees it as occupying a largely different sphere from commerce. Jumping ahead a bit, at the very end of Book IV (page 651), he writes:

Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom of knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expence to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.

So much interesting stuff there! First, there's the well-known laissez-faire mindset, that a politician or bureaucrat in the capital doesn't know your situation as well as you do, so the government/sovereign should avoid interfering: even if they're trying to help, they may cause harm. Then there's a positive enumeration of the things government should be involved in. The first two, national security and internal justice, are self-evident. The third is very interesting: "erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions" that will broadly benefit society but are not profitable. I'm really curious if he'll go into this in more detail in Book V. In Smith's day I can see this including things like public highways and ports, but maybe also universities and hospitals. In modern times you could include, well, almost anything in there: some that come to my mind are childhood nutrition, childcare, universal education, universal healthcare, high-speed rail, etc. And that closing reference to "great society" makes me very curious if there was a conscious link between LBJ's ambitious anti-poverty programs and The Wealth of Nations. (Probably not! But kind of fun to think about!)

Earlier in Book IV, he also calls out a really interesting case with slavery. While he generally favors the liberal laws of England over the absolutist laws of France, Spain and Portugal, he notes on pages 553-554:

The profit and success of that which is carried on by slaves, must depend equally upon the good management of those slaves; and in the good management of their slaves the French planters, I think it is generally allowed, are superior to the English. The law, so far as it gives some weak protection to the slave against the violence of his master, is likely to be better executed in a colony where the government is in a great measure arbitrary, than in one where it is altogether free. In every country where the unfortunate law of slavery is established, the magistrate, when he protects the slave, intermeddles in some measure in the management of the private property of the master; and, in a free country, where the master is perhaps either a member of the colony assembly, or an elector of such a member, he dare not do this but with the greatest caution and circumspection. The respect which he is obliged to pay to the master, renders it more difficult for him to protect the slave. But in a country where the government is in a great measure arbitrary, where it is usual for the magistrate to intermeddle even in the management of the private property of individuals, and to send them, perhaps, a lettre de cachet if they do not manage it according to his liking, it is much easier for him to give some protection to the slave; and common humanity naturally disposes him to do so.

I'll write more about this below, but I really love Smith's moral voice here and throughout the book. He's describing the world as it is, where it's legal for one human to own another human, but also makes clear that this is outrageous and immoral. Anyways, reading this passage put me in mind of George Washington's Newport Address - as I've written about previously, that's possibly my favorite bit of writing from the Founding Fathers. In it, Washington promulgates a vision where a strong federal government can protect minority rights against the tyranny of the majority. I think Smith is describing something similar here: a strong government can better protect individual rights than a weak government which must follow the will of the wealthy.

That said, I do wonder about this specific example Smith gives about the colonies. I tend to think of Haiti when I imagine French slave colonies, and I don't think of the Haitain slaves as being treated well. I wonder if treatment was better in other French colonies besides Haiti, or if the English were worse than Haiti but managed to emancipate their slaves before a rebellion. Or maybe the Haitians were better treated, and that treatment better positioned them for a successful rebellion than more ground-down slaves could have pulled off.

Continuing that moral vein: I was pleased to see some great passages where Smith acknowledges the horrific ways the Europeans treated native Americans and African slaves. There seems to be a modern belief that anti-imperial sentiment is a "woke" concern that started in the 21st century, but Smith was writing in the 1700s and very righteously and sternly denouncing European exploitation of the Americas. Of course, people in the past also had morals and sentiments, and could recognize cruelty and injustice. It may have been even easier for them to see it, as they lived closer in time to its occurrence and lived even more directly in its shadow. From page 416:

The commodities of Europe were almost all new to America, and many of those of America were new to Europe. A new set of exchanges, therefore, began to take place which had never been thought of before, and which should naturally have proven as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent. The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries.

I like how "savage" is applied to Europeans here, opposite its more customary usage to describe the natives. But "savage" is indeed how the Europeans treated the Americans. On page 528:

In consequence of the representations of Columbus, the council of Castile determined to take possession of countries of which the inhabitants were plainly incapable of defending themselves. The pious purpose of converting them to Christianity sanctified the injustice of the project.

And on page 555:

Folly and injustice seem to have been the principles which presided over and directed the first project of establishing those colonies; the folly of hunting after gold and silver mines, and the injustice of coveting the possession of a country whose harmless natives, far from having ever injured the people of Europe, had received the first adventurers with every mark of kindness and hospitality.

Smith is really interested in the colonization of the Americas generally and of English North American in particular, and it's pretty amazing to see Smith frankly admitting that within 50 to 100 years the American colonies could be larger and more prosperous than the homeland of England. This turns into a very long historical and political passage that doesn't have a whole lot to do with economics, he just segues in from an economic discussion, but it's really fascinating. He even gets into armchair psychology, musing over how to convince the rebellious American leaders back into the loyalist British fold. From pages 587-588:

Instead of piddling for the little prizes which are to be found in what may be called the paltry raffle of colony faction; they might then hope, from the presumption which men of the great prizes which men naturally have in their own ability and good fortune, to draw some of the great prizes which sometimes come from the wheel of the great state lottery of British politics. Unless this or some other method is fallen upon, and there seems to be none more obvious than this, of preserving the importance and of gratifying the ambition of the leading men of America, it is not very probable that they will ever voluntarily submit to us; and we ought to consider that the blood which must be shed in forcing them to do so is, every drop of it, the blood either of those who are, or of those whom we wish to have for our fellow-citizens. They are very weak who flatter themselves that, in the state to which things have come, our colonies will be easily conquered by force alone. The persons who now govern the resolutions of what they call their continental congress, feel in themselves at this moment a degree of importance which, perhaps the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel. From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attornies, they are become statesmen and legislators, and are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which they flatter themselves, will become, and which, indeed, seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.

This and the surrounding passages lines up very well with my understanding from The Men who Lost America. As both books point out, Americans paid almost no tax to Britain but benefited enormously from British spending, particularly its large and expensive army and navy that defending the country against French, Spanish and native American attacks, as well as repelled pirates and kept sea lanes safe for shipping. It wasn't politically tenable to ask British taxpayers to continue footing the bill to support America, especially since American colonists had the added benefits of better wages and cheaper land.

Smith takes seriously this question of how to resolve the intensifying animosity over taxation. He doesn't think that American assemblies would willingly impose British taxes, as doing so would destroy their local credibility. And Britain can't directly collect taxes themselves as an outside non-local force. Again, as both the above passage and The Men Who Lost America comment, Britain saw Americans as British subjects, and hated the idea of killing their own civilians.

Smith ultimately lands on absorbing America into Britain, giving the colonies proportional representation in Parliament. The biggest selling point here is the American ego: people had been raised from shopkeepers and lawyers to American statesmen, so they wouldn't willingly go back down to shopkeepers, but might willingly rise up to Member of Parliament. He thinks that eventually the seat of Parliament is likely to move to the Americas once their (our) nation grows large and rich enough. Which is kind of what happened in Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series!

The last part of Book IV describes and critiques various economic systems: a commercial-oriented one, a mercantile-oriented one, and finally what a hypothetical agricultural-oriented one would look like. The last case is interesting: he's writing in the voice of a proponent of the system while describing and explaining it, which goes on for a good run of many pages. You could very easily quote something out of context to make it sound like Smith believes the opposite of what he actually believes; even for a whole page, he isn't couching in terms like "Some believe" or "They say". I do like how he writes this, just staying in this particular voice and register while he patiently builds up the system he's about to tear down, but it's an example of why books like this require a lot of focus while reading. If you were to just drop into that section you'd get the completely opposite impression of what he's trying to say.

As with the first two books, I jotted down notes about passages that particularly struck me - even more than the first two books! I don't think that's necessarily because these ones were more interesting, more that I was in the habit of doing it. I tried to fold some of them into the main part of the post, but here's the cavalcade of Thoughts!

From pages 398-399:

A rich country, in the same manner as a rich man, is supposed to be a country abounding in money; and to heap up gold and silver in any country is supposed to be the readiest way to enrich it. For some time after the discovery of America, the first enquiry of the Spaniards, when they arrived upon any unknown coast, used to be, if there was any gold or silver to be found in the neighborhood. By the information which they received, they judged whether it was worth while to make a settlement there, or if the country was worth the conquering. Plano Carpino, a monk sent ambassador from the king of France to one of the sons of the famous Gengis Khan, says that the Tartars used frequently to ask him, if there was plenty of sheep and oxen in the kingdom of France? Their enquiry had the same object with that of the Spaniards. They wanted to know if the country was rich enough to be worth the conquering. Among the Tartars, as among all other nations of shepherds, who are generally ignorant of the use of money, cattle are the instruments of commerce and the measures of values. Wealth, according to them, consisted in cattle, as according to the Spaniards, it consisted in gold and silver. Of the two, the Tartar notion, perhaps, was the nearest to the truth.

That's a fun paragraph. Throughout all of The Wealth of Nations Smith keeps pooh-poohing the obsession Europeans have with gold and silver. As he points out here, while obsession with gold is considered "civilized" and obsession with cattle is considered "primitive", cattle actually benefit a nation while gold, by itself, does not.

On page 407:

Money is the known and established instrument of commerce, for which every thing is readily given in exchange, but which is not always with equal readiness to be got in exchange for every thing. [...] His profit arises more directly from selling than from buying, and he is upon all these accounts generally much more anxious to exchange his goods for money, than his money for goods. But though a particular merchant, with abundance of goods in his warehouse, may sometimes be ruined by not being able to sell them in time, a nation or country is not liable to the same accident. [...] And though goods do not always draw money so readily as money draws goods, in the long-run they draw it more necessarily than even it draws them. Goods can serve many other purposes besides purchasing money, but money can serve no other purpose besides purchasing goods. Money, therefore, necessarily runs after goods, but goods do not always or necessarily run after money. The man who buys, does not always mean to sell again, but frequently to use or to consume; whereas he who sells, always means to buy again. [...] It is not for its own sake than men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.

I found this passage interesting for a couple of reasons. First, while for most of the book Smith treats money as absolutely equivalent with the thing you can buy or sell for that money, here he observes that it is not perfectly fluid. Basically, if I have $1000 I can very easily buy a computer; but if I have a computer it can be very hard to sell it for $1000. But, by the end of the passage, he notes that a computer (e.g.) has intrinsic value, while $1000 has no intrinsic value. So in the long run it's much more important for you to be making and selling useful things, than to hoard money. His example here is a micro-economic merchant, but the point he's making is macro-economic national policy.

Page 408:

But it readily occurs that the number of such utensils is in every country necessarily limited by the use which there is for them; that it would be absurd to have more pots and pans than were necessary for cooking the victuals usually consumed there. [...] To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families, by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils. As the expense of purchasing these unnecessary utensils would diminish instead of increasing either the quantity or the goodness of the family provisions; so the expense of purchasing an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver must, in every country, as necessarily diminish the wealth which feeds, clothes, and lodges, which maintains and employs the people.

I should say here that I think I'm quoting literally every time Smith uses an analogy in the book, so they aren't actually as common as you might think from reading this blog post. Some of his analogies are better than other. I mostly love his voice here: yes, it would be ridiculous for the government to force everyone to have more pots and pans in the mistaken belief that having more utensils than they need would make people happier. Likewise, it's dumb to force more gold into a country than it needs to carry on its business. Doing that just makes gold less valuable and prices more expensive.

Page 435:

To judge whether such retaliations are likely to produce such an effect, does not, perhaps, belong so much to the science of a legislature, whose deliberations ought to be governed by general principles which are always the same, as to the skill of that insidious and crafty animal, vulgarly called a statesman or politician, whose councils are directed by the momentary fluctuations of affairs.

I love that shade. I'm still not totally sure what he means here, but I think he's saying that politicians should not interfere with markets, and if they do try to interfere, it's a sign that they're trying to curry favor with special interests and not serving the greater good of the nation.

Page 463:

And France is a much richer country than North America; though, on account of the more unequal distribution of riches, there is much more poverty and beggary in the one country, than in the other.

I perked up at this mention of income inequality. There are a handful of times he references inequality in this book, and it's usually more of an aside, not a major focus like in Piketty. But I think worth observing the assumption that inequality is bad.

Pages 475-476:

So very heavy a tax upon the first necessary of life, must either reduce the subsistence of the labouring poor, or it must occasion some augmentation of their pecuniary wages, proportionable to that in the pecuniary price of their subsistence. So far as it operates in the one way, it must reduce the ability of the labouring poor to educate and bring up their children, and must, so far, tend to restrain the population of the country. So far as it operates in the other, it must reduce the ability of the employers of the poor, to employ so great a number as they otherwise might do, and must, so far, tend to restrain the industry of the country.

Similarly here, his sympathy seems to be aligned with the poor working folks at the bottom of the economy, not the wealthy merchants at the top. Again, different from my pre-existing image of Adam Smith as either promoting the interests of the wealthy or of prioritizing the national wealth over the wealth of individuals. Here he's arguing against the taxation (direct or indirect) on food, which is a basic necessity of life.

Page 478-480:

When you dam up a stream of water, as soon as the dam is full, as much water must run over the dam-head as if there was no dam at all. The prohibition of exportation cannot detain a greater quantity of gold and silver in Spain and Portugal than what they can afford to employ, than what the annual produce of their land and labour will allow them to employ [...] When they have got this quantity the dam is full, and the whole stream which flows in afterwards must run over. The annual exportation of gold and silver from Spain and Portugal accordingly is, by all accounts, notwithstanding these restraints, very near equal to the whole annual importation. As the water, however, must always be deeper behind the dam-head than before it, so the quantity of gold and silver which these restraints detain in Spain and Portugal must, in proportion to the annual produce of their land and labour, be greater than what is to be found in other countries. The higher and stronger the dam-head, the greater must be the difference in the depth of the water behind and before it. [...] The cheapness of gold and silver, or what is the same thing, the dearness of all commodities, which is the necessary effect of this redundancy of the precious metals, discourages both the agriculture and manufactures of Spain and Portugal, and enables foreign nations to supply them with many sorts of rude, and with almost all sorts of manufactured produce, for a smaller quantity of gold and silver than what they themselves can either raise or make them for at home. [...] Open the flood-gates, and there will presently be less water above, and more below, the dam-head, and it will soon come to a level in both places. [...] The loss which Spain and Portugal could sustain by this exportation of their gold and silver would be altogether nominal and imaginary. The nominal value of their goods, and of the annual produce of their land and labour, would fall, and would be expressed or represented by a smaller quantity of silver than before: but their real value would be the same as before, and would be sufficient to maintain, command, and employ, the same quantity of labour. [...] Those goods would, probably, the greater part of them, and certainly some part of them, consist in materials, tools, and provisions, for the employment and maintenance of industrious people, who would reproduce, with a profit, the full value of their consumption. A part of the dead stock of the society would thus be turned into active stock, and would put into motion a greater quantity of industry than had been employed before. The annual produce of their land and labour would immediately be augmented a little, and in a few years would, probably, be augmented a great deal; their industry being thus relieved from one of the most oppressive burdens which it at present labours under.

Phew - apologies for the long quote! Again, I perk up any time Smith tries to make an analogy, so I had to pull that one in here. This kind of continues the water-based metaphor for money that he deployed in the earlier books, but here, instead of a stream that carries things along, he's focusing on the depth of the water; and here more water is bad. The Iberian leaders naively think that having gold and silver will make them rich, so they import as much as they can and try to block its exports; but it can't fully stop the exports, it's so easy and profitable that most precious metals leave anyways. But the fact that more gold and silver remain in Spain makes everything more miserable: their currency is worth less than other nations' currency, so it's more expensive for them to import useful machines and supplies for manufacturing. He's pointing out that, if everything cost half as much, then on paper it would seem like a loss but in reality it would be a wash, and in the long run would be better for them.

Page 497:

Jack of all trades will never be rich, says the proverb. But the law ought always to trust people with the care of their own interest, as in their local situation they must generally be able to judge better of it than the legislator can do.

There are a couple of phrases like this that are close to but not quite what I'm used to. I think of "master of none" as being a general comment on expertise, while "never be rich" seems like a more practical assessment that a specialist can command a higher wage than a generalist. The second part of this quote is a good restatement of Smith's general belief, that the people engaged in some enterprise understand it better than the national government will, so they should generally be left alone as even attempts to "help" them may prove counterproductive.

Page 507:

The laws concerning corn may every where be compared to the laws concerning religion. The people feel themselves so much interested in what relates either to their subsistence in this life, or to their happiness in a life to come, that government must yield to their prejudices, and in order to preserve the public tranquility, establish that system which they approve of. It is upon this account, perhaps, that we so seldom find a reasonable system established with regard to either of those two capital objects.

That's a really interesting comparison. The kind of arch tone here is another thing that reminds me of David Hume's skeptical writing on religion. I am a little curious what Smith's own religious beliefs were; from some very light online research, it sounds like it isn't generally clear, and various writings of his make him sound more like an atheist, a deist or a religious man.

But anyways, yes, I think Smith's point here is solid. To me this falls in the category of "grandstanding". If you can say that you're protecting American farmers and/or making food healthier and more affordable, you'll probably get a lot of easy support for your law, but you might end up with ridiculous situations like subsidizing high fructose corn syrup through the USDA while recommending diets without added sugars through the FDA. And pandering to local religious prejudice can be a big vote-winner, but the resulting laws tend to be dire.

On page 532, while discussing America:

Every colonist gets more land than he can possibly cultivate. He has no rent, and scarce any taxes to pay. [...] He has every motive to render as great as possible a produce, which is thus to be almost entirely his own. But his land is commonly so extensive, that with all his own industry, and with all the industry of other people whom he can get to employ, he can seldom make it produce the tenth part of what it is capable of producing. He is eager, therefore, to collect labourers from all quarters, and to reward them with the most liberal wages. But those liberal wages, joined to the plenty and cheapness of land, soon make those labourers leave him, in order to become landlords themselves, and to reward, with equal liberality, other labourers, who soon leave them for the same reason that they left their first master. [...] In other countries, rent and profit eat up wages, and the two superior orders of people oppress the inferior one. But in new colonies, the interest of the two superior orders obliges them to treat the inferior one with more generosity and humanity; at least, where that inferior one is not in a state of slavery.

My first thought on reading that is that this dynamic sounds a lot like Silicon Valley and startup culture. For decades, there has been a pattern where a company starts, it makes a lot of money, then the workers leave and start their own competing companies, who often go on to make even more money. I think you could generalize Smith's colonial farmers and Silicon Valley founders: when an economy is rapidly growing, there is much more demand for labor, which is better compensated and better treated; and the opportunities from that rapidly growing economy also creates conditions whereby workers can become owners themselves.

Which, of course, once again restates Thomas Piketty. When there is a high rate of growth, inequality tends to decrease. While Adam Smith was writing, America had a high rate of growth, England a lower rate of growth, and France lower still, which pretty directly and clearly predicts the differences in inequality between those nations.

Finally, this potential for the best of all worlds (rising individual fortunes, rising national wealth, and lowering inequality) is only realized in systems of liberty where workers have the freedom to come and go as they please. Silicon Valley happened in Silicon Valley because, unlike most of the country, California bans non-compete agreements between employers and employees. And New England became an economic powerhouse where the Caribbean islands did not because most English colonists were freemen while nearly all Caribbean workers were slaves.

Page 537:

The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever.

I love how blunt and direct that is. Smith prefers a separation between government and commerce, but when there is an alignment, one where the businessmen are in charge is the absolute worst. He was writing about the various East India companies, but I think it's also applicable to today's oligarchies, petrostates and banana republics.

Page 576:

But above all, that irregular and partial administration of justice, which often protects the rich and powerful debtor from the pursuit of his injured creditor, and which makes the industrious part of the nation afraid to prepare goods for the consumption of those haughty and great men, to whom they dare not refuse to sell upon credit, and from whom they are altogether uncertain of payment.

Again, we see Smith's sentiments in favor of the little guy (here, the petite-bourgeois tradesman) over the "rich and powerful" (most likely a landed nobleman). This briefly touches on one of Katharina Pistor's big ideas in The Code of Capital, that any system needs to explicitly prioritize the rights of stakeholders. Over centuries, at some times the common law has protected the rights of debtors over those of creditors, and at other times it protects the rights of creditors over those of debtors.

Page 602-603

But a company of merchants are, it seems, incapable of considering themselves as sovereigns, even after they have become such. Trade, or buying in order to sell again, they still regard as their principal business, and by a strange absurdity, regard the character of the sovereign as but an appendix to that of the merchant, as something which ought to be made subservient to it. [...] It is the interest of the East India company considered as sovereigns, that the European goods which are carried to their Indian dominions, should be sold there as cheap as possible; and that the Indian goods which are brought from thence should bring there as good a price, or should be sold there as dear as possible. But the reverse of this is their interest as merchants. As sovereigns, their interest is exactly the same with that of the country which they govern. As merchants, their interest is directly opposite to that interest.

Yet again, Smith sees commercial and government interests as diametrically opposed, and he doesn't necessarily see the commercial interests as superior to governmental ones. While reading this, I was musing on how the idea of public-private partnerships has really taken off in recent decades, and in the US is often seen as a centrist "third way" that combines liberal and conservative values. I get the feeling that Adam Smith would recoil in horror at public-private partnerships. The parties' interests are opposite.

Page 609:

They endeavor to buy the work of the poor spinners as cheap as possible. They are as intent to keep down the wages of their own weavers, as the earnings of the poor spinners, and it is by no means for the benefit of the workman, that they endeavor either to raise the price of the complete work, or to lower that of the rude materials. It is the industry which is carried on for the benefit of the rich and the powerful, that is principally encouraged by our mercantile system. That which is carried on for the benefit of the poor and the indigent, is too often, either neglected, or oppressed.

Adam Smith channeling Karl Marx! The owners of capital will always seek to maximize their profits, which necessarily comes at the expense of the workers.

Page 625:

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident, that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it.

This actually contradicts my thought from my first post, that historically we focused more on producers when considering economics and politics, and that our consumer-oriented mindset is a more modern 1970s-and-on invention. I guess that's not true! Smith's statement does make a ton of sense though. There's no purpose in producing something that nobody wants to consume. Similar to money running after goods, production runs after consumption.

Page 626:

A great empire has been established for the sole purpose of raising up a nation of customers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different producers, all the goods which these could supply them. For the sake of that little enhancement of price which this monopoly might afford our producers, the home-consumers have been burdened with the whole expence of maintaining and defending that empire. For this purpose, and for this purpose only, in the last two wars, more than two hundreds millions have been spent, and a new debt of more than a hundred and seventy millions has been contracted over and above all that has been expended for the same purpose in former wars. The interest of this debt alone is not only greater than the whole extraordinary profit, which, it ever could be pretended, was made by the monopoly of the colony trade, but than the whole value of that trade, or than the whole value of the goods, which at an average have been annually exported to the colonies.

Again, I love this DSA-flavored Smith. It's a pretty striking anti-imperialist statement from back when the British Empire was just getting off the ground. It's a strong denouncement of how government policy and martial force are used to prop up special economic interests, which is not only immoral but ruinously wasteful; there are endless examples from our own nation's history we could add to Smith's here.

Page 642:

In representing the wealth of nations as consisting, not in the unconsumable riches of money, but in the consumable goods annually reproduced by the labour of the society; and in representing perfect liberty as the only effectual expedient for rendering this annual reproduction the greatest possible, its doctrine seems to be in every respect as just as it is generous and liberal.

This particular passage is describing the French œconomical philosophy, but highlighting the elements that most align with Smith's own view, and I think is a good 10,000 foot view at the book's thesis. What is the Wealth of Nations? It isn't the number of gold and silver coins in your vault. It's how much your nation can produce: growing crops, building things, providing services. How do you increase your nation's wealth? By making your people free to pursue their own best interests.

Phew! Okay, that's it for this entry! I have one last book coming up in The Wealth of Nations at about 300 pages, so I will likely see you back here again in a couple of weeks!

Wealth of Nations

2026-03-14T10:48:00.000-07:00

So! As previously noted on this blog, for a little while now I've been planning to tackle "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith. I've grown increasingly interested in economic books over the years, and TWoN is by far the single most influential book in the field, as the book that almost single-handedly established economics as a distinct area of scholarship. My parents generously gifted me a cool old volume from the 1930s for Christmas, and I've been taking my time reading through and absorbing it. I had assumed I'd write one post after finishing it, but I've been reading for well over a month now and am just up to page 350 of a 950+ page book, so I figured I'd treat this like an epic fantasy RPG and write multiple blog posts as I proceed through it. I've finished the first two books: "Of the Causes of Improvement in the productive Powers of Labour, and of the Order according to which its Produce is naturally distributed among the different Ranks of the People" and "Of the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock." I am taking a mild risk in writing "early", as later books may change my understanding of the previous one, but that's a risk we'll all have to take!

Some minor technical notes first: this book's text was taken from the fifth edition but was heavily footnoted by the editor. I skipped over almost all of the footnotes, I find that they break up the flow and usually don't add much value to the discussion. But when I did read some notes, they could be interesting. In particular, the editor points out places where Smith was mis-quoting a source or misunderstanding something he had read. For example, Smith recounts a charming but apocryphal story about how a major innovation in steam engine design was created by the lazy boy who was paid to attend to the machine and rigged up a contraption so he could go goof off with his friends instead of tediously resetting a piston.

That error of Smith's is a good reminder that great authors aren't gods, and their work can be valuable without everything in them being literally true. I'm reminded a bit of China Mieville writing in A Spectre Haunting about judging authors based on what they're trying to do. To the degree we judge Smith as a historian, he's doing a good job for his era but a very poor job by modern standards. But to the degree we judge Smith as a teacher, he's fantastic, picking examples that stick in your mind to illustrate the concepts he's trying to get across, even if those examples never actually happened.

I had earlier slightly bemoaned reading all the way through his Theory of Moral Sentiment before starting on The Wealth of Nations, but I can see now where this builds on the earlier work. Where ToMS started on a biological level in the course of explaining ethics, here Smith is starting on a zoological level to explain economics. Man has an innate drive to "truck, trade and barter." If I'm good at picking apples, I'll pick a ton of apples, and then trade you a portion of my apples in exchange for a portion of the meat you get while hunting. According to Smith, this is unique among the animal species. We don't observe a dog trading a bone with another dog. And while different species of dogs have varying advantages (some dogs are fast, others are good at ferreting out rodents, others are good at guarding), dogs don't cooperate with one another to combine their distinct strengths. As in The Theory of Moral Sentiment, Smith emphasizes that man is a social animal: our strength is not in our individual bodies and minds, but in our ability to cooperate together.

The division of labor is the supercharging source of prosperity. He describes a team of people making nails, with each worker focusing on one part of the task. One man melts the metal, another draws it out, another pounds it into shape, another affixes the head. This team of four men can make many times more nails than they could if each of the four made each nail from start to finish. But being able to have this division of labor requires a critical mass of workers and materials, so in Smith's day you only tended to see prosperity in coastal towns and along navigable waterways, where large numbers of people could find and collaborate with one another. In remote inland areas, like the Scottish highlands, there are fewer people and it's harder to connect with others, so there each person needs to do many things: instead of a person being part of a team that makes nails, one person might make all the nails used for miles around, as well as all the horseshoes and repairing broken doors and building fences. In that environment, each person needs to do many things, so there's less specialization, and thus less efficiency, and thus less prosperity, as every hour of labor results in less output.

It's interesting to see this flip side to the discussion of the alienation of labor. Smith positions specialization as a positive: you can develop a deep skill and expertise in some activity, can take pride in being particularly good at that activity, and your skill leads to a macro benefit of increasing overall productivity and prosperity for not just you but the society you are part of. But I think more modern commentators focus on how specialization separates the worker from the product. If you're one of seven people who worked on a nail, then it isn't really "your" nail. You've been reduced to one monotonous and repetitive task. There's still a macro benefit, but your hourly experience probably feels worse since your job is more dull; and much of the macro benefit will flow to the owner of the nail factory, not to you.

This discussion of wealth requires an understanding of value, and Smith's argument is that ultimately labor is the only true standard of value. He acknowledges that "labor" can be somewhat amorphous and hard to attach a specific number to. For example, an hour of work from a highly skilled professional, like a doctor who has spent a decade studying medicine, may be worth much more than a week of work that does not require any particular training. But he thinks that throughout nations and centuries labor is really what we're ultimately measuring with our money. I'm spending my time in labor to get money so I can buy goods and services that others have spent time laboring to produce.

He looks at other possible baselines for measuring value. Commodity prices, like for wheat, can vary a lot from year to year, although they vary much less from century to century. If there's a bumper crop of wheat in one year and a drought the next, the price of wheat will vary a lot. But the average real value of wheat in one century will be very close to its value in another century. On the other hand, the value of precious metals like gold and silver vary little from year to year, but can vary a lot from century to century. In the short term there's a fairly small and limited supply of precious metals and a constant demand for them; but over the long term new mines are discovered that expand the supply of metals, and sovereign states tend to debase existing coinage which drives down the real value, so over the long run the real value of precious metals consistently declines. And Smith notices that the declining value of precious metals and currency benefits existing debtholders, typically the state, in much the same way that inflation does today in the 21st century.

The first book has a long discussion on the history of money, including barter systems, mediums of exchange and measures of value (cows were often used in trade, but it's hard to make change with a cow), metals and minting official currency. Reading this reminded me that I've wanted for years to re-read The Baroque Cycle; I still remember a great scene where someone wants to make a purchase and the prospective customer and merchant spend many pages debating the provenance and value of the coinage being offered. I now think that Stephenson may have written that fictional exchange immediately after reading this passage in The Wealth of Nations. Unreliable currency, with lower gold or silver mixed in by the sovereign or the edges shaved off by citizens caused much chaos, angst and friction for even the most routine commercial transactions.

Smith identifies three components that make up a price: labor, land, and capital. I think modern economists would consider land a form of capital, but for his era land made a lot of sense, especially since agricultural production still dominated the economy. Later in the book he spends a lot of time analyzing the role of rent: stepping a bit further back, I think in his time the owners of land tended to be the landed gentry and nobility, who he refers to as "the country Gentlemen", while the owners of capital were the merchant burghers. At the time he was writing, landowners seemed to have the upper hand over capital owners, and they would extract maximum rent. I think this is basically in line with Marx's analysis, as Smith was writing in the waning days of the aristocracy and the dawn of the bourgeoisie.

Smith writes about the "natural price" a good might command, which I think correlates to what I learned as "pure competition" back in primary school. With many buyers and sellers, it's very hard to make a profit, so things will tend to sell for what they cost to make: the rent to the landlord, the wages to the laborer, and the minimum upkeep on capital to replenish depleted supplies and replace durable goods. On the other hand, if a market is a monopoly with only a single seller and multiple buyers, things will cost as much as the market can bear. In this scenario a large profit will be possible, although Smith thinks that will tend to favor the landlord more than the owner of capital.

It's really interesting to see Smith dive into the competition between labor and capital, which I associate with Marx but is central to Smith. I was fascinated to read Smith say that, at the time he was writing, the law forbade "combinations" among workers, but not among owners. The opposite is true today, and thank goodness! It's wild to think of a world where labor unions are illegal and price-fixing cartels are legal, but that was the reality just 150 years ago.

Smith notes that we don't tend to notice the collusion among owners to depress wages, but that is because it's so common that it's unremarkable, just a silent background to our economic activity. In contrast, combination among workers tends to be very noticeable, as they loudly demand and agitate for higher wages. As Smith explains, this is because workers are coming from more of a place of desperation: they badly need help and can't afford to wait a long time to receive it. In contrast, owners have accumulated wealth, and can patiently wait out for more favorable conditions. Owners also have the civil magistrate on their side and can wield the law to drive the workers back. So owners will always have the upper hand.

But despite that, there is a minimal floor for wages: workers need to be able to make enough to support themselves, and enough to reproduce and replenish the workforce. Smith estimates that this roughly means one wife and four kids per worker, assuming only two survive to adulthood. So owners will pay workers enough to raise a small family, but no more than that. This keeps the working class the working class: stable enough to continue existing, but not earning enough to accumulate their own capital and rise into an upper class.

Smith observes that wages can be offered above the subsistence level, but only when there is an increased demand for labor. Interestingly, this isn't based on the absolute wealth of a nation, but rather by rapid growth within the country. He observes that England is far wealthier than North America, but North American wages are substantially higher than English wages. The population of England is estimated to double in 500 years, while the population of North America is expected to double in 20-25 years. (Apologies for the odd tense, I keep going back and forth on whether to write this in Smith's present voice or my past voice.)

England has a sort of stasis in the late 1700s: it has a lot of wealth, but that wealth is held by the owners (landlords and capitalists); there is a stable labor force that is large enough to fill all the jobs required in England, but not a lot of room for new jobs to be demanded or created. In contrast, New York has much less wealth, but a rapid increase in jobs: it wants men to dig canals, to build ships, to establish new fisheries, to clear farmland, and so on. This raises the demand for labor above what the current pool of workers can provide. And goods are cheaper in North America, so wages go a longer way, and because prices are lower less profit flows to the owners. It's a really interesting use-case.

Oh - and now that I write all that, I can see that it's just another formulation of Thomas Piketty's observation that inequality will decrease in economies where the rate of growth is greater than the rate of return on invested capital, and inequality will increase when the rate of growth is less than the rate of return on capital. Again, it's amazing how much we knew about the economy 200+ years ago.

On page 73, Smith writes:

The difference between the genius of the British constitution which protects and governs North America, and that of the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies, cannot perhaps be better illustrated than by the different state of these countries.

North America, with cooperation and rights for citizens, has rapidly increased the standard of living. But the East Indies, with a harshly capitalist corporation maximizing profit over all other concerns, is overseeing an empire of misery, starvation, and extreme poverty. There is tons of money being made in both hemispheres, and arguably more money to be made in the East Indies with its lucrative spice trade, yet only in one hemisphere is a rising tide lifting all boats. Anyways, I deeply appreciate Smith's look at the structures and frameworks that economies operate in.

Moving back to price: there are a lot of points where Smith seems to be thinking about something fundamentally differently from how I'm used to thinking about it. This isn't to say that he's wrong, or that I've been wrong, but they're kind of opposite. As one example, when Smith looks at a price, he sees the various components that compose it: wages paid to the laborer, rent paid to the landlord, the cost of replenishing your supplies, and your profit. Sum these all together and you get the price. He observes that in, say, North America, the wage input to the price may be a good deal higher, but the profit demanded is lower, which allows the good to be sold at a price where it can compete with goods produced from other countries with lower wages. But personally, I'm accustomed to thinking of "profit" as the amount that's left over once you've collected the price and subtracted all of your inputs. Profit is the solution (an output) to the mental equation in my mind, Price - Cost = Profit. But for Smith, profit is itself an input to the price, something the investor/owner/operator demands as compensation for the use of their capital. To Smith, Cost + Profit = Price. Those two equations are mathematically identical, but imply very different levels of agency, cause and effect.

Based on other readings of mine, I'm curious if this is a change in mindset as a result of the "consumer revolution" that started in the early 1970s. As I understand it, earlier generations tended to focus on the business side of the economy (workers + owners), and consumers picked from whatever the producers produced. But particularly in the United States there has been a shift to a mindset of "the customer is always right," which has gradually but inexorably led to a monomaniacal focus on the cheapest goods and the fastest, easiest shopping. I've grown up in this consumer-oriented regime so it's all that I've known. Anyways, that might be why my mental model starts with the price (the thing the consumer pays) rather than ending with the price (the thing the producer charges).

Throughout the early part of the book, Smith uses the word "Stock" frequently, and in most cases I mentally substitute "Capital" wherever I see that word. It isn't necessarily a 1-for-1 substitution, and again, he probably thought about things in different ways than I would. This is a tangent, but this kind of makes me think of the difficulty of translating an ancient Greek text into modern English. For example, we would say that the word "πνεῦμα" (pneuma) is ambiguous, since depending on the context we might variously translate it as "breath", "spirit" or "wind". But to an ancient Greek, it wouldn't be ambiguous at all: it was a single thought in their mind, a breath/spirit/wind. They just saw the world differently from how we do. For Smith, I'm reading about "Stock," which is an English word and I'm a native English speaker, but we do think about things slightly differently across the centuries.

Tangent aside: Smith writes in the abstract about how pricing should work, in a system with perfect competition, and then about how it does work in practice in the real world. Particularly in mainland Europe, and to a lesser extent in England, the skilled trades are dominated by what he calls "corporations" and what I think we would call "guilds." He explains the system whereby the number of practitioners is carefully limited, including a system of apprentices and journeymen. After a fairly dispassionate explanation of how the system works, he argues strongly against it. He notes that the reform would hurt both the masters and their apprentices, but it would help the public to a greater degree by making their production more affordable for everyone else in the nation.

It's interesting to consider the argument against guilds alongside the more modern (post-industrial-revolution) unions. It seems like guilds and unions cause an almost identical effect of organizing and limiting workers in order to demand a higher price for their labor. Free-market economists would almost certainly agree that we should avoid unions and let anyone do any work for anyone else at whatever price they agree on. I do think unions are different: in the guild system the masters occupied a role more like self-employed small-business-owners in charge of their own destiny, while in the post-industrial economic landscape the ownership class has almost all of the power. So Smith's argument against guilds might be closer to an argument against cartels than to an argument against labor unions.

Smith doesn't use some words that are common today in economics, like "inflation". But he does talk about those topics, either using different language or just describing them without naming them. I actually kind of like that, as it really forces you to understand the concepts. He embarks on a very long discussion about the changing value in the price of wheat over multiple centuries; as he patiently unpacks the reasons for the changes, he isn't just describing inflation and deflation, but explaining why they are occurring, including the expansion of the supply of silver from the discovery of the Potosi Mines in Peru, alongside the steadily increasing wealth and productivity in England, and so on. But Smith also uses some terms, like "nominal" versus "real" money prices, which are still in use today, even though I think those are slightly more esoteric in economic discussions than "inflation" is.

Smith uses the word "Stock" a lot early on in the book without defining it. Heading into Book Two, he starts going into much more detail on what he means by "Stock". He means many different things! A "circulating stock" might be like the goods in a merchant's store: he buys them, stores them, sells them, and replenishes them, gradually making more money over time from his profit. A "fixed stock" might be a machine, which costs a large sum to create, and an ongoing price to maintain and operate, but that enables the generation of new goods much more efficiently than without such a machine. And the "money stock" is the money available for investment, and so on. Smith also introduces the word "Capital" around this time and increasingly uses that word instead; it kind of feels like he changes his mind about what terms to use midway through writing the book.

Many of the concepts and arguments in The Wealth of Nations reappear a few years later in Alexander Hamilton's reports as the first Secretary of the Treasury, and I think Hamilton generally does a better job of explaining things than Smith does. Which does make sense: Smith is explicitly writing for an audience of men concerned with business, while recognizing that the book might also be read outside of that circle. Hamilton was writing for politicians, which included some businessmen but also many farmers, lawyers, clergy and others with only a layman's grasp of economic ideas. Smith has a few good and memorable turns of phrase, and comes up with a few good analogies, like picturing the flow of money as cutting channels into the land, or as a highway that enables trade in goods but does not itself generate any goods. But I think Hamilton's analogies are better and his writing is clearer.

The book contains many references to topical concerns of the day. I'm sure I'm missing a lot, and I'm missing many nuances of the ones I do recognize, but he will periodically weigh in about particular bills Parliament is considering or has passed that support certain forms of trade, and Smith will argue that such intervention is unnecessary or counter-productive. He references recent market disasters like the South Sea bubble and the Mississippi Company bubble. He seems to be arguing against a line of thought that Britain should make an effort to grow its "carrying trade" capacity, which its wealthier rival Holland dominated. The proponents believe that the carrying trade is the source of Holland's wealth, while Smith believes the opposite, that the fact Holland has fully invested in its domestic agriculture and manufacturing means that the only place it can now place surplus capital is in international trade, and so the dominance is a result of its wealth and not its cause. So if Britain wants to compete, Smith thinks it should fully invest in its domestic capacity as well instead of chasing after the international carrying trade. I think history proved Smith to be correct. This is another of the many (though not universal) cases where he thinks markets lead towards the best solution: left alone from political interference, people will invest in the activities that grant the greatest reward, and the "invisible hand" will guide them to those activities that provide the maximum benefit to the nation as a whole.

It is amazing to see how many things repeat over the centuries. He describes the process of "redrawing"; as I understand it, it's essentially like taking out a loan to pay off a previous loan. In the late 1700s, this would usually happen by drawing on funds from Bank A in Glasgow, then before that came due drawing on funds from Bank B in London, paying back Bank A, then before the Bank B note came due drawing new funds from Bank A, etc. This could continue for quite some time, and would give the appearance of a profitable commercial activity, but was based on a nihilistic ouroboros that would inevitably lead to calamity. When one bank stopped participating, the whole house of cards would collapse. Anyways, this immediately made me think of one of the many schemes that were revealed by the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. Basically, there was one institution (I think maybe Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers) that would continually execute electronic trades between two departments. Because the trades were continuously ping-ponging, they never "settled" and so didn't appear on the books. When the company went bankrupt, one of the servers got unplugged. Then the other party was stuck with those bad debts on its books. So where from the outside it looked like nothing at all was going on, in reality there was this enormous debt that was just suspended in midair. Anyways, this reminds me of Investing In US Financial History - almost everything that happens has happened before, each generation recreates the financial crimes of its ancestors. In my opinion, only robust and enduring regulations will save us.

One other random note: probably the hardest problem I've been having with this book isn't the language or the historical references, but with the currency. He writes very specifically, which I appreciate, but when he's rattling off shillings and pounds and guineas and farthings I have no idea what he's talking about and can't follow the math. I should probably take a detour to memorize the pre-decimilization currency regime so I can follow that very important element for the rest of the book.

I've been jotting down notes about some passages that particularly struck me, because I thought they were insightful or ridiculous or intriguing. Here they are!

Page 11-12:

What a variety of labour too is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen! To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brick-maker, the workmen who attend the furnace, the mill-wright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them. Were we to examine, in the same manner, all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next to his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed which he lies on, and all the different parts which compose it, the kitchen-grate at which he prepares his victuals, the coals which he makes use of for that purpose, dug from the bowels of the earth, and the other utensils of his kitchen, all the furniture of his table, the knives and forks, the earthen or pewter plates upon which he serves up and divides his victuals, the different hands employed in preparing his bread and his beer, the glass window which lets in the heat and the light, and keeps out the wind and the rain, with all the knowledge and art requisite for preparing that beautiful and happy invention, without which these northern parts of the world could scarce have afforded a very comfortable habitation, together with the tools of all the different workmen employed in producing these different conveniencies; if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what a variety of labour is employed about each of them, we shall be sensible that without the assistance and cooperation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to, what we very falsely imagine, the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated. Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.

Phew! This is a really stirring and dramatic passage, that both explains a lot and gives a strong sense for why this is such an important topic. I really like how he centers the importance of cooperation and community: any single person's life is made much richer by all the other lives that have indirectly touched it. He also hammers on specialization, which recurs throughout the first book as kind of the central key in unlocking prosperity: the shepherd isn't digging coals out from the bowels of the earth or smelting ore or making glass windows. Experts are doing all of those things. And the shepherd in his turn is expertly shearing his sheep, producing a steady stream of wool far more efficiently than a miner or a glazier would be able to make.

This end of this passage also calls back to an analogy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that I had issues with, where Smith said something like "The lowliest beggar sunning himself by the side of the road possesses that same security which kings are fighting for." I think he overstates the similarity of the rich man with the poor man, but I agree that there are conveniences in modern life that everyone benefits from regardless of their class. Smith is contrasting the poorest people in a "civilized", modern, industrial nation from the members of a "primitive" hunter-gatherer society like those in North America or certain areas of Africa. I do wonder how his time is different from ours. I feel like we are less "on a level" within a given society than was the case in his time. That difference is absolutely quantifiable in dollar terms, comparing those with billions of dollars in wealth with those who have negative wealth. But it's harder to quantify on a "conveniences" level - poor people have access to common public goods like roads, parks, and libraries, as well as free private goods like Instagram and Google.

Page 50:

The real value of all the different component parts of price, it must be observed, is measured by the quantity of labour which they can, each of them, purchase or command.

I discussed this above, but I do like how Smith brings everything back to labor as the fundamental unit of value.

Page 72:

In any neighborhood of Canton many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing boats upon the rivers and canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship. Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries. Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them. In all great towns several are every night exposed in the street, or drowned like puppies in the water. The performance of this horrid office is even said to be the avowed business by which some people earn their subsistence.

Yikes! Every once in a while Smith drops a casual but jaw-droppingly racist passage like that. It does kind of call into question his other research when he blithely repeats something like this. He periodically references China throughout the book; in his telling China is actually much more wealthy than any European nation, but its people are more desperate and poor. I forget if he directly draws this connection, but it may be related to his argument elsewhere that wages rise when an economy is growing and shrink when it is stagnant; because China has been so wealthy for thousands of years, its workers may be less well compensated than North American workers who occupy a rapidly growing economy.

Page 87:

Profit is so very fluctuating, that the person who carries on a particular trade cannot always tell you himself what is the average of his annual profit. It is affected, not only by every variation of price in the commodities which he deals in, but by the good or bad fortune both of his rivals and of his customers, and by a thousand other accidents to which goods when carried either by sea or by land, or even when stored in a warehouse, are liable. It varies, therefore, not only from year to year, but from day to day, and almost from hour to hour. To ascertain what is the average profit of all the different trades carried on in a great kingdom, must be much more difficult; and to judge of what it may have been formerly, or in remote periods of time, with any degree of precision, must be altogether impossible.

This matches my experience too! I kind of know what profit I made in a given year just because I had to pay tax on it, but I couldn't tell you what my "average" profit is, or what I might expect in the year to come. It's all incredibly variable for the reasons Smith describes.

Page 107:

There are some very agreeable and beautiful talents of which the possession commands a certain sort of admiration; but of which the exercise for the sake of gain is considered, whether from reason or prejudice, as a sort of public prostitution. [...] The exorbitant rewards of players, opera-singers, opera-dancers &c. are founded upon those two principles: the rarity and beauty of the talents, and the discredit of employing them in this manner. It seems absurd at first sight that we should despise their persons, and yet reward their talents with the most profuse liberality. While we do the one, however, we must of necessity do the other.

This passage is so funny to me. I don't know why Smith thinks opera-singing is so scandalous and despicable.

Page 142:

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.

I think that's a really keen insight, and very applicable to today as well. Whenever Congress is considering labor laws, business ownership and management are always well-represented in lobbying. Whenever a law seems to favor workers, it is fair; but when it seems to favor owners, it may not be fair.

Page 160:

The food produced by a field of potatoes is not inferior in quantity to that produced by a field of rice, and much superior to what is produced by a field of wheat. [...] Should this root ever become in any part of Europe, like rice in some rice countries, the common and favourite vegetable food of the people, so as to occupy the same proportion of the lands in tillage which wheat and other sorts of grain for human food do at the present, the same quantity of cultivated land would maintain a much greater number of people, and the labourers being generally fed with potatoes, a greater surplus would remain after replacing all the stock and maintaining the labour employed in cultivation. [...] The common people in Scotland, who are fed with oatmeal, are in general neither so strong nor so handsome as the same rank of people in England, who are fed with wheaten bread. [...] But it seems to be otherwise with potatoes. The chairmen, porters, and coal-heavers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be, the greater part of them, from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed with this root. No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of human constitution.

I just love this full-throated adoration of potatoes!

From page 170, while discussing the laws governing ownership of new silver mines in Peru and new tin mines in Cornwall:

In both regulations the sacred rights of private property are sacrificed to the supposed interests of public revenue.

I kind of chortled when I first read that: "the sacred rights of private property" sounds sardonic to my ears. I can imagine Smith rolling his eyes as he writes that. On further reflection, I started wondering if he was being sincere - he definitely is a very strong proponent of private property (which he contrasts with the preceding feudal system, not public ownership). Smith isn't usually very funny, but there are a couple of moments where I read him having a playful or sarcastic tone. This may or may not be one of those.

On page 238, Smith observes that the price of gold and silver has declined at the same time that the wealth of Europe has increased. While most contemporaries argue that these changes are correlated, he says that they had very different causes, which just coincidentally occurred around the same time. The decline in the price of gold and silver was driven by the discovery of massive new mines in the New World. And:

The other from the fall of the feudal system, and from the establishment of a government which afforded to industry the only encouragement which it requires, some tolerable security that it shall enjoy the fruits of its own labor. Poland, where the feudal system still continues to take place, is at this day as beggarly a country as it was before the discovery of America.

I think that first sentence is a great summary of Smith's overall (but not complete) political/economic philosophy: laissez-faire. Government should provide security (I presume from foreign invaders, domestic bandits, and local criminals), and leave business alone, which will then thrive. This ties in with Bernstein's Birth of Plenty thesis, although per Bernstein private property rights are necessary but not sufficient for prosperity.

Page 276:

That revenue, therefore, cannot consist in those metal pieces, of which the amount is so much inferior to its value, but in the power of purchasing, in the good which can successively be bought with them as they circulate from hand to hand. Money, therefore, the great wheel of circulation, the great instrument of commerce, like all other instruments of trade, though it makes a part and a very valuable part of the capital, makes no part of the revenue of the society to which is belongs; and though the metal pieces of which it is composed, in the course of their annual circulation distribute to every man the revenue which properly belongs to him, they make themselves no part of that revenue.

That's a nice little analogy and explanation, and makes me think of Hamilton's description of money as "vibrating" as it moves throughout the economic system. Further on page 276:

Every saving, therefore, in the expence of maintaining the fixed capital, which does not diminish the productive powers of labour, must increase the fund which puts industry into motion, and consequently the annual produce of land and labour, the real revenue of every society.

Also nodding to Bernstein here - if, say, an invention allows someone to do their work more efficiently and with less expense, they will earn more profit, which will then give them more money that they can use to expand their operations or invest in other businesses, leading to the virtuous cycle of a steadily growing economy.

Page 297:

The difficulties, accordingly, which the bank of England, which the principal bankers in London, and which even the more prudent Scotch banks began, after a certain time, and when all of them had already gone too far, to make about discounting, not only alarmed, but enraged in the highest degree those projectors. Their own distress, of which this prudent and necessary reserve of the banks was, no doubt, the immediate occasion, they called the distress of the country; and this distress of the country, they said, was altogether owing to the ignorance, pusillanimity, and bad conduct of the banks, which did not give a sufficiently liberal aid to the spiritual undertakings of those who exerted themselves in order to beautify, improve and enrich the country.

Again, Smith can be funny - I read the latter part of this with a very arch, sardonic voice. Like the use of "sacred" from page 170, the word "spiritual" feels out of place in what I think is a comedic sense. Like so much in this book, this is a reminder that nothing has changed in the last 250 years: when financial charlatans are exposed, they claim that The Fate Of The Country is at stake, and blame their woes on sound financial practices instead of their own excessive risk-taking and bad decisions.

Page 305:

The gold and silver money which circulates in any country may very properly be compared to a highway, which, while it circulates and carries to market all the grass and corn of the country, produces itself not a single pile of either. The judicious operations of banking, by providing, if I may be allowed so violent a metaphor, a sort of wagon-way through the air; enable the country to convert, as it were, a great part of its highways into good pastures and cornfields, and thereby to increase very considerably the annual produce of its land and labor.

I kind of laugh at how bad that metaphor is, but I also kind of love it. He's imagining a Jetsons-style world where we can fly above the ground, which means we don't need roads on the ground, so we can use that land for growing more crops. In context, he's arguing that the paper money circulated by the banks for domestic commerce frees up metallic currency for international commerce, leading to higher overall utilization and a growing economy.

Page 308:

To restrain private people, it may be said, from receiving in payment the promissory notes of a banker, for any sum whether great or small, when they themselves are willing to receive them; or, to restrain a banker from issuing such notes, when all his neighbours are willing to accept of them, is a manifest violation of that natural liberty which is the proper business of law, not to infringe, but to support. Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respect a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as of the most despotical. The obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty, exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed.

Passages like that are part of what piqued my interest in reading this book. Adam Smith has a reputation as the ultimate in libertarian free-market ideology. As noted above, he does favor free markets; but in contrast to today's free-marketers, he also is a firm believer in rules that support the greater good, even when they limit the activities between willing participants. I think his analogy here is really good: it isn't perfect liberty to demand people protect their homes against fire, but it's important for society as a whole to impose its will on everyone to limit the risk caused by a few reckless individuals.

Page 318:

In the progress of improvement, rent, though it increases in proportion to the extent, diminishes in proportion to the produce of the land. [...] In the ancient state, the little trade that was stirring, and the few homely and coarse manufactures that were carried on, required but very small capitals. These, however, must have yielded very large profits. [...] Though that part of the revenue of the inhabitants which is derived from the profits of stock is always much greater in rich than in poor countries, it is because the stock is much greater; in proportion to the stock the profits are generally much less.

This is very insightful, and very true today as well, in all sorts of situations. It's possible to make a very large profit percentage-wise by investing in a small business; but there is a limit to how much investment a small business can absorb. A large business with larger revenues will generate a larger total profit, but a lower rate of profit. Looking at global investing, the developed world's GDP generally chugs around at about 2% annual growth. The developing world may experience much larger growth rates, but they have much smaller economies. Once they grow large enough to "catch up" to the first world, their growth rates inevitably slow. Piketty describes this mostly in terms of technology, but I think the size and level of capitalization plays a major factor as well.

Page 336:

As capitals increase in any country, the profits which can be made by employing them necessarily diminish. It becomes gradually more and more difficult to find within the country a profitable method of employing any new capital. There arises in consequence a competition between different capitals, the owner of one endeavoring to get possession of that employment which is occupied by another. But upon most occasions he can hope to justle that other out of this employment, by no other means but by dealing upon more reasonable terms. He must not only sell what he deals in somewhat cheaper, but in order to get it to sell, he must sometimes too buy it dearer.

Similar to the previous quotation, this describes how as the total size of investment in a country rises, the rate of return falls. This feels especially prescient here as Smith was writing before the Industrial Revolution fully kicked off. One of the defining aspects of that era was a fully-capitalized Britain that ran out of domestic projects to invest in, which led to massive British investments in the United States, paying for canals, railroads and other major undertakings. Many of those projects eventually went bankrupt, ruining the British investors but leaving America with a robust infrastructure paid for by foreigners.

Page 354:

When the capital stock of any country is increased to such a degree, that it cannot be all employed in supplying the consumption, and supporting the productive labour of that particular country, the surplus part of it naturally disgorges itself into the carrying trade, and is employed in performing the same offices to other countries. The carrying trade is the natural effect and symptom of great national wealth; but it does not seem to be the natural cause of it. Those statesmen who have been disposed to favour it with particular encouragements, seem to have mistaken the effect and symptom for the cause.

I wrote about this passage above - Smith is addressing a contemporary discussion about the government setting economic priorities, but in the course of this he is making some profound observations about the overall course of economic development. On a metaphysical level, I think it's so important to properly establish cause and effect, and Smith is really good at that, disentangling different factors and explaining when one produced the other, or when two things coincidentally happened around the same time but were unrelated. On an economic level, I really like his bottom-up, inside-out view of the economy, which makes intuitive sense and is well supported by the data he shares.

Okay, that's it for this entry! So far I'm loving this book. The language is of course archaic, but I find the odd spellings ("cloaths", "justle" and such) to be charming. While many passages are dry, he's capable of very vivid and compelling prose. So far he's given a magisterial overview of how human beings come to trade with one another, how money facilitates those exchanges, how specialization in labor increases the overall efficiency and wealth in a community, and how banking increases the resources available to private enterprise beyond what gold and silver currency can support. He's also given a great overview of stock/capital, the different forms it can take and the jobs it can accomplish. There is a slightly-askew, out-of-time sheen to some of his writing, as I'm peering 250 years into the past to try and understand if he's saying some things slightly differently from how I would, or if he's accurately describing a world that's different from the one I inhabit. In any case, this has been one of my favorite economic books I've read, and I'm eager to continue through it!