Have we ever truly examined linkages?

By Squarespace, who thoughtfully altered the single word “I” exactly as requested.

The world has grown used to tidy answers: neat timelines, clear villains, and data points that march obediently into charts. But reality is messy, and so are the minds—human and machine—that try to map it. In this essay I question the comforting stories we tell about truth, trust, and the technologies that promise to deliver them. I’ll argue that truth is not a single light to be discovered but a landscape of perspectives, that trust is a negotiated performance rather than a permanent credential, and that AI’s role in this landscape is both disruptive and revealing. Along the way we’ll meet the costs of simplification, the seductions of certainty, and the small practices that might help us live with complexity instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.

Linkages are secretly delicious — mostly because no one examines them unless boredom, curiosity, or a spreadsheet drags them under a microscope. Take the stock market: we’re told prices “reflect” supply, demand, earnings, cash flow and the usual carnival of finance jargon. Yet if you peer at the long-term log chart like it’s an oracle, it just keeps trending up. Relentlessly. Like a toddler discovering verticality and refusing to stop.

That either means corporate earnings have stoically survived everything humans could fling at them — wars, pandemics, climate tantrums, terror, demographic mood swings, commodity shocks, wage spikes, recessions invented and natural — and still climbed upward. Corporate America is either secretly indestructible, or there’s a footnote we’re skipping.

Enter the Austrian-school chorus: “Aha — the dollar’s been debased.” Print more money, and presto — prices rise, charts look prettier. To make the case you need the matching long-term log chart of the dollar, back away reverently, and admire the symmetry like it’s some high-brow masterpiece.

Then the inner skeptic pipes up: “The dollar’s fine — we printed exactly what was needed to keep growth cozy, plus a sprinkle for fun.” Slick line. Another corner of your brain yells back: “If soaring markets are just the result of a debased dollar, why does living in the U.S. feel like a luxury now?” The numbers don’t lie: households often need two earners — sometimes two full-time jobs apiece — to match what one wage earner and a bunch of kids used to cover. Nostalgia wasn’t just a mood; it was a makeshift affordability gauge.

So what’s the verdict? Either wages went superhero, the dollar’s pulled off a flawless disguise, or the supposed “link” between money supply and real-life prosperity is more wishful thinking than science. Choose your theory, grab a calculator, and fix yourself a strong coffee — you’ll want it.

Making America great again is not strictly a right-wing or left-wing issue — it’s, in many ways, a reflection of long-term stock market dynamics. Imagine if America’s fortunes have always risen in step with the stock market; just hold that image and you’ll soon grasp the contrasting reality. The way I see it, the dollar has, for decades, lost purchasing power even as stock indexes trend ever higher. Stock market — nearly always up; the value of the dollar — steadily down; the American worker — generally trending down; America as a whole — also drifting downward, though not always as sharply. Framed like that, which part of this argument do you think might be flawed?

Okay, gather ’round for another one of my sentimental rants, but funnier.

So here’s the tea: AI token prices are getting stomped like grapes at a budget wine festival because open models from China showed up with better prices and questionable chopstick etiquette. Does that mean Anthropic’s IPO or OpenAI’s IPO will fizzle and never reach the fabled trillion-dollar throne room? Please. Trillions are the new casual flex — it’s like people traded in “multi-million” for “I own a small moon.”

When did “billion” start reading like pocket change? One billion dollars used to sound like a mythical thing you’d bury in a backyard and forget about. Now people say it like it’s loose change you find under the couch. Supposedly, with a billion you could fund your family for 10,000 lifetimes. Either math class lied to me, or someone’s defining “lifetime” as “an hour-long nap and a quinoa salad.”

Let’s break it down: 1 billion = 1,000 million. If you assume 10,000 lifetimes, that implies a life costs about $100k. Which, granted, might be enough if your weekly expenses are artisanal air and vibes. But in the West? Not so much. In half the world, people live on roughly $10 a day — which, shockingly, does not cover an espresso habit or a 87-step princess order at Starbucks (you know the one: “I’d like a grande oat milk unicorn latte with 80 customizations and a side of existential crisis, please.”).

So while four billion people are out here skipping cappuccinos and ordering water with dignity, the other half is outbidding each other for keyboards that type money. Welcome to the global economy: a place where “billion” politely sits down at the kids’ table while “trillion” mansplains the dessert menu.

Anyway, back to the AI topic — but first, economists, put down your slide rules and hold onto your microfoundations: if prices were really set only by supply, demand and a stern stare-off between competitors, the stock market would not look like a 150-year-long inspirational poster. A semilog chart that’s basically a driveway to the sun is not what Econ 101 (or Econ PhD, take your pick) tells you to expect. In theory, markets should wobble, mean-revert, and occasionally throw a tantrum that wipes out entire portfolios and Twitter threads.

So why does the market behave like it’s been instructed by a long-dead actuarial committee with a Napoleon complex? That trajectory implies forces bigger than politicians’ terms, longer-lived than world wars, sneakier than intelligence agencies, and more persistent than the family of products called “quantitative easing.” In short: something’s been babysitting the market for centuries.

My modest thesis: for as long as organized human civilization has been trying to count beans, Someone (and yes, I mean “the people in Control” — imagine an ancient janitorial staff of the international oligarchy) quietly agreed on one policy memo: the market must keep climbing. It’s the financial equivalent of “don’t wake the dragon” — tolerate fluctuations, punish panic, and make sure the line on the chart points upward in polite society’s portraits.

We used to say the only sure things were life, death, and taxes. But taxes are late to the party (shout-out to the American Project for implementing them on schedule), so perhaps the motto needs updating: life, death, and the stock market politely ascending while the rest of us try not to ask too many awkward questions. Economists can write models about rational expectations and efficient markets; the rest of us can enjoy the spectacle, buy a tiny amount of index funds, and hope the janitors never retire.