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I don’t know about you, but I can’t shake the feeling that we’re living in Groundhog Day. With one difference: instead of a charming rodent, what keeps showing up every morning is Abaddon, the angel of the abyss, commanding an army of locusts with human heads, lion’s teeth, scorpion tails, and the specific mission of tormenting mankind until we seek death and cannot find it.

Another war. Gas prices spiking at pumps thousands of miles away. Governments worldwide scrambling to cushion the blow. Stock markets in free fall. A recession looming. How many front-page headlines have we racked up so far this year?

But if you step back and look closely, there’s a pattern in the middle of the chaos. We’re living through the final weeks — maybe the final days — of a 17-year cycle that has run its course. The political and economic framework that carried us to 2026 is on the verge of collapse, its gears grinding under the weight of a reality that won’t let them keep turning.

In recent hours, the stars have aligned. A cascade of political and economic events is threatening one final, spectacular implosion — the simultaneous collapse of the political cycle and the economic cycle. The simultaneous collapse of Donald Trump and AI.

No. I’m not exaggerating. The signals are stacking up everywhere: Trump’s increasingly erratic maneuvering, the quiet deflation of US markets, Bitcoin’s price crash, and rising bond yields are all tolling the bell on the final movements of a cycle.

Here’s how it sounds:

THE END OF THE POLITICAL CYCLE: TRUMPISM IS DEAD

To make sense of this mess, we need to start with one question: Why did Trump attack Iran?

The answer: because he was cornered. The Supreme Court had suspended his signature policy — the one that had propelled him to the presidency twice — tariffs. He was mired in a debate over whether he owed Americans refunds on what they’d overpaid. Meanwhile, his approval ratings were in free fall ahead of midterm elections he looks set to lose badly. Trump, a master of capturing attention, needed a new lifeline — a new scandal, a new global crisis to dive into. He found it in Iran.

His plan probably wasn’t to stumble into this irreversible quagmire. He likely thought he could assassinate the Ayatollah and be out of Tehran in a couple of days, the way he’d handled Venezuela. Or he’d been fed bad intelligence and hadn’t accounted for the regime’s resilience, nor the economic fallout back home. Doesn’t matter. The point is that Trump — with no real agenda, backed into a corner — has careened from crisis to crisis like a true kamikaze, until he finally crashed into the immovable wall of the ayatollahs.

As we’ve covered before, regimes like Trump’s, in their final phase, tend to go one of two ways: they either consolidate and find some stability, or they launch into an increasingly desperate, agonizing forward flight. What we’re watching is that Trumpism has failed to find that equilibrium — and has chosen option B.

Donald Trump came to power wielding a story: that the cause of the decay Americans were feeling (a decay carefully stoked by alt-right influencers in the years prior) was an unfair deal that soft elites had cut with the rest of the world. The fix was simple — reorder the balance of power, put America First, make it Great Again. None of it has materialized. He’s deployed every tool at his disposal — tariffs, threats, even the kidnapping of foreign heads of state — to force the world to pay what he claims it owes, and it has produced zero meaningful effect on the American economy, which sits, at best, exactly where it was under Biden.

In other words, Trumpism doesn’t work. It cannot make America Great Again. What was once a fairly successful political common sense has curdled into a fringe obsession believed only by the most fervent devotees. It’s spent.

Today, there isn’t a single analyst in the world who isn’t already planning for the post-Trump era.

NO MORE TACOs

One of Trump’s most powerful weapons throughout all of this has been the blind confidence the big money had in him. Since he took office, the world of investment funds, banking, and big business had concluded that the Republican was one of their own — a man with the sensibility and track record of any other billionaire. No matter how much noise he made for the New York Times, the people who move markets knew that when things got dicey for Wall Street, Trump would always do whatever it took to course correct.

And Trump had been proving them right, time and again. Every time his antics rattled stock markets or bond markets, he backed down — often in fairly humiliating fashion. So much so that this pattern has its own name: TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).

Riding that confidence, US markets had been locked in an “all news is good news” loop since Trump’s inauguration: when employment and growth data looked strong, stocks rose because it was good news; when it looked weak, stocks also rose, because markets expected Trump to pressure the Fed into cutting rates to compensate.

But then we ran into the ayatollahs. The stubborn reality of a regime that has no intention of negotiating the way Venezuela did, combined with the damage already done to oil production infrastructure, means that the last two TACOs — a 5-day ceasefire announcement followed immediately by a 10-day one — have done nothing to calm markets.

We’ve run out of TACOs.

THE FINAL GASP

Beyond the specifics of the energy crisis this fool has dragged us into, what the death of the TACO effect reveals is that Trump’s political momentum is finished — and at the worst possible moment. In recent months it has become increasingly clear that the American economy was already slowing down, even before the war with Iran. Some very influential voices — including the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, and the President of the ECB — are sounding the alarm about a real threat of global recession in the coming months, a possibility now priced a between 30% and 50% for the US alone.t

Meanwhile, US Treasury bonds are straining, Bitcoin has lost half its value over the past several months, and gold… nobody quite understands what’s happening with gold anymore.

But what’s really got me gripped is the shift in market behavior.

Both the S&P 500 — the broad US market index — and the Nasdaq — the tech index — had been on a steep upward trajectory ever since ChatGPT burst onto the scene at the end of 2022. (The jagged dip in April 2025 was the scare from Trump’s first tariff threat, which he then walked back in his first TACO.)

But in recent months — and with growing intensity in recent weeks — markets have broken their upward trend and are heading decisively south. The Nasdaq is down 10% since October, while the S&P 500 has shed 11% from its January peak.

This wouldn’t be remarkable in any other context. Markets go up and down. But what defies explanation is that this is happening in direct contradiction to the pattern of absolute confidence investors had shown in Trump — and at the very moment when Big Tech is posting the best results in its history.

In the final quarter of 2025, America’s tech giants published earnings that would have looked like science fiction just three years ago. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, NVIDIA, and Meta all beat analyst estimates by an average of 11.2%, combining for $178.4 billion in quarterly revenue — year-over-year growth of 18.6%.

And yet their stock prices keep falling. To almost everyone’s bewilderment, this combination — extraordinary results followed by a market sell-off — has become the defining pattern of today’s markets.

How is that possible?

AI’S GREAT MISFIRE

Hold on. Weren’t we supposed to be on the cusp of a new industrial revolution — one that would reshape one in three jobs worldwide and add several percentage points to GDP every year? Weren’t those multinational earnings the proof of a revolutionary technology that was going to transform everything? How can anyone seriously be talking about recession?

What on earth is going on?

What’s going on is this: just as Trump has reached the end of his forward flight, the same slap of reality has landed squarely on AI.

I won’t wade into any debate in this article about the limits of what we’ve bundled together under the label of “AI.” But let’s talk about the promises its boosters have been making for years:

First, we were told AI would eliminate 300 million jobs and that two out of every three roles would be at least partially automated.

Then someone announced that the path to “artificial general intelligence” — capable of replacing humans at any task — had been clearly mapped out.

Then that all cars would be driven by AI.

Or that it would wipe out the entire legal profession.

Or that it was “the next frontier of productivity.”

And just when we thought there wasn’t a single hype-stick left to throw on the fire, in recent weeks the talk has turned to how a new wave of agentic AI could replace software developers entirely.

Not one — NOT ONE — of these things has come to pass. Maybe it’s worth revisiting how much credibility we extend to these so-called “experts.” But I don’t want to get lost in that rabbit hole. The truth is, it doesn’t actually matter whether any of these things ever happen or not.

What matters — the reason a bubble burst feels not just possible but inevitable in the coming days — is that three years after the launch of ChatGPT, AI still has no business model. It still has no product it can sell at a scale that even begins to justify the trillion-dollar investments being made on the hope that it might eventually be useful for something.

Like Google Glass. Like the Oculus. Like the Metaverse. Like NFTs. AI is miraculous in theory and could be genuinely transformative — but there doesn’t seem to be many people willing to pay for any of it.

What’s become increasingly impossible to ignore is that the results these multinationals publish quarter after quarter rest on a web of circular agreements so incestuous they’d make the Habsburg family tree look like a picture of genetic health. To date, AI has created no real added value. What exists is money spinning so fast, and in such tight circles, that the sheer velocity makes it look like a lot more than it is.

And what is now beyond dispute is that, whatever AI does, it will not generate economic growth. If it succeeds and delivers on any of its promises, it will produce the opposite result: replacing vast numbers of workers without creating anything new that generates jobs elsewhere. In other words, even if AI succeeds, what it will achieve is a smaller economy, not a larger one. Will it boost productivity? Perhaps in some companies — but that counts for very little if it keeps its promise of gutting entire sectors of the economy in return.

Just as it happened to Trump, AI has now had its own encounter with reality — and reality has left it exposed: its promises of generating economic growth simply don’t hold up.

Just days ago, the CEO of the world’s leading AI company, Jensen Huang, trotted out the AGI story once more — and it landed exactly the way Trump’s TACOs have been landing lately. Nobody believed him.

THE PERFECT STORM

Here’s the thing: just as the US has its midterms this year, AI has its own version of an election — except it won’t be decided at the ballot box. It’ll be decided in the capital markets.

Within a few months, the three biggest startups in the sector — SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic — are set to go public at astronomical valuations: over $3 trillion combined.

Market analysts rarely agree on anything. On this, there is near-unanimity: there simply isn’t enough money in public equity markets to absorb all three. If they all go through, it would be “like dropping a boulder into a fishpond” — it would drain the water and crater the valuations of every other company alongside them.

What’s more, none of these companies has revenue figures that come close to justifying their valuations. And going public means a full financial striptease in front of regulators — their opaque books thrown open for the entire world to see. The problem is they have no alternative. Because private investment certainly doesn’t have enough runway left to sustain these valuations either.

The AI IPOs are to the economy what the American midterms are to global politics: the moment of reckoning for the model that brought us here.

This, in my view, is what the market sell-off and the death of the TACO effect are reflecting. Trump and the AI bubble have weeks left, not months. I’d go further: the bubble has already burst — that’s why valuations are deflating. The only reason it isn’t exploding more violently is that, as the Financial Times noted recently, investors have nowhere else to go.

In the days and weeks ahead, we’ll watch this same process enter a far more acute phase. Perhaps the outright collapse of the stock market. Perhaps Trump finally following through on pulling the US out of NATO. Whatever form it takes, it will be the final gasp of a model that is dying.

REASONS FOR OPTIMISM

Regular readers know I don’t like leaving things on a note this bleak — mostly because I genuinely don’t believe this is a moment for pessimism. If anything, the opposite: an extraordinary window of opportunity is opening up in front of us.

Because the apparent collapse of everything around us is, in large part, a mirage. What is shaking is not society itself. The things that actually matter for human life — the indicators that, a hundred years from now, will tell whether our era was one of progress or regression — are doing just fine. Science continues to advance at breathtaking speed in the treatment of cancer, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. We keep producing more with less, and as a result, we continue — albeit not nearly fast enough — to reduce poverty and child mortality. And in recent years, we’ve been handed another reason for hope: the staggering progress of renewable energy is making a world free from fossil fuels feel genuinely within reach, one where abundant, clean energy is the norm.

What is breaking down is the economic project we’ve lived inside for the past 25 years. What we called the “knowledge economy” never worked — and today it is cracking apart because it always had an irresolvable contradiction at its core.

The economy is, at its most fundamental, the part of human activity that deals with scarcity. Things have economic value precisely because they are limited — because not everyone can have them. Oil is worth money because there’s a finite amount of it. Knowledge works in exactly the opposite way. When I teach something to someone, I don’t lose it. When a song is digitized, a million people can listen to it simultaneously without any one of them taking anything away from the others. Knowledge, once created, can be reproduced and distributed at virtually zero cost. Its natural tendency is to escape every attempt to turn it into a commodity and become free — and when it does, the entire economic activity built around its artificial scarcity collapses.

When the West made the most ambitious decision in its history — sending an entire generation to university, the first in their families to set foot in a lecture hall — it planted the seeds of its own economic model’s destruction.

In the decades that followed, those same young people, armed with knowledge and the internet, rendered entire economic sectors obsolete — one after another. It happened to music, to film, to journalism, to retail, to traditional banking, to large swaths of travel and tourism, and to dozens of other professions. In every case, the pattern was identical: the further knowledge spread, the more the ability to profit from its scarcity shrank.

Hence the deepest irony of our time: the more successful a knowledge society becomes — the more it educates its population, the more it innovates, the more freely it shares information — the more it destroys its own economic foundations. The “knowledge economy” was always, in a very precise sense, a contradiction in its own terms. An oxymoron.

The conclusion was always inevitable, even if it still isn’t obvious to everyone: in the twenty-first century, as knowledge has advanced, the economy has contracted. Today we see the most brutal expression of this process in artificial intelligence: if the promise of universal knowledge is ever truly fulfilled, it wouldn’t just make one sector redundant — it would threaten to make human work itself redundant.

The crisis of Donald Trump and the crisis of AI are, at their root, the same phenomenon. The industrial world of the twentieth century handed off a mandate to the “knowledge economy”: take care of its two main actors — capital and labor. But the knowledge economy failed to offer either of them an equivalent place to the one they’d held in the old world. Today, capital has nowhere to go — which is why it keeps producing one bubble after another. Labor, meanwhile, has lost the central role it once had. At least for a significant portion of the population. And it is that vast, displaced minority that is fueling Trumpism across the globe.

With the “knowledge economy,” it isn’t the things that truly matter in society that are shaking — it’s our beliefs. What’s collapsing are the rules of the old world. This is the end of an ideological cycle, of a system that never worked, that has been limping along for 25 years, and has now entered its death throes — producing one tragedy after another.

But is this really a threat? Wasn’t it always our final goal? Wasn’t this what we dreamed of — freeing ourselves from the tyranny of scarcity and toil?

If we can understand this moment — and stay united, clear-headed, and purposeful, the way we did during COVID, during the invasion of Ukraine, during the World War and the reconstruction of Europe 75 years ago — we will find that we have never been better equipped to face the challenges ahead than we are right now.

We are a society of extraordinary knowledge. We live longer than ever before. We have built solid political agreements that have allowed us to live in peace for decades. And we can build new ones. We have the intelligence and the capacity to move forward and find solutions to whatever stands in our way. No matter how savage the coming crisis; no matter how erratically the strongmen in the US, Israel, or Russia keep lurching from one disaster to the next — if we commit, if we come together, and if we give it our very best, there is nothing to fear.

If you enjoyed this article, you’ll love Hijos del Optimismo (Children of Optimism). It’s my first book, the older sibling of this newsletter, and a project I’ve been working on for years

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— Bad Bunny.

Robert Kennedy said that GDP ‘measures everything except what makes life worthwhile.’ It’s obvious: money or possessions, hours worked or the title that appears in your email signature are not what really define our experience. If anything, they are parts of an exoskeleton that holds within it a life made up of emotions, passions and fears.

Even so, every time a question arises — ‘Why is the far right growing?’, ‘Why are we losing confidence in democracy?’, ‘Why do we feel that society is in crisis?’ — instead of looking at what really matters, we return to GDP, to the hard, easy-to-find data of the economy. It is not surprising, then, that much of our understanding of the world falls painfully short.

I cannot help thinking that there is something prophylactic about all this. The economy is such a sterile field that no one has to reveal anything about themselves to talk about it. Over GDP, one can fight tooth and nail without revealing oneself. But if, instead of statistics, we look at art, television, cinema or literature, and ask ourselves where we really feel life in crisis, we will see that it is not our bank account that hurts us most, but love. Paradoxically, the more connected we seem to be, the lonelier we feel. Love has become a scarce commodity that many people lack and many others fear losing.

How silly, isn’t it? If anything is truly abundant, it is

So, for this Valentine’s Day weekend, a few weeks ago I decided to write a little theory about my particular —and somewhat unusual— way of understanding love from the perspective of abundance.

To my surprise, this post, which was intended to be a lightweight note among the rest of the economic and technological content, has ended up saying some very important things about a nascent theory of abundantism that I hope you will like.

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What is love?

Love is, in essence, curiosity. We say we love someone when we are interested in and involved in their existence. Love is ‘active concern for the life and growth of those we love’1 or ‘the condition in which another’s happiness is essential to your own happiness’2.

In English, there is a phrase that explains it particularly well: to be invested in someone (or something) is something like being interested, but not just superficially, but having something at stake; to be invested in someone is to have placed part of one’s own time, energy, even identity in the future of another. So to love is to stop being a spectator and become an interested party in another story.

Notice how, from this definition, it is not necessary for that emotion to be reciprocated; one can perfectly love someone who does not return that love. This is why teenagers can become infatuated with a K-pop star living thousands of kilometers away, just as mothers can fall in love with each of their children long before those babies are old enough to reciprocate. For this reason, someone may continue to love their father even after his death, while another person might be enamored with an idealized version of a first love from their youth, which, most likely, was not even exactly as they had imagined.

Love is as abundant as our capacity to pay attention: we could be in love with half of humanity or, at least, with as many people as we can evoke simultaneously without neglecting others. We could fall in love with many men and many women—some known, others less so. We could live in that experience all the time, every minute, until it overflowed our entire existence. Just as it seems we live immersed in hatred, we could live in love.

If we do not, it is because today this abundant form of love is proscribed. It was canceled the day love became synonymous with commitment.

Love as Commitment

For millennia, love and commitment were two very distinct things. Demosthenes claimed that good Greek citizens had “lovers for pleasure, concubines for daily care, but wives to bear legitimate children and be faithful guardians of their homes.”3

Until the Modern Age, aristocrats married whoever suited the family to produce legitimate heirs to manage the heritage; marriages were arranged and materialized long before the brides and grooms were old enough to understand what was happening. Common people, although lacking lineage, also married for convenience; they brought strength for labor, the possibility of a dowry, land, or simply the ability to share tasks necessary for survival.

In the Middle Ages, early romantic tales of love had no relation to commitment. Instead, they represented a rebellion against that mandate: the possibility of a life beyond duty. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, or Lancelot and Guinevere challenged the established order by falling in love outside of marriage.

However, in the early 19th century, with the rise of the first major cities and urban development, the game of social status began to transform rapidly. The worth of an individual ceased to be defined by the land they owned, and personal attributes—reputation, titles, skills, social networks—began to carry equal or greater weight than agrarian property. Marriage became a strategic investment in human relationships, and that romantic love which had emerged as protest gradually transformed into the cultural justification for marital commitment.

Over time, the bond between love and commitment solidified until, after World War II, it had established itself as the only legitimate glue not only for marriage, but for family and each person’s life project.

Commitment, unlike love, is scarce. We cannot live simultaneously with half of humanity, nor can we impose upon ourselves the burden of paying half their rent and birthing their children. When love became tied to commitment, the possibility of loving freely and abundantly became dangerous. Because if the justification for commitment, upon which domestic economies and social stability rested, was an emotion, it could not be volatile, immeasurable, and difficult to govern: its abundance became a formidable threat.

If not regulated or tied to a social contract, love endangered societal stability: thus, it had to be scarce and stable. Permanent. As predictable as the other parts of the industrial machinery. It had to be linked to commitment and limited to reciprocal affections, those that operated almost like an exchange of value.

Thus, transactional love, the one associated with commitment, solidified as the only “true love.” Only those forms of love that served to facilitate the devotion of another human being survived as valid expressions of this type of curiosity. Marriage, the highest form of commitment, emerged as the supreme bond, while children and family—who are expected to commit to us—occupied a discreet second place.

All other forms of love, which had always existed and would continue to do so, were proscribed, often through shame. Some, through direct social sanctions, such as extramarital relationships. Others, by making them seem ridiculous. Since then, in teenage romantic comedies, love hurts when it is unreciprocated; characters are caricatured for being overly in love or for falling for someone “out of their league,” while overly affectionate friends are depicted as foolish. Meanwhile, the main characters are always those who are “hard to get,” those with scarce love, who never give themselves unconditionally—that is, without a transactional.

Thus, a singular type of love—the one directed toward a partner and expected to last a lifetime—solidified as true love. Love in all its other forms—the affection we have for K-pop stars, or friendships, or love for lovers and concubines—was relegated to the margins, as if it did not count, as if it did not deserve such a name.

That love, which was an abundant emotion, was reduced to a scarce thing.

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The Most Painful Scarcity

Without any theoretical framework to support me, I assert that this scarcity of love we have imposed is the cause of today’s most acute pain in society. It is this precariousness that lies behind the statistics showing that everyone is angry and furious and that “society is broken.” The lack of love is that thing worth pursuing that cannot be explained by all the GDP numbers.

Because love, in this definition we are exploring, is the precondition for what is essential to our existence: connecting with other humans. If we strip it of the cultural baggage it carries today, it becomes evident that this genuine curiosity about another person’s story— or even about another animal—is the substrate from which those sparks can emerge, in which we experience a profound connection with others; those moments that leave us with an overwhelming sense of being whole, of lacking nothing. Those explosions that occur in (good) sex, or in nights of laughter that leave us sore, or when we half-discover an idea with another person that no one had understood before, or when we celebrate a goal with our best friend. That experience where it seems the universe aligns with you, like when you hug a child.

That we have to describe these experiences as “flashes” or “moments,” rather than as a daily habit, gives us an idea of the lacerating scarcity in which we live.

“What makes love a form of madness,” says Eva Illouz, “is that it has no connection to reality.” And for that reason, because it only lives within us and is not tied to the limits of the physical world, love is not scarce; it is abundant and holds the promise of returning to that intense experience of being a complete human, connected to others.

I want to imagine that those men and women from Classical and Medieval times, who did not bear the moral weight of scarce love, although they married for lineage, still sought love everywhere. But we cannot even allow ourselves that. In our lives, love has been restricted to the capacity for commitment we can offer and that can be offered to us. When someone put love in the closed box of marriage, they robbed us of the possibility of connecting with others.

As a result, people see how that possibility of truly connecting with other human beings is becoming increasingly limited. We find ourselves surrounded by cardboard relationships, sustained by clichés and elevator conversations that hardly produce the deep intimacy that makes us fully human. I have no doubt that it is the desperate search for more opportunities to feel that connection that drives the consumption of alcohol and drugs.

Fifty years ago, capitalism promised to end that scarcity. The “knowledge society” was supposed to bring a world of connected intellectuals living a life of sparkling experiences like those in Woody Allen’s films. Pure connection.

It did not happen. And today we drown in the life we have, in scarce love, rummaging through the internet in hopes of finding— not just on Tinder, by any means— other human beings with whom to share that bond.

And this, in my opinion, is why hatred prevails today. Because while love became scarce, hatred remained abundant. So it is no surprise that you might detest the president or even generic groups of people, but you would be locked away in a very dark place if you claimed, with the same fervor, that you were in love with him.

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A Small Theory of (Free) Love

A few years ago, I found myself tangled in one of those relationships where love and commitment cease to align. Over time—and with a great deal of therapy—I discovered one thing. What was truly painful for me was not that this person had stopped loving me (in reality, that hadn’t happened), but that once our commitment was broken, for some reason, I felt obliged to stop loving him, to stop being invested in him. To lose the connection we had.

I have the feeling that this is quite universal. What hurts us when commitment ends, or when we are not “reciprocated,” is that we feel compelled to give up the love we had. But it is an optical illusion: we are convinced that we desire to be loved solely because we have forbidden ourselves to love without being reciprocated.

Thus, the love we had is proscribed, just like a teenager’s love for their idols or a woman’s love for the child who died before birth. We have convinced ourselves that love must be measured in the same way it is tied to commitment, so one cannot be madly, intensely in love with all their friends. Nor can one continue to love an ex-partner, much less acknowledge loving someone who doesn’t even notice them.

But what if we allowed ourselves to love wildly, expecting nothing in return? What if we were capable of loving with the same freedom with which we hate today?

If we let go of that mantle of scarcity in love, what emerges is the opposite: we must love to the limits of our own capacity. To bathe in that emotion. To wake up every morning in love with a K-pop star, with your friends, with that guy you occasionally share a bed with, with your children, of course, but also with the children of all your friends, and even with your partner’s children, even if you didn’t give birth to them. Loving while relinquishing any expectation of reciprocity returns to us the possibility of abundance because when your love is infinite, you do not need it to be paid back.

It is here that it becomes clearer that abundance is synonymous with freedom. It has nothing to do with having more scarce goods (that is, more commitments) but rather with allowing ourselves to live in a world of limitless things. And in beginning to recognize a higher status not to those who possess more limited goods, but to those who know how to live a good life (extraordinarily good, even!) in an abundant place.

So I have stopped tying my hands behind my back in love. And since then, I move forward without brakes. I live in love with many people. My curiosity and desire to connect with others are no longer limited by the commitment we may have, nor even by the time we spend together, but in every moment we share, and in all the time I dedicate to thinking about those other people, I allow myself to feel the same ecstasy that most people reserve for the “love of their life.”

In French, they say that people who are very romantic have “a heart of artichoke,” “un cœur d’artichaut,” because they go through life giving a petal to each person. I reclaim that spirit, and I give pieces of myself until I exhaust myself.

And I seem like a weirdo, I confess. There are likely people who think I am too naïve, or too intense, or too goody-goody. But you know what? I don’t care. Because the consequence is that my inner life resembles that of adolescents living on a cloud thinking about their K-pop star, except my stars are flesh and blood, and I see them often: they are my friends, my lovers, my family, and the people I encounter who dazzle me, even if I never see them again.

And I am very happy. There is not a sliver of space left in me for hate.

Commensalism

While writing this article, I realized that this small theory of love has everything to do with a larger one that is at the center of all the things I think and write about.

Long ago, Adam Smith proposed that people act out of selfishness, and that this pursuit of individual interest magically produces a collective good. Other authors later tried to correct Smith and prove that humans are not selfish but altruistic: they do the right thing for everyone in the expectation that others will do the same. They care, hoping to be cared for; they drive on the right side of the road, trusting that others will do the same.

There is certainly some truth in all of this, but I would argue that the highest expression of humanity lies in the idea of being “commensalist.”

Commensalism is a form of biological interaction in which one individual benefits while the other is neither harmed nor benefited. The term comes from the Latin cum mensa, meaning “sharing the table,” and was created to describe the relationship in which one species takes advantage of the waste of another without harming it, like the dogs and cats that followed the early communities of hunter-gatherers.

But something extraordinary happens with humans: we have almost everything we need. We are capable of producing much more than we require. That’s why we can exist in a world of abundance: we are the only species capable of systematically creating more than we consume.

An innumerable amount of human behaviors—I would say almost all that go beyond mere survival—are commensalist: writing a book (or a newsletter like this), composing music, or software, doing science, caring, teaching, painting, dancing, producing art, or inventing tools. Our essence is to give, to create things that benefit others without expecting anything in return, simply because it makes us happy. In love, as in knowledge and art, our life experiences generate more than what is needed to create.

In fact, we could say, without fear of being wrong, that human progress is a consequence of this commensalism. From Socrates to Aristotle, Gutenberg, Newton, Curie, Kant, Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Tim Berners-Lee, and even Smith himself, the great figures who have pushed the world forward did not do so out of a desire for profit; on the contrary, they dedicated themselves to creating ideas that could be used by all without being depleted. The same is true in literature and art. Does anyone really believe that Camus, or Shakespeare, or Beethoven wrote expecting the world to give them something in return?

We could even say that something went awry the day we began to look at that generosity with suspicion and made that selfless giving seem naïve or ridiculous.

There are many species of selfish animals and many altruistic ones, but that ability to give without harming and without expecting reciprocity is, for me, the purest form of our existence, what makes us genuinely human.

So if I had to start liberating abundance somewhere, I would begin here, with love. I would start by allowing ourselves to love without measure, without filters, without any accounting. By unleashing that curiosity for others until we are filled to the brim and leave no space for hatred. And by silencing those who seek to shame us.

We need to make having a heart of artichoke a trend. ;-)

If you are also an abundance thinker, you will like Hijos del optimismo (Children of Optimism). It is my first book, the older sibling of this newsletter, and a project I have been working on for many years.

You can already order Hijos del Optimismo on Amazon, La Casa del Libro, El Corte Inglés and the publisher’s website, Debate.

You can also read more about me and the story that inspired me to write it

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (attributed)

That everything is going wrong is the only consensus that seems to survive in our time. On everything else, there are today as many positions as there are theories about who is to blame.

Among all of them, one stands out: the argument that wealth has concentrated in very few hands, and that as a result, even as the world keeps growing, a great many people feel an ever-greater sense of scarcity. We are being robbed.

It is a rather extraordinary thing, because translating macroeconomic concepts — such as inequality — into public opinion is very difficult. But years ago the Occupy Wall Street movement produced a slogan that ended up seeping into global common sense to the bone:

“We are the 99%.”

It was the hangover from the 2008 crisis, and the world was hearing in prime time the story of how a handful of bankers had turned the financial system into a casino. They — those men of flesh, bone, and wallet — were to blame for the bubble and the crash. The battle was to be everyone against the 1 percent.

Fifteen years later, the majority of people around the world believe that the accumulation of wealth has a negative effect on society. Major political leaders point to “billionaires” as the architects of the political and social crisis, and the slogan “tax the rich” has become an unlikely artefact of popular culture — one that some candidates have turned into merchandise lines and others have worn to film galas.

Following the success Zohran Mamdani had wielding this argument in his New York mayoral campaign, the British Greens’ candidate Zack Polanski returned to it a few days ago in a video that went viral far beyond the United Kingdom: “When the rest of us work ourselves to the bone to create wealth and almost none of it returns to our communities, it’s going somewhere — upwards, into the pockets of the super-rich.”

The idea that billionaires are to blame for the widespread discontent Polanski describes is a winning argument in this political cycle.

But beyond its undeniable political power, is it actually true? Is the accumulation of wealth responsible for the deterioration in living conditions in recent years? Or have we reached for the easiest target and missed the point?

In other words: is eating the rich enough to fix the world? Or are we going to walk away hungry?

Inside the “1%”.

Like all good stories, this one about the 1 percent contains a measure of truth. In every country there exists a super-wealthy majority that hoards an immense share of global patrimony. In the United States, the wealthiest 1 percent hold almost as much wealth as the poorest 90 percent of the population combined. Across the planet as a whole, the divide between rich and poor countries makes that proportion even more extreme.

But like all good stories, this one also has something of a fairy tale about it. The reality is not a uniform 1 % detached from a uniform society, but a wealth that becomes ever more concentrated as you climb the scale. This means that if you look inside the 1%, you find evidence still more striking: the top 0.1 %of the US population — 342,000 people — hold 14% of the country’s total wealth, half of everything owned by the entire 1 %.

And if you were to look inside that 0.1%, you would find that concentration continues to intensify until it can no longer be captured in a survey. But according to the Forbes list, which studies America’s largest fortunes each year, a third of the wealth of that 0.1%— 6.6 trillion dollars — is in the hands of the 400 richest people in the country. That is to say, 0.00001 percent of the population holds more wealth than the 177 million people who make up the poorest half.

And we could go further. We could look inside the Forbes list and find that of those 400 billionaires, the 10 wealthiest have a combined net worth of 2.4 trillion dollars — a third of the entire list.

Compared to these 10 billionaires, every other American — the 99.99999975 % — is poorer today than they were ten years ago.

The paradox is this: if the goal is to build political majorities, following the same logic as the “99 %,” one could construct a “99.99999975 % coalition.” It would be a grouping of interests that could bring together 342 million Americans alongside the other 390 billionaires on the Forbes list, plus all the millionaires who don’t make the cut, together with all of their staff.

And something considerably more thorny: if we look down the scale rather than up, we find that the population group running from the 1st to the 90th percentile — the 9% sitting between the wealthiest 1% and the poorest 90%, what we might loosely call the “upper-middle class” — owns 37% of total wealth.

Add both groups together — the 1% and the 9% — and the wealthiest 10 percent of the United States holds nearly 70% of the country’s wealth.

And this is not an isolated phenomenon. According to the World Inequality Lab — directed by Thomas Piketty — the wealthiest 10% of the population in each country holds, on average, 73 percent of that country’s wealth.

Three Sad Thirds

A far more productive way of understanding this problem, then, would be the following.

Wealth today divides into three thirds. The wealthiest 1 % takes one; the next 9%— the upper classes, colloquially speaking — captures another; and the following 40%— the middle classes — shares the last of the three. For the remaining 50%, the poorer half of the population, what is left is a pile of debts and scraps.

Societies have become a four-speed world, in which:

• A tiny economic elite has emancipated itself from the reality in which the rest of us live. These are the billionaires.

• A broader cultural and political elite — the wealthiest 10%— is seeing its relative position improve, and holds interests and levers of power in its hands. These are the lawyers, prosecutors, judges, the corporate world, senior civil servants, some journalists, much of the medical profession, media directors, some university professors, business owners, and some politicians too.

• A middle class trapped between the aspiration to climb into the upper class and the fear of falling into the great mass below. These are the schoolteachers and secondary school teachers, nurses, civil servants, police officers, firefighters, some university professors, some journalists.

• A working class that has nothing and lives only to pay everyone else. These are the waiters, supermarket cashiers, call centre workers, administrative staff, hospital orderlies, cleaners, carers, delivery drivers, security guards, construction labourers, and taxi and ride-share drivers.

I believe the virtue of this model is that it allows us to understand the problem of wealth distribution in its full complexity, without trying to reduce it to an idea simple enough to fit on a slogan.

I also believe that from this vantage point one can begin to understand the other universal consensus of our time: the one that has formed against political elites. But I do not want to get into that today — I will save it for another piece, which will give you an excellent reason to subscribe to this newsletter and receive it in your inbox in the coming days.

Is the Concentration of Wealth the Cause of the Malaise?

So we all agree that wealth is progressively concentrating toward the upper layers of society. But is that inequality the cause of the widespread discontent being felt around the world?

It is hard to see how, because this is not a recent phenomenon. On the contrary, we have been a three-thirds society for many decades.

Before the Second World War, elites accumulated more than 90% of wealth. Between 1945 and 1975, that concentration fell dramatically — through the effect of the “share issuance” by countries in the form of housing we discussed last week — before rising again between 1980 and 2000. But since 2000, the gap between what different social groups accumulate has been essentially flat. Even as far back as 1980, the wealthiest 10 percent already held 76% of global patrimony. Wealth is very concentrated — but it has been for a very long time.

In the United States, by far the most unequal country in the Western world, the top 1% already owned 23% of wealth in 1989, while the next 9% owned 38%— a figure that remains very similar today, at 36.4%.

The total wealth of the remaining 90% of society was 39.2% in 1989 and is 32.6% today — a difference of fewer than 6 percentage points. Six points that are explained by the outsized growth in the wealth of the 0.1%, which over these 35 years has gone from owning 8.8% to 14% of the country’s wealth.

Do those 6 points justify the galloping contemporary malaise? If we want to believe they do, then we will have to acknowledge another cause that represents a far greater difference.

The Elephant in the Room of the Western World

Over the past 35 years, total wealth has grown exponentially — multiplying eightfold. And what we can observe is that, unlike the concentration of wealth, which is a very ancient occurrence, this explosive growth in the volume of wealth is a recent phenomenon, specific to the last two or three decades — one that has accelerated extraordinarily, first from 2000, and far more dramatically from 2008.

Put another way: wealth is not much more concentrated today than it was 35 years ago. What has happened is that there is simply far more of it.

Of course, this should not be a problem in itself. Growing wealth is the leitmotif of our economic system. It becomes a problem because for decades wealth has been growing faster than the economy.

In the United States, total wealth rose from 20.44 trillion dollars in 1990 to 42 trillion in 2000, reaching 167.7 trillion in 2025. Relative to the economy, Americans’ wealth has grown at twice the speed of GDP. Where in 1990 wealth stood at 3.6 times GDP, by 2025 it is 5.6 times. And wages? Over the same period, the median weekly earnings of full-time workers have grown by only a factor of 2.8.

Across countries as a whole, wealth has gone from representing 3.9 times global GDP in 1980 to 6 times in 2025.

This is the macroeconomic explanation — with all its charts and data — that makes sense of a daily reality everyone understands: economic life is becoming progressively harder for the majority. Because in lived experience, that mountain of wealth materialises as “investment assets” that expect to be remunerated — and that we are obliged to remunerate in many ways: through rent or mortgage payments, through price increases that flow from rising rents and mortgages, through rising share prices. By the same logic, when taxes keep going up, it is because pensioners and public sector workers, like all other citizens, find themselves obliged to service that mass of wealth.

And so we are a society that must devote ever more money and effort to remunerating a growing mountain of wealth. It would be a relief to say that it sits entirely in the hands of a 1 percent, so as to have someone to blame — but the truth is that it makes no difference whose hands it is in.

This is why, even though two adults now work in nearly every household, even though far more money comes into homes than 35 years ago, the perception of scarcity keeps growing. More than that: since everyone can sense that the trend is toward wealth continuing to multiply, most people feel that they are falling further and further behind, that there is no way to keep pace — precisely as Polanski signals in his viral video.

The Global Warming of Wealth

Where does all this “wealth” come from? How is it possible? Is wealth not supposed to be the product of economic activity? Should it not grow in parallel with the economy?

So it should — and so it more or less did, until around 2000. But around that year, the economy stopped growing at the pace it had demonstrated in previous decades. The natural consequence would have been for wealth to stop growing too. But that would have meant ending the dream of infinite growth in which the society of that era was installed — and still is: telling people they were no longer going to become rich, confirming that their children would live worse than they did.

Instead, governments embraced a policy of stimulus-driven reactivation to keep the economy growing. But the economy did not grow again. What happened instead is that wealth emancipated itself from the economy — and for the past twenty-five years it has no longer grown as a product of economic activity, but through the appreciation of assets: specifically, stock markets, which have multiplied in value twenty-fivefold since 1989, and real estate assets, which have appreciated to seven times the value they held at the start of the Federal Reserve’s measurement series.

And here we remain. Policies that normalise the idea of people “investing” or “saving” in housing are the clearest expression of this attempt. In a world that no longer grows, where there are no new industries in which capital makes sense, countries normalise the continued extraction of profit from reselling real estate assets that produce no new value whatsoever.

All of that mountain of artificial “wealth” — paper wealth — is the truly distinctive phenomenon of these last twenty-five years. It is the great elephant in the room of contemporary society. And anyone who genuinely wants to resolve the contemporary malaise — rather than merely win votes by the quickest route — should attend to the causes and mechanisms that produce this runaway and unjustified inflation of wealth.

The reason not many people are willing to do this is that the mountain of wealth has an uncomfortable, difficult-to-confront origin: it is the twentieth-century dream of universal prosperity — the dream we refuse to relinquish — that has brought us to this dead end.

To fix it, what we need is a new dream :D

If you are also searching for a new dream, you can’t miss Hijos del optimismo (Children of Optimism). It is my first book, the older sibling of this newsletter, and a project I have been working on for many years.

You can already order Hijos del Optimismo on Amazon, La Casa del Libro, El Corte Inglés and the publisher’s website, Debate.

You can also read more about me and the story that inspired me to write it

Photo by Lea Kobal on Unsplash

— Ridley Scott, The Kingdom of Heaven

I have a theory that I suspect will be controversial — one that may even cause offence. But I find myself increasingly convinced that Meredith Whittaker is entirely right when she argues that failing to tell the truth, and failing to uphold it consistently, makes us stupid. Because it forces us to operate intellectually inside a charade — one that ends up atrophying our reasoning, as we build castles of pretended certainties that are nothing more than dogma.

Of all the dogmas of our culture, perhaps the most powerful is that of absolute evil. When something frightens us, we rush to invent a monster in order to exorcise it — so that the terror is no longer inside us, but inhabits an external body we can blame, fear, and hate.

And so, while we lived at the mercy of the natural world, the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and the Chupacabra were among the many variations of a single universal fear of nature. Later, vampires were the invention of a society traumatised by plague and tuberculosis. And when the world began to fear progress, it conjured up the creature of Doctor Frankenstein. Since it is usually the unknown that frightens us most, medieval mapmakers would typically inscribe the unexplored regions of their charts with a warning: Hic sunt dracones. There are always dragons in what we cannot yet explain.

We, the human beings of the twenty-first century, living in terror of the phenomenon of digital interconnection, have also invented the demon of our time. A being without a body, without a face, without a soul, which we have called “the algorithm.”

And since, at bottom, what frightens us most is not monsters but other human beings, we have convinced ourselves that this being is a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of creatures so malevolent they would have nothing to envy of Dracula: the tech bros. We have persuaded ourselves that, in their hands, social media will be the ruin of humanity — the hell in which children will burn and women will be violated.

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But monsters, you will agree with me, do not exist. On the contrary: every change that has ever frightened us has always been driven by a social phenomenon — by a plurality of interests, actors, and circumstances too complex to reduce to a monster.

And so today I am wading into dangerous territory, to argue against the widely held dogma that everything wrong with the world is the fault of social media. More than that: I maintain that social media, as we have known it, is dead. Or at least on its way out. In all likelihood, the children of a few years from now will have no interest whatsoever in using it.

And I do not believe it has been killed by the tech bros — but by the same agent that finished off Facebook: ordinary people. Or, put another way: it is not the algorithm. What is ruining the platforms is an invasion of users who have nothing to say.

Let me explain.

The first social networks — Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, LinkedIn — were built on an expectation of horizontality. Facebook promised to connect everyone with everyone else. Twitter occupied an adjacent space, but on the same principle. The format — those minimal posts that anyone could create with no effort — served that function: ordinary people talking about their lives on an equal footing with other ordinary people.

This was, to a large extent, an inheritance from internet culture itself. The thing is that software, in its first iteration, always tries to replicate the hardware it runs on — and in the early days, the internet was conceived as a kind of road network in which many nodes, the computers, connected with one another on equal terms. As a consequence, those first social networks of the 2000s replicated that architecture and conceived of themselves as “distributed.”

But that was a prehistoric vision of the internet — however firmly it remains lodged in some people’s heads. It makes far more sense to think of the internet not as a territory, but as a channel through which a torrent of information flows — created by billions of springs, each one of us. If, instead of thinking about the internet from the hardware perspective — the connected machines — we think about it from the human experience, it becomes clear that the internet is not a road map: it is a river.

The “feed” of each social network is a tributary of that river, but our WhatsApp chats are another, and websites — particularly those of news outlets — are a third, to take three familiar examples. The internet is us; it is humanity. And the best way to describe it is not a static map, but a process, a story — a becoming.

While the river was small, in the early 2000s, it was more or less comprehensible to the human brain. Facebook, at its best, did not contain everyone — only a small slice of society. A group of early adopters willing to invest considerable time in creating content and to modify their behaviour to adapt to the culture of the platform. It was a network of peers.

But over time, Facebook went mainstream and filled up with late adopters who were no longer willing to do any of that. The river became an immense and incomprehensible torrent.

Twitter, which was a far more niche platform, held on for a few more years — but ultimately suffered the same fate. In its early days it was the closest thing to a pub or a living room: a place of trust, an improved version of the many forums that had dominated the internet. But as it filled with late adopters unwilling to adapt to the local culture, it became a cacophony.

Reddit survived — more or less — because it never became entirely mainstream. To this day it remains a relatively closed community of peers, held together by the effort participation requires.

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The Algorithm Against Meaninglessness

Faced with that flood of late adopters, Twitter and Facebook encountered a problem. The feed was filling up with updates that held no interest, no importance, and no relevance for those receiving them. The human brain needs to invest a certain amount of time reading each update, and if it is forced to scroll through several that mean nothing to it, it grows bored and leaves.

And so those platforms modified their user experience to prevent that avalanche of irrelevant content from overwhelming them. They stopped displaying posts in the chronological order in which they were published, and began promoting their own version of what mattered. The algorithmic feed was born.

The social media algorithm is known as “predictive.” In essence, what it does is take an immense amount of data and a user’s prior actions, and attempt to infer what they will want to see next.

“Engineers assign a point value to each type of interaction users can perform on a post — liking, commenting, sharing, and so on.

For each post that could potentially be shown to you, these point values are multiplied by the probability that the algorithm believes you will perform that interaction. These multiplied pairs of numbers are added together, and the total is the post’s personalised score for you.

There are a few additional details, but broadly speaking, your feed is created by ranking posts according to these scores, from highest to lowest.”

(This link provides a detailed explanation of how Facebook’s algorithm works, and this one explains how Twitter’s algorithm works.)

At bottom, this is the same thing Google has been doing for twenty-five years — a function without which the internet could never have reached where it is today: ordering an enormous quantity of information that the human brain, on its own, cannot process.

The algorithms of social networks do not have to be the devil. In reality, they serve a function that is genuinely necessary in this interconnected world we inhabit: they explore content far beyond anything you could consume on your own, and attempt to infer which part of that mountain of information actually interests you.

And although the idea has taken hold that they were trying to control what we saw, I remain convinced that was not the case — at least initially. In their early days, social media algorithms were reacting to the fact that chronological feeds had become irrelevant, tedious, and incomprehensible.

If some networks have become cesspools, it is for two reasons. The first is that their users — the versions of themselves they present on those platforms — were seeking out that kind of content: confrontational, violent, or designed to serve as an echo chamber. The most compelling evidence is that while some platforms resemble spittoons, others, like LinkedIn, are a passable imitation of a tea room run by the late Queen of England at Buckingham Palace. If the algorithm were the problem, they would all be equally awful.

The second reason is that certain platforms — to some extent Facebook and YouTube, but above all Twitter — when particular users began exploiting the algorithm for their own political or financial ends, did nothing to correct it. They allowed far-right bots and professional fake news creators to flood users’ feeds and ultimately degrade the platform for everyone.

Of course, the phenomenon of users trying to exploit an application’s internal mechanisms for their own ends was nothing new. Google, on many occasions over the past twenty-five years, has made sweeping changes to its algorithm to correct exactly these kinds of drift. Readers will recall, for instance, that for a time every headline seemed to read something like “This girl went out on the street — you won’t believe what happened next,” and that at another point the internet was flooded with short recipe videos that then vanished as if they had never existed.

Companies whose business is organising information on the internet tend — out of a basic instinct for survival — to make decisions that prioritise the quality of their service over the interests of a few.

And this is what is truly new about the present moment. Mark Zuckerberg took, many years ago, an apparently inexplicable decision: to allow the platform to fill with low-quality content in order to keep charging for advertising. Over time, Elon Musk followed the same path and has ended up turning Twitter into the new Facebook. What both are signalling is that their platforms have failed at that model of creating a “distributed society,” and now have only a captive audience that will last them a few more years — and which they intend to squeeze for everything it is worth.

Peak Algorithm

As a result, these distributed social networks have stopped fulfilling their promise. They are no longer neutral spaces for conversation between equals. Publishing on them has become an extreme sport that exposes you to constant judgment, misunderstandings, and pile-ons. The ease of posting has made it far too cheap to attack those who put themselves out there. And to that must be added the ever more intensive presence of advertising and brand-generated content.

The result has been a silent withdrawal by the very people who once made these networks interesting: fewer and fewer posts, fewer likes, fewer retweets, and ever more passive consumption. The prevailing feeling is that, in order to protect your own identity and mental peace, it is safer today to watch than to speak.

As a result, these networks are dying. Facebook and Twitter’s user bases are in freefall, and social media use in general is declining too — at least outside the United States.

Meanwhile, the function that Facebook once served — keeping us connected with the people we know — has migrated to messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. The “distributed social network” now exists across multiple personal, private group chats.

And this has happened largely because we discovered years ago that we did not want to share the same updates with our mothers as with our friends — but also because the algorithmic feed culture of distributed networks has failed: it has become unbearable, irrelevant, incapable of making sense of reality and information.

Substack: The Moment of the Tribes

What the continued need for the algorithm ultimately reveals is something fundamental to human experience: we do not want a distributed society where every voice is heard equally. We do not want to listen to everyone. We want to pay attention to the people we find interesting at any given moment. On the contrary, having to engage with anyone who wanders past and fires off a tweet is a terrible waste of time — not unlike having to sift through every possible search result on Google to find the one that matters. It is something we simply cannot afford in a life where we need to stay connected to what is important.

For this reason, the next-generation platforms — TikTok, Substack, and, to some extent, Instagram — no longer share even a trace of that ambition for horizontality. No one expects us all to make videos or write lengthy articles, or to have the best photographs. We have abandoned the aspiration of living in a network of equals. We accept that there will be influencers and content creators whom the rest of us will follow, because they are the ones making the effort to create things of value. The new platforms look far more like a television channel made by many than like what Facebook once intended to be.

The meteoric rise of Substack is the consequence of that trend. This platform is today offering the content and connection to public debate that Twitter provided ten years ago. It is the new public square. Substack is the new Twitter.

Like TikTok, but unlike Twitter and Facebook, what is new about Substack is that it professionalises content creation by demanding a greater effort from anyone who wants to be an author. A 140-character tweet no longer suffices to claim an audience’s attention. By the same logic, mounting a bot campaign out of nowhere to attack an argument on Substack is no longer possible either.

Eighteen years after the birth of Facebook, we are closing the age of open, distributed networks. The experiment by which we gave a voice, simultaneously and without filter, to every person equally has not worked, and it is dying. And my instinct tells me that we are heading toward something that more closely resembles the organic texture of pre-modern human societies: decentralised networks organised around community leaders — a society of tribes.

In the years ahead, I believe we will see a decentralised network emerge — or, put another way, a network with many small centres, likely disconnected from one another. Every influencer of a certain stature will have a community, a group that trusts them and follows them everywhere.

I would wager that the next great platform will no longer be public, but will require an invitation to participate, or some form of credential. I would also wager that there will be far more of them than there are now.

I find myself wondering whether, after the tribes, something resembling nation-states might also emerge on the internet. But before that, we will have to confront another challenge: that of holding together a society that will no longer have shared public spaces, but a decentralised network in which each of us belongs to our own tribe.

If you’re interested in technology, you’ll like Hijos del optimismo (Children of Optimism). It’s my first book, the older sibling of this newsletter, and a project I’ve been working on for many years.

You can already order Hijos del Optimismo on Amazon, La Casa del Libro, El Corte Inglés and the publisher’s website, Debate.

You can also read more about me and the story that inspired me to write it

Do you know how he managed it?

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A few months before the resort opened, Trump — already an American television star and a fixture in the British media — sued the Scottish government, demanding that it halt the installation of a series of wind turbines.

Despite being an oil producer, Scotland had been one of the first countries in the world to make the energy transition a point of national pride, and lacking sunshine, around 2010 it was putting up wind turbines everywhere. Trump argued that this was unacceptable because the turbines “ruined the views” from the club.

What followed was a legal and media circus in which the tycoon went so far as to take out press adverts accusing the Scottish First Minister of releasing terrorists. He stirred up such a cultural storm that for many years the story kept resurfacing, delivering millions of pounds’ worth of free publicity in media outlets across the United Kingdom.

In time, he lost the case. In reality, it never had any prospect of succeeding — not only because the turbines were in the North Sea, more than two kilometres offshore on land that did not belong to him, but because it should be self-evident that the interests of a private developer cannot be allowed to obstruct a country’s project to overcome its dependence on fossil fuels.

But along the way, at a decisive moment, Trump planted on every front page the idea that democratic governments were servants of elites intent on changing British ways of life — dismantling what remained of the empire, selling the country out to foreign powers, and installing a woke agenda (even though that word had not yet been invented).

Trump lost the case. But a few months later, he won Brexit.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Since then, Donald Trump’s modus operandi has always been the same. The businessman has built a political career by placing the same narrative everywhere: democracy is a sham, and beneath a false appearance, we are governed by extractive elites working for a privileged minority that has seized power by co-opting institutions. Fortunately, these villains are a spineless bunch of bureaucrats — soft, lazy, and cowardly. When confronted with a strong man, they crumble. This is why the world should hand power to strong men like him, who are the only ones capable of putting an end to the woke elites.

More than that: Trump understands something that other politicians seem to struggle to grasp. Reality does not exist — except as an impression in our minds. What we call reality is nothing more than a narrative in our subconscious. So if one can make people believe that something is happening, it does not need to actually be happening. You do not need to win the case for it to appear, for a time, that a businessman can hold the governments of the United Kingdom to ransom. You do not need to invade Venezuela to make the world believe the country is under your control. You do not need to abolish fundamental freedoms across the United States for it to seem like a lawless state. It is enough for people to believe that all of this is true.

Or that it could be, in the future.

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In psychology, there is the theory of “broken windows.” In the 1980s, two criminologists argued that visible signs of crime or civic disorder create an urban environment that ends up encouraging the emergence of further crime and disorder — including serious offences.

“Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and not repaired, soon all the others will be broken too. This is equally true in affluent neighborhoods and in run-down areas. Window breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by window breakers and others by window lovers; rather, an unrepaired broken window is a sign that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.”1

In other words: it is not rules that make the culture of a society. In fact, everywhere there are rules that are not observed at all — think of traffic laws or drug use, for example. On the contrary, it is culture that dictates which rules, out of all those that exist on paper, are actually followed and which are not.

I like to explain this theory through the example of shellfish bars in Spain. In some bars — traditionally those that serve prawns — the custom is to throw the shells on the floor. As a result, the floors of these establishments are typically covered in an amount of organic matter that would be considered revolting in any other context. There are, of course, also bars where dropping anything on the floor would be an outrage. Neither type has a sign on the door telling customers where to put their rubbish — yet everyone understands the rules in both.

Culture makes the rules. This is why no one studies the criminal code of the country they are going on holiday to. They arrive, observe, and behave as they perceive the locals around them to behave. It is also why the international order sometimes operates as international law dictates — and sometimes does not.

And if someone is capable of conveying that a culture has shifted — in favour, say, of a lawless society ruled by strong men — they can, without changing the written rules, without altering what is actually happening at its source, eventually change reality itself. Or bend it to their preference.

The Broken Windows Coalition

Trump’s obsession, then, is to convince us that we live in a dangerous place — full of villains and crime, a world where the rules we once trusted have stopped working. This is why he devotes himself to breaking windows: through ICE raids, “coups” in other countries, and proclamations that he is going to open a resort in Gaza.

The trouble is that a single broken window does not make a culture. For us to have come to believe what Trump wants us to believe, an enormous international coalition has had to form in recent years — a motley collection of actors united by their relentless insistence on pointing out every window that is, they claim, broken.

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In the front line of that coalition stands the far right across the world, parroting the same message Trump never tires of broadcasting: migrants, woke ideology, elite betrayal.

But in the second line stand the media outlets that the alt-right has labelled the “legacy media.” The great newspapers of the twentieth century, stripped of a viable business model by the transition from print to digital, have become addicted — much against their better instincts, it must be said — to alarm and outrage, chasing the clicks that guarantee their advertising revenue.

This works because, as human beings, we are wired to detect signals of danger even before we have fully understood them. Evolution has shaped us to pay attention to whatever might threaten us: an unusual movement, an unexpected sound, a broken window. Our brains prioritize what is perceived as risk — they make us look at and react to threats first, and analyse them later. This is why, when someone insistently signals that the world is full of dangers — even if many of them are imaginary or exaggerated — our attention falls immediately on those broken windows, and we feel compelled to click.

And so the media, one after another, buy into and amplify the Trumpist narrative, because pointing to broken windows generates far more clicks than offering balanced analyses of the state of democracy.

Silicon Valley, too — with Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk at the vanguard — has signed up to proclaim that the world has ceased to be a solid and trustworthy place. This is why everyone involved in the artificial intelligence scam tries to make us believe that LLMs are going to displace millions of jobs and upend entire industries — because in that AI-dominated world, they are the ones in charge.

It is irrelevant that three years have passed since the launch of ChatGPT and none of this has happened, nor shows any sign of happening. What matters is not changing reality, but making us believe it is about to change. Pointing to the broken windows so that we believe we live in a lawless world, and go looking for shelter in the solutions they offer.

And a section of the left — what we might call the populist left — also wallows in that vision of an unjust world in which elites have been delivered into the hands of a minority (not the woke, in this version, but the billionaires). Just as consolidating democracy, seventy-five years ago, required the left and the right to agree that it was the best model available, weakening liberal states today is also requiring a certain connivance between a certain left and a certain right.

I do not believe Trump will invade Greenland. I think he is a braggart and a con man. Touching Greenland would trigger a war with the second most powerful military in the world, as well as an immediate global economic collapse.

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But I do believe that Europeans and liberals should go to war. Not only against Donald Trump, but against this broken windows coalition.

To win it, we need to build a coalition of our own: one committed to stopping the pointing at broken windows. One that refuses to keep proclaiming that nothing works. Because it is not true. But even if it were — if you are old enough to read this, you are old enough to decide what comes out of your mouth.

Like those volunteer groups that organise to pick up litter thrown in the countryside, let us organise to remind ourselves — as often as possible — how far we have come. Never before, across all the millennia of human history, did democracy exist. International institutions did not exist. The recognition of fundamental rights did not exist. I would never have been able to write this blog — or anything else — without the advances of equality.

Progress did not stop in the twentieth century. On the contrary: in the last twenty-five years, 1.5 billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, global GDP per capita has risen from thirteen thousand to twenty thousand dollars, life expectancy has increased by seventeen years, and child mortality has been reduced by two thirds. Today, 67 % of the world’s population has access to the internet, and half can connect to 5G networks — something unimaginable barely a quarter of a century ago.

In that same period, technological advances have allowed us to sequence and edit the human genome, develop messenger RNA vaccines, and glimpse the possibility of curing cancer. Meanwhile, the discovery of the Higgs boson and of gravitational waves brings us closer to understanding the universe in ways that, just a few years ago, were pure fantasy.

Today, the global rollout of renewable energy invites us to imagine a world in which climate change ceases to be a threat. And as the price of solar panels has fallen by a factor of twenty-five and installed capacity has multiplied by fifteen hundred, we stand at the unprecedented threshold of a future of clean, abundant energy.

For all the problems they may have, democracies have given us an extraordinarily long period of peace — remarkable, when we consider the speed and force with which societies have been transformed. Trade, international mobility, and a web of global institutions, for all their flaws, have proven to be a good adhesive, and have provided a guarantee of stability between nations.

Human progress has not stopped. On the contrary, it is advancing at a dizzying speed, transforming our civilisation and demonstrating that we can build a more prosperous and more free world.

We live — and I challenge anyone who disagrees to prove it with data — in the best place in the world and at the best moment in history. If we feel the world lurching beneath our feet, it is not because people have turned wicked, but because all our norms were built for a society that exhausted itself in the twentieth century, and we do not yet have new ones.

If anything binds us today to fear, hatred, and war, it is not the direction in which the world is transforming, but our stubborn resistance to change — our insistence on continuing to point at the broken windows.

The good news is that it is actually within our power to stop. :D

If you want to stop pointing out the broken windows in the world, you’ll like Hijos del optimismo (Children of Optimism). It’s my first book, the older sibling of this newsletter, and a project I’ve been working on for many years.

You can already order Hijos del Optimismo on Amazon, La Casa del Libro, El Corte Inglés and the publisher’s website, Debate.

You can also read more about me and the story that inspired me to write it

John Maynard Keynes

This post is the second and final part of a masterclass on understanding the global housing problem. If you have not already done so, you may want to start with the first part:

Here we go with the second one. From a comment by Jesús Zamora Bonilla, I have picked out a question that is a big debate (in some forums).

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Does Housing Produce Value?

No. “Having value” and “producing value” are not the same thing. Things have the value that people assign to them — but that does not mean they produce a distinct value of their own. A gold bar may have value, but it produces no more value than it holds as an asset. It creates nothing new.

Neither does housing.

Those who build and finance the construction of homes — developers, contractors, banks, investors — produce value. Those who buy a completed property in order to sell or rent it are not creating anything new. The built home would exist whether or not it changed hands. And putting it on the market is not, as we have seen, some act of generosity — insofar as homes are an administrative title conferring the right to enjoy a portion of the city, keeping them in active use is an obligation.

We might acknowledge some residual value in maintenance — though in reality this is not a voluntary act of value creation: the granting of the license requires that properties be maintained, on pain of having it revoked. This also reveals who the true owner of the licenses is: if the property owner failed to fulfil this duty, the state — as the real titleholder — would step in to keep the property in the necessary condition.

Stretching the argument considerably, someone might argue that buying a property frees up the previous owner’s capital and contributes to a larger pool of builders and developers. But this is absurd, because as long as licenses remain capped by the consensus of existing owners, there is no shortage of builders relative to what can actually be built. On the contrary, the capital circulating in the real estate market does nothing but concentrate, accumulating ever more homes in ever fewer hands.

Perhaps the most compelling argument that the buying, selling, and renting of housing generates no value is offered, paradoxically, by those who defend rentierism by insisting that it is not a business activity at all — merely an informal practice by “ordinary people” who “supplement” their pension with a rental income. Both things cannot be true at once. Either housing is a service that generates value — in which case there must be entrepreneurs or workers behind it actually doing something — or these are helpless elderly people, in which case no value generation is possible.

I lean toward the second.

So why are they being revalued?

To understand why housing appreciates, the company share analogy reasserts itself with full force. It is not the shares that appreciate — it is the company. It is cities; it is countries that grow and accumulate ever more capital. That capital takes the form of public services, roads, transport networks, universities, technology parks, communities, cultural movements, national brand and tourist appeal, and the concentration of human capital.

When cities appreciate, their shareholders — the homeowners — see the value of their titles rise without doing anything at all.

To make this clearer, consider an example that is by no means science fiction — similar things have happened in many places. Imagine a developer who built two identical residential towers during the property boom, but only had a license for one of them. When the works come to be legalized, the local authority grants the residents of Block A their license, but not those of Block B. Block A therefore has street lighting, electricity, sanitation, internet connection; its children can enrol in the local school and visit the neighbourhood health centre. Its residents can also register their homes and sell them if they wish.

Without a license, Block B sits empty and abandoned.

In Block A, the homes are worth half a million euros. In Block B they are worth nothing — they cannot even be sold, because they have no license and are not registered in the property registry.

One day, a particularly clever lawyer rummaging through an archive finds a document. The original developer’s license referred not to Block A, but to Block B. He goes before a judge and succeeds in having Block A’s licenses revoked and transferred to the owners of Block B.

Nothing about the buildings has changed. The owners are the same people. Which flats are now worth half a million?

If you think it is Block B’s, then you understand perfectly that housing has no intrinsic value — only the value of the city in which it sits.

This is why the appreciation of housing, absent any change to the properties themselves or the construction of new ones, is considered “paper wealth” — a form of patrimony that arises from the revaluation of assets, not from the creation of new value, but from a mismatch between supply and demand for a rigid good whose supply cannot be expanded by the market alone. It is a well-known, widely acknowledged, and extensively studied phenomenon.

Can Property Tax Be Made Progressive Based on the Number of Properties Owned?

Yes — and in fact it already is, in some places. France applies different property tax rates to second and third homes. And the United Kingdom charges higher stamp duty on second homes and on purchases by non-residents.

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Can Short-Term Tourist Rentals Be Prohibited?

Not only can they be — they already are, in effect. To operate any accommodation business, a license is required that the vast majority of tourist flats do not hold. The problem is that public authorities, for reasons that defy understanding, do nothing to enforce this. And so we have a proliferation of unlicensed mini-hotels — without insurance, without the most basic guarantees — operating in the heart of our cities.

Which is a shame, because the Airbnb model could have been something genuinely valuable for cities, had it been properly regulated. As it stands, it has become a free-for-all for companies of dubious ethics operating in an unregulated space.

Why Have REITs Not Been Abolished?

Because, as we have seen, rising property prices and a market with strong demand for those titles of ownership are features of the system, not bugs. REITs were invented precisely to stimulate demand and drive prices up. They remain for that reason. In reality, no one actually wants to deflate the market.

Can Empty Homes Be Penalized?

They can be penalized, and in my view they should be prohibited. All licensing systems include a provision ensuring that if you do not use your license, you lose it. This is the case with taxis, shellfish harvesting permits, pharmacies, notaries, and any other activity that depends on a public license.

That said, I think the idea that there are large numbers of empty homes in major cities is a myth. The small percentage that appears in statistics likely belongs to people who split their time between two locations, or who have a property temporarily vacant because a tenant has moved to a care home, and so on. Given the stratospheric returns available from renting, it makes no sense for an investor to buy a property for profit and then leave it empty.

Empty homes are, however, a serious problem in smaller towns and villages. Consider the absurdity: the state makes an investment; buyers acquire the properties but leave them vacant, squandering the public investment they represent. This is not science fiction — it happens in every village in Spain.

Paradoxically, empty homes are also a significant problem at the luxury end of the market. London has suffered severe abandonment in its wealthiest neighbourhoods, because foreign investors — Russians, Saudis — have bought up entire streets purely as financial assets, without spending a single night in them. “Foreign investors,” ran one headline, “are using the capital’s finest homes like a life-sized Monopoly board.”

It is a perfect illustration of what happens when a country’s shares are turned into an “asset” that foreigners can buy.

Can Developers Be Required to Build on Serviced Land?

Absolutely — they can be, they should be, and the law already provides for it, at least in Spain. But as with tourist flats, it is never monitored or enforced. Developers who sit on serviced plots without building on them are effectively holding on to a portion of a country-company’s shares.

Is Squatting a Problem?

Many people have pointed out that squatting rates are negligible. But I would like to offer a different argument. Anyone who rents out a property is a business owner — regardless of whether they are a helpless elderly person. They have entered into business. And all businesses have to deal with non-payment. It is part of the risk of doing business. Sometimes you sign a contract with someone who seemed solvent and turns out not to be. Sometimes you serve a table of ten and they walk out without paying. Sometimes a dispute arises between client and supplier and they decide not to pay. It is commonplace.

So commonplace, in fact, that most businesses “provision” for these losses — they factor into their accounts in advance that a certain percentage of customers will not pay.

By the same logic, the fact that 0.05 % of tenants do not pay seems entirely normal for a business sector. Quite low, actually. By way of comparison, Madrid’s most prestigious luxury hotel openly acknowledges unpaid debts of 1.8 million euros, and no one seems remotely troubled by it.

“But other businesses aren’t forced to keep providing their service.”

Actually, they are. All businesses providing services deemed essential are subject to special obligations, even when customers do not pay. Energy companies, for example, cannot cut off supply to households where minors or vulnerable people live. The same applies to water, healthcare, and basic telecommunications.

This is not an arbitrary or capricious intervention by the state. It is a direct consequence of constitutional architecture. In modern democracies, rights are not all equal — there is an implicit hierarchy among them. The right to property is not absolute; it is limited by other rights considered superior or more fundamental, such as human dignity, physical integrity, and the right to life. When these rights come into conflict, the legal order prioritizes the most important ones: the protection of the vulnerable and social cohesion over the strict logic of the market.

Housing, in this sense, is not merely an asset or a private contract. It is a space where economic rights and fundamental rights collide. And when that happens, the state logically intervenes — on the side of what it deems indispensable for a society to remain viable.

Nor is this an anomaly unique to renting. All businesses are required to absorb costs arising from rights that do not answer to market logic. An employer pays wages when a worker is on sick leave, when they take parental leave, when they accompany a child to a medical appointment, or when they suffer a prolonged incapacity lasting months or even years. From a strictly commercial standpoint, those costs are not the company’s to bear. But from a legal and political standpoint, they are the price of living in a society that has decided certain rights take precedence over economic efficiency.

Renting operates within that same architecture: it is not a contract between equals in a moral vacuum, but an economic activity subordinated to an order of rights that limits what the market can — and cannot — do.

That said: investing in housing is not compulsory. If a business owner dislikes this sector, they are always free to move to another. What is not acceptable is wanting the returns of a startup with the protections of government bonds — and without lifting a finger.

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How Can It Be Fixed?

Let us first define what “the problem” actually is. This is not a habitability problem — it is an intergenerational conflict over the distribution of collective capital: country-capital. The solution cannot therefore consist of renting as a model for one portion of society while the other continues to own. Not at any price. That “solution” leads us toward a feudal world, where some pay — little, a lot, or something in between — simply for the right to till someone else’s land.

Moreover, citizenship remains tied to homeownership — as does people’s financial security. What we need, therefore, is a system through which everyone can access those country shares.

The solution is a mechanism by which all generations can access the same portion of a society’s capital with the same level of effort.

Furthermore, this is a problem that today threatens to tear society at the seams. Proposals such as “building a public housing stock” — which would take decades to materialize — are not real solutions. They are empty gestures.

The housing problem can and must be fixed within the next five years.

Housing as a Country’s Share Capital

One option would be to retain the idea that housing represents a country’s shares, and to ensure that everyone has access to homeownership. To achieve this:

• New issuances of country shares: The state should be obligated to expand the supply of housing licenses in line with population growth — that is, to increase the permitted density of urban land and accept that buildings must be extended or demolished to make way for new ones. At present, the opposite is happening: masterplans are barely touched, and the buildable capacity of plots never changes. So when the population grows, the only option offered to new generations is to move ever further out. But if some hold capital at kilometre zero and others at kilometre one hundred, we are not distributing that capital equitably.

• A country’s shares in the hands of its citizens: Purchases by institutional investors and by non-resident foreigners should be prohibited. It is absurd that a country’s shareholding should be held by private companies and foreign owners.

• Licenses in active use: If properties are left empty — that is, closed indefinitely and unused, which is distinct from an owner splitting their time between two homes — the license should be forfeited. If the owner wishes to use the property again, they should have to reapply.

• A license to rent: To convert a property into a rental business — whether short-term tourist or long-term residential — a specific accommodation license should be required, equivalent to that held by hotels. Exactly as would be the case if someone wished to open any other kind of business in the city, urban lettings should be regulated by the relevant authority, to ensure they match actual demand and meet a minimum set of requirements — safety, sanitation, and so on — that are not even demanded today.

An Idea Worth Considering

As is so often the case in this world of abundance, creative solutions that go beyond what is currently on the table can resolve problems that seem intractable.

I have on occasion proposed an idea that has always struck me as genuinely virtuous. Since the majority of the housing stock was built in the postwar years, every country has entire neighbourhoods constructed in a period of great scarcity, with very low quality. These are poorly insulated buildings with little natural light, entirely out of step with the expectations of twenty-first-century life. As a result, these neighbourhoods routinely become pockets of poverty.

A measure that would activate the private sector to build far more housing in a very short time would be to increase the permitted density of these plots — so that where four homes exist today, eight could be built tomorrow, for example. This could even be time-limited to force owners and developers to act quickly.

When a private developer constructs a building, they are in effect exploiting an urban resource, and are therefore required to make “contributions” to the state — surrendering a portion of what they build. For decades, the norm has been to “monetize” these contributions: rather than handing over flats, the developer paid the state in cash and retained 100 percent of the building.

But it does not have to work this way. Entire neighbourhoods could be expanded — or demolished and rebuilt — creating millions of new homes across Europe, with the state contributions yielding a public housing stock in very little time. All of this without resorting to state-led construction, and without spending a single euro of public money, by harnessing the mechanisms of the market.

It is one of those rare ideas that achieves multiple things at once: regenerating neighbourhoods, making them more sustainable, injecting resources into the most disadvantaged sections of society, and creating both market-rate and public housing — in very little time.

But you have to want to do it, of course.

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If you are interested in housing issues, don’t miss Hijos del optimismo (Children of Optimism). This book explains how the housing crisis is the result of the immense transformations we are currently undergoing.

It is my first book, the big brother of this newsletter, and a project I have been working on for many years.

You can already order Hijos del Optimismo on Amazon, La Casa del Libro, El Corte Inglés and the publisher’s website, Debate.

You can also read more about me and the story that inspired me to write it

.Photo by Sean Lee on Unsplash

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Housing has become the defining problem of global society — and apparently overnight. Perhaps that is why there is so much confusion, and why it is so difficult to understand, let alone explain, what is actually happening. How did it become a crisis? Why does it affect every country? Why do prices keep rising without end? Can building more fix it? What about liberalizing the market?

When a problem is hard to understand, it is often because we are thinking about it in the wrong way. And I believe that is precisely what has been happening here for a long time. The other day, Bosco Gámiz suggested I write a piece answering some questions, which other readers then expanded upon with ideas of their own.

And I — who always wanted to write a book called The Housing Theory of Everything (and would have done so had I found a title equally catchy in Spanish) — got carried away, and what began as a Q&A ended up as a masterclass. A manual. Everything you need to know to understand, as well as any specialist, a problem that has become universal and now threatens our world.

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Here it is! I hope you like it.

Why Is the Housing Problem So Hard to Understand?

Because we are approaching it in the wrong way.

Some argue that housing is a market good, like cars or oranges. It is not. Others compare it to an “asset,” as though it were a printing press or a gold bar. That does not hold either. For housing to be comparable to those goods, it would need to satisfy one basic condition: that supply could rise or fall freely in response to market forces. But it cannot. Housing does not follow market logic, because its supply is constrained by the number of available licenses.

In fact, although — as so often happens — its physical materiality clouds our judgment, a dwelling is first and foremost a title: an authorization, a permit, a license. Without a license, a building cannot legally function as a home in any developed country. The housing market is therefore, in essence, the market for residential licenses.

And those licenses constitute a monopoly. It is states that issue them. This is why housing resembles neither consumer goods nor investment goods, but rather the share capital of companies. The best analogy for understanding housing is to think of it as stock in a company — and that company is a country.

Just as companies divide their ownership into shares priced according to the firm’s value, countries issue housing licenses whose value is tied to the city and country in question. Just as companies stand behind the price of their shares and regulate it, so too do countries. Housing is a country’s stock — and the real estate market is something very close to a stock exchange.

It is not a bug, it’s a feature.

The story goes like this. The first half of the twentieth century was a period of sweeping change across the Western world. Much of the rural population moved to the cities, industrial labour began to replace agricultural work, and the modern metropolis was born. In the midst of that transformation, the crash of 1929 unleashed a tsunami of poverty and dislocation on both sides of the Atlantic that ultimately pushed the world toward the Second World War. When the conflict ended, with part of the territory destroyed by bombing and the rest still waiting to be built, an entire world remained to be made.

And it was made — literally. In the years that followed the war (known as the “Trente Glorieuses,” or the Glorious Thirty), health systems, education systems, universities, transport infrastructure, sanitation networks, energy grids, legal institutions, and industries were all built from the ground up. Everything. The countries we inhabit today were founded in that period.

Spurred by the fear of another war and by the pressure exerted by the Soviet bloc, political elites designed a plan to bring the working classes into a share of the gains from progress. They struck a pact with their citizens — one that held for half a century — under which the ownership, both literal and figurative, of their countries would be distributed through housing.

For those in power, distributing homeownership was the means of securing popular commitment to a political model. For citizens, it meant acquiring a share that conferred a stake in the country’s future.

This is why Franco declared that Spain would move from being “a country of proletarians to one of property owners”; why Margaret Thatcher wanted “every man and every woman to be a capitalist,” and saw housing as “the starting point” for achieving that; and why, for both left and right alike, housing was, in Roosevelt’s words, “a participation in the future.”

And so the world embarked on a colossal “share issuance.” In Europe, for example, between 1950 and 1990, seventy percent of the current housing stock was built — far exceeding what had existed before. In 1945 there were fewer than thirteen million dwellings; by 1990 there were five times as many. For several decades, construction outpaced population growth.

In a handful of northern European countries, that housing stock remained in state hands, forming a public park of social housing. But in the vast majority of countries, it was distributed at cost price among the young adults of the time — like a gigantic universal inheritance. That is how two generations came to own the entirety of the Western world.

Today, housing is still this. It is a title of ownership over a small piece of a state — with its investments, its human capital, its national brand, its commercial and political agreements, and everything else that entails. This is why people who own a home feel like owners in a sense that extends far beyond their four walls. This is why housing rises or falls in line with how a country is faring. It is exactly what happens with a company’s shares.

Why Has Housing Become a Problem?

Until the end of the century, housing was not a particularly valuable stake. People had never paid much for their homes because cities were small and space was plentiful. In almost every city there were still peripheral districts and undeveloped areas that had gradually been occupied by waves of migration. The norm, in the 1950s and 1960s, was to pay very little for a rental.

In 1970, for example, the United States’ 22 million renters paid an average of around one hundred dollars a month, including utilities — roughly eight hundred dollars in today’s money, or about 12 percent of a median American family’s income.

The real sources of money in the twentieth century were natural resources, concessions on major infrastructure projects, factories, and construction companies — the firms of the industrial economy. Housing was the equivalent of what, in a company, would be “subordinated” or “Class B” shares. In other words, there was a first-tier capital — more expensive and more profitable — that consisted of companies, where large fortunes were invested; and then a Class B issuance was created for ordinary people to invest in: that was housing. The pact, in essence, was that the upper classes would retain the majority of each country’s capital, while the working classes would receive a subordinate and modest share.

But at the turn of the millennium, a perfect storm gathered, driven by several converging phenomena.

1. The industrial economy began to retreat. Factories disappeared from the Western world, and natural resources grew cheaper. At the same time, a new economy was emerging — one that no longer required the vast investment that factories once demanded. The true oil of the twenty-first century was no longer extracted from a well: it was knowledge.

2. And that new fuel was created and traded in the genuine value factories of our time: great cities. A new wave of urbanization swept the world. Cities grew ever larger; smaller towns emptied out. The educated classes congregated around immense capitals. The assets of societies — investments in both human and physical capital — accumulated around a handful of megacities, often just one or two per country.

   

3. When construction slowed and the economy turned digital, the world stopped growing at the pace that those who had designed the system had anticipated. At the same time, the 2008 crisis brought housebuilding to a sudden halt, from which it has barely recovered.

4. Meanwhile, as productive investment opportunities dried up, the middle classes of developed countries were accumulating ever-larger savings. Pension funds, investment funds, and sovereign wealth funds proliferated, all seeking returns somewhere. Many families also began buying property as an investment.

5. And central banks, responding to the slowdown in growth, injected hundreds of billions in liquidity into the global economy — causing all that accumulated wealth to grow still further.

As a result, wealth exploded. It became a mountain with nowhere to invest. And it began to accumulate in housing. The table turned: from being a form of “subordinated capital,” housing became the primary asset class of nations. Today, 60 % of all the world’s wealth is held in real estate, and 50% of all global wealth consists of residential property.

Worse still: all growth since the year 2000 is “paper wealth” — fictitious wealth consisting entirely of the appreciation of the same buildings constructed in the twentieth century. Since 2000, rather than growing by generating value, we have merely had the sensation of “growth” because real estate assets keep rising in price.

Why Is This a Problem?

Because housing produces no value. Unlike factories and construction companies, which drove economic activity — jobs, state revenues, opportunities — and unlike the purchase of new housing, which stimulated construction, the rental or resale of existing homes is the closest thing our world has to the feudal system of the fifteenth century. It produces nothing; it simply functions as a vacuum that extracts resources from the broader economy, channelling them directly into producing more wealth and more accumulation.

This is not, as is commonly claimed, a problem of habitability, or even of rent prices. It is a crisis of wealth distribution and of the “capital” of nations. It is a problem of citizenship.

And in reality it affects tenants and new buyers in almost equal measure. The underlying problem is this: for the generation that purchased the twentieth century’s shares to receive a return commensurate with their expectations — expectations calibrated to a world in which growth had not stopped — another generation must foot the bill. And in “country-companies” that produce far less than before, what happens is that younger generations must devote an ever-greater portion of their time and their lives to buying the “shares” of their country from the generations that came before them.

And if wealth no longer generates more economic activity, it can only end up devouring what remains. If the twentieth-century model was circular — investment produced employment and resources that justified a return — the twenty-first-century model is a Ponzi scheme. Each generation is compelled to make a greater sacrifice to compensate the previous one, until the whole thing blows apart. Meanwhile, the underlying moral logic is terrifying: it endorses a world in which it is far more profitable to be a landlord than an entrepreneur.

This is the tension. We have run out of a model that works for everyone. One generation received a universal inheritance in the form of shares in their country; now every subsequent generation is expected to devote an enormous share of its resources to compensating the previous ones for those shares. This is why housing consumes an ever-larger portion of household budgets. Fifty years ago, housing might represent between 5 and 10 percent of a family’s expenditure; today it reaches 50 percent — and beyond — in many places.

We are playing that game in which a group of people standing in a circle pass around a device with an internal clock — like a time bomb. The moment will come when it is no longer sustainable, and it will explode.

Why Was the Lack of Rental Housing Once Seen as the Problem, When Now It Seems the Rental Market Itself Is?

The traditional housing problem, up until the end of the twentieth century, was one of supply: because so little was paid for housing, there were no development companies, no thriving industry. It was largely people who built their own homes by hand. This is why states needed to build public housing in the twentieth century — no one else wanted to. When tensions began to emerge at the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, everyone reached for the old narrative of insufficient supply without thinking much further. But it was not the whole truth.

(Incidentally, constructing a building is very cheap relative to its useful lifespan, which can be effectively infinite. The problem is that we lack financing instruments matched to those timescales, and a tension arises between funding and construction.)

Can Building More Fix the Problem?

Building more is the first step — the equivalent of issuing new shares for the current generation, what in corporate finance is known as a capital increase. The problem is that the original shareholders would resist. And they already do, everywhere in the world: this is what the NIMBY phenomenon is. When a company issues new shares, it dilutes the value of existing ones.

In my view, building more must be part of the solution. The reality is that since 2008 most countries have built practically nothing, while populations continue to grow and household sizes shrink. There is a genuine tension between supply and demand. But to carry out this new “share issuance,” it is not enough to build on the urban periphery — planning codes must be reformed to increase density, and new generations must be guaranteed access at cost price. The land of the city must be redistributed, not merely extended.

Nor does it work to sell at prevailing market prices, because that simply transfers wealth to land developers rather than to the twentieth-century families the system is meant to serve. For any sustainable system, each generation should be able to access a share of their country’s stock at the same price — measured in terms of the life effort required, if you will. This is the key to making the model fair and sustainable: that the effort required of each generation to access a stake in their country’s capital remains constant.

Can the Market Be “Liberalized”?

The housing market cannot be “liberalized” — in the sense of allowing anyone to build whatever they like on land they own — any more than the issuance of a company’s shares can be liberalized. It would be absurd. The number of licenses in any given urban area depends on the available public services: the capacity of sanitation systems, street lighting, water supply, road networks, and public transport.

Urban planning is essentially the most important law in any country — just as controlling the share count is the first job of a chief financial officer. Before building in any area, a series of interventions must take place, necessarily coordinated by a higher authority: sewage, road building, lighting, utility networks, and so on.

If every developer could do whatever they liked on their own plot, cities would become uninhabitable — people throwing waste into the street for lack of sanitation, cars piling up everywhere for lack of any other means of getting around. It is nonsensical to talk about liberalizing land, unless one wants shanty towns to grow like those in parts of Africa. (If anyone wants to convince me otherwise, I am all ears.)

Can Public Housing Solve It?

That depends on which problem you are trying to solve. If the goal is a welfare solution for a minimum number of people in the greatest difficulty, perhaps 2, 3, or 5% of stock could be provided over a couple of decades. But to me that would be a way of entrenching inequality: leaving the country’s shares in the hands of a few, offering a small subsidy to a few others, while everyone in the middle continues to face the same problem.

If the goal is cities where 50, 60, or 70 % of housing is public and people no longer store their savings in property — that strikes me as science fiction. The only way to achieve it would be to expropriate the entire city and rebuild it from scratch.

In my view, the only problem this idea of “building more public housing” actually solves is a political one: it gives certain parties something to say, and allows them to project the illusion of having a solution, while delivering no real results — because building takes ten or fifteen years, and by then, no one will remember the promise. When anyone advocates for public housing, the right question to ask is: how much, and when? How many homes can the state actually build before the end of this parliamentary term? The answer, I fear, is depressingly close to zero.

Why Did Prices Rise During the Bubble Even Though Far More Was Built?

Because when a company carries out a capital increase to fund investments that are expected to make the company more valuable, the share price rises.

The bubble was the moment when the global message went out that housing would be “the great asset” of the future. It was then that governments — having watched prices appreciate through the final years of the twentieth century, when economic growth figures were still very high — could sell their citizens the idea that this was going to be a bonanza where money would fall from the sky. If housing kept appreciating at 10 percent a year, buying more shares was a fantastic idea.

For states to build extensively without prices rising, they must send the market a clear signal that they will not allow appreciation to outpace the economy.

I repeat: states, which issue the shares, control the price.

How Have Experiments in Rent Regulation and Price Controls Fared?

It is very difficult to compare, because every territory has its own characteristics. But in general I think price controls are effective at limiting rental prices. The problem, as we have discussed, is that rent is not exactly the issue — it is one of its symptoms. So controls are a small patch that does not fully resolve the problem, and can actually consolidate the idea that it is normal to have a society in which half the population are shareholders in their country and the other half are merely tenants.

Is the Intersection of Supply and Demand Really Useful or Economically Accurate When Applied to Real Estate That Can Be Withdrawn From the Market at Will?

Real estate cannot be withdrawn from the market. That is a fiction. As we have seen, homes are licenses — and licenses exist whether the property is occupied or not. The building will continue to appreciate in value even if it is never sold.

Housing prices are in reality set by the issuer — the state — which regulates the market through incentives such as tax deductions and purchase subsidies, and through disincentives such as price caps and property taxes. Exactly as companies issue shares or buy them back to support their price.

Should Purchases by Companies and Non-Residents Be Restricted?

They can and should be — and urgently. There is no logic in allowing the shares of one country to be held by the citizens of another. Even Trump recently signed an executive order prohibiting investment funds from buying single-family homes: “America will not be a nation of renters.” Canada has had a ban on foreign purchases in place for two years; the Netherlands has introduced certain restrictions at the municipal level; and other countries — China and Saudi Arabia among them — prohibit foreign property ownership altogether. This is Democracy 101.

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In order to stay within Substack’s recommended length limits, I have divided this masterclass into two parts. Click to continue with the second part:

If you are interested in housing issues, don’t miss Hijos del optimismo (Children of Optimism). This book explains how the housing crisis is the result of the immense transformations we are currently undergoing.

It is my first book, the big brother of this newsletter, and a project I have been working on for many years.

You can already order Hijos del Optimismo on Amazon, La Casa del Libro, El Corte Inglés and the publisher’s website, Debate.

You can also read more about me and the story that inspired me to write it.

Photo by Adrian Trinkaus on Unsplash

— Juan José Millas, ‘¿Hay o no hay avería?’(Is there a breakdown or not?), El País

Last week, following a post in which I argued that the world must choose abundance in order to put an end to hatred, Daniel Arjona published a review of the proposals put forward by the nascent abundantist movement, closing with a challenge: Is abundance compatible with the soaring electricity consumption of artificial intelligence? Or will those of us who believe in abundance crash headlong into that “thermodynamic reality” of technology before we have even left the starting grid?

I do not believe that AI will derail abundance. But the question strikes so deep a nail that I cannot help but wade in. The dichotomy between the scarcity that AI threatens to impose and the abundance it promises points directly to the reason why the twenty-first century feels like a car whose engine has failed without anyone being able to identify the cause.

This piece attempts to explain why the promises of scarcity work — and how the architects of AI have managed to turn it into the greatest such promise we have ever made, and perhaps the last.

The Two Gods of Capitalism

Human beings had always promised themselves a future of abundance. For as far back as historical memory reaches, and until just a few years ago, we believed in paradise. In salvation. In an existence beyond scarcity and earthly misery — even if it had to wait until after death.

And so, when capitalism came to occupy the place of religion in the moral order, it took great care to keep that promise intact:

“It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. Every workman has a great quantity of his own work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for; and every other workman being exactly in the same situation, he is enabled to exchange a great quantity of his own goods for a great quantity, or, what comes to the same thing, for the price of a great quantity of theirs.”1

The god of capitalism — no longer called Allah or Jehovah, but the “division of labour” and the “invisible hand” of the market — also promised a modern version of paradise: a future of plenty for all mankind.

It was this convergence that allowed us to enter the modern era without losing our faith — sustained by the same worldview that had guided us for millennia: that human beings, if we act virtuously, can earn our place in heaven. The impure, the heretics, and the unbelievers will receive their just punishment in hell — or in poverty. Carrot and stick.

Yet capitalism introduced, perhaps without fully realizing it, a profound mutation of that ancestral principle. The new order did not abolish God — but it split him in two. From that moment on, we prayed to two distinct deities: one that promised abundance, and one that announced scarcity.

The God of Abundance: The Assembly Line

Adam Smith’s favourite deity was the “division of labour.” The Scotsman was captivated by human organization and by the inexhaustible power of industrialization to accelerate material progress. His divinity was a being of abundance — one that multiplied everything it touched. “If a worker, on his own, can perhaps make ten pins a day,” Smith argued, “on an assembly line he can make thousands.” Industry was the modern miracle of the loaves and the fishes.

But for those workers to reach paradise, their labour had to be compensated. Someone had to recognize the value of what they produced and be willing to exchange it for the fruits of others’ work. The god of productivity, on its own, could not close the circle. It needed another god: that of the market. And this one, unlike the god of industrial production, was a god of scarcity.

The God of Scarcity: The Market

A good can only have a price if access to it is not free — if it is scarce. For me to want to buy something from someone else, that good cannot be freely available to me without payment. In economic terms, its consumption must be rivalrous: either the buyer consumes it, or I do. Only then can it be exchanged. The market is, in essence, the mechanism by which both parties agree on its price.

Scarce goods — such as cars, washing machines, and vinyl records — are easily traded in markets. But when goods are abundant — like the light from street lamps or public health — it becomes impossible to charge for them. That is why markets cannot provide them. So much so that even the most hardened theorists of capitalism eventually came to support the creation of the modern state to take responsibility for some of them.

(I explain this in much greater detail in this article and this one).

The Schizophrenia of Capitalism

Capitalism has thus existed, from its very birth, in a state of genuine schizophrenia — in an all-out battle between its two great gods. On the one hand, it promises that human organization can make goods abundant. On the other, it requires that goods remain scarce in order for markets to continue to exist.

The consequence is that our economic system — upon which we have staked the future of society — has advanced from its beginnings by devouring itself. Industries are born, grow, and reproduce, making goods ever more abundant. But the more abundant goods become, the more they lose their market value — until, one day, driven by their own improvements and innovations, their production becomes ubiquitous, they are “commoditized,” and they cease to be profitable. Industries thus render themselves unnecessary and ultimately disappear.

How did capitalism survive two hundred years of this tension? Should it not have collapsed? Should it not have exploded, supernova-like, from its very success? This is something that perhaps deserved more scrutiny in the twentieth century — but, then again, no one asks where the manna falling from the sky comes from. And so, for as long as the economy ran at full capacity, no one saw this as a problem. On the contrary, a very famous economist, Joseph Schumpeter, devised an idea to explain it and gave it a name so catchy that no one ever thought to question it again. The engine of capitalism, he said, was the “creative destruction” of the economy.

The Magic of “Creative Destruction”

Old industries, as they disappeared, released workers and capital back into the economic atmosphere. That surplus, in time, became fertile ground from which new industries — more innovative, more productive, capable of absorbing that labour and capital under better conditions — were born. This is how the automobile replaced the horse, petroleum replaced coal, and the electric motor replaced the steam engine. Capitalism was magical. The abundance of one thing created new scarcity somewhere else, and everything — the assembly line and the market — continued on its way.

Fascinating. Because that was in 1942, and since then no one has ever managed to demonstrate that this relationship actually exists; no one has been able to identify the mechanism by which the destruction of some industries gives rise to others. “Creative destruction” never ceased to be a theory. A hypothesis. A narrative. And yet, by the end of the twentieth century, that narrative was shaping economic policy, justifying the forced deindustrialization of the Western world, displacing entire populations, and transforming the face of nations — all in the name of industrial “restructuring.”

At precisely the moment — and what terrible timing it was — when it became clear that it had stopped working. That engine of capitalism had been turning for roughly 225 years when, twenty-five years ago, it seized up and ground to a halt.

Since then, since the turn of the millennium, the creative destruction of the economy has been conspicuous by its absence. The old industries — local commerce, postal services, travel agencies, newspaper kiosks — keep dying. But the new ones that should be rising in their place produce neither enough employment nor enough economic activity to offset the losses left behind by those that disappear. As a result, Western economies began to stagnate toward the end of the 1990s.

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The Bubble That Never Ends

And so countries embarked on a forward flight that has now lasted twenty-five years. First, they surrendered to the siren song of the dot-coms, trusting that the internet would deliver the productivity revolution they had been waiting for. It did not. Instead, when the bubble burst, the US Federal Reserve began applying the prescription that has brought us to where we are today: injecting artificial money into the economy — monetary stimulus — to keep it from stalling completely, sustaining it on life support until the promised technological revolution would arrive and return us to the path of growth.

But that did not happen either. Instead, all that fresh money found its way into the mortgage market and produced a second bubble, which burst in 2008. And although the world was by then growing acutely aware that something more serious than a simple crisis was underway, the prescription was the same: more liquidity to revive an economy that had been in cardiac arrest since the start of the millennium.

And so we have arrived at 2026 after twenty-five years of injecting ever more money in the hope of reviving an economy that keeps deflating — like a balloon, literally, with pressure pumped in on one side while it escapes from the other. This is the reason I say, without any fear of being wrong, that AI is a bubble that will burst in 2026. And I can say with equal confidence that, if we do not change course, there will be another bubble after it, and another, and another. Because what is happening to the world is that it keeps producing more and more abundance — but can no longer produce scarcity.

The Century of Abundance

One of capitalism’s two gods — the god of the assembly line — is running at full capacity. We are able to do more with less than ever before, and the world has never been so abundant.

Despite the dizzying growth of the global population, we today produce 50 % more calories per person than in 1960 — and 4.5 times more energy. We have cut illiteracy from 60 to 12 %. Today five billion people are connected to the internet, and there are 1.12 mobile phone lines per person worldwide. According to the Simon Abundance Index, life in 2026 is 518.4 times more abundant than in 1980. It is little wonder that global life expectancy has risen by 25 — 25! — years.

More striking still: every new innovation that emerges is born abundant — email, digital information, social media content, artificial intelligence. As a consequence, the god of the market — the one that paid wages, provided returns on investment, made it possible for companies, tax revenues, and all the other economic mechanisms of the modern state to exist — is growing ever more enfeebled.

A simple example. CD sales reached all-time highs in 2001, then plummeted, all but vanishing before 2010. Music streaming revenues did not match the business volume of CDs until fifteen years later, in 2015. And yet, in the music industry in the United States, barely more than half as many people are employed today as were in 2000.

Why? Because there is no scarcity. On the contrary: music is everywhere. For the same price we once paid for a single CD in 1990, we now get a month’s subscription to a platform that offers us every piece of music in the world. People spend hour after hour on Spotify. Meanwhile, the revenues and jobs that depended on music being scarce — record shops, manufacturers, distributors — have vanished.

The same story repeats itself across every other sector: search engines, accommodation platforms, e-commerce, messaging services, social networks, and cloud software have all created products and services that are abundant, accessible to millions of people simultaneously. But, as with music, that abundance of goods does not generate employment or material wealth in proportion to the scale of its consumption — because the remuneration of labour and capital was tied to scarcity, to the existence of a market.

This is the schizophrenia of the contemporary world. This is the arrhythmia at the heart of late capitalism that has the world on life support. The reason why, as the writer Millás puts it, “the engine of society is making a strange noise.” In the eternal contest between capitalism’s two gods, the god of abundance has the other pinned against the ropes and is delivering a beating.

The Scarcity Rebellion

Although it has never been explained in quite these terms, today almost everyone senses that this is true — you may well be feeling that “aha” moment right now: I’d never seen it that way before, but it’s obvious.

The problem is that, without a social contract different from the one we had in a world of scarcity, many people have come to see abundance as a threat. They find themselves in a kind of schizophrenia of their own: on one hand, they want access to the benefits of this new world — Amazon’s low prices, cancer treatments — but on the other, they are terrified that this drift will harm them. From that intuition springs the fear of the future, and of everything associated with progress.

And so we collectively refuse to accept that we live in a world of abundance — because, as Upton Sinclair put it, “it is very difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” And it so happens that a great many people’s “salary” depends on the world not being an abundant place.

Starting with workers. Taken to its logical extreme, abundance would eliminate a large portion of work — more than it has already eliminated. If, for instance, we were to maximize food production by supporting the technologies that allow proteins to be cultivated using bacteria, we would permanently resolve food insecurity, drive down meat prices dramatically, free up vast tracts of land for reforestation, and avoid the emission of thousands of tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere. But we would also eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs in agriculture and livestock farming — and, with them, the trade unions and all the power structures built upon those jobs.

And with political parties. Because the political currents of the twentieth century were always something like different churches worshipping at the altar of capitalism’s god — some at the god of the factory, others at the god of the market. This is why, in my view, every political movement has stopped speaking about the future and has turned scarcist, retreating into frameworks that still describe the world as though it were a place of scarcity — immigration, redistribution, the planet’s “limits,” degrowth, inequality, the unsustainability of public services, debt, and so on. This is why they are far more interested in perpetuating shortages — of housing, for example — in order to position themselves as saviours of their followers, than in exploring the opportunities that abundance offers.

But the great casualty of abundantism is none of these actors. Workers, before anything else, are people — and society can reorganize itself (and will) to ensure that there remains a role and a place for every person in an abundant world where work plays a secondary part. And political parties can reinvent themselves, or new ones can emerge.

The real corpse stinking out this funeral is that of capital. What place does capital have in a world of abundance?

In Search of Scarcity

This is what one of the world’s leading consultancies has to say:

“In an economy increasingly driven by intangible assets such as software and other intellectual property, a surplus of savings has struggled to find investments that offer sufficient economic returns and lasting value for investors. Instead, these savings have found their way into real estate, which in 2020 accounted for two-thirds of net wealth.”2

In other words: none. As the world became abundant toward the end of the 1990s, capital ran out of places to invest. It then launched a desperate search for new pockets of scarcity. First it sought them in the dot-com stock market. Then it took refuge in real estate. Around 2015 it returned to the stock market, this time in pursuit of “unicorns” — technology companies like Airbnb and Uber that promised stratospheric returns by demolishing entire sectors through the act of making them abundant.

One corner of the internet set out to create the first scarce digital asset: Bitcoin — “the only scarcity in the world.” Since then we have witnessed several more or less successful attempts to manufacture artificial scarcity: NFTs, which tried to replicate Bitcoin’s trick; the Metaverse, conceived as a form of digital “real estate” controlled by Meta; and all the things that have periodically come into fashion by convincing audiences of their scarcity — rare earth minerals, chips, and the rest.

All of these share the same value proposition. In an increasingly abundant world where generating a return on capital has become exceedingly difficult, the product on offer was always the next scarce thing — the next scarce thing — from which a return might finally be extracted.

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Sam Altman’s Holy Grail

AI is the latest and most sophisticated version of that scarcism — an almost perfect story, exquisitely modern, built upon three lies:

1. AI was “intelligent” and could “replace humans.”

2. It would therefore displace millions of jobs — and, by extension, boost productivity, the touchstone of this entire narrative.

3. The key to its success was not the technology itself, but scale: the sheer quantity of processors any given market player could concentrate in its hands.

It was Sam Altman — almost single-handedly — who created this monster. It was he who first floated the idea that what we have been calling “AI” constitutes a form of intelligence. And it was he who, as it became increasingly evident that large language models are little more than stochastic know-it-alls, announced the imminent creation of “artificial general intelligence — coming soon.”

But his greatest invention, the one that turned the world upside down, as they explain very well in this post, was scale.

The fact is that AI is a technology as abundant as email. It is not, in reality, a single technology that anyone can patent, but a collection of general, shared principles being applied by many different teams. It ought to be about as investable as a programming language or a collection of recipes — which is to say, not at all.

But a group of scientists at OpenAI discovered that ChatGPT’s performance improved the more processors it used. “Scale” — the computational capacity of each LLM model — became the key to success with this new technology (which, let us not forget, we had already been convinced could replace human beings and therefore be enormously productive).

“He reinterprets the discovery of scaling laws as a kind of founding epiphany, and presents himself as someone whose career revolves around ‘scaling’ what works. An engineer who worked with him described a conversation in which Altman delivered a small sermon about his career, saying that scaling is the defining idea of his life.”

What Sam Altman grasped was that a technology born abundant — one that had been sold as capable of replacing humans, yet which could be marketed as scarce because it was bound to the physical computational capacity of each individual company — was the Holy Grail that capital had been searching for since the early 2000s. That elusive technological creature, with the soul of an algorithm and the feet of a high-capex real estate investment, was the perfect lure to set every investor salivating.

Scale — or, put another way, scarcity — was Altman’s great invention, the one that launched AI into the trillion-dollar bubble in which we now find ourselves. In 2026, the major AI players — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle — are expected to invest more than six hundred billion dollars in processing capacity.

All the narratives built around this — from “hyperscalers” to the story of soaring electricity demand (which, incidentally, was already deployed in the Bitcoin era) — are far less established facts than they are reinforcements of that same promise: the last scarce technology, which the industry’s interested parties are determined to keep lodged in our heads.

It will last as long as it takes for the bubble to burst.

If you want to know why the world became abundant at the turn of the millennium, you’ll like Hijos del optimismo (Children of Optimism). It’s my first book, the older sibling of this newsletter, and a project I’ve been working on for many years.

You can already order Hijos del Optimismo on Amazon, La Casa del Libro, El Corte Inglés and the publisher’s website, Debate.

You can also read more about me and the story that inspired me to write it.

But the fact is that there is an American political scientist’s approach to the study of this phenomenon that reveals exactly where Donald Trump is heading today and what we can expect in the coming months from this man who is putting the world in check.

In ‘Anatomía del Facismo’, Robert Paxton rightly argues that fascism is not an ideology. It is not, like communism or socialism, a relatively coherent doctrine that someone can adhere to. It is a phenomenon, a historical occurrence that seems to arise when certain circumstances are present and that always develops in the same stages and in the same way.

This approach has two virtues. The first is that it decriminalises thought. A person or a party cannot be fascist because of their ideas. There is no “fascist” way of thinking; rather, fascism is a series of linked events or acts.

The second virtue is that it allows us to understand where Trumpism is headed – its roots, its evolution and its possible futures – without getting bogged down in ideological trenches.

If we strip away the layer of ideology and look at the facts, I believe it is undeniable that what is happening in the United States shares, if not all, then most of the characteristics of fascism proposed by Paxton in this definition:

“Fascism is a form of political behaviour marked by an obsessive concern with the decline of the community, humiliation or a sense of victimhood, and compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity. In it, a mass party composed of committed nationalist militants, acting in tense but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic freedoms and pursues, through violence presented as redemptive and without ethical or legal restrictions, goals of internal purification and external expansion.”

The idea that the country is in ‘decline’ (‘the American decline’) is an omnipresent element in American symbolic culture. Some of the most vocal religious congregations in the country are descended from Protestants (Puritans and Pilgrims) who emigrated from Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries fleeing religious persecution in the Church of England. These groups always found that the rest of the population did not live up to their expectations of purity, and therefore ‘moral decline’ has been a trope of American Christian culture since its founding.

When Barack Obama’s victory—which coincided with the subprime crisis—caught part of the Republican public opinion in a moment of total confusion, this framework became hegemonic and became the main—and almost only—issue for the right [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].

Obama had enjoyed a meteoric rise to power. At the end of 2004, just two years before announcing his candidacy for the Democratic Party primaries, he was still an unknown state representative in Illinois. For much of the primary campaign, it seemed almost impossible that he would stand a chance against Hillary Clinton, who was a sacred cow in the party. A few months later, that unknown figure became President of the United States.

Part of the Republican electorate could not understand how a proudly black, Hawaiian, Ivy League candidate could be ahead of their own in the polls. So much so that during the campaign, Obama’s opponent, John McCain (who, incidentally, was a giant), had to interrupt his rallies on several occasions to stop the racist insults that the audience was hurling at the Democrat, or to contradict his own voters and explain to them amid boos that no, Obama was not a Muslim, he was not a terrorist, and he was not a bad man. And they had no reason to be ‘scared’.

In the years that followed, the Tea Party and some agitators, such as Steve Bannon, took advantage of this discontent to shake up the political landscape in a very short time. They did so by reviving the latent notion of the country’s decline and transferring it to the economy and the mainstream.

Trump’s big message, ‘Make America Great Again,’ is a response to that perception of national decline and a promise of a return to purity. Riding on the back of the racial dispute that began with Obama, the Republican encouraged a victim mentality in part of the electorate by repeating ad nauseam that white people are discriminated against and have been ‘treated very badly’ by progressivism.

In the absence of a mass party, Trump was able to organise during his first term the nationalist militants of far-right and white supremacist groups, who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 to prevent Joe Biden’s inauguration. With his other hand, Trump began to forge another alliance with the economic and Republican establishment, which seems to prefer him over other more moderate but less effective candidates.

As if he wanted to fit Paxton’s definition like a glove, in his second term Trump has been eroding democratic freedoms both inside and outside the country, as we have seen in the creation of a violent paramilitary force within ICE. Even his own definition of power has taken on a tone indistinguishable from classic fascism. In a recent interview with The New York Times a few days ago, he asserted that the only limit to his global authority is ‘his own morality’ and that he does not need to comply with international law as an effective restraint on his actions.

This rhetoric, together with his constant references to territorial expansion and annexations—from Canada to Venezuela and Greenland—close the circle that allows us to affirm that Trumpism behaves exactly like other fascist movements.

From here, Paxton identifies five stages of fascism as a phenomenon, of which we have already experienced four: intellectual exploration, rooting, rise to power, and exercise of power. The last, which is just beginning, has two sides: radicalisation or entropy.

1. Intellectual Exploration, in which disillusionment with mass democracy manifests in debates over the loss of national vigor.

   As we have seen, from 2008 onward, conservative media cultivated a narrative of national “decline” that, in the wake of the economic crisis and the sweeping transformations of the twenty-first century, became hegemonic on the right. Confronted with this perceived decline, a segment of public opinion absorbed into its worldview the very themes that would later underpin Trump’s anti-democratic behavior.

2. Roots, when a fascist movement, aided by political gridlock and polarization, becomes a consequential actor on the national stage.

   In my view, this moment was Trump’s first term (2016–2020). The two-party system (first-past-the-post) makes it exceedingly difficult for a third party to reach power — or even the mainstream — in the United States. Yet Trump’s first term effectively installed a Trumpist party within the Republican Party, one that took root and became normalized in popular culture over those four years. During that period, Trump steadily empowered certain far-right groups — the Proud Boys among them — which coalesced into a kind of organization (armed, in many cases; digital, in others) that supports his actions entirely outside the boundaries of party consensus.

3. Seizure of Power, when conservative sectors, in their attempt to contain the rise of left-wing opposition, invite the fascists to share power.

   Trump was not the party’s automatic candidate for his second term. A new primary process unfolded in which the various factions negotiated their accommodation to an already unmistakably Trumpist reality. The ascent to power of a fascist Trump thus lies in precisely that pact — one in which a Trump now commanding an entirely new political force struck a deal with the different factions of the Republican Party to secure their support.

4. Exercise of Power, in which the movement and its charismatic leader control the state in equilibrium with state institutions such as the police and with traditional elites such as the clergy and major business figures.

   This phase coincides with the second term — with the present moment. It is characterized by Trumpism’s alliances with various sectors, most visibly with the Silicon Valley establishment (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, JD Vance, and others), which not only provided campaign funding but placed the Vice President and Musk, for a time, inside the government itself.

One might say that until a few weeks ago we found ourselves in this fourth phase — a period of relative equilibrium in power. Yet something has shifted in recent months, pushing Trumpism toward the final and definitive stage of fascism, which can unfold in one of two ways:

1. Radicalization or Entropy, in which the state either grows increasingly radical — as occurred in Nazi Germany — or drifts toward traditional authoritarianism, as happened in Fascist Italy.

Fascist parties either settle and “relax” into power (as Franco’s Spain illustrates) or tend toward relentless radicalization. The difference, Paxton argues, lies in the nature of the cult they have constructed — whether it has conditioned the public to expect constant displays of violence or action — and, crucially, in the fragility of the regime itself.

It is evident that Trump is today moving toward greater radicalization. What unfolded in Venezuela, and his reaction to the cold-blooded murder of a white mother at the hands of ICE agents in Minneapolis, are telling examples. Yet nowhere is this tendency more clearly visible than in the escalating dispute Trump has been waging against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

Central bank independence was, until very recently, the sacred cornerstone of neoliberalism and of the political right. Monetary policy, the argument went, must not be left in the hands of executive power, since the temptation to manipulate interest rates for political gain is simply too great.

Trump, by contrast, believes the Federal Reserve should be placed at the service of his political agenda, and has been pressuring the Chairman from the very outset of his term to cut interest rates — a move that would stimulate economic activity — even as the bank’s own technical staff advise the opposite.

Until now, the tensions had, as far as we know, remained verbal. But last Friday, Powell received a judicial summons to testify in an alleged corruption case concerning renovations carried out at the Fed’s headquarters. In an extraordinary statement, the most powerful figure in global finance accused Trump of pursuing judicial harassment as a means of wresting control of the Federal Reserve from him.

Why does Trump behave this way? In all likelihood, because he is afraid. Only days ago, at a public event, he repeated once more that if the Democrats win the midterm elections this year and retake control of both the Senate and the House, they will ultimately have him imprisoned.

And the odds are stacked against him. His poll numbers are in free fall across all voter groups — including Republicans. His handling of every major issue — immigration, the economy, trade, and inflation — is viewed negatively. And his image is eroding among a voter bloc that was crucial to his 2024 victory: the working class.

Meanwhile, macroeconomic indicators have continued to deteriorate. Employment is losing momentum, and artificial intelligence threatens to detonate what may prove to be la madre de todas las burbujas (the mother of all the bubbles).

More significant still, Trump has exhausted whatever goodwill voters extended to him on his signature issue — his great obsession, the promise he has been making to the American people for forty years: that tariffs would solve all their problems.

Trump is a man consumed by the conviction that the United States has been swindled by the rest of the world. So consumed, in fact, that in 1987 he paid for a full-page advertisement in The New York Times — addressed directly to the American people — in which he called for tariffs and demanded that other countries be made to pay (simply for existing). Tariffs, Trump argued, would close the deficit, bring industry back to the United States, bring prices down, and — above all — remind the world who is in charge.

Now, as the first anniversary of his initial tariffs approaches, food prices have not fallen, manufacturing has not returned, and the United States is once again shedding industrial jobs. That promise lies in ruins. And there is nowhere left to hide.

Donald Trump has run out of road. He has lost his narrative, forfeited the confidence of voters, and the structural pillars of the American state — Powell among them — are beginning to push back.

At bottom, figures like Trump — who resemble compulsive gamblers more than anything else — know that their time is running out. That sooner or later, reality will catch up with them. And so, like every fascist leader before them, when they fear losing power, they accelerate into a forward flight, moving ever faster in the hope that it never does.

Yesterday I came across a piece by Matt Robison recounting that, in the wake of the abduction of Nicolás Maduro, Trump convened a meeting in the Oval Office with the CEOs of America’s largest oil companies. There, he asked of them something to which he had already publicly committed on his own initiative: that they invest one hundred million dollars in Venezuela to extract more oil.

In a televised meeting that is, from beginning to end, a spectacle of incoherence, Trump — mid-sentence — rises from the table, stops speaking, and begins boasting about the ballroom he is having built at the White House (video here), while his own team looks on in visible disbelief. In the end, the CEO of ExxonMobil, following Powell’s lead, draws a line and tells the President plainly: no — Venezuela, he says, “is not investable.”

Robison argues that the very existence of that meeting — in which the President implicitly acknowledges that the operation had nothing to do with drug trafficking, as he had claimed from the outset, nor in reality with oil, since none of those executives had the faintest idea what they were being asked to do — is, on its own, sufficient grounds for impeachment.

But what struck me, above all, was how powerfully the scene called to mind another: the one from the film Downfall, in which Hitler, in his final days in the bunker, refuses to accept that reality has already overtaken him. There is no problem, he insists — “Steiner’s assault will bring everything under control.”

His generals, regarding him with a mixture of disbelief and shame, reply:

—“Steiner could not mobilize enough men, mein Führer” .“He was unable to carry out the assault.”

There will be a great deal of shouting in the months ahead. But I have no doubt whatsoever that what we are witnessing is the downfall of Donald Trump.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

If you are looking for new answers to understand what is happening, you will like my first book: Hijos del optimismo. It is an invitation to understand and trust the future (and ourselves) again.

You can already order Hijos del Optimismo on Amazon, La Casa del Libro, El Corte Inglés and the publisher’s website, Debate.

You can also read more about me and the story that inspired me to write it.

The Democrats had been ‘the party of working people’; they had promoted the infrastructure, industries and housing stock that transformed the lives of millions of people between the 1950s and 1980s. But then the ideological wind changed.

Politicians became convinced that the market, on its own, would be able to produce everything that was needed. Ronald Reagan, a Republican, successfully sold the idea that the government should simply get out of the way. So successfully, in fact, that even the Democrats bought into it. ‘The era of big government,’ declared Bill Clinton, ‘is over.’

So, the Democrats decided that their role would be to correct the distortions produced by the market. On the one hand, they would implement “demand expansion policies” — aid and subsidy programmes so that everyone could share in progress — and, on the other, they would pass laws to prevent economic interests from destroying ecosystems and communities.

Part of the party “specialised in the art of saying no” and ended up on the side of those who already had a secure life. Using this legislation, the “NIMBYs” (Not In My Back Yard) set about defending the status quo by demanding that any new construction project meet standards so high that they were unattainable.

As a result, the United States has been stagnant for a quarter of a century. Some infrastructure projects have been paralysed for decades and cities are collapsing due to a lack of housing. The world’s leading power lags behind other developed countries in terms of high-speed rail kilometres, and more construction is taking place in Republican states than in progressive ones. In California, the crown jewel of the Democratic Party, a small public toilet that was going to cost £1.2 million and take three years to build became a symbol of the tragedy.

Disappointed with this drift, many voters lost confidence in the party and began a march towards Republicanism that culminated in 2016 with Donald Trump’s first victory.

The way out of this quagmire, the authors conclude, is to regain the ambition to transform. To return to a ‘supply-side progressivism’ that multiplies infrastructure, transport, energy sources and, crucially, housing stock. To build and allow building so that people can regain their trust in politics.

Abundance is a great book, but it was published at a terrible time. It was written during Joe Biden’s term in office, when it seemed certain that the Democrat would win re-election. The text was a manifesto for a second term. But along the way, Biden had to withdraw, Kamala Harris took over, and the rest is history. When it went on sale, with Trump already in power, the book became a straw man (or paper man) on which half of the world’s political commentariat pounced.

But the fact is that a year has passed since then and no one has put anything different on the table. There has been a mountain of criticism of the book, yes, but nothing more than criticism: not a single alternative proposal, not a new framework, not an idea that aspires to govern reality. The ironic—almost obscene—thing is that its detractors have ended up embodying exactly what Klein and Thompson denounce: politics reduced to pointing fingers, discrediting and blocking. Lots of judgement. Zero action.

Meanwhile, the abundance agenda has been advancing and has ended up convincing both the right wing of the party and the new shining star of the left wing: Zhoram Mamdani. Even among some Republicans, there is talk of a ‘conservative vision of abundance’.

It has also crossed borders. In Spain, has recently published another good book, “Tres millones de viviendas. Cómo pasar de la escasez a la abundancia” (Three Million Homes: How to Move from Scarcity to Abundance), in which he finds similar arguments and points to the same culprits responsible for the paralysis. A coalition of interests—including investment funds, but also homeowners’ associations—blocks every public initiative on housing and infrastructure with obstacles and excuses (‘not here,’ ‘not like that,’ ‘not now’).

I have mixed feelings about these approaches. On the one hand, I love building things and even do it professionally, so I am convinced of the virtues of solving problems by doing.

But on the other hand, for me, abundance has much more to do with freedom than with the possibility of owning more things. In other words, true affluence lies in the end of work, in overcoming an economy based on scarcity, and in a new cultural horizon where we allow ourselves to be freer. If it is not that, and instead consists of a life identical to today’s, but with clean energy and housing that is 30% cheaper, I think it will be a bit of a let-down that will not inspire enthusiasm (at least for me).

But these are subtle differences, distinctions between families of an incipient abundantism that could perhaps be the subject of another article. What is relevant, and what Klein, Thompson Galindo and I agree on, is that in order to emerge from the current crisis, we must become abundantists: we must leave behind the worldview of scarcity that has been ingrained in us during this first quarter of the century.

The fact is that our world—the social and political structures we have created—has always been based on an idea of abundance that was at the heart of all the great traditions of the West.

In Christianity, that horizon of fulfilment had been with God, beyond death. When capitalism replaced religion in the moral order, it transferred that aspiration to earth, but did not take away its centrality: if we trusted in the organisation of labour, the expansion of productivity would lead us to an abundance very similar to that promised by the Gospel. Even Marxism remained a teleological doctrine: communism was a stage in which the development of the productive forces would make the struggle for resources unnecessary.

And if neoliberalism triumphed at the end of the 20th century, it was because it managed to embody that very promise. After decades of extraordinary economic growth, society had become convinced that nothing else was needed. The market alone would be capable of bringing abundance.

And so, although it took different forms each time, the belief that if we acted virtuously, we had the power to forge a future of affluence has accompanied us throughout our history. It is our philosopher’s stone. As relevant in the collective consciousness of the West as, say, equality or justice. We cannot live without it. At least, not in peace.

When, in 2008, the market collapsed and the last promises brought by neoliberalism evaporated, the West was left without a promise of abundance for the first time in... perhaps thousands of years.

A new promise then began to take hold: that of scarcity.

‘We had been living beyond our means.’

Overnight, from living in the boundless world of the early 2000s, we came to believe that we had gone too far. That all resources were finite and we had already spent more than we should have. Our survival now depended on being frugal, restraining our desires, giving up everything that was not essential. History had caught up with us, and all we could hope for was a future of effort, blood, sweat and tears.

In recent years, I have spent some time trying to trace who planted that idea in the collective subconscious. Who was responsible for making that mindset hegemonic in such a short time? I always thought it would have been Angela Merkel, or Jean-Claude Trichet — the then president of the ECB — or one of the many conservative politicians who later used that mantra to stir up an entire continent.

To my surprise — and perhaps to yours as well — it was not a right-wing politician who ended the dream of abundance. It was Barack Obama.

When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt on 15 September 2008, the American election campaign was in its final stages. Obama was the favourite in the polls. He probably did not want to take any risks. He was already an unusual enough candidate without getting himself into trouble over the economy. It may also be that at that time the left thought that economic growth was a neoliberal and right-wing thing. That a generation of politicians who had cultivated the art of morality saw the festival of opulence of the early 2000s as a deviation. I don’t know.

But the fact is that it was Obama who, in the third debate of the campaign, just weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, uttered those words. On the other side of the screen, a bewildered global audience, searching for answers to what was happening, listened intently.

‘There is no doubt that we have been living beyond our means,’ he said.

“Senator McCain and I have differences regarding the need to invest in America and the American people.” […] “But what is absolutely certain is that once we overcome this economic crisis, we cannot return to our wasteful ways. We will have to embrace a culture and ethic of responsibility: all of us, corporations, the federal government, and individuals who may be living beyond their means.”

That’s how it was. With these few words, the most influential leader of the 21st century promised us scarcity. The future would be a time of ‘zero sum’, where in order to invest in one area, cuts would have to be made in another. Where the gains of some were the losses of others. What we could produce was limited, and efforts and exchanges did not create value, they redistributed it.

The crisis of political representation we experienced in 2025 can be traced, with terrifying precision, back to that statement. At that moment, the left and right wings of the 20th century, which had been promising heaven (literally) to their voters for 50 years, found themselves speechless, with nothing to say.

Then the right wing beat a retreat. Its model was crumbling in prime time. Beneath the artifice of the neoliberal ‘market’ lay a colossal banking scam that was destroying the lives of millions of people. When Nicolas Sarkozy sounded the alarm—‘capitalism must be reformed’—it was already too late. That right wing never regrouped after the rout. It was another creature—populist, illiberal, authoritarian—that grew strong in the trenches left empty by the democratic conservatives.

The left, meanwhile, was suffocating. Policies aimed at “expanding demand”, without the tax revenues of a buoyant economy and under the yoke of austerity, became impotent. The left went from promising a horizon of dazzling material progress to settling for tiny patches—setting minimum wages, providing rent assistance, lowering bus fares—in a stagnant reality.

The promise that politics makes to citizens at every moment in history ended up like the meme of the big dog and the little dog.

But the left resisted. Perhaps because its people are more accustomed to difficult times, perhaps because neoliberalism had not been their project. Its leaders held their ground and found refuge in a theory that had been born in Latin America, a place where they had had plenty of time to perfect the politics of scarcity.

‘Populism is always a foundational political force,’ explains Íñigo Errejón, perhaps its most brilliant ideologue, “although the people are always called by the same name, they are a different people each time because they are made of new materials. They are always made from the construction of a new general interest in opposition to the existing elites and the order they had built. And it is a general interest that is constructed from scraps or pieces of the set of unmet demands, unfulfilled expectations, or unattained desires, but it is more than the sum of its parts. It is not just all the grievances put together to protest against those at the top, but rather the construction of a new horizon based on those unmet demands.”

In contrast to the ideologies of the 20th century, which promised a better future, populism triumphed by promising the opposite: that the future would always be bleak and that there would be a never-ending struggle for resources. There would always be a “people” to take refuge in, but it would not be a happy and proud one, but rather one made up of dissatisfaction and grievances against an elite that, in some way, would always be stealing from them. The task of politics was not to offer a horizon of progress, but to give shape to the discontent in a single voice (that of the politician of the moment, specifically) and, above all, to point out the culprits.

I suppose at the time it must have seemed harmless. The ‘1%’, those billionaires against whom the populist left was building itself, were untouchable. Demonising a handful of people as powerful as they were invulnerable seemed a small price to pay in exchange for building a political subject — ‘We are the 99%’ — that recognised itself.

The problem is that myths and hegemonic worldviews are always transversal, because we all live together in the same society. Just as all 20th-century ideologies shared the belief that productivity would lead us to a world of abundance, all 21st-century ideologies, both left-wing and right-wing populism, share the promise of scarcity. When the left spread the idea that we live in a permanent scam perpetrated by ‘elites’ against ‘the people’, it left the door open for the culprits to be not necessarily billionaires, but for the same arguments to be used to turn ‘the people’ against the woke, or against immigrants, or against pensioners.

“In the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, zero-sum beliefs on both the left—for example, that people only get rich by making others poor—and on the right—for example, that immigrants succeed at the expense of natives—are related expressions of the same underlying worldview. That is, there are only a limited amount of resources, and therefore we must use restrictions, levies, and preferential treatment to balance the scales between winners and losers.”1

If populist movements—from Milei to Meloni, Trump, and some very influential currents on the left—are successful, it is because they share this worldview: because they reinforce each other. And, in the absence of any other alternative, they end up dragging the entire ideological spectrum along with them. That is why it is so difficult today to find a politician—or a media outlet—that does not devote all its energy to replicating this framework: to explaining to us who the bad guys are and why we are the good guys (‘the people,’ ‘ordinary people’) and how they are stealing from us.

It is in this shared narrative that the great crisis is brewing today. Because if the embodiment of liberalism was peace—the debate between different political options that sought to coexist in the same world—populism can only be embodied in war. In a zero-sum world, if we take the tension to the extreme, only one can remain; the only solution to problems is to die or kill. That is why all populisms need war in order to exist. Sometimes they are really at war (as in Ukraine, Venezuela or Palestine) and sometimes they pretend to be (as in the ICE raids or the rhetorical outbursts of European parliaments).

Some will argue that the left did not arrive at these conclusions of its own accord, but rather was pushed there by the need to confront the physical limits of the planet. This is not true. The symbolic core of the idea that ‘we have been living beyond our means’ is not really a criticism of a way of life or consumption: what this framework questions are our ‘means’. What scarcity claims is that we are powerless, irrelevant, inane, incapable of controlling our destiny and shaping the world around us.

That is why all populists present themselves as ‘strong men’, because they want to convince us that we are weak and need someone to protect us. That is also why all the themes of scarcity (‘the limits of the planet’, “immigration”, ‘the accumulation of wealth’) are presented as global phenomena, incomprehensible, ungraspable and unstoppable (except, perhaps, for strongmen).

And that is also why all populisms are anti-scientific (techno-pessimistic, they call it). Because they need to deny that we are capable and that today we have the best tools humanity has ever had to face the future.

The root cause of scarcity has nothing to do with the planet’s finite resources, but rather with confidence in our own ability as a human species to face all the challenges (including biophysical ones) that lie ahead. This is what is radically new about the 21st century and the promise of scarcity.

That is why a populist’s worst enemy is not another populist from the opposing camp: it is the abundantists. That is why the books by Klein, Thompson and Galindo have provoked an angry reaction (and mine, will follow the same path). The belief that we are capable and masters of our own destiny is kryptonite for scarcity thinking.

Is there no third way? Couldn’t we live in peace by accepting the premise of a scarce world? Couldn’t we come to terms with the idea that there is nothing more to distribute and settle for it, finding other forms of happiness that are not based on constantly expecting something new and better? I don’t know. Degrowth has had two decades to produce a new paradigm that excites people based on that premise, and it has failed to do so. For my part, I have no interest in that possibility. I believe that the ambition to explore is the best thing about human beings. It always has been, ever since we left the caves. It is certainly what I do best and what I enjoy most. If anyone has another idea, please let us know.

Meanwhile, the reality is that today the political front lines are no longer between the left and the right. The axis has shifted, and the ideological battle will be fought between abundance and scarcity. Those of us who aspire to a future of prosperity, peace and freedom need to rally around this new paradigm of abundance for the 21st century, so that the world can once again become a place of hope where there is room for all human beings.

There are very few occasions when reality offers us something as simple as a dichotomy, but this is one of them. Today, there are only two possibilities on the table: either embrace a new agenda of progress, or abandon ourselves to regression. Either peace or war. Either build or demolish. Either democracy or tribalism.

Abundance or barbarism.

If you are also an abundance thinker, you will like Hijos del optimismo (Children of Optimism). It is my first book, the older sibling of this newsletter, and a project I have been working on for many years.

You can already order Hijos del Optimismo on Amazon, La Casa del Libro, El Corte Inglés and the publisher’s website, Debate.

You can also read more about me and the story that inspired me to write it.

* Abundancia is published in Spain by Capitán Swing and Tres millones de viviendas by Debate.

The photo accompanying this article is by Mateus Maia on Unsplash.

Human beings, who have neither claws to fight nor wings to fly, need to understand; that is our singular survival mechanism.

“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it,” Hitchcock said. In other words, understanding takes away our fear. Once we know what is happening, our brain finds a way to adapt to it and, in some way, regains control. But, oh, the uncertainty! That is the stuff of human terror. That’s why movie directors never show you the monster in the first scene.

And since it also happens that we are at the top of the food chain and don’t have many enemies in the animal kingdom, “for modern humans, controlling the world means controlling other humans. And that means understanding them.”1

That’s why when something like what happened yesterday in Venezuela happens, we all go back a little to that place; to that first scene of every horror movie where something is going to happen that we don’t fully understand, and we can’t take our eyes off the screen until we know what’s going on. And every message that repeats that this phenomenon is something we already knew is like a balm that relaxes the contracture that the uncertainty produces in us. As they say, better the devil you know.

And this is how we often buy the illusion of understanding, but at a very high price: it is the price of not really finding out anything.

For example, the oil in this whole story makes no sense. As several energy experts have explained, neither the United States needs oil, nor is Venezuelan crude good, and besides, oil is on the way out, overwhelmed by the electrification of almost everything.

And it doesn’t seem that Trump is pursuing a regime change either. At this hour, it is already known that he has not left any troops on Venezuelan soil. He is not going to take control of the country, nor is there any invasion. It will be Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who will continue to lead the government.

And if we are returning to the Cold War and bloc politics, one would say that the idea of putting yourself against all your allies to remove a gentleman from a government that doesn’t concern you at all doesn’t seem like the best of strategies.

So, except to fulfill that desire we have to explain the present by resorting to the past, it doesn’t seem that all these recurring themes of 20th-century international politics are useful to us today. Reality does not fit the old categories. In no way.

So this is going to be an article for those who are not looking for that form of complacency, for those who want new answers to old questions, even if they are not very reassuring.

These are ten lessons we can draw from what happened yesterday to understand the world of tomorrow.

//First Lesson

Donald Trump is only concerned about one thing.

And that thing is the attention of others.

Trump has no plan. He is not moving in a direction towards any predetermined destination. Throughout his life, he has shown no other aspiration than to have, every day of his life, the attention of as many people as possible.

This was the case while he built those huge golden towers in the center of Manhattan; while he was the protagonist of “The Apprentice” for 11 years; throughout his first term aand so far during his second term. All his projects, more typical of a pharaoh than a modern businessman, convey the same message:

I- W -A- N-T -A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N.

It’s not that he’s stupid: it works for him, it’s that the human experience is a limited set of moments of attention and if someone manages to capture them all, they win the game. Let’s imagine two competing companies. One sells the best watches in the world at a very good price. The other sells shitty watches at an outrageous price, but controls 100% of the advertising. Which company will sell more watches?

“Of course, but when people realize that the competitor’s watches are better, the word will spread.” But by then, so much time will have passed that Trump will have won (if he runs) the next election. Or so he thinks. In any case, that will be a problem for the Trump of the future. In politics, only the present moment counts. Or as Keynes said, “in the long run, we are all dead.”

Each and every one of Trump’s actions can be explained with the answer “To gain attention.”

—Why did he threaten to impose crazy tariffs on half the world?

To gain attention.

—Why did he withdraw them later, with great fanfare?

To gain attention.

—Why does he threaten all his allies one by one?

...

—Why does he order a paramilitary force of masked men to stop ordinary people on the street, just because they look Latino?

...

—Why does he threaten to invade Greenland?

...

—Why does he release a photo of Maduro handcuffed and bandaged?

...

//Second Lesson

It is all a lie

It is all a magic trick.

Yesterday, Trump made us believe he was taking control of Venezuela, but he did not leave a single soldier on the ground. He said he was going to “run” the country, but he has no way of doing so. He pretended to kidnap Maduro, but it is not so clear that there was not some kind of deal whereby Chavismo would remain in power in exchange for the dictator and his wife leaving the country alive. He pretended he was going to restore democracy, but he dismissed the opposition candidate and left the existing government in power. He says that American companies will invest in Caracas’ oil, but it is doubtful that this is a good business deal. And even Venezuela’s Supreme Court now claims that the president’s absence is ‘temporary’. As with tariffs, or when he promised to build a wall with Mexico, nothing is ever what it seems in Trump’s actions.

The president literally behaves like a conjurer: he waves his hands around a lot, pulls out a handkerchief, forces us to look in one direction and makes us believe that something has happened that has not really happened.

//Lesson three

In the war for attention, effort is worthless.

Donald Trump is not lazy.

One day he negotiates peace in Ukraine with Putin, and the next he kidnaps the president of another country. He imposes tariffs. He removes them. He reinstates them. He pardons a drug trafficker. He threatens to invade Greenland. Or Canada. He insults his allies. He embraces his enemies. He declares trade wars in the morning and deactivates them in the afternoon. He fires half the government on Twitter. He promises to build a resort in Gaza. And he talks about peace.

He does none of these things well. The vast majority of them turn out badly or worse. Nor does he do anything that a previous president could not have done. The difference between Trump and his predecessors is that he gets up in the morning and does them. Again and again and again. He is like a fly. He is neither very efficient nor very effective, but he never stops moving.

It is a very simple lesson, but one that we find very difficult to understand, because for centuries—even millennia—we have believed that effort was the key to success. So we had convinced ourselves that the important thing was to concentrate on a task, isolate ourselves from distractions, and work with our heads down until we achieved the most perfect product we were capable of producing. On the day of judgement, the judges (voters, employers, or whoever) would rationally choose the best product and place their trust in it.

So success belonged to those who worked hard. Those who did not drop out during their studies and achieved the best grades after five years, or companies that spent years designing the best product model, or parties that spent a long time rigorously crafting an unquestionable government programme. In politics, the idea that leaders had to speak as little as possible “so as not to burn themselves out” even prevailed.

Networks change that. Today, issues are exhausted in a day, and the day of judgement occurs every few minutes. The key to success is not effort, but stamina: the ability to stay in the race, every day, doing amazing things.

As my friend and guru Jorge García Castaño says, politics today is not about simmering a programme over many hours; it is about “bringing home the bacon every day”. It’s about having something to say every time the previous topic loses momentum, before your opponent has time to bring up theirs. It’s about occupying a little piece of humanity’s mental space every minute.

// Lesson Four

The law of conservation of energy.

One cannot continue in the race doing surprising things if one tries to sprint and give it one’s all constantly. Contemporary politics is a marathon where the important thing is to conserve energy.

That is why all of Trump’s actions remain strictly necessary to produce the desired effects on people’s attention.

The best example is the case of the fictitious agreement with NVIDIA. A few months ago, Trump announced an agreement whereby NVIDIA, the world’s largest company, would give 15% of its sales in China to the US government. Over the weeks, doubts began to arise. Was it a percentage of profits or revenue? Would it be the same for all companies? Was the US going to become a commission agent for its own companies around the world?

It never happened. Trump and the CEO of NVIDIA had not, in fact, signed anything. All they needed was to announce a lie to get thousands of headlines around the world, starting with the front page of the New York Times.

For that very reason, he has not invaded Venezuela on this occasion, nor will he do so. Invading a country costs a fortune, results in hundreds or thousands of casualties among your own soldiers, and is a huge logistical exercise that will not bring him any more headlines than the hit-and-runs we are used to seeing from him.

// Lesson Five

Curiosity.

Trump lives permanently in that first scene of the film where we have not yet seen the monster.

That is why his press conferences are chaotic, he contradicts himself, he is hard to understand, he beats around the bush and never finishes his sentences. That is why yesterday at the press conference he seemed to confuse Delcy Rodríguez with Maria Corina Machado. Because he wants us to keep watching, mesmerised, trying to understand. Chaos is his tool for keeping the attention on him.

It is not a bug, it is a feature. He is confusing and impenetrable by design. Like lingerie, he wants to reveal, but just enough, to be mysterious, to always leave things unknown, because if attention is the stuff human existence is made of, curiosity is the force that drives us in life.

// Lesson Six

The power of outrage (on the left).

Trump knows that the left controls the entire public debate because very few people on the right want to be journalists, writers or authors. Even the right-wing media (also in Spain) is full of progressive people.

So he uses the left to leverage his messages. That is why he constantly seeks to provoke outrage and terror among Democrats and European progressives in many ways. The first is by touching on all the issues that are sacred to them (women, migrants, human rights). If he does not achieve this with messages, he uses political spectacles with a tiny impact on the macro level but enormous communicative significance, such as paramilitary militias organising raids on racialised people.

In the best tradition of internet trolls, it uses outrage as a weapon of mass communication. His target is not his voters, but to flood the public space, get 100% of the publicity by outraging leftists and get free publicity from their media. This is why even Trump himself exploits the left’s image of the big bad wolf: he himself says that yesterday’s events are an invasion and that it is all about oil.

// Lesson Seven

There is no strategy.

Trump, like Pedro Sánchez, is a basketball player, not a chess player. He does not have a long-term plan where one event follows another. It is not that he is dumber than the great strategists of the 20th century, it’s that he is playing a different game. Rather, he has a few moves he knows how to make and a vision of the board. When he thinks he has bad cards, he breaks the deck, does something unexpected and forces them to be dealt again.

For his opponents, this pace is as exhausting as if a chess player had to keep up with a basketball player.

// Lesson eight

But there are objectives.

The absence of strategy does not mean there are no objectives. It is just that Trump understands that his objectives are not achieved through a succession of controlled and linked events, but rather by remaining faithful to an image and a brand that can be imprinted in people’s minds.

To a certain extent, Trump has the same modus operandi as Loewe: he repeats his brand over and over again, season after season, to continue reinforcing the imprint it has on people’s imaginations through a succession of ‘brand impacts’, such as Loewe’s advertisements or catwalks, or the collections they bring out.

Another way of understanding this is in line with Amador Fernández-Savater’s explanation (and this is one of my Roman empires, please be sure to read the article) of the Chinese idea of efficiency:

“According to Julien, the Chinese think about strategy in a completely different way. They do not divide the world into what is and what should be. In other words, they do not start from a model or plan, but from the course of reality itself. Reality is not formless or chaotic matter waiting to be organised by us: it is already organised. It has tendencies, inclinations and slopes that can be detected and exploited. This is what Jullien calls “facilitating factors” or “situational potentials”. The job of a good strategist is not to model and plan first, then implement, but rather to listen, evaluate, accompany and develop situational potentials. Not to act, but to be acted upon. Not forcing: supporting. Not directly pursuing a goal, but exploiting a propensity. Because the effects are contained within it. It’s like surfing a wave: it’s not about taming it, but about going together to the same place. Letting yourself go. The world is only resistance and obstacle from the perspective of control.

// Lesson Nine

The headlong rush forward.

Despite everything, Trump’s approach has a huge problem. Hate and fear, unlike love or desire, produce diminishing returns, because no one wants to revisit something that has frightened them and that they have already overcome. So Loewe can do more or less the same thing every year to continue dazzling its buyers, but Trump needs to do something even more outrageous each time to get the same amount of attention. He is like an addict who needs a higher dose with each high.

The umpteenth time he threatened tariffs on a country, no one paid any attention to him, and he had to move to the international stage in search of more relevant nonsense, such as pretending to give Gaza to the Saudis or invading Venezuela. That is why it is very likely that he will never talk about tariffs again. On the contrary, I would not rule out him ending up threatening Greenland even more, because I have no doubt that the final phase of this headlong rush can only be a head-on confrontation with the European Union.

// Lesson Ten

People are like frogs.

No man hits you on the first date.

All predators, abusers, paedophiles and manipulators share a modus operandi. They play with the truth to test your limits. What if one day they laugh at you? What if the next day they give you an order? What if one day they force you to do something small, but something you don’t want to do? What if they then try something bigger?

With each step, they push the limits of what you want to happen, until they shape your reality to suit them. Before you know it, you are living with an abuser and cannot leave the relationship because even you justify it. Like frogs, which allow themselves to be boiled alive as long as the temperature does not rise suddenly, people are very vulnerable to subtle but constant changes in the wrong direction. We do not know how and where to stop them.

With every gesture in which Trump seems to do something, but does not quite do it — like this kidnapping of Maduro — he is testing and pushing the limits of what the international consensus considers acceptable in order to give himself more room to manoeuvre. Pushing the boundaries of what he can do until one day, not too far in the future, we can’t help but wonder how we got here.

Yesterday, it was appalling to read the weak, shamefully submissive responses of many European leaders, who remained silent in the face of a scandalous violation of international law. Along with Maduro, what Donald Trump is hijacking is our ability to oppose evil.

If you are looking for new answers to understand what is happening, you will like my first book: Hijos del Optimismo (Children of Optimism). It is an invitation to understand and trust in the future (and in ourselves) again.

You can already order Hijos del Optimismo on Amazon, La Casa del Libro, El Corte Inglés and the publisher’s website, Debate.

You can also read more about me and the story that inspired me to write it.

I propose to consider the question: “Can machines think?” This should begin with definitions of the words “machine” and “think.” The definitions might be framed to reflect, as far as possible, the normal use of the words. But this attitude is dangerous: if the meaning of the words “machine” and “think” is to be drawn from their common usage, we would have to conclude that both the meaning and the answer to the question “Can machines think?” should be determined by a poll, perhaps a Gallup survey. But that is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition, I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and expressed in relatively unambiguous terms. The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game that we call the “imitation game.”

— Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950.

The world is holding its breath. Since the debut of ChatGPT in the final days of 2022, humanity has lived in a state of alert, hanging on the answer to a single question: Can machines think?

Because if the answer is yes — if what we call “artificial intelligence” can truly produce a machine that thinks like a human being — it would mean the end of the world as we know it.

To begin with, millions of jobs would evaporate. The economy would be transformed in ways we can’t yet imagine. Tax revenues would disappear, along with the funds that pay for pensions and unemployment benefits. It would feel like a monstrous global earthquake: overnight, markets and nations would shake in unison.

Military power would never be the same. Governments that obtained such technology could go to war with unlimited armies of robots and drones; those that didn’t would be left at the mercy of the new technological titans.

And what if it wasn’t a country that gained access to that AI? Criminals, rogue states, and terrorist groups could find themselves on equal (military) footing with the most powerful nations.

The potential impact of thinking machines is so vast that many wonder whether humanity could survive their emergence as a species. If the 20th century lived in fear of nuclear war, our updated version of self-destruction is this one. No wonder we’re so obsessed with the answer — our very existence is at stake.

And yet, three years after the launch of ChatGPT, none of this has come to pass. We have not reached “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), nor do robot armies exist. For now, the only thing that AI has truly revolutionized is the stock market — where colossal expectations have inflated a massive bubble now threatening to burst into a financial crisis as bad as, or worse than, 2008.

Still, despite the fizzle of chatbots, the fact that this may be a bubble doesn’t settle everything. Some voices remain convinced that AGI is still possible. Perhaps, they say, what’s happening mirrors the railways of the 19th century or the Internet of the 1990s — two revolutions that also sparked stock bubbles because investors rushed in too soon. The bubbles popped, but the transformations eventually arrived.

And so we remain suspended in the question of the millennium: Will this technology ever produce a new kind of intelligence?

In this article, we’ll answer that question in a way that allows anyone — guided by common sense — to form their own judgment.

To begin with, we should say that there are actually two different questions.

• One is whether the technologies rising today that we call “AI” (which include chatbots, so-called “agents”…) could ever become intelligent.

• And the second is broader: it asks whether any conceivable machine — even if it does not exist today — could, now or at some point in the future, come to think.

Can today’s AI produce true artificial intelligence?

The idea of a thinking machine has accompanied humanity for millennia. But defining “machine” and “intelligence” was never easy. “What does it mean to think?”, “What is the mind?”, “What is consciousness?” — these are some of the hardest questions we’ve ever asked ourselves. For thousands of years, they were the domain of philosophy, the discipline of difficult questions.

Until, in 1950, an English mathematician named Alan Turing formalized what a future computational intelligence might consist of. He proposed a game with three players: A, B, and C.

A and B were a man and a woman. In a separate room sat C, an interrogator who could communicate with A and B only by sending messages through a teletype. Their conversation took the form of a series of text exchanges — like an early chat. The interrogator’s goal was to figure out which participant was the man and which was the woman. B’s goal was to help him; A’s was to fool him.

But what if, Turing wondered, we replaced A with a machine? Would the interrogator be deceived just as often as before? “The best strategy [for the machine],” Turing concluded, “would be to try to provide answers that would naturally be given by a person.”

Thus, the question of whether machines can think was reduced to something far simpler and easier to measure: “Are there imaginable digital computers that could succeed in the imitation game?” In other words: Can machines deceive humans into believing they are one of us?

Software, after all, is a branch of mathematics — it evolves by solving concrete, well-defined problems. Unlike philosophical speculation, the imitation game was exactly the kind of problem engineers loved: something they could build, test, and measure.

In 1990, Hugh Loebner began offering a prize to whoever could create the software that best played this game. It was no longer called “the imitation game” — too quaint — but the Turing Test.

Despite many criticisms, over the next thirty years various institutions (including Cambridge University, Dartmouth College, the London Science Museum, and the Universities of Reading and Ulster) kept the award alive. The prize offered a bit of money, a lot of prestige, and plenty of publicity to anyone who could make a machine convincingly pose as a human. Turing’s game of deception became the yardstick of “artificial intelligence.”

The format was simple: a program had to chat with a panel of humans and fool them into thinking it was one of them. This is how a strand of AI research became obsessed with conversational software — a path that eventually led to ChatGPT and its relatives.

And this is also how modern chatbots inherited their defining trait: they were never built to be intelligent. Not even now. No one developing them has seriously grappled with what intelligence is; their goal has always been to trick us — to appear intelligent, to make us believe they think.

What we call “AI” today is really a set of new ways to process information — powered by leaps in computing power and fresh approaches to language modeling — whose goal is not to be intelligent, but to seem human. To seem like a smart human. AI is, as Julio Gonzalo brilliantly put it, a stochastic brother-in-law: a contraption that pretends to be intelligent by spewing out random things it’s read somewhere in its database.

Months ago, I wrote about why I don’t believe any system based purely on verbal language could ever match human intelligence:

“AI creators take a tiny, limited, archetypal part of consciousness — verbal language — and confuse it for the whole. They ignore that words are just a narrow representation of the vast, interconnected notions that inhabit our brain like chords on a piano with billions of keys.”

But the real reason this AI will never be intelligent is that it doesn’t even try. That’s why, when it doesn’t understand something, instead of saying so — the truly “intelligent” response — it makes something up, because that’s what makes it seem intelligent. It doesn’t actually hallucinate; it simply blurts nonsense, cheerfully and shamelessly, because its purpose isn’t to think but to deceive — to make us believe it thinks.

So the answer to our first question is no: this so-called AI will never produce true intelligence.

But that doesn’t quite put our fears to rest. There could be another technology just around the corner that actually manages to do it. The truly important question is the second one:

Can humans create an artificial intelligence that could replace us?

That depends on what we mean by artificial.

In fact, humans have always created “artificial” intelligences: the animals we breed and train don’t exist in nature. Sheepdogs, carrier pigeons, and mules, for example, are forms of artificial intelligence that replace us in certain tasks.

With our current knowledge, it wouldn’t be impossible to breed or genetically modify chimpanzees to make them more efficient at mining minerals or delivering packages.

But of course, none of these things fit today’s definition of artificial intelligence. Nor do they inspire civilizational fear, or make investors or warlords salivate.

Because animals, like people, have needs and desires. They get sick, age, and require care. More importantly, they suffer and enjoy. Therefore, how we treat them matters — they have moral value.

In the expression “artificial intelligence,” it’s really artificial that does all the work — concealing what we truly mean.

What we actually mean when we talk about artificial intelligence is immoral intelligence: a kind of intelligence that has no moral value and doesn’t care about ours. One that’s indifferent to life — its own or anyone else’s — unbound by experience, incapable of attachment. A being that could kill or be killed, harm or be harmed, without pain, without remorse, without asking questions. A creature that could be neglected, unplugged, altered, violated, or enslaved — and no one would care. One that obeys blindly because it cannot feel.

Can such a creature — intelligent yet incapable of suffering — exist? That is the question that truly terrifies us. Because if it could, it might fall into the hands of the soulless, and end us all — because it simply wouldn’t care.

Can they exist?

In truth, forms of “immoral” artificial intelligence already exist: the bacteria we use to ferment beer or produce insulin, though not conscious like us, can be seen as intelligences we’ve domesticated to perform tasks.

Similarly, the modified viruses used in mRNA vaccines act as programmed biological systems: they enter our cells and “teach” them to produce a specific protein. They don’t think, but they execute instructions with precision and autonomy — like biological algorithms.

If we were to evolve such organisms toward sentience, we’d find that as their intelligence grows, so does their consciousness, developing primitive moral instincts like empathy, fairness, or cooperation.

Because thinking, at its core, means making decisions through a lens that includes moral reasoning and a worldview. It means judging what benefits or harms me, how my actions affect others, what value I assign to things and beings, who is ally and who is enemy — in short, discerning what is right and what is wrong. Intelligence is a sequence of moral acts.

We see this clearly in the dilemma of self-driving cars. Building a car that drives itself is far easier than creating a general intelligence, because roads are closed systems with a small, well-defined set of rules. A car only needs to decide whether to brake or accelerate, to stop at a red light or not, to turn left or right. And yet, manufacturers remain stuck on moral decisions that can’t be preprogrammed: What if the car must choose between risking its passenger or a pedestrian? What if it must choose between two pedestrians?

As long as there’s a rule — “if the light is red, stop” — a machine can follow it. That rule substitutes for a moral system. But when there is no rule, how does a machine decide without morality?

Even the most selfish creatures, like sharks, have a biological moral program — one that tells them the only important beings are themselves. Something similar happens with humans who have narcissistic personality disorders.

Consciousness — the essence of who we are — arises from recognizing the effects of the world on oneself and oneself on the world. This self-awareness evolves alongside intelligence, which is why the most advanced beings are also the ones that understand themselves and their actions best. Without that feedback loop, life simply couldn’t exist.

So, to the second question — once reformulated correctly — the answer is also no: there will never exist a being that can think at the level of a human without also feeling as we do. Intelligence cannot exist without a moral system proportionate to its consciousness, because the two are inseparable.

The takeaway is this: we shouldn’t be distracted for a second by the siren songs of those selling cheap brooms under the name of “AI.” There are many technologies transforming the world today — but this, thankfully, will not be one of them.

I return to this newsletter after months locked away finishing a book that I’ve finally, finally delivered — thanks to the invaluable help of my dear friend Paloma Abad. It will be published by Debate in February, and I’ll tell you more in the coming months.

The book has been an intellectual triathlon, forcing me to refine many ideas and explore new territories. I come back with a head full of topics — and none of them are small. :p

My commitment now is to publish at least once a week, hopefully twice. If there’s a topic you’d like me to write about, I’d love to hear your suggestions :-)

Thank you all for your patience!

This will be a very short post. I’m on vacation and trying to focus on revising the book I’ll be publishing in February.

But I didn’t want to skip sharing this piece of news, which I find very revealing about what may happen in the coming months.

A few days ago, Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT, gave an interview to several media outlets where he was asked the following question:

“Are we in a phase where investors, in general, are overly enthusiastic about AI?”

“In my opinion, yes,” Altman replied. “When bubbles form, smart people get too excited about a kernel of truth. If you look at most bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was something real. The technology was really important. The internet was a huge deal. But people got overly excited.”

He was comparing AI to the dot-com bubble that, in the early 2000s, crashed global markets and wiped out hundreds of companies.

Why would the most ardent defender of the technology—the one who has been talking for months about us having reached “the singularity” and about humans being surpassed by computers in the evolutionary chain—try to burst the bubble of his own sector?

In my opinion: because he thinks the only way to save himself is by popping the megabubble that has been created.

ChatGPT is, as of today, the leading company in the AI sector. When companies are not publicly traded, their valuation is based on the price the last investor paid for shares, multiplied by all outstanding shares. ChatGPT is currently seeking investors at a valuation of $500 billion, making it the most valuable privately held company in the world.

But it has a problem. The technology behind “large language models” isn’t proprietary; it can’t be privatized. It’s open knowledge that many other companies also possess. That’s why it faces more and more competitors.

And those competitors are also reaching absurd valuations and raising billions in investments. So much so that some people are sounding the alarm with a very simple explanation: there isn’t enough money in the world to buy all these companies—except through the stock market.

Until recently, a startup was considered a “unicorn” (like Airbnb or Uber) when it surpassed a $1 billion valuation. Today, there are at least 500 AI startups valued at over $1 billion. Can all of these companies successfully go public?

The answer is no.

And if those companies go under, who’s going to pay for the entire data center bubble they’ve built?

“Somebody is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money,” Altman told the media. “We don’t know who, and a lot of people are going to make a phenomenal amount of money. My personal opinion, though I could be wrong, is that overall this will be a great net gain for the economy.”

Altman knows the bubble is going to burst. Everyone knows it at this point. What’s been built around all this isn’t sustainable. And he thinks his chance is to separate himself from the rest so that, when it explodes, he survives. So he’s sending investors a message: “If you want to make money, leave everyone else exposed and come with me.”

Altman is trying to pop the AI bubble himself in order to save himself.

What’s most frightening about all this is the speed at which events are unfolding. OpenAI’s last funding round (ChatGPT’s parent company), where they valued the company at $300 billion and raised $8.3 billion, was just at the beginning of this August. And now they’re announcing another at $500 billion. What’s happening to these companies is that they’re burning through money at the speed of light.

Stay tuned to your screens, because this can’t last much longer.

Update: Updating myself here, because I was slow to see this…

In reality, the only explanation for Altman making these statements is that he’s already running into difficulties raising money for this new round and needs to redirect funding that’s currently going to competitors.

It’s not that he’s going to burst the bubble—it’s that it’s already burst (only, since these companies aren’t publicly traded, we don’t yet see it in the markets).

The financial world—or the world of investment, or of capital, call it what you like—is a story in perpetual evolution. Stock markets and assets are nothing more than bets on what things will be worth in the future: pure narrative. To function, to stay in motion, they always need some kind of collective story to sustain them.

It’s no trivial matter. In 2025, that story says that the world’s wealth is six times the value of global GDP—about $620 trillion. Even in private thought, many people pay far more attention to their properties—the value of their house, their savings, or their future inheritance—than to their salary.

Today, two parallel stories are sustaining all that (imaginary?) wealth.

One is that the economy is booming: employment is at historic highs, wages keep rising, the shocks of COVID have given way to a moment of monetary calm, and the imperial ambitions of satrap Vladimir Putin haven’t been able to throw the global economy off course.

Riding this wave of prosperity, the story goes, houses and other real estate assets will keep rising indefinitely.

Investors of all sizes love this story. Real estate is a monopolistic market, where supply is limited by public authorities who are much easier to control than any free market. Most countries protect real estate investors more than any other asset class. And housing is such a basic need that people stop paying for anything else before they stop paying for their home. Investing in housing is like investing in toilet paper—but with a 10% annual return. A bargain.

If you don’t believe it, just look at the data: since the year 2000, virtually all “wealth” has come from the revaluation of real estate assets. In other words, in the last quarter-century, the only form of wealth that has really grown is real estate, which now makes up two-thirds of all global wealth—almost $400 trillion.

The other story driving today’s markets is that so-called “artificial intelligence” is such a powerful technology that it will revolutionize everything. All of society. And that it will boost productivity to levels never before seen. “AI is the new electricity,” as Andrew Ng, founder of Coursera, once said, a phrase that perfectly captures the core of this story.

As a result, there is another fantastic investment opportunity: data centers—huge warehouses filled with computers that rent out their computing power to others. Processor farms.

Here’s the story: unlike previous technologies, AI is extremely intensive in computing capacity. It needs vast numbers of processors to train models and to run inferences. As a consequence, in the race to reach the new AI frontier, up to $7 trillion will need to be invested in these behemoths within five years. That’s about 10 times the size of the EU’s Next Generation funds, to put it in perspective.

If the story of workers paying rent tickled investors’ stomachs, imagine machines paying rent… tenants that never complain about broken heating. Data centers are the fever dream of international investment: the holy grail of guaranteed cash flows.

If you don’t believe it, just look at the data:

In 2025, just Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft alone will invest $350 billion in data centers. “AI CAPEX,” as this infrastructure spending is called, has already outpaced American consumer spending in its contribution to U.S. GDP growth this year.

That’s a big deal, because the American economy is famously consumer-driven. The political system and every incentive are designed to keep consumption as the nation’s engine. What’s happening now is unprecedented: this year, AI investment will contribute more to U.S. growth than the increase in consumer spending.

So those are the two stories driving international capital markets today. And they both have one tiny, tiny problem…

If AI is going to revolutionize everything and drive productivity through the roof, it will be by creating the most brutal wave of technological unemployment in history. Some estimates put the figure at up to 300 million jobs. It’s that reduction in labor costs that will fuel the profits eventually ending up in the hands of investors and data center owners.

But if that’s the case, then… who’s going to pay for the houses?

…

…

…

If you’re thinking you haven’t seen this warning anywhere, trust me: the most important trends never show up in newspapers, but in data. And all the data points to international investors having already reached this very conclusion. Since the emergence of ChatGPT in 2022, the mothership of AI, housing prices have been dropping significantly in most of the world’s major cities.

This week, various datasets were released, all pointing in the same direction. In the U.S., home prices have fallen in the past year in 33 of the 50 largest metropolitan areas.

The list includes Los Angeles and San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Denver, Phoenix, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and Sacramento, among others.

One striking case is Austin (-8.5% in the year, -15% since 2022), which had been one of the great success stories of American urban economics over the past decade. In just a few years, the city had become a major hub for tech entrepreneurship, to the point that many media outlets dubbed it “the new Silicon Valley”.

It now seems that some of the U.S. economy’s big bets—like Austin, or the mega-bubble Miami had become—are deflating like birthday decorations the morning after.

“A couple of weeks ago I issued a yellow warning light for the housing market,” explained Moody’s chief economist, Mark Zandi, “but now I think it’s more appropriate to turn on a red one. Home sales, construction, and even prices are about to fall unless mortgage rates drop significantly from their current level, near 7%. But that seems unlikely.” Even in Manhattan, prices have dropped this year—3.8% annually.

Across the Atlantic, something similar is happening. London prices suffered in July their steepest fall since records began. Driven by the collapse in the most expensive neighborhoods—where in some cases prices have dropped up to 36% since Brexit—the crown jewel of Europe’s housing market is down 1.5% year-on-year. Kensington and Chelsea, the capital’s two priciest boroughs, are now at 2013 levels.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, prices have fallen in all major German cities, as well as in Stockholm, Paris, Copenhagen, and Helsinki, among many others.

At the national level, prices are flat or declining in Germany, France, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. In Spain—where, as we all know, we tend to arrive late to everything, including the news—prices have actually risen 15%, the second-largest increase in the eurozone over the same period.

Wherever you look, the story is the same: since their historic peak in 2022, coinciding with the explosion of AI, housing prices have declined in nearly every major American and European metropolis.

In the same period, the valuation of the “Magnificent Seven” on the U.S. stock market—the companies cashing in on this phenomenon (Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, and Microsoft)—has tripled, rising from $7 trillion to $19 trillion, and from representing 21% of the index to 35%.

One might think investors are leaving (or avoiding) the housing market to enter AI. But that doesn’t make sense. If the profit expectations were as strong as advertised for both sectors, no one would stop investing in one to invest in the other.

The reality, as every fund manager understands, is that in this battle between AI and housing, only one can win.

Or, seen from a broader perspective: we are watching, before our very eyes, the ultimate contradiction of this late stage of capitalism. Its impossible determination to live off consumption while trying at all costs to abolish labor. Firing workers while selling cars, cutting wages while raising rents.

This drama has one last ingredient: it’s a recursive problem. If wages have risen in recent years, it’s because the economy was artificially inflated by the expectation of a technological revolution and by the housing bubble. If those expectations fall, or housing stops rising, there will be no jobs. But if there are no jobs, who will pay for housing? What consumers will buy the products made by AI?

And then they say God doesn’t play dice with the universe. Wouldn’t it be a delicious irony if the technology that was heralded as the great executioner of labor ended up executing capital first?

I’ve written before about why I don’t believe a single word of this, and why I think it’s just a form of quackery designed to make some people rich. If you want to dive deeper, I recommend the detailed analyses on Edward Zitron’s blog about the subject.

But the fact that Altman—or any of his Silicon Valley friends—will never create it doesn’t mean we aren’t witnessing the advent of a superintelligence. I believe that something is indeed happening in the world, and the deeper reason why so many things seem to make no sense is that something is being born that we have not yet been able to understand.

My favorite pastime—no joke, I really am this odd—is to imagine how an alien intelligence would perceive us if it were watching. Or a god, if you prefer. If an almighty being were to pay attention to us from thousands of kilometers away and across thousands of years of history (or perhaps from quantum time), what would it perceive about human beings in this millennium?

It probably wouldn’t even notice that two years ago we discovered a more efficient way to predict natural language—something that has made us believe “humanity is close to creating a digital superintelligence,” as Altman says. That advance, which seems so extraordinary to us, would be imperceptible from outer space.

Assuming that a superior intelligence—if it ever existed—would resemble us is a rather silly simplification. It’s like imagining that our extraterrestrial, if it existed, would be practically a human painted green: made of carbon, with two arms and two legs, roughly our size. That it would travel in a craft similar to an airplane, made of comparable materials, and devote all its energy to coming to Earth… only to then hide from us.

And yet, it has always been this way. Every time we’ve imagined an artificial intelligence, we’ve thought we would be the ones to create it, in our own image and likeness. From the Golem to Frankenstein’s creature to HAL—who had no body but spoke our language and was obsessed with our existence—every superintelligence has been suspiciously similar to us.

This happens because we can only perceive the world through our brain; a deaf, blind, and mute organ locked in the darkness of the skull, with no direct contact with anything or anyone. The poor brain spends its life stewing in its own juices, obsessed with what happens to it and watching reality’s movie filtered through individual experience. It doesn’t get much further than that.

We are narcissists by nature. That is, surely, our deepest cognitive bias.

The alien, however, would have a different perspective. It would struggle to understand that we are individuals living separate biographies, because from observation it would conclude that we can only exist within a community. Exist—not just in the mere sense of surviving, of finding food or living until the next morning—but in the full sense of being human: distinct from a primate or a dolphin, beings with identity, language, and culture.

All those things—languages, cultures, identities, music, mathematics, philosophy—form an essential layer of our existence, inseparable from the fact of being alive. Just as a bee without a hive ceases to be a bee—it would be something else—we too cannot truly be human without humanity.

So, if that alien observed us from outside our heads, it wouldn’t see 8 billion independent lives, but a single superorganism. Something akin to a beehive or an anthill. From up there, each of us would look like tiny pieces of a vast mechanism: moving with our own—indecipherable—motivations, but forming part of a collective machinery that breathes, learns, grows, and transforms as a whole.

It wouldn’t see us as a succession of empires or countries, or of lives beginning and ending—just as we don’t pay attention to the ants that die—but as a single creature that has been alive and transforming for all eternity.

Until very recently—less than 10,000 years ago—there were multiple instances of this superorganism divided into family groups of about 25 hunter-gatherers who lived independently of one another and only came into occasional contact.

At some point, some of these groups began to merge, to form colonies, or to absorb others. Thus were born the first agrarian societies numbering several thousand individuals. To our alien, that process of annexation and mixing would look very much like the moment early in Earth’s history when individual cells combined into more complex multicellular organisms.

But what would astonish our interplanetary observer is that in the last 200 years—less than the blink of an evolutionary eye—this superorganism has undergone a breathtaking transformation:

Almost overnight, its size multiplied eightfold, reaching 8 billion individuals. The instances into which it was divided went from numbering in the hundreds, to millions. And the interactions between those individuals multiplied to unprecedented levels.

Cities function in exactly the same way as a living being. Each inhabitant is like an individual cell, with their own life and functions, but unable to survive in isolation or to produce what the city produces. Together, people generate flows: the traffic of people and goods resembles a circulatory system; power and water grids act like veins and arteries; communications and administrations serve as a nervous system that allows the whole to react and make decisions. A city grows, adapts, and also gets sick; it needs energy, expels waste, and can collapse if any essential function fails.

Over the past 200 years, urbanization has grown exponentially: in 1800, only 10% of the population lived in cities—around 100 million people. Today, it’s over 4.5 billion, 45 times more. In 1800, London was the world’s largest city with 1.1 million inhabitants; today, more than 500 cities exceed one million.

All those people—over 5.6 billion, about 68.7% of the world’s population—are connected to the Internet. In 2000, they were fewer than 400 million. Each day, every person generates about 4,909 digital interactions—one every 18 seconds. That’s 40 trillion daily interactions that didn’t exist 25 years ago.

If we compare humanity to a nervous tissue, where each inhabitant is a neuron, in just a few years we would have gone from being a constellation of jellyfish—with a few connections but no brain—to a mammal, with trillions of synapses and connections enabling thought, memory, and collective consciousness.

This is what an alien peeking at Earth would observe. They would see a superorganism that, until very recently, was a relatively simple being, metamorphosing at light speed into something infinitely more complex: a true superintelligence.

It takes a huge act of abstraction to see this from within and in real time, but we are living through a transformation that is hard to overstate. In recent history, tiny doses of knowledge and interconnection had civilizational effects. The printing press, which barely connected tens of thousands of readers in the 15th century, triggered the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, ending the Church’s cultural monopoly. The telegraph, which sent only a few messages a day between cities, enabled international trade and globalized war. The railroad and steamship were enough to conquer continents, and the Industrial Revolution—on which our way of life rests—sprang from the ideas of just a handful of Britons.

If so little did so much, it is nearly impossible to fathom what it means that today billions of humans have the knowledge and ability to interact every few seconds, sharing information, emotions, and decisions as if they were the synapses of a planetary brain.

One that has just been born.

We are witnessing live the birth of a new species. Unprecedented. Unimaginable.

It is overwhelming to think that all this is happening within the tiny span of our own lives—or even more, in just the last decade, since the Internet spread to the majority of humanity.

If a superintelligence has been born, this is it. One that has no body like humans, nor a language we can yet understand. But one that is far more alive than any chatbot or artificial neural network.

It would be wonderful if an extraterrestrial civilization came to explain what is about to happen to us, but since that doesn’t seem likely, we will need to put all our energy, all our enthusiasm, to work in order to understand it.

There’s a well-known quote by Peter Thiel that painfully captures the frustration of our times:

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

In just a few words, Thiel explains how, 30 or 40 years ago, society eagerly anticipated a future of lunar colonies, space travel, robots everywhere, nanotechnology, and bionic humans — a future of engineers and microchip factories. Then suddenly, without warning, everything went off course. Instead, we got a world of “distractions,” filled with people more interested in taking selfies while eating avocado toast and sipping specialty coffee than in launching new high-value industries. Damn it! It’s as if the train of history — which until the year 2000 was hurtling toward a sci-fi future at meteor speed — had taken the wrong turn and is now derailing in slow motion, threatening to stop at any moment, kick us out, and leave us stranded on the side of the road.

But that’s not what happened.

What Thiel and many others fail to understand is that 21st-century society hasn’t failed to create a technological future — it’s created a different one than they had imagined. The reason behind the success of social networks isn’t a lack of technical ability — or worse, moral decay — to build spaceships. It’s a conscious choice. The need that flying cars promised to fulfill, and the one Twitter satisfies with its 140 characters, are essentially the same. Twitter just does it better, and at lower cost.

That need is to connect with other human beings — our primary concern as a species. If giraffes have long necks to reach high leaves, and lions have strength to hunt, humans survive thanks to our unmatched ability to build and sustain hypercomplex social groups. Isolation, on the other hand, is a death sentence for us.

That’s why forming bonds with others is our main occupation — and the driving force behind nearly every innovation we’ve ever created. To connect across distances, we invented reading, writing, the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, newspapers, television, trains, airplanes, and cars. To build more complex societies, we invented hygiene, antibiotics, sanitation, and even concrete — which makes it possible to build tall buildings. Laws, rules, governments, bureaucracy, and justice systems were all created so that we could have increasingly complex, sophisticated, and well-ordered relationships among growing groups. Human history is the story of a species learning to create ever more complex relationships.

And while it’s still too early to say definitively, we can already suspect that the rise of the Internet — which, not coincidentally, coincided with this supposed derailment of the 20th-century civilizational project — has been the second great leap in that story, surpassed only by the invention of language hundreds of thousands of years ago.

So, if someone left behind the industrial society’s version of progress, it’s because they found something better. After all, the flying car — which already exists and is called a helicopter— didn’t offer much beyond the benefits of a regular car. And it’s hard to see what could be done on a hypothetical vacation to the moon. Certainly nothing worth spending a lifetime chained to a desk. The 20th-century dream didn’t die by assassination; it died of boredom.

By contrast, the possibility of opening your computer and instantly becoming the protagonist of a global “rear window” is a civilizational dream never before experienced — a bottomless sea that promises to satisfy our endless curiosity and opens up infinite possibilities for connection. No supersonic flight could compete with that kind of value proposition.

That’s why we’re obsessed with the Internet. The amount of information we pour into it has multiplied by trillions — and still doubles every two years — in a dizzying progression that reflects just how much interest and desire it continues to capture, whether for learning, connecting, or creating without limits.

This very opportunity to become a writer here on Substack, a privilege that just a few decades ago was only available to a handful of men, is a perfect example. The same goes for having your own TV show on YouTube, or exchanging ideas with a community that couldn’t even have existed without the web. The Internet has given rise to an entirely new form of existence, something no faster plane could have ever achieved.

So no one “gave” us 140 characters like a scam — we chose them. We chose this path of progress over flying cars and robots because it made us happier, more connected, and more effective.

What’s incredible is how little attention we pay to this phenomenon. We constantly frame it as mere distraction — a detour from the “true” path of humanity — like in the cliché of young people taking selfies. The most transformative event in our lifetimes is still overshadowed by the grumbling of 20th-century nostalgics raised on superhero comics. But also by something darker: it’s economically inconvenient.

Literally: the more the knowledge-based digital society grows, the more the traditional economy shrinks. What sets the Digital Revolution apart from the futuristic dreams of the 20th century is that it doesn’t require the kind of investment that the Industrial Revolution did, and it doesn’t produce the same kinds of jobs either. Industrial transformations required massive capital to build factories, railroads, power plants, mines, and shipyards. These monumental projects shaped both physical and social landscapes. Wherever a factory rose, a working-class neighborhood would form around it, along with schools, hospitals, bars, and local newspapers. Wealth was measured in steel, coal, kilometers of track, or tons produced. Almost all of today’s rich got that way through this process. The creation of the middle class in the West is inseparable from that era of material development.

But the Digital Revolution doesn’t build factories or move tons — it moves bits. Its raw material is knowledge. Its basic infrastructure is the network. Its energy is attention. When we gave up transforming the physical world to create new ones, we opened the door to a desert of job opportunities for millions, with stagnant wages and precarious conditions that the old steel magnates could never have imagined and still don’t understand.

So, the one that's truly off course — the one on a train about to derail — isn’t society. It’s the economy. And with it, the organization of nations that bet everything on markets and full employment to ensure a place in the world for everyone and enough revenue to fund public services. This, and not the absence of Thiel’s flying cars, is what’s creating the civilizational mess we’re trapped in.

The paradox is brutal: we’ve built the most connected, creative, and intelligent civilization in history — without an economic model that can support it for all.

That’s why the task ahead isn’t to get back on the track of flying cars. Trying to revive the industrial model of the 20th century doesn’t just make no sense: it would be undesirable.

Instead, we could start thinking about how to make this society — one where so many things, like energy, information, and even food, are becoming abundant — a much better place.

Humans operate in two distinct “modes of thought” (and no, they’re not “fast and slow” :p). There are moments when we seek the truth. For example, if you want to know what time a train departs, the most natural thing is to check the train company's website. You're looking for a specific answer — a reliable piece of information. Your brain is in true/false mode, to put it as simply as possible. The train leaves at 9:36 a.m., so any other answer is invalid.

However, if someone else asks you that question, a different thinking system kicks in — one where you're no longer just interested in the factual truth about the trains. Maybe the person asking wants to gauge your knowledge about train schedules because it’s your job to know them. Or maybe they’re mocking you. Or maybe you're trying to impress them. Or trying to go unnoticed. Or it’s a teacher and getting it right has consequences. Maybe you don't even want to answer.
When we interact with others, truth takes a backseat, and a social mechanics of behavior begins to operate.

Most people — those we call “neurotypical” because they are not on any neurodivergent spectrum such as autism or ADHD — spend most of their time operating within that social thought mechanic. If someone in a group of friends asks a question, the answers are often not about what’s true, but about what position each person wants to occupy: whether they want to align with one person or another, or reinforce their identity. Above all, it depends on who holds the power within the group. What does this person expect me to say? What is expected of me? Who should I be in this context? How should I respond?
So, most people operate much of the time seeking belonging, reputation, power, or safety within the group.

For that reason — because people care more about fitting in than about telling the truth — we often end up believing things that aren’t true. Like calories, or capital. That’s also why it’s so hard to dismantle a lie, even if proving it false is easy: most people don’t really care if something is true or false, as long as it helps them reach their goals. It’s not that they’re liars or cynics — it’s just that the very notion of “truth” doesn’t come into play in this mode of thought.

Autistic people don’t work that way: they don’t give the same weight to others’ reactions and tend not to process what others are thinking. That’s why we often live in that truth-focused system where neurotypicals operate only when no one is watching. If you ask an autistic person a question, they won’t beat around the bush: they’ll tell you what they actually think without giving much weight to how their words might affect your feelings or your relationship. That’s why we’re sometimes seen as awkward or inappropriate.

Software — at least until the arrival of what we now call “artificial intelligence” — functioned very much like an autistic person. In fact, most likely, a large portion of the software we use was designed by autistic people in their own image. So it was built to be precise, unforgiving of mistakes, unambiguous, and as succinct as possible. Its purpose was to understand what is true and to verify it. That’s why the programs we know are constantly checking whether something is true or false, or whether a condition is met, in order to determine the strict consequences of that outcome.

So traditional software had no trouble telling you what time a train leaves — as long as you’d entered the right data into a database — but it was completely incapable of answering a vague or generic question about train schedules.

Until AI came along. Large Language Models (LLMs) are the first form of software that function like a neurotypical human — seeking the socially acceptable response. For the first time in history, a piece of software doesn’t aim for truth, but rather the answer its interlocutor is most likely expecting.

LLMs are trained on massive datasets, which include vast amounts of information about train schedules. If you ask one of these bots how to get from one city to another, it might give you lots of general information — not because you asked for it explicitly, but because the LLM infers it might be useful based on what other people typically want in similar situations. That’s why LLMs are “stochastic uncles” — experts in commonplaces, in offering the most expected answer, filtered through political correctness, popularity, and repetition.

The problem these models are now facing is that the world has been promised they can deliver truth. For example, that they can reliably handle customer service tasks, like humans do. Or that they can review case files or read books coherently. Or that they can understand the complex nature of entries in a database. In reality, they are incapable of any of this. Truth cannot come from a probabilistic model.

A system that fails, say, 10% of the time, will — when asked a question requiring 10 independent decisions — make a mistake about 65% of the time. For this reason, LLMs will only work for producing ideas, inspiration, or results where precision isn’t vital — like social media posts, images, or creative drafts. They’re also helpful for people who already know how to do something — like writing articles or coding — and can use the LLM to handle some of the grunt work, as long as they carefully review everything afterward.

For an LLM to produce truth at the level we expect from a person or a code script, it would need to be trained on a dataset that also aims exclusively at the truth, systematically discarding everything else. And to do that, we’d first need to define what truth even means — for a large group of people and objects. And that’s no easy task.

In this fascinating interview, Lex Fridman and mathematician Terence Tao discuss this problem. As of 2025, mathematics still operates in a completely analog manner. Research is still published in natural language papers that other humans have to read, review, and process. A group of people is trying to “formalize” all mathematical objects into a system that, if successful, would allow new contributions to be made directly within this formal model — a system that already understands each object precisely and can manipulate them the way a calculator manipulates numbers.
Additionally, you could then run an LLM on top of that system to generate as many proofs as computation would allow.

But to get there, they first need to build a database — a model — that is ruthless with errors. One that’s written in a formal language, not in the permissive natural language we humans use. And that’s a colossal task, because much of mathematical knowledge, contrary to how it may seem, is informal, intuitive, and hasn’t been formalized anywhere.

In the meantime, as long as LLMs continue to feed on the social thinking mechanics of neurotypical humans found across the internet, “AI” will never be able to systematically find the truth.

Years later, a nutritionist borrowed the term and figured that, since the human body uses energy and produces heat, he could apply the same concept to explain how our body “burns” food — drawing a parallel with a thermal machine. So he took some foods, set them on fire under controlled conditions, and measured how much they heated water as they burned: proteins and carbohydrates produced 4 calories per gram of material burned, and fats produced 8.

That happened around 1890. Since then, we’ve been calculating the “calories” in foods based on how much they would hypothetically heat water if we set them on fire. We still understand the body as if it were a device that literally burns stuff to produce energy — and we apply this logic to food labeling, recipes, school lessons, and weight-loss programs. Even today, 150 years later, everything we are taught about nutrition is still based on that nonsense, which has no relation to human biochemistry.

Because the human body doesn’t actually “burn” anything. Food activates different metabolic pathways — like glycolysis, lipolysis, or ketogenesis — that convert nutrients into energy in different ways depending on what we’ve eaten, when, in what hormonal context, and even whether we’ve had enough sleep. These pathways also determine which parts of the food we process and which we excrete. Hormones — not calories — are the true key that decides how much energy the body uses, how, and when.

And yet, medicine — with the invaluable help of industry — has spent 150 years promoting a theory with no scientific basis, leading people to make poor decisions about their health. How is this possible?

It turns out that to explain the complex mechanisms that govern life, we need models — simplifications. And when reality — like human metabolism — is far more complex than the fiction — “calories in, calories out” — or when vested interests push in the opposite direction, bad science often becomes entrenched and impossible to remove.

The same thing has happened with economics. We’ve arrived in the year 2025 still using a paradigm from 250 years ago that can’t withstand even the most basic scrutiny. And now, the engine that had been producing continuous growth for all that time has stopped. We find ourselves in a colossal deadlock: governments around the world don’t know what to do to restart an economy that offers good jobs and keeps growing, because the theoretical model we use is based — just like calories — on things that don’t exist.

This excerpt from a recent article in El País is a perfect example of the civilizational mess we’ve gotten into:

“Let’s remember once again what TFP (Total Factor Productivity) is. Simply put, TFP is the “secret sauce” of economic growth. It’s everything that lets us produce more without needing more workers or machines. It’s technology, management efficiency, institutional quality, innovation — ultimately, the ‘know-how’ of an economy. It’s calculated as the portion of growth that can’t be explained by increases in the factors of production (capital and labor). It’s the leftover, what remains after everything else is subtracted. And in Spain, the evolution of that leftover has been persistently negative or disappointing.

How do we get TFP? Usually as a residual: what isn’t explained by observable factors must be TFP. However, the traditional method, the so-called ‘Solow residual,’ is highly pro-cyclical, as these authors point out. During recessions, when the economy tanks, TFP collapses; in expansions, it shoots up. And this seemed odd.”

Wait — “secret sauce”? “Know-how”? “Can’t be explained”? “Must be TFP”? How can a discipline considered a science — the very one underpinning the organization of our society — in the year 2025, talk in these terms? How can we understand anything if we don’t even know what the “secret ingredients” of the economy are?

If it’s possible to publish something like this in a serious newspaper in a major country, it’s because similar things are published every day, everywhere. The issue isn’t the writer, but the underlying model — which makes no sense.

You see:

Economic theory — mainstream, alternative, all of it — defines the production process as a combination of several “factors”, which (with some variations across time, schools of thought, and historical interests) are capital and labor.

But this definition has no real relationship to the actual production process. It is — like calories — a political invention, a speculation, a story that confuses productive factors with a representation of the social groups involved: the owners of labor (workers), and the owners of capital (capitalists).

In this definition, capital could be anything from investments in machinery and infrastructure to tools, buildings, technology, accumulated knowledge, or even the investment of advancing one's own work to create inventory.

Labor, on the other hand, could be a pure form of energy (like when workers operate machines), a form of technology (like when programmers write software), or a form of knowledge (like lawyers or consultants).

Following this loose and shifting definition, we could imagine two countries that both export wood. One does it using manual labor; the other has fully mechanized the process. In this case, labor and capital are serving the same function: collecting wood, and the result is the same — a stock of boards. But according to economic theory, the factors of production are completely different.

Now imagine both countries decide to industrialize by manufacturing furniture. One hires local designers (labor), while the other buys industrial designs from a third country (capital). Once again, the function in the production process is the same, but economics treats them differently.

So what differentiates them? Nothing. There’s no intrinsic distinction between labor and capital. The difference isn’t in the role they play in production, but in who provides them. Capital comes from those with accumulated surplus; labor comes from those who must exchange their time each month to participate (and be paid). The line dividing these two factors is not economic, but political. That’s why these categories don’t explain the production process, but rather the social organization behind the system.

Capital and labor are, like calories, units of measurement used to calculate each group’s contribution to the productive system. When we try to use these alien categories to understand how the economy actually works, everything falls apart — just like trying to understand the human body using calories to measure energy consumption. That’s why we’re running around like headless chickens trying to understand what’s happened to the world since the 20th century. Like those people who follow their nutritionist’s advice to the letter and still can’t lose weight despite eating fewer calories than they supposedly “burn,” we’re banging our heads against a theory that doesn’t reflect reality.

This becomes crystal clear if we apply that framework to a non-political context — like that of animals. For example, some ant species practice a form of agriculture in their nests. The process — in which worker ants collect and trim leaves to use as substrate for bacteria that grow fungi to feed larvae — is analogous to any of our industrial processes. As with all human behavior, we exist on a continuum with the rest of the animal kingdom, and the processes we observe in society echo in other species. That’s why biology, medicine, sociology, and psychology all trace continuity between our species and others.

And yet no one would dream of saying that the ants’ productive process is divided between “capital” and “labor.” That would be absurd! Because capital and labor don’t exist in nature — they are symbolic, political constructs, unique to our society. They can only be used to explain political processes in society, not the mechanisms of the economy.

Knowledge and Energy

So how can we understand the production process in its real essence? What model can help us comprehend and address the problems we face?

In essence, modern industry is just the evolutionary peak of the natural processes by which living beings meet their needs. There’s a continuous line from the mechanisms used by the first unicellular organisms to survive and reproduce, through increasingly sophisticated practices of more complex animals — like farming ants — all the way to the methods we humans have perfected over millennia, resulting in today’s industries.

All of these processes are governed by the same principle. From the earliest single-celled organisms to Taiwan’s microchip factories, every productive process — no matter how complex — is a combination of two factors: knowledge and energy.

Knowledge can be organic (genetic or epigenetic), learned (acquired during an individual’s life), or social and shared by a group (like in social animals). It can exist only in consciousness — like culture — or be materialized in tools or technology. It can be simple, like DNA, or complex, like mathematics.

Energy, on the other hand, can come from food, sunlight, water currents, fossil fuels, electricity, or conscious effort — which we call "labor" when it's human or animal in origin.

In this model, raw materials can be understood as the amount of energy needed to extract or transform them.

So ants combine group knowledge to develop their form of agriculture. The energy comes from the workers and the bacteria that grow the fungi. Elephants use the matriarchs’ knowledge to dig wells in droughts, using their own strength. Some birds hunt and hang their prey so that the sun “cures” the meat before they eat it.

We humans use a highly sophisticated mix of knowledge — mathematical, physical, mechanical, chemical, architectural, etc. — to meet our needs. The sheer amount of knowledge is so vast that it also requires vast amounts of energy — which is where capital and labor come in.

The confusion in understanding how the economy works comes from the fact that the two “factors” we’ve traditionally identified — capital and labor — are actually the same: both are ways of contributing energy to production, either as upfront investment or as ongoing effort.

Meanwhile, knowledge, which isn’t measurable, tradable, or marketable — which is produced and maintained in a distributed way and cannot be restricted — has historically gone unnoticed. Not because it’s irrelevant, but because it’s not represented in that political equation of productivity.

Can knowledge be the product of capital or labor? Not really. A specific application of knowledge — a machine, a design — may be produced using those “factors.” But that application is only a tiny tip of a vast iceberg of knowledge (cultural, aesthetic, mechanical, linguistic, mathematical, etc.) that is preexisting and not confined to an industrial logic.

The Productivity Enigma

That “secret sauce” that “can only be measured as a residual” and has economists scratching their heads — that je ne sais quoi that has puzzled us for a decade — is really knowledge. But since no single social group (like workers or capitalists) lays claim to it, it’s like a mist — everywhere, yet ignored. That’s how it became the elephant in the room of the economy, given various names throughout history: “work organization,” the “invisible hand,” or “total factor productivity.”

Yet when we observe the same productive system through the lens of knowledge and energy, the so-called “productivity enigma” becomes obvious.

The more knowledge we inject into the productive equation, the less energy we need. In other words: the more technology and technique advance, the less capital and labor are needed to satisfy a need.

This is what happened over the 250 years following the Industrial Revolution. The progressive intensification of knowledge increased productivity by reducing the energy required for production. But to sustain that system, a specific balance between knowledge and energy had to be maintained. Not only did energy — the only factor measured and rewarded — have to remain necessary, but knowledge had to remain in the hands of a few. A massive increase in knowledge would make energy virtually irrelevant.

And that’s exactly what happened from the late 20th to the early 21st century. Chasing the dream of a “knowledge society,” the world sent entire generations to college, unleashing an unprecedented surge of intelligence. In just a few years, we went from a handful of engineers, mathematicians, and philosophers to billions of educated people, in every country and across nearly every discipline.

The delicate balance between knowledge and energy that had supported the industrial society — where a few countries and companies monopolized all know-how — exploded. The massive intelligence boost of the late 20th century — thousands of times greater than that of the Industrial Revolution — caused a knowledge overdose the world wasn’t prepared for. Instead of stimulating the economy, it dismantled the productive system forever.

Since then, entire sectors — like music, information, and entertainment, but also education, design, photography, marketing, programming, consulting, architecture, translation, cosmetics, vocational training, and even parts of medicine, law, and engineering — have in just a few years gone from requiring huge amounts of work and investment to becoming weightless: distributed across millions of literate people, able to make decisions and meet their own needs.

Disintermediation (removal of middlemen, like travel agencies or bookstores), commoditization (when knowledge spreads, competition rises, and prices fall), and even deglobalization are all consequences of this same phenomenon, clearly traceable from the knowledge–energy paradigm.

When historians in the year 3000 look back at our time, from a bird’s-eye view, they won’t see an “industrial productivity enigma” or a bump in the road. They’ll see the end of an era — and the beginning of a new one.

Because we now live in an unprecedented world: a true knowledge society, nothing like what our parents dreamed of. A society where the exchange of goods and services no longer happens only in the economy, but in a realm still largely unnoticed — one that has become the core of our economic metabolism. This is the era of plutonomy.

It may take economists and political scientists a few more years to admit it — as it did with nutritionists. But reality is stubborn. It won’t bend to fit into the outdated models we keep trying to apply. Only when we finally discard those obsolete frameworks — in both nutrition and economics — can we begin to shed the excess weight we’ve gained from believing in capital… and in calories.

If you found this content interesting, please do me a favor: share it! That’s the best way to support this work — by helping it reach more people. 😊

What has happened with what we call “artificial intelligence” is similar to what happened with other technologies —like Facebook’s Metaverse or Google Glasses—: they were born from companies that had a strong interest in making us believe they would be revolutionary.

Until just a couple of months ago, several of the world’s largest companies were still promising to build an “artificial general intelligence”: a thinking being that would be “superior” to humans and capable of replacing us entirely. In other words, they were announcing the birth of a new species of all-powerful machines that would replace people.

Things got so absurd that at a conference organized by Google that I attended a few months ago, one of the speakers calmly claimed we would need to install a chip in our brains just to keep up with the robots to come. Corporate panic was rampant, and no one was safe.

Some of us have argued for a long time that this was never going to happen. That the very idea of “artificial intelligence” was a scam orchestrated to keep inflating the forward escape of the tech companies, which have had nothing genuinely new to offer for quite some time. Well, in recent weeks the economic and media consensus has fallen from the tree and is arriving at the same conclusion.

“For many companies,” The Economist said a few days ago, “the excitement over the potential of generative artificial intelligence has given way to frustration over the difficulty of using this technology productively.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times, in an article titled “Why Artificial General Intelligence Is Unlikely Anytime Soon”, got to the heart of the matter by quoting Steven Pinker: “there is simply no such thing as an omniscient, omnipotent automatic problem solver for all problems, including those we haven’t even imagined yet. There is a temptation to fall into a kind of magical thinking. But these systems are not miracles. They are very impressive gadgets.”

Reality, stubborn as it is, has imposed itself on the apocalyptic threats, and according to S&P Global, 42% of companies will have abandoned their generative AI pilot projects by 2025.

All that said, we can’t shake the feeling that these little machines that talk as if they really think must be good for something. They’re just too spectacular to amount to nothing, right?

And that is true. The technologies behind chatbots will bring about very significant advances —just not the ones we’ve been told.

So what, really, is generative AI, and what is it for? What can we expect once the hype truly fades? Will it transform our lives? Will it replace humans?

Humans evolved to relate to a very small community. Until the invention of agriculture —that is, for 95% of our species’ history— human groups had between 25 and 50 members. Everyone knew each other intimately.

Anthropologists think that, if there was a broader network linking some groups to others they might encounter occasionally, that network could not exceed 150 individuals, because there is a “cognitive limit” to the number of relationships humans can maintain without additional support.

Our primary methods of understanding the world were direct observation and gossip. Observation allowed us to interact with our immediate environment, and since there was no need to comprehend anything beyond what could be seen and touched, that was sufficient.

Gossip, on the other hand, was the mechanism for understanding other humans. “Social cooperation is our key to survival and reproduction,” says Yuval Harari. “It is not enough for men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison; it is far more important for them to know who hates whom in their group, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who cannot be trusted.”

When we moved from hunter-gatherers to the first agricultural settlements, it became necessary to understand realities we could not observe directly. Gossip and observation became insufficient, and new technologies were born to help us understand and manage the growing complexity of society. That is why agriculture is inseparable from the emergence of writing and numerical and mathematical systems.

Those two technologies were nothing more than an interface that allowed us to relate to a far more complex reality than our brains could handle on their own. Writing gave us access to stories and ideas from people we did not know and who could be very far away —in time and in space. Mathematics, meanwhile, created abstractions in which to store information about large groups, such as records, accounting, or statistics.

As societies became more complex, those “interfaces” between the human mind and complexity kept improving: books, painting, printing, the first property or birth registries, libraries, encyclopedias, abacuses, calculators, cash registers, universities, and administrative centers appeared —all to bring order and meaning to the world.

Eventually, we became capable of understanding entire realities even if we had never had direct contact with them: television, photography, history, literature, statistics, and the media, among many other things, made us see ourselves as part of an immense social group spanning seven continents and thousands of years.

The first computers were born to respond to that growing complexity. The amount of information we were using in the 1980s was becoming unmanageable without computing. Paper records, which could only be “computed” by hand —adding and subtracting— had become a bottleneck for progress.

That is why computing created an exponential leap in the human capacity to relate to complexity. Machines can store millions of times more information than a book and retrieve the part we need far faster than it would take to leaf through a massive collection of records.

But to achieve that, they had to make a concession: that information would no longer be organized for human understanding —which was still designed around observation and gossip— but rather for the machine. Let’s look at an example:

Think of a grocery store. This is the kind of record a person would make of their sales, based on observation and knowledge of each customer:

A computer would never organize information this way, mixing first names, last names, different product types, and notes, because these are actually very different things that only make sense relationally in our human heads.

Instead, it would create several tables:

One for customers,

Another for product types

And another for each main record, linking the other tables through a numeric identifier

The result is a far more efficient, better-organized system, capable of managing information and producing reports on demand —but incomprehensible to the human mind.

Then came the Internet. The amount of information created by humanity exploded like a supernova. In 1993, the entire web generated barely 40,000 GB per year; today we produce over 120 zettabytes —30 million times more. Every minute more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, 40 million WhatsApp messages are sent, and more than 6 million searches are made on Google. We have gone from storing knowledge in books and physical archives to producing data massively in real time, on a scale never seen before in human history.

And all that knowledge is not stored in a format adapted to our minds, but to machines: it is inaccessible to humans. That’s why we have such a massive sense of not understanding anything: because it’s true, there is simply too much information, and we lack the interfaces to process it.

And all of this has happened at record speed: it is estimated that more than 90% of existing digital data was generated in the past 10 years, and the total volume of information DOUBLES every 12 months. In fields like medicine, knowledge doubles every 73 days.

As if we were hunter-gatherers teleported to present-day New York City, we do not have the tools to comprehend all this information, this level of complexity. That’s why we cannot make sense of what happens on social media, and we feel overwhelmed by the information we receive.

AI as an Interface Between Human Knowledge and Machine Knowledge

The very first attempts to solve this problem and give us an interface to access this massive repository of knowledge were Google search, initially, and later mechanisms like “trending topics” and hashtags on social networks.

Both are information-access tools. Some let you search the entire internet and return results, while others show you the topics many people are talking about at the same time. But they all have the same limitation: they are still designed —and limited— by the human mind. They still try to understand a flow of information that is not organized according to our logic from our way of thinking.

The giant leap of AI is that someone came up with the idea just a few years ago that it should not be humans designing the interfaces to access information, but the machines themselves.

The idea behind machine learning and generative AI is the transformer: a type of system that learns to understand patterns and relationships within enormous volumes of data, especially language. How does it learn? It is fed millions of questions along with their correct answers, and the system tries to guess the answer by adjusting a network of internal connections called “weights.” At first, it fails almost every time. But each time it makes a mistake, it tweaks those weights a bit. And so, mistake after mistake, it learns to arrive at the correct answer on its own. The surprising thing about the transformer is that it does not follow a fixed path: it figures out on its own how to pay attention to the most relevant parts of each sentence or data set to find meaning.

This way, it is the machines that learn how to access information and how to display it, without us having to tell them step by step how to do it. And the thing is, they do it much better than we ever could, because that volume of information is made for them, not for us.

Confusion emerges when we give these chatbots the appearance of people with consciousness: we associate talking to them with the experience of talking to an expert, when they are not.

For example, if I ask a chatbot “what do you think about very short bangs?” it will give me a terribly mediocre answer full of clichés. Since it has no consciousness —no style, no taste— it cannot have opinions about bangs, or anything else.

When I ask a chatbot about bangs, expecting a human-like answer, it gives me the statistically most likely answer: that of the average human, which is to say, mediocre. That’s why sometimes it makes things up, often bores me, and always leaves me a bit cold.

But if, instead of thinking of them that way, we imagine we are talking to our computer and want to use its intelligence to access the content of all that information available on the internet, they become truly useful. For example, I might ask my computer “What has been said on the internet in the past 5 years about very short bangs?” or “What do people in Japan think about bangs?” or “What did people think about bangs between 1990 and 2010?” In this sense, they are a version 2.0 of what powers search engines.

Machines cannot access the truth, because truth is a concept that comes from consciousness. But they can open the door for us to a new level of human knowledge that we will never be able to reach without their help.

What opportunities will this new era bring?

One statistic obsesses me, and I never tire of repeating it: two-thirds of global “wealth” consists of real estate assets.

When I think of the idea of wealth, the first image that comes to mind is a mountain of gold bars. Or coins. Scrooge McDuck’s swimming pool, or a man lighting a cigar with hundred-dollar bills. At the very least, oil wells or cotton fields: factories and manufacturing plants producing things that are then sold for money.

But today, 62% of our “assets” are none of those things: they are buildings. Half of all global “wealth” is made up of homes. And not only that, but almost all of the “growth” in that wealth since the year 2000 can be explained not by an increase in the number of buildings, but by the revaluation of the existing stock. For comparison: all the gold in the world adds up to less than 3% of total wealth.

In other words, although we have the perception that the economy — which we picture as a machine of factories, products, and jobs — is roaring along, the reality is that two-thirds of the value we believe we hold is not in that mechanism. It isn’t shares of companies producing goods and services and creating jobs, nor even piles of money we have saved. It is houses, and — to a much lesser extent — offices and shopping centers.

If we believe that the world is growing, it is not because there are new sources of wealth, nor even because the real estate stock has expanded, but because these assets have become more expensive.

This statistic explains many of the otherwise incomprehensible phenomena of the 21st century:

First: that inequality has skyrocketed without any productive revolution to justify it. In past moments of history when the wealth of the richest grew exponentially, it was the result of economic transformations, like the rise of the automobile or oil. Today, the rich are getting richer not because they produce more, but rather the opposite: because wealth grows faster than the economy. For example, in the U.S., GDP grew by 147% between 1989 and 2023, while wealth grew by 300%.

Second: the consequence is that it has become far more profitable to own than to produce. Those who own property are far wealthier, while those who do not are far poorer.

Third: it has become impossible to revive a productive economy, no matter how much fuel governments shovel into that furnace, because all the money flees to real estate investment as soon as it can.

But this should be absurd, shouldn’t it? How can wealth grow faster than the productive economy? Shouldn’t wealth be the result of having produced something? Isn’t wealth a way of accumulating the output of the economy?

No.

The difference between the flows of the economy (like GDP) and what we understand as “wealth” is that the former measures all the transactions that happen in a period of time, while the latter is calculated by estimating the price of an asset and multiplying it by the total stock.

For example: In a country that exports bananas, GDP will be the result of all sales: we count every banana actually sold and the price it was transacted for, and that gives us what the country produced. Workers’ wages depend on those sales.

By contrast, the “value” of the wealth of that country is not calculated from actual sales. If only a single home was sold, we take the price of that one sale and multiply it by the total number of homes, as if they could all be sold for that price, even if only one actually sold.

This is the same way we calculate the other major form of wealth: shares in publicly traded companies. We take the price of the last share sold and multiply it by the entire stock of shares.

It is also the same kind of calculation that ordinary people make every day: on the one hand, we have our salary or checking account balance, which is a measurable and concrete reality. On the other hand, the supposed “value” of our apartment or the one we expect to inherit, which is an abstraction that only exists in our minds.

So much so that we often take refuge in this illusion of value to escape reality: our salary and bank balance are usually scarce and with little room for improvement, while “wealth” can keep on growing. While poverty is real, wealth has become imaginary.

When this logic is scaled up to an entire country, it becomes absurd: incomes, wages, corporate profits, and taxes all depend on a real, measurable mechanism. “Wealth,” meanwhile, is a product of collective imagination. We decide to believe in the fiction that all the homes in a country could sell for a certain price, and then build our lives around that invention.

Some might argue that all wealth is imaginary — that the price of gold or Bitcoin is also an illusion created by buyers. But those values do not depend on the real economy, since they serve no purpose except as a store of value. The value of housing, on the other hand, depends on the productive economy: on the incomes and wages of workers who pay rents and mortgages.

How did we get here?

During the second half of the 20th century, after World War II, the entire political spectrum conspired to create a world of infinite growth, where everyone would have infinite opportunities. At the time, it even seemed reasonable, because the gains of the Industrial Revolution over the previous two centuries had grown the economy so much that distributing its fruits had no cost. If the world kept growing, there would be enough for everyone.

That is why all political families — not just the left, as is often thought — waved the flag of redistribution. Even Margaret Thatcher (“The role of the State is to allow people to own, not to keep them as its tenants forever”) and Ronald Reagan (“There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to pursue their dreams”) in their own way envisioned a world where everyone would become rich.

And the way to store all that wealth, the vehicle where workers would safeguard their new place in society, was housing. That is why governments have insisted on keeping housing prices rising, with economic stimulus, subsidies for construction, and tax incentives.

In the absence of a better — and more beneficial — way to understand the world, we continue to believe all this is true. Many people still live as if the world will never stop growing. But reality is stubborn, and in the 21st century, growth in developed countries has stalled. It is now less than half of what it was in the 20th century (2.8% between 1961 and 2000 versus 1.2% between 2000 and 2024).

And this is not a statistical blip. Nor is it a pothole in the road that will be smoothed out in the coming years. It is the most painful symptom of the end of the brief period of industrial society.

If governments around the world are still committed to defending this fiction of infinite growth, it is because they have no alternative: they need it to maintain social cohesion. Savings, pensions, inheritances, and even the identity of many people are intimately linked to this fiction of ever-growing wealth.

But in this headlong rush, they are creating a monster: that imaginary wealth is an immense and dangerously fragile house of cards. We can only sustain the fiction that all those homes have that value because someone is willing to pay rent for them. And that money can only come from the productive economy. So the real estate market cannot, in the medium term, break free from wages or corporate profits. It cannot keep growing indefinitely.

In the coming years, the productive economy will continue to shrink, and rents will keep rising. There will come a point — whether triggered by a crisis that causes unemployment, or by reaching the absolute maximum that workers can afford to pay — when housing prices will stop rising.

And then we will have no choice but to face the consequences of all this.