See - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/feb/06/ancient-garden-cities-amazon-indigenous-technologies-archaeology-lost-civilisations-environment-terra-preta It presents the same sort of evidence as Graeber and Wengow's book does, but this time with technical details and pictures ! That book's message from the past is that the 'nobel savage' view of the deep past, assumed by Hobbes and Locke, with its supposed inevitability of top-down authoritarian rule (lots of varieties to choose from) as human communities increased in size, is wrong. The above article says - "These lost rainforest cities may seem to have little in common with today’s steel and asphalt behemoths but according to experts, early Amazonian metropolises are remarkable for what they tell us about the way ancestral urbanites lived off the land without trampling it.". Quoting Eduardo Neves, of the University of São Paulo, it also says - “We can safely say that biodiversity in the Amazon only exists because, and not in spite, of its inhabitants, who safeguarded their environment by transforming it,”.

I've written elsewhere about how the far-Right are sawing off the branch of the Tree of Prosperity they're sitting on. A Guardian journalist, Nesrine Malik, says the same. See - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/10/donald-trump-remaking-world-international-doctrine In conclusion, she says - "And so he takes the US with him, roiled and destabilised, into a world where its ability to advance whatever agenda it wishes at any time is increasingly undermined by its own moral and political collapse, and by the rise of other nations and arrangements that are rewriting the global order. It is the end of the end of history. A new chapter begins – nakedly transactional, more crowded, where political power is far more up for grabs. Trump could, by withdrawing in parts and aggressively asserting in others, create at once both a vacuum and a provocation that could catalyse that process. The irony is that as Trump casts a large, dark shade, more and more of the world is coming out of the US’s shadow."

Fix has just published what looks like a masterwork - about 15,000 words analysing the emergence (or should that be re-emergence?) of plutocracy in America in recent decades. See - https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2025/01/31/partisan-politics-and-the-road-to-plutocracy/ He starts by quoting the Ancient Greek philosopher Plutarch, saying - " [H]e who has more than enough and yet hungers for still more will find no remedy in gold or silver … for his ailment is not poverty, but insatiability and avarice. — Plutarch, ‘On love of wealth’ " Fix continues - "As billionaires dance in the halls of the second Trump administration, it’s haunting how well Plutarch’s two-thousand-year-old words describe the state of American politics. It’s a barren landscape of plutocratic insatiability. How did it get this way?". Fix's 'near-book' is as usual replete with diagrams, graphs and data. It has a useful 'Contents' section, showing how broad-ranging his analysis is. He concludes with what I think is an ingenious and revealing metaphor, saying - "In my mind, this evidence illustrates how the trappings of democracy can be used to ensconce plutocracy. As the rich get richer, they use their time and resources to become information-sucking machines. Meanwhile, as the poor get poorer, they fall into a pit of political ignorance where they become easy victims of propaganda. In a sense, this asymmetry is why reactionary politics are so easy, and why progressive politics are so difficult. Reactionary politics push snake oil downhill. Progressive politics push knowledge and solidarity uphill.". It's Greek myrh rather than philosphy, but maybe Fix should have ended his analysis with Sisyphus, condemned to push a great mass uphill during the day, only to have it roll back down overnight.

Here I think is a journalist who doesn't have a technology background, getting to the nub of the matter. See - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/02/deepseek-ai-veil-of-mystique-tech-bros-fear He gets the point, which folk at Skool have already grasped, that the long-term impact is economic, saying "The true impact of DeepSeek is not on the technology but on the economics of AI." After reviewing the situation and its external connections, he concludes - "Concerns about privacy, censorship and surveillance, rightly raised by amodel such as DeepSeek, can help obscure the reality that such issues bedevil all AI technology, not just that from China. Particularly at a time of threatened trade wars and threats to democracy, our capacity to navigate between the hype and the fear assumes new importance.". Does AI have a viable future as a tool-component of some other practical and reliable product, sold commercially? Do such business models exist? Or are the unreliability and privacy weaknesses of AI (as currently implemented, via external Internet-accessed mix of 'scraped from anywhere' and official data-sources) too great? The issue is surely that material on Internet has no mediation, there's no gatekeeper or editor-in-change, it's totally disintermediated. Any old guff can appear in the 'global-village database'. That effectively asks "Can a sufficiently good AI run standalone, accessing a local database of known quality?". Which is what some Skool folk are exploring, I think.

In my judgement, the Austrian School is A LOT closer to Keens thinking about economics than neoclassical stuff. They claim that markets are usually in disequilibrium for example. How right am I? Also I think we should adress the two kinds of roles the government has in economics. People often link wealth redistribution or stuff like that going on in depressions to the government doing something. However, when the Austrian economists say that government intervention should be minimal I think they mean in terms of price controls and stuff rather than redistribution or altering of interest rates (central bank).