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I’ve read over 200 history books and biographies. The two great drivers of history are war and money. For a dose of military history, I recently read “The Dark Path” by Williamson Murray. A big take-home of that book was how often victory depended on superior finances. For economic history, I’ve read “ Money: The true story of a made-up thing” by Jacob Goldstein, “ The world for sale” by  Jack Farchy and Javier Blas   and “Our dollar, your problem” by Kenneth Rogoff. But to understand the history of international finance, I turned to “Money Beyond Borders:  Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto ” by Barry Eichengreen.   This book begins with deep dives into the minting of Greek silver tetradrachms and Roman silver denarius, and the consequences of debasement by rulers like Nero. Both nations reached well beyond their borders with their coins, both through trade and by paying their far-flung militaries in coin.. Eichengreen argues that the fall of th...

  It was clear by the late ‘60s that America was doing far more harm than good in Vietnam and should just sue for peace and get out. Eventually, the US left and the Vietcong took over. Eventually, Vietnam became a reliable US trade partner. America is doing far more harm than good in Iran. Trump should just negotiate the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz and get out. Eventually, the religious dictatorship in Iran will give way to a government better able to work with its neighbors and with the US.

Venter died a couple days ago at the age of 79.     As a grad student, I wondered whether it would be possible to sequence the human genome. As a postdoc, I did both Maxam and Gilbert sequencing and Sanger sequencing (first with E coli Klenow fragment, then reverse transcriptase) a couple hundred nucleotides per reaction, each reaction taking up to a week. For the first decade that I had my own lab, we did our own sequencing, but eventually it became cheaper and faster to send the template out to be sequenced by a company.   Venter drove the progress of DNA sequencing with his own company, then allied with the NIH to complete the first draft of the human genome. Genomic sequencing has transformed medicine, as well as evolutionary biology and taxonomy.   In the last five years that I had my own lab, genome sequencing was so cheap that I had a local company sequence the entire genome of a mutant fly line I'd created in order to define the sequence at one gene. And arou...

I’m not enough of a scholar of international affairs to possess a highly differentiated opinion on Taiwan. Superficially, a PRC invasion of Taiwan seems analogous to the Russian invasion of Ukraine: the PRC brands Taiwan as a renegade state, just as Putin brands Ukraine as “little Russia.” The historical antecedents are very different, and the historical case for amalgamating Taiwan with the PRC is certainly stronger. That said, Taiwan currently wants independence and Xi plans for an eventual takeover. Most of what I read these days discusses a military takeover of Taiwan. That made little sense to me. How could the PRC justify the billions required to defeat Taiwan and the billions more to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure when they could simply build it on the mainland and outcompete Taiwan?   Eyck Freyman writing in Foreign Affairs envisions a crisis, not a war, as the path to takeover. “It begins not with missiles but with cutter ships. One morning, dozens of Chinese coast g...

  From the book "Money Without Borders": "In Switzerland, another country without a central bank, in its case until 1906, the authorities instructed banks to limit gold conversion by keeping only one teller window open, having tellers count out notes slowly, and encouraging tellers to be as rude as possible."

"L ife is essentially a game of turning energy into kids." From "The Exercise Paradox" by Herman Pontzer, PhD