Permissionless innovation and the graveyard of things never created
There is another reason for decentralization. That reason is what’s called permissionless innovation. If censorship is the thing you saw that now goes away, permissionless […]
Economics
New DoD cost estimating guide fails to address the problems facing the cost community
“No one can predict the future” is an often-used cliché, and yet this is what the DoD asks its cost estimating community to do every […]
Setting a new precedent for pricing defense contracts
When you’re trying to buy a product in the industrial era, most of the cost was in the physical attributes of the thing you’re buying. […]
Futurist and traditionalist views of national security
… the leaders and thinkers of this futurist camp have built a consensus that victory in great-power competition, especially between China and the United States, […]
Military capabilities are not well represented by DoD budgets
Here is fellow emergent ventures recipient Alexey Gurzey on the Venture Stories podcast talking about the declining relevance of GDP: If you think about someone […]
Defense acquisition decisions in a low-trust environment
The correct way to respond to a low-trust environment is not to double down on proceduralism, but to commit yourself to the “it does exactly what […]
Defense management is killing competition
The genius of the capitalist system is that it has no pretensions about prediction: It does not preselect winners and losers but instead facilitates competition […]
The nature vs nurture debate for defense program planning
There is an interesting story about a single crayfish that managed to reproduce asexually creating offspring with the exact same genetics. The offspring, called marmorkrebs, […]
When should systems decentralize?
very powerful economic forces drive centralization of a successful decentralized system… the fundamental problem is that decentralized systems inherently provide users a worse experience than […]
DoD’s fixation on cost stifles its ability to innovate
Accounting scholars Baruch Lev and Feng Gu found that the value of tangible assets and earnings explained more than 80% of companies’ value when entering […]
The national security implications of crypto, and a strategy to counter China
The US has this really amazing strategic asset in the US dollar. If you look at borrowing and lending in the world, how trade is […]
China focuses on applied tech much more than the US
Emily … Nate [Picarsic], my colleague, and I had these massive databases of Chinese science and technology resource allocations (i.e., funding) and prizes given out […]
Important decisions are not made the way economic textbooks teach us
Here’s a nice exchange between Agnes Callard and Russ Roberts on EconTalk. Remember — the defense resource allocation process, the PPBE, was explicitly created on […]
Ratio of sustainment to acquisition costs — is modernization being crowded out?
The graph shows the four phases of a program’s cost over its lifetime: research and development (R&D), procurement, O&S, and disposal, with O&S considered the […]
It’s not just my imagination — why funding is so important to tech progress
Here’s my last excerpt — I promise — from Jason Crawford’s excellent interview on the Venture Stories podcast, “Progress Studies in 2020.” Jason: I want […]