Cycles of Change

When grocery receipts climb at suburban checkout counters, shoppers naturally assume that farmers are pocketing handsome profits. A dozen eggs or a loaf of sourdough bread costs significantly more than it did four years ago. Yet out on county roads across Iowa and Kansas, family growers sit at [...]

Eighty years ago, the United States attempted to teach the world a lasting lesson about power. In the autumn of 1945, amidst the ruined brick piles of southern Germany, an American Supreme Court Justice named Robert Jackson took the podium inside a stone courtroom at Nuremberg. Allied armies had [...]

A morning routine in a coastal fishing town moves with predictable quiet. In Gurzang, eight miles outside the southern Iranian city of Minab, a literature teacher named Yaghoub Yazdanpanah kissed his six-year-old daughter Fatemeh goodbye on the last Saturday of February. Fatemeh loved reciting [...]

A television loses value the moment a customer buys it, and a car loses value the moment a driver steers it off the dealership lot. These items function as consumer goods. Industrial systems produce them in high volume, and their prices fall over time as physical parts wear down. The American [...]

A shirt costs eight dollars while a kilogram of rice costs less than two. Both are produced in quantities so large that scarcity has essentially ceased to be a meaningful concept for most of the world's population. The industrial systems that produce food and clothing run on feedback loops tuned [...]