Let’s take a look back at 2014 and a conversation that I almost walked away from too quickly. It was late afternoon in a conference ballroom amid a cacophony of voices and polite applause.

The day had been long and the coffee mediocre, and the ideas coming from the speaker sessions were ranging from genuinely provocative to aggressively self-congratulatory. I had been t...

Artificial intelligence is not a coming disruption. It is a present-tense legal and civic reality that’s already embedded in medical diagnostics, financial underwriting, criminal risk assessment, and in content moderation systems that determine which voices get amplified and which get suppressed.

Courts are beginning to grapple with it. Legislatures are scrambling. And ...

With total state and local public pension debt now over $200 billion, California’s taxpayers face the difficult task of paying the ever-growing pension costs for public workers. Despite paying down an additional $7 billion in pension debt since 2020, the state is still hundreds of billions short of funding the retirement benefits already promised to teachers, police, firefigh...

In parts 1, 2, 3,

At a time when gambling is increasingly treated by governments as a vice to be regulated or restricted, it is worth recalling a curious episode in European economic history: a casino once saved a country. In the 19th century, Monaco went from being a virtually bankrupt state to the playground of millionaires that we know today.

In the 19th century, the Principality of M...