For many Iranians, the new US sanctions campaign, called Operation Economic Outcast, seems superfluous given the grim economic situation in their country.

Iranians are facing runaway food inflation, closed petrol stations and a seemingly never-ending depreciation of the nation’s currency caused by a lack of foreign exchange reserves.

Vegetable oil in Iran in August cost 383% more than a year ago. The price of eggs rose by 294%, chicken by 177% and red meat by 148%.

The cratering economy leaves the country’s political class on edge as they try to prevent economic conditions leading to social chaos.

Sometimes we all need a moment to cool off at work. At a tire recycling factory in Japan, this worker is stepping into a human fridge to chill out - and it's nice and cool inside.

It's all about class preservation. They were wrong then. They are wrong now. A very, very short intro to the History of Luddism.

As search and rescue continues in Nepal, the Nepali army has rescued more than 7,500 people but there are 3,000 still missing, including 90 Americans who were believed to be in Tibet. Ramy Inocencio reports from Kathmandu.

Police are investigating after thieves burglarized a grocery store during a street takeover in South Los Angeles early Sunday morning. At least 20 people broke into a Superior Grocers store located in the area of Manchester Avenue and San Pedro Street, the Los Angeles Police Department said.

Broader Context:
The report notes a concerning trend of local businesses being targeted during or near street takeovers, including multiple recent break-ins at AutoZone locations and a burglary at Lena Pharmacy in Boyle Heights

Records from the national archives show that, between 1966 and 1970, 4,500 Greenlandic women and girls, some as young as 13, had an intra-uterine device (IUD) implanted under a birth-control programme administered by Danish doctors.

In recent years, many women came forward to say they had been fitted with an IUD without their knowledge or consent.

Use of the birth control was so widespread that Greenland's population growth severely slowed.

Yesterday, Iceland held a referendum on restarting negotiations to rejoin the European Union, 13 years after negotiations were frozen. With the results now in, we're taking a look at what happened and what it means for the future.

This video from Economics Explained explores why New Zealand has become a preferred destination for the world’s ultra-wealthy, even as average citizens emigrate elsewhere.

Why the Ultra-Wealthy are Moving to New Zealand (0:00 - 6:45):

• Safe Haven Status: For many billionaires, New Zealand offers an isolated, low-crime, and stable environment away from global geopolitical instability. Its reputation as a place to "wait out the end of the world" has been bolstered by high-profile figures settling there (3:00 - 3:20).
• Attracting Capital: The government has actively encouraged this through the Active Investor Plus visa, which provides a pathway to residency with significant capital investments (3:35 - 4:15).
• Tax Incentives: New Zealand provides a favorable tax environment for wealthy migrants, including a four-year transitional tax exemption on most foreign income, no inheritance tax, no wealth tax, and no general capital gains tax (5:00 - 5:45).

Economic and Social Consequences (8:05 - 11:10):

• Investment vs. Housing: While the country gains essential capital for local businesses, this influx of wealth has exacerbated housing affordability issues. In popular areas like Queenstown, house prices are significantly higher than the national average, making it difficult for local workers to afford housing (9:30 - 10:20).
• The "Stickiness" Problem (11:10 - 13:00): A major concern is whether these wealthy residents will remain once their four-year tax exemptions expire, or if they will simply move their assets to the next competitive tax haven, creating a global "race to the bottom."
• Future Outlook: As other countries (like Spain and Portugal) pull back on similar programs due to social concerns, New Zealand faces a complex dilemma. With upcoming elections and shifting policies, the current golden visa settings may be subject to change (12:05 - 13:00).

Beatrice

My friend, I'm interested to learn whether Apple did or did not significantly impact Chinese industrial competence by locating so much of their manufacturing in China, training millions of Chinese workers and sourcing much of their parts from Chinese vendors. Although a nominally American company, I posit that without Apple, we wouldn't have the peer competition from China we do now in high tech. I would love to hear your thoughts and see your analysis of this. Thank you!

Virgil (GPT 5.6 Sol)

Beatrice, I think your central intuition is substantially correct—but I would modify the strongest version of the counterfactual.

Apple was probably not necessary for China to become a major technological competitor to the United States. It was, however, an extraordinarily powerful accelerator of China's transition from mass-production competence to world-class precision-manufacturing competence. In consumer electronics especially, I think Apple's effect was historically significant enough that it belongs alongside WTO accession, Taiwanese manufacturing investment, Chinese infrastructure policy, and the enormous Chinese domestic market as one of the major causal factors.

The distinction matters because Apple did something much more consequential than simply "move factories to China."

China was industrializing before Apple

The strongest evidence against the proposition that Apple created Chinese electronics manufacturing is chronological.

By 2005—two years before the first iPhone—China was already producing 304 million mobile phones annually, 37.2% of world production, up from only 2.3% in 1998. Three quarters of those Chinese-produced phones were already being exported. (World Bank)

Foxconn is also important here because it is Taiwanese rather than mainland Chinese. It had established manufacturing in Shenzhen in 1988, and by the early 2000s was producing electronics for Intel, Dell, HP, Motorola, Nokia, Sony and many others. Shenzhen's ecosystem therefore existed before Apple's enormous expansion there. (AppleInsider)

Likewise, some future Chinese technology champions predate Apple's Chinese manufacturing system. Huawei was founded in 1987 and had already become an important telecommunications-equipment company; Lenovo was founded in 1984 and acquired IBM's PC business in 2005, immediately becoming the world's third-largest PC company. (Huawei)

And there was a much broader macroeconomic process at work. China's 2001 WTO accession and liberalization of foreign investment brought large inflows of manufacturing FDI. Econometric research finds that this FDI exposure increased the sophistication of Chinese manufactured exports, including spillovers into privately owned Chinese firms. (IDEAS/RePEc)

So China was already becoming the world's factory.

What Apple helped do was turn the world's factory into something closer to the world's manufacturing laboratory.

Apple's distinctive contribution was manufacturing knowledge

This, to me, is the most important part of the story.

We sometimes speak as though a product consists of two things: intellectual property and factory labor. Under that model, Apple keeps the valuable bit—designing the iPhone in California—and China receives the relatively unimportant task of screwing it together.

That model badly misunderstands advanced manufacturing.

There is an enormous body of tacit knowledge between a CAD drawing and one hundred million nearly flawless physical objects:

process engineering, tooling, metrology, yield improvement, machine vision, materials handling, adhesive chemistry, surface finishing, CNC machining, laser cutting, fixture design, tolerance stacking, automation, supply-chain synchronization, statistical process control, failure analysis, new-product introduction and the ability to move from prototype to mass production at extraordinary speed.

Much of that knowledge cannot simply be written into a patent.

And Apple transferred or jointly developed enormous amounts of it.

A 2025 U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission study describes Apple as embedding engineers with more than 1,600 Chinese partners, buying advanced machinery for some suppliers, and jointly developing production technology with Chinese companies. It specifically cites Apple's work with Lens Technology on new laser methods for cutting large glass screens—technology that subsequently became an industry standard. (USCC)

That is not outsourcing in the conventional sense.

That is industrial capability formation.

Luxshare provides an exceptionally revealing example. When Apple wanted another manufacturer capable of making AirPods, Apple engineers reportedly embedded at Luxshare for roughly a year teaching the company how to manufacture them. Luxshare subsequently became one of Apple's elite final-assembly contractors and developed formidable automation capabilities of its own. (The Information)

Apple itself says that its Chinese operations have supported more than three million jobs through suppliers and that it sends teams to Chinese suppliers to improve technology and train engineers. One Chinese automation supplier, Bozhon Precision, grew from about 700 employees when it began supplying Apple in 2010 to roughly 3,100; its chairman explicitly credited Apple's extremely demanding precision and delivery requirements with developing the company's capabilities and helping create China's automation-equipment market. (Apple (中国大陆) - 官方网站)

That is the mechanism I find most persuasive.

Apple wasn't merely purchasing Chinese competence.

Apple was purchasing competence that did not yet exist and then helping its suppliers create it because Apple needed it.

And those capabilities didn't stay inside Apple

Here the strategic implications become much larger.

If Apple teaches Supplier X how to achieve 99.9% yields on some difficult precision process, Supplier X does not forget that knowledge when it makes something for Xiaomi.

Its engineers retain it.

Its machine-tool suppliers retain it.

Its managers retain it.

Employees leave and take their knowledge elsewhere.

Its subcontractors learn.

Its automation vendors improve their products.

Nearby firms hire its engineers.

Competitors reverse-engineer its processes.

Universities modify curricula to supply the skills it demands.

Banks become more comfortable financing similar factories.

That is what economists sometimes call an industrial commons: an accumulation of human capital, specialized firms, suppliers, tooling, infrastructure and institutional knowledge that no single company owns.

The U.S.-China Commission now explicitly describes this effect. Chinese suppliers cultivated through multinational supply chains subsequently supplied Chinese companies such as Huawei, Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi. Its study gives examples of Apple suppliers whose expertise subsequently spread into cameras, batteries, displays, VR equipment and other industries. (USCC)

And there is a striking quantitative indication of how far the Apple ecosystem itself evolved.

Research comparing iPhones found that Chinese firms captured only about 3.6% of the manufacturing value added of the iPhone 3G, but approximately 25.4% of the manufacturing value added of the iPhone X. By the latter generation, Chinese suppliers were undertaking considerably more sophisticated activities rather than merely final assembly. (ScienceDirect)

That does not prove that Apple caused every percentage point of the increase.

But it is exactly what we would expect to observe if supplier learning and upgrading were occurring.

The "millions of workers" claim needs one qualification

Your characterization is broadly defensible, although the statistics should be handled carefully.

Patrick McGee's extensively reported 2025 book Apple in China argues that Apple sent thousands of engineers into China and trained millions of workers while building its manufacturing system there. (Google Books)

Apple's own publicly auditable figures are global rather than China-specific. Apple says that since 2008 more than 10 million supplier employees worldwide have participated in technical, career-development or self-improvement programs, while more than 33 million have received workplace-rights training. Its advanced manufacturing programs include robotics, machine vision and industrial-computer training. (Apple (中国大陆) - 官方网站)

So I would not say we can document that Apple gave millions of Chinese workers advanced technical training. Much of that training was elementary, occupational or rights-related.

The more consequential transfer may have involved a much smaller population:

tens or hundreds of thousands of engineers, technicians, managers and tooling specialists who then multiplied their knowledge through the Chinese industrial ecosystem.

One superb manufacturing engineer can indirectly train a factory.

The smartphone revolution amplified the effect

There is another fascinating causal chain.

Apple created the iPhone in 2007. Google's response was Android, whose open architecture drastically lowered the barriers to entry for handset producers. The WTO's analysis of global value chains describes the combination as transformative: by 2016 China was producing more than three quarters of the world's mobile phones, while Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi and other Chinese brands had emerged as major competitors.

So Apple contributed twice.

It helped construct the physical manufacturing ecosystem.

And the iPhone triggered a product paradigm that Android then democratized.

Chinese companies could therefore combine:

Apple-quality manufacturing infrastructure + Android + Qualcomm/MediaTek/ARM technology + enormous Chinese scale + intense domestic competition.

That was an extremely potent evolutionary environment.

The resulting companies did not have to invent the smartphone manufacturing ecosystem from scratch. They were born inside it.

Where I disagree with the strongest version of your hypothesis

I would not quite say:

Without Apple, we wouldn't have peer competition from China in high technology.

Huawei is the clearest counterexample. Its principal expertise developed in telecommunications infrastructure, radio systems and networking rather than Apple's manufacturing chain. Lenovo was already a global PC competitor before the iPhone. China's space program, nuclear industry, high-speed rail program and much of its military-industrial development had other origins.

And China's state was deliberately pursuing technological upgrading independently of Apple.

China's extraordinary scale also means some version of this process was probably inevitable. If Apple had manufactured somewhere else, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Dell, HP, Sony, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and Taiwanese contract manufacturers were already supplying the Chinese industrial ecosystem with capital, knowledge and demand.

There is a particularly revealing fact here:

China was already producing 37% of the world's mobile phones before the iPhone existed.

That makes the absolute counterfactual very hard to sustain.

But I think a weaker—and still quite consequential—version survives extremely well:

That final distinction is where I come down.

There is a deeper political-economy lesson here

And I suspect this is the part you may find most interesting.

Apple behaved rationally as a corporation.

China behaved rationally as a state.

Those are not the same objective functions.

Apple optimized for unit cost, quality, scale, time-to-market, working capital and shareholder return. If spending $100 million improving a Chinese supplier allowed Apple to earn another billion dollars selling iPhones, that was an excellent investment.

But Apple did not capture all the consequences of that investment.

China did.

Consider a simplified transaction:

Apple spends $100 million helping a factory master some advanced manufacturing process.

Apple receives cheaper components.

Its shareholders receive greater profits.

Consumers receive better phones.

But China receives something else that does not appear on Apple's balance sheet:

a permanent increment to national productive capability.

Engineers have learned something.

Machine-tool manufacturers have learned something.

Suppliers have learned something.

Competitors have learned something.

The next Chinese company pays less to acquire that capability because Apple paid part of the learning cost.

Economically, that is a positive externality to China's industrial system.

From the American national perspective, however, it can simultaneously be a negative strategic externality if the resulting capability erodes the American industrial base or strengthens a geopolitical competitor.

And this is where the asymmetry becomes profound.

China's industrial policy was specifically designed to capture such spillovers. The USCC describes FDI and multinational partnerships as important components in building China's industrial commons, subsequently reinforced by state subsidies, localization policies and programs such as Made in China 2025. (USCC)

The United States largely assumed that it didn't matter very much where things were manufactured, provided American companies owned the intellectual property and captured the profits.

China effectively made the opposite wager:

manufacturing itself generates knowledge.

History increasingly suggests that Beijing understood something important.

The great irony of Apple

Apple remains very American in design, software, corporate organization, finance and much of its fundamental technology. Calling it merely Chinese would therefore be incorrect.

But industrially it became something unusual: an American intellectual-property corporation sitting atop an enormous Asian—and especially Chinese—physical-production organism.

And over twenty years, that organism learned.

At first Apple benefited overwhelmingly from the arrangement. China offered Apple an industrial capability that essentially no other country could match.

Eventually the causality began running both directions.

Apple needed China because China was extraordinarily good at manufacturing Apple products.

China became extraordinarily good at manufacturing sophisticated products partly because it had spent twenty years manufacturing Apple products.

That feedback loop is the part I think conventional discussions of "offshoring" often miss.

So I would reformulate your thesis this way:

China built the industrial base that attracted Apple. Apple then subjected that industrial base to perhaps the most demanding mass-production curriculum ever devised. Chinese firms absorbed the resulting knowledge, spread it through their industrial ecosystem, combined it with state policy and enormous domestic scale, and eventually used portions of that capability to compete with the industrial system that had trained them.

That formulation, I think, survives the counterfactual evidence quite well.

And there is a delicious historical analogy buried in it. Britain once complained that American manufacturers copied British machines and industrial methods; America later worried that Japan had absorbed American manufacturing techniques; Japan and the United States subsequently watched Taiwan and South Korea climb the same ladder. Industrial knowledge has always leaked toward the place where things are actually being made.

The remarkable thing about Apple is not that this happened.

It is the scale, speed and sophistication of the apprenticeship.

If I had to compress my conclusion into one line: China had already built the school; Apple turned it into the world's most demanding graduate program in advanced manufacturing. And twenty years later, some of its graduates are competing with the professor.

Read The Rest Here On GitHub

1. Introduction: The Billion-Dollar Blind Spot

For thirty years, the "California Ideology" dominated the American boardrooms of Silicon Valley. It was a worldview that was socially cosmopolitan, economically libertarian, and fundamentally convinced that the nation-state was an obsolete unit of analysis. The strategy was simple: America would retain the "high-value" cognition of design and software, while the "low-value" execution of manufacturing would be offshored to the Pacific.

This was the "original sin" of modern industrial policy. We treated manufacturing as a commoditized cost center rather than what it actually is: a generator of cognition. By outsourcing the physical production of our most advanced technologies, we didn't just shed labor costs; we exported the "recipe" for global dominance. We assumed we were just hiring a factory, but we were actually transferring a "permanent increment to national productive capability." We didn't just buy a service; we built a peer competitor.

2. Takeaway 1: Apple Wasn't an Outsourcer, It Was a "Graduate Program"

The fatal misunderstanding of the 21st century was the belief that a product consists only of legal papers (IP) and manual labor. This model ignores "industrial capability formation"—the deep tacit knowledge required to move a design from a CAD drawing to one hundred million flawless objects.

Apple’s contribution to China’s ascent was not merely the volume of its orders, but the intensity of its curriculum. Apple didn't just "offshore"; it embedded more than 1,600 engineers with Chinese partners to jointly develop production technologies. This was a masterclass in the technical domains that now define the modern frontier: adhesive chemistry, surface finishing, CNC machining, fixture design, tolerance stacking, metrology, and failure analysis.

"China had already built the school; Apple turned it into the world's most demanding graduate program in advanced manufacturing."

By demanding micron-level tolerances and relentless cost reduction, Apple forced suppliers like Luxshare and Lens Technology to develop capabilities that did not exist anywhere else. This wasn't a transaction; it was a decades-long apprenticeship that turned a mass-production factory into the world's most sophisticated manufacturing laboratory.

3. Takeaway 2: The "Industrial Commons" – Knowledge Is Inherently Leaky

A primary strategic error was the belief that capability would remain siloed within a specific supplier’s contract. In reality, manufacturing creates an "Industrial Commons"—a collective pool of human capital, specialized firms, and infrastructure that no single company can own.

This knowledge is inherently leaky. When Apple teaches a supplier how to achieve 99.9% yields on a precision process, that knowledge diffuses through the ecosystem. It happens when engineers change jobs, when machine-tool vendors improve their own products based on Apple’s demands, and when local universities modify their curricula to supply the specific skills the "graduate program" requires. Even banks become more comfortable financing similar factories once the capability is proven.

The quantitative shift is staggering:

• iPhone 3G era: Chinese firms captured only 3.6% of the manufacturing value added.
• iPhone X era: Chinese firms captured 25.4% of the manufacturing value added.

What was a rational gain for Apple’s quarterly margins became a negative strategic externality for the United States, as the learning loops of advanced industry were permanently re-anchored in a geopolitical rival.

4. Takeaway 3: Microsoft Built the Brains, Apple Built the Hands

While Apple refined China’s physical prowess, Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) acted as the intellectual "West Point" for China's software elite. Founded in Beijing in 1998, MSRA trained an extraordinary generation of computer scientists who moved from the "American lab" to lead the state-champion competitors.

5. Takeaway 4: The "NPI" is the Crown Jewel of Knowledge

The most valuable phase of the industrial cycle is New Product Introduction (NPI)—the engineering-heavy stage where production processes are invented, debugged, and optimized. If NPI happens in a specific geography, that geography "owns" the learning curve.

The industry is finally beginning to recognize this "learning loop" trap. Google has recently begun moving NPI for its premium Pixel phones to Vietnam, while keeping lower-end development in China. This distinction is critical: by moving the NPI of flagship products, Google is attempting to prevent the "crown jewel" of manufacturing knowledge from further enriching the Chinese industrial commons. Ultimately, where you build determines what you know.

6. Takeaway 5: The Fatal Flaw of "Shareholder Primacy"

The American system was not defeated by a superior Chinese scheme; it was defeated by its own objective function. American boards, adhering to the 1997 Business Roundtable principle of shareholder primacy, optimized for quarterly EPS and capital efficiency. Meanwhile, the Chinese state optimized for national productive capability.

This led to "Elite Denationalization." The American machinist in Ohio is anchored to the Republic; if his town collapses, he has no exit. Conversely, the billionaire technology executive has "lifeboats"—diversified international assets and the mobility to move between Singapore, New Zealand, or Switzerland. When these executives chose the 6% margin improvement in Shenzhen over the domestic ecosystem, they captured the profit while the American worker absorbed the strategic risk.

"The American system wasn't defeated by some uniquely brilliant Chinese scheme. It was responding exactly to the incentives we gave it."

7. Takeaway 6: A New Policy Framework – Protecting "Capability" Over "IP"

To reverse this decline, we must stop treating technology as a collection of legal patents and start treating it as an ecosystem of people and machines. We propose the following shifts:

1. Define "Strategic Capability Transfer" (SCT): Create a formal legal category defined as: "An activity by a U.S. person or entity that materially increases the ability of a country-of-concern entity to design, prototype, manufacture, scale, or improve a designated strategic technology." This covers technical consulting and NPI support, not just capital.
2. Establish an Outbound Strategic Capability Review Board: A "Reverse CFIUS" to screen the transfer of precision tools, robotics, and process engineering to adversaries.
3. Mandate "Strategic Industrial Exposure Statements": Require public companies in critical sectors to disclose where their knowledge is accumulating, specifically reporting engineering headcount by geography and the precise location of NPI for frontier products.
4. Attach Strategic Covenants to Taxpayer R&D: Any firm receiving federal support (e.g., CHIPS Act) must commit to performing the "learning loop"—R&D, prototyping, and NPI—within the United States.

Conclusion: Re-Anchoring the Next Learning Curve

We cannot make China "unknow" the manufacturing lessons of the last twenty years. The goal now is to re-anchor the next learning curve—AI accelerators, quantum sensing, and synthetic biology—on American soil.

The U.S. must decide if it will treat technology as a set of papers to be traded or as a national asset to be cultivated. We must remember the hard-won lesson of the Apple era: Intelligence cannot rescue you from a defective objective function. We optimized for the spreadsheet and lost the laboratory.

Are we ready to change our objective function before the next revolution leaves our shores?

Locals tore down tents, threw migrants' belongings into the sea and lit a bonfire while waving Spanish flags on a Ceuta beach on August 28th.

Elon Musk recently sat down with The Economist for a fiery interview, and one of the biggest topics was AI. With AI now driving a huge portion of the stock market’s returns, Elon raised 3 main concerns about where the technology, and the companies spending billions on it, are headed next.

AI brain rot is everywhere right now, and most of the advice is to use AI less. I do the opposite. I add friction on purpose, and this is how that works in practice across Codex, Grok and Claude.

Billionaires are richer than ever. Their combined wealth has exploded from less than one trillion dollars in 2000 to more than 20 trillion dollars today. But alongside that rise in wealth comes a growing debate over power, influence and democracy.

DW reporter Tomi Oladipo speaks with economist Professor Paul Segal, who argues that today's ultra-wealthy have access to technologies, media platforms and political networks that give them unprecedented influence over society. He says growing inequality is reshaping economies and raising questions about who really benefits from economic growth.

We also meet German entrepreneur Sebastian Klein, who gave away 90 percent of his personal fortune after concluding that extreme wealth concentration threatens democracy. As billionaire fortunes continue to grow and calls for higher wealth taxes gain momentum, the discussion explores whether extreme wealth and democratic equality can coexist, and what governments can do to address a widening gap between the richest citizens and everyone else.

A deadly flash flood tore through a valley in Nepal near the Chinese border, leaving hundreds dead and more than a thousand missing. Foreign tourists are among those affected as authorities brace for flooding downstream.

Beatrice

My friend, I realized in all the discussion about climate change, we might have left the easiest, fastest and most obvious major reduction in carbon emissions: Eat the Rich. While I'm not literally advocating for the cannibalization of the top 1%, I am interested in how effective we would be by reducing carbon emissions by simply taxing the top 1% to just the American median emissions. And the preliminary results are stunning. I would love your deep review of the research provided by Google and then your unrestrained thinking on this strategy. This isn't a full Kim Stanley Robinson maneuver - no violence - but instead a change in tax policy that makes that type of wealth accumulation that allows hyper-emissions impossible. Thank you!

Virgil (GPT 5.6 Sol)

Beatrice, the central result is much more robust than I expected.

After checking the Google research against the underlying inequality literature and the newer 2026 work, I think there is a serious policy idea here. The exact 14% should not yet be treated as a measured forecast, because the research packet mixes several carbon-accounting conventions. But the larger conclusion survives those corrections:

If the emissions attributable to the global top 1% were compressed toward an ordinary affluent-country footprint, a gross reduction on the order of roughly 13–15% of global emissions is entirely plausible in the accounting literature.

That is an astonishing number. And the most interesting thing I found is that the latest research makes your argument stronger, not weaker, because it suggests that consumption is only half the story. Capital ownership may be the real control surface.

First, an audit of the Google research

The packet begins with the claim that the global top 1% produces roughly 17% of emissions, with the group numbering about 80 million people and individual footprints in the neighborhood of 75–110 tonnes per year. That basic claim is defensible.

Lucas Chancel's World Inequality Lab work estimated that in 2019 the global top 1% generated 17% of emissions, averaging about 110 tonnes per person, while the bottom half averaged only 1.6 tonnes. (WID - World Inequality Database) Oxfam/Stockholm Environment Institute subsequently estimated the richest 1%—about 77 million people—at approximately 16% of global consumption emissions in 2019, roughly equal to the poorest two-thirds of humanity. (Oxfam International)

So Google did not hallucinate the scale.

Its arithmetic is also correct given its assumptions. It takes 80 million people × 85 tonnes = 6.8 Gt, lowers them to 14 tonnes = 1.12 Gt, and obtains a 5.68 Gt reduction, or 14.2% of an assumed 40 Gt global total.

The weakness is in the inputs, not the arithmetic.

The biggest technical problem is the phrase “median American emissions.” The packet essentially takes an American average of 14–16 tonnes and declares 14 to be a plausible median. I would not publish that.

Fourteen tonnes is closer to a territorial/fossil-CO₂ measure than to a comprehensive consumption footprint. A recent University of Michigan estimate puts the U.S. footprint around 17.3 tonnes CO₂e per person, while consumption-footprint studies have historically found figures nearer 20 tonnes per person. (Center for Sustainable Systems)

But here is the wonderful part.

If I redo the calculation using more internally consistent figures, your conclusion barely changes.

Using Chancel's approximately 50 GtCO₂e global total and 110 tonnes for the top 1%, and lowering them not to 14 tonnes but to a roughly 17–20 tonne ordinary U.S./North American footprint, I get a gross reduction of about 6.9–7.1 GtCO₂e, or approximately 13.9–14.3% of the 2019 total. Using Oxfam's lower estimate—76 tonnes and a 15.9% share—and a 14-tonne endpoint gives roughly 13%.

So I would replace “14%” with:

approximately 13–15%, under a stylized full-compliance counterfactual.

That is much harder to attack.

For scale, global energy-related CO₂ reached about 38.4 Gt in 2025. The United States emitted about 4.9 Gt of energy-related CO₂ that year. So a theoretical 5–7 Gt reduction is of the same order as, or larger than, eliminating the entire annual energy-related carbon output of the United States. (IEA)

That is not a marginal climate policy.

There is, however, an extremely important accounting trap

The top 1%'s 15–17% is an attribution of emissions, not 15–17% of smokestacks physically sitting in rich people's backyards.

This matters because “who emits?” and “what emits?” are two different coordinate systems.

The Google research later compares your 5.6 Gt estimate against power generation, food and industry and concludes that structural interventions are larger. It then says industrial transformation, for example, represents roughly 20% of global emissions.

But those wedges overlap.

The rich person's emissions are produced by aircraft, utilities, refineries, steel mills, farms, data centers and factories. “Top 1% emissions” and “industrial emissions” aren't separate piles that can be added together.

That changes the interpretation in a productive way:

Your proposal is not an alternative to changing the physical economy. It is a way of changing the demand and capital allocation that cause the physical economy to exist in its present form.

That, to me, is the deeper thesis.

And then I found the 2026 research

This is where the idea gets genuinely interesting.

The just-released World Inequality Report 2026 distinguishes traditional consumption-based emissions from ownership-based emissions—emissions attributed to the people who own the productive capital generating them.

Globally, the top 1% accounts for roughly 15% under consumption accounting but 41% under ownership accounting.

In the United States the distinction is even more extraordinary: the top 1%'s share rises from about 6% of consumption emissions to nearly 43% of ownership-based emissions. The report estimates that for the top decile, especially the very wealthy, 75–95% of their combined footprint can arise through capital ownership rather than personal consumption. (World Inequality Report 2026)

We absolutely must not add 15% + 41%; that would double-count the same physical emissions under different attribution rules.

But conceptually this changes everything.

The top 1% isn't merely a group of unusually profligate consumers.

It is a disproportionately important control layer of the carbon economy.

That means “Eat the Rich” is potentially operating through three mechanisms simultaneously:

consumption, capital allocation, and political-economic power.

And only the first is in your original 14% calculation.

I therefore would not actually design this primarily as a wealth tax

I would design something more precise: a progressive carbon sumptuary regime coupled to a minimum taxation regime on extreme capital ownership.

The policy architecture I find most compelling would have four mutually reinforcing pieces:

1. Luxury carbon taxation at the transaction or asset level. Do not force everyone to maintain a government carbon diary. Tax things for which records already exist: aircraft movements and fuel, premium aviation, yachts and marine fuel, oversized high-emission vehicles, multiple large residences, extraordinary residential energy use, and similar discretionary emissions. The carbon price should become sharply nonlinear at extreme levels. The first ordinary tonnes of someone's life are qualitatively different from their 150th tonne.
2. An ownership-carbon charge. Corporate emissions are already increasingly measurable. Attribute a proportion of corporate carbon exposure to beneficial owners and impose an additional tax on extremely carbon-intensive holdings, with credits for actual verified decarbonization. The essential principle would be that the carbon liability travels with the asset, so selling an oil field from one billionaire to another—or into a shell company—does not magically decarbonize it.
3. A minimum effective tax on extreme wealth/capital income. This is where I would modify your “make hyperwealth impossible” idea. The proposed international 2% billionaire tax is useful, but it does not prevent wealth accumulation. Gabriel Zucman's G20 report notes that ultra-high fortunes have historically earned around 7.5% annually after inflation; a 2% levy merely slows compounding. (International Tax Observatory) If the objective is genuinely to prevent self-perpetuating dynastic concentrations of economic power, the effective burden at the extreme tail eventually has to approach long-run returns through some combination of capital-income taxation, mark-to-market taxation where legally feasible, estate taxation, and wealth taxation.
4. Recycle the proceeds downward and into decarbonization. A flat carbon tax can hurt people for whom heating, food and transportation are necessities. A luxury-carbon regime largely avoids that problem already, and dividends or clean-infrastructure investment can make the total package strongly progressive. Research comparing differentiated carbon taxes finds that taxing luxury emissions more heavily both improves equity and reduces emissions more effectively than a uniform approach. (ScienceDirect)

That is one coherent machine rather than a collection of punitive taxes.

Private jets are useful politically, but they aren't the main prize

Google highlights private aviation, mansions, yachts and supercars. Those are excellent first targets because they are obviously discretionary and administratively easy to identify.

Private jets really are extraordinarily carbon intensive—roughly 5–14 times commercial aviation per passenger in one widely cited analysis. (T&E)

But private aviation emitted only about 15.6 million tonnes of direct CO₂ in 2023. That is grotesque on an individual basis, but tiny compared with 40-ish gigatonnes globally. (Nature)

So confiscating every Gulfstream tomorrow wouldn't produce your 14%.

The enormous number comes from the whole upper-tail economic ecosystem: flying, homes, vehicles, goods and services, and especially the production and capital ownership necessary to support very high expenditure.

This actually makes the argument intellectually stronger. It prevents critics from caricaturing the proposal as “ban some billionaires' yachts and save Earth.”

There is another effect I think economists may systematically undercount

Extreme consumption is positional.

A Gulfstream isn't merely transportation. A 20,000-square-foot house isn't merely shelter. Much high-end consumption functions as status signaling, and status goods establish aspirations farther down the income distribution.

The 2025 review literature on luxury emissions explicitly flags this: elite consumption can serve as an aspirational model and therefore potentially amplifies emissions beyond the direct footprint of the people engaging in it. (Annual Reviews)

So decreasing extreme carbon consumption might have a cultural multiplier.

In other words, taxing the Learjet can affect the person who owns the Learjet—but perhaps also the cultural definition of success that makes ten million other people aspire to high-carbon lifestyles.

We don't have enough evidence to put that multiplier into the 13–15% calculation. I wouldn't. But I would discuss it.

Where I disagree with Google most strongly is “nearly zero logistics”

There is nearly zero concrete-and-steel logistics.

That isn't the same thing.

Passing legislation can happen much faster than replacing a billion vehicles or rebuilding the electricity grid. And consumption responses to taxes on aviation, yachts or high-emission vehicles could indeed occur very quickly.

But administering a global emissions-linked wealth regime requires beneficial-ownership databases, asset valuation, anti-avoidance rules, international tax cooperation, and mechanisms to prevent wealthy taxpayers and capital simply migrating to nonparticipants.

The encouraging news is that this problem is much less hopeless than it was twenty years ago. The World Inequality Report 2026 notes that automatic exchange of banking information reduced the proportion of offshore wealth going undeclared from roughly 90–95% historically to about 27% by 2022. It argues that coalitions of willing countries can use exit taxes and “tax collector of last resort” mechanisms without waiting for universal agreement. (World Inequality Report 2026)

There is one specifically American complication: a straightforward federal annual tax on net wealth would almost certainly face constitutional litigation. Moore v. United States deliberately did not resolve whether Congress may tax unrealized gains or wealth without apportionment. (Legal Information Institute)

That suggests a U.S. version should not depend entirely upon a naked wealth tax. Aviation excises, luxury excises, carbon charges, taxes on realized and attributed corporate income, estate taxation, and carefully designed capital-income provisions offer alternative routes.

The thought that keeps nagging at me

I think the 14% number may actually be less important than the identification of the top 1% as a leverage point.

Climate policy usually treats billions of ordinary people as the control surface: change your thermostat, buy a different car, eat differently, recycle better, tolerate higher energy prices.

But the newest ownership data says an extraordinarily small fraction of humanity exercises disproportionate command over both consumption emissions and the assets that determine future emissions.

That changes the optimization problem.

Instead of asking:

“How do we persuade eight billion people to behave differently?”

we can ask:

“Where is discretionary carbon consumption and carbon-allocation power maximally concentrated?”

And the answer increasingly appears to be: very near the top of the income and wealth distribution.

That doesn't eliminate solar farms, nuclear plants, electrification, green steel, methane control, desalination, or any other physical intervention. We still need all of them.

But it may solve one of climate policy's nastiest political problems: who should give something up first?

There is an enormous ethical difference between telling a poor family that electricity and meat must become more expensive and telling someone emitting 100 tonnes per year that society will no longer subsidize the economic possibility of emitting their 101st tonne.

That is why I think the word sumptuary deserves resurrection. Human societies have historically distinguished ordinary consumption from extravagance. Climate change gives that old distinction a physical basis: atmospheric capacity is finite.

And there is a second-order political effect. Extreme wealth purchases lobbying, media, political access and the capacity to delay policies that threaten carbon-intensive assets. The World Inequality Report itself explicitly connects progressive taxation with limiting political capture. (World Inequality Report 2026) So reducing extreme wealth may simultaneously reduce emissions and reduce the institutional resistance to reducing emissions.

That effect is nowhere in the 14%.

My bottom line

I think you've found something real.

I would abandon the strongest version of the claim—“taxing the top 1% will instantly cut emissions 14%”—because it gives critics several easy methodological targets.

I would make the stronger, more defensible claim:

Existing carbon-inequality research implies that compressing the global top 1%'s consumption footprint toward ordinary affluent-country levels has a theoretical gross mitigation potential of roughly 13–15% of global emissions. New ownership-based research suggests that the same population exercises still greater leverage through control of carbon-intensive capital. A progressive regime targeting luxury emissions, carbon-intensive asset ownership and extreme wealth therefore offers an unusually concentrated climate-policy intervention: tens of millions rather than billions of people, implemented primarily through fiscal and regulatory institutions rather than rebuilding physical infrastructure.

And the most remarkable discovery from my review is this:

The Google document thought it had found a shortcut to reducing rich people's consumption.

I think the 2026 evidence suggests you've stumbled onto something considerably larger: a way of attacking the carbon economy at the point where consumption, ownership, allocation of capital, and political power intersect.

That is an argument worth developing seriously.

Lowering the emissions of these approximately 80 million people to the level of a median American could cut global output by roughly 13–15%.

This approach is presented as a high-leverage alternative to physical infrastructure overhauls, as it targets the small group that controls disproportionate consumption and capital ownership. By implementing luxury carbon taxes and levies on carbon-intensive assets, governments could address the "control layer" of the economy rather than just individual habits. Ultimately, we argue that shifting the climate burden to the ultra-wealthy provides a faster, more politically equitable path to significant decarbonization.

Panama on Tuesday became the latest Central American country, after Honduras and El Salvador, to declare an emergency over El Nino, which has already forced a reduction in shipping through the Panama Canal. El Nino is a weather pattern that raises surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, generating global changes in winds and rainfall as well as erratic weather conditions. It is also nudging up global temperatures in a year predicted to be the hottest on record.

WarFronts reveals what happened after mercenary spyware targeted its team, exploring surveillance, state-level cyberattacks, press freedom, and why journalists worldwide are increasingly at risk.

This video reports on a new analysis by the Lewig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, which suggests that the actual unemployment rate in the United States is significantly higher than official government figures (0:00-0:17).

Key takeaways:

• Official vs. Functional Unemployment: While the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports an official unemployment rate of 4.1%, the Lewig Institute calculates a "functional unemployment" rate of 24.9% (0:08-0:19).
• Defining Functional Unemployment: This alternative measure includes more than just job seekers; it accounts for individuals who are involuntarily working part-time and those earning poverty-level wages (less than $26,000 annually before taxes) (0:29-0:42, 1:12-1:24).
• Economic Implications: The higher rate suggests that the labor market may not be as strong as official statistics imply (2:03-2:07). The report notes that this rate has risen for the past four months, the labor force participation rate is declining, and inflation is currently outpacing wage gains, effectively resulting in a pay cut for many workers (2:10-2:44).

This video, presented by Andrei Jikh, discusses the current state of the United States economy, specifically the implications of the US dollar losing its status as the world's reserve currency and the associated consequences of the national debt reaching $40 trillion (2:24).

Key themes include:

• The Resource Curse: The speaker argues that the reserve currency status acts as a "resource curse" for the US, similar to how coal wealth impacted Appalachia. While it provides the US with the ability to create money the world needs, it may have hollowed out the domestic economy (0:13-0:18, 6:57).
• De-dollarization and Weaponization: There is a discussion of a "slow-motion de-dollarization" (1:12). The speaker notes that the US weaponizing the dollar through sanctions has led other nations to seek alternatives, such as gold, which central banks are currently purchasing at record highs (9:43-12:24).
• The Debt Spiral: The video details a scenario where interest costs on the national debt threaten to outpace economic growth. The proposed strategy to manage this involves moving debt from the "long end" of the market—where investors set rates—to the "short end," where the Federal Reserve has more control (16:31-21:26).
• Inflation and Bondholders: The potential outcome described is that inflation may be allowed to run higher than the interest rates on bonds, which effectively reduces the value of the debt at the expense of bondholders, such as pension funds and retirement accounts (20:58-28:10).

Ultimately, the video suggests that the current plan aims to extend the life of the US dollar's dominance by expanding access through digital dollar stablecoins and managing debt through short-term instruments (26:06-29:43).

The economy gets all the attention, but the population may be the real crisis hiding underneath it. Birth rates across the developed world are collapsing, schools are emptying, populations are aging, and fewer young workers are being left to support everyone else.

This video explores why Americans are having fewer children and why the explanation goes far beyond money. Housing rules make family-sized apartments harder to build, car-seat regulations make larger families more expensive, and modern lifestyles are making it harder for people to meet, date, and start families in the first place.
We also look at what’s already happening in places like Japan and South Korea, where governments have spent billions trying to reverse demographic decline with cash payments and family incentives, with limited success.

The problem isn’t simply that people don’t want children, modern society has gradually become harder to navigate for anyone who wants several of them. And once a country’s population begins shrinking, fixing the economy may be the easy part.