Hello, World!

This is the first post on a site I have wanted to make for some time.

The plan is to think in public about economics, markets, technology, society, and the occasional philosophical detour. Some of it will be about Denmark, some about broader trends, some about ideas I have been sitting with for too long. This is a logbook as much as anything else: a place to put the best questions and thoughts I have, in writing, before they dissolve into the ether.

I am drawn to people of the past. Not out of nostalgia, but because history is the only laboratory we have. This risks exposing me as a conservative, in the Burkean sense: someone who thinks accumulated institutions deserve more than casual contempt. But reverence for the past and orientation toward the future are not in contradiction. We live in the near future. The rate of AI progress has compressed the distance between now and what comes next to something approaching zero, the present and the future becoming asymptotically connected. If the capability curves of the last few years continue in any direction resembling what researchers have modeled, then the question of what kind of world we are building is not deferred. It is next.

The ideology of my school years said otherwise. Its central claim, dressed in various clothes, was that enough had been built, history was functionally over, and the remaining work was careful management of what existed, with appropriate guilt about the having. A coherent worldview, for a society that believed it. The cost of that wrongness is becoming visible, perhaps most acutely among young people, where a quiet doomerism has taken hold that is less political philosophy than it is defeat dressed up as wisdom.

Growth is good. Not as an abstraction, but as the mechanism by which real people get longer, healthier, materially better lives. The counter-argument, that further ambition is indistinguishable from greed, has become surprisingly mainstream: a worldview in which prosperity is something to be suspicious of rather than pursued. I find that inversion unconvincing.

Progress is the purpose. But civilizations that lose the thread of what they are building toward tend to forget the non-fungible principles that made them what they are, and this is where the conservative instinct earns its keep. Denmark, where I live, is an interesting case study in exactly that: a country with deep institutional inheritance that has, somewhere along the way, mistaken restraint for virtue.

The past is the only laboratory we have. The next decade may be the most important experiment it has ever run.

If any of that sounds interesting, you can reach me at alfredbirkelund@gmail.com, or browse the archive as it grows.

More to come.

Best,

Alfred