Archive
Browse all 6 articles across governance, urban systems, ecologies, and latitudes.
Blueprints and Blockades: Latin America's Planning Wins—and the Times They Were Stopped
Latin America did not lack planners or plans. It lacked uninterrupted time. Over the last century, the region produced sophisticated projects in transport, health, energy, and social protection. Many took root and quietly improved daily life. Others were intercepted—often by U.S. power, sometimes by U.S.-based firms—before they could mature.
Ten Interventions That Bent a Hemisphere
Across the 20th century, U.S. covert and overt actions in Latin America traded short-term "stability" for long-term democratic fragility. From Guatemala's 1954 coup to Plan Colombia, the pattern is visible in declassified files: regime change at the top, mass graves at the bottom.
The Movement Tax: Noncompetes Cage Workers
Thirty million workers bound by noncompetes; one quarter licensed with credentials that won't cross state lines. These are not guardrails—they are tollgates. A Friction Index maps the cost of movement; a Mobility Atlas charts the reform.
The Landlord Leviathan: REITs, Private Equity, and the Price of Shelter
The landlord is no longer the woman downstairs with keys—it is a spreadsheet that lives in Delaware and dreams in waterfalls. When REITs and private equity own the marginal stock, rent becomes the solution to a covenant, not a neighborly bargain. A systems anatomy of financialized housing.
The Price of Roots: Licensing Immobility
Thirty million Americans are bound by noncompete clauses; one in four workers faces licensing barriers. These restraints suppress wages, block entrepreneurship, and turn exit into a debt event. The fix: ban broad restraints, price the narrow ones, port credentials.
The Profit-Price Channel: How Market Power Turns Shocks into Inflation
Between what we pay and what it cost to make runs a corridor of hidden doors—contracts, fees, platforms, habits—where a quiet arithmetic decides how much of a shock becomes a price and how much becomes a profit. The profit-price channel, mapped with equations and evidence.