Welcome back to Techne! I have always wanted to visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum, in part because it features a 66-foot whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling. Especially for Halloween, there is something that seems slightly off-putting about that place. Apparently, the skeleton has been oozing oil for years now, “which gives visitors a sense of what it was like to be stuck on a whaling ship for three or four years.” 

Economist Deirdre McCloskey opens The Narrative of Economic Expertise with an observation that blew me away when I read it as an undergraduate:

It is pretty clear that an economist, like a poet, uses metaphors. They are called ‘models.’ The market for apartments in New York, says the economist, is ‘just like’ a curve on a blackboard. No one has so far seen a literal demand curve floating in the sky above Manhattan.

To understand how the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun, we might use curves. To understand the forces acting upon a bridge, we construct a model. Disney uses agent-based models—simulations used to study the interactions of  people with things and places over time—to design its parks and attractions. When the Congressional Budget Office scores a bill and gives it a cost, it uses a model of the economy. Models are metaphors and like all metaphors, models have limits. 

But if you take these limits into consideration, weaving together multiple models of the world can be incredibly powerful. They helped Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger become a billionaire: “You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models,” he said in 1994. Especially in policy, having multiple models of the world can generate solutions, and it can also limit action. 

This week’s Techne is my attempt to share some of my models of the world. What follows are 24 insights that help to capture this moment in politics, in technology, in the culture of 2024. They don’t cover everything, they may even change in the future, but they are a start to making sense of this moment.