This week’s reading list is about lag, which is to say the inconvenient gap between an event and its consequences. Anthropic has done the arithmetic and found that robots are currently cheaper than people for 0.3 per cent of job tasks, and that on present trends ten per cent arrives in about forty years, which is not the timeline the share prices imply. Indian IT, meanwhile, has already surrendered roughly a third of its market value this year to a disruption that has barely begun. Venice invented the bond market in 1171 entirely by accident, while losing a war, a fleet and a doge, and then never repaid the principal. Postwar British sugar rationing is still turning up in blood pressure readings seventy years later. The time zone database that tells your phone what time it is has one real maintainer, a university lecturer doing it in his spare time. Higher interest rates have been excellent for savers, provided the saver does not also need a mortgage or a car. And a Supreme Court litigator ran two careers in parallel for two decades before the numbers caught up with him. The useful lesson for investors is that the purchase and the bill rarely arrive in the same quarter. The best investors are not trying to time the headline. They are working out which clock started, and when it stops.
📚 What work can robots do? Robots and language models between them touch about 80 per cent of job tasks by working time, which sounds alarming until you reach the cost column. Robots are currently cheaper than humans for 0.3 per cent of tasks, around 300,000 workers, and on a 3 per cent annual price decline it takes roughly forty years to reach ten per cent. Capability, not cost, blocks about 70 per cent of physical work, with manipulation alone accounting for half. (Anthropic)
📚 What Makes Warren Buffett One of a Kind: Jason Zweig, a week after Buffett stood down as chairman at 96 after 61 years, argues the real edge was structural rather than analytical. Berkshire charged no management fee and no performance fee, ran no investment committee, and gave investors no way to add or withdraw capital. The anchor is Alfred Chandler’s line from 1962: unless structure follows strategy, inefficiency results. (Jason Zweig)
📚 The Winners and Losers of Higher Interest Rates: Ben Carlson on who is actually enjoying this. Bills above 4 per cent and quality bonds above 5 are a gift to anyone holding savings and no debt, while mortgages near 7.5 per cent against houses priced for 3 per cent are the opposite. Existing US home sales are running under 4 million a year against more than 5 million around 2000, with 65 million more residents. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
📚 What Will Happen to Indian IT? David Oks on a sector worth about 7 per cent of Indian GDP and a quarter of its exports, employing some 5 million people. Infosys hired 85,000 graduates in 2022 and 12,000 in 2024; TCS announced 12,000 redundancies in July 2025 and Wipro cut 25,000 over two years. TCS, Cognizant and Infosys have each lost about 30 per cent of market value in 2026. (Asterisk)
📚 The 12th-century military disaster that forever changed global finance: Robin Wigglesworth on Venice in 1171, which funded a catastrophic war against Constantinople with forced loans paying 5 per cent and, crucially, made them tradable. The fleet came home ruined by plague, a mob killed the doge, and the republic never repaid the principal. It kept paying the interest out of market taxes instead, and the trade in those loans became the first bond market. (Big Think)
📚 The people holding up the internet: Of 23 critical open source projects examined, eleven are kept running by one or two people. Paul Eggert, a UCLA lecturer, made 218 of the 251 changes to the time zone database in the past year. The maintainer of core-js, which runs on roughly half the world’s top 1,000 websites, asked for US$57 a month in donations and has two sponsors. (Sheets.works)
📚 Swarm Intelligence: Kevin Kelly’s fifty-year forecast is that we stop talking about AI altogether, because it becomes infrastructure: many narrow minds, loosely coupled, noticed mainly when they fail. He thinks the failure mode is systemic rather than dramatic, seizing up if coupled too tightly and flying apart if too loosely. Governing it will look less like engineering than gardening. (Kevin Kelly)
📚 The Tell: Tom Goldstein’s Double Life: Bradley Hope on the man who argued his first Supreme Court case at 28, co-founded SCOTUSblog, and in one eighteen-hour session at the Bellagio in 2008 won about US$400,000 while betting blind on an estimated nineteen hands in twenty. He went to trial in February on sixteen counts, including concealing US$15 million of poker debts from mortgage lenders. All eleven chapters are free. (The Foundry)
📚 The generation raised on sugar rations: Wartime Britain capped adults at about 40 grams of sugar a day and children at under a tablespoon, until sweets came off ration in 1953 and consumption promptly doubled. Those rationed through their first thousand days show a 35 per cent lower risk of type 2 diabetes and a 20 per cent lower risk of high blood pressure, and test about a year younger on biological age measures. An accidental national experiment, still legible seventy years on. (The Guardian)
📚 John Locke: The Playful Philosopher: Henry Oliver’s three-year-old son put a finger into a candle flame to find out what flame was like, which happens to be Locke’s own example in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The argument is that knowledge begins in curiosity and direct experiment rather than in system building, and that a practice without play quietly dies. No portfolio application whatsoever. We include it anyway. (Online Library of Liberty)
