In Western’s 2012 Q2 letter we discussed a few historic natural disasters (notably, the 1900 Galveston hurricane) that acted as “black swan” events to alter the course of history around their geographic location. One question posed in the letter revolved around whether the 2011 Fukushima nuclear... Read More

In this day and age, the world does not lack for sensational headlines. Even in The Wall Street Journal or Financial Times, headlines in 2019 read like something out of the National Enquirer. Stories of salaciousness, intrigue and flat-out zaniness are a daily occurrence. Interesting recent... Read More

Every era brings certain trends and for the last quarter century society has been inundated with rankings and lists as the internet has grown and attention spans have shrunk. This fad first got legs at the end of the 1990s as people raced to quantify the unquantifiable “best of” everything from the... Read More

Understanding the economic dynamics of China or the socio-economic history of Detroit can be a fruitful exercise for determining what the future might hold, both in that region and globally. High-growth countries receive more press coverage than low-growth regions because a tremendous amount of... Read More

As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. If you really need something, you will figure out how to get it, or how to engineer a workaround or tool to aid in the process. Our ancestors must have thrown a heck of a party for their fellow caveman Zog when he invented the wheel in 3500... Read More