The Empire State Building was built in 410 days. The Lockheed P-80, the first jet aircraft deployed in the Air Force, took 143 days from project initiation to first deployment. Marinship went from 'proposal' to 'first ship completed' in six months. American involvement in WWII lasted 3 years 8 months and 23 days. Meanwhile, a BART extension is delayed more than a year because the wrong networking equipment was installed.

Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma improvement in student performance, and the results were replicated. Despite a very large body of research supporting Direct Instruction's effectiveness, 'DI has not been widely embraced or implemented.' Why we tolerate this gap is one of education's great mysteries.

When New York built its first subway, 28 stations opened 4.7 years after the contract was awarded, for about $1.1B in 2019 dollars. The Second Avenue Subway's first phase took 17 years for 3 stations and cost $4.45B — 37x more expensive per station. 'If technology is about doing more with less, our effective technology for manipulating the physical world seems to have drastically deteriorated.'

Schumpeter claimed the problem of capitalism is not how capital is allocated to existing structures but how structures are created and destroyed. Bankruptcy takes care of senescent businesses — but how do we get a sufficient replacement rate in systems and institutions that aren't naturally subject to extinction processes?

End-user computing is becoming less a bicycle and more a monorail for the mind. Emacs, Smalltalk, Genera, and VBA embodied a vision where if the app didn't do what you wanted, you could tweak it; today's mobile and web apps increasingly operate behind bulletproof glass, and even directly manipulating your own data has become a laborious chore.

For many of life's most important questions — how to navigate your education, select a career, choose a partner, be a good friend, raise your children — there is no canon. No book is so good that you'd assume others interested in the question will be familiar with it. Is it not possible for there to be 'great' books on these questions, or have they just not been written yet?

Switzerland and Japan exhibit much higher baseline execution quality in almost everything — punctual transit, tastier low-end food, more comfortable cheap hotels, cleaner streets, more beautiful villages, even homicide rates a tenth of America's. It isn't simply wealth (Japan's GDP per capita lags the US) or historical stability. Could other countries acquire this 'general execution capital'?

Stockholm, a city of less than 1 million people, has Spotify, King, Klarna, iZettle, and Mojang — all valued at more than $1 billion. London and Paris, vastly larger, have surprisingly few successful tech startups for their size. What's true of Stockholm (and Provo, and Tallinn) that isn't true of other European cities?