This article examines the ethical implications of profitability targets across three institutional domains: litigation departments in law firms, operations departments in hospitals, and private schools. Although all three operate under budget constraints and managerial performance systems, their institutional purposes, moral responsibilities, and permissible trade-offs differ fundamentally. Drawing on Kantian duty ethics, utilitarian welfare analysis, and a broad set of Weste

Modern politics does not favor technology by accident, nor primarily because of lobbying power or ideological alignment. The preferential treatment of technology firms reflects a deeper structural  compatibility between contemporary governance  and a specific form of capital: intangible, scalable, mobile, and politically legible. The consequences of this alignment are not limited to innovation outcomes or market concentration . They extend directly to the distribution of inco

This article completes a three-part series on Daoism, Stoicism, and the ethics of power. It should be read together with the previous essays on Daoism as restraint and Stoicism as endurance. The previous two   articles  examined Daoism and Stoicism separately as civilizational responses to systemic crisis. Daoism was analyzed as an ethics of restraint emerging against the bureaucratic and militarized state of Warring States China. Stoicism was examined as an ethics of enduran

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I used to travel to Sudan from time to time for certain business projects. It never occurred to me how eye-opening what I would see and experience in an underdeveloped country like Sudan could be. When I first landed in Sudan, the airport was covered everywhere with advertising posters of world-famous hotels. Familiar logos, familiar names. Yet the airport itself was terrible, with cats roaming all over the place. The cats were of a kind I h

The Rise of “Resilience” in Economic Discourse It is now commonplace to hear policymakers and markets praise the "resilience" of supply chains, of financial systems, of growth trajectories, and of investor sentiment. In its popularized form, resilience suggests strength, adaptability, and an underlying systemic vitality. What does it mean for an economy to be resilient? The global economy has shown  surprising robustness amid geopolitical shocks recently. Yet, it also warns o

In recent years, the proliferation of data-driven analysis has reshaped the epistemological foundations of economics. Vast computational capacity and algorithmic learning promise to turn uncertainty into calculable probability, and complexity into manageable prediction. Yet, the triumph of data often conceals a deeper conceptual poverty. As economics has increasingly become an empirical technocracy, it risks losing sight of what makes social inquiry meaningful: context, purpo

The Philosopher Who Looked Beyond Capitalism Few thinkers anticipated the dilemmas of twenty-first-century political economy as clearly as André Gorz  (1923–2007) did. Born in Vienna as Gérard Horst, Gorz became part of post-war France’s intellectual milieu, writing for Les Temps Modernes  under the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre . Over time he fused existentialism, Marxism, and ecological thought into a critique that re-imagined what economics could be about: not growth or pr

Once a symbol of unrelenting ascent, China’s model of social mobility is now showing cracks. For millions of young people, especially...