First Principles

The 8-hour day was negotiated for factory shift work in the early industrial era. Knowledge work output is not linear in hours, yet the unit of employment remains the hour-block.

Eight hours is the natural and necessary shape of a working day.

The 8-hour day may persist because it is easy to administer and signal, not because it matches how cognitive work is produced.

What does sustained deep-work capacity per day actually average? What coordination value does synchronised presence provide? What happens to output when firms drop hours accounting entirely?

Curricula, credentials and schedules have remained broadly stable while the information environment around them changed completely. Debates focus on methods, rarely on purpose.

Education means school, and improving education means improving schools.

Schooling bundles several functions — childcare, sorting, socialisation, instruction — and arguments about 'education' often conflate them.

Which bundled function does each reform actually target? What does credential signalling cost relative to skill formation? What would assessment look like if separated from instruction?

Money is described as one thing but performs three roles — exchange, account, store of value — and the three are increasingly served by different instruments.

Money is money. One thing, one definition, one debate.

Arguments about inflation, crypto and central bank policy often talk past each other because each side privileges a different one of the three functions.

Can the three functions be cleanly separated at scale? What breaks when the unit of account inflates faster than wages? Which function do households actually optimise for?

Minimum parking requirements set in mid-20th-century codes still govern construction in most cities, fixing land allocation decades after the assumptions behind them changed.

Parking minimums reflect how much parking is needed.

The minimums were largely copied between municipalities without measurement, and now function as a hidden tax on housing and small business.

What is the actual peak utilisation of mandated parking? What happens to rents where minimums were abolished? Who bears the cost of an unused space?

Meta-analyses consistently find unstructured interviews are weak predictors of job performance, yet they remain the central hiring instrument in most organisations.

Interviews let us identify who will perform well.

Interviews may persist because they measure something else effectively: social similarity, confidence under observation, and the interviewer's feeling of agency.

What predicts performance in each specific role? What do structured alternatives cost to run? Why does the weak instrument feel so convincing from inside?

Insurance pools rare, large, unpredictable losses. A growing share of products now covers small, frequent, predictable costs — which is prepayment with overhead, not risk transfer.

More insurance means more protection.

Coverage of predictable expenses converts a risk-pooling mechanism into an administrative layer that inflates the cost of the underlying service.

What fraction of premiums covers genuinely unpredictable events? How does administrative load scale with claim frequency? What would direct pricing of routine services look like?