Sovereign Sum Futures
your Saturday roundup
Professionally, I focus on creating social benefit startups. In my Saturday morning emails I share what I’m learning and thinking. Topics range from better living and parenting to business and philosophy.
The Sovereign Child. Remember Taking Children Seriously? The movement has a new manifesto. The book Sovereign Child challenges assumptions of modern parenting like rules about food, sleep, and screens. Instead, it proposes a libertarian approach, with parents treating children with respect for their autonomy, while still taking responsibility for their safety and support. The focus is on creatively solving the current problem or finding win-wins to meet children’s and parent’s desires. Rather than neglect, the goal is leaning in to assist children in exploring the world and learning through experience. If The Thing to Avoid for Dr. Becky is a child suffering alone, then The Thing to Avoid for Aaron Stupple is thwarting a child’s autonomy. As you might expect, like libertarians, he believes in children having private property, private spaces and parents stepping in to physically prevent violence (in government context this would be the night watchman state). I’m sympathetic to the argument that lots of rules are enforced for the preference or short-term convenience for parents. I do see a paradox in treating kids like adults in the importance of their preferences and autonomy but not treating them like adults in holding them accountable to follow through on promises, not interrupt or to clean up after themselves. I also wonder if kids following only their immediate interests causes them to miss out on important windows for learning things like language, reading, or math? What if an early lack of sleep hurts development? Or what if early “unhealthy” food experiences set a person's tastes for later life? Also, I’m unclear if no food rules means effectively unlimited budget for ice cream and candy or do parents have autonomy to shape the food environment at home?
Other takeaways from the book:
Why Rules Hurt: Rules often prioritize short-term convenience for parents over long-term learning and growth for children. They can erode trust, ignore individual needs, and stifle a child’s ability to self-regulate.
Shape the Environment: Ditching rules doesn’t mean chaos. Parents act more like stewards, setting up environments where kids can explore safely, such as childproofing spaces rather than constantly enforcing a “no” rule.
The Importance of Trust: Arbitrary rules risk losing a child’s trust. If a teen sees curfews or screen time limits as pointless, they may not believe parents about more serious issues like substance abuse or driving safety. (Although the author only has younger kids.)
Unschooling: A full embrace of the philosophy may naturally lead to unschooling.
More Visions of AI. Developing a clear understanding of AI’s current capabilities is tough. Advancements are coming fast enough that even those in tech have widely different understandings of what tools are available today. As they say, the future is already here but it’s just not evenly distributed. If you want more visions of the AI future (and present?), check out Machines of Loving Grace. You’ll read about rate of discovery in biology and health increasing by 10x, curing mental illness, 20% annual GDP growth rate in the developing world, and an “informed AI whose job is to give you everything you’re legally entitled to by the government.“ Even previous tech pessimists say that AI is a big deal. Here is Tyler Cowen author the Great Stagnation says “the great stagnation is over” and he says “Economists, social scientists, most of them are blind and asleep to the promise of strong AI. They're just out to lunch. I think they're wrong. I trust the AI experts. But when you talk about, say, diffusion of new technologies, the people who do AI are basically totally wrong. The people who study that issue, I trust the experts. If you put together the two views where in each area you trust the experts, then you get my view, which is amazing in the long run, will take a long time, tough slog, [with] all these bottlenecks in the short run.”
Something Sum Games. Life is full of games, from the stock market to real estate to everyday negotiations. My favorite are games where we create value and many can share the upside. We call them positive sum. Some games are zero-sum—where one person’s gain is another’s loss. Even worse, some games are negative-sum where participants in total lose value. Understanding this distinction can shape how we approach competition and collaboration. How would you classify the following games? Like many things, it can depend on the definitions and where you draw the boundary of the game. Does your answer influence which games you want to play?
Traditional real estate bidding wars
Buy and hold real estate
Real estate development
Poker
Lawsuits
The secondary public stock market
The full public stock market
Bitcoin
Crypto generally
Starting a company
Community building
Retailing
Import / Export
Until next time,
Miles