Welcome to My Developing Concepts

I have spent most of my professional life inside institutions — designing them, reforming them, occasionally watching them fail from closer than I would have liked. Special economic zones, public-private partnerships, governance frameworks, dispute resolution systems. The work is technical, often invisible, and rarely makes for good dinner conversation.

A few years ago I decided to write a book about one particular chapter of that work — the creation of Honduras's special economic zone framework, its brief flourishing, and the political forces that eventually came for it. Writing it turned out to be one of the most absorbing experiences of my professional life. The book is finished, a publisher is involved, and it will find its way into the world in the coming months.

In the meantime, I find I can't stop writing.

So this is My Developing Concepts — a place where I can think out loud without footnotes, explore ideas before they are fully formed, and occasionally write fiction when the history is too good to leave to historians. Some of what appears here will be serious. Some will be a musing. Some will be illustrative fiction — a Roman soldier, a medieval merchant, a widow in Weimar Germany — used as a way of making abstract ideas feel like what they actually are: human problems, not technical ones.

My professional obsession is institutions. How they are built, how they fail, how they shape the daily lives of people who never think about them until they stop working. A currency, a court system, a tax code, a central bank — these are not bureaucratic abstractions. They are the invisible architecture of how things work, and when they crack, ordinary people feel it first.

Lately I have been thinking a great deal about inflation.

Partly this is personal. I have two children studying abroad. Since the war with Iran began, I have watched the cost of everything rise on two continents simultaneously — and I have seen, up close, how that pressure lands differently depending on where you sit. The student paying rent in a currency that keeps losing value. The family sending money across borders that buys less every month. Inflation is always described as an economic phenomenon. From where I have been watching it lately, it feels more like a slow tax on everyone who cannot protect themselves from it.

But the thinking goes deeper than the personal. I have always been fascinated by financial and economic history — by the recurring pattern of societies that understood the problem, named it correctly, and then repeated it anyway. Which brings me to a question I keep returning to:

My suspicion — and this blog is partly where I intend to work it out — is that inflation is not just a monetary failure. It is an institutional one. The mechanism is well understood. The historical record is unambiguous. And yet societies have repeated this failure across centuries and continents with a consistency that suggests something more than ignorance is at work. If the problem were purely technical, it should be easy to fix. It never is.

Which means the question worth asking is not only how to control money supply, but how to build institutions strong enough to resist the temptation to debase — and why, across all of human history, that has proven so remarkably difficult.

That is what I have been thinking about lately. What I will be thinking about here — at least for now, in this thread of ideas — among other things.

Welcome.