Friday, 1 May 2026

Cahal Moran (the YouTube channel Unlearning Economics) doesn’t push one single “grand plan,” but there are clear themes in the kinds of solutions he tends to support. They come out of his broader goal: challenging mainstream (neoclassical) economics and promoting more realistic, pluralist, and policy-focused approaches.

Here’s a grounded breakdown of the main types of solutions he promotes:

1. Pluralism in economics (method + policy)

A core idea is that no single economic theory is enough.

He argues economics should draw from multiple schools (Keynesian, institutionalist, behavioural, etc.)
Policies should be case-by-case and historically informed, not one-size-fits-all models

Implication:
Instead of rigid free-market or rigid socialist policies, he supports pragmatic, mixed approaches depending on the problem.

2. Stronger role for government (but not simplistic “big state”)

He often critiques the idea that markets alone solve problems.

Typical positions he explores:

More public investment (healthcare, education, infrastructure)
Regulation of markets where they fail (housing, finance, labour)
Using policy to shape outcomes, not just “let markets decide”

This is tied to his view that current systems “set us up to fail” and need active reform

3. Reforming money and banking

A recurring theme in his work:

Most money is created by private banks through lending, not governments
This has big effects on:
- housing bubbles
- inequality
- financial instability

Solutions he discusses:

Better regulation of credit creation
Rethinking how money enters the economy

4. Housing system reform

Housing is one of his biggest concrete policy areas.

He highlights how policy mixes land and housing in problematic ways

Typical solutions he supports or explores:

Separating land value from property value
Planning reform and/or public housing expansion
Policies to reduce speculation

5. Tackling inequality and poverty

He consistently focuses on distribution, not just growth.

Ideas he engages with include:

Wealth inequality and the power of billionaires
Social mobility barriers
Better welfare systems

He has discussed proposals like:

Universal Basic Income (UBI) (often as something to seriously consider, not always uncritically)
Expanded public services

6. Behavioural, real-world policy design

Because he’s a behavioural economist, he emphasises:

People don’t act like perfectly rational agents
Policy should reflect actual human behaviour, not idealised models

So solutions often involve:

Better “choice architecture”
Policies designed around real decision-making biases

7. Democratising economics

From his book The Econocracy and channel:

Economics shouldn’t be left only to experts
Ordinary people should have a say in economic decisions

Solution direction:

More public debate and transparency in economic policymaking

Bottom line

Moran isn’t proposing a single ideology like “capitalism vs socialism.” Instead, his solutions are:

Pragmatic (what works empirically)
Interventionist where needed (especially in housing, finance, inequality)
Pluralist (multiple theories, not one model)
Often centre-left in flavour, but grounded in critique rather than slogans.

Can you take a more in depth look at one of his solutions/proposals

Let’s take one of his most concrete and recurring themes: housing reform, because it’s where he moves beyond critique and actually engages with specific policy directions.

🏠 The problem he’s trying to solve

Moran argues that housing crises (like in the UK) aren’t just about “not enough houses,” but about how the system is structured:

Land is scarce and gains value passively
Housing is treated as an investment asset, not just shelter
Credit (mortgages) fuels price increases
Planning systems interact with all of this in complex ways

This overlaps with ideas from economists like Henry George and modern housing researchers.

🔧 One key proposal: Land Value Tax (LVT)

A major solution he discusses is shifting taxation away from buildings and onto land itself.

The core idea:

Tax the value of land, not the property built on it.

How it works (in simple terms)

If you own land in a desirable area → you pay more tax
If you improve the building (renovate, extend, build more) → you are not penalised

So:

Current system → taxes activity (building, improving)
LVT → taxes passive ownership of valuable land

Why Moran (and others) like it

1. Reduces speculation

Right now:

People can hold land and wait for prices to rise

With LVT:

Holding unused or underused land becomes costly
→ pushes owners to develop or sell

2. Encourages more housing supply

Because:

Building more doesn’t increase your tax burden

This removes a weird incentive in current systems where:

doing nothing can be more profitable than developing

3. Targets unearned wealth

This is the economic rent idea:

Land value often comes from society (infrastructure, jobs, demand)
Not from the landowner’s effort

So taxing it is seen as:

capturing socially created value for public use

4. Hard to avoid

Unlike income or corporate tax:

You can’t move land offshore
You can’t hide it

So it’s relatively efficient and difficult to dodge.

⚠️ Where this proposal gets tricky

This is where serious debate comes in.

1. Political resistance

Homeowners (especially in high-value areas) would face higher taxes
That’s a huge voting bloc

So even if it’s economically elegant, it’s politically difficult

2. Transition problems

If introduced suddenly:

House prices could fall
Existing owners could lose wealth

That creates:

fairness concerns
potential financial instability

3. It’s not a silver bullet

Even strong supporters admit LVT alone won’t fix everything:

You still need:

planning reform
construction capacity
infrastructure investment

4. Measurement challenges

Separating:

land value
from
property value

…is technically difficult (though not impossible—some countries do it).

📊 How economists view it

What’s interesting here is that LVT is unusually cross-ideological:

Supported by classical economists like Adam Smith
Championed strongly by Henry George
Backed by many modern economists across the spectrum

Even fairly market-oriented economists often like it because:

it’s efficient
it distorts behaviour less than other taxes

🧠 So what does this tell you about Moran?

This example shows his general pattern:

✔ Strengths

Focuses on structural causes, not just symptoms
Draws from serious economic traditions
Highlights under-discussed but credible policies

⚠️ Limitations

Tends to emphasise the benefits more than the political difficulty
Often presents ideas that are technically sound but hard to implement

🧾 Bottom line on this proposal

Economically: widely respected, even by people who disagree on other things
Practically: difficult, especially in countries like the UK
In Moran’s framing: part of a broader attempt to fix how housing and wealth distribution interact

If you want, I can dig into another one of his proposals—like banking reform or UBI—which are a bit more controversial and less widely agreed upon.

Life is fraught with sorrows: no matter what we do, we will in the end die; we are, each of us, held in the solitude of an autonomous body; time passes, and what has been will never be again. Pain is the first experience of world-helplessness, and it never leaves us. We are angry about being ripped from the comfortable womb, and as soon as that anger fades, distress comes to take its place. Even those people whose faith promises them that this will all be different in the next world cannot help experiencing anguish in this one; Christ himself was the man of sorrows. We live, however, in a time of increasing palliatives; it is easier than ever to decide what to feel and what not to feel. There is less and less unpleasantness that is unavoidable in life, for those with the means to avoid. But despite the enthusiastic claims of pharmaceutical science, depression cannot be wiped out so long as we are creatures conscious of our own selves. It can at best be contained — and containing is all that current treatments for depression aim to do.

Highly politicized rhetoric has blurred the distinction between depression and its consequences — the distinction between how you feel and how you act in response. This is in part a social and medical phenomenon, but it is also the result of linguistic vagary attached to emotional vagary. Perhaps depression can best be described as emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals. Depression is not just a lot of pain; but too much pain can compost itself into depression. Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory. Saint Anthony in the desert, asked how he could differentiate between angels who came to him humble and devils who came in rich disguise, said you could tell by how you felt after they had departed. When an angel left you, you felt strengthened by his presence; when a devil left, you felt horror. Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.

Andrew Solomon

I returned, not long ago, to a wood in which I had played as a child and saw an oak, a hundred years dignified, in whose shade I used to play with my brother. In twenty years, a huge vine had attached itself to this confident tree and had nearly smothered it. It was hard to say where the tree left off and the vine began. The vine had twisted itself so entirely around the scaffolding of tree branches that its leaves seemed from a distance to be the leaves of the tree; only up close could you see how few living oak branches were left, and how a few desperate little budding sticks of oak stuck like a row of thumbs up the massive trunk, their leaves continuing to photosynthesize in the ignorant way of mechanical biology.

Fresh from a major depression in which I had hardly been able to take on board the idea of other people's problems, I empathized with that tree. My depression had grown on me as that vine had conquered the oak; it had been a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I. It had had a life of its own that bit by bit asphyxiated all of my life out of me. At the worst stage of major depression, I had moods that I knew were not my moods: they belonged to the depression, as surely as the leaves on that tree's high branches belonged to the vine. When I tried to think clearly about this, I felt that my mind was immured, that it couldn't expand in any direction. I knew that the sun was rising and setting, but little of its light reached me. I felt myself sagging under what was much stronger than I; first I could not use my ankles, and then I could not control my knees, and then my waist began to break under the strain, and then my shoulders turned in, and in the end I was compacted and fetal, depleted by this thing that was crushing me without holding me. Its tendrils threatened to pulverize my mind and my courage and my stomach, and crack my bones and desiccate my body. It went on glutting itself on me when there seemed nothing left to feed it.

Andrew Solomon

Every second of being alive hurt me. Because this thing had drained all fluid from me, I could not even cry. My mouth was parched as well. I had thought that when you feel your worst your tears flood, but the very worst pain is the arid pain of total violation that comes after the tears are all used up, the pain that stops up every space through which you once metered the world, or the world, you. This is the presence of major depression.

Andrew Solomon

All I wanted was for “it” to stop; I could not have managed even to be so specific as to say what “it” was. I could not manage to say much; words, with which I have always been intimate, seemed suddenly very elaborate, difficult metaphors the use of which entailed much more energy than I could possibly muster. “Melancholia ends up in loss of meaning . . . I become silent and I die,” Julia Kristeva once wrote. “Melancholy persons are foreigners in their mother tongue. The dead language they speak foreshadows their suicide.” Depression, like love, trades in clichés, and it is difficult to speak of it without lapsing into the rhetoric of saccharine pop tunes; it is so vivid when it is experienced that the notion that others have known anything similar seems altogether implausible.

Andrew Solomon

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, two questions troubled the neuroscience of depression. One was whether mood states traveled through the brain in electrical or in chemical impulses. The initial assumption had been that if there were chemical reactions in the brain, they were subsidiary to electrical ones, but no evidence supported this. The second was whether there was a difference between endogenous neurotic depression, which came from within, and exogenous reactive depression, which came from without. Endogenous depressions all seemed to have precipitating external factors; reactive depressions usually followed on a lifetime of troubled reactions to circumstance that suggested an internal predisposition. Various experiments “showed” that one kind of depression was responsive to one kind of treatment, another to another. The idea that all depression involves a gene-environment interaction was not even entertained until the last quarter of the century.

Andrew Solomon

'Misery and poverty remain their lot, till most of them succumb to an early death. Given the thrust of public policy for the past sixty years, it should come as no surprise to learn that those afflicted with serious mental illness have a life expectancy of between fifteen and twenty-five years less than the rest of us. It is, nonetheless, a disgrace'.

Andrew Scull

It’s not some inevitable conveyor belt from mild meh to existential agony. It’s more like a chain reaction that can happen under certain conditions: Unhappiness — low-level dissatisfaction, vague discontent.
Being troubled — your mind starts chewing on it, turning it into a problem. Immiseration — now it’s identity-level (“my life is bad,” not just “this thing is bad”). Pain — emotional or even physical suffering.

GPT: Stoicism has a way of showing up in modern life like an app that refuses to die: preinstalled, occasionally useful, and constantly overestimated.

The basic pitch is simple. Control what you can. Don’t panic about what you can’t. Accept fate with dignity. In the hands of figures like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, this becomes a disciplined ethical system for surviving chaos without dissolving into resentment or despair. It is psychologically elegant. It is also, if taken as a full account of reality, incomplete in ways that matter.

The modern question isn’t whether Stoicism works. It clearly does, in a narrow sense. The question is what it leaves out.

The Stoic focus: interior sovereignty

Stoicism draws a hard boundary between what is “up to us” and what is not. Your judgments, intentions, and responses are yours. Everything else—health, wealth, politics, weather, other people’s decisions—is not.

This division is powerful because it produces a stable psychological outcome: reduced reactivity. It trains attention inward, toward interpretation rather than circumstance. In modern psychological terms, it resembles cognitive behavioral approaches later formalized by thinkers like Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis.

But that is also where the philosophical narrowing begins. Stoicism is optimized for endurance, not explanation. It answers: “How should I remain composed within this world?” It does not fully answer: “Why is this world structured the way it is?”

The missing layer: material conditions

When people talk about “material conditions,” they mean the economic, political, and institutional structures that shape life chances: class, labor relations, access to healthcare, education, housing, and power. These are not random background details; they are often the primary drivers of what individuals experience as “personal fortune” or “personal failure.”

This is where Stoicism begins to look partial rather than universal.

A person can master Stoic techniques and still live under exploitative conditions. They can reframe, accept, endure—and remain materially constrained. The philosophy can reduce psychological suffering without necessarily engaging the structures producing the suffering.

This gap is not a minor technicality. It is the difference between:

“I will remain calm despite hardship,” and
“Why does this hardship systematically reproduce itself?”

The second question belongs more to traditions like Marxism and broader sociological critique, which treat material structures as primary objects of analysis rather than background noise.

Stoicism as a tool, not a worldview

The most defensible interpretation of Stoicism today is not as a complete philosophy of life, but as a toolkit for agency at the individual level.

Used this way, it has clear strengths:

Emotional regulation under stress
Reduction of impulsive decision-making
Increased tolerance for uncertainty
A sense of internal stability when external conditions fluctuate

These are not trivial benefits. They are often the difference between functioning and collapsing under pressure.

But tools are not worldviews. A hammer does not explain architecture.

The risk appears when Stoicism is promoted—explicitly or implicitly—as a total framework for interpreting human suffering. In that mode, structural problems begin to look like personal attitude problems. That is where its limitations become politically and ethically relevant.

The structural blind spot

Stoicism tends to individualize response. Even when it acknowledges injustice, its emphasis remains on the internal stance toward injustice rather than collective transformation of it.

This creates a subtle philosophical tension:

If everything outside the mind is “externally indifferent,”
then systemic injustice can be emotionally neutralized without being analytically or politically confronted.

That does not mean Stoicism endorses passivity. Epictetus was himself born into slavery, hardly a position compatible with naive acceptance of social order. But the framework does not develop a robust theory of structural change. It is not designed for that.

The complementary move: combining lenses

This is why contemporary thinkers often—implicitly or explicitly—combine Stoic-adjacent psychology with structural analysis rather than choosing one.

A useful synthesis looks like this:

Stoic layer:
Stabilize the mind. Reduce emotional volatility. Improve clarity of response.
Structural layer:
Understand how institutions, incentives, and power relations shape available choices.

The point is not to merge them into a single system. They do different jobs.

Even public intellectuals who engage Stoic ideas often operate this way. Massimo Pigliucci, for instance, is explicit that Stoicism is an ethical framework for personal conduct, not a replacement for political or scientific understanding. Other thinkers in psychology and philosophy adjacent to Stoicism often make similar distinctions, even if less formally.

The practical reality

Most people who function reasonably well already do this hybridization unconsciously.

They:

Use Stoic-like detachment to survive immediate stressors (“I can’t control this deadline panic spiral”)
While still recognizing structural causation (“the workload is unreasonable due to organizational incentives”)

It is less a philosophical achievement than a survival strategy.

The mistake is expecting philosophical purity where life offers none. Stoicism alone produces psychological stability without full explanation. Structural critique alone can produce explanation without stability. Each is incomplete on its own, in different directions.

Conclusion: partiality is not failure

Calling Stoicism “fatally flawed” because it neglects systemic factors misunderstands what it is trying to do. It is not a theory of society. It is a discipline of attention.

But treating it as complete is equally mistaken.

The more accurate framing is simpler and less satisfying: Stoicism is a partial model of human experience that becomes powerful when paired with other partial models. It does not need to explain everything to be useful. It only needs to stop people from confusing emotional control with full understanding of the world.

Which, historically speaking, is a mistake humans keep making anyway.

Thursday, 30 April 2026

China is doing extremely well in green tech: it now dominates manufacturing in solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles, and it is also the world’s largest investor in clean-tech production capacity. At the same time, China’s scale has driven down global clean-energy costs, but it also creates overcapacity and trade tensions as exports surge.

Where China leads

China has built a strong lead in the supply chains for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and new energy vehicles. Recent reporting also says China accounted for about three-quarters of global investment in clean-tech manufacturing capacity in 2023, and it is expected to supply a very large share of new renewable capacity added worldwide through 2028. One reason this matters is that Chinese production has made solar, wind, and EV technologies more affordable globally.

Why it matters globally

China’s green-tech sector is not just a domestic story; it is shaping the world energy transition. A large share of Chinese solar, wind, and EV exports is going to the Global South, where cheaper equipment helps countries build power systems faster. That means China is both accelerating decarbonization and increasing dependence on its industrial base.

Main weaknesses

The biggest downside is overcapacity: factories have expanded faster than global demand, especially in solar and batteries. That is pushing prices down, squeezing margins, and triggering trade friction with other countries. China also remains the world’s largest CO2 emitter, so leadership in clean-tech manufacturing does not automatically mean it has solved its own emissions problem.

Overall read

In short, China is ahead in green tech manufacturing and deployment, and it is arguably the single most important country for scaling low-carbon hardware worldwide. The challenge now is shifting from pure production dominance toward a more balanced model that matches demand, supports domestic decarbonization, and reduces international backlash.

Follow-ups

China green tech vs US and Europe comparison

China is ahead of both the US and Europe in green-tech manufacturing, while the US is stronger in policy-driven innovation niches and Europe sits somewhere in between: advanced in deployment and some equipment categories, but highly exposed to Chinese imports. The big picture is that China dominates scale, the US leads more in R&D and domestic policy support, and Europe has solid industrial strengths but weaker cost competitiveness.

China

China’s edge is manufacturing scale, supply-chain control, and speed of deployment. It has invested heavily in solar, wind, batteries, EVs, and critical minerals processing, which is why it can flood world markets with low-cost hardware. That gives China a strong export position, but it also creates oversupply and trade friction.

United States

The US is still a major innovator, especially in next-generation clean tech, but it has not matched China’s production scale. Recent policy swings and tariffs have made the US market less open to Chinese imports, which protects domestic firms but also slows competition and raises uncertainty. In short, the US is better at frontier innovation than mass manufacturing, but it is not yet cost-competitive in many mainstream green-tech categories.

Europe

Europe has respectable strengths in wind equipment, heat pumps, electrolysers, and some battery technology, but it depends heavily on China for solar panels and many inputs. European renewables deployment is strong, yet the bloc is vulnerable because so much of its clean-tech supply chain is tied to Chinese imports. That leaves Europe caught between US trade barriers and Chinese overcapacity.

Side by side

Area	China	United States	Europe
Manufacturing scale	Highest	Lower	Moderate
Solar panels	Dominant	Catching up	Strong importer dependence
Batteries/EVs	Very strong	Growing	Competitive but cost-pressured
Innovation	Strong, especially in applied commercialization	Strong in frontier R&D	Strong in selected industrial niches
Supply-chain control	Very strong	Mixed	Weaker, especially for solar inputs
Main weakness	Overcapacity, trade backlash	Policy instability, weaker scale	Import dependence, cost competitiveness

China is the clear leader in green-tech industrial power, the US is the strongest rival in innovation and policy support, and Europe is stuck trying to defend its industrial base while relying on Chinese hardware.