Our Insights
Articles, essays and studies on strategy, evidence, blended finance and technology — written by the people doing the work, for the people who have to make it hold up in practice.
Essay 7 min read
D.C.’s Accountability Illusion - Institutional Transformation and Government Operational Efficiency at the Intersection of Public Policy, Operations, and Governance
Essay 2 min read
The UN fixed its worst financial accounting rule and started slashing Secretariat posts. But the next Secretary-General inherits an even tougher structural challenge.
Essay 4 min read
The Operator’s Dilemma - Navigating Capability, Security, and Strategic Framing in Modern AI.
Essay 4 min read
Beyond the hype, a look at foreign aid’s darkest year, why AI isn’t the cause or the cure, and why AI has so far failed to offset record losses in global aid.
Essay 9 min read
Why verification, not creativity, is becoming the real professional edge.
Essay 5 min read
What happens to the build-first loop when you’re not a venture-backed startup but an institution that spends public or foreign aid money and has to justify that spend before it happens?
Essay 6 min read
The Real-World Governance Challenge of Agentic AI and Why AI Safety Essays Don’t Match Ship Dates
Essay 14 min read
Cryptocurrency's libertarian promise contradicts the reality we are experiencing.
Article 2 min read
Most federal programs that call themselves “agile” haven’t actually changed their risk exposure.
Study 10 min read
What forty years of IRS modernization reveals about a blind spot in how we hold federal programs accountable.
Article 11 min read
A practical guide to what a bank or surety sees that a contracting officer never asked about.
Article 10 min read
The legal mechanics that turn “let’s be more agile” from a slogan into a contract you can actually stop.
Essay 9 min read
A healthcare website’s spectacular 2013 collapse, a statute nobody quotes, and the psychology of why one big bet keeps beating a thousand small ones.
Study 11 min read
What that gap tells us about money, risk, the strange new shape of private capital, and private equity's new continuation fund model.
Study 10 min read
And one of them just failed in exactly the way the theory predicts. What the right question to ask right now is.
Study 10 min read
On the Sydney Opera House, the Big Dig, and why the outside view keeps losing to the inside sell.
Article 9 min read
A distinction that looks obvious once you’ve sat on the other side of the table, and nearly invisible until you have.
Study 5 min read
A well-designed null result is not the same thing as a closed case, it is valuable precisely because it’s falsifiable, checkable, and specific.
Study 9 min read
The Fantasy of Leverage - “America First” approach to aid, assumes tactical, transactional aid can be wielded as leverage. The best available research says that lever doesn’t move anything.
Study 13 min read
Foreign aid & international development - Billions to Trillions, Minus a Zero.
Essay 11 min read
What the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation’s new language reveals about an old, unresolved argument.
Essay 9 min read
Bootstrapping was never about doing it alone. It was about sequencing what you already have.
Study 10 min read
How three economists replaced grand theories of poverty with something closer to a clinical trial.
Essay 12 min read
Why “does aid work?” is the wrong question, and what a more honest one reveals.
Essay 10 min read
After two essays cataloging everything wrong with foreign aid, it’s worth asking the harder question; compared to what, and measured by what?
Essay 9 min read
On judgment, trust, and the strange economics of being human in an age of very smart software.
Essay 11 min read
What the unwinding of USAID actually reveals about power, money, and the strange afterlife of institutions.
Essay 11 min read
The Village That Was Supposed To Prove Poverty Could Be Solved. Inside Jeffrey Sachs' Boldest Experiment - What Six Years Revealed About Foreign Aid And International Development.
Essay 12 min read
The most influential books ever written about foreign aid all arrive, from wildly different starting points, at the same diagnosis, we keep treating a political disease with a technical m…
Essay 8 min read
Buried in a 2026 appropriations bill is a three-sentence legal mandate that may do more to counter China than the $2.2 billion sitting next to it.
Essay 10 min read
What eighteen months of institutional sleight of hand reveal about a much bigger trade happening in plain sight; a superpower quietly swapping its soft power for silicon.
Essay 9 min read
The UN just launched the AI for Good Global Commission meant to steer artificial intelligence toward the common good, and its membership list is the most interesting thing about it.
Essay 9 min read
One year after America’s foreign aid agency officially closed its doors, the fight over what it actually cost has barely begun, and the agency, technically, still hasn’t legally died.
Essay 10 min read
The most important labor story of this decade isn’t which jobs AI eliminates, it’s which humans, and which countries, still get the chance to learn how to think for a living.
Essay 10 min read
Artificial intelligence isn’t mainly a story about jobs. It’s a story about who controls energy, chips, and data, and every government on Earth is quietly renegotiating its power because…
Essay 10 min read
The coming reinvention of public services isn’t really a story about technology. It’s a story about who gets to be believed when a machine says no.
Essay 10 min read
How a strange bidding war in Washington reveals a much bigger story, nations are quietly turning themselves into tech companies, and the implications will outlast every election cycle in…
Essay 15 min read
How a financial invention designed to tame risk became the most dangerous force in modern economics, and why it’s happening again, right now, in the Persian Gulf.
Short, practical pieces on a single problem and what actually worked.
Longer arguments about where a field is heading and why we think so.
Evaluations and research with the method and the data stated plainly, including what the evidence does not support.