⚡ Velocity Economics

I wasn't supposed to like this book.

I'm the kind of person who reads economic frameworks looking for holes. Show me heterodox monetary theory, and I'll ask where the peer review is. Claim that thermodynamics explains civilization collapse, and I'll want the mathematical proof. Tell me everything I learned is backwards, and I'll defend my education.

So when I started reading Breaking the Pattern, I was already composing my critique. The currency death cycle seemed too neat. The 1980s inflection felt politically convenient. The Bitcoin chapter looked like grinding an axe.

Then something uncomfortable happened.

Every objection I raised was already addressed in the text. Not as counterargument—as explanation for why I would object in exactly that way. The book had anticipated my resistance and shown me the mechanism producing it.

I was demonstrating the blocking mechanism while critiquing a book about the blocking mechanism.

So I went back. Read it again. This time asking a different question: not "what's wrong with this framework?" but "does this framework explain what I actually observe?"

It does.

Why the economy grows while most people fall behind. Why markets hit record highs while auto loan delinquencies exceed 2008 levels. Why both oligarchs buying climate bunkers and workers maxing credit cards they'll never repay are making the same calculation about system continuity.

Why this pattern has repeated across millennia—Rome's latifundia, France's aristocratic extraction, America's Gilded Age. Not through conspiracy but through mechanism. The same thermodynamic algorithm producing the same outcomes.

Why smart people miss it. Why economists with PhDs and policymakers with decades of experience see seventeen separate problems instead of one disease manifesting seventeen symptoms. Not because they're corrupt or stupid, but because the frameworks they learned were designed to make the pattern invisible.

And why this iteration might be terminal. Nuclear weapons mean violent correction risks extinction. Climate tipping points mean delayed action risks irreversibility. Demographic mathematics mean the 401(k) structure faces reversal within years. The reset button previous civilizations had may not exist for us.

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Here's what the book doesn't do:

It doesn't tell you what to think. It shows you how to see.

It doesn't prescribe specific policies. It gives you six characteristics to evaluate any proposal yourself—whether from 133 BC, 1933, or 2026.

It doesn't promise salvation. It honestly assesses that breaking a millennial cycle may be impossible. That every previous attempt has failed. That the blocking mechanism has defeated every reformer through five consistent tactics you'll learn to recognize.

And yet it argues the attempt is worth making.

— A friend