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David Oks
The world is what it is. Click to read David Oks, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
- Posts
- 26 from 19 Aug 2025 to 9 Jul 2026
- Posting
- monthly (21 in the last year)
- Kind
- personal blog
- Feed
- https://davidoks.blog/feed
2026 18
- Why American ambulance rides are so expensive
- Why kinship societies kill their old
- Why China got rich and India didn't
- AI is killing the cheap smartphone
- Why Japanese companies do so many different things
- Language models are weird for the same reason human cultures are weird
- Why airlines are always going bankrupt
- How funerals keep Africa poor
- How citations ruined science
- Seeing like a spreadsheet
- Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
- Why I’m not worried about AI job loss
- Oks notes #2: AI math, the Epstein emails, and why Steve Jobs wanted to buy General Motors
- GDP numbers in poor countries are usually fake
- Oks notes #1: DeepSeek, the WASPs, and the last Mossad station chief in Tehran
- A lot of population numbers are fake
- Why poor countries stopped catching up
- The good luck of Nicolás Maduro
2025 8
- On getting robbed
- The era of declining global poverty is over
- Southern Italy is poor because of malaria
- Social media is a demonic force in the world
- The crisis of central banking is structural
- Africa doesn't have large firms because it doesn't have social trust
- Were European immigrants to the U.S. always considered white?
- Notes on Bihar