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Kotkin, Luttwak, Poker, DRW, PCs, Statistics, AI, Hamilton

Byrne Hobart Byrne Hobart

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Alexander Hamilton:Hamilton was always a funny subject for a hip-hop musical treatment. On one hand, he had the kind of dramatic arc that lets someone tell a pretty incredible story without having to stretch the facts much. He really was born out of wedlock on an obscure island, really did write his way into prominence and end up playing a major role in the Revolutionary War and the early United States. And he also had the kind of entertainingly messy personal life that keeps the story interesting: one well-documented affair (documented, in fact, by Hamilton himself, in the late 18th century equivalent of posting a long Instagram story that consists of a series of Apple Notes screencaps), whispers of other possible affairs, close proximity to the country's first insider trading scandal, and lots of back-room political maneuvering. But also, Hamilton was deeply skeptical of the average person's ability to make good political decisions, and tended to defer to aristocracies of one kind or another; he married into a land-owning family, made substantial money as a lawyer defending the economic interests of loyalists after the war, personally participated in putting down tax revolts, and was generally more popular with merchants and manufacturers than with everyday Americans.

There are some rules of history that are broadly applicable across times and places, but that apply to predict the existence of, but not the nature of, N-of-1 figures. That rule is that as institutions get older, the path to the top is more determined by internal politics and luck than by raw skill. And as a corollary, when there's a major shift in those institutions, there are suddenly a lot of young people involved. In 1776, Hamilton was in his early twenties, as was Aaron Burr; James Madison was 25, John Jay was 30, Jefferson was 33. George Washington was part of the existing establishment, and was 44 at the outbreak of the war, but he immediately surrounded himself with young and energetic people, Hamilton among them. As a loyal British subject, Hamilton might have found ways to move up various ranks (and he'd already shown a talent for this; in his early teens he was briefly put in charge of a trading company while his boss sought medical treatment). But being aide-de-camp to the de facto leader of an almost-country is the kind of thing that happens a lot more when there's a revolution going on. Hamilton actually had a sense of this; five years before, he'd written in a letter to a friend that what he really needed for his career to take off was a war.

After the war, Hamilton spent a while as a lawyer, with a specialty in defending Tories. Many of the newly-independent colonies were all too happy to economically punish people who were loyal enough subjects to take the British side, but not so fiercely loyal that they left after losing. Hamilton was in the fortunate position where his moral belief in the sanctity of property rights intersected perfectly with his love of contrarian arguments and his practical interest in fees.

But principled, argumentative, ambitious people are not always content with torts. Hamilton played a major role in organizing the Constitutional Convention, and in shaping what that constitution would look like. And when it was settled, with a newly-empowered state and a chief executive who had legal and moral authority to act, Hamilton worked as the first treasury secretary, and designed a financial system complicated enough that his successors were afraid to mess it up.

As with many other history books, there are some things that just don't map to contemporary political realities—left and right can both see plenty to admire and plenty to disagree with in Hamilton's politics. But the overall narrative has all sorts of fun parallels to recent history. Not just the ongoing debate over how decentralized the country ought to be, and how to balance between the state, the private sector, and individual rights. But even down to very narrow details like a pandemic (the Yellow Fever outbreak of 1793) where there was a deep partisan divide about how to treat the disease, and plenty of rhetoric about how people were overreacting and surely weren't so wimpy as to be afraid of the sniffles.

Every biography runs into the problem that a human life doesn't fit into the same dramatic arc as a novel or a play. "And then they lived more or less happily ever after" can take up half the timespan in question, especially if the subject is notable partly for how early their achievements were. Hamilton doesn't quite have that problem, because he died in a duel in his forties, but even before that, his career and influence were in decline. So the story gets a bit more depressing even before the infamous duel.

Reading the book, it's striking how some cycles have actually returned to their late 18th-century level. Was there any time between now and then where pseudonymous writers had so much influence on political thought in the US? Very young people mostly aren't rising up the ranks in government, though there are a few of these like Lina Khan, but they are having a big impact in the private sector. Reading the book gives the sense that if Hamilton were brought to the present, bouncing between untangling gnarly cap tables for money and posting blistering Substack rants for fun, he'd feel right at home.

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