See The Great Depression 2 before the headline does!

If you've spent any time reading serious economic analyses, you've probably had this experience: you finish an article, close the tab, and realize you've learned almost nothing about the structure of what's happening. You've absorbed a narrative — markets did this, the Fed did that, experts disagree — but the underlying mechanisms, the way risk actually accumulates and hides inside complex systems, remain completely opaque. You're left with opinions instead of frameworks. That gap is what this seminar exists to close.

I built The Fragility Seminar because I became convinced that the analytical tools most people use to think about economic crisis are badly mismatched to the actual shape of modern systemic risk. We are trained to watch for sudden shocks — a crash, a default, a pandemic — and to interpret stability as safety. But the history of major economic ruptures tells a different story. The conditions that produce crises are almost always slow, structural, and visible in advance to anyone looking at the right indicators with the right conceptual vocabulary. The problem is not a shortage of data. It is a shortage of thinking framework.

What you will find in this seminar is that framework, built carefully from the ground up. We begin with the fundamental paradox: that prosperity itself is the mechanism by which modern economies accumulate fragility. Debt, efficiency optimization, institutional overconfidence, and the convergence of millions of similar decisions — these are not signs of weakness. They are the predictable outputs of a system working exactly as designed, right up until it doesn't. From there we move into the financial architecture that conceals and amplifies systemic risk, the specific structural fractures in education, housing, food, energy, healthcare, and social cohesion, and finally into the institutional and democratic dynamics that determine whether a crisis is navigable or genuinely destabilizing.

I want to be direct about something: this is not a comfortable seminar. The analysis does not resolve into reassurance. But intellectual seriousness requires sitting with that discomfort — because the alternative is allowing comfortable narratives to substitute for clear thinking at exactly the moment when clear thinking is most consequential. My promise to you is precision, not comfort. I will never ask you to accept a conclusion on authority. Every claim in this seminar is built on mechanism, evidence, and historical precedent that you can interrogate yourself.

The last section of the curriculum is the one I find most important: resilience as a form of political and civic seriousness. Preparation is not capitulation to pessimism. It is what serious people do when they have looked at a system clearly and decided that keeping better futures possible is worth the effort. I hope you'll join me in that effort.