2026-03-26 06:55:57

One of my most successful articles now has a YouTube version. If you want to see why warm countries are poorer, go watch it!

Now today’s article, which I had a lot of fun writing, full of crazy facts. Enjoy!

After 1300 years as the largest dome in the world, Rome’s Pantheon was replaced by Florence’s dome in Santa Maria del Fiore. To this day, it remains the biggest masonry dome ever built.1 What?!

In a span of 100 years, the same city would birth an endless list of history-making figures: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Raphael, the Medici, Machiavelli… What’s going on?!

What was in the water? I’d like to know, to brew it again. Florence or Silicon Valley can’t have been pure serendipity. How do we replicate them?

To answer that, the best place to start is a cathedral that had spent 100 years with a massive hole in the roof that nobody could plug, much before Lorenzo de Medici, Leonardo, or Michelangelo were born.

Brunelleschi’s Duomo

The architect that originally designed the cathedral died, and he left no solution on how to build the dome.

After a century with that hole (!) came a goldsmith (!!), Brunelleschi, who built the biggest dome the world had ever seen! And he did it without the cement used for the Roman pantheon, as its recipe had been lost in time!

Even harder, since the rest of the cathedral was already built when he arrived, he couldn’t change the shape of its walls, reinforce them, buttress them, or anything like that. He had to work with what he had! And he did it without scaffolding! And he did it without ribs!2 This is crazy.

The key challenge was to prevent the dome from falling. The first thing there was to adopt the insight of Gothic architecture that taller arches are stronger than circular ones. So the dome is not a hemisphere, it’s a bit more vertical.

The second was to make it light by emptying it. The structural force is carried by the inner dome (red), and then there’s a space and an outer shell (green).

You can see the space between the roofs here:

Even then, it would have fallen.

Brunelleschi needed a way to pull the top outward and push the bottom inward. He solved it with stone and wood rings around the dome!

The other thing Brunelleschi had to figure out was how to build this thing without a wooden scaffolding inside (it would have required too much wood!). He solved that by building the entire structure ring by ring, using herringbone bricks, crossing the bricks so that they would support each other.

OK hold on. What’s going on here? Why, after 1300 years, out of nowhere, is a goldsmith that doesn’t even have the materials necessary for replicating the Ancient Rome Pantheon able to build a bigger one?! That we’ve never replicated?!

Leonardo’s Roman Proportions

Brunelleschi lived in Florence, a city with plenty of Ancient Rome ruins. I think it’s hard for us to understand what living among these vestiges of a better time felt like.

From Petrarch, a Tuscan from the neighboring city of Arezzo3 who visited Rome in the mid-1300s:

[Rome is a] broken city, the remnants of the ruins lay before our eyes. [...] Who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?

Every day, you’d be reminded that your civilization is inferior to the one that came before.

Brunelleschi, inspired by these ruins and by some people before him like Petrarch, who had visited Rome, decided to make a trip to Rome too. Ruins were everywhere. He spent two years there, studying its remaining architecture. He studied the Pantheon to replicate its dome in Florence, and got the idea for the herringbone bricks by observing brickwork there.

He didn’t go alone; he was accompanied by the famed sculptor, Donatello, who was inspired to sculpt a David, the first freestanding nude male sculpture since antiquity. Together, they excavated buried structures and measured monuments like the Pantheon, the Baths of Caracalla, Roman basilicas…

Around that same time, another Florentine, Bracciolini, rediscovered4 Vitruvius’s De Architectura, the only architectural treatise that has survived from antiquity to this day.

Other Florentines like Michelangelo, Raphael5, and Leonardo da Vinci traveled to Rome to form the ninja turtles squad study it.

Between De Architectura and visits to Rome, architects and artists started noticing that Roman buildings used modular, proportional systems and strict rules of geometry: harmonious numerical ratios (1:1, 1:2, 2:3, etc.), room height related to width, temple column spacing based on column diameter… These ideas gave Renaissance architects something medieval builders lacked: a theoretical mathematical framework for beauty.

Brunelleschi came back from the trip with a firm idea of what the dome should look like, and all the other Florentine visitors came back with specific ideas of proportions and classical elements.

So why did the Renaissance happen in Florence? Well, it couldn't have happened much farther from Rome. Think of the experience of these Florentines, growing up among substantial Florentine ruins from the Ancient Roman Empire, and close enough to visit Rome and witness the massive beauty that had been lost. The farther you were from Rome, the fewer the ruins, the harder it was to get to Rome, and the less inspiration Rome would have provided.

This probably explains why the Renaissance had to happen close to Rome, but not specifically in Florence. Why not Siena, Pisa, Naples, Milan, or even Rome? Why then, and not 200 or 300 years earlier or later?

Machiavellian City-States

In the Dark Ages, as the Roman Empire fell and law and order withdrew, cities decayed and many disappeared. But not so in Italy. Cities like Milan, Florence, Verona, Bologna, Ravenna, Pisa, Venice, Genoa, and Siena remained populated. By the 11th century, they had merchant classes, bishops, courts, guilds, militias… They were already institutionally capable of governing themselves. This independence of communities happened everywhere in the former Roman Empire, but it was especially true in the Holy Roman Empire, modern-day Germany and Italy.

This is Italy in 1500. Chaos!

I explored why this happened in Why Were Germany and Italy the Last European Countries to Unify? The short answer is that Italy was the battleground between two dimensions of power: the temporal and the spiritual.

This was Europe around 1200 AD:

For centuries since the creation of the Holy Roman Empire in the 10th Century, the Emperor and the Pope fought for power and influence, like who would appoint the powerful bishops. Around 1200, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had just united the northern part from his father with the Kingdom of Sicily to the south from his mother. The Pope logically freaked out when he saw his Papal States surrounded, and stirred up revolts everywhere he could in Italy.

Crucially, Italy is separated from Germany by the mighty Alps, making it very hard for the Holy Roman Emperor (HRE) to have strong influence to the south.

And Italy is very mountainous, with lots of secluded valleys that birthed strong, independent cities. This meant that, in practice, local cities had been quite autonomous for a very long time, even if they were nominatively under the HRE.

So when the Pope stirred revolt all over Italy, different cities decided to support different sides. This is what’s called the war of the Guelphs and Ghibellines.

Notably, the closer you were to one of these big powers, the less likely you were to support it, because it’s better to have a distant lord than a neighboring one. This created a patchwork of alliances and counteralliances, of wars and betrayals. Over the centuries, the power of the HRE dwindled in the region, and the emperor became just a distant influence.

This is the context in which the Florentine Machiavelli thrives and writes his famous work The Prince in the early 1500s.6

So all this is why the Northern Italian region had many independent city-states:

• The cities there remained inhabited since Roman times.

• The area has many fertile valleys among mountains, allowing for many urban nuclei to sprout.

• The region was separated from its rulers by the Alps, which meant little oversight.

• This is at the border region between the HRE and the Papal States, so they became a proxy war battleground that exacerbated their differences and undermined the oversight of both on the region

Independent states were crucial to explore new styles locally and to push for their own architectural styles to differentiate from other competing city-states. But this doesn’t tell us why they were so rich, and you needed a lot of money to build such huge cathedrals.

Medici Wealth

At the time, Italy’s population was rebounding from the Black Death faster than in many other European countries.

And these people were rich! In the 1300s, Northern Italy was already the richest region in Europe.

One of the main reasons was urbanization. These were the main European cities in the early 1500s. Notice how many are in northern Italy!

We already explained why: They were already quite populated in Roman times, and they have some of the best plains in the Mediterranean, especially in the Po Valley.

A big population that could grow fast and was already urban meant a bigger share of the population lived in cities.

Of course, cities are more productive than rural areas due to their network effects. They become marketplaces, develop industries, invest in infrastructure, build industrial clusters…

Northern Italy also had another huge benefit: It was in the middle of global trade networks.

The richest regions at the time were Flanders, the Holy Roman Empire in general, the Byzantines, and the Muslims,7 and Northern Italy was in the middle of them all. This is why Venice and Genoa grew so rich as maritime trade republics.

And within Northern Italy, Florence was very well positioned.

If you wanted to move between the HRE and Rome, the best path went through Florence, which is a natural crossroads because Florence and Bologna flank the Apennine mountains.

So Florence, like only a handful of other Italian cities, had a unique confluence of assets:

• It was in a populated region, because it has a good climate and great agricultural plains

• This was in the richest region in the world, because it was at the crossroads connecting all the main kingdoms of the time

• The region also contained many cities that had remained inhabited since Roman times, and Florence was one of the big, urbanized cities in the region

• Situated between the two regional powers of the HRE and the Papal States, these cities had more independence than most

• It was at a crossroads for internal Italian trade, making it uniquely rich as a marketplace

• Close to Rome, to receive strong architectural influence from the Roman Empire

Still, it could have been Siena, Bologna, Parma, maybe Genoa or Venice. And sure enough, all of them have beautiful architecture. But something set Florence apart.

Money.

The Origins of Florentine Wealth

The best way to know who ruled back then is to look at who funded the biggest monuments. So who funded the cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore?

One tip is in the name: Santa Maria refers to Virgin Mary, and echoes the importance of religion. But fiore? These are flowers—like Firenze. This refers to the city: The cathedral was meant to represent both the church and the state. This was not a purely religious endeavor. In fact, it was anything but. It was the commune of Florence that financed it. And where did the money come from? The Wool Guild, Arte della Lana.

By the 1200s, the wool trade had become one of the city’s largest industries, among other things precisely because Florence was such a big city:8 Wool must be sheared, sorted, scoured, carded, drawn, spun, wound, warped, woven, fulled, sheared, pressed, dyed, sewn… There are many steps, but crucially, each step can be done by one single person or a few, with pretty basic machinery. So people across the city worked on different steps in their homes. The bigger the city, the more workers could be dedicated to each step, the more competition and learning between them, the more volume could be produced, and the bigger the industry. The bigger it is, the more it specializes, the better its products compared to the competition, the better the reputation, and you end up dominating a continent-wide market.

This industry became so big that local wool was not enough to feed it, so Florentines started buying wool abroad (in Spain, England, Flanders…), and finished it into high-quality cloth. They organized themselves into guilds, which helped them work together to promote the industry’s quality, its trade, its financing…

Financing! When you buy wool and sell cloth abroad, you need currency exchange. And when there are so many steps to the process, from so many workers, you must pay them a salary before you sell the cloth or garment, so you need a lot of working capital. So the Florentines also developed a very strong financial guild.

The financial guild minted the gold florin, which soon became a currency used across Europe thanks to its distribution through wool commerce and banking, and to its reliability, as ensured by the guild.

The power—and money—of the commune was concentrated in the hands of these guilds, and of course legislation favored them. Imagine what that did to the competition: Across most of Europe, industrialists, bankers, and merchants had to withstand the logic of Church and nobles. But Florence could do regulatory arbitrage, optimizing everything to support its trade; another advantage to pull forward.

Then the city had a lucky strike. Remember the Guelphs and Ghibellines? Florence supported the Guelphs (the pope), while its rival Siena supported the Ghibellines (HRE),9 and it turns out the pope won. Siena was stripped of its banking and tax collection monopolies, which went to Florentine families. Notably, the Medici created a bank that grew strongly throughout that time, was on the right side of the war, and was given the management of the Papal Treasury. Their good relationship also gave them a monopoly of alum mining, a product crucial for dyes that could only be sourced in mines near Rome.10 This is also the time when silver started flooding Europe, so banking became extremely profitable. Eventually, the Medici would take over the politics of Florence and convert it into a duchy.

Florence used this newly-found power to strengthen its position across Tuscany and conquered its neighbors one by one. When it took over Pisa, it acquired a port. When it took over Siena, it eliminated its main rival.

So we can add a few factors to our reasoning of how Florence became the cradle of Renaissance:

• Thanks to its sizable population and perfect position at a crossroads within Northern Italy, Florence became wealthy in the pretty typical network effect of cities we’ve already seen elsewhere: first an industry developed (wool), which begat new industries (wool processing into cloth, finance). This made the city rich.

• It was on the right side of a war, so it was showered with spoils, most notably lots of financial power and control over valuable commodities (alum was crucial for making colorful cloth).

But why push for a new art style? And why this one?

Florence Style

Power was conveyed through architecture. The Arte della Lana guild wanted to show its power in the city, and to other cities. Remember, there are dozens of city-states in Northern Italy, the competition was brutal! They had to stand out, establish themselves as the most successful, so they could have status and gain more business. That’s why they invested in Santa Maria del Fiore. But that cathedral is not yet Renaissance! It starts as a mix of Gothic and local Tuscan style. So what is the Renaissance style, and why does it appear here?

As we saw previously, the impetus behind Gothic was to go as high as possible, to reach the heavens. This pushed the boundaries of architectural technology of the time: verticality, pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, detailed decoration for mysticism, and stained glass were the methods, and I think the goal was clearly achieved.

In the Renaissance, the idea was to go back to the wisdom of the more powerful ancient Roman Empire. Studying it, architects realized they followed some rules, and they decided to decode them and apply them. They decided that space should be graspable, measured, balanced, and ordered as a coherent whole. They did that by going back to columns, round arch, domes, volumes, horizontality, visual legibility, proportions, and a return to hard-coded classicism.

The love for proportion and precision could also be seen in small details like these:

Lines, squares, circles, crosses, mathematical curves… These textures are beautiful.

Of course, Rome and the popes loved the new architectural style based on their own city, so they funded and promoted it. They realized that Rome was a pile of ruins, but if they could rebuild it and make it even more beautiful, their power would radiate across Christendom. This is why Vatican City’s St Peter’s Basilica is of the Renaissance style, for example, and why the Renaissance became huge in general.

A Change in the Reason behind Architectural Innovation

OK here’s my ignorant and probably unpopular opinion: Renaissance churches are beautiful but… underwhelming?

With Gothic, society had a clear goal: Convey their love of God by reaching upward and pushing the technological boundaries to make it happen.

The great thing that Renaissance does is rediscover domes, which are objectively awesome. It also recovered the pendentives (which were Eastern Roman, not from Rome…), and made proportions explicit. But does that mean you have to adopt all the other Roman stuff, too? Why go back to columns and rounded arches, when we’ve seen they’re objectively inferior, since they can only allow smaller spaces? Why go for horizontality, an architectural feeling that was already so pervasive in cities because houses were not tall? Why pretend an obsession with order that your predecessor didn’t have, when in fact Gothic architecture had a similar order that you just couldn’t read?

It feels like the Renaissance was trying too hard to define its path in opposition to what came before.

“Gothic” litearlly means from the Goths—the Franks and the Germans on the other side of the Alps. That style was born in France and spread to Germany. It makes sense that Florence, allied to Rome and against the German HRE, would define itself in opposition to that by getting inspiration from ancient Roman architecture. Of course, a city that is managed by merchants wants to define itself in opposition to pure religious piety too. But when you define yourself by opposition to others, how strong are your values?

It’s a bit like how Swiss handwatches tried hard to become precise and thin, and once the Japanese figured out how to do that better, most Swiss watchmakers went bankrupt and the few that recovered (and soared) did so not because their watches were better (not more precise, nor thinner), but because their cost and elaborate shapes became symbols of status.

This is the first time in all the architectural styles we’ve observed that the innovations are not done to improve, but just to be different.

Renaissance Outside of Churches

Renaissance really shines outside of churches for me. Before, it seems like most architecture of beauty was concentrated into churches, but now it appears everywhere. Compare Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, built around 1300 just before the Renaissance, with the Medici-Riccardi, built around 1450, during the explosion of Renaissance in Florence:

The Palazzo Vecchio is basically a fortress!11 A small unassuming door without many indications that it is even the main door, small windows, stones of different colors, no texture between windows, the crenelated roof for defence, a single tower in one corner…

Now compare that to the Medici Riccardi. Still strong, but now the round arches with voussoirs on top make them taller and much more conspicuous. There are more, bigger windows,12 external decorated marks for each floor, the roof overhang is now beautifully decorated, dimensions feel harmonious…

And I think this becomes even stronger when you have several houses following this style, even when some of them mix with other styles.

So Why Did Florence Birth Michelangelo, Fibonacci & Galileo?

Although I am lukewarm about Renaissance church architecture, this doesn’t take away from the improvement in non-Church architecture, and more importantly the amazing intellectual movement that emerged in Florence.

The Renaissance precursor Dante Alighieri revolutionized literature; Luca Pacioli, a collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci, became a ground-breaking figure of accounting; Piero della Francesca emphasized the divine proportions; Fibonacci13 discovered the Fibonacci sequence and popularized Indian numerals; Galileo the astronomer defended heliocentrism against the church; Botticelli, Boccaccio, and the aforementioned Michelangelo, the Medici, Da Vinci, Petrarch, Donatello, Raphael, Brunelleschi…

And now we know what the Renaissance is, and why it started in Florence:

• Because of the mountainous terrain, the Alps, and the length of the Italian Peninsula, Northern Italy was distant from foreign centers of power, which gave them autonomy, especially given the contest between the HRE and the Church.

• Northern Italy was rich because it was at the right spot in the Mediterranean, so it was the marketplace for Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

• It also has highly fertile valleys, so the population grew fast.

• A big share of that population was urban, which means network effects, more industry, trade, and money.

• Within this region, Florence was rich as a crossroads between Rome and Northern Italy. It developed a wool industry, and from there other industries, including finance.

• It was close enough from Rome to get its patronage, but not too close to be absorbed by it.

• It was lucky to be on the winning side of the war between the Church and the HRE, and got a massive boost when the Church won, with financial and mining monopolies.

• It was close enough to Rome to gain inspiration from Ancient Rome and be able to study it.

Once Florence had the money and the independence to go beyond the daily focus on war and survival, it could use the example of Rome to study it and replicate it. This meant massive investments in architecture, art, and all types of studies of Ancient Rome. This created a critical mass of thinkers who learned from each other, creating an explosion of knowledge across the disciplines.

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In many regards, this reminds me of what I witnessed in Silicon Valley in the nearly 15 years I spent there: an incredible concentration of intelligent, ambitious people, all focused on pushing the boundaries of one new technology—the Internet. It’s difficult to get these network effects set up. Can San Francisco survive its current downfall? Where will the next Florence emerge? What type of endeavor can justify the massive investments that are concentrated in one place, to attract geniuses from everywhere? Can Dubai do it, or does it not have enough of a mission? Shenzhen fits the definition. Is it limited to manufacturing, or will it bleed into other types of innovation? What do you think?

This type of article takes blood and sweat, and they don’t leave me much more time to do other things. But I want to do even better ones! And more of them! Across more media! I hope you saw the video at the top. I want to do more of that too! But I can’t do this alone. So I am going to hire a team to help me research, write, and publish more articles, convert this content into videos, audio, and podcasts, translate them, make tools to make them interactive, and much more. But I can only do that if you help me pay for it. If you like articles like this one and you want to see more, I need you to fund it.

2026-03-20 01:17:42

We saw in the previous article how the Romans developed the voussoir, barrel and groin vaults, domes, cement, plumbing, and heating to allow for space and comfort in their many buildings. Today, we’re going to see what happened afterwards: As the Roman Empire collapsed in the West, the Byzantines picked up the torch in the East and pushed its architectu…

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2026-03-17 21:05:25

Geography has dramatically influenced architecture, but another force might have been even more important: technology. How has technology shaped architecture and our living spaces?

We’re going to answer this question today through a trip to the Roman Empire: What problems did the Romans try to solve? How did that influence the architecture that we know today?

In the next few articles, we’re going to explore successive architectural styles: Byzantine, Islamic, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, Historicist, Revival, Modernist, Contemporary… In the process, we’re going to see how geography, culture, and technology have interacted to drive architecture.

The Architectural Problems the Romans Inherited

The Romans learned most of their architecture from the Greeks, and some from the local Etruscans. Here, the Hera II Paestum in southern Italy:

But this type of structure has two big problems that didn’t fit Roman goals:

1. The indoor part is too small to hold an event. The system of vertical columns with horizontal lintels was too heavy to allow for big indoor spaces.

1. They’re expensive to make. If you want to build many civic buildings (temples, forum, baths, basilica, market, theater, bridges, aqueducts, walls, gates…) across many cities in the empire, it’s hard to replicate this design: It requires too much stone that might be scarce, or skilled craftsmen to cut, carry, and assemble the stone.

There’s a third problem that Romans wanted to solve: comfort in private homes. They wanted the entire city, including many residences, to have running water, drainage, and heat.

The Key Roman Technologies for Architecture

Romans adopted a few technologies that allowed them to increase indoor spaces. One is the voussoir arch.

Voussoir

The voussoir arch transfers weight sideways, preventing collapse and allowing a much wider space between columns.

The Romans didn’t invent either of these arches; they took them from the Etruscans, who probably took them from around the Mediterranean (Mesopotamia and Egypt). But the Romans perfected them.

Barrel & Groin Vaults

If you take an arch and extend it along a corridor, you get the barrel vault. Again, this already existed around the Mediterranean, but not extensively, and the barrel vault is quite limited to single corridors anyway. The Romans learned to combine two of these into groin vaults.

You can see the type of result that arises from this as you scale it:

Dome

Instead of projecting the arch in a single direction, you can rotate it in a circle and create a dome.

Rome’s Pantheon, with a span of over 43m, was the largest dome in the world for 1,300 years! And you can see the transition from Greek to Roman style when you view it from outside:

Imagine that you come from a Greek world where virtually all social life happened outdoors, and suddenly you can create these huge indoor spaces that had never existed before. Big events and social life can now happen indoors!

Cement

Notice, though, that neither the dome nor the groin vaults from before are solely made of stone. They require a lot of cement.

Like the previous technological improvements, cement already existed before the Romans: It was made through a process that took limestone, changed its chemistry to reshape it, and then reconverted it into limestone.

Yes, cement used to be basically limestone: Both were calcium carbonate, CaCO₃. When heated, CO₂ is released and what is left is quicklime, CaO. Add water, it becomes slaked lime Ca(OH)₂. Now wait for long enough, and it will capture some CO₂ from the air and eject the water, creating CaCO₃ again. The problem with this is that it takes a long time, and you can’t have much water around or your slaked lime will not dry out.

If you add sand to the cement, you get mortar. Add stones to the mortar, and you get concrete. Previous civilizations used mortar and concrete, but not as much as the Romans, because their version was weaker for building, longer to set, and couldn’t be done around water.

The Romans were lucky to discover that mixing the lime with volcanic ash (pozzolana, very common around Naples, added silicon and aluminium to the mix) made a much stronger cement that could even set under water, and became stronger with time rather than weaker. The Romans mixed elements in such a way that cement could actually heal over time, something we’ve only recently understood.

There is a kind of powder which from natural causes produces astonishing results. It is found [...] about Mt. Vesuvius. This substance, when mixed with lime and rubble, not only lends strength to buildings of other kinds, but even when piers of it are constructed in the sea, they set hard under water.—Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book 21

Only with this superglue could the Romans make the dome and the other types of buildings we’ve seen.

This is all Roman concrete: Roman cement with sand and aggregate (e.g. sand, stone, pieces of brick…) that serves as a skeleton. The mix was lighter at the top, with pumice stone (volcanic stone with bubbles in it) and became heavier and heavier as it went down, closer to the walls. The dome width is also thicker towards the bottom.

Note the squares throughout: They are coffers, which enabled reduction of material (and hence weight). At the top, a hole further lightened the structure, while also allowing for a beautiful play of light and shadow.

Small holes in the floor allow for drainage.

You really see the progress when you compare it with what came before:

Wooden Formwork

But concrete is a bit liquid; you can’t just place it in a specific shape. It needs formwork: a frame to hold it until it hardens.

Romans used wooden molds, just as we do today, and poured the concrete inside. They used it for everything, from domes to walls to columns.

With the discoveries of voussoir arches, groin vaults, domes, and cement, building became much easier. Romans didn’t need to source good stone and even better craftsmen. They could simply crush and transport limestone and brick, mix them with sand, aggregate, and water, pour the result into wooden formwork, and erect their buildings.

This means construction became much cheaper and easier than in earlier days, giving Romans a solution to their second problem, which meant they could build many more buildings across the empire. Of course, these two things go together: It’s not like the Romans figured all this out and then started to build. Rather, all this building allowed them to iterate and figure out better and better construction techniques.

Civic Buildings

Romans built aqueducts to bring drinking water to their cities. Once they could build huge indoor spaces, they could bring water to indoor buildings, and baths became possible.

Indoor Architecture

Once you start bringing water indoors for baths, you might as well start bringing water to other buildings, including private ones. This requires channeling water through small tubes in walls. But with what type of material? As we saw in How Ancient Metals Started Civilization, Romans had way too much lead from their silver mining, and lead is easy to work with, so they built their plumbing with it. Plumbing comes from plumbum, Latin for lead.

Moving water requires pressure, so Romans built water towers to store the aqueduct water. Water is generally cold, though, so Romans had to warm it up. They didn’t just face the challenge of water management, but heat management, too. For that, they needed cauldrons, some fuel, chimneys, all incorporated into the building.

And once they did it for the communal baths, they began incorporating it into housing, starting with the rich.2

And this is how Roman architecture solved their problems:

• Huge enclosed spaces thanks to arches, vaults, domes, cement

• The ability to build them at scale thanks to the easier processing of limestone and clay, the standardization of shapes, and the use of wooden formwork for pouring concrete

• The ability to provide services like running water, drainage, and heating at scale, by applying the learnings from construction of many public buildings to that of private homes, and by taking advantage of the critically wide availability of lead.

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What’s striking about Roman architecture is that a lot of it was extremely practical: They had convenience problems and they wanted to solve them, so they developed the corresponding technology. I always heard that Rome was a civilization of engineers rather than philosophers, but this was the first time it gelled for me. They had the benefit of an empire that kept expanding, so more and more buildings to build meant much more experience through iteration, and more technological development.

Most other ancient architectures stemmed from a cultural desire that translated into the technological progress that enabled it. We’ll see those in the next few articles, where we cover the Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic architecture. After that, we’ll examine Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, Historicist, Revivalist, Modernist, Contemporary, etc. All, to understand how architecture got where it has, and how we can improve it.

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2026-03-14 00:52:43

In the previous article, we visited Britain, Egypt, and Greece. Today, we’re going to journey through India, China, and Japan, and see how their different geographies pushed their architectures in different directions compared to those around the Mediterranean and in Britain.

India

Whereas all of Egypt’s water comes from one single river, India’s water comes from one single season, the monsoon.

This has determined India’s architecture. A big chunk of its land (and most of its population) is in the Ganges Valley:

That valley is criss-crossed by the Ganges and its tributaries. When the monsoon floods the rivers, they bring sediment with them to fertilize the land. Water and sediment mean lots of people, and the rivers allow for cheaper trade. So many cities emerged on their riverbanks.

In the dry season, waters go down tremendously, though. So how do you make sure you can access the river at all times?

So water in India arrives dramatically, it leaves dramatically; it structures trade, it structures agriculture; it determines good years and bad years; it determines survival. Water cycles mean life and death. So they drive religion, pilgrimages, life and death rites.

In places where water is scarcer, it’s even more important. So people store it.

If you build storage for water, and water is holy, you end up building a decorated, inverted pyramid.

But you can only do that when it’s easy to carve into the ground.

There are also temples carved into stone from the ground. They are not built by adding material, but by subtracting. In the case above, it’s carved inside a mountain from the Deccan, a massive volcanic plateau made of basalt. It can be extremely hard, but here it has joints and planes that can be exploited for carving.

As with pyramids, one of the reasons to do this is that it makes the building very bulky, which means temperature will be stable and fresh—ideal in the scorching heat of India.

These structures still need to stand, but they’re heavy, so we see small indoor spaces and lots of columns again.

Have you seen this type of video? Same energy.

This video is from tropical Australia, where extreme weathering by constant rain and heat makes laterite, a certain type of soil that hardens with air. People can make bricks out of it.

West Bengal, which has lots of this laterite, uses bricks for its temples.

The result of these types of stone (laterite, sandstone, limestone, soapstone…) is that it’s not strong enough to create big indoor spaces without arches, but carving is easy, so decorations are extreme.

You combine these elements, and you get things like the inverted temple stepwell of Rani-ki-Vav:

However, not all India is like this. In some areas, it rains a lot more:

In Kerala, you need tiered slopes on your roofs that carry the water off, and since this is a mountainous area, timber is more available to make those. Since you don’t want this water to run on the walls, you’ll add cornices that eject the water out.

But in this area, the climate is very hot and humid, and you want air to circulate all the time to refresh you and to avoid mold, so houses have a central opening.

The Nalukettu was born.

It evolved into a system of courtyards surrounded by homes, so that extended families could live under one roof, each with their own space.

So you can see some of the elements that have driven Indian architecture:

• Water is sacred

• Access to fluctuating river water levels requires ghats

• In drier areas, people dug wells that could also capture monsoon water, and since they’re sacred, they became temples like inverted pyramids

• Carve structures into the ground to protect against temperature swings

• Where it rains the most, protect your head and your home with slanted roofs, especially with tiered slopes, so that the cascading water doesn’t accumulate too much energy and make holes in the ground

• Have an internal courtyard to make sure air circulates well

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China

We see similar patterns in China. In the Loess Plateau, where stone is easy to work, people would carve decorations and homes into the mountain.

This protected from the extreme temperature swings throughout the year and between day and night.

Kerala’s Nalukettus are mirrored in the Chinese siheyuan.

They also have homes around a central courtyard, made to optimize airflow and allow for a central common area.

Now take this concept and bring it to the mountains, where harder transportation means less communication and trade across valleys, more cultural distance with your neighbors, less political unity, and more conflict. You get the Tulous, semi-fortified community homes with a central courtyard.

The Forbidden City, in Beijing, uses the same logic, just on a bigger scale.

We see:

• Axial distribution, to wow visitors

• North-south orientation

• Walls and a moat, to protect against intruders

• The closer to the center, the more intimate the dwelling

• Social courtyards

The nesting from outside to inside is continued through the Imperial City and the Inner City.

Unlike in India, however, Chinese architecture stands out for its use of wood:

Why so much more wood?

India’s civilization emerged across the Indus and Ganges River Valleys, which have access to sandstone (e.g. in Rajasthan). It also spread quickly across the Deccan Plateau—the mountains in the center—where stone is available, which is very useful to avoid rot and insulate against the heat.

China originates in the North China Plain, an alluvial plain made by the sediments brought by the Yellow River. This means rock is under a deep layer of soil, hard to reach. But there was a lot of timber here.

This region is much farther north, so it’s colder, and timber is better at trapping and storing heat. Also, stone can trap water and break with too many cycles of freezing and thawing (because water takes up more space as ice, and pushes against the stone), but timber is flexible, so it doesn’t break as easily with these cycles.

Also, the North China Plain has many more earthquakes than India, and stone is bad for earthquakes since it can’t flex at all. Stone buildings tend to crumble during earthquakes, while timber ones survive.

For all these reasons, China used much more timber in its architecture. And that has its own sets of challenges.

For example, when you’re making your walls in stone, they can carry the weight of the entire structure. It would be expensive to do the same with timber, so instead, timber architecture tended to have strong wooden columns to carry the weight and light timber for the walls.

Look at the beams, columns, and wooden roof of the Shanhua Temple:

One of the positive things about wood, of course, is that it’s lighter, so indoor spaces could be bigger.

But you don’t want your wooden walls to rot, so they should avoid contact with monsoon rains. The answer is a roof with long eaves that allow for a deep overhang:

That way, water is ejected far from the wall and doesn’t touch it. It’s also why the Chinese roofs are curved, as you can see in the background in this pic. This allows water to run out fast and be projected outwards, farther from the wall.

Curbing the wood had another advantage: Over long periods of time, gravity makes wood sag downward. So to avoid that, the Chinese curbed wood upward. Once you start doing that, it makes sense to push it for aesthetic purposes, to make the roof “reach for the sky”.

Notice what’s below the roof? That’s called a dougong, and is very typical of Chinese architecture. It’s to support the weight of the roof. Why?

• With big indoor spaces, roofs are heavy.

• But they can’t rest on walls like in Europe, because they’re made of light timber instead of stone. So they must rest on the timber columns.

• They must support the eaves, which have a deep overhang as we just mentioned.

• Architects needed a system made of interlocking timber that could be flexible during earthquakes.

The dougong was the solution—nested brackets that could reach far into the eave to support it.

Of course, once you have this type of structure, you might as well decorate it:

And it’s not just for dougongs. Anything, really. Columns? Roofs? All of it. Because timber is super easy to carve, so it’s easy to decorate.

And roof tiles are all mass-produced, so the casting mold can make them pretty.

You might have noticed that there’s a lot of red in here. That’s because, after all we’ve done to protect our wood, it still needs protection from the Sun and rain, so it must be coated. Some of the coats don’t have much color, but those that did were frequently red, as it’s the most common dye color that exists. Imperial buildings used the less common cinnabar, which you might associate with opulent traditional Chinese buildings.

Of course, there are a million other specificities of Chinese architecture, but what I find fascinating about all of this is that so many of these specificities are the result of simple geographic differences—in the case of China, the widespread use of timber instead of stone.

Japan

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2026-03-12 05:57:02

All buildings everywhere are the same—the International Style.

Towers of concrete, steel and glass. We mourn for the traditional architectures of yesteryear, without realizing why.

Why are these buildings the same everywhere?

And why were they so different before? Is it just a matter of globalization, or is there something more?

Here’s a little known fact: A lot of the world’s architecture was the consequence of geography.

In some cases, it’s easy to see, such as steep roofs in places with heavy snowfall.

But the depth of the influence of geography is hard to grasp. So today, we’re going to take a trip across different world architectures to see how geography influenced them: Egypt, Ancient Greece, India, China, Japan, and Britain. As we do, we’re not just going to learn why things are the way they are, we’re also going to understand what elements we could bring back to our architectural styles today.

British Stone

Here’s a map of Britain’s soils, along with some of its most notable architecture.

The island’s geology changes strikingly, from oldest in the north to youngest in the south. Every type of stone gave birth to a different type of architecture.

Aberdeen is famous for its dark granite. We can also find granite in southwest England around Dartmoor, and sure enough, there, homes tend to be made of granite. Edinburgh has sandstone, evident in its sand-colored buildings. Golden limestone is common around Bristol, and old country houses are golden as a result. The soil in the surroundings of London is the result of sediment accumulation, so there’s much less stone to go around. But there’s clay, which can be made into bricks. Sure enough, London is full of brick buildings. The chalk in South and East England is too brittle for walls, but use timber frames, fill the wall with twigs, wet soil and straw, and then whitewash it with a solution made with chalk, and these homes can last centuries if well maintained. For the roof, use thatch.

Once the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, the cheapness of canal and train transportation meant bricks for walls and Welsh slate for roofs could be used everywhere, so they were.1

So stone is important. But it’s not all-encompassing. What else matters? Let’s travel far back in time to Ancient Egypt to figure this out.

Ancient Egypt

What do these have in common?

1. Big monuments

2. Bold geometric lines

3. Light brown color

4. Lots of rows of things, notably columns

5. For temples and tombs

Why?

The Egyptian government always had massive power because it controlled the Nile and knew how much food it would grow, so it could tax it precisely. The farmers couldn’t escape because the country is surrounded by desert and sea. So the government was extremely powerful and had lots of resources at its disposal.

If you want to project power, the best way to do that is to build big things.

But building technology is not very advanced. If you make a big column of stuff, it falls. How do you build a huge thing so that it doesn’t break and fall apart? You pile matter into a mountain.

Stacked mass is the simplest way to create stable height. That’s why we find it across the world, not just in Egypt.

Stacked mass has another benefit: If you can make an indoor space inside, It protects you from temperature swings because of the thermal mass stored in the stone/dirt.

But these spaces must be small: All that mass risks collapsing on you. As a result, no grand indoor halls, only small rooms.

With flat roofs, because why would you slant them? It’s difficult and expensive, and unnecessary in places with little rain like in Egypt.

The rooms you do have need plenty of columns to support them.

But you want to make lots of big columns, so everybody knows you’re such a powerful ruler! So you’re going to use your millions of minions to build many rows of these columns. Except how do you coordinate these minions? You need to standardize. Most columns, or rows of stuff, need to be as similar as possible.

You haven’t learned yet how to do arches well, so the moment your windows are too big, your walls fall. So small windows.

Notice how it’s also very axial: Lots of these buildings are constructed along a main line (axis).

Axial architecture is meant to wow you as you arrive and follow the line towards the entrance. These structures tend to be organized along cosmic lines, like cardinal directions, solstices, etc.

If you’re aligned with the stars, your architecture is cosmic, it has meaning tied to the sun, the moon and the stars, so you as a ruler surely must be cosmically ordained.

Since you have constructed lots of big buildings and columns, you now have all these surfaces. What can you do with them? Maybe depict your grandiosity and how cozy you are with the gods. And since you have plenty of money and workers available, you can arrange this:

Notice how there’s plenty of carving? Stone is normally hard to carve. But not all stone. Most Egyptian architecture is made of limestone and sandstone, which is relatively soft.

Why? It’s what Egypt had available. Carrying big blocks of stone is not easy, so Egyptians mostly quarried them close to the Nile and used the river to transport them.

And Egypt used to be a shallow ocean—Tethys. This is why today it has some of the biggest depressions on Earth, enough to make them into seas again.

As a shallow seabed, it teemed with life, so its floor got covered by those sediments: shells. As they compressed, they became limestone. As sand compressed, it became sandstone. They are both a similar white-brownish color.2

Both are easy to work with copper tools, and hold up well when compressed, so they’re ideal to cut and stack as blocks to form shapes. Which is why Egyptian blocks are so geometrically accurate, unlike those in Mycenae:

The grandiosity, the connection with the seasons and the cosmos… all of this fits well with the Ancient Egyptian mindset—a civilization that lasted thousands of years with very little change, because the geography is so stable:

• The Nile’s annual flooding, which was measurable, cyclical, drove all work, and generated the most wealth (and the food needed to survive!)

• Isolated from other civilizations through desert and sea

• Strong governmental control because it’s so easy to tax the Nile’s production, so state stability

And that’s how you get the Egyptian Aesthetic:

• Mostly limestone and sandstone, and their ochre colors

• Their tech was ideal for compression, not spanning, so no windows, no big indoor spaces

• But lots of resources, so just pile up stuff and create many of the same thing

• Focus it all on your grandiosity: big piles of stuff, long lines of columns/decorations, all along a strong, impressive line, aligned with the cosmos to create a sense of godlike legitimacy

• Flat roofs: just protect against the Sun and its heat, not rain

• Market yourself through messaging on the walls, mostly through carving, adding color when possible

• It all fits the philosophy of the place: not dynamism, progress, or experimentation, but permanence, continuity, and repetition.

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Ancient Greece

While Egypt is flat and desertic, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Greece is extremely mountainous.

This is because Africa subsided for a long time below Eurasia, and pushed the mountains up on the European and Asian side.

With so many mountains, Greece has abundant workable stone, including limestone, but also another type that was uncommon in Egypt—marble.

Marble starts as limestone: shells and tiny marine organisms that are compressed together, with other particles that cement them and some void that forms between them. That makes it easy to carve, but you can’t use too much detail or your edges will round or chip.

When limestone goes deeper down inside the Earth, it gets more compressed and heated. These particles fuse into interlocked crystals. These are much harder to separate, so the stone is harder and breaks more cleanly, as crystals remain together. You can polish these crystals into a very smooth surface, and their varying angles will scatter light in different directions, making the stone shiny and luminous.3

Naturally, the Greeks played with the ability to finely shape the marble and with its light. For example, notice the vertical lines on these columns? They’re called flutes.

In hard Mediterranean light, small changes in depth create strong shadows. Since the flutes surround the columns, the sun will hit different flutes differently, creating different shadows. Together, all these alternating lights and shadow lights give a sense of vertical elegance to the temples, multiplying the effect of the columns themselves.

Marble allows you to play with light and shadow much more than other types of stone.

Columns shouldn’t be perfectly straight, though, because the base carries more weight than the top, and the center tends to bulge because it’s not as supported as the top of the bottom, so the Greeks used entasis:

Notice the pediment, the triangular shape on top of the columns three pictures back? Why triangular? Because it had to hold a slanted roof to evacuate rain—something that was not needed in Egypt because it basically never rains there, given the difference in latitudes.

Thankfully, Greece also has access to plenty of clay that could be fired for roof tiles, something that temples had at the time, which many people don’t realize because roofs crumble more than columns, so most Greek architecture doesn’t show them anymore.

You need something to support that roof and pediment—the lintel, that horizontal beam that spans across columns.

And since we’re in the mountains here in Greece, the ground is uneven, so you need to place your temple on top of a platform to even it out, the stepped platform.4

We have now rebuilt from first principles the most iconic aspects of Greek architecture.

Notice another detail about this type of architecture:

Marble can be cut with extreme precision. When two marble blocks are perfectly dressed, the contact surface is large, the friction is high, and compression loads transfer cleanly, preventing blocks from sliding.

Stonemasons realized they could make do without cement, which added a paste that was less elegant, uneven, and was actually bad for earthquakes—of which there are a fair amount in the region, if you recall the tectonics. With sufficient precision, dry contact is stronger than cement.

You can’t just pile blocks and hope they don’t move at all, though, especially during earthquakes, so masons carved a hole in the blocks and placed iron clamps to hold them together.

The post-and-lintel structure (columns with a beam on top of them) doesn’t allow for big indoor spaces, so these temples were not designed to hold lots of people, just the statue of the temple’s god and a few other artifacts.

As a result, congregations happened outdoors. Altars were in front of the temples, and that’s where animal sacrifices were held.

Why have a temple at all then? First, because it provided shade on hot days and cover on rainy days. Second, it was a way to convey wealth and success. This meant that the external appearance of the temple was more important than the inside. Hence the flutes and the entasis, and also all other kinds of decorations.

Early on, the style of column tops was pretty basic (Doric), but as time went by, the Greeks explored ways to decorate them further without jeopardizing temple integrity. With the Ionic, and later Corinthian styles, they achieved thinner columns and added more flutes and decorations. The same was true of the friezes above the columns.

These styles evolved relatively fast, because architecture was one of the ways to compete with other Greek city-states, and there were many.

With so many mountains, Greece couldn’t connect overland easily, and ended up with lots of small valleys developing semi-independent cities in each.

You can see some of them if you zoom in on the region:

I assume that most architecture at the time was trial and error, but errors in architecture are bad, so when builders found new, better shapes, others would adopt the same recipe without questioning it too much, and this resulted in pretty standardized sizes for any architectural element: column height, width, spacing, size of pediments, of friezes… everything.

We can see how so many aspects of Ancient Greek architecture are direct results of the region’s geography (and the technology they had at the time): mountains, sunlight, and infrequent rains:

• Mountains provided lots of stone, including marble, which promoted the development of precision masonry

• Mountains are also uneven ground for construction, so Greeks developed bases (crepidoma) of one or more levels for their buildings

• The harsh sun necessitated shade, which required columns to support a roof

• The harsh sun, together with precision masonry, pushed the aesthetic limits: flutes, capitals, friezes, perfect stone blocks, waiving cement

• But since there’s also rain in the region, roofs had to be sloped, with tiles, which begat the triangular pediment

• The technology was not advanced enough to allow for big indoor spaces though, so most ceremonies still happened outdoors.

In other words: Although Greece is just across the Mediterranean from Egypt, its slightly different geography (more mountains, more rain)5 brought a different architectural language.

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This is enough for today. We’ve seen how geology determines the stone available, and how that drives the type of architecture that is possible and unfolds. In the next article, we’re going to move to Asia, and cover India, China, and Japan, and then we’re going to bring it home: Why are all buildings the same now, and how can we do them differently, if we wanted?

2026-03-05 21:03:38

It’s 2050, and the Middle East is a mess.

Iran is in the midst of a civil war between different factions of the IRGC and the military, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Kurds, and the Azeris.

In the northwest, the Kurds have established an independent state. They are de facto ruling the Kurdish parts of Syria and Iraq too, and are in a low-intensity conflict with Turkey.

Azerbaijan enlarged its surface area by taking parts of northwestern Iran, but now is engulfed in a civil war itself.

Iraq is split between the northeastern Kurdistan, western ISIS, and Sunni and Shia militias and mujahideen.

Hejaz has split from Saudi Arabia, and there’s a three-way war waging between them and the Houthis to the south, in Yemen.

Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon are in a defense pact under Israel, trying to suppress Palestinian guerrilla warfare together.

The former rulers of Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and Equatorial Guinea all live in Dubai: They escaped from the coups in their countries. They financially support Dubai’s army in its fight to secede from Abu Dhabi, which has dramatically increased national taxes to make up for the loss of oil income.

Elsewhere in the world, Russia is now a failed state ruled by oligarchs fighting it out in Moscow neighborhoods. The Stans have moved closer to China, which is ruling de facto Russia’s easternmost Siberian regions. Belarus is now a neutral state, and is working to join the EU. Its strongest supporter is EU member Ukraine.

Venezuela and Cuba are now firmly under the US’s grasp. Iran and Russia can’t afford to prop them up anymore.

Nigeria, Congo, Chad, and Angola are failed states in constant civil war.

Nobody cares about any of these.

This might happen as oil demand peaks in a few years and then drops. How could we get there? How can we avoid it? This is what we’ll discuss today.

We saw in the previous article that peak oil might come in the 2030s, and within a couple of decades, demand might have plummeted due to renewables and batteries.

This is how dependent many countries are on oil and gas income:

The average oil-rich government is 2x to 3x larger than the average non-oil government, even at the same income level. As a fraction of the economy, the governments tower over the private sector and all other actors.

Also, all this wealth is concentrated in a few physical points of extraction, so if you control them, and the transit routes to transport the oil and gas to international markets, you control all the wealth. This is why virtually all the rulers of oil countries are authoritarian: The resource curse is especially salient in oil & gas countries.

The Oil Curse

We showed how bad oil has been for democracy in Venezuela, but this is true across the world.

As countries decolonized, the more oil they had, the less democratic they became.

In the Middle East and North Africa, the more democratic countries have more accountable governments, more freedom of the press, and more freedom of association: Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey… The countries with lots of oil—Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Iran… have more authoritarian governments.

When a resource is easy to control and extract, whoever does the controlling also does the ruling, and they don’t need to share it with anybody. Well, just enough to keep people quiet and content. So corruption is rampant, inflation destroys other industries, citizens live off of government handouts, and these countries develop little else to offer to the world.

Countries where revenue comes from taxes rather than oil and gas are much more transparent, and spend their money on many more services than O&G countries: Taxpayers demand accountability. They want to know where their hard-earned money is going, and they want to see the results. Meanwhile, in a resource-based government, citizens are just happy to get a share of the loot. They don’t complain too much, so they can keep suckling mama government’s tit.

The lack of transparency in O&G countries leads to corruption and entrenched interests, because a lot of the revenue is hidden, so it can be diverted. Those who do the diverting accumulate the money and buy out allies, who keep them in power.

Since it’s bad optics to have much more income than spend, most of these countries update their spending in bonanza years. When commodity prices drop, their economies crash.

To avoid fiscal troughs that bring them down, they focus their spend on short-term initiatives, which means long-term infrastructure is not prioritized. When it is, revenue shortfalls means they might not be maintained, or even worse, they might be abandoned halfway through.

When the resource is exhausted, they have no fallback, and the country goes to ruin, as we saw in the previous article The Resource Cliff. Governments, without the money to finance their security apparatus, fall. This provides an opening to those who own the weapons to do the only thing they know to do—fight to capture what little power remains… and the country descends into civil war, like in Yemen.

Which countries are most exposed?

Now, imagine you’re the ruler of one of these countries. You know these things. What do you do?

Petrostate Transition

1. Deny

Many of these countries will deny this is happening. The OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) projections show an increase in overall demand for fossil fuels from now to 2045. Wishful thinking. Most of these countries won’t be properly prepared when this hits.

2. Postpone

Oil and gas countries and companies try to postpone the end of oil. The US under Trump is actually a great example—remember, the US is the world’s largest oil producer. In 2025, Trump increased subsidies for fossil fuel producers, weakened environmental laws, gutted Biden-era support for clean energy and moved to block clean energy projects, even some that were near completion. The US formally withdrew from the Paris Agreement in January this year.

Academics split the strategies to fight the transition to renewable energies into two types:

• Pre-shift strategies, founded on explicit climate denial: spread doubt, question science, lobby, revolving doors1.

• Post-shift strategies: subtler forms of climate action delay through the readaptation of lobbying and revolving doors, the conviction that fossil fuels are irreplaceable (necessitarianism), the adoption of a green façade (greenwashing), and blame placement towards their consumers (strategic blame placement).

I think these worked in the past, but not anymore: The engine of the transition is now economic; solar, wind, and batteries are just cheaper.

Personally, if I were a Middle Eastern government, the one thing I’d do to postpone the transition is to flood the market: The more oil I produce and sell, the lower the price, and the less competitive renewables become. I think this could postpone the twilight of fossil fuels by a few years or even decades, but I don’t think they would do it: This would drop the price of barrels, on which their finances depend. Also, at this point, it might be too late, as China has firmly decided to push this transition.

3. Squeeze

If you know your oil sales are about to vanish, you have two options:

• Agree with other oil providers to limit supply over demand, so that prices remain high for as long as you can.

• Pump like there’s no tomorrow, so that you can extract as much value while you still can.

According to this paper, what will happen is the 2^nd scenario. And it makes sense: It’s hard to keep dozens of countries limiting their production when they know their wealth is devaluing by the day. Also, if they kept prices up, that would only accelerate the transition to renewables.

So if I were a ruler of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or the UAE and didn’t care about the environment, right now I would be investing to extract as much oil as possible, as fast as possible. Oil that remains now in the ground will remain in the ground.

4. Try to Diversify

This is the biggest way oil countries will fight the oil transition: If you know your golden goose is sick, you’ll try to find another one. They’re going to do it by buying foreign assets, investing in local projects, opening up to the world, and improving the productivity of their population.

a. Diversify by Buying Foreign Assets

The best example of this is Norway, which instead of spending its oil wealth, invests it all, and only spends 3% of the fund every year. The money is invested in assets across the world, mainly in the stock market.2

But it’s not the only one. There are equivalents for Oman, Qatar3, Azerbaijan4, Kazakhstan, Kuwait5, Saudi Arabia… They invest across geographies and industries, from Chinese petrochemicals to French luxury to Silicon Valley startups to Indonesian mining. For example:

Saudi Arabia’s PIF [Public Investment Fund] has pumped $45bn into SoftBank’s Vision Fund in 2016 and $20bn into a Blackstone infrastructure fund the following year. In the years since, it has splashed the cash in a diverse range of sectors from electric-car maker Lucid to its controversial LIV Golf venture, a cruise liner group, mining, sports assets and gaming firms. It also poured tens of billions into US and European equity markets and injected $2bn into a private equity venture set up by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

The more these funds own a bit of everything, the less likely they are to lose all their money, and the more they will be able to rely on their returns for a steady future income.

Of course, they know the future of the world is in tech, so they focus on that a lot.

In March 2024, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) created MGX, a tech-investment company with a target size of $100bn, which will invest in AI infrastructure, such as data centres and chips. It has also set up a $10bn AI venture-capital fund. In Saudi Arabia a number of different funds with a combined firepower of $240bn will splurge on AI, data centres and advanced manufacturing.

E&, an Emirati telecoms company, will help to build part of a 45,000km-long subsea cable that makes its way around south Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean and Britain. A data-centre construction boom is under way, too, with the likes of Khazna, a unit of G42, and Damac, an Emirati property developer, building facilities.

Gulf companies are building data centres abroad, too. Damac is a longstanding business partner of Donald Trump, helping him manage golf courses in the Middle East (Hussain Sajwani, its boss, is known as the “Donald of Dubai”). On January 8th Mr Trump said that Damac would invest at least $20bn in data centres in America.

The Gulf recorded almost $8bn of foreign direct investment in tech infrastructure and another $2bn in software in 2024, up three-fold from 2017, according to fDi Markets, a data firm. Talent is moving, too. BCG, a consultancy, says that the AI talent pool in the UAE and Saudi Arabia has grown by over one-third and almost a fifth, respectively, since 2022.—The Economist

b. Diversify through Local Projects

These countries realize they’ll need jobs for their citizens, too. They might also be wary of their foreign assets being seized. So they’re investing in national projects. The best example of this is Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, with about one trillion USD to invest. Half of that is invested in Saudi assets, on projects summarized in its Vision 2030. We’ll talk about this when we cover the special case of Saudi Arabia’s future in an upcoming article.

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c. Diversify by Developing Their Citizens’ Productivity

But if these countries develop their citizens’ abilities and make them more productive, maybe they can create as much wealth as what’s pumped from the ground today?

So these countries invest a lot in education and healthcare. Why do you think Saudi Arabia has started allowing women to work?6

This is a great start, but it’s not enough. Take Kuwait for example, with over 90% of government income from oil. They’d need the tax base of the rest of the economy to grow by 1000% to make up for the loss of oil. Normal productivity gains are 2% per year, and that’s in a dynamic economy like the US’s. How are these oil countries supposed to get their unproductive citizens, who have never had to fight in a hypercompetitive labor market, to suddenly become superproductive? It would take more than a generation to get there!

d. Diversify by Opening to the World

So one way to make up for it is to learn from the best: Welcome foreigners who can bring their know-how. This is the context in which many of these countries now allow alcohol consumption, despite being haram7. But why would foreigners go to countries like Saudi, Oman, Qatar, Iraq, or Kuwait, knowing they prioritize their own citizens? Wouldn’t they prefer going to Dubai, which has a track-record of openness, tolerance, and low taxes?

But foreigners don’t need to move for work to add value. They can also visit as tourists, and that’s why so many of these countries invest in this industry. Why do you think Abu Dhabi has a Louvre Museum?

It’s amazing, by the way. And so is teamLab’s installation there.

Abu Dhabi wants a full cultural district with facilities like these in Saadiyat Island.

It has also recently built the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the Presidential Palace, Yas Island Attractions (Ferrari World, Warner Bros World, Yas Waterworld, Seaworld Abu Dhabi)... Abu Dhabi is among the most aggressive in this direction, but there are only so many trips people can take. Other countries will be competing for the same visitors.

What are the results of these efforts so far? There’s some progress, but in most countries, not near enough to escape the black hole of the future fossil fuel crash,8 so despite their diversification efforts, many will have to take more drastic measures, like selling assets and reducing costs.

5. Sell Assets

Oil prices have already shrunk by 40% since their peak in 2022.9 As a result, many O&G countries are already facing financial problems, and some have been forced to sell assets.10 For example:

• Kuwait is planning to sell a $7B pipeline stake in February of this year.

• Saudi Aramco plans to raise $64B through privatizations in the next five years, including a $4B power plant sale within weeks.

• Oman is aiming at divesting from 30 companies.

• Nigeria is selling at least a 25% stake in some oil and gas fields.

• Angola plans to privatize over 70 companies, including the sale of 30% of the state oil company Sonangol in an IPO.

• Kazakhstan’s sovereign fund plans to divest from several state-run companies to privatize them.

This is good not just because it raises money for their states, but also because it professionalizes the management of the assets (making them more productive), reduces corruption and vested interests, and if it works well, it encourages foreigners to invest further in the countries.

The more prices fall, the more assets these countries will have to sell. Unfortunately, one-off sales might not be enough to cover ongoing spending.

6. Reduce Costs

So after trying to deny, and then postpone the reality of dwindling oil demand, they will try to squeeze oil sales, diversify their economy, and sell some assets. After all of that, most will still be short, so they will have to reduce their recurring costs pretty dramatically.

The first step is to shrink the share of citizens receiving benefits. This is what the new Kuwaiti emir has done: He has stripped tens of thousands of Kuwaitis from their citizenship, to:

…deliver Kuwait to its original people clean and free from impurities.

The following step? Reducing benefits to natives, including as education, healthcare, subsidies, civil servant jobs, and at some point, direct transfers.

That’s when people will revolt.

What will happen then?

The Breakdown of the Current Order

1. More democracy

Countries will have one of these options:

1. Transition to democracy.

2. Keep an iron grip on their countries’ politics. Become more authoritarian. Strengthen the secret police.

It does look like countries tend to move towards democracy after they reach their peak oil production:

If I had to guess, this will be more common than people think:

• The Arab Spring showed that many people in the Middle East and North Africa want more democracy.

• It’s not surprising, since many citizens from these countries have experienced the freedom and democracy of neighboring Europe.

• Since then, mobile phones and social media have become widely accessible, increasing the flow of information from free countries towards more authoritarian ones.

Inshallah.

2. More Repression

But in many countries, this transition won’t happen. So far, no country with as much oil wealth as Libya or Iraq, or even with half as much oil wealth as those, has ever made a successful transition to democracy.

Even if democratic elections are held, and the results are respected, those might well be the last meaningful elections, as whoever gains control of the central government is able to establish a kind of monopoly on power that precludes future challenges.

That’s if elections are held and if they’re respected.

3. Failed states

In many cases, internal conflict might prevail, people won’t agree on leadership, and they’ll fall into civil wars and states of anarchy.

Russia (the USSR) invaded Afghanistan when oil prices were high, it became a failed state when prices shrank, Putin could only consolidate power when oil prices started growing again, and he went to war with Georgia and annexed Crimea when they were highest.

We saw something similar in Yemen, where revenue grew after unification and when it shrank, civil war exploded. Libya has been in a civil war ever since Gaddafi was deposed in 2011.

4. Less Global Islamic Influence

Whether they become democracies or not, their revenue will dry up, and with it their influence initiatives.

Muslim-majority countries constitute only about 23% of all countries,11 but by sheer coincidence, they control ~51% of oil exports. Not just in the Middle East. In sub-Saharan Africa (Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, which has a plurality of Muslims), South East Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan)...

Some of this revenue has been dedicated to projecting Islam around the world:

• Promotion of the practice and teaching of Islam, especially Salafi / Wahhabi:

  • Mosque construction, including monumental ones

  • Religious schools

  • Islamic universities

  • Imam salaries

  • Religious materials

• International Islamic organizations, such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Muslim World League, or the Islamic Development Bank

• Islamist parties, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood

• International media such as Al Jazeera

• Disaster relief and refugee aid

As these countries’ incomes shrink, their international influence initiatives will shrink too—especially from the countries that become failed states.

What about changes elsewhere in the world?

5. Russia Loses Superpower Status

Russia is the one big superpower whose influence relies mainly on energy, as 30% of the government’s revenue comes from it. Lose the energy, and the country becomes fiscally insolvent. No more military incursions into neighboring countries, no more use of force to bully satellite countries like Belarus or Kazakhstan. Russia will have to withdraw from Central Asia, and won’t be able to maintain its support of governments like those in Cuba or Venezuela.

This won’t happen immediately, though, as a big share of Russia’s income comes from gas, which will take longer to be replaced than oil.

6. Small Countries Suffer Too

So far, we’ve talked mostly about the Middle East and North Africa, but there are other oil producers in the world.

Venezuela will be particularly affected by the transition, as most of its government’s income comes from oil, but it’s expensive to extract, so this will be among the first countries where oil companies will stop investing. The country will be forced to diversify, and some options it has include mining and agriculture, like its neighbor Brazil.

Congo, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Azerbaijan, Brunei, Ecuador, and Nigeria are other countries that will see their coffers empty and will suffer tremendously. Expect some to become stronger democracies, and most to fall into civil war or into failed state status.

And as some players weaken, others strengthen.

7. Energy Security for Consumers

Structurally, oil suppliers and demanders were at odds:

• Democracies tend to develop faster, so they demand more oil

• As we have seen, oil supply tends to produce authoritarian regimes

• Democracies and authoritarian regimes tend to be at odds, because democracies challenge the monopoly on power of authoritarian regimes

So the world evolved into authoritarian suppliers of oil and democratic demanders. For decades, these global politics have hit consumers:

This will happen less and less, as wind and sunlight are much better distributed around the world.

Not only will energy be more reliable, but it will also be cheaper! Yay!

8. The Weakening of the US – Middle East Alliance

Before the US was a net exporter of oil and gas, it depended on the Middle East’s fuels. Knowing this, the US developed a long-standing alliance with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, and other oil producers in the region: They provided the oil, and the US provided the security.

Once the oil becomes less important, so will that alliance.

Middle Eastern countries will have to find new alliances. The obvious one is China—to whom Saudi Arabia sells more oil than to the US, for example. India is another partner these countries have been getting closer to. And, as the region becomes less relevant internationally, regional politics will become more important, with Israel as the biggest emerging power in the region (and maybe Iran if it frees itself from the current regime).

9. China’s Power Rise

China was one of the countries most weakened by the importance of oil and gas. Releasing the importance of these resources is a boon for the country.

Also, the US is the world’s maritime superpower, so it could control the chokepoints of oil and gas distribution.

But if oil doesn’t flow through these straits anymore, the US can’t threaten China with energy famine anymore.

China is also the biggest provider of solar panels and batteries, and one of the biggest producers of the rare-earth metals they require. It will gain a commensurate amount of power.

Now, solar panels and batteries aren’t as critical as oil and gas, because solar panels and batteries are a fixed cost that lasts decades, while O&G are difficult and expensive to store, and are depleted with use, so they require ongoing purchases.

However, even if China excels at manufacturing, it’s not easy to keep these secrets under lock and key. Other countries could manufacture these products, even if not as cheaply. This reduces the leverage that China would have on other countries compared to what oil countries have today.

10. Importance of Rare Earth Minerals?

Today, China produces most of the world’s rare earth minerals, necessary for solar panels and batteries, among other things. But I don’t think that’s a long-term advantage: It’s not like these minerals only exist in China; it’s simply that China has been the most diligent in finding and mining them. The more China weaponizes their trade, the more other countries will look for these minerals—and find them.

11. EU Energy Independence

The EU is the other big importer of energy. It also produces solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, albeit less than China. So it will gain the same benefits from the elimination of energy supply constraints as China.12

Another benefit of this transition for Europe will be the fact that it has been hobbled by the internal push to transition to green energy, which has brought it astronomical energy prices, and with those, industry has withered. As energy prices shrink and become similar to those in other countries, this disadvantage will fade.

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Takeaways

We are likely to reach Peak Oil in the next few years, and fossil fuel consumption will drop in the following decades, replaced by wind, solar, batteries, and electrification. When that happens, there will be big shifts in the world:

For oil and gas countries:

• They will try to fight this as much as possible, by pumping more oil, buying foreign assets, diversifying their economies, and attracting international talent and visitors.

• This won’t be enough, and they’ll have to sell assets and reduce their costs, which will cause regime change:

  • Democracy is likely to increase

  • Many will try to become more authoritarian

  • Some will become failed states

• The international influence of them all will dwindle. Since Islam is overrepresented in oil and gas countries, its influence will be particularly affected.

• But the impact will not be limited to countries in the Middle East and North Africa. It will also affect others around the world, including Gabon, Angola, Nigeria, Brunei…

• Russia’s superpower status will be challenged. It’s unlikely it will be able to maintain its sphere of influence.

For the rest:

• Every consumer around the world will have more energy security. This is great for consumers.

• The Middle East will shift its alliances, probably towards countries like China, India, and Israel.

• China becomes the biggest winner, mainly because today it’s the country most weakened by this system and is working hard to position itself as a frontrunner of renewable energy technology.

• Europe will be the other big winner, as it’s been hindered by its huge energy consumption, and the resulting high energy prices.

Overall, I think these changes are good for freedom, for consumers, and for the world in general. This is exciting!