The Sovereign Individual: A Book for the 1% (of Readers Who Finish It)

Show Notes

Dan and I finally closed the cover on The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, a book we started somewhere back around November and dragged ourselves through over the winter. I want to be honest with you: this was a slog. Eleven chapters, roughly twenty-two hours of audiobook, and both of us admitted on-mic that we mentally checked out for a good third of it. I kept the Kindle version open alongside so I could go back and snag quotes, which is the only reason I came out the other side with anything coherent to say. My one-line review is the title of this episode — there are real nuggets in here, but they are buried under about forty percent fluff that a good editor would have cut, and I think you can get the whole thing from chapters one, two, and then eight through eleven.

The frustrating part is that the authors got a startling amount right. Writing in the late nineties, they called the information age, the migration of banking and commerce online, smartphones, and something cryptocurrency-shaped — back when serious people were still calling the internet a fad. But for every good call there's a wild one. The Y2K chapter went completely off the deep end, banking on blackouts and chaos, and Dan remembers his mom prepping a doctor's office for a catastrophe that simply never arrived. That's the pattern with these two: hyperbolic to the downside, doomers in the truest sense. And the deeper I got, the more convinced I became that they were writing from a moneyed perch — they paint a sweeping picture of how "the world" will be when what they really mean is how the rich will be, cheerfully waving off the ninety-five percent of us they expect to leave behind.

Where Dan and I really dug in was their vision of the borderless cyber economy and the lone sovereign skipping past every government with his money in tow. I don't buy it. Look at China, look at the TikTok fight — a state can exert enormous control over digital lines that physically cross its territory, and the only real escape hatch I could think of was something like Starlink beaming around it from space. Dan reframed the whole thing better than I did, reaching for the post-war Bretton Woods order: power doesn't evaporate, it floats to whoever guarantees the sea lanes, and the only question is whether the next entity holding it is as benevolent as that arrangement turned out to be. He pulled in Ben Thompson's aggregation theory too — kill Google and something else just hoovers up the demand, because network effects and scale don't politely disappear when you wish them gone. As Dan put it, the more alone you are, the more of a target you are. Power structures reassert themselves; that's humanity we're talking about.

The back half is where the book actually earned its keep for me. Their argument that the Industrial Revolution really began two centuries earlier — that the printing press cracked the power of the Catholic Church the way our own information shift is cracking today's structures — landed hard, and Dan and I both liked the idea that these transitions are slow, uneven metamorphoses rather than clean breaks. Then they get into the prescriptions, and a couple genuinely fired me up. Selecting representatives by sortition, at random, like the ancient Greeks, so the people running the country actually resemble the country instead of being a pile of lawyers and narcissists. And, my favorite, performance-based pay for legislators, modeled on Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, where government compensation is keyed to real economic growth. Pay them on outcomes instead of re-election. I want that — though Dan and I both clocked the obvious trap, that you can't just incentivize FBI agents on arrest counts without breeding something ugly.

The line I keep coming back to is their warning about a "godless, ruthless and rich elite" — the coming leaders who will be moral illiterates, fluent in economic efficiency but never taught the virtue of self-sacrifice. I read that as the authors quietly indicting their own peer group, the people they went to school with. But Dan caught me leaning on my biases there, and he was right to: this isn't really about religion or chastity. It's about leaders so untethered from any real community that they govern in a direction the people beneath them never asked for, and once the tribe crumbles, the government you thought you had goes with it. We talked DOGE and the twenty-something staffers and whether this is America molting its feathers to run the mile or a horse loose in the hospital. Honestly, it might be both. That tension — oddly optimistic, quietly terrified — is the whole episode.

If you've got the time and you genuinely enjoy chewing on this stuff, there's reading advice worth taking here. If not, go read something you actually want to read — and let the government keep being just a little afraid of you.

— Sean