The law of attraction says think of something and the universe delivers it.

The law of attention says something quieter but more honest: your mind can only ever act on what it notices, and most of us notice far less than what’s actually available to us.

Attention is the widening of the lens - not wishing something into being, but training yourself to actually see the options, people, and openings that were there all along, hidden in plain sight because you weren’t looking.

Once you see more, you still have to choose - and that choice, not the noticing, is where the real power sits.

Quantum physics has a strange, distant cousin of this idea: in Wheeler’s participatory principle, a particle has no definite state until it’s observed - reality, at that tiny scale, seems to need a witness to become real.

It’s a poetic echo, it points at the same intuition on a human scale: what you attend to is what becomes real to you - and what becomes real to you is what you’re able to act on, and eventually, become.

Every few years, Britain has the same argument again. Should university be free, like the NHS, because an educated population is a public good the state has an interest in producing?

Or should it be priced, like any other service, because the main beneficiary of a degree is the graduate who earns more because of it?

Tuition fees go up. A cap gets debated. Someone proposes a graduate tax. The argument circles back to where it started, because nobody ever agrees on the premise underneath it: that a university is a good - something an individual consumes, which the state either subsidises or doesn’t.

I think that premise is wrong.

A university isn’t a good. It’s infrastructure. And once you see it that way, the entire debate about who should pay for it starts to look like the wrong question.

Nobody debates whether to fund the grid

We don’t ask whether the electricity grid should be a public or private good, because a grid isn’t something an individual consumes and then owns the benefit of. It’s the precondition for everything else to function. You can debate who operates the grid — state utility, regulated private monopoly, some hybrid - but you don’t debate whether the grid should exist, or ration it by ability to pay, because the cost of not having reliable electricity is borne by the whole economy, not just the household that goes without.

Treat a university system the same way and the funding question changes shape. The relevant output of a university isn’t “degrees for individuals.” It’s capacity - research capacity, talent-formation capacity, the physical and institutional link between a lab and the industry next door that lets a discovery become a product without a decade of friction in between.

That capacity is what an economy runs on the same way it runs on power and transport. Once you’re arguing about capacity rather than consumption, “should this be free or priced for the individual” stops being the central question, because the individual student was never the primary unit of account. The country was.

China never had this argument, and I don’t think it’s because the debate got won by one side. I think it’s because the premise was never accepted in the first place. University R&D capacity there was treated as something the state needed built, at scale, on a timeline the market alone wouldn’t produce - the same logic you’d apply to a rail network or a semiconductor fab.

And you can see the downstream effect physically, not just in policy language: research labs sitting inside industrial parks, professors running commercial ventures without institutional suspicion, campuses positioned next to the exact companies their graduates and their research feed. The infrastructure framing isn’t a metaphor for how China talks about universities. It’s a description of where they were built.

The obvious objection - and why it doesn’t quite land

The strongest case against this reframe is: infrastructure implies central direction, and research is precisely the domain where central direction historically performs badly.

Nobody can decide in advance which lab produces the breakthrough. That unpredictability is the whole argument for distributed, uncoordinated, occasionally wasteful-looking pluralism over any system where a planner declares in advance what matters. Roads are infrastructure because every driver needs the same road. Research isn’t like that, and treating it as if it were risks trading genuine discovery for prestige projects that look good in a five-year plan.

But this objects to the wrong thing.

“Infrastructure” doesn’t have to mean the state picks the research topics or the winning company. It can mean the capacity is guaranteed - the labs, the funding continuity, the administrative and physical proximity to industry - while what happens inside that capacity stays genuinely competitive.

China isn’t running one national AI lab and declaring it the winner. It’s guaranteeing that dozens of labs, sitting close enough to commercial capital and commercial problems, can compete fast, because none of them has to spend two years negotiating for the right to exist. Guaranteeing the plumbing is a different claim from picking the outcome, and it’s the one actually worth making.

It’s also fair to name what this framing costs, because a system that guarantees capacity regardless of market signal can overbuild - empty science parks, prestige labs producing output nobody wanted, capacity justified by political optics rather than genuine need. That risk is real and I’m not going to pretend the trade-off doesn’t exist. But the alternative has its own failure mode, and Britain is currently living inside a clean example of it.

What “priced good” actually costs, in practice

In 2023, the UK government commissioned an independent review into why university spinout companies - the exact handoff point where research becomes a company - were struggling to raise investment and get off the ground.

What it found was a negotiation problem baked into the funding logic. Because universities are cash-constrained institutions that have to behave commercially to survive, their tech transfer offices were negotiating equity stakes in spinouts as a counterparty, not a collaborator - and negotiating hard.

The average opening equity offer from a university was around a third of the company. Close to a third of universities opened negotiations demanding half. Two out of three academic founders never even left their university post to run the company they’d started, in part because ownership terms were still unresolved. The review’s own conclusion was blunt: the process took too long, and deal negotiation was a primary reason why.

That’s the cost of treating the university as a good rather than infrastructure, made concrete.

When the institution has to fund itself by extracting value from the very company it helped create, every spinout becomes a negotiation before it becomes a business. Compare that to a system where the lab doesn’t need the equity, because its existence was never contingent on winning that negotiation in the first place - where the professor and the company next door are already collaborators because the funding question was answered upstream, once, at the level of the whole system, instead of being re-litigated at every single handoff.

The UK review has since pushed universities toward smaller stakes, and it’s working - average equity has come down.

That’s an improvement.

But it took a Treasury-commissioned intervention to talk institutions into taking less of something they were never meant to be extracting from in the first place. That’s what happens when the underlying category is wrong: you spend policy effort correcting symptoms of a framing problem, one review at a time, instead of asking whether the framing was the mistake.

The actual question

I’m not arguing China’s version is free of cost, or that Britain should copy it wholesale - a system that answers the funding question once, centrally, gives something up in return: arm’s-length distance from state direction, a founder’s fuller claim on their own company, the friction that sometimes protects academic work from being pulled too early into commercial urgency. Those are real and worth keeping.

But I don’t think “public good or private good” is the axis worth arguing on anymore. The more honest question is whether you’re building capacity or selling a product - because everything downstream of that answer, the negotiations, the timelines, the distance between a discovery and the moment it ships, follows from which one you picked.

Britain keeps having the old argument. It might be worth having a different one.

This is a part of a series on the Platform State.

In the West, we can’t agree on what a university is for.

Is it a public good - something the state should fund because an educated population is infrastructure, like roads or clean water? Or is it a private good - a service purchased by an individual to increase their own future earnings, priced accordingly, and left to compete in something like a market?

Britain has spent thirty years oscillating between these two answers without ever picking one. Tuition fees went up, then got capped, then got debated again. American state schools drifted from land-grant public mission toward tuition-dependent quasi-private operation, while a handful of endowment-rich private universities behave more like sovereign wealth funds with a teaching arm attached.

Nobody has settled the argument, because the argument assumes universities are, fundamentally, in the business of educating individuals - and the debate is over who should pay for that.

China never entered the debate. Not because it resolved the philosophical question, but because it never accepted the premise. In China, the university isn’t a service provided to individuals. It’s core infrastructure, of China’s Platform State - positioned inside the industrial base the same way a power grid or a rail network is - and infrastructure doesn’t get a public-versus-private debate, because nobody argues about whether the electricity grid should be optional.

What “infrastructure” actually means here

Walk the geography and the claim becomes literal. Zhejiang University sits in direct working proximity to Alibaba’s DAMO Academy - the company’s core research arm for AI and chips- with faculty and joint labs moving between the two as a matter of course, not exception.

In Shenzhen, campus labs feed straight into the Huaqiangbei electronics market, the largest of its kind in the world, where a prototype can go from CAD file to physical object faster than a Western team can get a vendor to quote. Beijing’s E-Town innovation zone, Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Science City with its semiconductor and biotech clusters - these are not metaphors for “innovation ecosystems.” They are physical arrangements: the campus, the lab, the market, and the company standing close enough together that the boundaries between them stop mattering operationally, even if they still exist on paper.

In the West, the pipeline from research to product runs through a series of institutional handoffs - publish the paper, file the patent, find the tech transfer office, pitch the VC, spin out the company -each one a separate negotiation with its own incentives and its own delay. In China, large parts of that pipeline have been architecturally compressed.

The professor who also sits on a company’s technical board isn’t viewed with the institutional suspicion a Western tenure committee might apply. Proximity to industry is a credential, not a conflict.

A lab funded by commercial partners gets fed real production problems instead of hypothetical ones, and the distance between an efficiency gain on a whiteboard and that gain shipping in a product can be measured in the same building, sometimes the same person.

Why the debate can’t exist here

You can’t have a serious public-versus-private argument about a piece of infrastructure that the state has already decided it needs, at scale, faster than the market alone would produce it. Nobody in China is asking whether university R&D capacity should be rationed by ability to pay, because the strategic calculation was made upstream of that question: closing the university-industry gap is national policy, not a value someone gets to opt out of funding.

The debate that consumes Western higher education - access, affordability, the return on an individual’s investment - is a debate about a good.

China’s arrangement is a debate about a grid, and grids get built.

This has consequences beyond ideology. It means the earliest, most reliable signal for where China’s technology is actually heading doesn’t sit in corporate roadmaps or product announcements - it sits inside university labs that are already commercially entangled with the companies everyone else is watching.

The incubators, the joint research centres, the professor quietly running a Series A company on the side. By the time a capability shows up in a Huawei keynote or a DJI product line, it’s often been alive in a lab down the road for a year or two already.

Why this matters

If you work in education policy, this is worth sitting with regardless of whether you think China’s model is desirable: it demonstrates what happens when a society stops treating the university as a contested resource and starts treating it as committed capacity.

Whatever you think of the trade-offs - the Chinese model is at minimum a working counter-example to the assumption that public-versus-private is the only axis worth arguing about.

And if you’re trying to understand where Chinese technology is actually going, rather than where its press releases say it’s going, the practical implication is simpler: don’t just visit the company. Visit the lab next to it and the university. The company shows you the output. The university shows you the mechanism - and in China, increasingly, the two were never really separable to begin with.

This is what we are managing with the China tech tour of China Admissions.

For nearly a century, political imagination has been trapped in a, binary choice: the left-wing model of a heavy-handed, protective state, or the right-wing model of an unbridled, laissez-faire market.

But as we confront the massive logistical, ecological, and economic demands of the mid-21st century, this old axis is breaking down.

A new paradigm is emerging, one that resolves these contradictions into a powerful synthesis: New State Capitalism.

This is is a model where an incredibly efficient, high-performing state constructs the foundational “operating system” of society, enabling a hyper-dynamic private sector to flourish on top of it.

Like how a gardener organises the gardens, provides the nutrients, space, and organisation so a beautiful garden can flourish.

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The State as the Base Layer: Massive Construction and Abundant Housing

The core tenets of the old right - that the state is inherently incompetent and that the market should dictate all infrastructure - have been thoroughly debunked by the realities of modern development. Particularly - China.

When left entirely to the private sector, critical infrastructure becomes fragmented, underfunded, and optimized for short-term dividends rather than long-term resilience.

New State Capitalism treats infrastructure as a national competitive advantage.

The state steps in as the ultimate developer, executing massive construction projects with corporate-level efficiency and technocratic precision.

• Energy and Transit: The state builds and operates the core utilities - next-generation nuclear power plants, robust smart grids, and high-speed rail networks. These aren’t run as sluggish bureaucracies, but as lean, high-performing engines designed to lower the baseline cost of doing business.

• Abundant Housing: Rather than leaving housing to speculative real estate markets that choke cities with artificial scarcity, the state treats shelter as a critical infrastructure project. Through massive, industrialized construction initiatives, the government ensures a permanent abundance of housing. By flooding the market with supply, the state structurally drives down the cost of living.

Universal Basic Income: Venture Capital for the Masses

Universal Basic Income (UBI) isn’t a leftist welfare program, it’s instead an essential macroeconomic stabilizer and an entrepreneurial catalyst.

When the state ensures a baseline financial floor alongside abundant, cheap housing, (and let’s be honest, housing is the majority of the cost - that also drives inflation in the economy)

The entire psychology of the workforce changes.

UBI removes the existential dread of starvation and homelessness. Instead of trapping citizens in a safety net, it provides them with a springboard.

The Entrepreneurial Floor: UBI acts as a form of state-sponsored venture capital for every citizen. When the cost of failure is no longer destitution, people are suddenly free to take massive creative and entrepreneurial risks. They can quit dead-end jobs, learn new skills, invent new technologies, and start businesses.

The Symbiosis: Why Entrepreneurs Flourish Under Efficient Government

The greatest irony of the old ideological debate is that the free market actually works better when supported by a strong, efficient state.

Under New State Capitalism, the public and private layers do not compete; they complement each other perfectly.

Entrepreneurs and private enterprises flourish precisely because the government is exceptionally well-run:

• Eliminating Cost Frictions: Business owners don’t have to subsidize hyper-inflated employee salaries just so their workers can afford rent in broken housing markets. They don’t have to worry about blackouts, crumbling roads, or failing transit links.

• A Healthy, Agile Workforce: With housing guaranteed and a UBI floor in place, businesses have access to a workforce that is healthier, less stressed, and more willing to engage in high-upside, innovative work.

• Clear Rules, Fast Execution: An efficient state eliminates bureaucratic red tape. Regulatory frameworks for new technologies (like AI, biotech, and robotics) are clear, fast, and predictable, allowing private companies to scale at unprecedented speeds.

Examples:

Post-WWII France (Dirigisme) - The Energy & Transit Platform

• The Action: The democratic government stepped in as the ultimate developer, taking on the massive, long-term capital costs of building the nation’s core utilities-specifically constructing a world-class nuclear energy grid (EDF) and the high-speed TGV rail network (SNCF).

• How It Happened: The state ran these networks like lean corporate engines rather than sluggish bureaucracies. By absorbing the crushing infrastructure costs, the government radically lowered the baseline cost of doing business, which sparked a massive boom in private manufacturing, technology, and commerce.

Vienna, Austria - The Abundant Housing Platform

• The Action: For over a century, the city government treated shelter strictly as critical infrastructure, continually buying up land reserves and ensuring that 60% of Vienna’s population lives in municipal or state-subsidized housing.

• How It Happened: By permanently flooding the market with government-backed supply, the state structurally suppressed rent prices city-wide. Private enterprises flourished because they didn’t have to pay hyper-inflated salaries just to help workers survive, making the local economy fiercely competitive.

The Nordic Nations - The Entrepreneurial Floor Platform

• The Action: Countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Norway built comprehensive universal safety nets—including free higher education, universal healthcare, and aggressive retraining programs—to provide a permanent baseline of human security.

• How It Happened: This security net effectively functions as state-sponsored venture capital. By removing the existential dread of starvation or homelessness, the state dramatically increased citizen risk tolerance. Because the cost of business failure is a return to comfort rather than destitution, places like Sweden became global leaders in tech unicorns per capita (e.g., Spotify, Klarna).

Taiwan - The Tech Infrastructure Platform

• The Action: Taiwan realized that advanced semiconductor manufacturing was a critical national advantage, prompting the government to directly fund, incubate, and build the initial infrastructure for what became TSMC.

• How It Happened: The state absorbed the staggering, multi-billion-dollar financial risks of pioneering the microchip hardware foundation. Once that “operating system” was securely established by the government, a hyper-dynamic private ecosystem of software, hardware, and global logistics companies rapidly scaled on top of it.

Conclusion: The High-Performance Future

The left-right debate was born in an era of scarcity and industrial friction. New State Capitalism is designed for an era where state efficiency can unlock radical abundance.

By taking responsibility for the massive, high-risk undertakings - building power plants, laying rail lines, constructing abundant housing, and guaranteeing a financial baseline through UBI - the state removes the heavy burdens that crush private initiative.

The future does not belong to the state that taxes its markets into submission, nor to the state that abandons its citizens to the whims of an volatile global economy.

The future belongs to the platform state: a lean, efficient powerhouse that builds the foundation so its people can build the future.

This is connected to the idea of emergence:

Thatcher set out to get Britain growing.

Her solution to the bloated post-war state was to shrink it and sell it off - move it to the private sector.

The thinking was government is inherently inefficient, and the private sector, disciplined by market forces, is not.

In the short term, it looked like it was working.

The sales raised money, grew investor wealth, and reduced public debt.

And in some cases it did work - where privatisation created real competition - telecoms, airlines like British Airways. BT was in competition with rivals and prices fell.

But it was too much.

Privatisation only works when there is competition to do the disciplining.

A water company, a railway, a national grid - these are natural monopolies.

There is one set of pipes, one set of tracks. Selling them doesn’t create competition; it just transfers a public monopoly to a private one.

The answer to an inefficient state was never to sell off its monopolies. It was to make the state itself run them better.

Read more

I had two conversations within the span of two days

One was with a Chinese friend, who was sharing about their perspectives living in US, which she found to be more messy, chaotic, combative, and less efficient, she shared how they think it’s different how they focus on the individual more (which can hinder the overall efficiency and results of the group), rather than the more pragmatic and practical.

Another conversation with someone from the US who couldn’t understand the need in China for facial recognition to enter buildings, and how they found it creepy.

I tried to explain to them that most Chinese people don’t share those concerns, they see the state as an extension of the family, and are more concerned with efficiency, harmony, social responsibility and how well things actually work and are more welcoming of the use of technology for security and efficiency.

It’s true that the perspectives on AI now is quite different. China is embracing AI while it is more divisive in the west.

The key difference between the two conversations was that the Chinese person described it as being more centralist and efficient and the other described it as being authoritarian.

But this is more about values and perspective than about reality.

And in terms of cultures - the stories we tell, becomes the reality.

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I explored this topic more in the article on clear thinking.

Collectivism Vs Individualism

In China harmony, and social responsibility are more important.

I am from Britain, with British, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish ancestors and consider myself to be quite individualistic naturally.

I have lived in China for over 12 years and so I believe I understand how both sides think.

This has led me to see the limitations of too much individualism, and the benefits of combining them and how to combine them well.

I was in China during one of the most fascinating times in history. It is probably one of the periods of fastest wealth creation and human development in the history of the world.

There is a significant information and understanding gap in the west because many people have got their information about China from social media or other forms of media.

News and media tends to be more divisive and polarizing - thats what gets more attention and drives virality and money for media.

I believe the simplistic narrative about China that we have in the west, is used more as a tool, to unite people against a common enemy.

But it’s important to rise above that to seek a deeper, more nuanced, accurate understanding.

It’s less polarising, attracts fewer views, but it’s important to seek to understand China and how they think and that seeking to do so can improve the world.

Why is China how it is? Why is there this difference?

You can explain Chinese culture in a number of ways, looking at confucianism, cultural reasons, but I think a lot of the difference comes from geography and looking into the history of China and how it has developed.

I believe we are very much a product of our environment.

And China is effectively a large self-sufficient river basin of three rivers which is protected by the himalayas, and has been self-sufficient off or more isolated from the world for much of its history, and this has lead to the unique aspects of Chinese culture.

Whereas Europe is quite different. It’s effectively a collection of small-easily protected areas.

This difference has lead to different ways of thinking:

Almost like many small cups, vs one large basin.

As an island the UK has been quite insulated from the perpetual threat of a better-organised mass.

The geography of Europe itself is divided by peninsulas, mountains, rivers.

This has enabled different groups of people to survive and thrive and develop their own cultures.

Our history is one of individual rights, personal identity and liberty.

Greece itself, a collection of city states, created a new form of governance that took each city into account.

And for Europe, our most prosperous times were those of greatest competition.

The renaissance, the industrial revolution.

Throughout history, extreme inter state and city state rivalry and competition encouraged individual risk-taking and innovation.

Despite repeated attempts, the European continent has never successfully been united.

And the lessons of history of Britain and Europe lead to certain conclusions.

Individualism.

But China’s geography is very different.

With its massive agricultural plains and huge river systems like the Yellow and Yangtze rivers it needs centralized control.

Looking through China’s history, the most prosperous times of China’s history were those of unity, and centralised control.

The Song, Han, Tang, Ming dynasties.

Because China’s geography is fundamentally different.

You need someone to centrally manage water resources to reap the benefits of irrigation, protection, and flood control.

Because it’s all one system.

You need to control the whole river to be secure.

It’s like how a railway is a natural monopoly.

And if there is disagreement then the whole system breaks down.

The same thing happened in China time and time again.

• The Warring States Period (475–221 BCE)

• The Three Kingdoms & The Period of Disunity (220–589 CE)

• The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period (907–960 CE)

• The Late Qing Dynasty & The Warlord Era (1839–1928)

The optimum solution is to be united and part of the whole system.

And reading the history of both, the lessons of history in China and Europe are fundamentally different and lead to different conclusions.

I think it’s important to understand what are the underlying instincts and where they come from.

Our instincts for individualism and seeing others as competition, and China’s for centralisation and harmony.

Of course, there is more to this:
- China has a great deal of diversity.
- The West is not totally individualistic, the best companies in the west are not run purely by committee.
- The west sees a great deal of collectivism in sports teams, families and so on.
- Culture is always changing

Neither is better, each has their advantages and disadvantages.

But I believe that if we seek to understand China more accurately, it can lead to a better world: “when two cultures collide” or we seek to understand together and our perspectives to create a new kind of synthesis.

Understanding is the first step in bridging any gap.

First seek to understand, then seek to be understood.

I’ll leave with a quote from Lee Kuan Yew

Lee Kuan Yew, educated in Britain, of Chinese descent, played a key role in the development of Singapore and also served as a model and inspiration for China’s opening up - Deng Xiaoping’s visit to China profoundly influenced China’s reform and opening up policy.

I explored his book, which I highly recommend, and remains even more relevant today, in this video.

You might ask- What about the US? It’s geography is different as a centralised system? Yes but it was founded on the European principles of individualism.

You might ask - What about the European Union? There have been many attempts to unite the continent before with Napoleon and Hitler. The success of the union depends on its ability to manage multiple cultures and languages and systems, and Brexit proves my point.

You might ask - What about the united Roman empire? This also proves my point. It was highly centralised at a time when the mediterranean provided huge benefits as a center for transport and trade. Those things changed.

These things are always changing, I believe with the rise of technology, and as our world becomes smaller, and more interconnected, our environment and geography is effectively changing.

The internet is the new city.

Rivers and mountains are becoming less important in shaping how we communicate and travel and who we become, while they do shape our inherent instincts.

As technology collapses geography, the old instincts may be becoming maladaptive for everyone.

As in many things.

The point is to rise to a higher level view, rather than within, where it is invisible.

To be having a higher level of public understanding, openness and debate and discussion the kind of governance, organisation and culture likely to be most successful in this era, and how best to arrange ourselves and therefore the kind of culture we want to create.

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Further reading

• Interestingly the same principles apply to business - Michael Porter’s Five Forces - the shape of an industry determines what kind of firm wins in it.

• Coase's theory of the firm - the optimal size and shape of a firm depends on the transaction costs of its environment

• Reading Chinese history is fascinating

  • Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China

  • Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China

• Studying about China gives you access to a parallel reality - Introducing: Study in China with China Admissions.

• And also studying in multiple countries and cultures gives you the advantages of understanding and using the ideas of competition.

• We are going through a transitional period

• We are not living up to our absolute potential - far from it

• Thinking about how we are organised is the highest leverage activity we can do

• We need to re-examine the operating principles and upgrade our operating system and institutions.

For example:

• Birth rates are falling - this is not inevitable, it is a signal.

• Many countries are experiencing some form of political chaos or zigzagging - wasting enormous energy and resources. This is also not inevitable. This is also a signal.

They are signs of a mistake in our thinking that needs course correcting.

About Me:

I’ve founded China Admissions and Global Admissions - online platforms for studying abroad.

I studied Chinese at Peking University in China and living between UAE, UK and China.

I’m writing in the following sections

Manufacturing Scarcity. Scarcity is not inevitable and a sign of failure usually because of a confusion about what should be done by the state and the market, and because we are using thinking is outdated. This can be upgraded on the societal level.

China & The World

Opportunities - the changing nature of careers and jobs.

Mindset - our own mindset is the thing not taught but most important to our success.

I write weekly about what I’m learning, as a way to improve my thinking. and to help and the choices in front of you.

Subscribe, and I’ll send the next one straight to you.

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The CSCA Exam is Easy?

Not quite, but these strategies I’m going to introduce can give you a massive advantage and save time.

These strategies apply to the CSCA, HSK, Chinese tests, and GMAT and GRE and others.

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As a graduate from University of Exeter (a top UK university), when I came to China I realised that Chinese students have a completely different way to taking tests.

In the UK, the exams were often essay questions - where I had to come up with unique insights. Originality and critical thinking was important, someone would then read my exams or essays and grade it.

China has 1.3 billion people, there are 12 million people taking the annual high school (Gaokao) tests each year. A big part of the exam is multiple choice - machine-graded and fed into a computer - where the result is either right or wrong. The CSCA is based on this logic.

Introducing Chinese Test-Hacking

Because of this - Chinese students need to excel at learning the subject matter, but also at becoming great test-takers, and there are specific hacks and strategies.

This massive competition, strategies and need to do better than others to stand out (it’s an arms race) is one of the reasons Chinese students are excellent at GMAT and other tests.

In order to prepare to succeed in China’s education system, it’s necessary to understand this, because all the exams follow similar strategies. You need to learn the content, the strategies, shortcuts (you often don’t need to calculate each question), and recognising the traps.

China also huge competition - people spend a lot more time preparing for tests. Chinese also has some advantages in maths - the numbers are easier and more logical.

Before, when I was preparing for tests, I would often spend many hours just looking up answers in text books to try to understand it. Often, the information there seemed confusing. Now we have AI, it is so much easier.

So in this article I’ll share some steps and prompts you can use.

The great news is that this isn’t just going to help you with the CSCA exam. It will help you with all your future exams, and with life.

About the CSCA

We created a video you can watch here about the CSCA exam, and a guide here.

Universities don’t just see your raw mark, they can see where you rank against test-takers around the world. It’s not only about hitting a number, it’s about where you sit compared to everyone else. That’s good news, because it means everything in this article pays off twice over - every shortcut you learn, every trap you stop falling for, every extra practice test moves you up the ranking relative to everyone who didn’t bother. Beating the cohort is the game, and most people won’t prepare like this.

What to learn

1. Understand The Syllabus

   1. You can download it from csca.cn

   2. Depending on which topics you are going to learn, you will need to make your own syllabus of topics. Then you can break this down with the core foundational concepts that you absolutely must know.

2. Understand Test Strategies

   1. We have a certain number of questions, and a certain amount of time. How much time per question? 48 questions in 60 minutes - about 75 seconds each. You can then set a timer in practice. Aim to do in 60 seconds. If you go over 75 seconds, keep going, come back to it. If you spend 3-4 minutes on a question you might be missing easier questions.

   2. And how is the test laid out? Are there some easier and harder questions?

3. Understand Shortcuts

   1. There are often many shortcuts you can use in tests, because questions are phrased in a certain way. When you do many practice tests, you will see the same question keep coming up, with different numbers or content. There are also many shortcuts you can use.
      For example, as a super simple answer, if the number is 1492 x 99 then you can round up - 1500 x 100 = 150,000 and then find the answer that is closest to that.

4. Understand Traps

   1. Each multiple choice question has a certain number of traps. Some are logical traps. When you recognise the types of traps, you will see them coming up again and again.

5. Take many practice tests

   1. A big part of it is just taking as many tests as you can and seeing the patterns come up. When I did my Chinese driving license test for example, I downloaded an app which had all the 1500 questions on out of the 75 they will ask. I then spend 1-2 days learning all these. Those I got wrong, I kept studying, to learn the underlying principles, until I got them right (because there are some that are not logical or a bit strange). Then I got full marks in the test.

   2. And don’t skip the official mock test. CSCA releases one on csca.cn about a week before each exam. Take it. The questions matter less than the interface - you want the layout, the timer, the navigation, and the submission process to feel completely familiar before the real thing, so that on exam day not a single mark is lost to fumbling with the system instead of answering the question.

6. Training

   1. When you enrol in some kind of test course or training, they will teach you these tricks. It’s a really good idea to do that, or search online. If you don’t you are at a disadvantage.

7. Environment

   1. Sometimes people around you will actively try to discourage you from doing better than them (even family members). If possible you need to be aware of this influence, and curate your environment, and try to listen to yourself more than others - set a goal on the future, and dedicate time to it. Find a quiet space, look after your inputs - diet, exercise, sleep etc., and try to get around smarter people.

8. Repeat

AI Prompts

You can use these prompts with AI. Currently I recommend Claude.ai, or Gemini, but the latest models keep changing. It’s worth getting their pro version because it’s smarter.

It’s a good idea first to spend some time on the syllabus. Depending on when your test date is. Spend the first 20% of the time on the syllabus.

Then start looking at practice papers, and let your results from that take you back to your learning - about the question and about the core concepts.

Just keep taking tests and your results should improve continually.

You can budget to spend 1-3 hours a day on this for a certain number of months.

NOTE - AI can produce confidently wrong answers, especially at exam precision in maths, physics, and chemistry. Use AI to explain concepts and drill, but verify numerical answers and facts against the official syllabus and past papers

Understand The Syllabus

1. What is the curriculum I need to know for the CSCA test? (Input which test you are taking), or copy and paste from CSCA so it has the background.

2. How many hours do you think I need to spend to learn this?

3. What are the most important concepts I need to know in this test?

4. Explain this concept for me.

5. Explain to me like I’m 15 (lower the age according to how easy you find it)

Practice Questions

1. Give me 5 practice questions for this topic.

2. Explain this concept? How to get this answer?

3. Give me another one.

4. Just keep doing these test
   

Understand Test Strategies

1. What are the top test strategies for the CSCA exam?

2. How is the test laid out?

3. What are the top shortcuts?

4. What are the common traps in questions?

Improvement Strategies

1. How can I improve my CSCA exam result?

Find a Mentor

Another option is to find a mentor. You can search on Upwork and find a teacher for $20-30 USD an hour. Often you can hire a Tsinghua student to help you. They can help you prepare. 1 on 1 teaching is one of the best investments you can make. It can save you many hours of test.

Enroll in Courses

Find online courses you can join with teachers and others students. This can help you a lot to give you momentum and make progress

Good luck!
加油

How is your progress?

What do you find hardest about the CSCA exam?

Have any questions or strategies to share?

Let me and other students know in the comments.

If you found this useful you’ll probably find this article useful

There is a saying in China: 井底之蛙 - the frog at the bottom of the well, looking up at a small circle of sky and mistaking it for the whole thing.

I think about that frog a lot when I talk to universities about recruitment. Not because the people running admissions aren’t smart - they are some of the most thoughtful people I’ve met in this industry - but because the well they’re looking up from has walls they can’t see.

The shape of what they can observe becomes the shape of what they believe is happening.

And right now, what they can observe is shrinking.

Students apply out of nowhere

The traditional recruitment funnel was tidy. A student would find you, sign up, send a few questions, maybe come to a webinar, maybe go through an agent. They’d raise their hand. You’d see the hand. You could trace a line from first contact to enrolment and tell yourself a story about what worked.

That funnel is no longer a funnel.

More and more students now do the entire journey themselves. They research, compare, shortlist, and apply — and the first time the university hears from them is when a completed application lands in the system, seemingly out of nowhere.

Except it isn’t out of nowhere. It only looks that way from the bottom of the well.

These are what I’ve come to call the invisible students: the ones who were always there, doing the work of choosing you, but who never showed up in your CRM until the decision was already made. The ones who very nearly converted and didn’t — and left no trace of why. The ones for whom you’ll never know whether it was the webinar, the article, the conversation with a student ambassador, or none of the above.

They are everywhere in the application data, and nowhere in the pipeline you actually manage.

Why this is accelerating

Two things are happening.

The first is simply the internet doing what the internet does - collapsing the distance between a curious seventeen-year-old in a town you’ve never heard of and your program page. More of the search happens before any human at the university is involved.

The second is AI, and it’s moving faster than most institutions realise. A 2026 EAB survey found that 46% of high school students now use AI tools like ChatGPT during their college search - nearly double the 26% who said the same just six months earlier. That is not a trend line. That is a step change.

Think about what that means for the funnel. The questions a student used to email you - Can I afford this? Will I get in? Is this place right for someone like me? — are increasingly being answered by a model, in a chat window, with no university in the room. By the time you meet the student, the persuading is done. You weren’t part of it. You can’t even see that it happened.

The blind spot universities can’t see

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable, because the invisible-student problem doesn’t sit in isolation. It compounds an older blind spot: over-reliance on agents in a handful of large markets.

Agents cluster where the volume is - China, India, Indonesia. They are not in Panama, or Lithuania, or Fiji, or Rwanda. Out of 193 countries, the median country has fewer than six million people, and most of the world’s source markets have simply been too small or too hard to reach to build an agent network around.

So the map of who universities recruit ends up tracing the map of where agents already are. China and India alone now account for more than half of international students in the US and nearly half of UK sponsored study visas. That is a concentration risk dressed up as a strategy - and it quietly works against the diversity most universities say they want.

Now layer the invisible students on top. The independent, self-directed student — the one researching alone, applying directly, never raising a hand - exists in both worlds. They’re the growing cohort in the big markets that agents don’t capture, and they’re almost the only kind of student in the small markets that agents never reach.

Which means the institutions most exposed to the invisible-student shift are often the same ones most dependent on a narrow set of source countries. The blind spot and the dependence reinforce each other.

What I think this asks of us

I don’t think the answer is to mourn the old funnel. It’s not coming back. The student who does their own research and trusts their own judgement is, frankly, exactly the kind of student most universities claim to want.

The answer is to stop measuring recruitment only by the hands you can see being raised - and to start building visibility into the part of the journey that now happens without you. That means investing in a direct-to-student brand that does its work before the application, in markets large and small. It means meeting independent students where they already are, rather than waiting for them to surface in a system that was designed for a different era.

It’s a hedge against concentration. It’s access to the students you currently can’t see. And done well, it’s a push towards more diversity and more quality at the same time — not a trade-off between them.

The frog isn’t wrong about the sky. It’s just wrong about the size of it. Most of the international students universities want are already out there, already choosing, already applying.

The only real question is whether you can see them before they’ve made up their minds - or only after.

This was originally posted on Global Admissions

Lessons from Building a Company in China

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is

The act of clarifying and generating thought.

Of choosing between many possibilities.

The act of speaking reality into existence,

to orchestrate attention.

Telepathy.

Moving.

Powerful.

Persuasive.

An asymmetric bet, expanding surface area for luck.

Art.

Magic.

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It is one thing to write to describe in detail, the colors of a picturesque scene and the emotions that resonates.

One that will never be seen again,

But for that moment.

It is another to write for a cause, to influence, to move, to persuade.

Like when the many times that try men’s souls.

That is when it is most needed.

It becomes more important now.

Maybe the biggest moat and skill that compounds.

When AI can write in a day many more times than humans have written since the first word was written.

But it doesn’t give it meaning, unique experience, and intention.

And when something is abundant, like air, people take it for granted.

Unless it is consciously moulded and put to use.

Like a cup, the value of it is the container, the gap - what it can hold.

The word is the code of our civilisation.

The operating system of the new age.

How great companies are built.

And by mastering it we can transfer it to re-writing our civilisation.

It is a base layer that supports anything else.

While being something fun, too.

Especially when it flows.

I love the idea of combining ideas, of making the complex simple, and presenting an original position.

To write something only I can write.

So how do we become so great, to learn to yield this powerful tool?

Just as every craft.

By reading a lot and writing a lot.

Especially from the greats.

And mimicking them.

To absorb from them, and what they absorbed from others, and make it a part of you.

To combine the parts and aspects of writing that give it its power and depth, exploring all aspects of the tool.

The beauty, the effectiveness, the simplicity, in your own style.

Shakespeare for his range.

To give shape to the brief candle of the ideas of our lives.

Orwell for his influence, to strip it to its point, to make an argument obvious and inevitable.

Tolstoy, Homer, Austen and Joyce.

Rumi, Borges, and Montaigne.

Study the great texts that shaped us.

And all those that you resonate with.

Become the fusion, synthesis,

and

Emergence.

And then reduce and simplify it to make something better.

Learn the principles, of what works.

And then toss them away into the wind

So experiment, do it badly, and make it your own.

Like how the Chinese emperors used to create new characters just for fun.

Because Every word was originally made by someone.

Like a Szegemon.

Converge two or more seemingly contradictory or unrelated fields or ideas.

Solve problems for people,

Combine and advance.

Or just make art.

And the real output is not what shows up on the paper.

It’s how it changes you.

And makes you become more YOU.

Like the greats from Franklin, Caeser, Napoleon and Churchill,

Their speeches and thought, success, and influence, was built by writing.

It lets you think clearly.

And like Buffet, do it every day.

Get 1% better each day.

And let that sh*t compound.

And that is why, whenever I wake.

I find the urge to write.

Whenever I want to think.

To solve.

Whenever I have a thousand ideas.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth.

Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul.

Whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing, stuck between errands, void of flow; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately steering off course, when my finger starts to scroll, I diverge in a million directions, or feel the urge to punch a wall.

I account it high time to write as soon as I can.

Hi,

My name is Richard,

And I’m a writer.

In the following article I share more about how defining words helped me to become a clearer thinker.

Because It Co-creates Reality - So learn how to harness it

1. Principles from Every layer of reality apply at each one above them

2. This includes quantum physics

3. The particpatory principle also applies at every layer upward - How you perceive reality shapes it

My grandma had her first child at 17 and raised four. I asked her recently how she thinks about family differently to our generation - she told me she didn’t think about it - it just happened. It was expected.

What struck me is how different our life is at university campus. Thousands of people at peak health, peak energy, peak fertility - and almost no children anywhere.

We treat that as natural.

It isn’t.

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Universities evolved from cathedral schools and monastic schools - institutions built by and for celibate men.

The architecture, the housing, the rhythm of academic life all assumed students without families.

When higher education went mass-market and opened to women, we scaled the model without ever asking whether the celibate-monk template still made sense.

So today, a student who wants a family faces a system designed to make it impossible. Dorms built for singles. No campus childcare. Timetables and funding that assume zero dependents.

The message is: family comes after.

But after keeps moving.

After the degree.

After the master’s.

After the PhD - which finishes at 31 or 32.

After the job is stable,

After the house is bought,

After the career is established.

Governments are now spending billions trying to reverse the demographic crisis this perpetual “after” helped create - a crisis that is, ironically, now hitting university enrollment and finances directly.

But students can’t afford children?

But when exactly does a family become affordable?

The economics of having children at university could be arguably better than at 30 - abundant flexible time, communal living, shared resources, and daycare that an institution could provide at marginal cost.

What students lack isn’t capacity.

It’s permission and infrastructure.

I’m not arguing everyone at university should have kids.

I’m arguing that we should question childless universities being the norm.

And for some people it might be the perfect time.

And the reason is not that it’s not possible - it’s that the culture is not set up for it to exist.

It should be a real option rather than a structural impossibility - family housing, campus nurseries, leave for students, funding that doesn’t penalize dependents.

We’re training our most capable people to see children as a trade-off.

While universities sit on an answer to their own enrollment crisis.

I first came to China in 2007

I’ve been working in the study in China market since 2010 having founded China Admissions online platform.

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I’ve been speaking to many students and understanding their reasons for studying in China.

China is an incredible country and I’m hugely grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, how I’ve been treated and to have experienced such an incredible boom and development of human - probably the biggest period of economic growth in the period of the world.

Looking back on it now, I recognised two key phases:

• Phase 1: Between 2007 and 2019 - this was the time when China was booming.

  • Careers, Language and Opportunity.

• Phase 2: 2020-Now - Research, Credential & Low-Cost Launch Base

In Phase 1 - the energy was very much - study in China - the future is China. Many students were coming to study in China to learn Chinese and build a career in the fastest growing major economy.

In 2020, the market shifted - for a couple of reasons, COVID, and part of it is housing market in China which meant the forces of gravity hit the Chinese market.

It wasn’t obvious at the time, I thought it was a temporary issue, but it’s clear in retrospect that things had changed permanently in some ways.

Part of that is because housing is limited, and international talent is usually transient compared to other countries.

What this means is that while you will build relationships in China with students from multiple countries, very few of them, or you, will end up staying - because of fewer long term career opportunities. This is quite different to other countries like Germany, UK, Australia for example, or those where there are more career opportunities.

Of course part of this is up to each student.

Right now China is a great destination for students who:

• Are looking at high quality research - China is one of the best places for that.

• Are looking to save money and get a great education - but launch their careers elsewhere. International students can’t easily get work permission in China after graduation. The job market is tighter, China’s youth unemployment is high, and post-graduation work access for foreigners is restricted.

• Are connected with China, from overseas Chinese family, or looking to learn Chinese.

• Some of the good opportunities are top ranked universities such as Peking or Tsinghua and international universities in China, such as XJTLU or UNNC where you can often get two or more degrees, at a lower cost.

• Are interested to travel and explore China.

• Students interested in hardware, robotics or tech companies can choose Shenzhen.

• Students who are outgoing and looking to network and go to events and meet people.

Who shouldn’t choose studying in China?

• Students looking for a career in China - students need to do the career planning themselves actively - online and in their home country to set up career opportunities for themselves.

• Students unwilling to engage with the language and culture.

• Students who already know what kind of career they want in their home country or another country, and studying in China might not be a worthwhile investment of time (which is the most valuable form of investment)

Advice for students

• It is more important to take your education into your own hands. Use the facilities and resources available to you - the community, the internet, resources online, mentors, AI and get involved in your own projects. If possible try to start working as soon as possible to get experience and build proof of work online. Network and get to know more people who can help in your career.

• Also think about family early. There is no reason why you can’t have a family young.

If you are looking to study in China, I explore more in this article about scholarships here.

You can also explore more about the programs on China Admissions and globally on
Global Admissions.

I also write more about China on this blog - consider subscribing.

Hi, I’m Rich

Originally from UK, and founder of China Admissions and Global Admissions. We’ve helped thousands of students study abroad.

Most students miss out for one reason: they start too late and don’t know the system.

Here’s how it actually works.

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The main scholarships you can apply for

• Chinese Government Scholarship (CSC) - the main one. Covers tuition, accommodation, and a monthly stipend. You can apply two ways: through the Chinese embassy in your country (Type A), or directly to a university (Type B).

• University scholarships - most universities offer their own, separate from the CSC. Often easier to get and less competitive.

• Provincial / city government scholarships - e.g. Shanghai, Beijing. Usually applied for through the university.

• Confucius Institute Scholarship - if you’re studying Chinese language or teaching.

The timeline (this is where most people go wrong)

• December–January: start preparing your documents. Don’t wait.

• For bachelor’s applicants: you now need to take the CSCA test (China Scholastic Competency Assessment) before the deadline - this is new, and many students don’t realise it exists. Check dates at csca.cn.

• Application window: opens around Spring Festival and most deadlines fall late February to March. University and provincial deadlines can run into June.

• Results: usually announced in July.

The single biggest mistake is starting in spring - by then the best scholarships are already closing.

What makes a strong application

• Understand what they want - they don’t give free scholarships for nothing - they want to build international influence, and attract talented students to learn about China and build ambassadors who understand will connect China with your home country.

• A clear study plan that connects your background to the program and show your China interest. Learning some Chinese is a big advantage.

• Strong reference letters and well presented documents with good English.

• Applying to the right level of university for your profile and showing that you’ve done research - eg., reached out to others and understand their culture.

• Getting your language certificates sorted early (HSK for Chinese-taught programs; or IELTS/TOEFL for English-taught).

• Because each country, and agency has a certain quota, applying early and making a connection at the embassy or university can give you a big advantage.

• Make sure to present your application documents perfectly, because usually they won’t give any feedback - they’ll just put it aside and you’ll never know. With the number of applications they have, they usually don’t have the resources to give you feedback and help you refine your documents.

• If you can present it to them in person it can be a big advantage - either in person at the embassy, or at a university, or ask a friend to hand it in - so you can watch them review it and then update it if theres an issue. You can also get their contact so you can follow up on the status.

Go deeper

• Our full written guide: Scholarships to study in China

• My video tutorial on applying

• Browse open programs and university scholarships: China Admissions

• Explore and apply to other global scholarships on Global Admissions

  

Explore more scholarships on Global Admissions here.

Want help?

Applications for 2027 open right after Spring Festival - the best time to start preparing is now.

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Any questions? Let me know

I run platforms that help international students choose where to study. Over the past decade I’ve watched hundreds of thousands of young people from Seoul, Shanghai, Mumbai, Lagos and Hanoi make the most consequential decision of their early lives.

I now long to realize I was also watching, in real time, the machinery of the fertility crisis.

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Let me describe a student I’ve seen a thousand times. She’s 24, from a good family in Seoul or Shanghai. Her parents have spent fifteen years and a meaningful fraction of their lifetime income optimizing her credentials tutors, test prep, the right schools. She’s now choosing a master’s program abroad, because a bachelor’s degree no longer clears the bar. Marriage is just not something we discuss. She has simply filed them under a category called “later,” but watching their journeys, that later has a habit of receding at exactly the speed she approaches it - unless they are an outlier and do something quite different.

Multiply her by a generation and you get the demographic charts everyone is panicking about. South Korea’s fertility rate is around 0.7 - the lowest ever recorded by a nation in peacetime. China, Taiwan, Singapore and Japan are not far behind. And here is the pattern that my industry sits on top of: the societies sending the most students per capita into the global education race are precisely the societies with the lowest birth rates in human history.

That is not a coincidence. They are the same phenomenon.

The arms race

when the cost of raising one child to a competitive standard explodes, families respond by having one child, or none. But “cost” makes it sound like a price tag, and it’s more like a war. Education in East Asia - and increasingly everywhere - is a positional arms race. What matters is not how educated your child is, but how educated they are *relative to everyone else’s child*. And like all arms races, it has no natural stopping point, because every escalation by one family forces escalation by all. And in this arms race, a masters is not a nice to have, it’s the new bar.

What sets the intensity of the race is one variable: the gap between winning and losing. Korea’s race is the world’s fiercest because its prize gap is the steepest - a job at a chaebol versus a job at a small firm is not a different salary, it is a different life, a different marriage market, a different future for your own children. Where losing is survivable, the race stays mild. Where losing means a visibly diminished life, parents rationally go to war, and the war consumes everything: money, time, attention, and eventually the willingness to enroll a second soldier.

I used to think this was a story about tiger parents. It isn’t. Every family I’ve met is behaving rationally inside a structure none of them chose. The structure is the problem. And the structure has a headquarters that almost nobody examines.

The monastery we never left

Here is a piece of history that changed how I see my own industry. The university - the institution through which we now route the majority of every generation in the developed world - descends directly from the medieval monastery. Its first scholars were clergy. Its residential colleges were cloisters. Celibacy wasn’t a side effect; it was the rule. Fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges were legally forbidden to marry until 1877.

We secularized everything about the university except its life-script. We kept the cloister and dropped the chastity: campus life is famously not celibate, but it remains childless by design. The dorms assume no dependents. The financing assumes no dependents. Can I bring children with me? Students sometimes ask. The schedules, the visas, the degree structures - all of it prices in a person with zero family obligations. And for most of the twentieth century, under the doctrine of in loco parentis, the university literally acted as the student’s parent. You cannot become a parent inside an institution whose premise is that you are still the child.

Then we scaled it. Tertiary education went from an elite minority experience to the majority experience in two generations. The master’s degree became the new bachelor’s. For ambitious young people the kind I meet every day - formal education now stretches comfortably to 28 or 30. Which means a 900-year-old monastic default, never deliberately revisited by anyone, now sits directly on top of the entire window human biology allocated for something else.

Demographers have long known that educational expansion, especially for women, is among the strongest predictors of fertility decline anywhere in the world. The standard explanation is opportunity cost and choice: educated women choose later and fewer. Both are real. But there’s an assumption hiding inside that account - that the institution doing the educating is neutral, a fixed backdrop against which free choices are made. It isn’t. The institution was engineered, a millennium ago, for celibate monks, and it has never been re-engineered. When every structural feature of someone’s twenties makes parenthood impossible - academically, financially ruinous, we should be careful about calling the resulting childlessness a preference.

The trap has three walls

What the evidence actually supports is an interlocking trap with three walls.

The first wall is the credential arms race described above, which sets the durationof pre-adult life and the per-child cost of competing.

The second wall is the institution: a university system that occupies ages 18 to 30 while structurally penalizing family formation, converting the arms race’s duration into enforced childlessness.

The third wall is what waits at the exit. In most Anglophone countries, restricted housing supply means two incomes get capitalized into house prices - the second salary doesn’t become surplus, it becomes the entry ticket, bid against every other two-income couple for the same fixed stock of homes. Add the quiet inflation of what “ready for children” means - own home, completed credentials, established career, the full arms-race victory aand the responsible life-script doesn’t finish until 35, in a biological window that closes regardless of how responsible you’ve been.

Three walls, one trap. A young person can do everything right inside it and still find that “later” has become “never.” Most of the people my industry serves are doing everything right.

Why the checks don’t work

Once you see the trap, the policy failures stop being mysterious. South Korea has spent more than $200 billion on pro-natal incentives and its birth rate fell while the money flowed. Hungary spends a reported five percent of GDP. Even the Nordic countries -cheap childcare, long parental leave, the model everyone cited a have slid below 1.5 in the past decade, quietly breaking the academic consensus that generous family policy restores fertility.

The reason is simple: subsidies don’t disarm an arms race, they just raise the bar. Paying families to have children does nothing about what those children will be raised into - another round of the same competition, run through the same monastic institution, exiting into the same housing auction. You cannot compensate people for obeying a life-script that is itself the problem. You have to change the script.

The cheapest lever nobody discusses

Which brings me to the most unfashionable idea I’ve arrived at, and the one I’d ask you to actually sit with: the bottleneck institution in the fertility crisis is the university, and it is also the cheapest place to intervene.

Universities concentrate every generation’s young people at peak health and peak partner-availability - medically, the early-to-mid twenties is the safest decade for pregnancy, before the years medicine labels “geriatric” - and then structurally forbid acting on it. The fix is not exhortation. Nobody should be nudging 20-year-olds toward parenthood; the genuine risks of early partnership are real and don’t vanish with better childcare. The fix is removing the penalty: family housing on campus, childcare as standard infrastructure, leave-and-return rights for student parents, financing that doesn’t assume zero dependents. Make student parenthood viable and let people choose. An option that wont be right for everyone, but might be for some, and should at least be an option. We have proofs of concept - the GI Bill generation studied married with children in their millions; Soviet universities ran kindergartens - it could be one of the best environments to raise a child; a handful of universities today treat married students as a normal category rather than an anomaly.

Compared to Korea’s $200 billion, this is institutional plumbing. And unlike the checks, it attacks the script itself: it breaks the assumption - installed by monks, scaled without questioning it - family is what begins after the credentials race ends.

A confession

I’ll end with the uncomfortable part. Every trend in my industry points in one direction: more credentials, later study, career-pathway migration. Students now choose destinations almost entirely on work outcomes - Japan and Korea are booming as study destinations precisely because they offer jobs at the end, and nobody, anywhere, chooses a country for its compatibility with starting a family. International education profits from the arms race I’ve just described. It’s the incentive of the industry.

I don’t think the answer is for ambitious young people to compete less. But those of us who run the machinery owe it some honesty about what the machinery does. We have built a civilization that routes its entire young population through an institution designed for celibate monks, auctions them a house at the exit, and then stands amazed at the empty maternity wards - writing ever-larger checks to solve a mystery that isn’t one.

It impacts every other part of emergence

The core principle is that the act of observation is not separate from reality - it participates in it.

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These are some of the different layers of emergence. Observation in all these parts has different impacts.

Biology Life is chemistry that learned to copy itself and adapt. The core principle is evolution by natural selection — things that reproduce better, survive. Everything in biology, from cells to ecosystems, is the result of billions of years of that single filter.

Chemistry Matter wants to reach its lowest energy state. Atoms combine, break, and rearrange to do that — and those rearrangements are chemical reactions. The core principle is that electrons are shared or transferred between atoms, and that determines almost everything about how substances behave.

Physics Reality follows mathematical laws, and those laws are the same everywhere in the universe. The core principle is that matter, energy, space, and time are all interconnected and governed by rules that don’t change — from a falling apple to a collapsing star.

Economics People make choices under scarcity. The core principle is that incentives drive behavior, and markets are the collective result of millions of individual decisions about what things are worth. Everything in economics flows from that tension between unlimited wants and limited resources.

Quantum Physics At the smallest scales, reality is fundamentally probabilistic and discrete. Things don’t have definite properties until measured, energy comes in chunks, and particles behave like waves. The core principle is that the act of observation is not separate from reality — it participates in it.

Politics Power is the ability to make others do what you want. The core principle is that humans must organize collective decisions, and politics is the endless negotiation over who decides, and who benefits. Every political system is a different answer to the question: how do we live together?

Sport Defined constraints create meaningful competition. The core principle is that rules, limits, and opponents reveal what a person or team is truly capable of. Sport is the only domain where you can measure human performance against a completely fair and equal standard.

Music Sound organized in time creates emotion and meaning. The core principle is tension and resolution — music sets up expectations and either fulfills or subverts them, and that relationship is what moves us. Every musical tradition in human history is built on that dynamic.

Astronomy The universe is unimaginably large, old, and mostly unknown. The core principle is that the same physics that governs Earth governs everything — and by reading light from distant objects we can reconstruct the history, structure, and fate of the cosmos.

Philosophy Everything we think we know rests on assumptions we haven’t examined. The core principle is rigorous questioning of foundations — of knowledge, reality, morality, and meaning. Philosophy is what every field does before it becomes a field.

Writing Language is the compression of experience into symbols another mind can reconstruct. The core principle is clarity of thought expressed through precise selection of words — every good writer is really a good thinker who has learned to make their thinking visible.

Civilisation Cooperation at scale requires trust, institutions, and shared story. The core principle is that humans can coordinate beyond the tribe by building systems — writing, law, currency, religion, cities — that allow strangers to work together. Civilisation is accumulated cooperative infrastructure.

Mathematics Pure structure, independent of physical reality. The core principle is that from a small set of assumptions, infinite true things can be derived by logic alone. Mathematics is the study of what must be true, regardless of what actually exists.

Psychology Behaviour makes sense once you understand the mind producing it. The core principle is that most of what drives us is hidden from our own awareness — our decisions, emotions, and beliefs are shaped by processes we don’t consciously control or even see.

History The present is the residue of the past. The core principle is that context explains everything — no event, person, or idea can be understood without understanding what came before it. History is the discipline of taking time seriously.

Sociology Individuals are shaped by invisible social forces. The core principle is that your beliefs, choices, and identity are far more collectively produced than they feel — class, culture, institutions, and norms operate on you whether you notice them or not.

Medicine The body is a system that can be understood and intervened in. The core principle is diagnosis before treatment — understanding what has gone wrong, and why, before attempting to fix it. Medicine is applied biology meeting individual human suffering.

Architecture Space shapes human experience. The core principle is that how a building is designed changes how people feel and behave inside it — architecture is the art of making space serve human life while remaining standing.

Law Rules only work if they’re enforced consistently. The core principle is that written, agreed-upon rules applied equally create predictability — and predictability allows trust, commerce, and peaceful coexistence. Law is the technology of fairness.

Religion Humans need meaning, community, and a framework for death. The core principle is that there is something beyond the visible world that gives this one significance — and ritual, story, and community are the vehicles for connecting to it.

Art Form carries feeling that language cannot. The core principle is that the arrangement of visual elements — colour, shape, light, composition — can communicate directly to a mind without passing through words. Art is meaning made visible.

Engineering Turn scientific principles into things that work. The core principle is constraints are the job — any solution must be safe, affordable, buildable, and functional. Engineering is physics with consequences.

Linguistics Language is not just communication — it’s the structure of thought itself. The core principle is that all human languages share deep underlying patterns, and the diversity of languages reveals how differently reality can be carved up and perceived.

The Emergent Curriculum

Emergent curriculum is based on the premise that children are most successful at learning when curriculum experiences account for their interests, strengths, needs, and lived realities

This is based on the idea that whatever emerges in a child should be used to explore. It facilitates learning from the child, not from external sources.

The Emergence Curriculum

This is what I call the emergence curriculum.

This is a different idea that we are the result of our inputs, and that we should feed students with stimuli that represent the best of our civilization at the same time as feeding them obstacles and what’s missing so that they have the drive to create and grow.

The problem is that many grow up in great education systems with great families and abundant wealth, but they lack a drive, because they don’t need to.

At the same time there are many talents who emerge from poor areas without the best inputs, but they developed an intense drive to overcome their environment and become something far greater. Some of this is partly by luck, but most are held back by it.

The limitation of the emergent curriculum is that things can only emerge that the student has been exposed to already.

The emergence curriculum leaves none of this to chance, and seeks to take students to the best cathedrals, listen to the best music, to have the best teachers that can be found. Or, if they are unable, surrounds them with as much great material, as possible.

So that if they are the average of their inputs, those inputs are pretty damn great, and if they are the best of their inputs they are likely to be even greater still.

The emergence curriculum has a bigger view of human potential, and would seek to invest more in training the teachers and curating the environment for students.

But if we don’t introduce to students real challenge, real tension, real things to overcome, then they will not create and become something greater, they will observe and enjoy what they already experience.

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Rome was the center of the empire.

In Wikipedia, there is a saying - all articles lead to Philosophy.

If you click the first link in any Wikipedia article and keep following the first link, they eventually lead to the page about Philosophy.

In the digital age, in terms of careers and opportunity - all roads lead to the internet.

Welcome.

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In the age of Industrial revolution - when people lost their jobs in farming - millions moved to the city looking for work.

In the age of AI, as people lose their opportunities, they are also moving somewhere.

And that place is the internet.

The internet is the city.

The more I think about the future of work the more I realise that all roads and solutions lead to the internet.

Create content.

Create an online store.

Solve problems for people.

Build a community in real life - through the internet.

So here we are on the internet.

The internet is the new city.

A place to learn.

A place to find opportunities.

A place to connect.

And it’s even more true because it exists at a higher level to cities.

I can be in any city and still connect with anyone on the internet.

It is the city of cities.

What is a city?

It comes from the Latin word: Civis which means citizen.

In this case the internet is of greater size, population and importance than a city.

And it might even make more sense to model our cities from the internet.

And it doesn’t even really matter where I am anymore.

Yes the place you are living matters - who you are around matters still, just like what kind of house you live in and which neighborhood you lived in, and who your neighbors were mattered.

So

If you are not using the internet to connect and grow your careers, you can still grow and improve, but you are not going to grow as fast as those that are using the internet.

So you will be falling behind.

That’s why the biggest and fastest growing companies are all digital and online companies.

Because the economics and connective ability of the internet is free.

But in the physical world there is friction.

So you’re paying a friction tax.

Yes, the real world is still useful and necessary.

Like we needed the farms to survive. But they are no longer a source of growth and opportunity.

They are a source of food and subsistence.

For most of the last 200 years, the majority of growth, the majority of the connections, and opportunities, happened in the cities.

In the next 200 years, the majority of the growth, connections and opportunities are going to happen on the internet.

There are similarities but there’s also a massive difference.

The difference is that new jobs started to form - the middle class started to grow. But the nature of the internet is different.

There is no middle class on the internet.

Rather than a middle class to fit into with set jobs to find and career pathways, there are long tail niches to fill.

A place you can build your unique category of one in a thousand niches.

The problem is that any change of this scale has massive challenges.

The move from the countryside to the cities was far from pleasant.

Many people were worse off.

And thats happening now.

And what solved it is that people came together to build new institutions to fill in the gaps, to solve these problems.

Huge numbers together led to sanitation and health problems - so they built sewers.

People were untrained, so they built training centers, the guilds, the trade associations.

People were exploited - so they built mutual-aid and collective-bargaining.

And thats what we need to do now.

Realise that attention is the labor of the new era.

That’s the currency of the internet, that these platforms rely.

And that’s something that we own.

And it’s much more valuable than most people think.

So we can come together to create solutions to our common problems by directing and coordinating our attention.

People are isolated, let’s build online communities that become offline.

People are struggling to retrain, let’s educate them to find opportunities.

The internet is the new city.

Our attention is the new currency.

Let’s build.

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This is an example of emergence:

This is incredibly empowering because the principle is that Newtonian universe is not correct - there is no A to B. It is not linear and you do not choose from a range of choices.

There are multiple possibilities, and your observation and interaction with them affects which ones come into existence.

It’s just like quantum physics becuase principles from lower levels exist throughout all the higher levels too. Physics operates on a biological, and economic and civilisational level too. Biological idea of hunger, does affect economics for example.

Why is this so empowering?

Because you are not choosing but also generating your reality.

You can see the range of possibilities and then choose one, and in doing so bring it into existence.

When you believe in a rigid, linear universe, you carry an immense amount of anxiety.

You are constantly terrified of making the “wrong choice” from the fixed options available, feeling like a victim of whatever environment you walk into.

The shift to a Generative Reality changes your entire operating system:

• You Stop Predicting and Start Steering: Instead of wasting energy trying to passively predict what the market, a team, or a situation will do next, you realize that your entry into the system alters the system. Your clarity, your preparation, and your Frame become active physical variables in the equation.

• You Create Your Own Optionality: If you don’t like the current options available in a market or a business scenario, you don’t accept them. You change your frequency, isolate yourself to clear the noise, focus your intent, and interact with the system differently until a completely new set of outcomes collapses into existence.

• You Realize the Canvas is Wet: The world looks solid, but it’s actually a highly responsive mesh network. The walls are made of probabilities, not stone.

You aren’t a passenger guessing which way the train is going. You are the engineer realizing that the tracks are being laid down in real-time, exactly where you choose to look.

Entanglement also works with groups and relationships.