The substrates beneath modern economic and political life — money, motivation, memory, and moral judgment — were architected for a world that has passed. They presume a rational actor who does not exist, an exchange that has never been fair, a politics that pretends each generation reasons from scratch, and an economics that pretends to need no moral philosophy. The work of this archive is to specify those substrates again, in whatever register each one demands: a formal model when the claim is mathematical, a history when the claim is causal, a moral grammar when the claim is normative. The argument throughout is that money, motivation, memory, and moral judgment are load-bearing, not residual — and that the institutions of the next half-century will be drawn around them or not redrawn at all. The papers collected here are early drafts of that redrawing, specific enough to be wrong about.
Each card shows the argument — not an abstract. The full text, citation, and slides live behind the title.
A thread is a sustained argument across papers. The editor's note explains the throughline — what each paper in the thread is doing in relation to the others.
On institutions drafted around motivation rather than against it. The capitalism/socialism binary treats human action as something to be unleashed or constrained, and quarrels over which; both presume the underlying motion. This thread treats motivation as a substrate to be engineered, and asks what an institution drafted around it would have to specify.
1 paper in threadOn the architecture beneath currency. Market-clearing and fair exchange are different design criteria, and the systems that result from each are not the same machine in different costumes. This thread specifies what a monetary order built for fair exchange would actually look like — in the formalism the claim demands.
1 paper in threadOn the generational shadow of formative events. A decade of televised history imprints a cohort; that cohort's later grip on institutional power governs the politics, conflicts, and architectures that follow. This thread reads politics as a function of who is still in the room — and what was happening when they were eighteen.
1 paper in threadOn moral philosophy as the missing half of economic thought. Smith wrote on sympathy before he wrote on prices, and the second book is read without the first. This thread reads them back together, and asks what becomes of his account of moral judgment when economic action passes from persons to machines.
1 paper in threadDecks are arguments in their own right, not visual aids. Each is keyboard-navigable in browser. Press ← / → in the viewer; esc to close.
What this is, and why it exists. Not a CV.
Armchair Scholar is the working archive of Marshall Cahill: long-form papers and essays on the substrates beneath economic and political life — money, motivation, memory, and moral judgment. It is a publishing house of one. The papers are arguments — not posts, not threads, not commentary — and they are written to last past the news cycle that produced them.
The work runs along four threads, each addressing one substrate. The first drafts institutions designed around motivation rather than against it — alternatives to the capitalism/socialism binary that treat human action as something to be engineered, not assumed. The second asks what a monetary order designed for fair exchange rather than for market-clearing would actually look like, and specifies it in the formalism the claim demands. The third asks how televised events imprint on the generation that watches them, and how that generation's later retention of institutional power governs the politics, conflicts, and architectures that follow. The fourth rereads moral philosophy as the missing half of economic thought — beginning with Adam Smith, and asking what becomes of his account of moral judgment when economic action moves to machines. The threads converge on a single move: name the load-bearing assumption a dominant framework will not, then say something specific enough to be wrong about. New threads will open as the work demands.
Work in progress is shown openly. Citations are public. Slides are first-class artefacts, not afterthoughts. The argument is not that the conclusions here are correct. The argument is that money, motivation, memory, and moral judgment are load-bearing — and that an institutional design which does not specify them precisely is a design that has chosen not to look. If something here is useful to you, please use it.