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, moral judgment, and the medium. 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 five 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 fifth asks what becomes of the evidence on media influence when the broadcast it was measured on — one message, many receivers — gives way to a channel that argues back, individually, at scale. 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, moral judgment, and the medium 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.