Balaji's Network School Curriculum

Isaac Asimov

Macrohistory reading: Asimov's psychohistory dramatizes the curriculum's core question — predicting and steering the rise and fall of civilizations.

Will, Ariel Durant

Macrohistory reading distilling patterns of growth, decay, and renewal across civilizations into a short synthesis.

Richard Dawkins

Macrohistory selection grounding social and cultural evolution in selection at the level of genes and memes.

Peter Turchin

Macrohistory text applying Turchin's cliodynamics to the cycles of imperial cohesion and collapse.

Sean McMeekin

Macrohistory case study reframing the Second World War around Stalin's aims and the remaking of the twentieth-century order.

David Reich

Macrohistory reading using ancient DNA to rewrite the deep story of human migration and population mixing.

William Strauss, Neil Howe

Macrohistory reading on the generational cycles that drive societies through crisis and renewal.

Ashley Rindsberg

Macrohistory selection on how the dominant media narrative has shaped — and distorted — the historical record.

James C. Scott

Political case study on why grand schemes to engineer society from above so often fail.

Lee Kuan Yew

Political case study: the firsthand account of building Singapore, the curriculum's model for a startup society that worked.

Ezra F. Vogel

Political case study of the reforms that turned a poor, closed China into an economic power.

J. Storrs Hall

Regulation reading on how stalled technological progress traces back to risk aversion and regulatory drag.

Harvey Silverglate

Regulation reading on how an overgrown legal code makes ordinary citizens unwitting criminals.

Daniel Carpenter

Regulation case study of how a single agency accumulated and wielded power over an entire industry.

Robert A. Caro

Regulation reading: Caro's study of Robert Moses, the definitive account of how unelected power reshapes a city.

Lewis Dartnell

Rebuilding reading: a practical guide to reconstructing civilization's technology from scratch.

Matt Ridley

Rebuilding reading on why innovation flourishes under freedom and incremental trial, not central direction.

Ray Dalio

Rebuilding reading mapping the long cycles by which reserve currencies and great powers rise and fall.

James Clear

Self-improvement reading on compounding small habits into lasting change.

Eric Jorgenson

Self-improvement reading on building wealth and judgment through leverage and clear thinking.

Peter Thiel

Tech reading on building genuinely new things rather than copying what already exists.

Ben Horowitz

Tech reading on the brutal realities of leading a company through crisis.

Elad Gil

Tech reading: a practical manual for scaling a startup from product-market fit to large company.

Kai-Fu Lee

Tech reading on the US–China contest to lead the AI era and its geopolitical stakes.

Saifedean Ammous

Crypto reading making the economic case for Bitcoin as sound, hard money.

James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

Crypto reading: the 1997 forecast of how digital money would let individuals escape the nation-state.

Michael Casey, Paul Vigna

Crypto reading on how blockchains create trust and could rewire economic institutions.

Daniel Suarez

Crypto reading: a techno-thriller imagining autonomous software building a parallel society.

Balaji Srinivasan

Startup Societies reading: Balaji's own blueprint for founding new countries online first, the capstone of the curriculum.

Francis Fukuyama

New Countries reading tracing how states, rule of law, and accountable government first emerged.