Nine Years of Notes
Hi all, my name is Arata Hoshino. Let me share my life stories and how I ended up writing Far Side of the Constraint, a book-length thesis that looks at the future from the standpoint of civilization. I came up with the idea in my second year studying mechanical engineering at Waseda University in Tokyo. It was around 2017, and I was nineteen. One day, a general partner of Scrum Ventures (the VC firm where I would later intern, from July 2020) came to the university as a guest lecturer, and I hung on his every word. He covered the latest technology trends, but what drew me in was the bigger story of civilization he told around them. He talked about what each past industrial revolution had produced and how, from the invention of writing to the telegraph, the steam engine, and the railway network, and about where the future was heading.
Essay #01
One Constraint
In 1915, about 93 million acres of American cropland grew feed for horses and mules. By 1960, the figure was 5 million. In between, the tractor arrived on the farm and the car on the street, and motor vehicle registrations rose from 468,500 in 1910 to almost 27 million in 1930. Land was the scarcest input of that age, and when one source of power replaced another, land was also the very first thing released. Whenever an argument about how a society should be run seems to have no end in sight, I always remind myself of that fact.
Essay #02
A scarcity chosen
In 1978 Americans used more energy per person than they have in any year since. The country has gone on getting richer on paper while using close to a fifth less energy per head. That is a strange shape for a growth story, and it is the shape of the last half-century in every advanced economy. Economists have a name for countries that stall on the way up, the middle-income trap. What the rich world fell into is a different trap, and it built this one itself. Of the three terms in the equation, the one that broke was energy, and it broke because people chose to stop expanding it, and then built everything else on the assumption that it would never grow again.
Essay #03
The household Malthus
Between 2006 and 2021 South Korea budgeted roughly 200 trillion won to persuade its citizens to have children. The birth rate it arrived at was 0.72 per woman, and 0.55 in Seoul. Nobody in a rich country today gives "there is nothing to eat" as the reason for not having children, and yet fertility sits pinned at the lowest levels ever recorded, and money has not moved it. Something underneath the money is setting the number. In 1798 an English clergyman named Thomas Malthus published an essay arguing that population would always press against the food supply. People multiply faster than fields can be made to yield, so every advance in living standards would be eaten up by more mouths, and famine, disease and late marriage would push the population back down to what the land could feed. He was not wrong about the world he described. In an economy that ran on nothing but the sunlight that fell that year, output was bound by land, and population was held down by whatever physical constraint bound hardest. Then synthetic fertilizer arrived, made by pulling nitrogen out of the air, and food stopped being the limit. Malthus's logic survived; what changed was the thing doing the limiting.
Essay #04
The abundance cascade
On a week abroad with 2GB of roaming data, you ration yourself. Whether something is finite or unlimited works on the mind far out of proportion to the actual scarcity. Give the same traveler an unlimited plan and the phone never rests; they are out among the sights from morning to night with a voice assistant running the whole time. We decide where to put capital from inside a constraint. Each business that gets built makes other businesses possible, and one that is never started because energy is scarce takes with it all the others that would have grown out of it. From inside a constraint, we cannot really picture what we would do without it.
Essay #05
The distribution of ownership
On 4 July 2026, every baby born in the United States since the start of 2025 became an investor. Under a law passed the year before, the federal government pays 1,000 dollars into an account for each of them, invested in a low-cost fund that tracks the American stock market, and on that day the accounts went live. The sums are small, but the idea behind them is large, and I think it is the beginning of an answer to what will be the political question of the 2030s. My view is optimistic about supply and pessimistic about distribution. Put precisely: somewhere in the 2030s, redistribution by taxation will be tried, and it will fail. What can work instead is ownership.