2021-06-01

Reading

  • The Honest Broker by Ted Gioia. And they do this for a very simple reason: their prestige is enhanced by making these connections. […] the Honest Broker plays the long-term game, mate. He’s taking about getting things done as an outsider in China in the nineties, but reputation economies tend to be a vital and underestimated resource in the West too.
  • Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the leisure class - an update This is Rob Henderson’s idea that Ellie status is conveyed by displaying a certain set of beliefs in the same way that one might wear a certain hat or handbag or sports car. Interesting and provocative idea, bit I’m not convinced. My two big gripes are that knowledge is cheap in the internet age making for low barriers to entry and that is not clear to me how the lower classes bear the costs of adopting these values. Some of the examples are very hand wavy.
  • American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins.
  • This entry in Hacker News. Heavy on technical programming recommendations, but a lot of other stuff too. Recommend.
  • I never would have thought that you could make money on literal gibberish in markets devoted to distributing real information, but apparently it’s happening in both science and audiobooks.
  • The differential goals to trade restrictions. I find this stuff fascinating. Not even for the economics of it (though that is interesting too), but because there’s are clear areas where in groups (beef producers, cheese makers, loggers, aluminum manufacturers, etc) so clearly animate for their interests in spite of economic “common sense”.
  • Cracking Consciousness and David Chalmers’ classic essay Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.
  • The Growing Importance of Decision-Making on the Job. Human’s comparative advantage is in making complex decisions. If you earn $50k at 23, your income at 37 will be $90k if you are in a job that does not require much decision making versus $112k if you are in a job that requires a high amount of decision making - a difference of 25%. It rises to about 45% around 55: Humans beating robots .
  • Simone Biles. What a beast.