I no longer can send posts out by email. My hosting provider insists that I pay for Constant Contact, and even then I am skeptical that it will send to any of my existing subscribers.
Also, I have this garbage at the top of the page, and my hosting provider says that to get rid of it I have to pay for customization services.
This is a really bad time for me to be trying to deal with these issues. So bear with me.
All in a podcast, edited down to about 20 minutes. Mostly about The Three Languages of Politics. I start around minute 3. It seems that for about the first half of the podcast there is occasionally the sound of breaking glass. Not quite sure what that’s about.
So product is merit and distribution is connections. And so for example, a great blog post that nobody sees is a great product with terrible distribution. Conversely, a really dumb article, or whatever, that is a piece of content that is in a feed that is seen by millions is a terrible product with great distribution, right?
From an interview of Balaji Srinivasan by Tim Ferriss. Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Balaji, Tim, and Tyler were all picked early in the version 1.0 FITs draft.
Set aside time to read the transcript. Balaji certainly scores a Thinking in Bets point, but it is hard for any scoring system to do justice to this piece.
Here’s another Balaji line:
it’s futile to try to argue with someone who has way more distribution and is hostile, you just need to build your own distribution, which is much more possible in the internet age.
And another:
I think we’ve just begun the global internet Cold War, where all of the social networks, currency networks compete for ideological and economic dominance around the world, because it can just spread virally back and forth like this. And everyone will be trying to cancel each other and whatnot, it’s going to be this crazy, crazy thing.
…pseudonymity stops both discrimination and cancellation. So it’s not ideal, but it is accepted and widely used by people of all political persuasions. And so it’s sort of like a mutual disarmament where you can’t cancel somebody.
and another:
when the internet disruptor comes in, variance increases, there’s more downside and more upside, more amazing outcomes and more really bad outcomes in all kinds of ways.
I know Washington is political, and a Treasury Secretary must go along with her President’s agenda. But that does not mean you have to say such silly things in public. It will cost us all dearly, including yourself and the institutions you care about.
Here we see the stark difference between the incentive to seek the truth and the incentive to seek power. I have been interested in this ever since I read David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. That theme permeates the book, starting with the opening vignette, which describes the way that the power game was played as of 1960. These game-players gave us the Vietnam War. Our contemporary game players are giving us things like Woke financial regulators and the antics of the peacetime bureaucrats of the FDA and the CDC.
From my first substack essay:
I want to encourage a non-tribal intellectual style. I am eager to read Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset. Based on the reviews, I would agree with her praise for what she calls the scout mindset and also with her disparagement of what she calls the soldier mindset.
I have gone so far as to devise a scoring system for op-ed pieces, podcasts, long blog posts and essays written by public intellectuals.
Subscribe for free. RSS at substack feed
For May’s edition of Fantasy Intellectual Teams, I would like to have three leagues of eight owners each. As of this morning, we are a little more than half way there. I am thinking that each owner would pick 5 intellectuals, but we could have one of the leagues consist of 7 intellectuals on a team if enough owners want that.
As an owner, you really have to keep track of the intellectuals on your team, so that you can let me know when one of them has scored a “point.” Tracking your players is your cost in terms of time. There may be a dollar cost if you pick players for whom you need to buy a subscription. Note that intellectuals are chosen in a competitive draft, so you cannot count on getting the exact 5 players you would most like–a couple of them might be picked ahead of you by other owners. So you have to have more than 5 players in mind as possibilities before going into the draft. Although within a league a player can have only one owner, the same player could be owned in multiple leagues.
If you have not already indicated an interest in becoming an owner, leave a comment below to let me know. We need to draft teams before May 1.
House prices have been soaring lately. Stock prices reached new highs as this was written (earlier in April). Are these bubbles?
If you go by the ratio of property prices to rents or stock prices to dividends, one would say “yes.” But there is the possibility of inflation to take into account.
If a condo rents that rents for $2000 a month sells for $1 million, that is a ridiculously high sale price. But suppose that after a decade of inflation, the rent is $20,000 a month. Then even if the price/rent ratio drops by 80 percent, the nominal sales price will still be $2 million. So the price will have doubled. If you are looking for an inflation hedge, real estate is a legitimate candidate.* In the long run, so are stocks.
*In this example, the price does not keep up with inflation. But it’s hard to find assets that will exactly keep up with inflation. Inflation-indexed bonds do so in theory–but not if official measures of inflation are slow to capture actual inflation and/or the issuer ends up defaulting on them.
So I would not advise you to short stocks or real estate today (you can short real estate by being a renter and putting your savings into ordinary bonds). You might come out ahead, but not if inflation really takes off.
I do not subscribe to strong market efficiency. I believe that there are times when can call “bubble” and be correct. But not now. Because of inflation risk, when it comes to stocks and real estate, This Time is Different.
UPDATE: Some people have expressed interest, so for now I am not taking any more applications. Thanks.
I would like about a weekend’s worth of work (maybe two weekends) from
(a) a web designer, who can create an attractive, functional, and mobile-friendly template for some forms and some tables of statistics.
(b) a developer who is handy with scripting (JavaScript plus either Python or PHP). The project involves simple manipulation of data, which could be kept as JSON files or in a simple database. The results of the data manipulation are then used to populate the tables on the web site.
As of now, I have web pages and software that work. But the developer was an idiot. I used him because I was in a hurry. I am still in a hurry, but it’s time to replace the idiot.
The project is my Fantasy Intellectual Teams project (FITs). The project goal is to change the way that public intellectuals communicate about current events. Today, they are rewarded for nasty tribalism. Instead, FITs will award points in eight categories:
To get a picture of the functionality, look at this fake demo (with all numbers made up).
Tens of thousands of people follow intellectuals who participate in Twitter, YouTube, Substack, and web sites maintained by newspapers, think tanks, and individuals. These commentators tend to be rude and polarizing.
The idea of FITs is to have some of these tens of thousands of followers draft fantasy teams whose content will be scored using criteria like those listed above. Once FITs achieves popularity, there will be a lot of people rooting for intellectuals who are truth-seekers rather than tribal warriors. In terms of a recent book by Julia Galef, FITs will reward intellectual scouts rather than intellectual soldiers.
I would prefer help from someone who is motivated by the goal of the project. I am willing to reward help with small gifts. But I do not want to set up a corporate entity with a payroll. I know I can always fall back on the idiot. But the idiot would rather be dancing.
If you or a kid you know might be interested in helping, contact me at arnoldsk at us dot net, or leave a comment.
Economic progress can be understood in terms of the different effects of commerce and predation. Commerce makes it easier for people to trade with one another. The resulting expansion of trade leads to increased productivity, which creates opportunities for further expansion of trade. Economic progress, therefore, is a self‐perpetuating process. Why, then, isn’t every nation wealthy? The answer is predation. Predation slows, stops, and even reverses economic progress. And the principal source of predation is governments.
Read the whole thing. His libertarian thinking is close to identical with mine. He concludes,
Government is necessary to protect us against predation by other governments. But government is not a suitable instrument for other purposes, such as regulating economic activity, funding scientific research, or engaging in social engineering.
Every other ideological viewpoint, from “state capacity libertarianism” to “national conservatism” to progressivism to socialism, presumes that government will do other jobs well. For me, those ideological viewpoints have a burden of proof to show that they are not delusional.
Where libertarianism fails is in convincing those with Fear of Others’ Liberty. Our delusion is that FOOLs will put up with limited government.