WeWork redux, Mexico's Secret Sovereign Wealth Fund
Plus the economics of not living up to your reputation, and a regulatory arbitrage unicorn, and more...
All posts
In chronological order
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What René Girard Can Teach Us About Bubbles
Read this article →If your interests are niche enough, it feels like the world’s population is, at most, a couple hundred people. Enough that you don’t personally know everyone, but not so many that you’re more than two degrees of separation away. This thought occurred to me a few months
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Basis Risk, Google Finance, Business Mafias, YC as Harvard
Read this article →The Latest It’s been a busy week. The latest posts: * In Basis Risk, Alpha Factories, and Being too Clever for your own Good, I take a look at the perks and perils of hedge funds that lever up to run lots of ostensibly-uncorrelated strategies. It usually works, but everyone
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Lessons from the East Asian Economic Miracle
Read this article →Edited August 7, 2019: I have a follow-up post with more. I’ve always had highly libertarian instincts, for both pragmatic and ideological reasons. You say civilians should be able to own rocket launchers, I demand that these rocket launchers not face a sales tax. But for me and people
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Cases for Optimism
Read this article →Readers, I appreciate you all, but you are so negative. I’ve published 64 pieces on Medium, but 75% of my lifetime pageviews come from just three: one about why US residential real estate is broken, one about the challenges of the mealkit industry, and one about how California has
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The Case for Subsidizing, Or Banning, COBOL Classes
Read this article →You can’t reduce all economic decisions to a series of financial bets, but it’s a good way to clarify things. Sometimes. Unfortunately, in the case of COBOL, a sufficiently thoughtful analysis points in two equal and opposite directions: we either need to pay people to learn it or
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Overthinking Elevators
Read this article →Everyone knows you can justify writing about any trend as long as you have three examples. So I was absolutely thrilled to see this tweet: The time has come. Join me as I overthink elevators. Elevators are a big deal because interruptions are a big deal. There is almost no
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Reasoning From First Principles: The Dumbest Thing Smart People Do
Read this article →The most committed atheists I know are people who grew up religious. The most devout people I know went through a Strong Atheism phase. There are various theories here, most of which are folk psychology — disgust, attention-seeking, daddy issues, etc. — but the best one I’ve heard (from an evangelical
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Peak California, Revisited
Read this article →In Peak California, I argued that California was no longer the best place in the world for startups, but that the state’s economic ecosystem and tax ecosystem rely on a steady flow of new companies. I got some feedback. In this post, I’ll address some of the questions
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Spend Money Like a Drunken Sailor to get Skin in the Game
Read this article →Nassim Taleb has worked hard to popularize the concept of “skin in the game,” both through his books (like, well, Skin in the Game), and by calling people who don’t have sufficient skin in the game imbeciles on Twitter. The idea is straightforward: if someone makes a prediction, it
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Sin, Secret, Series A
Read this article →“How many secrets are there in the world? Recall that, reframed in a business context, the key question is: what great company is no one starting? If there are many possible answers, it means that there are many great companies that could be created. If there are no good answers,
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Pandora’s Shipping Container
Read this article →The world economy has grown by about 19x since 1950. Total trade has grown by around 60x. This means the world economy has gotten much more globalized since the middle of the last century.The Box is the story of how. The short version is that shipping used to be