Does Alan Greenspan still matter? Reassessing his legacy feels like the Cadaver Synod: we’ll dig up a bunch of FOMC transcripts from the early 2000s and complain that the Fed was completely unaware of what is obvious only in hindsight. Rehabilitating Greenspan is equally pointless, though: he was the
A quick blueprint for a successful company: 1. Start with a team of talented perfectionists, ideally ones who prefer non-verbal communication. 2. Work on a task that’s either impossible or so vague that it might as well be. 3. Once it’s apparent that you will never achieve your
There’s this meme that you shouldn’t work more than forty hours per week. Don’t believe it. It’s just laziness apologetics. If you’re reading it on Twitter or Hacker News, it doesn’t apply to your job. There are studies showing that productivity per hour drops
There’s a general recipe for megacap success: find a business where the upfront costs are high, the marginal costs are low, and building a copy is much more expensive than building the original. This is the very high-level outline of every large-cap tech success story, but it extends beyond
My piece on the East Asian Economic Miracle has gotten some attention. It’s time to follow up. Noah Smith tweeted this: I should note that Noah and I are friends. We’ve hung out together, and maintain a sporadic email correspondence which usually starts with me emailing him to
Investment acumen is hard to measure. In the short term, skill is indistinguishable from luck, and if you wait until the long term has arrived, skilled investment managers won’t take your money. So asset allocators — fund LPs, heads of multi-manager funds, and portfolio managers who work with teams of