David Rubenstein: “Private equity is a business of adding value to a company. The theory of private equity — and I’m talking about buyouts as opposed to venture capital for the moment — in buyouts, you’re taking a company that isn’t performing that well, and you’re adding better management or incenting the current employees to do a better job. Then ultimately, after three to five years, you tend to sell the company, and you typically make a return — if you’re good — at 20-some percent per annum. And 21 percent, or 20 percent, or 25 percent per annum is a pretty good rate of return when you compare it to other kinds of things you can do with your money. Venture capital is a little different. You’re making bets on entrepreneurs, helping them but probably not quite the same way you would do in a buyout.”
DAOs, A Canon: from a16z. “We’ve culled the … list of resources for those seeking to understand, build, and otherwise get involved with these “decentralized autonomous organizations” — which represent the future of community, coordination, work… and much, much more.”
The Economist on a new era of big government: “The state almost always expands relative to GDP over time. Three forces are at work. The first is obviously malign. Inertia and mission creep make government hard to pare back … The second force is a fact of life. Prices of the services welfare states provide, such as health care and education, grow faster than the economy because of their high labour intensity and low rates of productivity increase … The third force is that governments today have more things to get done. As voters became richer over the 20th century they demanded more education and more of the expensive health care that takes advantage of the latest science.” More: “Governments are not going to stop getting bigger. Some factors which drive the process are eternal and some are getting stronger … stopping further growth of government over the coming decades will be close to impossible. The most important debates to come will be about the state’s nature, not its size.”
