WSJ: “[The US] Government is a giant Industrial Age machine with new legal extruders added every year—at this point, made up of about 150 million words of binding law and regulations. Recent reforms limiting the time and length of environmental-review processes don’t work because they conflict with countless mandates—say to minimize harm to threatened species and historic buildings, to consult with Native Americans thousands of miles away, to give preferences to minority-owned businesses, and more. This machine produces the poor decisions that it was ostensibly designed to avoid. The solution isn’t to oil the machine or rearrange its parts, but to replace it with a 21st-century framework that allows flexible and transparent decisions. Red tape should give way to human responsibility. Simpler frameworks would allow officials to make unavoidable trade-offs needed to achieve public goals. This isn’t radical—it’s how any successful human enterprise works. Nor does it require trusting officials to do the right thing. The only necessary condition is that everyone in the hierarchy must be accountable.”
Mrudul Nile: “If [Indian] politicians are unable to generate employment, it is essentially a matter of economic policy. Bank transfers before elections are nothing but the distribution of cash for votes. This is not a policy solution to the problems of unemployment and poverty, nor is it compensation. Traditionally, politicians would build a constituency by continuously engaging with the people. Most issues, including civic issues, were resolved with the intervention of people’s representatives. This is no longer the case. Today, larger constituencies are built using social media and post-truth narratives. In modern-day politics, a constituency is not confined to a geographical space with a proportional population; it is a demographic imagination of an entire subset of a population, such as the youth or women. While earlier studies show that women were the last to be considered as independent potential voters and it was assumed that most women would vote according to the choice of the family (essentially the male head of the family), this is not the case any longer. Women are important voters and are being wooed everywhere.”
FT: “Bitcoin’s grand vision of a trustless financial system has been reduced to just another entry in the ledgers of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation — the massive clearing house that processes nearly all stock trades in the US. In other words, the revolutionary technology meant to bypass the establishment has become another product it controls. The implications for pension funds and their beneficiaries — ie those of us hoping to retire one day — are worrying. While crypto allocations remain relatively small, a precedent is being set. Fiduciaries are increasingly pressured to consider crypto exposure part of a “modern” portfolio. This is despite the fact that its fundamental characteristics remain unchanged. It still produces no cash flows, has no intrinsic value and its price movements are overwhelmingly driven by retail sentiment.”
WSJ: “Among the many items stored in my basement was a box that my mother left me shortly before her death. It contained a number of seemingly random items, most of them passed on to her by her own mother…If the items in the box could talk, I wondered what I would learn about this distant figure in my life…I found myself imagining a box of my own, one that could give my children, grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren some insights into my life—not necessarily what I accomplished, but who I was as a person. What would I put in this box, and how would I describe the significance of each item?”
William Shughart II: “Opinions expressed in response to political polls and decisions made in the voting booth differ substantially from ordinary market decisions, where costs and benefits are more closely aligned. Because they have skin in the game, people’s market choices do reveal their preferences. Thus, it should be no surprise that pollsters claiming to forecast hypothetical political preferences often get it wrong.” Part 2.
