Category: Thinks

The Economist on the creator economy: “Social-media platforms used to get most of their content for free. That dynamic is changing…Though there is more content than ever, platforms are competing harder than ever to get it. “There’s an arms race to acquire creators,” says Li Jin, founder of Atelier Ventures, a venture-capital firm. Startups are developing new ways for creators to monetise their work. Substack gives writers 90% of the subscription fees they charge for newsletters; together its top ten authors earn more than $15m a year. Twitch gives its game streamers more than half of its subscription fees, plus a cut of ad revenue and the money paid to “cheer” their performance. Cameo, a platform on which 40,000 celebrities sell personalised videos to fans, passes 75% of the spoils to contributors.” More from Subscribed.com.

Art Carden in WSJ: “…People vote for capitalism and against socialism in droves by trying to move to freer and more prosperous countries. Socialists might have laudable goals like feeding, clothing, and sheltering everyone–and I agree with these–but I would no more suggest socialism to treat poverty and inequality than I would prescribe leeches, mercury, and bloodletting to treat cancer.”

George Will on turning 80: “To be 80 years old in this republic is to have lived through almost exactly one-third of its life. And to have seen so many ephemeral excitements come and go that one knows how few events are memorable beyond their day. (Try to remember the things that had you in a lather during, say, the George H.W. Bush administration.) This makes an American 80-year-old’s finishing sprint especially fun, because it can be focused on this fact: To live a long life braided with the life of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to an imperishable proposition is simply delightful.”

WSJ on the NFT Origin Story: “A few years ago, it could be difficult to find someone to accept a free NFT; today, the same digital tchotchke might fetch tens of thousands…Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are fungible because one bitcoin won’t have a different value than another, whereas NFTs are designed to be unique. They came into widespread use with the cats, but they are now being applied to digital art, albums and even weapons in videogames and other virtual accessories.” More from NYT.

The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media: by William Davies

Art Carden on the Bourgeois Deal: “…The Bourgeois Deal says “Physician, heal thyself.” The Bourgeois Deal, we argue, is the appropriate Deal for a society of masterless men and women: it says leave me, a fully-grown adult, alone to blaze my own trails and try new things. Especially don’t expect me to ask you or the American Consolidated Mousetrap Company for permission to produce, sell, and market what I think will be a much better mousetrap than anything they offer. I grudgingly admit that people will imitate my innovations or at least come up with innovations of their own that lead to better mouse-catching, and hence, I don’t expect my unusual profits to last very long before I’m grudgingly forced to accept a normal rate of return—though I’ll admit when looking at a lot of those other deals that they look pretty good once I’ve got mine. By the time I’m finished, I will have made you—my customers, my shareholders, my bondholders, and my business associates—rich.”

The Economist on digital coins issued by central banks: “Government or central-bank digital currencies are the next step but they come with a twist, because they would centralise power in the state rather than spread it through networks or give it to private monopolies. The idea behind them is simple. Instead of holding an account with a retail bank, you would do so direct with a central bank through an interface resembling apps such as Alipay or Venmo. Rather than writing cheques or paying online with a card, you could use the central bank’s cheap plumbing. And your money would be guaranteed by the full faith of the state, not a fallible bank. Want to buy a pizza or help a broke sibling? No need to deal with Citigroup’s call centre or pay Mastercard’s fees: the Bank of England and the Fed are at your service.”

Hayek: “The possibility of men living together in peace and to their mutual advantage without having to agree on common concrete aims, and bound only by abstract rules of conduct, was perhaps the greatest discovery mankind ever made.” [via CafeHayek]

The Age of Revolution: Five Books Expert Recommendations

Bloomberg on the rise of social commerce in SE Asia: “Throughout Southeast Asia, consumers’ affection for haggling and interacting with businesses is fueling a boom in social commerce. Unlike the U.S. or China, where most consumers do their internet shopping with established platforms run by companies like Amazon.com Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., in Thailand almost half of all e-commerce takes place through social media or chat rooms on Facebook, WhatsApp or Line’s app. Social commerce accounted for about 44% of Southeast Asia’s $109 billion e-commerce market last year, according to Bain & Co.”

James Scott: “For almost all of human history, one has been dealing with a quite different state whose objective was to extract as much wealth, grain, taxes, and manpower from the population as possible, and to help support forms of bonded labor or slavery.”

Reading: Phase Six

Bill Janeway on Who Should Be in Control: A veteran venture capitalist’s insights on why a founder’s control shouldn’t be entrenched.

Thomas Sowell: “A crucial fact about the theories and social visions of intellectuals is that the intelligentsia pay no price for being wrong.” [via CafeHayek]

David Perell: “The best writing is so well-edited that it doesn’t look well-edited at all. In that way, it’s kind of like makeup.”

To sell or not to sell: Lessons from a bootstrapped CEO: from Techcrunch. “Put happiness at the center of the decision, and let your intuition — the instincts that made you the person you are today — be your guide.”

A new book on James Buchanan by Donald Boudreaux and Randall Holcombe. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in Economics and is considered, with Gordon Tullock, the originator of public choice theory.

James Otteson: “There is, unfortunately, no Great Mind who can survey the totality of one’s life, who knows all the possible courses one’s life might take, who can anticipate all the surprises and accidents that emerge in one’s life, or who, therefore, can know what you should do. (Maybe God could do this, but He is unfortunately not running for office.) [via CafeHayek]

Airbnb’s Brian Chesky in FT: “I think the psychology of the leader often becomes the psychology of the organisation..The trick is to be optimistic..The optimism has to be rooted in facts that you can present as a case to people, to tell them, ‘I’m optimistic because here’s where we’re going, and here’s how we’re going to get there.”

Your Money Will Be Digital. Will It Be Smart?: by Andy Mukherjee. “It may be more practical for central banks to make their digital currencies smart. The private sector can do the programming. The money we put in the car’s wallet would handle fuel, parking and toll expenses. The refrigerator’s app could deduct an item the online grocery forgot to send and pay the rest of the bill without messing up the entire delivery.”

100 reasons to love Satyajit Ray: from Mint

A virtuous cycle of entrepreneurship: by Neelkanth Mishra. “In a country notorious for stifling private enterprise, can the next decade be the best ever for new businesses?”

How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life: from NYT. “Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered — but so did activism.”

The Truth About Mental Models with Shane Parrish: from Superorganizers. “With mental models, you learn to walk by falling down. You can learn the lessons, but you can’t be taught how to put them into practice. In order to do that, you take those lessons and go out and over-fit them—try to apply them to as many situations as you can, and that will give you tons of practice with their limitations. But by doing that, you’ll gather all the information you need in your own reflections to start creating your very own abstractions.”

Ruchir Sharma in FT: “The idea the state has been shrinking for 40 years is a myth..The ‘neoliberal’ era that began with Reagan and Thatcher has instead presided over ever-bigger government.”

Adam Grant on Rethinking: “I don’t think it’s easy for most people. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn to get better at it. For a lot of people, rethinking requires skills they are uncomfortable with. One is valuing humility over pride. You have to be comfortable acknowledging your limitations—the discomfort of doubt over the comfort of conviction. You need to be willing to recognize that you’re wrong, which is difficult for a lot of people, especially those in leadership positions.”

John Stossel: “When markets are free and private property is protected, innovation happens in ways that allow ordinary people to live better. Over time, that innovation multiplies. It’s why, today, most of us live better than kings once did.”

What history tells you about post-pandemic booms: from The Economist. “People spend more, take more risks—and demand more of politicians.” And: “Social unrest seems to peak two years after the pandemic ends. Enjoy the coming boom while it lasts. Before long, there may be a twist in the tale.”

James Otteson: “What has changed over humanity’s recent history is not biology, psychology, physiology, ecology, or geography. What has changed, instead, is their attitudes. As economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has demonstrated in her magisterial three-volume investigation under the general title The Bourgeois Era, the most salient factor distinguishing the post-1800 era from everything that went before is the attitudes people held toward others. Before that period, the standard background assumption people had was that some people are superior to others – more specifically, one’s own people are superior to those other people – and hence people believed they were under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to treat all human beings as their moral equals. What began as an inkling in the sixteenth century, gained some traction in the seventeenth century, and then began to spread in the eighteenth century, was the idea that cooperation was not only allowable, but morally appropriate; and not only with some people, but with ever more people. As that idea spread, more and more cooperative behavior was engaged in, leading to mutually beneficial exchanges and partnerships, which launched world prosperity on the precipitate upward slope we have seen since.” [via CafeHayek]

An amazing visualisation of airport runways