Category: Thinks

Founding vs Inheriting by Balaji Srinivasan: “When an heir inherits an institution, it’s like inheriting a factory. During normal times the factory continues to operate, the widgets keep coming out, and the career managers appointed by the original founder appear to have everything in hand. Nothing seems amiss. But something important has been silently lost, which is the founder’s ability to invent the institution from scratch – or reinvent it in the face of a crisis, like COVID-19. We can also think of this as read-only culture, the ability to repeat what an ancestor has handed down – but not recreate it from first principles.” [via Arnold Kling]

The power of personal: “Make both customers and workers feel that there is a person on the other side of the transaction. You’ll increase satisfaction, sales, and product quality.” [Thomas McKinlay]

How to forget something: “Memory relies on what cognitive scientists call retrieval cues…Rather than total retrieval-cue avoidance, try a technique called thought substitution. If you had a bitter argument with your sister and think of it every time you see her, work to focus on other, more positive associations. Practice until your brain sees her face and surfaces those better memories first and not the fight. You can also work on what cognitive scientists call direct suppression. ” [from NYTimes]

Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein: “The big shift that is happening that will exist long after the pandemic and, frankly, will be the future of retail, will be that consumers will simply say, “I want to buy however is most convenient for me.” And if you’re a really forward-thinking merchant like Allbirds, for example, and you know that it’s all about consumer choice, then you’re going to have a great physical store in San Francisco and New York City and a whole bunch of other places, you’re going to have a great online store, you’re going to cross-sell on things like Instagram and Facebook, you may also activate the TikTok ad channel because that’s when you can reach new potential customers. But what Shopify’s role in all that is, is that we want to integrate all of it into a centralized retail operating system.”

Zeynep Tufekci: “The problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one. Belonging is stronger than facts.” [via NYT]

Watched: The Iron Lady (on Margaret Thatcher, played brilliantly by Meryl Streep)

Elon Musk’s 7 Rules To Increase Productivity (via Gabriel Gruber). Among them:  “Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get [rid] of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience in which case keep them very short.” And: “Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.”

Reason on the era of big government in the US: “Even if nothing truly terrible happens—no interest rate hikes, no runaway inflation, no major catastrophes or recessions demanding that we tap into a nonexistent rainy-day fund—the current projections show that, within a few decades, half of all tax revenue will be used just to pay the interest on the debt. By the time a child born today is old enough to be nostalgic for the 2020s, half of his annual tax burden will go toward paying off the debt—a debt that includes myriad benefits his parents received without paying for. Maybe his generation will come to care about fiscal responsibility. Maybe things will change even sooner than that: Perhaps Biden, once the fog of the pandemic has lifted and the cost of its response becomes clear, will rediscover the importance of balancing budgets. Until then, it’s clear that the era of small government is over.”

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]