Awesome post!! I actually saved this book a few weeks ago you beat me to it!
Some of my thoughts.
Firstly I love the housing snippet at the end. I think you should find time to read the Land Trap, I listened to it on Spotify. It had a long section on Chinas real estate policy. Surprisingly Chinese cities are even less affordable! Than even SF NYC etc. even mid tier cities (their classification not mine) have income multiples similar to our least affordable areas. Even though there is so much housing stock. Due to a confluence of factors, not the least that Chinese as you mention have a strong propensity to save, but also so few places to put their money. They can’t take it into international companies, and real estate traditional returned far more than Chinese equities. But the bubble has sort of popped, and the authors assertion was that the government is propping up a failed market and slowly letting the air out.
Industrial policy as defense rings true. I first made that connection reading AI 2027 and of course we have bigger problems at hand these days (demolition of our civil society and relationships with international community) but ideally we can get back to being competitive.
Interesting analysis of the pitfalls of engineer society. As I’ve been bemoaning lawyer society much recently. I wonder how to find a robust medium. My mind goes to Norway, specifically when they set up their Oil Fund which is a fascinating story. They explicitly hired in experts and let them create a win win model for oil effectively subsidized discovery and socialized the profits.
I just saw a quote about how more physicists become traders than physicists. I’ve long been worried about the college brain drain into finance etc but am now wondering if the top level PhD talent drain is even more hurtful to our productivity and bread and butter industries.
As someone increasingly abundance pilled the key question for the movement will be how to be like China without the bad stuff. Jersey city built a lot over the last decade or so, but haphazardly and their credit rating is in the dumpster, and clearly not much planning holistically. There’s some interesting mix of decentralization as WELL as centralization that is interesting with China. Like we need less government fingerprints to for example let building happen, but we don’t want to be Dallas. Zoning preemption laws at the state level are interesting.
Thinking about a lot of the same things! I posed the finance brain drain question to one of my roommates and he argued it was so b/c the marginal reward is still higher than in other professions + that the government changing this would be harmful. He also had some decent points when it comes to thinking about what can/can't be centralized, especially as it comes to pluralism.
Awesome post!! I actually saved this book a few weeks ago you beat me to it!
Some of my thoughts.
Firstly I love the housing snippet at the end. I think you should find time to read the Land Trap, I listened to it on Spotify. It had a long section on Chinas real estate policy. Surprisingly Chinese cities are even less affordable! Than even SF NYC etc. even mid tier cities (their classification not mine) have income multiples similar to our least affordable areas. Even though there is so much housing stock. Due to a confluence of factors, not the least that Chinese as you mention have a strong propensity to save, but also so few places to put their money. They can’t take it into international companies, and real estate traditional returned far more than Chinese equities. But the bubble has sort of popped, and the authors assertion was that the government is propping up a failed market and slowly letting the air out.
Industrial policy as defense rings true. I first made that connection reading AI 2027 and of course we have bigger problems at hand these days (demolition of our civil society and relationships with international community) but ideally we can get back to being competitive.
Interesting analysis of the pitfalls of engineer society. As I’ve been bemoaning lawyer society much recently. I wonder how to find a robust medium. My mind goes to Norway, specifically when they set up their Oil Fund which is a fascinating story. They explicitly hired in experts and let them create a win win model for oil effectively subsidized discovery and socialized the profits.
I just saw a quote about how more physicists become traders than physicists. I’ve long been worried about the college brain drain into finance etc but am now wondering if the top level PhD talent drain is even more hurtful to our productivity and bread and butter industries.
As someone increasingly abundance pilled the key question for the movement will be how to be like China without the bad stuff. Jersey city built a lot over the last decade or so, but haphazardly and their credit rating is in the dumpster, and clearly not much planning holistically. There’s some interesting mix of decentralization as WELL as centralization that is interesting with China. Like we need less government fingerprints to for example let building happen, but we don’t want to be Dallas. Zoning preemption laws at the state level are interesting.
Thanks for the long post.
Thinking about a lot of the same things! I posed the finance brain drain question to one of my roommates and he argued it was so b/c the marginal reward is still higher than in other professions + that the government changing this would be harmful. He also had some decent points when it comes to thinking about what can/can't be centralized, especially as it comes to pluralism.
Let's catch up soon