What rises and falls in status through the FTX story?

by  Tyler Cowen in

More than one MR reader has requested this post, so here goes:

Rises

  • Common-sense morality
  • Common-sense investing rules
  • American corporate governance
    • Boards, and nervousness about related-party transactions
  • Coinbase
    • Seen as stodgy and bloated for much of the past year. But run in the US, listed in the US, and properly segregating customer funds.
  • Elon Musk’s ability to judge character
  • Vitalik and Ethereum
  • Circle, Kraken, and Binance
  • Anthony Trollope, Herman Melville, and the 19th century novel.  Books more generally.
  • U.S. regulation of domestic exchanges – it is one of the things we seem to do best, and they created little trouble during 2008-2009, or for that matter during the pandemic
  • CBDC, and sadly so
  • Crypto forensics
  • Twitter and weird anon accounts
    • When would the trouble have been exposed if not for Twitter? And much of the best coverage came from accounts with names like Autism Capital.
    • Some critics (like Aaron Levie), too.
  • Bitcoin
    • After a cataclysm for the crypto sector, it’s down about 15% over the past month. That’s less than the S&P 500 lost during the worst month of the GFC.

Falls

  • Effective Altruism
    • A totalizing worldview that has enabled some undesirable weirdness in different places.
    • Valorizing “scope sensitivity” and expected value leads people violently astray.
  • Being unmarried (and male) above the age of 30
  • Being on the cover of magazines
  • Appearing with blonde models
  • Buying Super Bowl ads and sponsoring sports and putting your name on arenas
  • “Earn to give” as both a concept and a phrase
  • Mrs. Jellyby
  • The concept of self-custody
  • Weird locations for corporate offices
  • Venture capital
  • Our ability to see crazes for what they are in the moment
    • This is not just, or even mainly, about crypto
  • Drugs
    • Adderall and modafinil, perhaps stronger stuff also played a role.
  • The children of influential faculty
    • Do they grow up witnessing low-accountability systems and personality behaviors?

What else?  I thank several individuals for their assistance with this post.

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