More Peter Thiel lecture notes
You will find them here, listed under “Founder as Victim, Founder as God.” Excerpt:
PayPal’s founding team was six people. Four of them were born outside of the United States. Five of them were 23 or younger. Four of them built bombs when they were in high school.
You will see the influence of Rene Girard. For the pointer I thank Blake Masters.
The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market(s) in everything
Would Adam Smith be happy about this?:
Wealth of Nations handcrafted to include a hidden 250 ml swing top glass flask imported from Italy. Behind the flask we’ve inlaid handmade decorative paper imported from Nepal. Let’s be honest, you are never going to read this book, but you sure might drink from it!
Our handmade booze books will ship in two to six weeks (sooner if possible). Supplies and motivation are limited, so act fast!
For the excellent pointer I thank Pablo Halkyard.
Should B. emigrate from England?
A request from a loyal blog reader. I attended a talk in Oxford by Martin Wolf from the FT a few months ago, in which he gave a very pessimistic assessment of prospects for the British and European economies. A member of the audience asked what his advice for a young graduate entering the job market would be, and his response was ’emigrate’.
So two requests, really:
(1) Do you agree?
(2) If so, where should I go?To put things in context, I am a 21-year-old male, a final year student at Oxford University reading for a BA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (concentrating on the latter two subjects). I have work experience in the financial sector, moderate language ability (high school level French and German, but a fast learner), and I am willing to consider a wide range of locations. I am an EU citizen, so obviously have freedom of movement within the EU. I am open to staying somewhere for a relatively long period, but at the moment I am more inclined to think of it as a below-ten-year stay. Assume, perhaps, the prospect of permanent residence is not excluded. Feel free to edit the request as appropriate for the blog.
I say:
1. The key data point is the polarization of labor market returns, including in the United Kingdom and much of Western Europe. Given that your background and reading habits signal smarts and hard work, you probably will do fine staying at home.
2. Switching languages will set you back by years, even if you are a quick study. Stick to the Anglo world, or to an English-speaking job at least.
3. It is not already obvious to B. that he should move to the United States. That’s fine, so perhaps he quite likes England already and indeed who wouldn’t? That lack of obsession with America also means he does not have a diehard commitment to maximizing pecuniary returns and that is yet further evidence he should stay in England.
4. If you want to travel and live abroad, try to start with an English multinational and then signal a willingness to move far afield. Or consider the foreign service. Or work for a year or two and then do a Jodi Ettenberg for as long as you can. All of those options sound better to me than moving to Stuttgart and trying to master the intricacies of “dass ich nicht habe lachen mussen,” (or is it “dass ich habe nicht lachen mussen”?, or do they mean different things?) while petitioning the Knigge Society for a knowledge of manners.
5. “A man who is tired of London is tired of life.”
Malcolm Gladwell on Bill James
James turns out to be not just the most important writer/thinker on baseball of our generation but also — completely unexpectedly — to have read more books in the true crime genre than maybe anyone else alive. In Popular Crime he works his way though every major true crime story of the last 200 years — from Lizzie Borden to JonBenet Ramsey — making (as one would expect) all kinds of brilliant, wildly entertaining and occasionally completely nutty Jamesian observations. Why Popular Crime wasn’t a huge bestseller, I have no idea. OK. Maybe I do. It’s 496 pages …
That is from Gladwell’s dialogue with Bill Simmons, much of which covers talent allocation and talent spotting, channeled through the medium of sports, and how technology, talent, and fame interact.
Just a coincidence?
The EU’s worst [corruption] problems are to be found in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain (in the eurozone), and Bulgaria and Romania (outside it).
Not so much of a direct cause, but perhaps a relevant correlation nonetheless. Here is more.
Assorted links
Estonia fact of the day
There is no movie with the word “Estonia” in its title.
That is from Alexander Theroux’s new and interesting Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery. Here is from one Amazon review:
It is one of the most hateful books I’ve ever read. There is even an entire chapter called “Why I hate Estonia”, and almost every sentence starts with “I hate…” Here’s how that chapter starts: “I hate the pointless cold. I hated the fact that most people are sour but consider that normal. I hated the ungrammatical ‘5,2 litre’ alcohol content comma, when it should be a period ‘5.2’ liter!”
The author is badly uninformed about the region.
Most of the reviews are one star, but so far I am enjoying the book, and for that matter the reviews. I can’t vouch for all of the information. Here is another recent controversy about Estonia.
Internet Killed the Porn Star
Free porn is killing the professional industry reports Louis Theroux in the Guardian.
Fees for scenes, not surprisingly, have taken a hit. “Some girls get $600 [£390] for a scene now,” the retired performer JJ Michaels tells me. “It might be $900-$1,000 for a big-name girl. It used to get up to $3,000.” For guys, rates can be $150 or lower [25 cents for every dollar a woman earns, AT]
Musicians have adjusted to declining music sales by increasing the number of live shows and porn stars are doing something similar:
It’s an open secret in the porn world that many female performers are supplementing their income by “hooking on the side”…For many female performers nowadays, the movies are merely a sideline, a kind of advertising for their real business of prostitution.
Many porn stars are now ZMP workers says Theroux:
“The way it is now, within five years I don’t see how there could be a professional porn actor,” Michaels tells me. It’s not easy to sympathise with the porn companies, which made so much money for so long by embracing a tawdry business and a dysfunctional work-pool. But it is worth sparing a thought for the legions of performers, qualified for nothing much more than having sex on camera, who have no money saved, and no future.
A pay what you want model worked for Radiohead but will probably not work for porn:
…it is difficult to see how a business selling hardcore movies and even internet clips is sustainable when most people simply don’t want to pay if they don’t have to. To many people, when it comes to porn, not paying for content seems the more moral thing to do.
There is a new Dan Ariely book out
Which are the best walking cities?
I will nominate London, Paris, and Buenos Aires as leading contenders. New York is for me too familiar for me to judge objectively and so I exclude it.
Reasonable safety is a prerequisite, and then we have the following dimensions:
1. Chance of seeing a striking yet non-famous piece of architecture. All three cities are strong here.
2. The right mix of broad boulevards and narrower streets. Ditto.
3. The chance of spontaneously encountering good bookstores or excellent dark chocolate: London wins the former, Paris and Buenos Aires win the latter.
4. Cheap, convenient cabs, and places to sit and drink sparkling water: Buenos Aires is #1 on these.
5. Strangers are willing to talk to you: Tough to call, though NYC would win hands down if it were in the running.
6. Strategic and frequent use of historic plaques: London wins; yesterday I saw “George Canning lived here” and “Clive of India lived here,” among others.
B.A. loses points for imperfect safety and also capital confiscation, though it has by far the warmest weather of the trio. Overall I am inclined to pick London as first, perhaps because I prefer English to French for bookstores. Paris offers fewer surprises, even if it has a higher average level of beauty. Paris is also worse for spontaneous cheap dining in restaurants, though it has far better food stores for urban picnics. Berlin is perhaps the best city right now for living, but it is too spread out, and with too many broad boulevards, to be the best walking city. It is an excellent city to take a cab in.
Walking cities on the rise: Istanbul. I suspect it’s long been splendid, it’s now reaping the gains of being modern.
Underrated walking cities: Moscow, Mexico City, Toronto, parts of northern England, Los Angeles.
Overrated walking cities: Budapest, Krakow, Munich.
Best city to take the subway through: Tokyo.
If I had to pick a fourth in line: Barcelona.
Why were we obsessed with flying cars?
David Graeber has a fascinating albeit uneven essay about our changing visions of the future, here is one excerpt:
Why, these analysts wonder, did both the United States and the Soviet Union become so obsessed with the idea of manned space travel? It was never an efficient way to engage in scientific research. And it encouraged unrealistic ideas of what the human future would be like.
Could the answer be that both the United States and the Soviet Union had been, in the century before, societies of pioneers, one expanding across the Western frontier, the other across Siberia? Didn’t they share a commitment to the myth of a limitless, expansive future, of human colonization of vast empty spaces, that helped convince the leaders of both superpowers they had entered into a “space age” in which they were battling over control of the future itself? All sorts of myths were at play here, no doubt, but that proves nothing about the feasibility of the project.
And this bit:
The growth of administrative work [in universities] has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.
As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years.
Interesting throughout, as they say. For pointers I thank Umung Varma and Kevan Huston.
The economy that is Singapore
At S$86,889 ($67,000) just for a permit, the total price of a Volkswagen Passat in Singapore is about the same as the median U.S. metropolitan home. A 25 percent jump in residents in seven years, coupled with the world’s highest proportion of millionaire households, has fueled a 10-fold surge in license prices over three years. The government said last week it will postpone plans to cut the number of permits available and slow traffic growth, responding to the outcry over soaring prices.
…A new 2012 Passat sedan made by Volkswagen AG (VOW), the world’s second-largest carmaker, costs about $152,000 in Singapore, including the license, according to classified ads website SGCarMart.com. The median price of a U.S. metropolitan area home is $158,100, National Association of Realtors data show.
So-called open-category permit, which can be used to buy any type of vehicle, reached S$92,010 in April, the highest since the end of 1994 when a record of S$110,500 was reached. At the latest auction May 23, the licenses went for S$86,889, compared with S$8,501 three years ago. The permits give the right to own a car for 10 years. The next auction is tomorrow.
Besides having to bid for certificates at auctions that are held every two weeks, Singaporeans also pay registration fees and taxes that can amount to 150 percent of the market value of a vehicle, according to the Land Transport Authority website.
There is more here, and for the pointer I thank Ken Feinstein.
Assorted links
All bookstores should be organized by country
Like Daunt Books, 83 Marylebone High Street, in London. You go to the “India” section and they have Rushdie and Roy and Dalrymple and Luce.
For the pointer I thank Alen Mattich.
Game theory and cross-border deposit guarantees
What was it that Jeff said? Nonetheless this issue has been bothering me, especially after reading EconomistMeg. Let’s say that “Germany” guarantees bank deposits in Spain. But the guarantee cannot be unconditional. That is, if Spain leaves the euro anyway and redenominates its bank deposits into lower-valued pesetas, Germany will not make the Spanish bank depositors whole. For one thing the implicit liability is too large, for another Germany would be offering Spain a huge free lunch and relying too much on political pressure to stop subsidized exit from happening. For yet another thing you cannot reward those countries which totally break the basic rules.
So the guarantee is actually “we cover your bank deposits against many contingencies, except the one we all fear the most.”
Could that work anyway?
Perhaps it depends on the motives for deposit flight. If the motive is “I’m afraid that my bank in particular will fail, and I’ll be left in the cold before the whole system goes down,” the German guarantee may be worth something. Such depositors, with such fears, will be reassured.
If the motive is “I see the whole domestic system going down, leading to peseta redenomination,” the guarantee won’t stop the bank run. Or should I say “the non-guarantee will not stop the bank run”?
Thinking about this problem makes one less optimistic about the prospects for a cross-border deposit guarantee.
Another issue is that the Netherlands, Slovakia, Finland and others may not feel the same “responsibility rights” as Germany when it comes to “saving the eurozone.”