Import 2022-12-07 11:48

Plus: social status hyperinflation, nominal status stickiness, climate change and the quants.

Plus! Marketing, China, Peak California update, unweirdness

Featuring: Strategy Games, Economics of Ghosting, Recipe Sites, Optionality & Leo Strauss, and Reading

Plus more globalization, a job ad, a reverse job ad, and more...

Plus: Introverts, Malthus, the economics of love, book reviews—and an upcoming book!

Plus: Charter Cities, technical debt, Euro conspiracies, and how hedge fund LPs asked for fee increases before they asked for lower fees

Plus the economics of not living up to your reputation, and a regulatory arbitrage unicorn, and more...

If your interests are niche enough, it feels like the world’s population is, at most, a couple hundred people. Enough that you don’t personally know everyone, but not so many that you’re more than two degrees of separation away. This thought occurred to me a few months

The Latest It’s been a busy week. The latest posts: * In Basis Risk, Alpha Factories, and Being too Clever for your own Good, I take a look at the perks and perils of hedge funds that lever up to run lots of ostensibly-uncorrelated strategies. It usually works, but everyone

Edited August 7, 2019: I have a follow-up post with more. I’ve always had highly libertarian instincts, for both pragmatic and ideological reasons. You say civilians should be able to own rocket launchers, I demand that these rocket launchers not face a sales tax. But for me and people

Readers, I appreciate you all, but you are so negative. I’ve published 64 pieces on Medium, but 75% of my lifetime pageviews come from just three: one about why US residential real estate is broken, one about the challenges of the mealkit industry, and one about how California has

You can’t reduce all economic decisions to a series of financial bets, but it’s a good way to clarify things. Sometimes. Unfortunately, in the case of COBOL, a sufficiently thoughtful analysis points in two equal and opposite directions: we either need to pay people to learn it or