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Oct 9, 2021Liked by Byrne Hobart

I really liked the Insull book you recommended a while back. It's interesting to read about the how the widespread adoption of electricity unfolded and how it connected to transportation and architecture, and you don't necessarily get that as much when you read about Tesla and Edison. In context of the recent discourse around the Scott Alexander piece about traditional architecture, there is a great bit in there about how everything before electricity was built around the limitations of kerosene/candle lighting, from the high ceilings to the brown furniture, and people got away from it as soon as they could. Traditional architecture may be outwardly attractive to many but a) there is a huge supply of it left over and b) many people don't necessarily want to LARP living in the 1890s.

The resource curse is interesting to me because you can argue that most major countries with lots of natural resources actually do much better than those without. America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, for example. Within those countries, I think the states and provinces with the most resources do better than the rest, and people tend to congregate around the richest natural resources, we just stop noticing that after a while (for example, Seattle was originally a lumber town and is still Weyerhauser headquarters). It's just that we intuitively expect resource-rich countries to *always* be richer, and that is simply not true because as we know it opens some incentive for people to shift from productive activity to rent extraction.

In terms of companies, Marc Andreesseen has talked about his early career at IBM as an example, they were once dominant but by the time he got there it had ten layers of highly compensated management that prevented them from doing anything. Rich families also sometimes have the tendency to litigate over inheritances and trusts.

I mentioned in an essay a while back that I think any economic agglomeration is functionally similar to an oil deposit, in that it is a resource that can't easily be moved, so people scheme to find ways to extract from it rather than build something useful, so e.g. if you think about Silicon Valley, people that own homes in California want to limit new construction so that they can sell or rent their existing houses to tech workers at inflated prices, they maintain a tax regime where they are exempt from paying taxes and tech workers have to make up the shortfall with high income taxes, the construction unions are happy to cooperate so they can get their cut on what little does get built, etc. - everyone schemes to extract what they can from the tech industry in much the same way that powerful people in Venezuela extract what they can from the oil industry.

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Oct 9, 2021Liked by Byrne Hobart

Other countries that are Norway-like outliers:

- Germany and Japan after WW2. Both lost territory, lost manpower, lost geopolitical influence, and had heavy economic damage, but quickly started strong growth. Dont really know why - a reset of political institutions might have played a role (if all previous laws go away, or are re-evaluated, it's a good opportunity to start with light regulation), luck in terms of natural resources (just as Germany lost it's coal mines in Silesia, the coal mining industry in Europe went into decline), and profiting from the new world order (the USA needed allies against communism, so provided investment to restart German industry, and military power to enable international transport and trade).

- Negative example: East Germany after the fall of communism joined West Germany, which meant, unlike for e.g. Poland or Czchia, instant access to established institutions, experienced capitalist managers, and huge investments in infrastructure, education and transfers. But it actually did worse - being a part of West Germany also meant that it was really easy for all the smart and ambitious young people to move away to the west, and adopting the Deutschmark meant East Germany quickly adopted a western standard of living, but also became expensive before it became competititve.

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Botswana is a frequently-cited example of having beaten the resource curse. I havent kept in touch with the latest news though.

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Good read on energy https://www.slowboring.com/p/energy-abundance

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Oct 9, 2021Liked by Byrne Hobart

On the philosophy of time (passage of time):

https://www.jack-chong.com/blog/an-investigation-into-the-passage-of-time/

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