Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures program raises some fascinating questions about great talent curation. Is it scalable? What kind of impact does it have? What does it reveals about our education system? Does it require deception? I address them here.
Index funds are an example of a sustainable business with one of the lowest take rates - Vanguard's total market fund has an expense ratio of 0.03%.
Though one might quibble with whether this can actually be considered "sustainable" -- Vanguard, per my understanding, is essentially operated at cost, and it seems like all its competitors who offer competitive pricing were pretty much forced to do so by Vanguard. I wouldn't be surprised if they offer these funds as a loss leader, and rely on cross-sells for unit economics to actually be attractive.
> David Shorr likes to point out that "centrists" are not people with middle-ground opinions, but people with a fairly random set of extreme opinions that more or less offset one another
PG calls these people accidental moderates (his definition is not precisely the same but spiritually equivalent). http://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html
Trading costs for highly liquid stocks or bonds are a candidate for lowest take rate - you get to the .00X% range pretty quickly. Underwriting costs for bond issuances made by a large, highly rated company like Apple must be minimal. Even lower for the US Treasury.
One could argue that you can't measure the value of the asset being traded and call it economic activity. If it's real economic activity, then besides payments I would submit something like distribution costs for airline tickets (2% or so? and the consensus seems to be that this is too high). Or any commodity that moves in volume - gross margins for gas stations are in the single digits, for example. Moving outside of commodities, probably Costco?
People always write things like this about Ezra Klein but I've never seen him even sniff heterodoxy. His opinions are reliably bog-standard progressive and when he defects, he espouses nothing more than DNC-style neoliberalism. He's a deeply boring thinker who has the right friends.
- the FDA regulates any medical drug or device sold to Americans
- they punish companies that violate norms/undermine the FDA's authority by slow-rolling or rejecting approvals
- most other medical regulators function in the same way
It'd be very difficult to profitably conduct medical research in low regulation locations, because a sponsoring company wouldn't be able to internalize the benefits for any developed medical treatments. They'd be risking their relationship with the FDA and jeopardizing all of their product lines.
A suitably ambitious individual or organization that conducted purely research for public benefit might be able to pull it off - ex. if someone had run infectivity trials w/ COVID last year and published the results it would have helped a lot of people - but that's a tall order.
Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures program raises some fascinating questions about great talent curation. Is it scalable? What kind of impact does it have? What does it reveals about our education system? Does it require deception? I address them here.
https://dwarkeshpatel.com/talent/
Index funds are an example of a sustainable business with one of the lowest take rates - Vanguard's total market fund has an expense ratio of 0.03%.
Though one might quibble with whether this can actually be considered "sustainable" -- Vanguard, per my understanding, is essentially operated at cost, and it seems like all its competitors who offer competitive pricing were pretty much forced to do so by Vanguard. I wouldn't be surprised if they offer these funds as a loss leader, and rely on cross-sells for unit economics to actually be attractive.
> David Shorr likes to point out that "centrists" are not people with middle-ground opinions, but people with a fairly random set of extreme opinions that more or less offset one another
PG calls these people accidental moderates (his definition is not precisely the same but spiritually equivalent). http://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html
The article on Brunello was awesome. Unique write-up on merging business and philosophy.
Trading costs for highly liquid stocks or bonds are a candidate for lowest take rate - you get to the .00X% range pretty quickly. Underwriting costs for bond issuances made by a large, highly rated company like Apple must be minimal. Even lower for the US Treasury.
One could argue that you can't measure the value of the asset being traded and call it economic activity. If it's real economic activity, then besides payments I would submit something like distribution costs for airline tickets (2% or so? and the consensus seems to be that this is too high). Or any commodity that moves in volume - gross margins for gas stations are in the single digits, for example. Moving outside of commodities, probably Costco?
Mega thread on Martin Buber and the philosophy of dialogue: https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1437420726865338375
People always write things like this about Ezra Klein but I've never seen him even sniff heterodoxy. His opinions are reliably bog-standard progressive and when he defects, he espouses nothing more than DNC-style neoliberalism. He's a deeply boring thinker who has the right friends.
Given that:
- the FDA regulates any medical drug or device sold to Americans
- they punish companies that violate norms/undermine the FDA's authority by slow-rolling or rejecting approvals
- most other medical regulators function in the same way
It'd be very difficult to profitably conduct medical research in low regulation locations, because a sponsoring company wouldn't be able to internalize the benefits for any developed medical treatments. They'd be risking their relationship with the FDA and jeopardizing all of their product lines.
A suitably ambitious individual or organization that conducted purely research for public benefit might be able to pull it off - ex. if someone had run infectivity trials w/ COVID last year and published the results it would have helped a lot of people - but that's a tall order.