This is pretty well known, but Keynes ironically has the distinction for being practically wiped out speculating on macro, then later making a lot of money for himself and Cambridge as a value investor - I believe someone wrote a book on this. His chapter on investing in the General Theory holds up extremely well.
One tidbit I came across writing the piece from last month is that the brother-in-law of the main character makes his initial fortune speculating against the Mark in the 1920s, and then he raises money from the DuPonts to start the Delaware Fund. I get the general feeling that people in the 19th and early 20th centuries did a lot more speculating on macro - for example Gould trying to corner the gold market - and then as investing in equities became more accepted and understood, people moved to that.
I think part of the problem with debt ceiling as ritual is that it happens too often to have any meaning - even if debt isn't really growing relative to the economy, it still has to be raised. If the debt ceiling was automatically indexed to GDP, and we only held debates when we were going to raise the limit on external debt from say 100% to 110% of GDP, that I think might have more meaning. Even that is probably a bad idea though, since that would happen mostly during recessions.
The hard part to me is that in government as in business, the really important stuff happens off-balance sheet.
As a relatively new reader to The Diff, is there a list of 'Greatest Hits' posts which I could get started with / a readable archive to go to? (instead of trawling the substack history...)
The research that "Slime Mold Time Mold" are doing on underappreciated causes of obesity is interesting stuff, though I think I'll perpetually have a bone to pick with how sloppy their job of dismissing conventional explanations of obesity was and how hard they've had to *quietly* and *inconsistently* backtrack on it in response to people pointing out issues; the specific issues there weaken my faith they're not screwing up on the stuff I know less about, and the fact that it wasn't really even necessary to make a bunch of wrong and poorly-supported claims about energy balance, "overfeeding", &c in order to contextualize the more interesting work they're doing gives me pause too. Probably one of the first times I've seen someone commit "epistemic trespassing" in a somewhat lauded work and thought they actually failed in the way that the people who'd use the term "epistemic trespassing" would predict.
This is pretty well known, but Keynes ironically has the distinction for being practically wiped out speculating on macro, then later making a lot of money for himself and Cambridge as a value investor - I believe someone wrote a book on this. His chapter on investing in the General Theory holds up extremely well.
One tidbit I came across writing the piece from last month is that the brother-in-law of the main character makes his initial fortune speculating against the Mark in the 1920s, and then he raises money from the DuPonts to start the Delaware Fund. I get the general feeling that people in the 19th and early 20th centuries did a lot more speculating on macro - for example Gould trying to corner the gold market - and then as investing in equities became more accepted and understood, people moved to that.
I think part of the problem with debt ceiling as ritual is that it happens too often to have any meaning - even if debt isn't really growing relative to the economy, it still has to be raised. If the debt ceiling was automatically indexed to GDP, and we only held debates when we were going to raise the limit on external debt from say 100% to 110% of GDP, that I think might have more meaning. Even that is probably a bad idea though, since that would happen mostly during recessions.
The hard part to me is that in government as in business, the really important stuff happens off-balance sheet.
As a relatively new reader to The Diff, is there a list of 'Greatest Hits' posts which I could get started with / a readable archive to go to? (instead of trawling the substack history...)
I wrote about the cult of founders and the theories of history; long-form alert!
https://www.jack-chong.com/blog/the-great-founder-theory-musk-bezos-and-instagram/
The research that "Slime Mold Time Mold" are doing on underappreciated causes of obesity is interesting stuff, though I think I'll perpetually have a bone to pick with how sloppy their job of dismissing conventional explanations of obesity was and how hard they've had to *quietly* and *inconsistently* backtrack on it in response to people pointing out issues; the specific issues there weaken my faith they're not screwing up on the stuff I know less about, and the fact that it wasn't really even necessary to make a bunch of wrong and poorly-supported claims about energy balance, "overfeeding", &c in order to contextualize the more interesting work they're doing gives me pause too. Probably one of the first times I've seen someone commit "epistemic trespassing" in a somewhat lauded work and thought they actually failed in the way that the people who'd use the term "epistemic trespassing" would predict.