40 Thoughts for 40 Years

Today is my 40th birthday and I thought I’d take the chance to share a collection of small thoughts I’ve had this year. As you can see in the history of this blog, I used to post much more of my thoughts online. However, as I got older, I realized people rarely change their minds. So I spent less time putting my thoughts on the internet.

But if you know me, then you know I still have a lot of thoughts and love to put them out there. So over the years, I’ve gotten in the habit of texting myself what I might otherwise posted online. It’s become a kind of miniature private blog to myself. So, for my 40th birthday, I got myself a present. The chance to share about 40 of the things I’ve texted myself over the last year (organized by date texted, not topic):


True greatness requires longevity.

Investment in institutions (government, school, business, communities) is the key to human thriving. Institutions attempt to systematize beyond the influence of individual human choices. In that way, they are also inherently dehumanizing.

The bias of the news is that there is always something newsworthy. You’ll never see the headline “Things are mostly the same as they were yesterday”. Daily news needs to talk less about the present. More about the past. And a lot less about what the future might hold.

Just because a habit was once adaptive, doesn’t mean it’s working for you now.

Religion can offer us an ancient sense of humility: Our free will is constrained by our weaknesses. I’m grateful it’s also constrained by a loving God.

Parent as if you knew your kids were going to be okay. You’ll push them less and enjoy them more. Then they’ll probably turn out okay.

Capitalism is said to have an invisible hand that guides markets. Democracy needs to have a visible hand that voters can see, appreciate, and want to support.

Move away from “is what I’m saying the most correct” to “is what I’m saying the most effective”.

It seems like Adam and Eve were never meant to die. Never meant to go to heaven. Maybe this is the purpose of the human story. To end up better than where we started.

The American empire will eventually fade. Instead of putting energy towards holding on to as much power for as long as possible. Maybe it’s more productive to put that energy towards supporting growing nations that might share our values (maybe like India, Brazil, Ethiopia, etc).

One of the best ways to make America more resistant to radicalism and more open to gradual change is to help us realize just how successful they we've already been.

Every piece of criticism needs to be couched in the context of predetermined acceptance.

If someone is primarily describes the “good news” of Christianity as just delayed gratification (wait for heaven), that is truly some very bad news.

Your emotions are true, but they might not be telling you the truth.

Avoid financial advice that sounds like easy money or a complicated workaround.

Unlikely benefits of having a lot of children younger: Every year early you have a child, is an extra year you are in their life. Every extra child you have is an extra family member for them after you are gone.

The tradeoff to the many benefits of the 18th-century Enlightenment was an over-reliance of what we can see and understand. Apparently there is a lot about the world we will never understand. Thinking otherwise turns us into skeptics and conspiracy theorists.

We should replace the phrase “I can’t do that” with “I don’t want to do that” (because the benefits of success aren’t worth the costs to try)

“Don’t worry what other people think. No one is keeping your score. They are only keeping their own score” -Jeff Probst

Maybe everyone everywhere is struggling and needs to be treated with kid gloves. If so, I’ve got a lot of more apologies to give.

When you compare men and women, remove the top 1% (which is mostly old white men). Then by almost all measures, women are doing just as well if not better than most men over the last 30 years. This is both a celebration of the progress made and a model for how we can help moving forward. This is a big idea I’ve gotten from listening to Scott Galloway

Immigrants are an incredible piece of positive social engineering. There’s something about the immigrant experience that even makes them perform better than other marginalized groups. Are Kamala Harris and Barack Obama successful people of color, or are they products of a family with an immigrant work ethic and talent?

I’m less afraid of AI taking over society like Terminator. I’m more afraid of AI negatively affecting the way humans actually live their lives in the real world. This is already happening with social media algorithms.

The average age of inaugurated Presidents when I was a kid (Clinton, Bush, Obama) was 49. The average of the next 3 presidents (Trump, Biden, Trump) is 75.

Cynicism is a type of cowardice.

“Identical twins, raised apart are more similar than fraternal twins raised together. The most important thing you give your children is genetics. The second is zip code” -Daniel Pink
I feel like this justifies my laissez-faire parenting and the fact that I’m so picky about houses. Note: I’ve been technically homeless for over 6 months.

When things are bad, just keep pushing. When things are good, slow down.

Too much advice, even too much good advice, can create anxiety in the receiver and actually end up being taken incorrectly and become bad advice. If you feel that now, just stop reading this blog post ;)

People only get better when it’s easier to improve than to stay the way they are.

One of my greatest personal flaws is I love the simplicity of Checkers and I am easily tired from the complexity of Chess.

A good summary of the U.S. economy of my adult life: The price of non-essentials have gone down (TV’s, computers, air travel, etc) largely thanks to automation, but the price of essentials has gone up (housing, groceries, college, etc), largely due to fixed human labor costs. Curious how AI will affect this,.

There is never a more fickle mistress than the approval of others.

The bad times will come and go. So will the good times. It’s all about enduring and enjoying the now. If life is a gift, we’ve got to accept it all with gratefulness. Somehow.

Expectations are what drive us. They are also what drive us crazy.

My pitch for a new cult: “25 year Amish”. There are costs to living in the modern world. So instead of tying your culture to an arbitrary century like the Amish do, just delay all technology you use by 25 years. So go out and get a Blackberry and start ordering books from Amazon.

If you find yourself serving someone, something, or some group more than they serve you… great! That’s the purpose of life. To become a net positive on the world.

Negative emotions are key factor in human survival. Ignore them at your own peril.
That said, see above about the news high jacking your emotions.

People are not drawn to you. People are drawn to how they feel about themselves around you.

Earnestness is not a measure of whether what you are hearing is in fact correct. Earnestness is saying confidently what you think is correct. This is what makes Trump so believable, yet so incorrect.

It’s weird that as you get older your parents have less impact on your daily life. But it’s not until you’re older that you realize just how much they impact who you are.

I have found that my own lack of empathy is a lack of willingness to endure the feeling someone else in having right in front of me. It is brave to embrace the joy and sorrow of the world around you.

This NYT article is about how one of the most powerful things you can give children to increase their resiliency is an intergenerational self. An idea of how they fit into the larger narrative of their family history. A way to test this, is to see how much of the stories about their parents and grandparents they know. My wife and I played a trivia game asking our children these questions. They scored an average of 84%!

Career advice for my children: cast a wide net of hobbies and interests and then follow the ones that offer the lifestyle (money, hours, satisfaction) you desire.

You don’t get to choose who you are. That is largely a function of who you spend your time with. But you do get to choose who you spend your time with. I’d suggest regularly participating in more than just one group to ensure a healthy competition of ideas.

I’d like to increase not only my transparency, but also my vulnerability. One challenge for myself is to use more “I feel” statements. People will commonly respond incorrectly to vulnerability, but worst case scenario I’m just giving us all practice.

I’ve gotten very good at communicating with large groups. My challenge for the next decade of my life: give more individual attention.

Economics of Organ Donation (and Trade)

"many trades as you can possibly make because that's what a market's for"

There's No Money in Improv (Directly)

Alchemy held our bi-annual auditions and company meeting today and here was a quote I emphasized. From Miles Stroth:

Improv is not something you make money doing. It’s a skill set that hopefully one day will be rewarded better commercially or financially. But people love it because it’s a fucking art form. But there’s not money is doing it well. There’s money is translating the skill set you learn doing it into other things.

Politics As Religion

I'm catching up on my "Conversations with (Economist) Tyler Cowen" podcasts (earlier on Tyler). Here's a great quote from an interview with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt:

National politics is different from local. National politics, I believe, is much more like religion than local politics is. If you take it all the way down to the very local level — who the dogcatcher is, who the treasurer is of the town — that’s all very practical stuff. People are very worried about their property values and things like that. It’s not very ideological. National politics is much more like a religion. The president is the high priest of the American civil religion

And to be clear, I think this is mostly a negative.

Top 5 Thoughts on Kids and Money

While going through my email recently I came across some thoughts from my brother-in-law on kids and money. My response was my top 5 thoughts on kids and money (earlier):

1) There are chores you have to do because you are a part of the family. There are extra chores you can do to earn money (I think I might let my kids bid against each other on these).
2) During the summer they can do extra work for you/neighbors/businesses.
3) The older they get the longer their pay periods are.
4) Buy a piggy bank that can only be cracked open. Anything they add to savings we will match dollar for dollar (like my own retirement account). Encourage them to keep a ledger of what has gone in so they can have an estimate of when/if they want to crack it open.
5) I'd like them to tithe, so pay day is church day so they can take their "first fruits" to church that day. I'd also like to encourage them to give money away. I'm not quite sure what the kid equivalent of a tax deduction is.

Economics of the Flu Vaccine

This is the first year I've ever gotten a flu shot. This is the first year I've ever gotten something like the flu (that eventually or was always pneumonia). I have been convinced, perhaps expectantly to get a flu shot every year for now on. How you might ask?

The classic explanation for government subsidy and distribution of vaccines is externalities. We often hear the word associated with negative externalities like pollution, unemployment, or even panhandling. However there can also be things that have positive spillovers, like vaccines. But externalities is only part of the story. There are two other issues two information and temporal. Here's the information needed:

1) Cost: Most people can get it for free
2) Pain: Be a wimp like me and try the new needle so small you can't even see it and it literally cannot hurt you
3) Hassle: Bring your phone and do something useful on it (even if calling your mom is all you can)
4) Likelihood of making a difference: What I take away from this experience is that if I get 50 more flu shots and it only makes a difference for 1 person 1 time it's worth it. I've felt like crap for 7 days, I'll do a lot to keep that from happening again.

And that brings us to the other issue, the temporal. All the "hard" work of getting a flu shot doesn't benefit you immediately if at all. It benefits some future version of you. The key is to get that present you to help the future you. How do you do it? Write a blog post about how much you want a flu shot when your sick, that way when you get better you'll remember this YOU'RE ONLY GETTING OLDER AND SICKER.

Last Minute Voting Guide

"Remember, remember, the 5th of November, the blog post of treason and links." I've put a lot less energy into blogging lately, but I did give some thought about tomorrow's election and if I had anything new to say. It's turns out I don't. So here's a quick summary what I have said over the last 4 years:

1) It's okay NOT to vote. In fact, with the general lack of useful knowledge on the issues, it may be best not to.
2) It's okay TO vote, but be honest with yourself, statistically your vote doesn't matter. It's because it makes you feel good to get out and do something to support your team.
3) The BEST reason to vote is to push the political discussion in your preferred direction. It's not about the winning vote, it's about the marginal vote towards a bigger idea.
4) Your political perspectives are always SHIFTING. Who knows, in 4 years I may be voting for someone who actually wins.

I won $20 from dad in the last election betting on Obama. It looks like I'll win another $20 on him in this election from my brother. God bless America.

The Blog That Can't Wait

If you know you can always go back to it, sometimes you don't always make it a priority:

Cheating Game Theory on a Game Show

One of my favorite past blog posts was the one picked up by the New York Times' Freakonomics blog. It was about the economics of the game show finale of the Bachelor Pad. I then revisited the idea mentioning another reality TV show Golden Balls. It's a British show where at the end the two contestants have to decided whether to split or steal the money. Recently, a contestant played it a little differently:

Emptying the Bottle: Early April '12 Links

Here is the best of what I've shared on Twitter recently:

• Don't text and live via The Onion [video].
• Great Wall, cracking knuckles, and other common misconceptions [video].
• Too big to fail badly, a living will for big banks.
• Justin, my blogfather, has quit blogging.
• From Penelope Trunk: Divorce is immature and selfish. Don't do it.
• You are impossibly small (and impossibly large) [graphic].
• Nerd March Madness: Democrats vs. Dictators.
• The story of Morse code and why technology matters [audio].
• It's not about Tiger moms, it's about moms.
• You're in relationship trouble when you see no trouble [chart].
• Alchemy Comedy interview on Your Carolina [video].
• The problem with feminism from the daughter of a leader.

As always, feel free to email me anything interesting you come across.

Big Government to Prevent Bigger Government

I recently posted Tyler Cowen's thoughts on income inequality, but the article linked was originally sent to me by Justin because of Cowen's positive thoughts on the bailouts (which I don't support):

How about a world with no bailouts? Why don’t we simply eliminate the safety net for clueless or unlucky risk-takers so that losses equal gains overall? That’s a good idea in principle, but it is hard to put into practice. Once a financial crisis arrives, politicians will seek to limit the damage, and that means they will bail out major financial institutions. Had we not passed TARP and related policies, the United States probably would have faced unemployment rates of 25 percent of higher, as in the Great Depression. The political consequences would not have been pretty. Bank bailouts may sound quite interventionist, and indeed they are, but in relative terms they probably were the most libertarian policy we had on tap. It meant big one-time expenses, but, for the most part, it kept government out of the real economy (the General Motors bailout aside).

I actually agree. In fact, in my history classes I describe the intervention of FDR's New Deal as effective. Not because it fixed the Great Depression, but because it was the moderate choice in a time of extreme global chaos. Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were taking over nations as the extreme right. Stalin and the communists were taking over as the extreme left. Even in America leftist critics like Governor Huey Long were writing books like Share Our Wealth. In fact, 1930's socialist Norman Thomas wrote that the "Mr. Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher". Perhaps FDR's huge expansion of the government was the least government could do without forcing a revolution.

Income Doesn't Mean Inequality of Life

From Tyler Cowen:, who wrote a whole book about how income inequality is real, but wrote an article recently about how the implications are not that bad:

First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does.

[...]

Compare these circumstances to those of 1911, a century ago. Even in the wealthier countries, the average person had little formal education, worked six days a week or more, often at hard physical labor, never took vacations, and could not access most of the world’s culture. The living standards of Carnegie and Rockefeller towered above those of typical Americans, not just in terms of money but also in terms of comfort. 

The Past, Present, and Future of Greenville Manufacturing

I love it when NPR does a story on my hometown. Just this week Planet Money did a two part series on the history of American manufacturing through the lens of Greenville, SC. Here's my version of the story:

The Past

With several forces coming together at the right time, the early days of the Industrial Revolution brought about radical economic change. Work moved from the home to factories in cities, greatly improving human life, wealth, and morality. Which meant the late 1800's and early 1900's saw huge economic growth. These increases in production, and in turn increasing wages, didn't require very much expertise (assembly lines run themselves) and could often be created by a lone genius inventor.

The Present

Then we had The Great Stagnation. The Industrial Revolution picked up all the low-hanging fruit of innovation. Printing press, cheap western land, fossil fuel powered machines, penicillin, clean water, cars, planes, basic worker education, etc. all made life better quickly and relatively easily. Computers, cancer research, alternative forms of energy, college education for all, etc are all slow going and complicated to benefit from. Also, much of the innovation of machinery and globalization of trade has replaced the low skill industrial workers of the past and it's still happening (just check this old and new video of automobile manufacturing).

The Future

If you read the full Planet Money story in the Atlantic the future looks grim. Workers are suffering in the name of profit. The poor try, but can never succeed. The reality is a little more optimistic. Every time a human is replaced by a machine (or even a cheaper human) customers benefit. And since all workers are also customers, even the replaced workers' lives can improve. The unemployed of today probably have better living standards than the employed of the 1910's because of increases in productivity. That's why I support some kinds of social safety nets (especially the kind that retrains replaced workers). I also suggest that when choosing a career be sure you can't be replaced by a machine in your lifetime (hint: don't go into the toy assembling business).

The Distant Future

Though if I did have a worry about how technology impacts society, it would be about fertility. As technology improves, jobs become more complicated. That's why the return on education is actually greater than it used to be, even non-economically speaking (especially if you weren't "supposed to go"). This increase in complexity requires an increase in education. Which is usually fine because increases in education result in increases in pay that exceed the cost of that education. But what I'm specially worried that if jobs become so complicated that they require decades of education, they could delay plans for family past the point of our most fertile years. What if we have to learn so much we can't have babies anymore, increasing the future underpopulation bust? My guess is creating a family while still in school will become a more common trend.

Money Can't Buy You Votes

With the Republican primaries dominating the news these days, it's worth taking a look at. But unlike most reporting which feels more like sports commentary based on either hunches or the obvious, the boys at Freakonomics ask an important and interesting question: Does Money Really Buy Elections?:

When a candidate doubled their spending, holding everything else constant, they only got an extra one percent of the popular vote. It’s the same if you cut your spending in half, you only lose one percent of the popular vote. So we’re talking about really large swings in campaign spending with almost trivial changes in the vote.

So even though I'm a big supporter of publishing who gets what money from where, what I thought in 2008 and  2010 still stands. Campaign donations are like voting, they are a way to show your support, but they don't matter much.

Major Problem with the Gold Standard

Ron Paul is back and so are his calls for the gold standard. I've talked before that even though gold is the best element for exchange, it still can be gotten rid of, so has similar problems of a fiat standard. However, Tyler Cowen (the only person with his own label on my blog) thinks it has more foundational problems:

The most fundamental argument against a gold standard is that when the relative price of gold is go up, that creates deflationary pressures on the general price level, thereby harming output and employment. There is also the potential for radically high inflation through gold, though today that seems like less a problem than it was in the seventeenth century.? 

Why put your economy at the mercy of these essentially random forces? I believe the 19th century was a relatively good time to have had a gold standard, but the last twenty years, with their rising commodity prices, would have been an especially bad time. When it comes to the next twenty years, who knows? 

Whether or not there is “enough gold,” and there always will be at some price, the transition to a gold standard still involves the likelihood of major price level shocks, if only because the transition itself involves a repricing of gold. A gold standard, by the way, is still compatible with plenty of state intervention.

I Don't Want to Buy Anything

Loyal reader Free Spirit recently asked how the transition has been to my new smart phone. I'd break my use down to 25% email reading, 25% blog reading, 25% gps, and 25% other (camera, games, social networking, calculator, flashlight etc). Mostly things I was already doing right when I got home, but now I can do them on the go, in the line, and on the toilet.

But the biggest change has been my purchasing satisfaction. In the last month I've bought the two things I've been researching and reading about for almost 4 years, a smart phone and a nice TV. And since I've bought both I literally haven't wanted much else. I recently realized that if my income went up $50,000 I'm not sure what more I would buy. Unless you can tell me some thing I'm missing...

Avoiding Xmas Deadweight Loss, Part VI

Okay, last one (for this year at least):

You’ve found that perfect, pricey gift for your significant other. Now, you decide to pick up a little something else. But wait! The second smaller gift can actually take away from the powerful impression of gift number 1. That’s according to an analysis in the Journal of Consumer Research. [Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen M. Garcia and Norbert Schwarz, The Presenter’s Paradox] 

The researchers call it the “presenter’s paradox.” The person presenting the gifts thinks more is better. But the receiver unconsciously averages the two – so a cheaper addition makes the bigger gift seem, surprisingly, cheaper itself. 

The researchers evaluated seven test situations. In one, subjects were asked to assign a value for a gift iPod. Others were asked to value an iPod plus a free mp3. The participants assigned a significantly higher value on just the iPod. 

And this occurs in other facets of life. Participants in another trial were asked to rate the severity of a littering punishment. And they rated a fine of $750 as a more severe punishment than a fine of the same $750 fine plus two hours of community service. 

So, to avoid the averaging effect, keep it simple with gifts. It’s the thought that counts. The one thought.

Avoiding Xmas Deadweight Loss, Part V

Just in case you haven't finished up your shopping yet, here's some more holiday saving (ruining?) advice on gift giving:

my first guideline for efficient giving: Gift-giving should be redistributive. Reciprocity is a lovely sentiment, but the holidays are an excellent time to rebalance the overall family or friend group portfolio in favor of its needier members.

Not sure if I agree with the desirability of that, but I think it is definitely true. Here's another:

When you step outside the circle of things you know for sure your gift-getter likes, you risk creating a massive deadweight loss. (You give her a ticket to Las Vegas, without knowing that she hates gambling.) But with the greater risk comes a greater potential reward.

And once you've decided to give a gift, you should give an experience:

In particular, people consistently overrate the extent to which money in general and material possessions in particular will make them happy, underweighting interpersonal relationships and new experiences in the process. So try to give your loved ones the opportunity to go do something new, ideally with other people.

Here's part one, two, three, and four of the series.

The Experience Bank

Everything either brings net positive emotions (happy) or negative emotions (sad). They also bring varying amounts of happiness or sadness. For example, the night I got engaged was one of the happiest days of my life. Let's just label that 100 (happiness) points. My recent move on the other hand, has been fairly difficult. Let's label that -25 (sadness) points. Positive experiences add a finite amount to our life satisfaction and negative ones subtract a finite amount from it. The balance of those events are the measure of how we feel about our lives.

Although this seems obvious there are some interesting implications when you start to consider that experiences, like money, can be borrowed. Upcoming events, both and good and bad, have expectations. Those feelings are you taking some of those points out before they are earned. Here are three scenarios:

Neutral: Imagine you have a holiday coming up. The entire week before you imagine all the great experiences you are going to have. When the day arrives, it goes exactly how you thought it would. But when things go exactly like we think, even when they are great, we aren't ecstatic. It's because we consumed a lot of the positive happiness points before the event even happened. We borrowed from future happiness. This Louis C.K. bit describes it perfectly.

Deficit: But like real debt, sometimes we can predict our future earnings incorrectly. Imagine that same holiday is coming up and we have the same expectations. But nothing happens. No one shows up to your get together. No one calls. Nothing. Then you are sad. You're not sad because nothing special happened. Nothing special happens all the time. You're sad because all week you borrowed from the experience bank and your Christmas bonus didn't come.

Surplus: Now imagine a third scenario. The holidays are coming up, but you have no expectations of fun. All week you dread the day because you just know it is going to be miserable. Then suddenly all your friends and family arrive for some amazing holiday fun. You explode with joy. You hadn't consumed any of the experience value until that very moment and now you get to gorge.

So which situation is best?Neutral account? Deficit account? Surplus account? Well clearly the deficit is worst. No one likes to be let down. Except I see a lot of people who live their life like this. They have unrealistic expectations for the future. They live rich in the present, but will suffer in the future. A surplus account also has it's problems. Sure you get the explosion of joy when things turn out great, but in the meantime you are miserable.

That why I personally prefer a neutral account. You get to spread out the joy (or pain) of events over a long period of time. It's not about being optimistic or pessimistic. It's about being right. It's giving the gift people want for Christmas is best, even if you were able to accurately guess what they wanted. And why having a loved one die suddenly is worse than having them die slowly (unless they die too slowly which creates a whole different experience). This is what happened with my recent life transition. The experience itself wasn't that terrible. I had just not expected my life to ever get worse. I had been borrowing from my "imaginary eternal spiral upward, into a bigger and better future".

But here's the kicker. I started this post assuming my preference was the right answer. But I broke one of my own presuppositions that people have wildly different preferences. It turns out some people do like to play the lottery. Conversely, other people fear change so much they would rather be a little more sad in the present than ever be really sad in the future. I expect that there are different discount rates for happiness like there are for money. Perhaps being experientially patient results in more wealth just like being economically patient results in more real wealth. I know I often tend towards preferring the present too much. So feel free to get your hopes up or down, just know there is no so such thing as a free hope.

Avoiding Xmas Deadweight Loss, Part IV

In parts one, two, and three of this series I've discussed how to prevent the efficiency loss of Christmas. I've suggested giving guilty pleasures, giving in your expertise, exchanging names and buying less gifts, and using Amazon's patented auto-return policy. But perhaps the easiest (and most efficient) way is to just get exactly what they asked for:

Five studies show that gift recipients are more appreciative of gifts they explicitly request than those they do not. In contrast, gift givers assume that both solicited and unsolicited gifts will be equally appreciated. At the root of this dilemma is a difference of opinion about what purchasing an unsolicited gift signals: gift givers expect unsolicited gifts will be considered more thoughtful and considerate by their intended recipients than is actually the case (Studies 1–3).

And here's how you ensure this:

In our final two studies, we highlight two boundary conditions for this effect: identifying a specific gift and using money as a gift. When gift recipients request one specific gift, rather than providing a list of possible gifts, givers become more willing to purchase the requested gift (Study 4). 

And then there's always cash:

Further, although givers believe that recipients do not appreciate receiving money as much as receiving a solicited gift, recipients feel the opposite about these two gift options (Study 5).

This is why this year I'll be exchanging names with my siblings and I asked for 1) Greenville event/activity tickets (expertise), 2) Apple gift card (guilty pleasure=cash), and 3) a thin mouthed gray Nalgene bottle (very specific). Though the more I consider the idea that giving is better than receiving, I wonder if doing neither is best.