Thought-provoking interview on how American politics really works and how elections are really won.

nymag.com/intelligencer/…

Some of my favorite bits 👇
Voters have a few radical views that they are the most passionate about so candidates tend to be more radical than people that vote for them
Whatever issues are getting most talked about is what people end up voting on.

"In 2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn’t. And so the correlation between views on health care and which candidate people voted for went down."
People may feel one way about an issue in a vacuum but there is a strong identity layer where they agree with their party once they know the party's view.
Voters trust the parties on different issues.

If the main issue is the environment, poverty, or race relations then leftist parties tend to win.

If the main issue is the economy, unemployment or crime, further right parties tend to win.
@Scholars_Stage did a nice write up as well ith the TL;DR:

"the reality is that voters do not make their votes on the basis of individual policies, but a general idea of whether the candidate can be trusted to handle the issue before him."

scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/08/how-to…

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More from @TaylorPearsonMe

10 Sep
1/ The investment management business is turning into the media business, but most investment managers don't realize it.
2/ This is a natural result of aggregation theory (stratechery.com/aggregation-th…) applying itself to the investment management business.
3/ On the internet, attention is scarce and anyone that can aggregate a specific type of attention will be able to aggregate that and "match" it with investment management.
Read 10 tweets
4 Sep
I believe for most investors, the easiest way to improve their risk-adjusted returns is not to get better at "picking winners" but to get better at diversification and portfolio construction.

A short 🧵 on why that is and how to do it...
As a simple example, let’s say you have the ability to buy two assets out of a possible three choices.
The first two assets (Asset A and Asset B) have positive returns but are highly correlated; they track one another and the business cycle. Both do well when markets are up and poorly when markets are down.
Read 23 tweets
18 Aug
Has any bitcoin/Austrian person written a good analysis of Bitcoin in light of Graeber's debt thesis?

As I understand it, a key point of his theory is that inequality grows over time and so you need some sort of reset every 100 years or so in the form of a debt jubilee.
This is because economics ultimately becomes political.

When .1% have everything then everyone else just comes to kill them and take their stuff so the wealthy end up either forgiving the debt or letting it be inflated away.
Is there a good refutation to this point?

If it is true, what are possible futures? Some Diamond Age/Snow Crash city-state future with high levels of inequality? Something else?
Read 10 tweets
3 Aug
1/ Francis Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order is one of the most insightful books on understanding what's going on today in geopolitics and political systems that I've read.

Here's a short summary 🧵
2/ At the core of his thinking is the notion of an institution as a "stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior that persist beyond the tenure of individual leaders."
3/ Different Countries today face one of 3 challenges

1. No functioning institutions - E.g. Post-Qaddafi Libya

2. Decaying institutions - E.g. United States

3. Social change outstripping existing institutions - E.g. Turkey and Brazil
Read 18 tweets
30 Jul
The Farmer's Fable

Today, I’d like to tell you a little story about a farmer named Bill.

If you’re not into farming, it just so happens that Bill discovers one of the most important principles in investing and decision-making in this story, so there’s also that.
Anyway, back to Bill.

Bill grows crops. In a good season, Bill harvests 150 seeds for every 100 seeds that he plants.

That’s a 50% growth rate!
If Bill does that every year, his farming business will grow exponentially. 1 kilogram of seeds grows into 1.5kg of seeds in the first year. 1.5kg of seeds grows into 2.25kg of seeds the next year, then into 3.375kg of seeds the next year, and so on.
Read 25 tweets
24 Jul
I've gotten a bunch of amazing book recommendations over the years, so here's a thread of "best book recommendations on various aspects of history, math, evolution, business and investing
Read 15 tweets

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