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Laurent Franckx 🇧🇪🇪🇺

@LaurentFranckx

30 Jan

https://twitter.com/LaurentFranckx/status/1355487916542275584

In case you wonder, The Code is a history of Silicon Valley. And it's really good if you're interested in innovation and innovation policy. Of course, it doesn't replace academic work on those topics, but, besides being entertaining, it also /

https://twitter.com/LaurentFranckx/status/1355487916542275584

brings together a lot of important facts that are forgotten. The crucial role of defence spending in kickstarting the Valley is known - what is less obvious, is that defence industry only came there because the American top brass was worried that a Soviet first strike /

might wipe out the defence industry in southern California. Contingency and path dependency matter. Also, the first generations of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs were not exactly hippies, but conservative men in white shirts and ties. And venture capitalists usually had very/

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Laurent Franckx 🇧🇪🇪🇺

@LaurentFranckx

29 Jan

I haven't seen "Margin call" so for me the best film ever about financial markets is "The big short". It's a real thriller, and, as far as I can judge, as accurate as movies go. It also shows something important: it takes a lot of guts /

to go short. Shorters make money when they go against the market "consensus" that a security will go up. Given that there is no upper bound to the amounts of money they can lose if their assessment is wrong, they face very strong incentives to be very well informed. That's also/

what you see in the movie: they reached the conclusion that the subprime market was about to blow up after careful field research that demonstrated the disputable practices of mortgage lenders. You cannot simultaneously claim that bubbles demonstrate the inefficiency of /

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Laurent Franckx 🇧🇪🇪🇺

@LaurentFranckx

28 Jan

"To what extent can supporting carpooling reduce road congestion?" - an analysis for Belgium with the PLANET model of the Federal Planning Bureau.
plan.be/uploaded/docum…

The relatively modest potential for increasing the occupation rate for cars can be explained by the relatively small share of trips for which such an increase is a realistic option, and by the inconveniences linked to the organisation of carpooling. Nevertheless, /

this policy mix can induce a notable improvement in the traffic situation during the peak periods in the regions that currently suffer the most from congestion.

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Laurent Franckx 🇧🇪🇪🇺

@LaurentFranckx

21 Jun 20

Started reading "The populist temptation" by Barry Eichengreen. First interesting point: not all economic crises are as likely to result in political swings to the extremes. Banking & financial crises are particularly bad in this respect, /

because they are seen to result from the actions of selfserving bankers (who are obviously not seen as part of the "people"), and often require bailouts by the state (which is then seen as profiteering). I guess there's some truth to this. /

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me on twitter is how many highly educated people don't seem to understand that bank bailouts are sometimes needed to avoid a bank run, and that bank runs would result in an economic collapse that would make the current crisis/

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Laurent Franckx 🇧🇪🇪🇺

@LaurentFranckx

14 Jun 20

@TheEconomist

Ethiopia's experience with the difficulty of making former agrarian workers fit in an industrial setting, which requires punctuality and discipline, is indeed reminiscent of something that happened during the industrial revolution/ economist.com/node/21787918?… via @TheEconomist

With technological changes at the end of the 18th century, coordination became important. Until then, "manufacturing" mostly took place at home, and an individual's productivity often fluctuated from day to day, depending on his personal circumstances /

(which could range from otheywirk to do to the occassional hangover 😉,). Large scale factories were not only created because of technological economies of scale, but because they allowed the direct supervision of workers, and the disciplining of slackers. This is a typical/

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Laurent Franckx 🇧🇪🇪🇺

@LaurentFranckx

7 Jun 20

@ProfJohnKay

I am now at page 278 of "Radical Uncertainty" by @ProfJohnKay and @projectmervyn and I have now come across this: "How many of us would contemplate buying a flight to a specified airport on 3 August 2030, contingent on the weather at that destination at that time and the /

political situation in that country in that year". This sentence unwittingly illustrates the key point of the book: as late as in 2019, they didn't consider constructing an example where the flight was contingent on the absence of a pandemic. QED /

I also learned that Jeff Bezos seems to think that if data and anecdotes contradict each other, something must be wrong with the data. Given the key role machine learning has played in the success of Amazon, this is truly remarkable.

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