Hate to be a broken record but. Blockchain. Videogame. Skins! Do it! Artificial scarcity! Tokenize everything!

notboring.co/p/the-value-ch…
There is a huge demand to non-fungible-ize things. Own a mass-produced watch, pass it down a few generations, and it becomes a family heirloom - different from every other identical watch coming off the same factory line. A physical NFT
Bottle up some grape juice, hire some famous artists to slap a label on it and it's worth thousands (wine folks, don't cancel me)
Buy a $2 t-shirt, print a red box on it... you get the point
If it is technologically possible to imbue ex-ante identical things with artificial uniqueness. Someone will do it and make a ton of money off it. That's... something like art, I guess. Just make it technologically possible. The rest will take care of itself..

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More from @AnthonyLeeZhang

23 Feb
If you're in a top-10-ish US undergrad, there is a playbook which still gets you a good shot at top-10 econ PhD programs straight out of undergrad

(I think it's extremely unfair that this essentially only works for top US programs, but, info is info)
1. Major in math, or any major that lets you take hard math classes. Definitely take real analysis, and if possible a couple higher level classes (e.g. measure theory, stochastics, functional analysis, etc.)
2. Skip most of undergrad econ. Take a few classes in the PhD first year and get A's

3. RA for econ faculty, starting from around 2nd or 3rd year

4. Aim to have all this done by end of 3rd year/start of 4th year
Read 9 tweets
21 Feb
This is good and basically a 5 minute read

chiefofstuff.substack.com/p/commenting-v…
Quote. Applies for giving feedback on papers also. I find the most useful feedback comes from, put yourself in the author's shoes. What is something they _could realistically do_, which _they might also be interested in doing_, that they may have missed? Image
I think here are some "mistakes":

- Wishful thinking: wouldn't it be great if you used microdata instead of aggregate data (yes but I don't have it), wouldn't it be great if you had a perfect instrument (don't have it)
Read 4 tweets
21 Feb
Fun fact: there is a financing trick called a "seller carryback", or just "seller financing". Where you buy a house/business/etc., with money borrowed from the house seller. Pretty popular in real estate and small business world, apparently. Here's how it works.
Suppose you see a small business, say, this car wash. It makes $80k a year. You think you could run it more efficiently, to produce say $120k a year. You want to buy it from the owner for say $2mil. However you don't have $2mil, you need financing Image
Suppose you can't find a bank to lend you money to buy the car wash. You can instead buy the car wash with money borrowed from the car wash owner. That is, you pay the owner $2mil, but you immediately borrow $1.5mil from them, that you pay off at, say, 4% annual interest or so
Read 16 tweets
20 Feb
Building on @ben_golub's about a field coffee-chat Slack group: what if we had Slack (or other chat) groups organized around commonly used datasets? e.g. a demographic data Slack (ACS, CPS, Census, PSID, etc.), or banking data (call reports, HMDA), etc
Goal being, essentially, to build a slightly more modern version of statalist. Or basically an econ data stackexchange, in chat form. It seems to me that Q&A-style social platforms are relatively easy to get going, compared to pure social platforms like Clubhouse
cc @arpitrage from the other thread. To be honest, a lot of the documentation issues might be better solved with a stackexchange than a big manual. Nobody reads big manuals, but everyone googles questions
Read 6 tweets
12 Feb
Random thought: there seems to be "hidden curriculum" stuff in many lines of work. Academia, of course, but also: how to schmooze your way into a tech internship/offer, how to get onto good projects, be visible, and get promoted quickly in tech,
What specific combination of extracurriculars gets you into Harvard without buying the fencing coach a house or winning the IMO, etc
My parents think this is a fairly "hidden curriculum-heavy" era. Perhaps they are biased by their experience, growing up in post-cultural-revolution China. Exams were newly re-established, basically meritocratic and without many loopholes. Maybe most eras look like our era
Read 18 tweets
9 Feb
Cool paper Image
Couple other NBER's I'm reading this week ImageImageImage
Read 4 tweets

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