This is interesting as it raises a fun "boundaries of the firm" question. In the past, writing, editing, publishing, graphics, etc. were organized within firm boundaries. Substack makes writers mini-entrepreneurs
At the moment they do their own editing/etc., but you can imagine industries will pop up to provide editing, etc. services for creator economies.
But if these are organized as arms-length transactions rather than within a firm, how does this affect moral hazard/agency issues?
In a big firm, proofreaders/researcher/editors have reputational incentives to get things right. If you hire these Upwork-style, do they have similar incentives? Presumably ratings matter, so that's one thing
Writers might end up forming long-term relationships with workers, which also helps align incentives
This also applies to e.g. game streaming, etc. You'd expect these kinds of paid "support industries" to start rising in prominence as there are more and more big-name streamers with the resources to hire them and offload some work
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The recent Archegos saga is a fun piece of game theory. Stylized model:
- Suppose Hwang is long $50bil of, e.g. Tencent on 5x leverage. Technically this is being held by a few banks on his behalf, say, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Nomura
Suppose Hwang runs out of margin and the banks decide to sell off his position. They realize they are stuck in a kind of prisoner's dilemma.
Trades move markets. If you try to sell $50bil of Tencent into the markets in a day, well, there aren't many buyers so you'll end up with much less than $50bil.
One thing ex-post kind of puzzling. In the US, there seems to have been much more public skepticism/outrage/distrust about mask-wearing, compared to vaccination
This is interesting because:
1. Masks, whether they are useful or not, are not new, and obviously not harmful 2. The vaccine is totally new science
You might think the American population's opposition towards 1. is driven by anti-science sentiment or something. It is then puzzling that ppl have been so willing to embrace 2., with (afaik) so little backlash/conspiracy theory/etc surrounding it
Cool idea. Somewhat related: there seems to be a difference between "specialist" and "generalist" kind of roles in general in industry, government, etc
"Technology" being inherent highly "specialized". "Technocracy" might be defined as "we should run society by dividing social problems into specialized chunks and assigning the best specialist to each chunk"
Other social roles such as being a CEO, news reporter, <others?> are inherently "generalist" in the sense that they require interfacing with lots of different specialist areas. Role perhaps is somewhat more about understanding emergent system-level properties/drawing connections
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
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)
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?
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)