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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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14 Nov, 5 tweets, 3 min read
Sean McMeekin's latest tour-de-force makes a strong case that Stalin should be thought of as the main actor in WW2 — not Hitler or the US.
amazon.com/dp/B08F6Z72Q4
One angle he goes into that I hadn't seen elsewhere is that the Soviets *wanted* the Japanese and Americans to fight.

Makes sense, given the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and the 1939 Soviet/Japanese war in Manchuria! But not that widely discussed. thediplomat.com/2012/08/the-fo…
He unearths some amazing quotes, which of course make sense, but are a new angle on things.

Even under Lenin, the Soviets *wanted* the Japanese to fight the Americans, and the Euros to fight each other. Then they'd roll in and install communism. Which is kind of what happened...
After all, at the end of WW2, the Soviets acquired most of Eastern Europe, invaded Manchuria, set the table for a communist win in China, occupied half the Korean peninsula, and even got some islands from Japan (after letting the US & Japan duke it out). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2…
McMeekin's book links up with Koster's Operation Snow [1] which goes into detail on how[2] and why the Soviets managed to get their Japanese and American rivals to fight.

Just an under-theorized aspect of the whole thing.
[1] amazon.com/dp/B009KN1RUU
[2] archive.md/lBKQ0

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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
16 Nov
Already happening. India’s most important export is the CEO. Their next most important is the globally savvy, English-speaking internet user.

Indeed, as more Indians learn English, the Anglosphere may become the Indosphere. Image
Just as the UK handed things off to the culturally adjacent US, the dark horse scenario is that democratic India and its diaspora need to become the global champion of liberal values, relative to China, if America descends into anarchy.
The UK relied on the US after they fell. This was a relatively friendly handoff between culturally adjacent, democratic parties.

The Indian diaspora is already fairly prominent in the West in tech and media, on left and right; and more bridges will be built as 1B+ come online.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
16 Nov
This is a possible scenario by ~2040: Centralized China vs International India. Surveillance state vs decentralized digital diaspora. Two rising powers, with very different cultures.

The US may be like the declining British Empire, whose dominance in 1913 was gone by 1945.
The naive version of this thesis is the idea that India will ever match, let alone out-execute China in physical infrastructure.

The sophisticated version is that it’s all going digital, decentralized, diasporic — and in that plane India is more naturally suited than China.
The conventional wisdom is that we are gearing up for a multi-decade conflict between the US and China.

But what if the US gets KO’d in the first round, by military defeat abroad and inflation at home, followed by civil conflict and/or a national divorce?
Read 10 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
14 Nov
Ascending class & descending class is a better frame than poor, middle-class, rich.

First, poor Indians in the ascending class are happier than rich people in the descending class.

Second, ascent/descent captures rate of change, shows class isn't static.

Last, all can ascend.
The ascending class and descending class is the microeconomic version of the ascending world and the descending world.

Rather than assume static categories, like developed/developing world or rich/middle-class/poor, it puts the focus on rates of change.
The various versions of the elephant graph show the phenomenon of the ascending and descending class.

Roughly speaking, most of the world along with the global elite has been economically gaining in recent years, while the Western middle class has not.
brookings.edu/research/whats…
Read 6 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
14 Nov
Almost 75% of billionaires are not American. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c…
This list has many omissions, of course, but it's directionally accurate. And illustrates a few things.

1) You don't need a US visa to make it anymore.
2) Billionaires will exist no matter what the US government does. Millionaires too.
3) Asia isn't the future, it's the present.
Therefore slogans like "billionaires should not exist" or "every billionaire is a policy failure" actually stem from an outdated American chauvinist view of the world.

No US policy can now stop the founders of the world from finally rising. Because wealth is decentralizing.
Read 6 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
12 Nov
Oh, so you think the founder of a huge company might know something? Their success was survivorship bias. Dumb luck! As we all know, Zuck just flipped a coin and this datacenter appeared.
This is in response to the common trope that successful entrepreneurs were just "lucky". There are so many micro-decisions involved in building a company that it'd be quite a trick to simply random walk your way to infinity.
Chance certainly plays a role in many contests, and to a greater degree in investing than entrepreneurship, but to even be in the game in the first place requires some skill.

Put another way: missing one shot is luck, being in the NBA after making many shots is skill.
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
12 Nov
We are building the ledger of record.

As each assertion goes on-chain, the metadata becomes verifiable.

- Proof-of-who via digital signature
- Proof-of-what via hash
- Proof-of-when via timestamp

Argument from cryptography begins superseding argument from authority.
We're transitioning from fiat information — it's true because this august institution said so! — to cryptoinformation, which is truth anyone can computationally verify.

Cryptocurrency is cryptoinformation on debits and credits. But it can be generalized.
chainlinktoday.com/balaji-sriniva…
A recent talk on the ledger of record, with some slides.
Read 7 tweets

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