tripu @tripu@qoto.org
Technologist, Spaniard, male, 42
Joined May 2020
“In 1989, 23 of the top 50 (including the top 5) companies ranked by global market capitalization were Japanese firms. By 2019, that number was reduced to just one, at no. 38: #Toyota.”
This time of the year I like to reflect on all the great new #music I’ve discovered and enjoyed, and on the classics that I keep on playing on loop and dancing to.
I’m talking wonderful tracks such as “The Wheels on the Bus”, “Five Little Ducks” or “The Potty Song”.
I love #economics because its basic principles are so powerful and generalisable (ie, it’s not just “about #money”).
I started using Greg #Mankiw’s very popular textbook “Principles of Economics” as a reference a few years ago, and since then I find myself applying its “ten principles of economics” often in everyday life.
This week I learnt that David #Henderson has been teaching his own “ten pillars of economic wisdom” for decades. Those seem good, too.
So I decided to merge both!
Hereby I present the main insights of economics condensed in fourteen principles of economics. Even if you don’t like econ as a subject, you’d do well to heed these ideas:
👉 In common (Mankiw ≃ Henderson):
- Rational people think at the margin. ≃ Economic thinking is thinking on the margin.
- People respond to incentives. ≃ Incentives matter; incentives affect behavior.
- Trade can make everyone better off. ≃ The only way to create wealth is to move resources from a lower-valued to a higher-valued use. Corollary: both sides gain from exchange.
- A country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services. ≃ The only way to increase a nation’s real income is to increase its real output.
- Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity. ≃ Competition is a hardy weed, not a delicate flower.
- Society faces a short-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. ≃ Creating jobs is not the same as creating wealth.
👉 Mankiw’s:
- People face trade-offs.
- The cost of something is what you give up to get it.
- Governments can sometimes improve market outcomes.
- Prices rise when the government prints too much money.
👉 Henderson’s:
- TANSTAAFL: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
- Information is valuable and costly, and most information that’s valuable is inherently decentralized.
- Every action has unintended consequences; you can never do only one thing.
- The value of a good or a service is subjective.
I decided that these merry days leading to Christmas, when we’re infused with positive sentiments and hope for humanity, are as good as any other to read… #Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
😲
Not really! In fact, I’m a bit embarrassed to leave my e-book reader lying around so that others can see what I’m reading… But my Theory of Reading actually supports and encourages reading anything that has been very influential (for good or for ill) regardless of its literary merits, its veracity, its applicability today, or its moral qualities.
Not to put them all necessarily in the same bucket, but I have read The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Communist Manifesto and Atlas Shrugged — and I would read The Bible and The Quran too: all of them #books that are ( in a way or another) wrong, false, corrosive, harmful, evil, racist, sexist, pro-violence, or pro-war — or even all of those things at the same time!
Granted: #MeinKampf may well be the wrongest among the wrong books… And in a way, that contributes to making it “useful” as a reading.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/64930929-tripu?shelf=currently-reading
#Pocket says that in #2021 YTD I read > 1,100,000 words using the app, and that I’m in the top 1% of readers 🤷
Has everyone seen the exact same message? 😆
#Goodreads has been pestering me about “the best #books of 2021”; first to vote, then to see the results — but I couldn’t care less.
I try to read the best there is since writing exists. That often means reading works written half a millennium ago, and sometimes even as far back as the 8th century BCE. How could it be otherwise?
The year 2021 alone represents < 0.04% of time elapsed since humans started writing and reading. Even if we assumed that book production, or even book “quality”, increase over time somehow (questionable), I can’t understand the disproportionate interest in novelty most people seem to have.
I just finished reading the first volume of the #Essays by #MichelDeMontaigne, arguably the most important non-fiction work in all of world #literature.
Here are all my highlights (in 🇪🇸 #Spanish):
Speaking of #socialmedia… another beautiful #dataviz by #VisualCapitalist
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-social-networks-worldwide-by-users/
Go, #fediverse, go!
This #cartoon by #JohnJonik is the answer to so many things happening on/to the #internet. So often applicable.
https://jonikcartoons.blogspot.com/2011/09/general-cartoons.html
#Madrid (🇪🇸 #Spain) is the most liveable #city in the world, and the 9th best city in the world overall, according to the Mori Memorial Foundation’s “Global Power City Index” 2021.
https://mori-m-foundation.or.jp/english/ius2/gpci2/index.shtml
Antonio Escohotado, one of my dearest intellectual heroes, died today 😢
He was a true erudite, a polymath, and a free soul.
He devoured the classics, opposed dictator Franco, was the fiercest of Communists, pioneered the hippy revolution in #Ibiza, travelled the world, studied and experimented with most drugs known to mankind, changed his views, lectured #philosophy, taught himself a few languages, became the most articulate #liberal, wrote the definitive tomes on a variety of scientific subjects, changed his views again, and shared it all along the way.
What I admire the most, though, is that he read everything under the sun. Primary sources, secondary sources, biographies, commentary. And he seemed to remember it all. #Escohotado set out to deeply understand something — be it #theGreeks, #drugs, #economics, #ChaosTheory — and damned studied every single relevant page there is about the subject, tirelessly, for years, until he emerged with the most robust of opinions about the topic, and a comprehensive view in the form of a new #book.
I am very inspired by him to always freaking read the classics, and the sources.
And I have always lamented that his fame in the English-speaking world wasn’t commensurate with his many merits.
His last months were the chronicle of a death foretold: he chose to leave, and did so in his own terms, with dignity, in his beloved Ibiza.
I went to see him at public events here in #Madrid a couple of times. He was a giant, some unfortunate views or quotations notwithstanding.
I miss him already.
For a long time I thought #programmers were unusually egocentric and annoying in our obsession with our own trade and tools: we dedicate inordinate attention to designing, rewriting and tweaking libraries, frameworks, plugins, etc for our own, and our peers’, usage.
But most recently, I’ve realised that #journalists also love to discuss and criticise the #media; #musicians often write and sing about #songs and other #artists; so many #economists seem focused on #Economics and its tools (as opposed to their object of study); etc.
Perhaps we #technologists are not so unique after all…
This is more or less how I spend the #money I earn
Happy #InternationalMensDay! This year focused on “better relations between #men & #women”.
#CognitiveBias interactive taxonomy — very handy:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg
Technologist, Spaniard, male, 42
Joined May 2020
