4th Selected Links

Some links for you to check out over the weekend:

1. Welcome To The 'Turbulent Twenties', by Jack A. Goldstone and Peter Turchin. I praised Turchin in last weekend's email. Goldstone is coming on the podcast in a couple of weeks. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration enlisted him to study why states fail. Unexpectedly, his model predicted political instability for the US.

2. 'Amazon's Antitrust Paradox' - Lina Khan's long but important article. Worth getting it under the belt. It was published (and went viral) in 2017, when she was aged 27 and studying law at Yale.

3. This weekend I'm reading The Year 2020: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, by Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener. Awesome book. It was first published in 1967, and the authors attempt to methodically list all of the technologies that would likely be born by the new millennium. They get most of them wrong, including "individual flying platforms". It's a cool example of how technology is both a cause and consequence of radical uncertainty. I bought a second-hand copy via Amazon. You should be able to find copies there. Photo of the front cover below.

4. 'Evolutionary Thinking in Microeconomic Models: Prestige Bias and Market Bubbles', by Adrian Viliami Bell. Joe Henrich shared this paper with me after finishing a podcast recording, as we were chatting about speculative bubbles. The paper models how the human tendency to imitate famous and successful people can generate bubbles. Examples of such copying behaviour abound the current market. Indeed I've noticed, some investing apps have turned it into a feature.

5. C. S. Lewis' classic essay The Inner Ring ponders how the quest to belong to the in-crowd can distort one's incentives and intellectual honesty and enjoins us instead to pursue craftsmanship and true friendship.

Have a nice weekend,

Joe