Disclaimer aside, the best answer I've come up with is that the most likable, charismatic, enjoyable people to be around are people who demand nothing of you. That's the best phrasing I can come up with after trying for two years. At first, I had "ask nothing of you" but it didn't quite feel right. It felt too detached, like they wanted nothing... See more
By unfolding I mean “interrogating the conclusion to come up with an explanation of why it could be true.” What premises and reasoning chains leads to this conclusion? The explanation isn’t meant to prove that your conclusion was right. It is just a way of unpacking it.
By unfolding a claim into an explanation, you spread it on a “wider front” (to... See more
The “Tech Right” is just one faction in a rising alliance of thinkers, policymakers, and industrialists that spans the political spectrum, united by their focus on accelerating American innovation to drive growth and global primacy. I’ll refer to this blob as the “progress coalition.”3 They are the most dynamic and interesting policy machine on the... See more
Some of Cowen’s theories seem to misunderstand on a fundamental level why people do things at all. Use opportunity cost to your advantage, he enjoins his reader, by scheduling a call halfway through a movie; if you don’t have to reschedule, the film wasn’t worth finishing. Desserts deliver diminishing marginal returns after the first few bites; the... See more
The “other countries should put tariffs on China” idea and the “China should shift its economy toward domestic consumption” idea are unified in the worldview of Michael Pettis, who has advocated both things. He has been saying that China needs to increase the share of consumption in its domestic economy for well over a decade, and it seems to me... See more