Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 498
June 8, 2012
More Peter Thiel lecture notes
You will find them here, listed under “Founder as Victim, Founder as God.” Excerpt:
PayPal’s founding team was six people. Four of them were born outside of the United States. Five of them were 23 or younger. Four of them built bombs when they were in high school.
You will see the influence of Rene Girard. For the pointer I thank Blake Masters.
June 7, 2012
The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market(s) in everything
Would Adam Smith be happy about this?:
Wealth of Nations handcrafted to include a hidden 250 ml swing top glass flask imported from Italy. Behind the flask we’ve inlaid handmade decorative paper imported from Nepal. Let’s be honest, you are never going to read this book, but you sure might drink from it!
Our handmade booze books will ship in two to six weeks (sooner if possible). Supplies and motivation are limited, so act fast!
For the excellent pointer I thank Pablo Halkyard.
Should B. emigrate from England?
A request from a loyal blog reader. I attended a talk in Oxford by Martin Wolf from the FT a few months ago, in which he gave a very pessimistic assessment of prospects for the British and European economies. A member of the audience asked what his advice for a young graduate entering the job market would be, and his response was ‘emigrate’.
So two requests, really:
(1) Do you agree?
(2) If so, where should I go?
To put things in context, I am a 21-year-old male, a final year student at Oxford University reading for a BA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (concentrating on the latter two subjects). I have work experience in the financial sector, moderate language ability (high school level French and German, but a fast learner), and I am willing to consider a wide range of locations. I am an EU citizen, so obviously have freedom of movement within the EU. I am open to staying somewhere for a relatively long period, but at the moment I am more inclined to think of it as a below-ten-year stay. Assume, perhaps, the prospect of permanent residence is not excluded. Feel free to edit the request as appropriate for the blog.
I say:
1. The key data point is the polarization of labor market returns, including in the United Kingdom and much of Western Europe. Given that your background and reading habits signal smarts and hard work, you probably will do fine staying at home.
2. Switching languages will set you back by years, even if you are a quick study. Stick to the Anglo world, or to an English-speaking job at least.
3. It is not already obvious to B. that he should move to the United States. That’s fine, so perhaps he quite likes England already and indeed who wouldn’t? That lack of obsession with America also means he does not have a diehard commitment to maximizing pecuniary returns and that is yet further evidence he should stay in England.
4. If you want to travel and live abroad, try to start with an English multinational and then signal a willingness to move far afield. Or consider the foreign service. Or work for a year or two and then do a Jodi Ettenberg for as long as you can. All of those options sound better to me than moving to Stuttgart and trying to master the intricacies of “dass ich nicht habe lachen mussen,” (or is it “dass ich habe nicht lachen mussen”?, or do they mean different things?) while petitioning the Knigge Society for a knowledge of manners.
5. “A man who is tired of London is tired of life.”
Malcolm Gladwell on Bill James
James turns out to be not just the most important writer/thinker on baseball of our generation but also — completely unexpectedly — to have read more books in the true crime genre than maybe anyone else alive. In Popular Crime he works his way though every major true crime story of the last 200 years — from Lizzie Borden to JonBenet Ramsey — making (as one would expect) all kinds of brilliant, wildly entertaining and occasionally completely nutty Jamesian observations. Why Popular Crime wasn’t a huge bestseller, I have no idea. OK. Maybe I do. It’s 496 pages …
That is from Gladwell’s dialogue with Bill Simmons, much of which covers talent allocation and talent spotting, channeled through the medium of sports, and how technology, talent, and fame interact.
Just a coincidence?
The EU’s worst [corruption] problems are to be found in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain (in the eurozone), and Bulgaria and Romania (outside it).
Not so much of a direct cause, but perhaps a relevant correlation nonetheless. Here is more.
Estonia fact of the day
There is no movie with the word “Estonia” in its title.
That is from Alexander Theroux’s new and interesting Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery. Here is from one Amazon review:
It is one of the most hateful books I’ve ever read. There is even an entire chapter called “Why I hate Estonia”, and almost every sentence starts with “I hate…” Here’s how that chapter starts: “I hate the pointless cold. I hated the fact that most people are sour but consider that normal. I hated the ungrammatical ’5,2 litre’ alcohol content comma, when it should be a period ’5.2′ liter!”
The author is badly uninformed about the region.
Most of the reviews are one star, but so far I am enjoying the book, and for that matter the reviews. I can’t vouch for all of the information. Here is another recent controversy about Estonia.
Internet Killed the Porn Star
Free porn is killing the professional industry reports Louis Theroux in the Guardian.
Fees for scenes, not surprisingly, have taken a hit. “Some girls get $600 [£390] for a scene now,” the retired performer JJ Michaels tells me. “It might be $900-$1,000 for a big-name girl. It used to get up to $3,000.” For guys, rates can be $150 or lower [25 cents for every dollar a woman earns, AT]
Musicians have adjusted to declining music sales by increasing the number of live shows and porn stars are doing something similar:
It’s an open secret in the porn world that many female performers are supplementing their income by “hooking on the side”…For many female performers nowadays, the movies are merely a sideline, a kind of advertising for their real business of prostitution.
Many porn stars are now ZMP workers says Theroux:
“The way it is now, within five years I don’t see how there could be a professional porn actor,” Michaels tells me. It’s not easy to sympathise with the porn companies, which made so much money for so long by embracing a tawdry business and a dysfunctional work-pool. But it is worth sparing a thought for the legions of performers, qualified for nothing much more than having sex on camera, who have no money saved, and no future.
A pay what you want model worked for Radiohead but will probably not work for porn:
…it is difficult to see how a business selling hardcore movies and even internet clips is sustainable when most people simply don’t want to pay if they don’t have to. To many people, when it comes to porn, not paying for content seems the more moral thing to do.
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