Choke

by Sian Beilock

 

 

It's a good book. Unfortunately, much of the material is covered in Outliers & The Emotional Life of Your Brain. Still, it draws it's own unique conclusions.

Doing Capitalism In the Innovation Economy

by William H. Janeway

 

I had a very hard time focusing on this bug. Not that it's a bad book. It's very dense. Janeway is a very smart man who has been through some amazing times. Unfortunatly, this book is more like a text book than any thing else.

 

For my own good, I probably want to go back and reread this sometime. For right now, I want to remember... that Janeway faults many companies for spending too much time and money developing technology, and not enough finding customers with problems they are willing to spend  money to solve.

 

My father is farmer. When I told him about our sick cat, of course he had a very simple solution-- a shovel. He is strongly against spending hundreds of dollars on an animal that will die in a few years anyways. Let the end of her life come quick and painlessly. Don't drag it out.

 

The cat isn't getting better or worse. She just sits there. She tolerates the force feedings. Then she stares out to the road. Sometimes she responds when we pet here. But mostly she ignores us.

 

Vet says the cat is anemic and probably has either kidney failure, cancer or a virus. We'll get the results of the blood test in a day or two. Till then, she's on an apatite increaser, antibiotics and I'm syringe feeding her a special cat food.

 

 

Animal Spirits

I also finished animal spirits today.  It's a good complement to the rational optimist.  Not that the rational optimist is wrong, but that it doesn't cover the failings and limits of capitalism.  Yes people choose rationally, but they only choose rationally about things they think about.  Many choices in our life are not thought through.

Animal spirits then covers the gap between rational thought and emotional experience and how it affects the economy.  It argues that we must be wary of snake oil and market conditions that allow for runaway economy not a healthy growing economy.  Snake oil can be very attractive in many circumstances you may not realize you've bought snake oil until years of gone by.  Take the housing bubble for example.  It was years before that correction happened.  Too many people had had no incentive to think rationally about what they were doing.  They were paid to sell house after house, issue mortgage after mortgage, and pass the risk on to someone else.

 

It's too bad that animal spirits isn't as fun of a read as the rational optimist.  The rational optimist has a certain exuberance to it.

 

 

The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley

This book is almost panglosian in its optimism. The book argues well that thanks to trade, fair capitalism really, that life on earth is getting better and better.

 

The book raises some good points-- the future is not a projection of the past. Innovation is accelerating and has been for centuries. That many problems of the past, acid rain, dwindling oil and other resources, limited food production, many diseases, were tackled head on by powering through them, not by cowering, and backing off, thus preventing them from happening. Let people do what they want. They have to decide what's best for them, not me.

 

Restricting trade causes more problems than it solves. The people involved in the restricted trade have less time, and money to engage on other problems. This causes other man made problems, rather than allowing people to engage on actual problems.

 

The optimism turns me off a little bit. I'm reminded of the investment advice "The market be wrong longer than you can stay solvent." For the world then, in general, in aggregate, in the long run, things are getting better. But my life is not a general aggregate long run. It's specific to me. Things can go wrong. I must be ready for it.

 

But don't panic. Deal with the problems.