I had the same idea on Lewis and made a comment to that effect on Molly White's excellent crypto blog (newsletter.mollywhite.net). It's really the classic phenomenon in our culture - and all of human history - of the enemy of my enemy being my friend. Lewis seems like such a clear case of it, but you can see it in the people who had reasonable critiques of 'wokeness' but then fell down a rabbit-hole of insanity, all sorts of conspiracies, negative polarization on Ukraine, etc., etc, etc. ad nauseam.
See: Yascha Mounk's theory of "180ism", that ideological fights these days are more and more concentrated around espousing the polar opposite of whatever our filthy enemies are pushing. One reason that so-called easy wins are so hard to find these days is that our politicians are facing an incentive structure where compromise is not just difficult, but completely at odds with what actually arouses the base, which is performative opposition.
In the podcast, Noah Smith's analysis of the trends in military technology strikes me as spot on. But I would push back against his insinuation that America's military budget is too small. It is just massively misallocated. We are spending way too much on machines that are big, costly, dumb, and vulnerable. We are spending too little on stuff that is small, smart, cheap, and disposable.
+1 re: we don't get the "bang for the buck" [sic] we should with military $. Zillion dollar old-school things (boats, tanks, etc.) taken out by cheap missiles, etc.
I very much agree. My favorite article on that subject was published in a specialist magazine covering Navy procurement a few years ago under the headline "Build Droids, Not Death Stars."
The argument, which convinced me, was that the US military and and defense contractors, were no longer capable of building R2-D2.
I actually did read Michael Lewis excellent book Going Infinite. I recommend reading it it before criticizing. SBF spent many hours with Lewis, around the globe. Lewis also had access to SBFs parents, brother, coworkers, and “friends”. No journalist had a better inside look at the company and it’s culture. To review the 60 Minutes piece without reading the book is just lazy.
Yes, I agree. The odd thing is that his book-tour commentary has been *much* more pro-SBF than the book is! The book outlines a variety of ways in which SBF & Co were criminally sloppy. I feel like Lewis decided to double down on the SBF support rather than face his critics and act all abashed and ashamed.
It is not my intention to be provocative, but does FTX allowing Alameda to carry a negative balance in the Billions count as "criminally sloppy" or deliberate fraud? Even if just criminally sloppy, it meant SBF was running a ponzi scheme.
Oh, I really just meant to comment on Lewis's book vs. his later remarks on the book tour. If you read that Matt Levine newsletter (https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/39626), he notes that it's only illegal if SBF actively lied to investors about the safety of the investments. Simply losing a ton of money isn't illegal. I really recommend that newsletter to explain it better than I can.
Re: Michael Lewis, I think this is brilliant marketing for the book. Anyone that has followed the SBF saga closely will not learn anything new by reading his book. The audience for this book are people that don't know much about crypto, FTX, or SBF. But with those comments he made he outrages the crypto world and keeps the book and himself in their posts.
In the book I didn't think Lewis was taking it easy on Sam.
On the shoplifting issue: I don't trust the data for the reasons Noah cites. But I think there are larger, more subjective effects in play that aren't captured in any tally of incidents or reports. Shoplifting used to be mostly of the furtive kind, signaling at least a wary respect for the law and norms of behavior in a public marketplace. Now it's more brazen, signaling not just a disrespect for the law and norms, but menace as well. And smash-and-grab incidents, often captured on videos, generate not just outrage, but wariness about entering those stores. It's assaultive behavior, even if considered only property crime, and its psychological impacts can affect both a store's customers and its employees. The better rationale for "broken windows" policing was not just a bottom-up approach to prosecuting crime but a community-wide approach to creating an environment of civility and safety. We could use a "broken display case windows" approach to tackling this issue, because its effects are broader than any data analysis can discern.
Oligarchs can never be wrong. If you over supplied your stores because you miss judged the pandemic effect and have a lot of now-worthless merchandise to write off, blame the lower profits on theft. If you were over exuberant and opened too many stores, or stores in the wrong places, blame it on the theft.
It like inflation. CEOs don't want people to think they used "pricing power" to increase profits just to pocket the extra money, so they blame it on your nephew getting Child Tax Credit money up front instead of when they file income taxes. Cool thing is, the hoi palloi swallow these explanations hook, line, and sinker.
Signaling to shareholders and a way to influence lawmakers to pass legislation friendly to their interests. Especially those of a more conservative disposition who are more likely to take a face value that shop lifting is out of control.
I really don’t want to dismiss the shoplifting explanation entirely. But it’s more likely being used as a crutch to cover up the fact that a lot of shopping that used to occur Target shifted online.
I think we make a mistake if we argue about whether Lewis liked SBF too much or got too close to him. He repeatedly tells us that SBF’s perceived “super power” was playing games where there are no rules or in which the rules were deliberately and arbitrarily changed - ultimately BY HIMSELF. That is an extremely important paradigm to understand in this moment. I think it is a source of both widespread rage and widespread apathy: when “winning” is really nothing more than moving faster than the pinball, nothing really matters, there is no trajectory for learning or growth or improvement or doing anything that might be defined as “better.” No commitment, no negotiation, no recognition of lasting effect of any kind. There is only NOW, this moment, in the most self-involved, nihilistic sense. A potent and seductive poison perhaps; but a deadly one nevertheless.
Why did Lewis write and publish his book before the SBF trial? It makes no sense for him to have done that, to tell the story without the trial evidence and verdict that would complete it.
Was he rushing to get it into the market while SBF and his gang of nincompoops were still a hot topic, before they disappeared into the penal system for a very long time?
Big parts of the book publishing industry are driven by product marketing, not establishing the truth about anything. It seems to me that <> 90% of new non-fiction books are conceived and executed working backwards from an addressable market, not forwards from interesting data and ideas.
One of the less called-out aspects of Western liberalism is its seemingly inexhaustible appetite for showcasing shallow twerps as if they are truly of any interest. SBF - whatever else he may be - clearly is one; witness his number-crunching-bureuacrat-mentality 'theory' about Shakespeare. This has received massively greater media coverage than it merits (ie none whatsoever).
With regards to #4: I've read a small handful theories attributing the Target store closures to the challenges of the small-footprint urban store model. Nearly all of the stores that are closing are smaller stores in urban areas that have opened within the last 5 years. Urban shoppers typically have smaller basket sizes, buying a smaller amount of lower priced necessities versus higher margin items in more volume (I can attest to this myself as an urban shopper without a car and a very small Target a block away). You just don't get the basket sizes at an urban store, and couple that with the higher rent costs in urban areas, they can't turn a profit. Company comms have also shifted over the past few years -- in 2020/21, Target was vocal about the amount of small-footprint stores they were planning on opening. While the opening of these kinds of stores are still in their pipeline today, they've shifted from saying in 2022 that they want to start emphasizing the 'flexibility' of store size, to small-format stores not even appearing in their strategic priorities statements this year. All in all, I feel like the shoplifting narrative from Target is a convenient way for them to shift their priorities away from without admitting that they made some mistakes on executing the small-footprint model.
For what it’s worth — and I’m not pretending that this is in any way dispositive — Target is a public company, so there are potential legal and financial consequences if it lies in its public announcements. That’s obviously not true of Judd Legum and his outfit. I don’t understand his anti-anti-shoplifting sentiment, but I have a hard time believing Target is playing whatever game / fighting whatever battle Legum is.
First of all I honestly think it’s willfully naive to believe that companies don’t lie in public announcements. But the key it’s probably not 100% lying as opposed to exaggerating a claim or overemphasizing an explanation.
Don’t believe me about shoplifting? Please see this series from cnbc. May I add, to quote Al Pacino from The Insider*, not exactly a bastion of anti-big business and anti-capitalist sentiment.
Ha I certainly don’t believe that companies are always truthful! Just pointing out the difference in incentives between the two camps. And thanks for the CNBC links, those were interesting. Maybe I’m hopelessly naive, but I still don’t understand the stakes here — if it’s internal theft (as CNBC suggests) rather than shoplifting (a word Target didn’t use in its press release), who cares? Or, more to the point, why does Judd Legum care about that distinction?
Noah—Re your comments on the National security blog, what on earth (or elsewhere) makes you think the Biden Administration “really needs to hear” about the importance of alliances? They’ve practically written the book on how to revive and renew alliances e.g., NATO/Ukraine, Taiwan, SW Pacific (Japan, Australia).
The only problem is that Michael Lewis is such a compelling writer. He's just so fun to read, and so good at telling stories!
Matt Levine could do a pretty good book on SBF, I think. He's my go-to finance writer for when I want to get in the weeds and really get a grasp of what's going on, at least from a legal perspective.
I have not read the book, but what I picked up from Lewis's defense is that he views SBF has delusional levels of optimism combined with incompetence as opposed to malfeasance. Meaning that in spite of the fact that he stole from his customers, he didn't think he was stealing from them. I'm not saying that's correct, but that's how I interpreted Lewis's words, and I could see it being true. I've noticed a real shift in mindsets in young adults compared to when I, a tail end of Gen Xer, entered adulthood, and I view it broadly as less realistic and more optimistic than I was and am, but it's sincere.
Back in the 90s many people were skeptical that "depression" was a real mental illness. "Pah, everyone feels bad sometimes, you just need to snap out of it!" The messaging from mental health advocates back then was "Yeah but we're not talking about the sorts of ordinary depression that everyone feels sometimes, this is _clinical_ depression, a totally different, completely debilitating thing".
But then a decade or so after everyone accepted that clinical depression was a genuine mental illness, the same people started expanding the boundaries again so that all of a sudden the normal "sometimes I feel bad" type of depression counts as a mental illness too. So now everyone who ever feels bad can have a mental illness of their very own. All this has been great for the de-stigmatisation of mental illness.
Anyway, given how loosely "depression" has been defined, I'm not the least bit surprised that 30-40% of teenage girls have it.
I guess I mean "optimism" in the sense that "why wouldn't it work?" The cluelessness of young adults who grew up in a world with few "real" problems.
FWIW, I think the lack of "real" problems is related to the high rates of depression (something I suffer from myself). When you're not worried about the basic needs of human life, you get to turn all your worries inward. I don't recommend it!
I had the same idea on Lewis and made a comment to that effect on Molly White's excellent crypto blog (newsletter.mollywhite.net). It's really the classic phenomenon in our culture - and all of human history - of the enemy of my enemy being my friend. Lewis seems like such a clear case of it, but you can see it in the people who had reasonable critiques of 'wokeness' but then fell down a rabbit-hole of insanity, all sorts of conspiracies, negative polarization on Ukraine, etc., etc, etc. ad nauseam.
See: Yascha Mounk's theory of "180ism", that ideological fights these days are more and more concentrated around espousing the polar opposite of whatever our filthy enemies are pushing. One reason that so-called easy wins are so hard to find these days is that our politicians are facing an incentive structure where compromise is not just difficult, but completely at odds with what actually arouses the base, which is performative opposition.
Or the internet aphorism Cleek's Law: Today's conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.
In the podcast, Noah Smith's analysis of the trends in military technology strikes me as spot on. But I would push back against his insinuation that America's military budget is too small. It is just massively misallocated. We are spending way too much on machines that are big, costly, dumb, and vulnerable. We are spending too little on stuff that is small, smart, cheap, and disposable.
+1 re: we don't get the "bang for the buck" [sic] we should with military $. Zillion dollar old-school things (boats, tanks, etc.) taken out by cheap missiles, etc.
I very much agree. My favorite article on that subject was published in a specialist magazine covering Navy procurement a few years ago under the headline "Build Droids, Not Death Stars."
The argument, which convinced me, was that the US military and and defense contractors, were no longer capable of building R2-D2.
I actually did read Michael Lewis excellent book Going Infinite. I recommend reading it it before criticizing. SBF spent many hours with Lewis, around the globe. Lewis also had access to SBFs parents, brother, coworkers, and “friends”. No journalist had a better inside look at the company and it’s culture. To review the 60 Minutes piece without reading the book is just lazy.
Yes, I agree. The odd thing is that his book-tour commentary has been *much* more pro-SBF than the book is! The book outlines a variety of ways in which SBF & Co were criminally sloppy. I feel like Lewis decided to double down on the SBF support rather than face his critics and act all abashed and ashamed.
It is not my intention to be provocative, but does FTX allowing Alameda to carry a negative balance in the Billions count as "criminally sloppy" or deliberate fraud? Even if just criminally sloppy, it meant SBF was running a ponzi scheme.
Oh, I really just meant to comment on Lewis's book vs. his later remarks on the book tour. If you read that Matt Levine newsletter (https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/39626), he notes that it's only illegal if SBF actively lied to investors about the safety of the investments. Simply losing a ton of money isn't illegal. I really recommend that newsletter to explain it better than I can.
Or listen to his podcast “Judging Sam.” Doesn’t seem like a SBF apologist.
Re: Michael Lewis, I think this is brilliant marketing for the book. Anyone that has followed the SBF saga closely will not learn anything new by reading his book. The audience for this book are people that don't know much about crypto, FTX, or SBF. But with those comments he made he outrages the crypto world and keeps the book and himself in their posts.
In the book I didn't think Lewis was taking it easy on Sam.
My question is why do SBF and George Santos look like they could be cousins?
On the shoplifting issue: I don't trust the data for the reasons Noah cites. But I think there are larger, more subjective effects in play that aren't captured in any tally of incidents or reports. Shoplifting used to be mostly of the furtive kind, signaling at least a wary respect for the law and norms of behavior in a public marketplace. Now it's more brazen, signaling not just a disrespect for the law and norms, but menace as well. And smash-and-grab incidents, often captured on videos, generate not just outrage, but wariness about entering those stores. It's assaultive behavior, even if considered only property crime, and its psychological impacts can affect both a store's customers and its employees. The better rationale for "broken windows" policing was not just a bottom-up approach to prosecuting crime but a community-wide approach to creating an environment of civility and safety. We could use a "broken display case windows" approach to tackling this issue, because its effects are broader than any data analysis can discern.
On shoplifting, why would Target make up a reason?
Oligarchs can never be wrong. If you over supplied your stores because you miss judged the pandemic effect and have a lot of now-worthless merchandise to write off, blame the lower profits on theft. If you were over exuberant and opened too many stores, or stores in the wrong places, blame it on the theft.
It like inflation. CEOs don't want people to think they used "pricing power" to increase profits just to pocket the extra money, so they blame it on your nephew getting Child Tax Credit money up front instead of when they file income taxes. Cool thing is, the hoi palloi swallow these explanations hook, line, and sinker.
Signaling to shareholders and a way to influence lawmakers to pass legislation friendly to their interests. Especially those of a more conservative disposition who are more likely to take a face value that shop lifting is out of control.
I really don’t want to dismiss the shoplifting explanation entirely. But it’s more likely being used as a crutch to cover up the fact that a lot of shopping that used to occur Target shifted online.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/09/claims-about-organized-retail-theft-are-nearly-impossible-to-verify.html
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/08/10/retailers-may-be-using-organized-theft-to-cover-up-internal-flaws.html
I think we make a mistake if we argue about whether Lewis liked SBF too much or got too close to him. He repeatedly tells us that SBF’s perceived “super power” was playing games where there are no rules or in which the rules were deliberately and arbitrarily changed - ultimately BY HIMSELF. That is an extremely important paradigm to understand in this moment. I think it is a source of both widespread rage and widespread apathy: when “winning” is really nothing more than moving faster than the pinball, nothing really matters, there is no trajectory for learning or growth or improvement or doing anything that might be defined as “better.” No commitment, no negotiation, no recognition of lasting effect of any kind. There is only NOW, this moment, in the most self-involved, nihilistic sense. A potent and seductive poison perhaps; but a deadly one nevertheless.
Why did Lewis write and publish his book before the SBF trial? It makes no sense for him to have done that, to tell the story without the trial evidence and verdict that would complete it.
Was he rushing to get it into the market while SBF and his gang of nincompoops were still a hot topic, before they disappeared into the penal system for a very long time?
Big parts of the book publishing industry are driven by product marketing, not establishing the truth about anything. It seems to me that <> 90% of new non-fiction books are conceived and executed working backwards from an addressable market, not forwards from interesting data and ideas.
One of the less called-out aspects of Western liberalism is its seemingly inexhaustible appetite for showcasing shallow twerps as if they are truly of any interest. SBF - whatever else he may be - clearly is one; witness his number-crunching-bureuacrat-mentality 'theory' about Shakespeare. This has received massively greater media coverage than it merits (ie none whatsoever).
You don't think a $8 billion dollar fraud is worth significant coverage?
I was referring to the coverage of his Shakespeare theory....as indeed I made quite clear.
I hadn't heard of it, I'll look it up. Oh wait, I'm not supposed to do that...
Oh go on then....just this once.
I did...and regretted it. I WAS warned!
You were!....put your trust in me: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
With regards to #4: I've read a small handful theories attributing the Target store closures to the challenges of the small-footprint urban store model. Nearly all of the stores that are closing are smaller stores in urban areas that have opened within the last 5 years. Urban shoppers typically have smaller basket sizes, buying a smaller amount of lower priced necessities versus higher margin items in more volume (I can attest to this myself as an urban shopper without a car and a very small Target a block away). You just don't get the basket sizes at an urban store, and couple that with the higher rent costs in urban areas, they can't turn a profit. Company comms have also shifted over the past few years -- in 2020/21, Target was vocal about the amount of small-footprint stores they were planning on opening. While the opening of these kinds of stores are still in their pipeline today, they've shifted from saying in 2022 that they want to start emphasizing the 'flexibility' of store size, to small-format stores not even appearing in their strategic priorities statements this year. All in all, I feel like the shoplifting narrative from Target is a convenient way for them to shift their priorities away from without admitting that they made some mistakes on executing the small-footprint model.
For what it’s worth — and I’m not pretending that this is in any way dispositive — Target is a public company, so there are potential legal and financial consequences if it lies in its public announcements. That’s obviously not true of Judd Legum and his outfit. I don’t understand his anti-anti-shoplifting sentiment, but I have a hard time believing Target is playing whatever game / fighting whatever battle Legum is.
First of all I honestly think it’s willfully naive to believe that companies don’t lie in public announcements. But the key it’s probably not 100% lying as opposed to exaggerating a claim or overemphasizing an explanation.
Don’t believe me about shoplifting? Please see this series from cnbc. May I add, to quote Al Pacino from The Insider*, not exactly a bastion of anti-big business and anti-capitalist sentiment.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/08/10/retailers-may-be-using-organized-theft-to-cover-up-internal-flaws.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/09/claims-about-organized-retail-theft-are-nearly-impossible-to-verify.html
*The Insider is probably the perfect example of a story where a big business was just willfully lying to the public.
Ha I certainly don’t believe that companies are always truthful! Just pointing out the difference in incentives between the two camps. And thanks for the CNBC links, those were interesting. Maybe I’m hopelessly naive, but I still don’t understand the stakes here — if it’s internal theft (as CNBC suggests) rather than shoplifting (a word Target didn’t use in its press release), who cares? Or, more to the point, why does Judd Legum care about that distinction?
Noah—Re your comments on the National security blog, what on earth (or elsewhere) makes you think the Biden Administration “really needs to hear” about the importance of alliances? They’ve practically written the book on how to revive and renew alliances e.g., NATO/Ukraine, Taiwan, SW Pacific (Japan, Australia).
@Noah I strongly recommend Barry Ritholtz’s recent interview with Michael Lewis, along with his companion blog post here https://ritholtz.com/2023/10/cancelling-michael-lewis/
The only problem is that Michael Lewis is such a compelling writer. He's just so fun to read, and so good at telling stories!
Matt Levine could do a pretty good book on SBF, I think. He's my go-to finance writer for when I want to get in the weeds and really get a grasp of what's going on, at least from a legal perspective.
I have not read the book, but what I picked up from Lewis's defense is that he views SBF has delusional levels of optimism combined with incompetence as opposed to malfeasance. Meaning that in spite of the fact that he stole from his customers, he didn't think he was stealing from them. I'm not saying that's correct, but that's how I interpreted Lewis's words, and I could see it being true. I've noticed a real shift in mindsets in young adults compared to when I, a tail end of Gen Xer, entered adulthood, and I view it broadly as less realistic and more optimistic than I was and am, but it's sincere.
Reading Reddit, I would agree with "not realistic" but not "more optimistic". Probably more anxious and schizo, actually.
BTW, the number young girls who say they suffer from depression (something like 30-40%) defies belief.
Back in the 90s many people were skeptical that "depression" was a real mental illness. "Pah, everyone feels bad sometimes, you just need to snap out of it!" The messaging from mental health advocates back then was "Yeah but we're not talking about the sorts of ordinary depression that everyone feels sometimes, this is _clinical_ depression, a totally different, completely debilitating thing".
But then a decade or so after everyone accepted that clinical depression was a genuine mental illness, the same people started expanding the boundaries again so that all of a sudden the normal "sometimes I feel bad" type of depression counts as a mental illness too. So now everyone who ever feels bad can have a mental illness of their very own. All this has been great for the de-stigmatisation of mental illness.
Anyway, given how loosely "depression" has been defined, I'm not the least bit surprised that 30-40% of teenage girls have it.
I guess I mean "optimism" in the sense that "why wouldn't it work?" The cluelessness of young adults who grew up in a world with few "real" problems.
FWIW, I think the lack of "real" problems is related to the high rates of depression (something I suffer from myself). When you're not worried about the basic needs of human life, you get to turn all your worries inward. I don't recommend it!