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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.