8 ms·

IQ, life expectancy, top-tier universities, super effective, culture of excellence, higher GDP, worker productivity, state of knowledge. Given that a list of pr

by dmos62 7y ago

IQ, life expectancy, top-tier universities, super effective, culture of excellence, higher GDP, worker productivity, state of knowledge. Given that a list of priorities betrays a view of the world, I find something eery about this one. Nothing said is obviously wrong, but there's something between the lines that I can't quite put my finger on. To retreat to imagery, I feel like a forest is being missed for the trees, but with a hint of violence.

danShumway 7y ago
I'm thankful that someone else wrote this comment so I wouldn't have to try and figure out how to put it into words. This list sets off minor alarm bells for me as well. I guess part of it is that I look at some of these goals as being kind of naive, for lack of a better word? Measuring worker productivity is a good example -- if I were to try and sit down and think hard about why companies aren't moving quickly, I would say that the problems I see are related to unnecessary scaling, focusing on the wrong business goals, overcomplicating solutions and infrastructure, and an overemphasis on measurement to the point where Goodhart's Law can't possibly not come into play. I'm not sure worker productivity is a real problem that's worth prioritizing over more basic questions like, "how can businesses make sure they're building things that actually solve real-world problems?" It's very hard to describe. I keep on seeing things that seem very very vaguely "off" to me -- sometimes that I think it's the wrong prioritization, or that there are actually already people working on the problem and the author doesn't seem to be aware of their work, or that the problem is actually more complicated than the author seems to believe it to be ("mechanisms for better matching" is a particularly strange simplification of what makes relationships work). Anecdotally, usually when I feel this way about an article or topic, I come back later and find that it hasn't aged well. I pay more attention to these feelings now than I used to.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  Measuring software developer productivity is a hard problem. But I totally agree that the biggest production drain in any software team is bad management and bad direction. Building the wrong thing faster is not going to help much. Not wasting time building the thing that the marketing manager thought would be cool while on a night out with the CEO would help more.
secstate 7y ago
Oh my. This does appear to be a path towards Marxism. You also missed the call for 10-page "solutions" to municipal and regional government problems.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Something on Tyler Cowen's blog is a path towards Marxism? LOL The blog owner (Cowan) runs the Mercatus Center at GMU, which exists entirely to explore free market alternatives. It's funded directly by the Koch family; one of the Koch brothers is on the board.[1] That said, Tyler Cowen's food blog is pretty good, if you live in the Northern VA / Washington DC area. [1] https://www.mercatus.org/about https://www.mercatus.org/about and https://www.mercatus.org/board https://www.mercatus.org/board
  - antisthenes 7y ago
    Actually, that explains a lot of his posed questions. Another corporatist Koch shill at GMU that shouldn't be considered an economist if Brian Caplan. If you ever see any "insightful" articles by either one of these, run like hell.
- conjectures 7y ago
  Cowen is something of a libertarian AFAIK, and seems to be hard to predictably position. So...
- duxup 7y ago
  I think any large scale plans tend to hint at all sorts of large central planning type systems, in all political directions.
faitswulff 7y ago
There’s a neoliberal hierarchy implicit in the things the author deems worthy of researching. In other words, things that make more money are inherently better regardless of cultural differences or human factors and we should all aspire to be productivity porn stars. Other types of people or lifestyles don’t warrant investigation.
- seibelj 7y ago
  It appears that throughout human history an increase of wealth is the precursor to an increase in all of the things anti-capitalists love. It’s a pretty safe bet that if you want to enrich the poor’s souls then you need to enrich their pockets first.
  - Ar-Curunir 7y ago
    Wealth for whom? If the money is going into poor people's pockets, things will improve, but inevitably capitalism, and specially neo-liberalism, will only be lining rich people's pockets. We're seeing that happen right now across the globe, and we're seeing popular uprisings in response to that.
  - klyrs 7y ago
    > It’s a pretty safe bet that if you want to enrich the poor’s souls then you need to enrich their pockets first. Can't disagree with that. But we haven't been enriching the poor. We've been practicing trickle down economics instead. Enriching the rich has marvelous side effects like a proliferation of low paying contract work (jobs!), ratcheting housing prices (wealth!) and increased production of luxury goods (utopia!). But then you look at minimum wage, inflation and the consumer price index; and see that the poor have been hemorrhaging purchasing power since the 1970s. So, yeah. Increasing wealth is great for humanity. But there's a wide gap between anticapitalism and the neoliberal/libertarian economic theories which brought today's plutocracy. The middle ground is classical capitalism.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      > But we haven't been enriching the poor. Of course not. We've just been lifting many hundred millions of people out of poverty in China, India, South-East Asia and elsewhere, but what does this have to do with "enriching the poor"? Maybe you need to look beyond the literal "first world problems" in your privileged corner of the West.
muzani 7y ago
I think what society is really missing is this sense of belonging. We're raised to think that wealth correlates with happiness but it clearly doesn't. History has always formed these loops of prosperity, then spirituality. I mean it's nice not to starve, but I think people would be happier being part of a tight knit tribe who support one another, even more than having air-conditioning and dating apps.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  > We're raised to think that wealth correlates with happiness but it clearly doesn't. Studies show it does, to a degree. Once you hit something like $70-80k the satisfaction levels off. It's one of those hygiene things -- not having it will make you (or others) miserable, but having it doesn't mean you're good or happy.
  - muzani 7y ago
    For the individual, yes. For a society, I think the culture of making as much as possible has left everyone slightly worse off, instead of slightly better off as we were promised.
    - harimau777 7y ago
      Do you think that trying to get everyone to the 70k level (or the equivalent in their region) has made society worse off?
      - muzani 7y ago
        If society was focused on getting everyone to 70k, everyone would be happier. But instead, modern society encourages people to make as much as possible, create as many jobs as possible, and pay as close as possible to 15k.
  - pseudalopex 7y ago
    Some measurements of stress and sadness level off. Satisfaction keeps going up logarithmically.
crispyambulance 7y ago
Yeah, there's something "off" about it. It seems to take for granted that the domain of human affairs runs like clockwork, like a machine that merely "needs fixing". This smells libertarian and a quick google of the authors and their books confirms that suspicion. The "hint of violence" you're detecting is subtly judgemental smugness.
xwowsersx 7y ago
I have to agree with you and admit that I'm somewhat relieved to see I'm not the only one who felt this way. The list as a whole reflects a certain self-unaware separateness from the "real world". It is hard to describe, but eery indeed.
- rusk 7y ago
  I think it smacks of a young person who has been spending a lot of time trying to get an insight into what super-wealthy industry leaders, VC, politicial leaders etc. are wondering about, to the point that these lines of enquiry seem perfectly normal and hasn't had enough exposure to the broader picture to understand why these things are weird, even unfeasible. Could be completely wrong. Just a guess. EDIT just checked his Bio. Nope, not young. Perhaps just in some sort of bubble. Thinktank perhaps. The whole tone is all very think-tanky.
  - xwowsersx 7y ago
    Haha yes, before you edited I was going to say he's 57! It's more the bubble/think-tank thing, you're right.
    - rusk 7y ago
      He's a "policy wonk"
- nathan_compton 7y ago
  Its also nuts that one of these "things to work on" is "find me a wife, I'm too high performing to find one on my own."
  - realbarack 7y ago
    I strongly disagree with this comment. Many, many people pour massive amounts of time and energy into finding a partner, and often end up dissatisfied with the results. Mechanics that improve the experience and the result of dating really would make life easier and better for many people. If you doubt this, have some conversations with people in their late 20s and 30s who are dating. Your "find me a wife" portrayal is the least charitable possible interpretation of that section of the article. Was your comment made in good faith?
tootie 7y ago
Dude is a macro economist. Studying the forest is basically his job.
pgorczak 7y ago
I felt this way too. At least one thing is blatantly wrong though: there is no discipline of institutional criticism. This is literally what political science deals with.
sebsito 7y ago
I expected such semi-negative, distrustful comment the second I finished reading this list. Some will dislike the individualistic, anti-collectivist character of it.
- notacoward 7y ago
  It's not individualist so much as corporatist, and not so much anti-collectivist as anti-humanist. This post exactly mirrors Stalinism in its reduction of humans to their capacity for production. Can we please just for once stop trying to portray anything but the most extreme pluto-techno-libertarian POV as pure communism?
  - sebsito 7y ago
    It sounds terrible if you call it “capacity for production” but not so bad if called “ability to fulfill needs of others”
    - notacoward 7y ago
      Employing a euphemism to make something sound better is always fun (corporate "missions" and "visions" are often good examples) but that doesn't really change the underlying reality.
- adamsea 7y ago
  I would argue the list is not individualistic at all as, as others posters have mentioned, it implicitly reduces the individual person to their economic output (productivity). A real individualistic list would focus on the quality of life of the individual. Of course money is important in that regard but studies have pretty consistently shown that community, meaning, and I’ll throw in health, are the key components of individual happiness.
  - sebsito 7y ago
    The quality of life, meaning and individual happiness are for individuals to pursue and figure out. It’s very leftist idea to try to solve that on society’s level. The list is focusing on things we can improve on society’s level from an individualistic perspective.
duxup 7y ago
There seems to be a confidence that these things can simply be measured by some metric and then improved. That sort of implies a lack of appreciation for the nuance / complexity for some of these topics ... let alone any understanding of what happens if you do simply measure and improve such systems. It doesn't help that there is no sense of policy or what the goal of some of these things are, like there's no policy here to indicate if we're hoping for an outcome or not... Reminds me of the manager who shows up and says "oh man look at this mess and all these terrible metrics" and after a few months just changes the metrics and doesn't understand that the metrics themselves create problems ;)
PaulHoule 7y ago
My take is that the article expresses interest in topics a certain fraction of the right are interested in (IQ) but it often leans left relative to the interest in those topics (IQ is affected more by environment than 'people who care about IQ' think.) I do find the calls for institutional criticism to be a bit thin. In particular, the most troubling "institutions" in our society use decentralization to avoid responsibility. In health care, for instance, everybody can point to somebody else as the source of the problem -- the real case the status quo has against single payer is that now the system can limit costs by denying claims in an unaccountable manner. In a single payer system patients will descend on Washington with their wheelchairs and crutches with their airfare and hotel paid for by "charities" run by the health care industry. Similar complaints can be made about the media. One reason people don't trust "experts" is that they've never seen real experts, they've only seen the likes of Cokie Roberts and Larry Kudlow. In a world with accountability, people like that wouldn't get traction.
notacoward 7y ago
It all seems to be about increasing economic efficiency. Good little workers, turn dollars into more dollars as efficiently as possible! Nothing about increasing anyone's quality of life, solving environmental problems, advancing science (except tangentially for the NSF/NIH item) let alone arts, etc. It's an MBA wish list, not a human one. Not a surprise considering the source, but still disappointing.
- Isamu 7y ago
  Tyler Cowen is an academic economist at GMU, so yeah, he presents an economic view. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen >Nothing about increasing anyone's quality of life, solving environmental problems, advancing science Tyler is all about those things, but his whole thesis is that they are directly linked to economic efficiency. That is not an unsupported idea.
- ksdale 7y ago
  Tyler posts all the time about music, literature, food, and travel. I think he's perfectly aware of what's required to increase quality of life. I think this list mostly demonstrates that he believes there are certain people and institutions in the world that are incredibly effective, and we actually don't understand why at all. We who live at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy wonder at his lack of focus on quality of life, but I believe if you asked most people in the world (people who are not American or European) what they most valued, they'd tell you access to food, clean water, cheap energy, healthcare, etc. Things that come from economic growth, which comes from building effective institutions and increasing the number of people who can be productive.
  - marcus_holmes 7y ago
    Can confirm. Poor people really, really care about money. Since there are more poor people than rich people, it makes sense to focus on what most humans care about.
    - dmos62 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
svara 7y ago
The author is an economist, and therefore steeped in that culture, I think that explains most of it. That said, I found him very insightful when he came on Eric Weinsteins podcast recently.
nathan_compton 7y ago
Yeah, I've got to admit, I was like "Man, its gonna be fun to put this guy in the gulag." (I don't actually advocate putting anyone in gulags or even their existence).
bryanlarsen 7y ago
It feels off because the author is a conservative. But he's rational and well-spoken. We should be able to welcome him with "I disagree with you but I will listen to your arguments. Sometimes they will be persuasive and change my mind and other times they will help me to strengthen my own arguments against your position". But his arguments also attract the wackos and are used as justifications by them. Therefore we have an urge or desire to just shut him down justified by "don't feed the trolls".
jgwil2 7y ago
> If you ask informed Filipinos why the street food is mediocre, they will tell you that Philippines lacks a “culture of excellence”. This line in particular rubs me the wrong way. Who are these "informed" people? Who says the street food is mediocre? Have you looked at other possibilities before pointing the finger at nebulous "culture"? The line of reasoning seems very subjective and unscientific.
- lorepieri 7y ago
  See here https://cuervopropertyadvisory.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/is-there-hope-for-a-culture-of-excellence-in-the-philippines/ https://cuervopropertyadvisory.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/is-t... This also match my personal experience (my girlfriend is from there). The other side of the coin is that they are on average much happier and social than other cultures. This is in line with schools of thought that see happiness as inversely proportional to perfectionism.
bitwize 7y ago
> To retreat to imagery, I feel like a forest is being missed for the trees, but with a hint of violence. oof. Yikes, thanks for letting me know. I'm softblocking him right now. sorry but I saw a joke tweet of his and followed, didn't know that by being curious about research into highly effective people and institutions he was committing or advocating actual, physical harm to people.

by dmos62 7y ago

danShumway 7y ago

I'm thankful that someone else wrote this comment so I wouldn't have to try and figure out how to put it into words. This list sets off minor alarm bells for me as well. I guess part of it is that I look at some of these goals as being kind of naive, for lack of a better word? Measuring worker productivity is a good example -- if I were to try and sit down and think hard about why companies aren't moving quickly, I would say that the problems I see are related to unnecessary scaling, focusing on the wrong business goals, overcomplicating solutions and infrastructure, and an overemphasis on measurement to the point where Goodhart's Law can't possibly not come into play. I'm not sure worker productivity is a real problem that's worth prioritizing over more basic questions like, "how can businesses make sure they're building things that actually solve real-world problems?" It's very hard to describe. I keep on seeing things that seem very very vaguely "off" to me -- sometimes that I think it's the wrong prioritization, or that there are actually already people working on the problem and the author doesn't seem to be aware of their work, or that the problem is actually more complicated than the author seems to believe it to be ("mechanisms for better matching" is a particularly strange simplification of what makes relationships work). Anecdotally, usually when I feel this way about an article or topic, I come back later and find that it hasn't aged well. I pay more attention to these feelings now than I used to.

marcus_holmes 7y ago
Measuring software developer productivity is a hard problem. But I totally agree that the biggest production drain in any software team is bad management and bad direction. Building the wrong thing faster is not going to help much. Not wasting time building the thing that the marketing manager thought would be cool while on a night out with the CEO would help more.

secstate 7y ago

Oh my. This does appear to be a path towards Marxism. You also missed the call for 10-page "solutions" to municipal and regional government problems.

blaser-waffle 7y ago
Something on Tyler Cowen's blog is a path towards Marxism? LOL The blog owner (Cowan) runs the Mercatus Center at GMU, which exists entirely to explore free market alternatives. It's funded directly by the Koch family; one of the Koch brothers is on the board.[1] That said, Tyler Cowen's food blog is pretty good, if you live in the Northern VA / Washington DC area. [1] https://www.mercatus.org/about https://www.mercatus.org/about and https://www.mercatus.org/board https://www.mercatus.org/board
- antisthenes 7y ago
  Actually, that explains a lot of his posed questions. Another corporatist Koch shill at GMU that shouldn't be considered an economist if Brian Caplan. If you ever see any "insightful" articles by either one of these, run like hell.
conjectures 7y ago
Cowen is something of a libertarian AFAIK, and seems to be hard to predictably position. So...
duxup 7y ago
I think any large scale plans tend to hint at all sorts of large central planning type systems, in all political directions.

faitswulff 7y ago

There’s a neoliberal hierarchy implicit in the things the author deems worthy of researching. In other words, things that make more money are inherently better regardless of cultural differences or human factors and we should all aspire to be productivity porn stars. Other types of people or lifestyles don’t warrant investigation.

seibelj 7y ago
It appears that throughout human history an increase of wealth is the precursor to an increase in all of the things anti-capitalists love. It’s a pretty safe bet that if you want to enrich the poor’s souls then you need to enrich their pockets first.
- Ar-Curunir 7y ago
  Wealth for whom? If the money is going into poor people's pockets, things will improve, but inevitably capitalism, and specially neo-liberalism, will only be lining rich people's pockets. We're seeing that happen right now across the globe, and we're seeing popular uprisings in response to that.
- klyrs 7y ago
  > It’s a pretty safe bet that if you want to enrich the poor’s souls then you need to enrich their pockets first. Can't disagree with that. But we haven't been enriching the poor. We've been practicing trickle down economics instead. Enriching the rich has marvelous side effects like a proliferation of low paying contract work (jobs!), ratcheting housing prices (wealth!) and increased production of luxury goods (utopia!). But then you look at minimum wage, inflation and the consumer price index; and see that the poor have been hemorrhaging purchasing power since the 1970s. So, yeah. Increasing wealth is great for humanity. But there's a wide gap between anticapitalism and the neoliberal/libertarian economic theories which brought today's plutocracy. The middle ground is classical capitalism.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > But we haven't been enriching the poor. Of course not. We've just been lifting many hundred millions of people out of poverty in China, India, South-East Asia and elsewhere, but what does this have to do with "enriching the poor"? Maybe you need to look beyond the literal "first world problems" in your privileged corner of the West.

muzani 7y ago

I think what society is really missing is this sense of belonging. We're raised to think that wealth correlates with happiness but it clearly doesn't. History has always formed these loops of prosperity, then spirituality. I mean it's nice not to starve, but I think people would be happier being part of a tight knit tribe who support one another, even more than having air-conditioning and dating apps.

blaser-waffle 7y ago
> We're raised to think that wealth correlates with happiness but it clearly doesn't. Studies show it does, to a degree. Once you hit something like $70-80k the satisfaction levels off. It's one of those hygiene things -- not having it will make you (or others) miserable, but having it doesn't mean you're good or happy.
- muzani 7y ago
  For the individual, yes. For a society, I think the culture of making as much as possible has left everyone slightly worse off, instead of slightly better off as we were promised.
  - harimau777 7y ago
    Do you think that trying to get everyone to the 70k level (or the equivalent in their region) has made society worse off?
    - muzani 7y ago
      If society was focused on getting everyone to 70k, everyone would be happier. But instead, modern society encourages people to make as much as possible, create as many jobs as possible, and pay as close as possible to 15k.
- pseudalopex 7y ago
  Some measurements of stress and sadness level off. Satisfaction keeps going up logarithmically.

crispyambulance 7y ago

Yeah, there's something "off" about it. It seems to take for granted that the domain of human affairs runs like clockwork, like a machine that merely "needs fixing". This smells libertarian and a quick google of the authors and their books confirms that suspicion. The "hint of violence" you're detecting is subtly judgemental smugness.

xwowsersx 7y ago

I have to agree with you and admit that I'm somewhat relieved to see I'm not the only one who felt this way. The list as a whole reflects a certain self-unaware separateness from the "real world". It is hard to describe, but eery indeed.

rusk 7y ago
I think it smacks of a young person who has been spending a lot of time trying to get an insight into what super-wealthy industry leaders, VC, politicial leaders etc. are wondering about, to the point that these lines of enquiry seem perfectly normal and hasn't had enough exposure to the broader picture to understand why these things are weird, even unfeasible. Could be completely wrong. Just a guess. EDIT just checked his Bio. Nope, not young. Perhaps just in some sort of bubble. Thinktank perhaps. The whole tone is all very think-tanky.
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  Haha yes, before you edited I was going to say he's 57! It's more the bubble/think-tank thing, you're right.
  - rusk 7y ago
    He's a "policy wonk"
nathan_compton 7y ago
Its also nuts that one of these "things to work on" is "find me a wife, I'm too high performing to find one on my own."
- realbarack 7y ago
  I strongly disagree with this comment. Many, many people pour massive amounts of time and energy into finding a partner, and often end up dissatisfied with the results. Mechanics that improve the experience and the result of dating really would make life easier and better for many people. If you doubt this, have some conversations with people in their late 20s and 30s who are dating. Your "find me a wife" portrayal is the least charitable possible interpretation of that section of the article. Was your comment made in good faith?

tootie 7y ago

Dude is a macro economist. Studying the forest is basically his job.

pgorczak 7y ago

I felt this way too. At least one thing is blatantly wrong though: there is no discipline of institutional criticism. This is literally what political science deals with.

sebsito 7y ago

I expected such semi-negative, distrustful comment the second I finished reading this list. Some will dislike the individualistic, anti-collectivist character of it.

notacoward 7y ago
It's not individualist so much as corporatist, and not so much anti-collectivist as anti-humanist. This post exactly mirrors Stalinism in its reduction of humans to their capacity for production. Can we please just for once stop trying to portray anything but the most extreme pluto-techno-libertarian POV as pure communism?
- sebsito 7y ago
  It sounds terrible if you call it “capacity for production” but not so bad if called “ability to fulfill needs of others”
  - notacoward 7y ago
    Employing a euphemism to make something sound better is always fun (corporate "missions" and "visions" are often good examples) but that doesn't really change the underlying reality.
adamsea 7y ago
I would argue the list is not individualistic at all as, as others posters have mentioned, it implicitly reduces the individual person to their economic output (productivity). A real individualistic list would focus on the quality of life of the individual. Of course money is important in that regard but studies have pretty consistently shown that community, meaning, and I’ll throw in health, are the key components of individual happiness.
- sebsito 7y ago
  The quality of life, meaning and individual happiness are for individuals to pursue and figure out. It’s very leftist idea to try to solve that on society’s level. The list is focusing on things we can improve on society’s level from an individualistic perspective.

duxup 7y ago

There seems to be a confidence that these things can simply be measured by some metric and then improved. That sort of implies a lack of appreciation for the nuance / complexity for some of these topics ... let alone any understanding of what happens if you do simply measure and improve such systems. It doesn't help that there is no sense of policy or what the goal of some of these things are, like there's no policy here to indicate if we're hoping for an outcome or not... Reminds me of the manager who shows up and says "oh man look at this mess and all these terrible metrics" and after a few months just changes the metrics and doesn't understand that the metrics themselves create problems ;)

PaulHoule 7y ago

My take is that the article expresses interest in topics a certain fraction of the right are interested in (IQ) but it often leans left relative to the interest in those topics (IQ is affected more by environment than 'people who care about IQ' think.) I do find the calls for institutional criticism to be a bit thin. In particular, the most troubling "institutions" in our society use decentralization to avoid responsibility. In health care, for instance, everybody can point to somebody else as the source of the problem -- the real case the status quo has against single payer is that now the system can limit costs by denying claims in an unaccountable manner. In a single payer system patients will descend on Washington with their wheelchairs and crutches with their airfare and hotel paid for by "charities" run by the health care industry. Similar complaints can be made about the media. One reason people don't trust "experts" is that they've never seen real experts, they've only seen the likes of Cokie Roberts and Larry Kudlow. In a world with accountability, people like that wouldn't get traction.

notacoward 7y ago

It all seems to be about increasing economic efficiency. Good little workers, turn dollars into more dollars as efficiently as possible! Nothing about increasing anyone's quality of life, solving environmental problems, advancing science (except tangentially for the NSF/NIH item) let alone arts, etc. It's an MBA wish list, not a human one. Not a surprise considering the source, but still disappointing.

Isamu 7y ago
Tyler Cowen is an academic economist at GMU, so yeah, he presents an economic view. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen >Nothing about increasing anyone's quality of life, solving environmental problems, advancing science Tyler is all about those things, but his whole thesis is that they are directly linked to economic efficiency. That is not an unsupported idea.
ksdale 7y ago
Tyler posts all the time about music, literature, food, and travel. I think he's perfectly aware of what's required to increase quality of life. I think this list mostly demonstrates that he believes there are certain people and institutions in the world that are incredibly effective, and we actually don't understand why at all. We who live at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy wonder at his lack of focus on quality of life, but I believe if you asked most people in the world (people who are not American or European) what they most valued, they'd tell you access to food, clean water, cheap energy, healthcare, etc. Things that come from economic growth, which comes from building effective institutions and increasing the number of people who can be productive.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  Can confirm. Poor people really, really care about money. Since there are more poor people than rich people, it makes sense to focus on what most humans care about.
  - dmos62 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

svara 7y ago

The author is an economist, and therefore steeped in that culture, I think that explains most of it. That said, I found him very insightful when he came on Eric Weinsteins podcast recently.

nathan_compton 7y ago

Yeah, I've got to admit, I was like "Man, its gonna be fun to put this guy in the gulag." (I don't actually advocate putting anyone in gulags or even their existence).

bryanlarsen 7y ago

It feels off because the author is a conservative. But he's rational and well-spoken. We should be able to welcome him with "I disagree with you but I will listen to your arguments. Sometimes they will be persuasive and change my mind and other times they will help me to strengthen my own arguments against your position". But his arguments also attract the wackos and are used as justifications by them. Therefore we have an urge or desire to just shut him down justified by "don't feed the trolls".

jgwil2 7y ago

> If you ask informed Filipinos why the street food is mediocre, they will tell you that Philippines lacks a “culture of excellence”. This line in particular rubs me the wrong way. Who are these "informed" people? Who says the street food is mediocre? Have you looked at other possibilities before pointing the finger at nebulous "culture"? The line of reasoning seems very subjective and unscientific.

lorepieri 7y ago
See here https://cuervopropertyadvisory.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/is-there-hope-for-a-culture-of-excellence-in-the-philippines/ https://cuervopropertyadvisory.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/is-t... This also match my personal experience (my girlfriend is from there). The other side of the coin is that they are on average much happier and social than other cultures. This is in line with schools of thought that see happiness as inversely proportional to perfectionism.

bitwize 7y ago

> To retreat to imagery, I feel like a forest is being missed for the trees, but with a hint of violence. oof. Yikes, thanks for letting me know. I'm softblocking him right now. sorry but I saw a joke tweet of his and followed, didn't know that by being curious about research into highly effective people and institutions he was committing or advocating actual, physical harm to people.