OP's critique feels like a celebrity economist's variant of those travel magazine pieces that tell us why Zermatt, Phuket or Nantucket is no longer a "cool" vacation spot. On some sort of momentary buzz meter, sure.
But the factors that help Singapore be an Asian or often global hub in so many respects are still running strong, no? Worrying about whether a couple dozen X/Twitter legends are hyping you today feels silly.
Think it's more looking at the trend for Very Serious Political/Economic Commentators to suggest it as a model to emulate in long form articles than the Twitterati, but yeah, it's explicitly asking about opinions rather than whether there's anything about it that's actually broken down. Which is, relatively speaking, a nice place to be as a country.
Cowen is focused mostly on the US commenteriat, but the trend is similar in the UK, where "we should totally be like Singapore" peaked around Brexit, under the delusion idea that all we needed to do to emulated the success of the city state that founded ASEAN two years after declaring independence was leave the EU.
Meanwhile HN generally forms its opinion from a decades-old William Gibson article lamenting that it wasn't cool enough to write cyberpunk about :)
That is what MarginalRevolution is. It's fairly heterodox by most standards, but not in the good way.
> the factors that help Singapore be an Asian or often global hub in so many respects are still running strong, no
Nope.
If I can now IPO in China or India with Singapore level valuations and attract Singapore level deal sizes, why would I as a Chinese or Indian want to dedicate significant capital in Singapore beyond what is needed to build an operating shell to interface with western capital markets?
Similarly, if I'm GS, JPMC, Citadel, etc and I'm seeing significant dealflows in China and India, I should concentrate on building an organization within their borders as much as possible - which is what they have been doing since the mid-2010s.
Singapore will remain a major financial hub, but it is losing it's relative advantage to other hubs within Asia.
India and China don't have the low tax stable capitalist system thing that Singapore has. In some ways it's advantage has increased now Hong Kong is part of China.
> low tax stable capitalist system thing that Singapore has
I can say from personal professional experience that historically businesses are domiciled in Singapore primarily for us investors in Western capital markets to enter China, India, and ASEAN.
For capital that is already located in China, India, and parts of ASEAN (primarily Vietnam), that becomes less attractive, especially because China, India, and Vietnam all operate SEZs that have aligned with western corporate law or have BITs signed with major western financial hubs (eg. Pudong SEZ, GIFT City SEZ), so we don't need to route via SG to the same degree we did 20 years ago.
Additionally, if we want to exit our investments in China or India, we have no choice but to list on a Chinese (including Hong Kong) or Indian stock exchange because no other Asian market has comparable trade volume, which makes exits difficult.
Finally, what differentiates Singapore from the Dubai or London? Depending on where you are investing in Asia, you may end up getting much more preferential access from either of those two instead of Singapore.
This is why Singapore has lost it's mojo - it can't differentiate itself as a financial services center and Singapore never really had a strong innovation sector.
Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede?
But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncrackable Bitcoin private keys might someday be crackable with quantum computing. Preposterous? Maybe. Maybe not. There's a mind-blowing amount of compute coming into the world, and not all of it's going to be used to create goofy memes or robo-PowerPoints. Call me timid, but I cashed out with modest Bitcoin profits last year and am fine watching the show from the sidelines from here on.
The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate.
How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.
> there's no fundamental underlying value [...] its free to fluctuate
I don't understand this argument since that's how literally all markets work: the consensus is the current price. If we're talking about fundamentals then crypto isn't comparable to gold at all since 1) it's a physical, tangible, durable thing, and 2) has been used for centuries as a store of value.
Gold is easy to understand from a human perspective and doesn't require knowledge of a blockchain or anything tech related. You store it, secure it, and transport it like any other physical asset. Whereas something like Bitcoin involves seed phrases, blockchains, irreversible transactions, a public ledger, and it's all virtual. If your store of value is one mistake away from being lost to the void then it's not very good. I'll just finish with this: there is a reason that central banks have been loading up on gold recently in light of uncertainty and not crypto.
A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. That presents a very real floor on price. If good was suddenly worth 1/10th as much we would use it in far more industrial applications thus driving up the price. Similarly mining would slow down from the current ~3,000 tons annually again driving the price up.
Gold is currently priced way above that level, but just like the stock market were dividends allow people to buy more stock when the price is low there is a very tangible feedback loop propping up the price which eventually kicks in.
Counterintuitively this means using gold as an investment vehicle makes the world a worse place because we fall back to less efficient methods in industry, and efficiency is ultimately the engine of progress.
Gold is also one of the best heat conductors so if it got really cheap it could be used a lot in industry and electronics. Anything from cookware to heat sinks!
Hence why I said at 1/10th the price we would use a lot more of it.
There’s easily decades worth of industrial use in vaults so the instantaneous floor is quite low. However feedback occurs well before you hit the actual limits here.
Recycling jewelry to make more jewelry is quite common, which kind of distorts how much the gold supply vs reserve is. If demand to manufacture jewelry ends then the supply of recycled jewelry also dries up.
~3,300 tons where mined in 2024
“Industrial and tech demand accounted for 83 tons of gold in the third quarter” of 2024. 83 * 4 = 332 so ~10% which is fairly typical.
Whats your baseline for volatility? 0%? Outliers aside, metals are still the most stable store of value thats widely used
And the P/E and product announcements your touting as inherent value are for generating value, not storing it. If your purpose was to store and transfer value, it would be stupid to use stocks over currency or gold
They’re durable, resistant to corruption, relatively rare, pretty… Titanium or gems would’ve been equally used if they were equally convenient. Not to mention that coinage could be minted or mixed with, say, copper. Gold makes good alloys and can be recovered later.
The fundamental underlying value on stocks also depends on fluctuating prices for the goods and services that firms buy and sell, just like commodities.
The way bitcoin works is that addresses are hashes of a public key.
This technically allows for an emergency measure in case ECC is broken by a quantum computer:
The [unknown] public key becomes the private key. The signature becomes a ZKP of this key. I believe this has been proposed before as well.
The signature sizes are going to be a big problem is this scenario however, consensus may actually do something up to alleviate this in extremis. And also the people who have coins in addresses for which the public keys are known will be screwed, but then that's how everyone will know there is a problem - it's unlikely early cryptoraphically-relevant quantum computers (CRQC) will be able to front-run bitcoin transactions.
Quantum computing is interesting to think about in the context of bitcoin. It would be technically feasible to upgrade the protocol to be quantum-secure (e.g. allow wallets to make an on-chain declaration of a new PQ pubkey, and after that point all transactions must be signed with the PQ keypair) - but getting everyone to coordinate on something like that would be challenging.
Quantum computing isn't a serious threat. Would require a concentrated effort from the community to migrate to a quantum-proof hashing algorithm but there's no greater motivation than potentially losing it all.
You can easily trade gold today. You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts to the goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead. You can easily trade gold after a nuclear apocalypse to your local warlord so you get access to non-irradiated food.
Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable. It is fundamentally a superior store of value than bitcoin if you’re talking about notable global disruptions, even without going into the actual tech.
This can’t be a serious comment. If ww3 starts the respective countries central banks will keep the gold for themselves. You are so naieve if you think any government is going to honour the fact that you have a piece of paper that saya you own some gold in their vault.
It is not like they haven't done lot to collect it off the population in such scenarios during previous crises. My guess is that if WW3 breaks out. For duration your gold will have rather little use. At best you get price set by government. At worst it will be confiscated. And black market will probably be only place to use it.
And post WW3. If there is economy left. It will be while before people lock back on gold.
If you want something you can trade post ww3 also stockpile alcohol, tobacco, coffee, etc. . Small luxuries everyone will be willing to trade for in a post war country.
Sugar and salt are non-perishable if stored in right conditions. Later one does not get too much use. But first one can be turned to drugs and those are always popular.
Yeah, that angle never worked out for me. If we imagine instead the world became hyper-capitalistic (even more than today), then I could see that digital and untracable (not Bitcoin) decentralized money might have a big influence, but in the opposite scenarios, I don't think there is a lot of need for cryptocurrencies.
It might be worth considering why drug deals are always portrayed as a high stakes, dangerous event (it's because to do the sale, the physical products have to all be in one well known place where everybody knows both the place and time).
> Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable.
But isn't this all based on belief? What if you break the spell? During the Dutch Tulip Mania you could've replaced "gold" with "tulip" and changed a few adjectives and it was the same until the spell broke... I don't see the difference to Bitcoin, GME, or TSLA, "I'm going to hoard this because tomorrow (for an infinite amount of tomorrows) someone else will want to buy it at a higher price!".
Yeah yeah yeah, gold can also be used for technology (e.g. as a non-reactive metal), but copper is useful in technology too...
Sheep is probably a better thing to own. You can eat it, or you can take its wool to make clothes to keep yourself warm. You can't eat gold.
Ah, it would have been nice to get OP's perspective on Russian population counts. They've stayed remarkable stable at 144 million for two decades, even though the fertility rate has been long reported at way below the 2.1 that's considered stabilizing. And I don't think Russia is attracting a lot of inward migration.
My intuition is that their official numbers are cooked. Factors that influence the numbers:
- after 2014 the official numbers include the annexed parts of Ukraine
- since 1992 the natural change is negative (with a small interval around zero in 2013-2015), yet the total population was 148 million then and is 146 million now?
- there is some migration but officialy not enough to replace the decline of natural change ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Russia ). The numbers just don't add up, and that's not even counting emigration.
I haven't actually found any credible estimate what the 'true' numbers could be.
It seems like, in the course of calling out a perceived assumption, you may have made an assumption yourself. I'm aware of the difference between casualties and deaths. My chosen terminology applies equally to both. And I think both are relevant to a number of related stats like lifetime earnings, mental and physical health, family prospects, etc.
War is hell. And I don't think anyone comes out untouched by it. The stats on vets are brutal.
If Lou Gerstner had put any energy into growing RJR Nabisco's tobacco business, I could see your point. But during that 1989-1993 timespan, RJR Nabisco's leaders at the time (Gerstner plus private equity guys) were focused on wringing cash out of the shrinking tobacco division. Most of their growth strategies involved the Nabisco half, which actually accounted for about 60% of revenue.
There's still nothing heroic about that chapter of Gerstner's career. But if you're seeing public good in having tobacco companies fade from sight, there are bits of Gerstner's stewardship at RJR Nabisco that unwittingly worked out okay.
So a while back, I was interviewing business people still active in their 80s and 90s -- as part of a very intriguing project that got cut short but did produce some fascinating notes. I remember asking one 95-year-old guy still serving (competently) on a bank board if there was anything that he did better now than when he was in his 60s.
His answer: "I'm a better writer."
The Cambridge research cited in this study categorizes late-life changes in brain function as nothing but declining capability, all the way down. My guess is they are mostly right. But I'm intrigued by the notion that some of that elder erosion might lead to new clarity about how everything fits together.
There's a crucial extra factor that isn't in the original article, but ought to be: Money's ability to buy great experiences decreases as you get older. I've seen this with beach vacations, road trips to see a favorite band, fast cars, ski trips, etc.
Seize the moment, friend! What you can do NOW with that 10% slice will never exactly be on your possibilities map again.
I think you're hitting on something that very rarely gets discussed, at least in the US and maybe some other Western societies. I wonder if it's just simple depreciation or compound depreciation (or whatever the opposite of compound interest would be).
Me finding the money to climb Kilimanjaro at 23 is different than me having the money at 40 but worse knees.
Thank you for pointing this out and I hope someone formalizes it more.
This is why I love old tech like my 40 year old car (bmw e30 325is) and analog camera and whatnot. You have way more control because of less external dependencies and simplicity, and the prices are still decent compared to what you'd get now for vastly more money. $70k dogshit unwrenchable SUV or $10k 80's car that works like a dream and is built like a thinkpad? It's so relaxing working with older things. Hearing old peoples stories are wild, like just crossing the border with a 6 pack of beer no passport no nothing and having a good time on the weekend. Now my asshole is getting scanned down to the submillimeter and sitting in a palantir database just so I can go on a vacation.
Maintenance is great. I've only had to do minor things to it. Since I'm 6'5 I did have to re-weld all my stalks to be 30 degrees back and do a bunch of work on the steering column and wheel to bring it forward 8 inches and up 2, some stuff on the throttle body from coolant leaks, but other than that it's been great. I've put 100k+ km on it in just the past two winters since I live up in the boonies. I'm alerted of oil changes by the lights in the centre of the dash as well. I haven't done much of any work at all except what I mentioned since buying it and it's been smooth sailing for multiple winters now. The M20B25 is built like a tank. I have it sitting on B8's on H&R sports springs so the handling couldn't be better, and I did some minor ECU tuning on it to give me a little more power on the low end. The idle has remained at a perfect 750 as well, and I can get it down to 6.8L/100KM if I baby it. It's the perfect car [0]. I've even binned it a few times and it's still going strong.
I've also got a period correct radio in there from bmwradios.com (radio wizard from estonia) who gave it bluetooth functionality along with a period correct panel in the console for a microphone, so I can talk hands free while I'm driving. He also modified the radio for me to read out the different GTA 3/4/5 radio stations and I can switch them around as I only listen to GTA radio and commercials when driving [1]. Besides it being 900kg with no airbags, it's the perfect car.
Between e30zone, the bentley manual, and realOEM [3] amongst the other infinite amount of resources it's impossible not to do your own work on it and it's usually easy. It really is a thinkpad in car form. Most parts are still produced and if they aren't you can get any number of things from third party shops like e30garage.no [4] if it's not on FCPEuro. Lot's of parts are also plug'n'play between different BMW models like steering racks which are quite easily swappable.
> Money's ability to buy great experiences decreases as you get older.
Excellent point. You may have just talked me into retiring.
> What you can do NOW with that 10% slice will never exactly be on your possibilities map again.
Maybe not... but "once in a lifetime chances" come around more often than you think. You don't have to take every one right now. (As you get older, options narrow, as you said.)
Read it earlier this year and it definitely changed some of my thinking along those same lines.
My loose summary of the book:
"Any money left in the bank when you die is essentially wasted - you could have used it to have experiences when you were alive, or given it to family / charity earlier when it would have had more benefit. Figure out what major experiences and memories you want to have in life, plan to do them earlier when you have health and time, and build up memories for later in life."
I didn't find the discussions of how to plan out retirement savings very useful - there's a lot better info on withdrawal approaches in various FIRE-related groups.
But the "be willing to spend now on activities you might not be able to do later / don't hold off on 'living' until you're retired" argument made a _lot_ of sense to me for a variety of reasons, and it was a major factor in researching early retirement a few months later (and deciding to make that a new goal. along with taking more vacations before then).
We were in our 20's when my friend said 'A day in your 20's is worth a year in your 30's, a day in your 30's is worth a year in your 40's, etc...' Now in our 60's we're a little less adamant - every day is worth something.- but it has been a useful perspective.
Physically, I don’t feel a lot different than in my 40s. ( I’m pretty firm in my exercise schedule. ) But looking over almost anyone in their 80s, I’m reminded that the 60s likely kicks off ‘the fourth quarter’, to use sports parlance.
Time to let it all hang out, leave nothing on the table.
A day in my 20s was worth nothing. I went and flipped burgers for $4/hr, then probably went out for beers at a dive bar that night. Just living day to day.
I took a few months off intentionally in between jobs to hike and camp and hang out with my kids. Now that my kids are older my only regret is that I didn't do it for longer.
I don't agree. How can wasting your money in your twenties and thirties be more valuable than saving for an early retirement. Imagine being able to retire at 40 and do whatever you want. If you weren't stupid, your health should be good enough. Why prolong the time you have to do stupid chores for other people when you can be strategic and opt out as early as possible.
You can take once-in-a-lifetime experiences in your 20s and still save for retirement. I went to Burning Man and traveled to Amsterdam in my 20s and that didn't impact my savings.
I should point out that it's cheaper to travel when young: Back then I stayed in a tent in the desert and in a friend's room near Amsterdam. If I did the same trip today, I'd have my family in tow, and would need more comfortable accommodations.
I should also point out that startup equity is not retirement savings. Selling 10% of your equity, investing most of it, and then doing something that you won't be able to do when you're old is a very wise and mature decision.
Taking some time off to travel when you're young is much more than a beach vacation. You meet people (sometimes you meet your future wife), that can become lifelong friends. You learn what you like and don't like; and that the world is infinitely more complicated and beautiful than what you could imagine through books and watching youtube.
After 40 you've already made many of your major life decisions - career, partner, education, kids etc. There's less room for new experiences to alter that trajectory meaningfully.
One thing I've also realized through being lucky enough to enjoy some "semi-retirement" between work is having a healthy balance makes me appreciate both work and "leisure" more. It gets pretty boring to go to the beach every day, it turns out. I was itching to get back to building something by the end.
I don't think it's an either or proposition. You can both retire early AND take a nice vacation. Sure it delays your retirement date by a couple of days, but I think that's a good tradeoff generally. I'm approaching 40 and even now, the vacations I took when I was 10 years younger were different than now, I could cram more in, do more things without being as sore the next day, etc. And I haven't had kids yet, that would definitely change vacations.
Kids is one big reason. You can have totally different experiences before you have kids, once they arrive your outlook on life changes, risk tolerance changes etc.
If you can retire at 40 having lived your 20s/30s to the fullest then game on, but it would be crazy to sacrifice that time when you are so free and full of energy otherwise IMHO.
FWIW I am fortunate enough to have really enjoyed by earlier years and be mostly retired in my early 40s.
It's worth reading former WashPost editor Marty Baron's memoirs for a little more insight about Bezos's priorities. Back when Bezos was married to MacKenzie Scott, she was a surprisingly strong voice about how to do things. (The slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" got approved after her blessing.) Lately, my sense is that his new wife, Lauren Sanchez, has more of an interest in the Post than Bezos does.
So he's basically the absentee owner of a property that's more interesting to the women in his life than to him. Current management at the paper is probably eager to make sure that the paper doesn't embarrass (or "complexify") his bigger business priorities. Their desire to mollify may be excessive. I've seen such things happen inside large organizations.
Hire people who are going to do their best work ever, for you, after having partially but not fully mastered everything you want, via their previous jobs. It's easy to evaluate a resume. It's harder -- but not impossible -- to assess potential. Working inside a big tech company for six years, I saw that PM hires were done almost entirely on pedigree: find me another Stanford grad. These tended to produce a lot of fast exits as well as some comically bad and totally predictable fails.
Engineering hires were done on hunger, drive, scrappiness (and networks). They fared better.
It is possible to do leetcode without practicing, even before AI. That said the structure of the Big Tech process is also quite long/multi-step with many opportunities to give up during, which helps select for drive. It's hard to do this effectively with shorter processes. It is however always a good practice to 1) design very hard interviews but 2) give a lot of preparation to candidates beforehand, even for non-leetcode interviews, as it helps filter who can efficiently and diligently use provided information to increase their performance.
>It is possible to do leetcode without practicing, even before AI
Back when people did in person interviews, people were writing psuedocode on whiteboards, so knowing the right algorithm and being a strong programmer was necessary, and I can see how one might not need to practice.
However, with the move to online interviews where people are expecting running and debugging some complex solutions (so you cannot hand wave trivial but potentially time consuming helper methods), coding speed can easily become the bottleneck.
> 2) give a lot of preparation to candidates beforehand, even for non-leetcode interviews, as it helps filter who can efficiently and diligently use provided information to increase their performance.
Yes, this reminds me of the netflix interview process where they told me to read the culture packet thoroughly, then quizzed me on it! It was quite easy, but you can bet that a lof candidates don't take that seriously.
Those things are fakeable, but there are plenty of people who will aggressively signal a LACK of hunger. It's more of a negative predictor than a positive one.
Verifiable evidence of them learning key new skills on their own, building passion projects (ideally somewhat comparable to what your startup needs), taking work to the finish line, etc.
Press (politely) for extra details via follow-up questions. Make it easy for the legitimate doers to share specifics of what they've done and learned, while the posers get vague in a hurry and change the subject.
Wall Street and the big corporate law firms of NYC/DC have been championing extreme hours since the 1980s. Maybe earlier. So it's interesting to see the short- and long-term effects of this on people's lives.
Informal assessment here, re: how these versions of "hustle culture" have played out. First, people who can last a long time do make a lot of money. Second, the wipe-out rate is pronounced but not catastrophic. Yes, there's sometimes a price to pay in terms of bad marriages, early heart attacks, etc. but it's not so pervasive that everyone who chases all-out success comes up short. You can win at this game.
Third -- and this perhaps OPs best area for questioning: When you work 90-hour weeks, your judgment about picking the right projects goes to hell. You're the greyhound going round the track as fast as you can, chasing the rabbit that you'll never catch. Your rabbit-value assessment system doesn't exist. You just keep running toward whatever someone else points you toward. On Wall Street, a lot of marathon hours are spent trying to close deals that won't close. Or that turn out to have been identifiable mistakes/misguided obsessions.
I was chatting earlier this year with a former Big Law attorney who spent a frenzied year after Hurricane Katrina drafting blizzards of legal filings so that big insurers could dodge claims. Her work was valued enough that she (and her firm) got paid a lot and maybe even did landmark work. Nearly 20 years later, is that the career badge that you'll always feel good about?
> Nearly 20 years later, is that the career badge that you'll always feel good about?
Well, if the result work has negative connotations, you wouldn't even mention it (especially after 20 years). However, as you said:
> enough that she (and her firm) got paid a lot and maybe even did landmark work
At the end of the day, that's what mostly matters. Sure, some people believe in what they are doing and put insane hours, but most just do it for money. And if they manage to get a lot, then yeah, it was all justified.
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> Second, the wipe-out rate is pronounced but not catastrophic
I agree with this -- people who are deeply invested in their projects are often already do the second shift. So if you are motivated enough, that's kind of the same, plus people can be in a position where they have no external obligations (often when they are young).
It is bad long-term, but for a relatively short term for many it is a decent gamble.
But the factors that help Singapore be an Asian or often global hub in so many respects are still running strong, no? Worrying about whether a couple dozen X/Twitter legends are hyping you today feels silly.
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