Peter Thiel did a 25 minute video interview on Big Think, a wonderful site if you're looking for video brain food. He answered questions from Scott Summers, Will Wilkinson, Arnold Kling, and others. Embedded below. Full text transcript is available on the page. Some excerpts:

On a decreasing appetite for bailouts:

With respect to Dubai, the basic mistake people made was they assumed that it was all part of the United Arab Emirates. Everybody was in the same boat, Abu Dhabi had lots of money, and they would help Dubai out. In reality, Abu Dhabi was probably quite resentful of the shiny and glittering and fake city known as Dubai and when push came to shove didn't really want to give them more money. And I think that kind of emotional or political or social phenomenon is going to be much more widespread and the question that will come to the fore in the next few years is will Germany bail out Greece or Spain, or Italy, or Eastern Europe? Will the responsible people bailout those they deem to be less responsible? If General Motors goes bankrupt again, will it get a second bailout? Will there be a second bailout for the banks? Will there be a second stimulus bill? I think the answer to all of these things is, no.

On thinking about what the world will look like in 20 years rather than six months:

There have been many people ask many questions about whether the recession will end with the 'U' or 'L' or a 'V' shaped recovery and sort of a lot about the tactical questions, you know, how high is the employment rate going to go, is it ticking down, is things turning a corner. I tend to think the really important questions are not about the next six months, but are about the next 20 years. The next six months is driven by the financial system liquidity, what central banks do, what they don't do. The next 20 years are driven by science, technology, a set of questions that are very different from the ones people are focused on.

On his least favorite economist:

My villain in economics is clearer. I believe the villain is Keynes and there was a Keynes line that in the long run we are all dead. Whether or not that is true, I believe that in the long run Keynesianism will be dead and that the problem with never thinking about the long run is that in the long run, the short run becomes the long run. And I wonder whether the crisis of 2008-2009 was not just a crisis about finance or about technology, but also a crisis about short run thinking and it was a point in time where short run thinking had run out and there was no more time to think about the short term and that actually a lot of long term problems we have been putting off and deferring had finally come home to roost.

On his favorite thinker overall:

My favorite thinker remains a French philosopher named Rene Girard. He developed an account of human nature in which one thinks very hard about the question of imitation and the role it plays in the ways in which culture and societies form.

Here are my past posts on Thiel. Here's my post of icons / heroes.

I just found myself on a Facebook profile page of a random guy and when I scrolled to the Favorite Quotations section, screenshot below, I started laughing uncontrollably.

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Muscle weakening, to me, is a good litmus test for humor. At the present moment I do not know whether I will have the strength, for example, to move the mouse and press the "publish" button.

Recall the Jan Helfeld interview of Congressman Peter "Shut the Fuck Up or I'll Throw You Out the Window" Stark -- after watching I was unable to open the disposable soap package in my hotel room, so intense was the humor-induced muscle weakening.

A perfect life metaphor indeed. It's from Melissa Sconyers.

Bill Simmons on Tiger Woods and the effects of fame during one's formative years:

Did we underestimate the effects of fame in his formative years on Tiger? Become famous at an early age and invariably you "mature" into someone who can't remember anything other than being famous. Most (if not all) of your interactions are with people who are impressed by you or want something from you. You don't have to win anyone over. You don't have to work on being a better person, or funnier, or nicer, or anything. You don't want to make new friends because you can't tell if any prospective friends want to be friends because you're who you are, so you end up gravitating toward other famous people, most of whom are just as messed up as you. You can get away with almost any indiscretion and be forgiven. Your only responsibility is to stay yourself, but you became this twisted, self-aware version of you without even knowing it. And that's when the trouble starts.

Right. One problem with youthful fame in general is that it makes you risk averse at a time in life when you are supposed to be taking risks. Child stars who stumble in adulthood may do so because they did not acquire life lessons usually obtained in conventional youth, when the cost of failure is low and thus benefits of experimentation (of all sorts) are high.

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Robin Hanson once asked Tyler Cowen whether increased influence and fame through his blog has made him less interesting and weird. Robin thinks it has. Here's Clive Thompson's piece in Wired about the Age of the Micro-Celebrity: fame dynamics are at work even on a very small scale.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Journalists always have a notebook with them -- to record impressions or jot down that perfect opening sentence for a future story. It is the first dumping ground of their ideas. It's a physical artifact of their curiosity.

It's always good to see journalistic instincts in non-journalists. Yesterday I met with a technologist who, in the first five minutes of our dinner, pulled out a notebook to make notes. It was a terrific first impression on me.

Here's my post analyzing pros and cons of taking notes in an informal lunch/dinner meeting. Here's my post on the importance of capturing your fringe-thoughts. Moleskine notebooks are in-style but I prefer spiral ringed notebooks of equivalent size because I can clip a pen to it easily.

(thanks Steve Dodson for pointing out this essay)

In the early days of a start-up forming an advisory board can be a great way to formalize and regularize the feedback you receive from experts.

I think an ideal advisory board contains big names with no time (whose name, by association, offers credibility in the sales or fundraising process) and no names with plenty of time to give you specific advice.

Among the no names who actually give you advice, I think an ideal mix in the early days emphasizes customer-centric folks -- people with deep knowledge of the market you're selling to. Perhaps even potential customers themselves!

The opposite of customer-centric advisors is "random business experts." These are folks who are smart and experienced but don't have specific experience in the niche your company is going after. They don't have relevant experience in the exact market you're playing in.

On day 1 of a start-up, perhaps 80% of the advisory board should consist of customer-centric folks, and 20% "general" experts.

As a company matures so does its understanding of the mind of its customers. And newer, different issues arise, and the composition of the company's supporters and advisors evolves accordingly.

That's why you see many publicly traded companies' boards of directors filled with general business experts and executives from different industries. But you never see start-up boards filled with random big-shot attorneys or CEOs of companies in unrelated industries.

Bottom Line: The most effective start-up advisory boards seem to consist of big names with no time, and no names with plenty of time, and the no names have deep, specific experience in the specific customer niche of the start-up.

I'm a big fan of litmus tests, heuristics, rules of thumb (here's my wiki with hundreds of rules), and anything else that can help me make a quick decision when there's too little time or too much indecisiveness.

Colin Marshall posted 10 "easily memorable and implementable life problem-solving strategies" that are really stellar. I've excerpted all the heuristics below. Read each one.

• "Would I respect me?" I supposedly ask myself this about either my life in general, as a tool for broader self-assessment, or about a specific action I'm contemplating taking. Pro: straight to the point. Con: too much wiggle room — where's the line between what's respectable and what isn't?


• "What benefits my future self?" I've found no better way to battle the bad habit of foisting tasks and undesirabilities onto the Colin of a few days from now than to identify what I could do next and automatically choose whatever benefits my future self most — or harms him the least, anyway. Pro: eases the dealing-with of future unforeseen developments, both positive and negative. Con: what if present Colin gets hit by a bus, leaving nobody to collect my future-self benefits?


• "Find the thin end of the wedge." This is stuff of folk aphorisms about thousand-mile journeys begun by single steps, camel noses poking inside tents and what have you. Meaning: daunting tasks are made more doable than they seem by isolation of the small ones that precede or collectively constitute them. Werner Herzog, discussing the task of assembling an entire cast of little people for Even Dwarfs Started Small, put it eloquently: "One dwarf would tend to know another." Pro: makes hardish stuff not so hard, at least perceptually, which is half the battle anyway. Con: could potentially get me under more onerous obligations than I can foresee.
  
  
• "Barf it out, then clean it up." A friend quoted her journalism teacher as saying this, and I've since adopted it as a pithy reflection of the broader phenomenon that the sole path to non-suckage winds through the treacherous woods of suckage. I must therefore make peace with producing something sucky and then iterate that initial product until it achieves decency. The trick is avoiding discouragement by that first piece of suckiness. As a writing principle, everyone knows this — you pound out the rough draft, then do the real writing, which is rewriting — but I submit that it's applicable across all pursuits. Pro: it's the only way to create good things, I suspect. Con: risks incentivizing producing crappier than I have to, at least to start. A worse initial effort might make fruitful iteration tougher.


• "Can I fail at this?" It's like Raymond Chandler said: there is no success without the possibility of failure. Therefore, something I can't fail at is also something I can't succeed at. I can fail at conducting an interview, writing an essay or making a video. I can't fail at meandering around the internet in search of "neat stuff to read." In a recent tweet, I defined procrastination "the temporary displacement of tasks at which it is possible to fail with tasks at which it is not possible to fail." I suspect I'm less far off the mark than ever, especially regarding why procrastination is not a productive tendency.


• "Always produce." Hat tip, of course, to Paul Graham. Operating under the mandate of always producing something, no matter if it sucks, isn't fully formed or doesn't match my vision, drives away the seductive demons of fantasization whose mission is to keep me thinking about doing stuff but never actually doing it. Thinking about doing something doesn't help, and in fact probably un-helps. You might have noticed Nike's successful employment of their own version of this heuristic. Pro: easy motivator, addresses a hugely common issue. Con: could lead to a life-threatening miscalculation or two.
  
  


• "What's the deadline?" Even when solidly in the actually-doing-stuff phase, I find my stuff rarely reaches actual doneness in the absence of a hard end date. Because how do I identify "doneness," anyway? I can always keep noodling away on a project, telling myself it's incomplete, if I never need to hand it in. This has the ancillary effect of preserving the precious mythologies of B.S. one builds about one's own brilliance. ("Oh, but it would've been awesome if I'd had more time!") Hence the importance I've come to grant the skill of adhering to self-imposed, sharp-edged rules. I have set a deadline of 11:30am on this post, for example, because I otherwise risk spending all day on squirrely retoolings. It's happened before. Pro: prevents life from being overtaken by unending boondoggles. Con: how to know exactly where to set the deadline?


• "What are the rules?" Though this is perhaps my interest in conceptualism talking, it seems to me that nothing interesting ever gets done or made without rules, whether imposed by the creator or by the creator's circumstances. I find "drive across country without using a freeway" more interesting than "drive across country," "write a novel without using the letter e" more interesting that "write a novel," "make a movie for ten grand" more interesting than "make a movie." Crude examples, but you get my meaning. This has all been said before, but more in terms of creativity being truly sparked by limitations, necessity being the mother of invention, things opened up by way of closing them off, etc. I like to think of it as arbitrarily setting down the first element and taking it as given, using it as a structure on which to build the rest of the work. (Then, if you like, remove the structure.) Pro: makes the first steps easier. Con: encourages stunts, though stunts aren't necessarily worthless.


• "What am I doing now?" I often fall victim to the delusion that circumstances will be somehow be more advantageous in the future, so that's when I'll really bear down on my work. Of course, conditions are never so much more suitable when the time actually comes, or at least they're not as perfect as I'd perhaps assumed they'd be. So if I want do something or be a certain way, I try to cut off any line of thought that terminates in my having convinced myself that I'll act on my intentions in the future. If I'm serious about it, it'll be reflected in what's going on right now, at the present moment. There's no such thing as ideal conditions. Pro: prevents excessive pipe-dreaming. Con: sounds superficially like a mindset some flake on Oprah would peddle.


• "What's the hardest thing I can do?" Again, my hat tips to Paul Graham: "This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it." What more could I add? Pro: helpful when choosing between defined options. Con: the usual problems about the very act of option definition, plus, how do you define "hardest"? Also, it might lead into pointless exercises in frustration.

Troy Senik writes about California's problems and talks in passing about how the public school teachers' unions have the state by the neck. Read it and weep:

Perhaps the most vexing labor organizations are the teachers' unions. These groups were the driving force behind Proposition 98, locking in mandatory spending on public education without regard to any other fiscal considerations. But that's only where their transgressions begin. In 1992, the California Teachers' Association — by far the most powerful teachers' union in the state — blocked a ballot initiative to promote school choice in the Golden State by physically intimidating petition-signers and allegedly placing false names on the petitions. When asked about his union's opposition to the measure, the CTA president responded: "There are some proposals that are so evil that they should never even be presented to the voters." And in 2000, when testing results revealed that two-thirds of Los Angeles public schools were ranked as failures, the president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles announced that his union would accept a proposal for merit pay only on "a cold day in hell."

The result of the teachers' flight from responsibility has been unadulterated dysfunction. In Los Angeles schools, one out of every three students drops out before graduation. And a research team from the University of California, Riverside, recently concluded that by 2014 — the year all students are required to be proficient in math and English under No Child Left Behind — nearly every elementary school in the state will fail to meet proficiency standards. Yet despite the atrocious performance of California educators, it is nearly impossible to fire an incompetent teacher (the percentage of California teachers terminated after three or more years in the classroom is just 0.03%). For example, in a May exposé on the Los Angeles Unified School District, Los Angeles Times reporter Jason Song revealed: "The district wanted to fire a high school teacher who kept a stash of pornography, marijuana and vials with cocaine residue at school, but a commission balked, suggesting that firing was too harsh. L.A. Unified officials were also unsuccessful in firing a male middle school teacher spotted lying on top of a female colleague in the metal shop, saying the district did not prove that the two were having sex."

But no matter how egregious their misconduct, California's public-school teachers can always skirt the consequences. With 340,000 members statewide, the California Teachers' Association is perhaps the most powerful interest group in state politics. In 2005, for instance, the organization spent nearly $60 million to defeat ballot measures aimed at bringing more accountability to California schools. And when budget agreements get hashed out in meetings of the state's notorious "big five" (the governor and the four legislative party leaders), the CTA is treated like an unnamed sixth party to the talks. It's no wonder, then, that despite having some of America's lowest-performing schools, California's teachers are the highest paid in the nation.

Trenik doesn't even touch the idiocy of tenure.

It's unfortunate that public school teachers are often portrayed as selfless martyrs, the guard-bearers of our children, when in fact they are selfish economic actors who look out for their own interests. Sure, the prison guards are similarly spoiled. But they make no bones about being anything other than self-interested prison guards.

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Here's the in-depth L.A. Times piece on how it's basically impossible to fire teachers in LAUSD. Here's the New Yorker just a few months ago on New York City's battles with unions, where some teachers are being paid more than $100,000 to sit in a room and do nothing.

Though we often hear of emotion and passion clouding the decision making process, research shows that feelings help us make better decisions. Specifically, emotions aid decisiveness. Humans who have suffered damage to the part of their brain responsible for emotions are prone to crippling indecisiveness.

Here's a metaphor I came up with that conveys the mix: reason is the steering wheel, emotion is the gas and brake pedal.

When you get in a car, you first need to decide where to go. You need to think clearly and objectively about the best route. Once you've decided on a route, you need to press the gas pedal at different intervals to move forward, to go faster, or to slow down and come to a stop.

Suppose you brainstorm a new business idea. You want to think about the idea clearly and assess honestly the pros and cons, market size, competitive landscape, etc. You don't necessarily want your emotional side to dominate this assessment process. Once you've decided you want to pursue an idea, dreams of success and emotional excitement enable you to press the gas pedal and put in 12 hour days.

If the business is headed for the gutter, and you need to take immediate action to right the ship, emotions such as fear of failure and embarrassment will accelerate the actions prescribed by a rational cost-benefit analysis.

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I frequently have to remind myself that good decisions can have bad outcomes. Also, I'm still unsure of the role of intuition in good decision making, but I agree with Auren that it's better to trust your gut when it tells you not to do something.

I'll be living in Santiago, Chile for a little while. I'm here to learn Spanish, explore a new culture and country (as a resident more than a tourist, a longtime goal), and pursue some professional projects.

Why Chile? As Spanish-speaking countries go, if you value security, political stability, and a professional/modern business culture, your options are Spain, Costa Rica, Uruguay, or Chile. I liked Chile the best. I'll explain why later.

I've been here for two weeks so far and intend to semi-regularly post observations, lessons, and stories from Chile. I hope they will help improve my (and your) understanding of what's going on in Latin America today and offer insight on the experience of living abroad. Thanks for bearing with me through the miles and months ahead.

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Six random observations / lessons so far:

1. An entrepreneurial culture? Economically speaking Chile has been a success in Latin America. At current trajectories it will be the first LatAm country to join the club of first world nations. But for the next stage it needs to rely less on natural resources and more on knowledge-based industries. The government is offering an incredible set of incentives for tech entrepreneurs to locate in Chile. Yet incentives are not enough. To spur entrepreneurship and attract knowledge workers there needs to be an entrepreneurial culture. How the heck do you develop an entrepreneurial culture?

2. The Election. The first round of presidential elections are in a couple weeks. It's striking that the issues being debated are generally high on on Maslow's Hierarchy. When people start complaining about the hours the park is open, you know a country has taken care of the basics. In other words, people are starting to debate intangible social issues since the basic functions of government work correctly. For example, the country has finally gotten around to discussing rights for homosexuals. Remarkably, it's about whether gays deserve civil union rights, not marriage. The Catholic church influences this conservative agenda, of course. (For the same reason, abortion is illegal regardless of circumstances (such as rape) and divorce only recently became legal.) The candidates are also debating how to deal with economic inequality -- I will address this in a future post.

Bottom line: The Presidential election in Chile is important inasmuch as the president has a lot of power in the political system. Congress doesn't have much say on the budget, for example. However, it's not an important election in the sense that none of the candidates proposes changing the successful status quo very much.

3. No Hablan Inglés. Chileans speak little English, say both the studies and my experience to-date. Sparse is signage in English and it's basically impossible to acquire English-language print media. I almost never hear English spoken on the street. The government is apparently trying to remedy this. A population that doesn't speak English is a population disadvantaged in the global economy.

4. I'm Learning Spanish.

• You don't go to Chile if your only goal is to learn Spanish. First, Chilean Spanish is arguably the fastest spoken on the continent. Second, Chileans use higher-than-average slang and colloquialisms. Third, they rarely pronounce the endings of their words. Some ex-pats have told me that they can barely talk with Chileans in Spanish but they have almost no problem in a place like Costa Rica or Guatemala or even Mexico.
• Fortunately, because there's so little English spoken, I get plenty of opportunities to mess up my Spanish when speaking with locals. When I do speak English here, it is usually with other gringos learning the lingo in Santiago. I've discovered that when I talk to another American in Spanish, it's always an interesting conversation. Every sentence a challenge! To find that right word or translation! It's been funny switching to English with someone and thinking, "Gosh, this person is actually quite boring." When learning a new language, everyone speaking your target language becomes interesting.
• I've noticed myself be more aware of my body and body language. When words are difficult to come by, body language must be used to express ideas.
• Speaking Spanish for awhile and then switching to English feels like picking up a light bat in baseball after warming up in the on-deck circle with the heavy bat. It's so light and easy!
• The feeling of learning a word and then later hearing it used by locals. I like this feeling.

5. We Love American Pop Culture (Even if We Don't Like America). Latin Americans harbor some of the fiercest anti-Americanism I've encountered. (I haven't noticed this one way or another in Chile; I suspect Chileans are average in this respect.) Some of it is justified: the U.S. foreign policy record in Latin America is pretty terrible, recent projects in Colombia and elsewhere notwithstanding. Yet, as ever, American pop culture continues to dominate the air waves. In the metro stations, there are always music videos from American artists singing English-language songs. Last night, Miley Cyrus' "Party in the USA" was playing -- most of the video is her dancing provocatively in front of an American flag. The Chileans around me watched the TV in the subway station, entranced. At the restaurant I went to tonight for dinner nobody spoke a lick of English, and yet the TV was playing a "Greatest Hits from the 80s" compilation of American music videos. At the gym, American movies are always shown on the TV.

6. Chile Needs Green-Tech Entrepreneurs. Locals are obsessed with conserving energy, turning off lights, etc. I've never seen so many green-friendly lightbulbs. Apparently they've been popular in Chile for years; only recently have they infiltrated the U.S. Chile has very little natural energy itself and it hates having to import it from Argentina. If you're an energy entrepreneur, consider doing business here.

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When I arrive in Santiago, I first note the sanity of the airport. There is no illegal taxi operation to speak of. You can tell a lot about a country by the sprawl of taxi touts.

My first day I spend at Plaza de Armas. It is a grand old square with stunning architecture and offers world-class people watching opportunities. The sun gently baths my back as I people-watch. People watching is not just entertainment. I learn so much. 20 minutes of sitting and observing a pack of teenagers brings the ideas of peer pressure and groupthink to life: the teen girls are constantly mirroring each other in the way the walk, flick their hand, or get excited. They are all dressed the same, too.

I find a gym near my house. ¿Habla ingles? I ask the woman working the front-desk. A momentary lapse of self-confidence in my Spanish. No. Hablame. she replies. She knows the routine. So I ask her in Gringo Spanish about the gym and prices. It is a successful conversation, and when I walk to the next gym that I had researched online I first ask the front desk lady, ¿Hola, cóma está? and the conversation proceeds apace. Day by day, by day by day.

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I see couples making out everywhere. On the subway. In parks. On the street. Everywhere: lips touching. A culture where kids live with their parents until marriage pushes sexual activity out into the public. I see men in plazas yelling religious enunciations until their throats literally give out, as everyone sits around half-listening. I see every person who walks past me as a potential pick-pocketer even though most everyone in this country is sweet and hospitable. I do not see anyone taller than me, ever.

"For me, 50% of the stuff I do is bad, and that’s just going to be the way it is, and if I can’t accept that then I’m not cut out for this. The trick is to know what’s bad and not let other people see it."

A terrific post by venture capitalist Josh Kopelman on why marketing and customer acquisition plans are strategic and core to a business and not something you put off until the product's ready to ship. I especially agree with his point about the buzzword "virality." Building word-of-mouth doesn't come by wishing it so or "sprinkling" on some magic ingredient at the end of the product development process...

Since the beginning of time political theorists have debated the relationship of power between the elites and the masses. Plato talked about it. Jefferson and Hamilton argued about it. Adams was wary of an overly democratic democracy; Paine championed the everyman. Contemporary thinkers have weighed in. Bill Buckley famously said he's rather entrust the U.S. government to the first 400 people in the Boston telephone directory than the faculty of Harvard. A few months ago an editor from the Wall Street Journal told me he believes an illiterate Afghan has a "horse's sense" for what's right and therefore can make the right choice at the voting booth.

I am less instinctually trustful of the common man. There is a worldly wisdom that comes from walking the earth, but it's hardly sufficient to be an informed voter or ruler. I sooner put my lot with the well-educated elite.

If your car is broken, you want a mechanic who possesses elite knowledge. If you're going to get surgery, you want an elite surgeon -- someone whose knowledge of the matter far surpasses the average Joe.

Shouldn't you want the same out of the people in government? Yes, with two qualifications.

First, elites should rule but be able to be replaced by the masses. This is why we have a republican form of government.

Second, the ruling elites need to be humble. One reason why elites are more dangerous in politics than in the narrow sphere of car mechanics is that they can widely exercise unbridled ambition. The Obama cabinet is stacked with elites -- very smart individuals. And they are probably trying to do too much. They are too ambitious and too confident in their ability to direct and organize events. It's tricky because ambition and talent tend to go hand-in-hand. In politics we need the rare talent who'll be very humble once in office.

Elitism, by the way, has come in all sizes. Some of America's finest leaders did not possess elite educations or ex ante high brow status, but rather were in an elite category in terms of their fundamental decency and perseverance. George Washington and Harry Truman come to mind. It's unlikely we'll see this type of elitism in the future.

I've read two main concerns about elites in politics.

There's first the Sarah Palin View. She sees the common man as a better representative of the aesthetic ideals of Americana, and thus more fit to participate in the democracy. She will crack jokes about latte drinking, New York Times reading, sushi eating elites who are "out of touch." I believe Palin's dislike of elites is fundamentally stylistic not substantive. She disrespects George Will and Maureen Dowd, even if Will shares some of her policy beliefs.

Then there's the Arnold Kling View. Arnold's wariness of elites stems from their substantive failures in the past and policy tendency toward state control. He's disheartened by elites' failures: he sees "mostly harm in the way educated elites have exercised power...from Vietnam to the current economic crisis." He agrees that the common man's ignorance can be dangerous, yet he also notes the danger that can come from over-confident elites:

The gap between what one knows and what one thinks one knows may be higher in the ranks of the elite. The result is supposedly-clever government interventions, introduced with excessive confidence, leading to disastrous results.

Bottom Line: I share Arnold's conclusion: "I think that the best solution to the elitist/populist dilemma is an elite with humility. Don't let the mob rule, but at the same time don't let the elite get too sure of itself."

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The "people" are stupider than you might realize. Here's Robin Hanson reminding us of this fact. Here's Bill Maher doing the same. Nick Shulz dubbed the following Summer's Law, after Larry Summers' utterance: "THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around."

If you find yourself in a big company, you can still be "intrapreneurial" -- a term that refers to entrepreneurial activities in an otherwise non-entrepreneurial environment. Here are 10 Commandments of the Intrapreneur:

1. Come to work each day willing to be fired.

2. Circumvent any orders aimed at stopping your dream.

3. Do any job needed to make your project work, regardless of your job description. (BC: Or, as Eric Reis puts it: "In any situation it is your responsibility, using your best judgment, to do what you think is in the best interests of the company. That's it. Everything else [in your job description] is only marketing.")

4. Find people to help you.

5. Follow your intuition about the people you choose, and work only with the best.

6. Work underground as long as you can - publicity triggers the corporate immune mechanism.

7. Never bet on a race unless you are running in it.

8. Remember it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.

9. Be true to your goals, but be realistic about the ways to achieve them.

10. Honor your sponsors.

A gentler version is here, both I think are attributed to Gifford Pinchot.

On British novelist Zadie Smith's new collection of essays, entitled Changing My Mind, reviewer Ella Taylor writes:

Taken together, they reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life, literature and a great deal in between. Delightful, painful and spontaneously funny...

Lively, rigorous, erudite, unselfconscious, earnestly open-minded, delightful, painful, spontaneously funny: not a bad set of adjectives.

I am always interested in how you can describe really talented people. "Smart" has been overused to be devoid of meaning. The most original and descriptive adjective from the above list is: unselfconscious.

Here's my review of Smith's On Beauty.

Justin Wehr, a research assistant in behavioral health economics, blogs about posts-he-would-write-if-he-had-time. It's a smattering of interestingness:

A good question to ask anyone: "What don't you know, but wish you did?" [BC: Another good question to ask: What have you learned in the last year?]

Since discovering how to play audio faster (I am typically playing podcasts at 1.7x speed), it seems my comprehension has actually improved. Why might this be, and how can I test it?

Music is deeply personal and important to people, but at the same time it is incredibly boring to hear about other people's music preferences. Why is that?

Why don't retail stores (particularly Wal-Mart) generate revenue by allowing companies to put advertisements around the store?

Near death experiences. They have a fascinating history and are surprisingly common: 8 million people in the U.S. report having had one. Testable evidence for existence of the soul? There are many interesting studies on near death experiences and Duke even has a journal devoted to the subject.

Laughter, religion, and sleep: The three most puzzling things to psychologists.

Is productivity spiritually important as Marty Nemko suggests or just another form of hedonistic pleasure?

People should be paid for their attention on the internet. How can that be arranged? 

From this post alone it's pretty easy to tell that Justin would be a fun guy to have dinner with. Blogs are excellent filters in this respect. It's near impossible to write an interesting blog and be an uninteresting person.

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Speaking of interesting people, here's Stan James on how the complexity of a user interface evolves to meet a user's expectations. Compare the iPod of 2000 to the iPod of today. Here's Clay Shirky on the business model for local bookstores and the role they play in the community.

It is unfair that where you happen to be born matters so much to your potential success in life.

Warren Buffet has said that he won the "ovarian lottery" by being born in the United States -- had he been born into a poor village in Peru, he says, his "talents" probably would have gotten him nowhere. "Lottery" is the right word: luck alone determined Buffet's place of birth.

The process of globalization has leveled the playing field a bit and reduced the relative advantage of being born in a rich country. Information and knowledge and physical goods now flow to the poorest corners of the earth. Over the last 50 years, with the rise of free trade and emergence of technologies like the internet, we've seen an extraordinary reduction of poverty. Hundreds of millions of people, mostly in Asia, now live above the poverty line.

But there is still work to be done, of course. Every night, in 2009, over a billion people in the world go to bed hungry. And just because someone isn't ultra-poor, doesn't mean he has the same opportunities or access as someone born in the United States.

So how do we make further progress toward the ideal of all people of the earth starting the race at the same point?

Here's an answer you won't hear from guys like Peter Singer or Jeffrey Sachs: immigration.

Or, to continue the globalization idea: more globalization, though a globalization that includes the free movement of people, not just goods and ideas. The champion of this cause is the economist Michael Clemens.

I recently met Michael at a conference in Miami and witnessed his presentation on migration issues. He began his talk with a moral question: why is it that a guy who happened to be born in the U.S. can do a certain job and get paid more than 300x that of a guy born in Haiti who's doing the exact same job, working equally hard, equally industrious. Why shouldn't the Haitian have the opportunity to move to the U.S. and receive the higher wage? We don't allow discrimination based on the choice-less facts of race or gender -- why do we on place of birth?

He went on to debunk various myths: such as the idea that increased legal or illegal immigration depress U.S. worker wages or that the so-called "brain drain" hurts the countries exporting their people to richer places. In one jaw-dropping slide he showed a chart showing unemployment in the U.S. being inversely correlated with total immigration.

It's a complicated issue, to be sure. While I'm persuaded by the short and long run economic gains of immigration, I have lingering doubts about a country's ability to weave together floods of people from varied backgrounds. I wrote a long review of Samuel Huntington's arguments about the challenges of assimilating immigrants into the national fabric. Clemens, for his part, praises mongrelization and notes we've assimilated immigrants successfully in the past. (Not all agree with even this. Mark Krikorian bizarrely argues that our past experience with immigration is no longer relevant; he says we're a post-immigrant country.)

Here's Will Wilkinson in praise of the "intellectual rigor" of Clemens' work. Here's Jeff Jacoby on why conservatives have it wrong in their outrage over illegal immigration. Here's another Jacoby piece that Lou Dobbs should read. Here's an extremely simple, easy to understand chart that explains how the immigration system works in America. Here's a photo that should convince any foodie to think twice before protesting against immigration.

Bottom Line: Immigration is one of the best anti-poverty solutions. We need to reform immigration policy to make it easier for (non-terrorist, healthy) people to enter the U.S. Hail Michael Clemens' work on this topic.

From Poverty to Prosperity: Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities, and the Lasting Triumph Over Scarcity by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz sketches out "Economics 2.0" -- economic models to understand a world driven by the positive forces of creativity, innovation, and advancing technology. A theme that runs throughout is the centrality of entrepreneurship and innovation to economic growth. The authors explore it themselves and via transcript-interviews with several of the most prominent living economists.

This is a book for people interested in economics first, entrepreneurship second, and globalization third. It's a book for people looking for contemporary insight on the ideas of people like Hayek, Drucker, Schumpter, and Smith.

Entrepreneurship still gets short shrift in economics textbooks. I recently flipped through an international economics textbook and looked up the word "entrepreneur" in the index. It appeared three times in a 300 page book. On each page, it was referenced only in passing and the one definition of "entrepreneur" read: "Someone who takes risks and makes decisions." Yikes.

Also, besides the entrepreneurship theme, Kling and Schulz discuss Masonomics principles such as "Markets fail, use markets" (instead of "Markets fail, use government").

For more academic / economic readers who can mine insights from interviews (ie, it's not spoon-fed in bullet points), this is a great read. Here were my favorite bits:

Robert Solow: "It is far from obvious to me that the way to foster competition is to leave the private sector alone. The private sector does not much like competition; it has its own ways of creating monopoly power, restricting access to wealth (and therefore to political rights), and preserving vested interests. It is no easy matter for a society to get the benefits of competition without the disadvantages of oligarchy, and there is no reason to believe that laissez-faire will do the trick."

Paul Romer: "Everyone wants growth but nobody wants change. You've got to have both or you've got to have neither."

Paul Romer on American culture: "It's the kind of culture that can tolerate rap music and extreme sports that can also create space for guys like Page and Brin and Google."

Arnold and Nick: "The three ideal elements of a prosperous society would be self-reliant families, effective institutions of civil society, including business firms; and good government. These elements are more likely to be present together than individually, because they are mutually reinforcing."

Douglass North: "The natural state is a mixture of mutually interdependent economic and political interests that reinforce each other. The economic interests are the elites that produce economic activity. But they tend to support political groups that in turn will protect them from too much competition. The interplay is the elites in the political world protecting the economic elites from too much competition and giving them monopolies, while on the other hand the economic elites provide the funds that support the political elites."

Amar Bhide on what a government can do to promote entrepreneurship: make the basic governmental functions work. Property rights, provision of roads, water, electricity. (BC: Simple, but so true. Screw incentives, tax breaks, etc. Just do the basics.)

William Lewis: Education level of the labor force isn't as important to the overall economic performance of a nation as commonly thought. Processes, culture, etc can be imparted even on uneducated people. One example showed that uneducated people in the U.S. did a task four times as fast as people in Sao Paolo of the same level of education people.

This week I witnessed two presentations by New York University professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a noted political scientist and futurist. His latest book is called The Predictioneer's Game and claims to use complex game theory to predict political and economic events. He claims his predictions have been 90% accurate, which is why the CIA and others pay close attention to them. He never told us exactly how his models work, except to say several times that they are "very complex."

As he spoke about the world and proffered future events -- Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon, Colombia and Venezuela will not go to war -- it was clear that Mesquita is a smart man who knows a great deal about international politics. He also is a talented public speaker.

Yet something bothered me. During his talk my buddy Justin Rockefeller (also in the room) texted me, "What do you think?" I replied, "Entertaining but I'm deeply skeptical. Nassim Taleb would have a field day." He replied, "Yep."

In Fooled by Randomness, Taleb talks about "why human beings are so prone to mistake dumb luck for consummate skill." The idea of survivorship bias figures prominently in Taleb's work. If I play the lottery 100 times, and I win every time, this doesn't necessarily mean I've developed the skill to regularly win the lottery. Someone has to win. We ignore those who lose.

Mesquita wasted no breath acknowledging the improbability of developing a mathematical model that reliably predicts world events. He offered no qualifications on how much of his success might be due to luck and randomness. Instead, he dished predictions with breathtaking arrogance and certainty, returning again and again to his 90% success rate. He never once elucidated how this 90% number got calculated (I predict Hugo Chavez will die, eventually) despite it being the source of his credibility.

It took only a few minutes of Googling to find long, detailed criticisms of Mesquita. You'd think such a body of criticisms would temper his certitude. No sirree.

Surprisingly, people in the room seemed taken by Mesquita. He had spot-on observations, to be sure, about the selfishness of Mother Theresa or the self-interest of the Iranian regime. But why didn't more people eye his prediction schemes with skepticism?

Charisma, for one. He was entertaining. We are so often bored by speakers that anyone who can dance a gig on stage gets a vote for "keeping us awake." I hear that. But it is a dangerous heuristic -- equating entertainment with substance.

He wasn't just charismatic; he was an "expert." In general, people are too deferential to experts who make predictions inasmuch as experts sometimes do no better than laypeople at predicting. In particular, people are too deferential to experts toting fancy credentials (such as a PhD), even if those credentials have little to do with the topic at hand. We should be especially skeptical of experts who feel a need to remind us again and again of their expertise, as Mequita did.

Look, Mequita is more than qualified to riff on current affairs and the state of the world. He has written a dozen plus books on international politics and economics and he is more knowledgeable than me on most of the issues he discussed. But it's unimpressive to commentate under the vague guise of "complex game theory." Do analysis and make assertions as an informed pundit, like everyone else, not some mathematically gifted prophet whose models only the CIA understands.

Bottom Line: Nassim Taleb's popularity notwithstanding, there are still intellectuals who take their knowledge too seriously, confuse luck and randomness with skill and foresight, and pontificate with inappropriate levels of certainty in an uncertain, complex world.

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Seth Roberts takes Elizabeth Kolbert to task for putting faith in scientists over science. Seth writes about "practically all science journalists":

They take the consensus view too seriously. In case after case — so many that it’s hard not to draw sweeping conclusions — the consensus view about difficult topics is more fragile than an outsider would ever guess. It’s not necessarily wrong, just less certain.

Continuing the James Ellroy theme of talented people being obsessed, here's writer Cormac McCarthy in a rare interview with the WSJ:

I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

The pointer is from Roger Ebert's very interesting Twitter feed. Elsewhere in the interview McCarthy explains why he doesn't travel.

Of course, most Americans are not working on activities that drive them to suicide. The average American spent nearly five hours a day watching television in last year's TV season. It's the highest ever -- up 20% from 10 years ago.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a marvel of a memoir: a remarkable story of a materially impoverished yet highly intellectual family, told in the humane and empathetic voice of one of the daughters, Jeannette.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who loved it: more than 2.5 million copies are in print, the book spent over 100 weeks on the NYT Bestseller List, and it has 1,330 mostly five-star customer reviews on Amazon.com to boot.

Here's the description:

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict." Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.

Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town -- and the family -- Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.

What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

It will resonate with different types of people: those who were raised in poverty, those who feel at once very angry and very grateful about their parents, or simply those who can appreciate good writing and feel grateful anew for their favorable number in the ovarian lottery (that's me). I highly recommend it.

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Here's Laura Miller on a new book on the history of memoirs. It touches on the two questions I always ask myself when reading memoirs: Is it true? How much does truthfulness matter?

Benjamin Kunkel three years ago wrote about memoirists. He says the motto of the typical contemporary memoirist is: "I survived that. Unwittingly, I had earned a Ph.D. in survival."

Over the last ten years my interest in sports has shifted away from closely following teams and players and towards:

1) maintaining cultural literacy and facilitating social bonding by understanding the basics of the most popular sports and the most important facts associated with them (e.g. who Lebron James is or which teams are in the NFL Superbowl).

2) following how sports generally affects culture and the economy. What's the economic impact on a country when its team wins the World Cup?

3) using the rich examples in sports to learn about widely-relevant ideas.

#3 is most important to me. For example, I'd rather read about how Baron Davis manages side projects than follow the Warriors' specific wins and loses. Other examples:

• One way to think about the general idea of whether you'd want to be universally loved or loved and hated to a greater degree is to compare Kobe Bryant and Steve Nash.
• One way to think about the general idea of how superstar contributors affect group dynamics is by pondering Barry Bonds' impact on the Giants.
• You can discover the power of framing by reading about the non-differences between dog fighting and the NFL.

General ideas found in sports are served up regularly by some excellent sports journalists whose writing you can admire even if you can't keep up with all the details. Frank Deford has interesting things to say on NPR. Gregg Easterbrook mixes smart commentary on sports with nuggets on economics and finance. Even if Rick Reilly is past his prime, he's wise and still finds inspirational stories.

But the most famous sports writer of today is Bill Simmons, who writes for ESPN.com. Here's a quick take on Bill Simmons' new book with this interesting nugget:

Mr. Simmons may be the first sports writer to see the games purely from the view of the fan — and a very modern, unsentimental fan at that. As Mr. Simmons sees it, his job is not to get into the heads of the players, but into the heads of his readers.

Tyler Cowen says, "Bill James and Bill Simmons are two of the greatest living social scientists. Seriously."

Bottom Line: Even if you're not a hard core sports fan there are still good general lessons to be taken from the sports world and excellent writers, such as Bill Simmons, who can deliver them to us.

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If you want to experience the fascinating and under-researched phenomenon of goosebumps caused by an emotional reaction and not cold weather, watch this clip of ESPN highlights from the past 100 years. One word: goosebumps.

On his book tour in San Francisco, the noted crime novelist James Ellroy said:

I'm interested in doing very few things. I don't have a cell phone. Don't have a computer. Don't have a TV set. Don't go to movies. Don't read. I ignore the world so I might live obsessively.

This seems to be the case among many mega-successful people. They are obsessed with their talent. They can do little else, even if they've already hit it big. You see it a lot in writers like Ellroy. The very best entrepreneurs seem to be this way, as well. Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal, can't get off the saddle, even after making lots of money. He's now famously a workaholic at Slide.

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Here's how James Ellroy began a recent public appearance:

Good evening peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. I'm James Ellroy, the demon dog, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I'm the author of 16 books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. These books will leave you reamed, steamed and drycleaned, tie-dyed, swept to the side, true-blued, tattooed and bah fongooed. These are books for the whole fuckin' family, if the name of your family is the Manson Family.

1.

America was a start-up created by a dozen or so entrepreneurial people who were rebelling against an aristocratic, overbearing empire. They were scrappy, quick on their feet, smart, hard working as hell, and (mostly) open-minded to whoever could help their improbable cause. Kind of like Silicon Valley start-ups. Except for America's founders the stakes were higher and urgency greater.

When George Washington became the first president of the United States, he rejected regal titles like "His Majesty," taken from the British tradition. Instead he made sure "the titles and trappings were suitably republican and never emulated European royal courts." He said he was to be called "Mr. President."

I believe this relaxation of formalities is a component of Americanism. I'll call it an ethos of casualness. Europe's different. EU passports, for example, list your degrees (Dr., PhD, etc). Or when introducing someone's biography at a European business conference you start with his titles and degrees. I remember the senior journalist Martin Wolf being introduced at the St. Gallen Symposium as first a graduate of LSE, followed by his professional accomplishments. In a start-up environment, by contrast, you don't have time to flatter the status sensibilities of everyone in the room.

To be sure, although America has let go of the Victorian era more than Europe on the whole, there are exceptions. "I don't understand you Americans: you wear jeans to the opera but insist on wearing clothes at the beach." I.e., Europeans are more casual about nudity.

2.

I like casualness. It maximizes commonality instead of difference. When everyone's name appears the same way on a passport, what they have in common -- a name and citizenship -- is the focus. If jeans and t-shirt are the attire guidelines, everyone can comply; if Italian suits are the standard, not as much. In this way casualness emphasizes similarity by focusing on a common denominator.

3.

My upbringing stressed casualness and affected the way I think.

First, I grew up in the most casual part of America. There's only one restaurant on the entire west coast which requires men to wear coats. New York City, by contrast, has 13 such restaurants. Clothes are just one part of this, but they stand for a lot: in California you might well see Sergey Brin or Steve Jobs wearing jeans at a nice restaurant, as I have, but you would never see Henry Kravis doing the same in New York. California's billionaires blend in.

Second, at my high school we addressed all of the teachers, including the head of school, by their first name. Several teachers had advanced degrees -- we still addressed them orally and in writing by their first name. Head of School, janitor, Chair of Science department, freshman student, security guard: Mike, Jason, Nancy, Jim, Kevin. There also was no dress code. I wore sweat pants to school many days and sometimes my teachers did the same.

Third, I had little interaction with the institutions that usually prize formality. People with religious upbringings get steeped in hierarchies, traditions, protocols, history. Not me. I also had little interaction with high culture (cuisine, fashion, or the arts).

The ethos of casualness came from my country, city, school, family and it's had an impact on how I think. It could explain why I'm skeptical of certain formalities. When someone dresses fancily, I sooner suspect he is trying to signal wealth than that he actually likes the clothes. I harbor related skepticism of people who talk about how much they love sushi or fine art.

As I've gotten older I have begun to selectively emphasize formality (and thus difference) in certain dimensions, such as use of language. But these are the selective overlays on a casual base.

Bottom Line: The ethos of casualness is a component of Americanism. Casualness maximizes similarities over differences. I am a product of this culture -- I prefer casualness and I harbor skepticism of certain formalities.

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Last year I wrote about how weak a hold institutional categories have on my identity, and excerpted widely from an excellent essay titled Identity is That Which is Given.