I have frequently pointed out, on this blog, that Iyers must be distinguished from Iyengars, and must be granted not just Backward but Mentally fucking Retarded Status. So far, I have confined my attacks on Iyengars to people like Amiya Srinivasan. But Balaji is yet stupider. I know he may turn out to be an Iyer. But why is the fellow trying to act all smart? Unless he is a swindler, it is due to Iyengar influence simply.
To clarify matters, for Smartas- but using Aumann's vocabulary- the following should get you up to speed-
where uncorrelated asymmetries give rise to bourgeois strategies, you get ownership and the possibility of run-away growth without rent dissipation. It doesn't matter if the uncorrelated asymmetry arises by Lockean labor- i.e. mingling physical effort with physical resources- or by purchase or inheritance or anything else. All that matters is that the 'oikeiosis'- i.e. appropriable control rights- remain the same. Where this does not happen- i.e. where the 'founder' had different rights to the 'successor'- there will be qualitatively different results.
Hindus know that 'Mitakshara' regimes did better than 'Dayabhaga' because control rights were less contested. That's why Hindu India chose Democracy and a common (save for Muslims) Civil Code of an atomistic type. But, even before, our Hindu Joint Family laws helped us greatly- if we were rich. This continues to be the case. Jinnah- like Timur Kuran- pointed to this 'mechanism design' aspect long ago.
Where appropriable control rights get diluted, Rent dissipation due to contestation is likely. However, this is also true where such rights change though the 'owner' remains the same. Thus a bureaucracy whose control rights change may become more or less effective though its Weberian charismatic founder continues to helm it.
Balaji has a silly post based wholly on foolish memes where he argues the reverse.The East Coast of the United States is about inheritance.
No. It is about how being an immigration entrepot causes higher land prices which in turn creates a Finance industry which in turn funds a 'go West young man' culture.
That means inherited wealth, like the Du Ponts, Forbes, and Mellon families.
No. Higher land prices meant concentration on higher value adding manufacturing and services- which last means sophisticated Judicial and Financial Institutions gaining focality. There is lower Agent Principal hazard in such areas than in managing a plantation or coal mine or ranch because auditors don't need to have guns and knives to protect themselves while they do their job. This means that the divorce between Ownership and Control- absent high compliance burdens and soak the rich tax laws- is less bleak. Wealth is more heritable because Control rights are effective and delegable in an efficient manner. Another way to put this is to say that there is a juristic culture and social norms favorable to incomplete contract enforcement.
It means inherited names, like Kennedy, Bush, and Clinton.
Where the fuck does this guy think George Bush or Bill Clinton came from? Even the Kennedys were second generation- when they were anything.
But most of all it means inherited institutions, like the media corporations of New York and the government bodies of Washington, DC.
This is crazy. Washington is in the East coz that's where America started from. I suppose this guy thinks Australia is a Borough of Manhattan. Murdoch grew up in the Bronx.
Why call them inherited institutions? Well, the related term legacy institution is in common parlance, and a legacy is a synonym for an inheritance. But the nomenclature is useful because it focuses attention not simply on the age of these institutions (which are indeed old) but on the manner in which they select a new leader: through inheritance.
Very true. Kamala Harris inherited Vice Presidency from her mum- Walter Mondale.
BTW, this cunt made a lot of money out of a bio-tech startup. Did it do anything for COVID? No. This Madoff wannabe is concentrating on crypto. But Iyers will always be around to slap the cunt down. We're a caste of external auditors- which is why Pyrrhonism was invented in India and imported from there into Greece.
One way to inherit an institution is to pass it from parent to child, along with the fortune. That's the model that the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Company still follow, where the Murdochs and Sulzbergers named their successors from within the family.
These things aren't institutions. They are enterprises. Still, Balaji is right to say that Biden inherited his office from his grandmother- Ronald Reagan.
A more subtle way to inherit an institution is to win an election.
In the same sense that a more subtle way to win an election is to inherit an institution. Trump is right. Biden didn't get elected. He inherited power coz the ghost of Ronald Reagan rose up and went searching for her heir. Biden is the 'chosen one' for in each generation a Vampire Slayer will arise who shall inherit the Oval Office by appearing, in a subtle way, to win an election.
Now, of course someone who attains political office through this route isn't always a familial heir, though it's more common than you might think. But when they inherit a seat they have inherited something they could never have built from scratch.
Unless, as is more likely, they actually helped Dad and Uncle build it from scratch the way Dad and Uncle helped Grandad build shit from scratch and so on and so forth.
In that sense they are a political heir. After all, most folks who assume political office in the modern US do not have the skills to organize anything like the Federal Reserve or the US Military from scratch, unlike George Washington or Alexander Hamilton.
Balaji is showing how deeply Amrikan he is by piously worshipping the Founding Fathers. Tell me Balaji, did George Washington have six heads like Lord Murugan or ten heads like Ravana?
Their primary skill is getting elected, which is more like becoming popular on Twitter than creating Twitter. The banks they bail out are too big to fail, and the shoes they inherit are too big to fill.
No. Their primary skill was getting funded just as Twitter's primary skill was getting better funded than its alternatives.
A bank that is 'too big too fail' is still likely to see considerable change in its appropriable and residuary control rights. Shoes that are too big to fill don't have to be worn. Balaji, poor chap, may not know this. Do yourself a favor, dude. Throw away your granny's platform shoes and go buy yourself a pair of snug fitting Nikes.
Read-Only Culture
When an heir inherits an institution, it's like inheriting a factory. During normal times the factory continues to operate, the widgets keep coming out, and the career managers appointed by the original founder appear to have everything in hand. Nothing seems amiss. But something important has been silently lost, which is the founder's ability to invent the institution from scratch – or reinvent it in the face of a crisis, like COVID-19. We can also think of this as read-only culture, the ability to repeat what an ancestor has handed down – but not recreate it from first principles.
This is silly. Factories grow or duplicate themselves just as Institutions grow and branch out. The Institutional memory associated with this growth is the same as that associated with foundation. Only when entire product lines go extinct is there a risk of Institutional memory loss- as happened with some Nuclear ICBM production after SALT.
Read-only culture is similar to partial bilingualism: the ability to understand a language, but not speak or write it, a phenomenon which is common among children of immigrants. If children can't write the scripts of their parents, if their access to ancestral culture is read-only, then that culture won't be replicated.
If it is intrinsically shit- sure. Otherwise, plenty of 'read only' cultures revived spectacularly over the course of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. Balaji is talking bollocksji.
This is a microeconomic explanation for how Idiocracy happens slowly. People think the cultural capacity remains because the artifacts surround them...but the culture producers are actually slowly vanishing, and their descendants can only repeat, not create.
But this microeconomic explanation hinges on there being a monopoly- or at least no free entry into the market. Provided there is entry, then the cultural capacity persists. Right at this moment, if Tamil Nadu gets very very rich, then peeps like me and Balaji will find it pays us to alter our 'read only' Tamil status to 'read and write and pod-fucking-cast' Tamil like crazy.
It's the difference between stock and flow.
So there is no actual difference. Balaji is saying 'Read only' peeps are like inventory or shop display models. Bureaucratic drones can always be turned into white-hot innovators at the toggle of a switch.
If new books aren't being written in a language, if the new owners of a factory don't understand manufacturing, the flow has been cut off.
Just as if new cats don't say miaow and chase mice they won't be cats. OMG! Pussy just said woof woof! This proves Balaji isn't a cretin.
The culture that surrounds us is then just the stock, and it's being depleted without anyone to replenish it.
Very true! If we eat all the food in the fridge, Mummy won't be able to replenish it coz....oh. Mummy goes to the grocery store and buys stuff. I didn't know that. I thought she was having it off with the check-out girl. Boy do I feel bad for calling her a lipstick lesbian!
What this suggests is that the civilizational equivalent of being able to code from scratch is more important than realized. It's not enough to simply push a button; we need to be able to build from scratch simply to continue as a civilization, else maintenance – let alone innovation – is impossible.
Join the boy scouts. Learn how to rub two flints together to make fire. Also get reamed by the Scout Master. Paideia was founded on pederasty as the 'Lysis' shows.
Now, it might seem like a high bar to ask for the kind of leader who is capable of organizing the Federal Reserve or US Military from scratch.
Fuck off! Even I'd do a better job of it. Mechanism design is easy. Actually dealing with hold out problems is very very fucking expensive and emotionally draining.
But such people walk the earth. Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin and Vitalik Buterin created Ethereum, developments that in the fullness of time will be seen as on par with what Alexander Hamilton accomplished.
No they won't.
As for the US Military, as the saying goes: amateurs talk strategy and professionals talk logistics.
Why stop there? Why not admit that amateurs do logistics as well. Professionals slit throats.
And the logistics network built by Jeff Bezos in just a few short decades is more sophisticated than the supply chains of many past and present militaries.
No. It is much much simpler, much much more fragile, and depends wholly on external contract enforcement. The the thing could collapse tomorrow without a shot being fired.
That's what the West Coast of the United States was about: founding.
No. It was about the Spanish being displaced by trigger happy racists.
We use the past tense because technology is now quickly decentralizing away from the West Coast. But in the same way we refer to the Greco-Roman origins of Western civilization, we can refer to the West Coast origins[1] of the technology founder, while recognizing that the concept and its correlates have now spread to virtually every country in the world.
So, we can talk worthless bull-shit even though everybody knows Greece and Rome had turned into shit-holes ruled either by crazy Popes or crazy Turks long long ago. It was London and Paris and Amsterdam that exported Western Civilization back to Greece and Rome.
Much as the East Coast spread its older, institutional ideology around the world through mechanisms like the Columbia School of Journalism and Kennedy School of Government.
Both were and are shit.
Heirs Failed, Founders Succeeded
That older, institutional ideology is now failing. Over the course of 2020, public health failed, public schools failed, fire departments failed, and police departments failed. National, state, and local governments failed.
Fuck off. They are still around, larger than life and twice as ugly. Where people failed to protect themselves, their elected Governments too failed. But Taiwan and Japan show that where people are smart, their Governments too will be smart.
Media corporations failed and even the US military failed.
No. If a bunch of guys still get paid big bucks despite fucking up, they haven't failed. They have succeeded in cornering a market. The best monopoly profit is a quiet life and taking a year to design a face mask and so forth.
The EU did very badly on vaccine procurement. But it did get it cheaper. This does not mean the EU will break up. It means its members are fucked for forever and forever because EU governance aint incentive compatible. To make it so, Nation States have to fail. But, their instinct is to hang on by their finger nails.
Just about every Western institution run by a political heir failed, because it was presented with the unanticipated shock of COVID-19.
Any country which didn't do social distancing fucked up. Modi isn't an 'heir'. But he comes from a country where we'd all convinced ourselves we were immune coz the virus would simply find Indian conditions too hostile. It would get beaten up by all the indigenous viruses. Sad.
The widgets these heirs' factories were cranking out were no longer suited for the occasion. And their failure has caused a crisis of faith in American institutions specifically, and in the postwar order more broadly.
Perhaps. Let us hope not. Why? The alternative to public institutions which are shit are public institutions which get to kill off and cannibalize private institutions which aren't utterly shit. This may be done by creating an ever more crushing tax and compliance burden. Or it may be done even more brutally.
Where heirs failed, founders succeeded. The internet stayed up.
But it could be taken over. China has shown the way.
The state couldn't deliver checks, but Amazon could deliver packages.
& China could get people into re-education camps. Look what's happened to Jack Ma. Is this really such a great time to be saying 'founders rule'? If only they can get stuff done, then let's Nationalize them. Impose a huge financial penalty on them for anti-competitive practices and get them bowing and scraping to public officials for fear of being sent to our equivalent of Xi's re-education centers.
The legacy universities were closed but the MOOC platforms were open.
But MOOCs have done a terrible job of protecting vulnerable students. I was repeatedly sexually and racially harassed when doing my on-line degree at Pornhub University. Ultimately, mummy forced me to quit my studies because she feared I would go completely blind.
The restaurants were shuttered by the state but the delivery apps were shipping.
So were non app delivery systems. Arguably, reliance on apps rather than local authority based initiatives would have delivered a better outcome. If we saw the State and the local community was delivering our necessities, we'd have accepted that there really was a grave existential threat.
The media corporations reported that the virus was at best a remote threat while the tech companies prepared for remote work.
The media had to follow social media in telling us what we wanted to hear.
And the billions spent on military biodefense didn't do much, but the millions invested in Moderna did.
Moderna is East Coast. It partnered with Astra-Zeneca which is old world, old money.
In other words, the alternative to the East Coast model of simply inheriting institutions has been beta-tested on the West Coast for the last 25 years, and founders took over many of the functions of running American society while the East Coast floundered.
Fuck off. Google's little sister- Verily- floundered. We here in Britain- who are as un-West fucking Coast as you can get- more particularly with Bo-Jo as our Kaiser- did better than Veri-fucking-stupid-ly
Many of the functions – except those still heavily run or regulated by the state, like education, healthcare, police, fire, the management of the economy, and the physical control of a deadly disease.
What happened to this sentence? I don't know. Probably, Balaji- as a 'Founder', not an 'heir', decided to orphan it.
Now, founding writ large certainly helped in some of those areas, particularly in the form of new biotech companies that created diagnostics and vaccines.
Name one thing founded after COVID which has helped fight it. Audrey Tan in Taiwan? But they were brought in by political heirs.
Balaji is just pulling this shit out of his arse. Bill Gates founded something sho nuff as did Musk and Theil etc. But none have played a blinder of a decisive type. Political heirs- in places where peeps be smart- have shown that raw death rates can go down without negative growth during these difficult times. But that's just another way to say that when a group of peeps be smart, then collective decision making be smart coz you have Muth rationality reinforcing Aumann public signalling.
But for the most part these regulated functions are not something that can be tackled by a typical startup. You need to be the mayor of a city, or the head of a state.
You could be Narendra fucking Modi but, if your peeps believe the Wuhan virus is getting the shit kicked out of it by desi anti-bodies, sooner or later you too have to go with the flow. Why? Because a democratic leader is an Agent, not a Principal. The Bhagvad, not the Vyadha, Gita applies.
Which leads to the question: how do we go about founding alternatives to the ultimate inherited institutions, namely cities and states?
ISIS. That's how. Join a Militia now.
The West Coast Forked the East to Found
One clue comes from the fact that many of the most prominent people on the West Coast sought it out as an alternative to the culture of the East.
Very true. They got tired of the Puritanical, Christian, refusal to enslave Blacks or kill Indians and Mexicans and grab their land. So they invested in guns and ammo so as to go West to participate in a culture of ethnic cleansing and getting drunk and fucking whores.
For example, it's not a coincidence that both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to go West and become tech founders.
It is no coincidence because Zuckerberg was influenced by Gates's decision. Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to go to New Mexico to work with MITS. But then lots of people in that field from all over the world moved to the Muth rational expectation of where the relevant 'Marshallian industrial district' might be.
They are atypical in many other respects, but not this one. Many tech founders and investors would in another life have become (or remained) professors, jurists, or journalists.
Or gone to jail for fraud.
This set includes Paul Graham, Larry Page, Peter Thiel, Mike Moritz, Diane Greene, Daphne Koller, Andrew Ng, and many more.
None of whom have done shit re. COVID.
These people had the intellectual horsepower to compete with the best of the East.
Horseshit vs Bullshit. Hmm... Which will prevail?
Yet they chose to found something rather than inherit it. And that's how tech became a cultural fork of the East Coast. It's the same root but different branches, like the United States and the United Kingdom.
Balaji, you fucking cretin, 1776 represented a 'fork' such that your and my ancestral South India (and maybe Bengal) were supposed to make up for the loss of the 13 Colonies. For a time, that's exactly what happened. Then... not so much.
One reason that tech forked is that computer science collapsed the distinction between the word and the deed,
Fuck off. Balaji, your ancestors, like mine, understood very well that 'words' admissible under 'juristic protocols' were indeed deeds. The reason us guys were attracted to 'software' is coz we knew 'machine languages' would be done in Japan and Taiwan and places where mathematical Economists were less shite.
and turned a generation of intellectuals into software CEOs.
Fuck off! None of these guys were intellectuals. Some could teach a technical subject. Most could not.
Another is that top professors and tech CEOs both tend to feel deeply that they should be in charge – and the low cost of registering a domain name gave every professor the opportunity to show just how "easy" it was to be a tech CEO, converting many of them into capitalists as part of the experience.
The same may be said of prostitutes and guys who want to be rewarded for cramming larger and harder vegetables into their rectums.
That was arguably the key to it all: that founding something became possible at relatively low cost.[2] And it is now possible to found a community, a company, or even a currency from your laptop.
As opposed to founding it with just a piece of paper on which your wrote with pen and ink.
The next step is to make it possible to found new cities and new countries, rather than simply inherit them. And for that we will need some new ideas.
ISIS and Boko Haram have such ideas. So do Militias which envisioning carving out Red State enclaves in Blue States.
Balaji has shit inside his brains. So does 'Marginal Revolution'. But, from the Indian point of view, that's a good thing. China must rise. America must fall. Why? American stupidity aint something you can just laugh at guiltlessly any more. Why? Your smart cousins wot got Greencards there thirty years ago might run back home. That would be inconvenient, coz u assured Granny that they were all totally gay. Their kids were adopted or grown in test tubes. You are gonna look pretty stupid when these guys all come flooding back and your ancestral home is filled with the moans and rhythmic rocking of purely heterosexual intercourse.
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