Are our Angels less Better?

The Economist opened its first leader article this week by noting that about 750,000 people died in wars in the period from 2021-2024, marking a significant acceleration from the 1990s-2010s (note that the 1994 spike reflects the genocide of Tutsis by Hutu in Rwanda).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts-by-type?time=earliest..2024

Excluding Rwanda, the world experienced a period of great calm between the fall of the Iron Curtain and the accession of the era of global populist strongmen, first Putin then all of his imitators, including most obviously Trump. Hegseth's fetishistic embrace of war and lethality does not prophesy anything better. This marks a retreat from the key metric proposed by Stephen Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature, that the decline in the incidence of death at the hands of another (he looped in homicide rates -- also improved over long time scales) was a core marker of societal progress. 

The rise in battle deaths and also coincides with the rise in power of the new strategic powers, the megatech companies within whose platforms (Blogspot for instance is part of Google) we live so much of our lives. It's probably worth reflecting on the extent to which the rise in arm conflict is facilitated by, correlated with and -- dare I suggest it -- marginally caused by the rise of these new strategic powers centers of what Ian Bremmer has termed our Technopolar world. Certainly since they have no dog in intra- and inter-state armed conflicts, they don't harm the hyperscalers. 

It's too late in the day for me to draw this line of thinking out too far. Ponder it.

Processing speed

Sunday has evolved into doubles day for our merry little clan, where Adam, Patrick and I host a rotating cast of neerdowells for our yuckfest of on-court fuckupery. Yesterday we got Seth, who along with Patrick made me and Adam look slightly silly.

Many years ago Graham got a neuropsych evaluation through TEACH, the pioneering autism research and treatment organization of which Victor Zinn had been a founder. Graham's results came back high and very high in a bunch of categories, but on the low end for "processing speed." As with many of his traits, I'm pretty sure this came from me. I've never been good at certain things. I remember having a hard time at Phillips when guys would stand around in circles telling circles and trading witticisms. Chris George and Crabill were on fire, but I'd be on the edge and something would come to me but I wouldn't be able to get it in. Or I'd wait and jam it in somewhere when there was a nanosecond of free air but the whole flow had moved on and the guys would look at me funny. Organized basketball, especially with a ref, was the same thing: the patterns would emerge too quickly and I could never really consistently anticipate what was going to happen next. Doubles feels the same. It happens so fast sometimes I can't get get my arms around it.

Soccer and singles are different. For the most part fewer things can happen, and the rhythms that emerge are pretty rule-bound. They suit me better than basketball and doubles.

No doubt I could overcome this with more practice and/or with going to clinics or even watching more YouTube videos about doubles strategy. But there are problems with all of those things, mostly related to efficiency and the limitations of the whole 24/7 thing. Who has time for all that when a hungry blog cries out in hunger?

A continuation

Just as I was firing up the old blog, I heard voices inside. Graham came home to sleep last night, after he and his housemates moved from last year's rental to this year's one, which is about a half a mile closer in to campus from last year's as the crow flies. It's actually quite close to where David Hall and I lived in 1989-90, when Marvin actually took up residence on the enclosed sun porch for a little while. That was fun.

In thinking about yesterday's theme of altering one's look for pragmatic reasons, having one's ego/presentation blunted as it were by the demands of others, it occurred to me that part of such pragmatic thinking and practice is that it is a component of thinking quite of quite specific others: one's family. Which is to say spouse and children. I wore a suit and tie for years to maximize my ability to earn money and I still kind of do. If I go to a wedding, funeral, church service, fundraiser, meeting with a prospect or client, whatever it is, I actively dial back ego and fall into compliance with broader norms, and partially it's to optimize my chances of getting revenue somewhere down the line or perhaps of calling up and asking someone if they might do an informational interview with one child or another. I've been doing a lot of that recently for Graham.

And in some sense even in our adolescence we were doing that when seeking out mates. Again, we were in training. Marxists would say that we were "reproducing the social means of production," or something like that. And they would not be wrong.

When I was at Yale it was the second or third inning of broad social acceptance of gay people and lots of people were out or experimenting with same-sex relationships. Straight people were sometimes referred to as breeders. I began to semi-ironically refer to myself as a "breeder" when talking to gay people. It was a good line.

Dressing for others

As Graham transitions from studenthood towards straight up adulting, I ponder what is the right cadence and pressure level at which to deliver messages to him about the transition. At times I am tempted to suggest that he think of every time he leaves the house to be a potential job interview. Not that he should put on a oxford shirt and khakis and real shoes, but maybe to dial back on the old t-shirts and gym shorts in favor of cargo shorts and short sleeve shirt just in case he runs into somebody who might be a potential employer. 

I know I had to think like that for a while in my career. Not really dress up but not wear my absolute worst shorts to the grocery store in case I ran into a client or prospect. I am past that now but it took a while.

Then there's the issue of the ladies. What if you're at the library or a cafe or wherever you want to look not bad because... In some ways the fact that we were almost always seeking mates when we weren't in couples back in the day prepared us for later in life, when we had to figure out where to array ourselves vis-a-vis corporate norms to earn a living.  

A precious few rock and rollers and other artist types got to say fuck it all and just do whatever and we always idolized them for their freedom.

Does this do violence to our individuality and self-expression, as has been a theme of lots of cultural production down through the years? Yeah, maybe. But then again, that's life.

How it should work

I am still very much in the adjustment phase of getting up and getting to the office by 9, or 9ish, technically. And, frankly, to having someone in my office when I get there. The former is largely a burden though I see the benefits, the latter almost entirely a joy, though some facets of my productivity suffer a little. For instance, my blog.

A few weeks before at the spring musical extravaganza of the Prime Time Players, my mom's theater troupe, at intermission time a guy came up to me. It was Henry (not his actual name), a Chinese friend of one of our former partners who is a biotech entrepreneur but also an avid ping pong player (though he might prefer I call it table tennis). There's a lot of this sport played at the Seymour Center by people of a wide variety of ethnicities. In the my first summer of work for Red Reef Advisors, the partner informed my that we were going to bring in Henry's son Ted (a Duke student) as an intern. Not being used to having interns, I wasn't altogether delighted by this but what was I gonna do?

So Ted came in most days and sat with me at the office, and as I was doing stuff I explained to him what I was doing, and in the course of so doing he got a solid basic grounding in a lot of principles of finance. Asset allocation and location. The difference between capital gains and ordinary income tax. The logic of tax deferral in a person's lifetime earning's arc. These are the kinds of things that come up quickly. Turned out the kid learned a lot and found the internship valuable.

Flash back to the Seymour Center. Henry, who was playing ping pong, comes up to me and says hello and tells me he has some financial questions. "I have a financial advisor, but I'd like to call you to discuss some issues." I gave him my card.

This is how things are supposed to work. Maybe he'll be a client soon.

The Lack of Light

On my birthday a month and change back this 2022 novel (English translation 2025) by Nino Haratischwili arrived wrapped under my birthday tree. Apparently it had been on my Amazon list, where it likely landed after being on the Economist list of best books of the year or something like that. Honestly I don't remember. 

Clocking in at 700 pages and change, one of its many cover blurbs likens it to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series. Honestly that may be a stretch, but it was still quite solid. 

The Lack of Light chronicles the trajectory of post-Soviet Georgia and Tbilisi through the prism of four female friends who grew up around one apartment building and its courtyard. In my mind's eye it's a Stalinka, a sturdy building from around WWII but before the dawn of the shoddy neo-modernist buildings which sprouted all over Eastern Europe like shitty quadrangular mushrooms from the 60s forward.

There's a lot of drama around civil war, love, internecine gang wars in which the four protagonists' brothers are engaged, art etc. It's solid and worth reading, if ultimately as much Oprah as Ferrante. Sadly, there are no really compelling description of khachapuri or other delicious Georgian foods. Good enough that I may check out the author's other books, but I won't sprint out and grab them.

Leaning in to AI

The invited speaker at Graham's UNC Econ graduation did a great job. He himself was a UNC Econ grad who had gone on to be successful in business and he looked and fit the part. Short haircut, affable, confident. He kept it short and sweet, with three basic points. One of them was about presentations (tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell it to them, then conclude by telling them again). Sad but true.

Point 2 was that AI's gonna be big so the grads should lean in to it. On the one hand, it's hard to argue that. I keep meaning to do it. But I already have so much to do and so much that's not getting done. My blog for instance. Books to read. People to talk to, esp phone calls that don't get made. Tennis lessons I should be taking. Exercises I should be doing to strengthen my aging body. Little crap that needs to get done around the hose. So I never do it.

Should Graham (and Natalie)? Well yes, kind of, maybe. But part of me believes that the whole world is going to be leaning in to AI and maybe we should be leaning in to people to counterbalance all that AI leaning. People are what we should ultimately be caring about. (remember, the planet itself will be here long after we are gone and is more or less indifferent to our presence, on a geological time scale).

I forget what the guy's third point was but remembering 2 of 3 is far from bad.

Power law in the new new economy

As the newest models of AI enable hackers to run more and more effective models against corporate AI at scale with lower headcount and higher possibilities of payout, questions of values and alignment all up and down society become ever more important. People need to believe in what they are doing and there has to be an ethical grounding to their activities for a substantial chunk of the most talented to wish to forego the very largest paydays, work for a salary and pay taxes. The system has to seem to work for a lot of people for us to want to participate.

With Trump continuing to substantially run roughshod over most of government (witness this week's $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" settlement from the IRS) and our corporate titans ever more untethered from reality (witness soon-to-IPO SpaceX's corporate structure which gives unprecedented power to Musk, and even the S&P 500 bending over backwards to revise its rules to include the new IPOs [OpenAI and Anthropic too]), we are not encouraging abidance with rules, norms or values. Raw power is in ascendance.

Something will break, and it won't be pretty.

Some reflections on local fauna

I wonder where we are in the long-predicted bird-pocalypse. Out on the porch in the mornings these days I hear a variety of birdsong.

Some light Googling tells me that the declines in bird populations across America continue. 2.9 billion birds gone since 1970, says the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a loss of 1 bird in 4. I suppose we shouldn't be shocked given that there are a lot more humans and a lot more built environment in which we live. 

So they have less environment in which to live. It sounds bad, but maybe it's not all bad. We have more deer living everywhere, but they're skinny little things and it doesn't look like they're having much fun as they munch through everything they can see.

Interestingly, Mary has been seeing some mink in our yard recently. Given that mink love to eat bunnies and we haven't seen many bunnies this year, Mary has hypothesized that the mink have gobbled up the bunnies and taken over their dens. Good of them to do that away from our curious but squeamish human eyes.

Summer residence

Just now I find myself back out on our screened in porch, looking out at the lake. I posted a picture of it back in April. It looks much the same now. Since the pandemic I have spent as much time out here on the porch as I can during the warmer months. Right now is the key window: we are past peak pollen season (I think! famous last words) but before peak heat.

There's still a tablecloth on the picnic table out here left over from our party we had for Graham's graduation last Saturday. It didn't end up being that many people: 15 or so including family plus a few of Graham's friends plus their family members. But that turned out to be a really nice size, plus the weather was perfect.

In the lead up to the party I had gone out to pick up a couple of bags of ice to throw in the cooler with drinks. My phone rang. It was Mary. "Are you close to the farmer's market, can you pick up flowers?" I had to make a U turn so I gave her a good snarl and let her know what an unthinkable imposition it was. Then I went to the market and bought some really lovely flowers. When I got back home I presented them to her with dulcet tones, "here you are, darling?" and she laughed.

It has been a beautiful thing over the years to get to the point where we can do this: get really snippy with one another in the lead up to parties as we stress out over getting things right, then just drop it all because we know by now that it's all part of our particular petit bourgeois kabuki.

Continued adjustment

I continue to adjust the rhythms of my life to the addition of my new understudy/coworker, Amanda. For example, she gets in at 9 most days, so I have to do the same. She leaves at 2 to meet the school bus and have a WFH afternoon and I want to max out the utility of face time.

Right now there's the additional complication of the fact that D, a neighbor guy who can do almost anything (details to follow) who is renovating our two downstairs bathrooms, which have remained more or less as they were when we moved in to the house in 1978 or so, so in my mind they are just perfect. Mary, however, could not disagree more strongly, and she is at long last basking in the glory of justice. Below is the main hall bathroom, once more for posterity.

So I am trying to get out of the house by 8:30, which takes me back to days of yore. It also gets me in to the office while the breakfasts are still out, offering me an opportunity to harvest food and preserve it for later.

Standing on its own

Just went through Graham's graduation from UNC. A lovely weekend, but one populated with an awful lot of speeches. A few reflections.

First and foremost, there were all too many references, direct and obligue ("we wear the RIGHT shade of blue") to Duke. Defining ones self by comparison to others is an inherently self-denigrating and slovenly thing to do. UNC needs to be who it is and not worry about other institutions. 

Instead of defining ourselves in terms of Duke, we might do better by looking at positive examples of what the university should be. It was telling (and to his credit, I might add) that only one person thought to invoke Dean Smith, Eric Church, the apparently famous country singer who gave the main address at the big ceremony at Kenan Stadium. In three ceremonies (Friday night for the History and other departments, Saturday night the big one, and Sunday morning for Econ students), nobody thought to invoke Frank Porter Graham, Bill Friday, or any other of the university's historic north stars. Big miss.

About Eric Church, he spoke well but I wasn't impressed with his guitar-playing or song-writing. He sang well.

I was very unimpressed by the fact that the university somehow granted only him an honorary degree. Typically it confers five or so of them. He was the only good person or North Carolinian that could be found? It seems there is a defined process for nominating and advancing candidates for degrees. Somehow I tend to doubt that a country singer who has raised some money was the only good candidate who could be found. This looks all too much like the Board of Governors saying to the faculty and the rest of the community: fuck you, we're in charge.

A few words about Lee Roberts, current Chancellor and a Duke grad. He came across as a total stiffy. He said "Go Heels" with all the enthusiasm of the McDonalds CEO biting into that Big Mac. The only time he seemed genuine was when he was introducing Eric Church, whom he noted was "a real North Carolinian," unlike Roberts, who grew up in DC. Roberts does not belong at the helm of a major university.

Herd instinct

Talking to Robert sometime recently, he mentioned some short-term social decision that he "just wanted to do whatever the most people wanted to do," really so as to have a nice time and interact with more people. It occurred to me that that calculus had never been natural to me. 

Similarly my client Martin from a large state university noted that since from the university's perspective the job of professors was to put "butts in seats," from a career perspective it made sense for professors to select mainstream areas of focus within their fields: Shakespeare, Goethe, the American Revolution, macroeconomics, etc, because that would help their departments maintain enrollments and compete successfully for budget. But for the most part young academics want to do something new in their field, to produce distinctive and innovative research, so they're always scouring the corners for some fresh topic or at the very least angle on something familiar. I know that's what I did, though admittedly what I wrote about (Turgenev) was mainstream-adjacent in my field, a top 10 writer if not top 5.

It seems rather obvious that there's a virtue to being close to the core, to the herd. But it runs so very counter to my instincts in all matters except UNC basketball, an even there as some of my friends will tell you I'm not that great a fan.

As Graham steps out into the world teaching him to find ways to at least selectively assimilate to the mainstream will be key. He has at least discovered, as I kind of did back in the day, that sports statistics and knowledge can be a bit of a gateway drug.

Gearing up for graduation

Graham graduates this weekend and we are getting organized for the big event. Actually, there are three events. He came over this evening to try on outfits to go with his cap and gown and I was able to snap this quick preview. 

And now it is time for dinner.

History in the Present

Some months back I had lunch with an older financial planner (yes older than me, imagine that!). Great guy. "I never read the news," he tells me. Reading my surprised expression, he goes on "Well think about it, when was the last time you made a good investment decision based on the news." No argument there.

And yet, I still read the news, not that closely, mind you. At the other extreme I remember guys who used to work at the Mutual Series Fund managed by Michael Price (apparently legendary though I had never heard of him at the time). Price would quiz the young guys at his firm about the details of specific stories from the Journal, stories which may have come out in the second edition of the paper later in the morning. He expected them all to have read the whole thing, including the later edition. Admittedly the guy has largely faded from memory.

Certainly I don't read the paper to think it's going to help me make market-beating decisions on the day I read it. That's not happening. But I do think it's important to be somewhat up to date on the news because what happens today constitutes history as it transpires. For example, as I was writing yesterday's blog post I thought to myself: "have I broken out this story about the fifteenfold increase in Airbus market share back in 1983?" Turns out, I had, in this post from 2007. That is of course drawn from deep prehistory, back when Paulson was still the CEO of Goldman Sachs and when Sachs bestrode the world, before Paulson as Financial Crisis-era Secretary of the Treasury had gone down on bended knee before Nancy Pelosi in front of many other congresspeople and implored her to help him and move the $700 billion TARP through Congress, which saved the banks and kept the wheels on the economy but gave us the Tea Party which...

Also, we should note that Paulson was arguing at the time in essence that the strictures placed on US public companies by Sarbanes-Oxley (post the accounting scandals that brought down Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia, Tyco, Arthur Andersen and others) would force companies to list in Europe rather than the US. Turns out it didn't happen like that. Companies didn't list in Europe. Instead, they didn't list at all. An altogether new era of private financing (private equity, private credit) dawned. Now a lot of money is trapped there and deep-pocketed individuals and institutions want to translate their paper gains into liquidity. We'll see if it works. Opinions vary as to whether it's feasible.

Fifteenfold

Sometime last week I was reading something about China's Yuan (AKA Renminbi) becoming more and more acceptable and accepted as a way of conducting trade internationally, which moves it closer to becoming a plausible reserve currency and a challenger to the dollar's primacy. As of now the dollar still dominates a 58% share of global trade but that's down from 70% at the turn of the millennium. The dollar's dominant position constitutes the US's "exorbitant privilege," that everybody needs dollars to settle trade which creates demand for dollars and therefore makes it cheaper for us to finance everything than it otherwise would have been.

So the dollar still dominates but... Many around the world are pondering this question.

It takes me back to the fateful moment over 40 years ago. There I was in my interview for the AB Duke scholarship at Duke.  I was arguing for a National Industrial Policy in support of Robert Reich's proposed program for one. European champion Airbus's share of the large passenger jet market had gone from 1% to 15% and I had written that its share had increased "fifteenfold." A fact. The professors pressed me on this, asking me if 15% really constituted a threat.

Lockheed Martin exited the commercial market a year later. By 1997 McConnell Douglas had been eaten by Boeing the last company standing to do battle with Airbus.

So funny things do happen as small numbers grow. Right now the yuan/renminbi has a 2% share of global trade. It doesn't sound like much but one never knows, does one?

Paths in the Woods, pt 2

A few weeks back I was up at a guys' weekend at a friend's lake house. It was pretty cold to ride bikes so after breakfast most of us went for a ~3 mile walk to burn off breakfast. Then came lunch. I had a really impressive seafood basket. The fried oysters were top notch, the fish was solid. The slaw sucks, but that's almost always going to be the case now that I'm in the habit of making my own.

After lunch most of the guys settled in on the couch to watch rando NCAA tournament games. I was pretty full and knew dinner was coming so I tried to drum up interest in a second walk. No takers. I headed out on my own. This time instead of turning left down the road I turned right, went to the end of the road and headed into the woods.

The woods there have gone through phases. For a time little was happening. This lakeside subdivision had paused for a decade and change post-Financial Crisis but has kicked back into gear in recent years. Lots have filled in, including some on distant lots reached by roads that run behind this subdivision out to secluded lots suitable for big, fancy houses. I had bushwhacked through these woods back from those lots while they were still fallow years back. In the interim I had seen some ATV trails once or twice.

By now those have gone away, but as I stepped through the first stands of trees I could see a clearing off to my left. I headed off towards it. I found myself walking within an alley where trees had been cut but little pine saplings grew from the ground. It lead to a round clearing, from which more alleys with baby pines branched off. I walked these. Clearly, some developer was looking to the future and had sent in backhoes to clear roadcuts for future roads and courts, but then had hit the pause button (hence the saplings, some of which were chest high). The future beckoned, if uncertainly.

Paths in the woods

Not for the first time, the other night I dreamed about secret paths in the woods near my house. I have a recurring leitmotif in my dreams, for instance, about paths high up on the hill above the south side of Eastwood Lake, paths which lead to a hidden castle, really more of a chateau, which may serve as a private school or some other vaguely esoteric function, depending on the dream. I also dream of paths into the woods there branching off of Ridgecrest. Similarly, my sleeping brain at times conjures jogging trails leading from the north side of the lake over towards Carolina North, which itself of course contains a rich system of trails that I still haven't fully mastered and which we referred to as "The Woods" when my childhood neighborhood backed up to it. I have written before about how The Woods was a quasi-mythical space in my childhood imaginings.

In recent months, as I continue my pre bedtime wanderings through YouTubeLand, sometimes traveling with Noralee of Itchy Boots wherever she is in a given season (currently the Southern Andes), sometimes watching the Australian Alexander Campbell walk through Asia, I wonder if I have reverted to my childhood ways, when I would engage the world through the World Book encyclopedia and dream of the outside world, but in many ways the imagination of it sufficed. I've travelled a fair amount over the years, not as much as others, surely, but more than most. By now I like being at home quite a lot. I still enjoy travel, but I have less need of it than once I did. 

Our summer travel schedule has not yet firmed up. I had been thinking Japan but it seems to be having its Portugal moment in which the selfie sticks of the world converge there. I've been trying to talk Mary into flying into Istanbul and driving from there to Tbilisi, Georgie, probably in September. We'll see how this goes.

Adults and children

I for the most part enjoyed Dwarkesh Patel's recent interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while listening to it in the car (No way am I going to waste two hours of video time watching two guys like this talk). Without a doubt, the best part was hearing Jensen beat Dwarkesh down when the youngster was advancing simplistic arguments. Much as Stephen Kotkin -- when appearing on Patel's show to discuss his bio of Stalin -- had impromptu started in calling Dwarkesh "DP" or maybe even "DK" to put him in his place a little.

Dwarkesh is no doubt a force of nature, an impressively smart guy who reads and studies prodigiously and gets a parade of really smart people from diverse places come on his podcast. But he more than anyone epitomizes a trend exhibited at times by the haute technoscenti to talk 175 miles per second out of the apparent belief that their time and that of their interlocutors and listeners is so valuable that it must be optimized through machine gun staccato speech. So that software engineers become "SWEs" etc, because the thoughts just must must must come out.

The big bone of contention between Jensen and Dwarkesh comes when the youngster shows that he has bought hook, line and sinker the neo-Cold War logic of restricting the export of top of the line Nvidia chips to China. We all kind of have. It's hard to think our way around it. Jensen pushes back, insisting that there is much more to AI than chips ("it's a five-layer cake") and that by restricting the export of Blackwells and whatever the next-gen top Nvidia chip to China, we are forcing their champions -- first and foremost Huawai, it seems -- to build around their absence and create an AI stack that will be quicker and will come to dominate AI in the global south. 

I'm honestly not sure who's right here, but I know who the adult is in that room, and certainly Jensen has good points. Fundamentally he is also right that we need to foster more interplay and dialogue between US and Chinese researchers as a counterweight to the Sturm und Drang emanating from the top of the political establishment on both sides of the Pacific. I have heard that the Chinese people are even more jingoistic than their leadership at this point in time. Points of lower-level interchange between our societies are dramatically less in evidence than they were 10-15 years ago. We need to have contact all up and down society to remind ourselves of what we are dealing with (another nation where people want to live and raise families and eat and sing and sleep) to offset the power-crazed ideologues and those who want to be inscribed in the Book of History as Big Men.

Country Bauhaus

Mary and I are continually looking for the next Sierra Ferrell, someone with a voice and a sensibility that will transfix us fully. So we find ourselves browsing around YouTube, helped of course by the Algorithm.

Haley Bonar is not this artist, I don't think. And yet there is something special to the first song of her Tiny Desk concert, "Hometown." It is perfectly uniform. Standard rhythm (no syncopation or other embellishment), standard chord sequence. Even a perfectly classic verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus structure. It is beautiful, lyrical, wistful, she has a lovely if ultimately not super-distinctive voice.

Underneath the beautiful surface, however, lurks a deep irony. Let it burn in the rearview mirror. Love it and leave it. Herein lies the genius of the song, the tension between a shimmering skin and a core of intense and violent conflict.

I am reminded of Adolf Loos' 1910 Bauhaus manifesto Ornament and Crime: "We have out-grown ornament, we have struggled through to a state without ornament."