☝️ Interesting Things #3 - January 23, 2021

Jan 24

Ezra Klein with an excellent piece of political analysis and recommendations on how Democrats ought to govern.
Noah Smith with a quick 5 min read on on why a $15 minimum wage is probably a good thing, despite the legacy economic research. FWIW, this piece did a lot to soften my position on it (I’ve been pretty adamant against a national $15 min wage until now).
WONK ALERT. Revisiting speculative hyperinflations in monetary models by Rogoff and Obstfeld
Open source is eating SaaS from Posthog. Related: last week’s SUPER DEEP 🕳 discussion

Bloomberg Odd Lots interviews a quant manager on lessons from 2020. There’s a lot of useful info here, and almost none of if it is about “quant” per-se. A few particularly insightful bits:
1. Flows vs prose. Price action increasingly becoming a function of momentum (fund flows) vs fundamentals and/or narrative.
2. On the reflexivity between institutional money managers with required rates of return (e.g. pension fund managers) and central bank zero interest rate policy, and how it effectively drives cash-based savings into equities.
Village Global with Morgan Housel. This is a particularly insightful section of the conversation on Warren Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway’s investing success: access to permanent capital. Housel notes that Berkshire has a completely different set of incentives than most professional investors because he doesn’t have to keep his investors happy and/or worry about redemptions. Berkshire is a holding company, not a hedge fund. Thus, Berkshire can afford to do nothing; most fund managers cannot.

This reflexivity between incentives and the ability to do nothing — or, more generally, the right thing per your own calculus — is something I’ll be noodling on for a while.
🔌🔌🔌 Last week on SUPER DEEP 🕳 episode 2 @heyzk and I talked with Jon Morehouse about the SaaS privacy revolution that’s driving the adoption of on-cloud solutions, and the rise and challenges of open source businesses.