đ ASB Partners Nuggets 3.7.25
This is a short weekly email that covers a few things Iâve found interesting during the week.
Interesting Links/Reads
Many links are sourced from Marginal Revolution
âWhat do I think of the Trump-Zelensky dust-up?â from Tyler CowanâŚ(Iâve seen him give this advice a few times on parsing news headlines to look at financial assets to parse what is really going onâŚmakes a lot of sense)
Downweight almost every opinion you read on Twitter, instead check the Ukrainian bond market.
In âMe, but Better,â Ms. Khazan chronicles her attempts to modify elements of her own personality by tinkering with the so-called big-five traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
There is a lot of common sense here. Fake it until you make it. Your emotions follow your actions. Also: Other people are paying less attention to you than you imagine. There is withal so much common sense in âMe, but Betterâ that a cynic might question the value of the enterprise. It should be admitted that Ms. Khazanâs narrative, though rich in comic anecdote, is pretty thin on the vaunted âscience.â But itâs a jolly readâand encouraging too.
Podcast/Videos
How much of your lifeâs trajectory was set in motion centuries ago? Gregory Clark has spent decades studying social mobility, and his findings suggest that where you land in society is far more predictable than we like to think. Using historical data, surname analysis, and migration patterns, Clark argues that social mobility rates have remained largely unchanged for 300 yearsâeven across radically different political and economic systems.
He and Tyler discuss why we should care about relative mobility vs growing the size of the pie, how physical mobility does and doesnât matter, why England was a meritocracy by 1700, how assortative mating affects economic and social progress, why India industrialized so late, a new potential explanation why Britainâs economic performance has been lukewarm since WWI, Malthusian societies then and now, whether a âhereditarianâ stance favors large-scale redistribution or a free-market approach, the dynamics of assimilation within Europe and the role of negative selection in certain migrations, the challenge of accurately measuring living standards, the neighborhood-versus-family debate over what drives mobility, whether we need datasets larger than humanity itself to decode the genetics of social outcomes, and much more.
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I am chatting live with Greg Clark, the economic historian. I think itâs fair to say that Greg is the most interesting and most influential economic historian of the last 20 years
CLARK: Assortative mating turns out to be a fascinating phenomenon, and in this new book, we actually have records of 1.7 million marriages in England from 1837 until now. What is astonishing in England is the degree to which people end up assorting in marriage so that basically, theyâre matching with people that are as close to them, essentially genetically, as their siblings in marriage. Itâs really interesting because people could mate in any way.
You could think I want the tallest person, the handsomest person, the youngest person, but for some reason, consistently, people seem to want to match to people who are close in social status. Now that doesnât affect anything about the average level of ability in a society, but if itâs consistently followed over generations, it will widen the distribution of ability.
From The Drive show notes:
Itâs important to just have some scale on all of these things
The US federal budget each year is about $5 trillion
We typically overspend that by about $2 trillion, which is what a deficit means
So the US budget ends up being actually closer to about $7 trillion per year (thatâs what the US government spends every year)
And obviously that $2 trillion of excess is being added to a pile of debt that now sits at about $35 trillion
Our GDP (gross domestic product) is probably in the neighborhood of about $28-30 trillion at this time
Total US health care spending: right now weâre sitting at $4-4.5 trillion a year
It varies a little bit from year to year, and we saw a bit of an uptick in COVID
Breakdown of the $4+ trillion/year of US healthcare spending
About $1 trillion of that is insurance premiums and out of pocket spending by consumers
About another $1 trillion of that is the employerâs spending to insure their employees
About $2+ trillion of that is the government spending through something called CMS (the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services)
This is both state and federal spending
Healthcare is about 18% of GDP â thatâs staggering, both in absolute dollars, nobodyâs within the same zip code
Keep in mind, we were 5% of GDP in 1960, 6% of GDP in 1970, and weâre 18% of GDP today
In absolute dollars: in 1970, it was $74 billion
In the year 2000 (this is 24 years ago), it was $1.4 trillion
Today itâs $4.5 trillion
Mike Israetel episode: insights about strength training, minimum effective dose, troubleshooting plateaus, tips for beginners, and more [1:28:15]
For #1: Mike said that you could achieve 70-80% of your maximum potential if you did only 30 minutes twice a week
Spaced out by 3 days
If you did a Monday, Thursday or Tuesday, Friday or something like that
â But this is only true if youâre willing to do a very, very intense and exhaustive workout
This workout would be a whole day body split twice
Meaning you do the whole day body split on Tuesday, then on Friday
There are no breaks in the workout
You just do opposing muscles back and forth, back and forth
Youâre basically just doing compound movements: rows, pull-ups, pull-downs, squats, deadlifts
4 â Intensity â you should not be at an intensity less than 2 reps in reserve
This has been echoed by many other guests on this podcast: Lane Norton, Andy Galpin
That means if you put the bar back and you could have done 3 or 4 reps, so thatâs 3 or 4 reps in reserve (you didnât go hard enough)
I hope you enjoyed it.
Adam