👋 ASB Partners Nuggets

This is a short weekly email that covers a few things I’ve found interesting during the week.

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Cartoon of the Week

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Interesting Links/Reads

Many links are sourced from Marginal Revolution (bold and italics are my own to highlight what I found particularly interesting)

1. Will We Ever Learn Why history rhymes Russ Roberts

I had the privilege of interviewing Milton Friedman for EconTalk a few months before he died. I asked him about public demand for price controls and economic literacy and he answered:

…we are now only 20 or 30 years from when we had price controls [on gasoline]. And so a large fraction of the population had personal experience with it. Twenty or 30 years from now, after there’s nobody living who had experience with price controls, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it come back again.

Friedman was channeling his inner George Santayana who said:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Santayana is often misquoted as referring to people who don’t study history but I think that inaccurate version is propagated by history professors eager for higher levels of enrollment in their classes. I want to take Santayana literally in support of Friedman’s claim: only those who are alive with actual memories of the past have a chance of internalizing its lessons. That is, those who cannot remember the past and who have merely read about it, are condemned to repeat it.

2.The Everyday Guide to Supersizing Your Retirement Account There are a number of tricks to grow a tax-advantaged 401(k) or IRA into a fortune

3.Pathways into homelessness.

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Podcasts/Videos I’ve watched during the week

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And my physics teacher, who was my partner in Chicago, when he retired, he said, “You can have whatever you want from my office. You can have. I want the $10 plaque that was behind your desk that said, “If we’re all going to eat, someone has to sell.” Because when I was like 20 years old and looked at that plaque, it was like it was like a wakeup moment. Like of all the things that this man could have around him, he’s got like this cheesy $10 plaque that says if we’re all going to eat, someone has to sell. And it speaks to the importance of what it takes to build a business. You’re always selling. You’re selling to candidates. You’re selling to vendors. You’re selling to counterparties. You’re selling to customers. And you just have to get comfortable with with the fact that if you’re always selling, you know what you’re going to hear a lot? No, not going to do that. Not interested, no interest. You know, in 1994, I was in Switzerland. We’d had a rough year in ‘94. We lost about 4% of our capital in ‘94. It was one of our only losing years in the history of the firm. And I’m in Switzerland. I mean, it was a rough day. My lunch, my lunch, I sat down at lunch. This person sits down. Oh, you’re not John Griffin. No, I’m I’m Ken Griffin. He goes, “Oh, I thought you were John Griffin from uh Fen Church, another firm.” He goes, “I I got to go.” Like, “Great.” I flew all the way to Switzerland for my lunch date to get up and leave the table. And then around 3:00 or 4 in the afternoon, I was with uh another Swiss banker and were in his office. His office was like almost the square footage of the stage, beautiful furniture. Goes, “Do you mind if I smoke?” Takes out a big cigar. He’s smoking this cigar. And we’re talking for about 45 minutes. Such a pity that such a bright young man so picked the wrong career. Like, well, that’s the most graceful no I’ve gotten today. But, but you just have to tolerate. You’re going to hear no a lot. But you need to become accustomed to having to market your ideas and market what you represent and what you stand for. Again, whether it’s the people that you want to have work for you or people who are trying to give you capital or customers, you need to get comfortable with the art of selling.

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👇Elon Musk on AI deflation

Money won't matter in 2036. I'm not sure that the people who bought your shares think that money won't matter in 2036. What do you want money for? You you want money for goods and services, right? You want money for obviously food, housing, transport, entertainment. Um well, if that is so abundant that uh there's more that the robots and AI are providing more goods and services than you than any human could possibly consume. What do you need money for in that case? Let's agree that that could be where we end up. I'm I'm concerned about the road and we live, you know, we live in democracies and people are very worried about this. So I guess two questions. Firstly, do you have to have massive redistribution from people like you to the people who are losing their jobs? Do you need to pay more tax? Do you have much higher taxes on capital so that you fund what some kind of universal income? Otherwise, what do people live off? I I think that that the Treasury should just simply issue people checks. But you But where's the revenue coming from? I mean, I'm enough of an economist. If you just issue checks, you're going to have inflation. it it you know this is like a lot of what we're trying to think about is these things were relevant in the past they will not be relevant in the future. So like inflation is simply the ratio of money to the to to goods and services. So if the goods and services output increases dramatically if it increases you know a th000%. You can increase the you can literally print or these days change the database never print money. It's you create money in the in the database um provided the creation of that money uh is less than the rate at which goods and services increase um you you will actually have deflation. So I'll make a prediction which is that deflation will be the issue not inflation because because as the output of goods and services increases um if if the output of goods and services increases faster than the money supply you will have deflation. I'm actually I'm perfectly willing to believe that. You may well be right. Absolutely. You may well be right. But I I'm I'm really hung up on how we get from the current, polarized, angry, fearful policy we have now to this nirvana. And and I think you could you can paint a picture where people are so scared by this, you know, they essentially try to stop it. Maybe they can't, but you get nationalized. There's a kind of, you know, far-left government. Uh there's exorbitant tax increases. is the kind of economy crumbles because people are so worried about a future which does sound quite scary as you describe it. So how do you how do you handle the politics now? It's exhilarating and terrifying but if if you were in Yeah. Exactly. Honestly, and if you ask me on any given day, I I I

Sounds like this…

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I hope you enjoyed it.

Adam