Things People Say About My Writing
This is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek page to collect & highlight things people have said about my writing, both the good & the bad.
In Legacy Media
CNBC on The Uncharity of College: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/02/harvards-win-is-a-loss-for-minority-education
As shown in a brilliantly argued and researched 2018 blog post by MIT graduate and tech entrepreneur Conrad Bastable, the top endowed universities in America are getting much more revenue from their investment returns than tuition income. Bastable also explains that keeping the sticker price of tuition high and offering varying levels of financial aid to defray that cost is the way top colleges legally maintain their status as charitable, and therefore untaxed, organizations.
TechCrunch on The Uncharity of College: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/01/wtf-are-isas/
Universities are incentivized to be unaffordable and don’t have a direct financial interest in the outcomes of their students. The average budget for career services at colleges is $90,000 including salaries, with only one career counselor for every 2,900 students on average.
On Social Media
On Ouroboros Theory: Describing The Nature of Right vs. Left:
[This is] one of the most insightful articles I've ever read.
…Credit where credit is due, I think Mr. Bastable has demonstrated that he genuinely understands his opponents’ philosophy and worldview.
That was a fantastic read, thank you
On The Germany Shock: The Largest Economy Nobody Understands:
Conrad Bastable’s outstanding essay is a “must-read” for anyone interested in economics, trade policy, Europe, Germany, and the larger state of the geo-political world in which what has worked so well (for some) for the last 25 years may not work out quite so well in the coming decade — and was worth all my The Browser subscription within the first five minutes.
Editor’s note: I receive zero dollars from any The Browser subscriptions.
That was super interesting and I’m looking forward to reading more of Bastable's work. Thanks!
TLDR: economists are imbeciles…I submit this article as evidence that economists don’t understand any economy.
…
He may not be an economist, but he excels at economic imbecility.
A pretty grandiose claim. Reading the essay, the “understanding” seems little more than the fairly mainstream narrative that the Euro is too weak for Germany and too strong for the EU periphery. Am I missing something?
This is a very interesting article.
I particularly liked the insight that currency stability may be desirable for the most successful economies but undesirable for the least successful.
Being in the cryptocurrency space, I can see how this plays out on a much smaller scale as well. When your community is made up of nobodies, one of the few advantages you have is that your cryptocurrency has more upside potential than established players. This can offset the significant downside of not having a reputation.
On The Uncharity of College: The Big Business Nobody Understands:
Wow this essay is fantastic. The idea that the amount of people who “need” financial aid has stayed constant while tuition prices have increased 170% (way outpacing wage growth) is unreal.
Conrad if you wrote a book about this I would buy it. Super fascinating stuff. Colleges are clearly massive financial instruments that need to be analyzed further.
I didn’t see a citation for that…and if that were true, then the policy fix would seem rather obvious and achievable.
I think the first part of your argument basically is factually incorrect and you should probably retract it.
Really an eye opening discussion. I think I’ve been consuming reporting on the ever rising cost of tuition for all of my adult life. Yet never has any journalist approached the question of universities 501(c)(3) status, in the publications I’ve read.
It’s crazy! Over time the tax advantage could make university endowments (as well as wealthy religious entities) the largest owners of capital in the world, along with sovereign wealth funds.
The underlying assertion is that universities must provide financial assistance to the majority of their students to be considered tax exempt. No citation is provided.
He's not really saying that there is some "50%" magic number in tax law. What he is saying is that, imagine a situation where the price of admission was much more reasonable (i.e. hadn't gone up 300+% in the last generation) so that only, say, 10% of students needed aid. This means 90% of students would be paying full price. Well, if 90% are paying full price, he imagines the political pressure would come to say "Why the fuck are these absolutely gigantic, small country-sized endowments able to earn all this profit, and compound it, tax-free, and still 90% of students are paying full price!"
Thus, he argues that the large universities play this fuzzy-math shell game to consistently jack up the price of tuition so that the majority of students require aid. That way they can argue their endowment profits should remain tax-free because they are going to subsidize the students' education.
On The Full Stack of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier?:
This was personally helpful to me in understanding the roots of our contemporary global economy and particular actor's roles in it (the US, China, and the EU primarily). I feel that at least on the level of a good primer for How We Got Where We Are, it was useful, if overlong and undersourced (I feel like I've got enough of a grounding in this realm to understand when the gloss is probably right and when it smells like it bears more scrutiny, but not enough of an expertise or time to point it all out).
No offence to the asshole who wrote this, but he sounds like an asshole.
…He ended his essay on hints and links that Germany and Japan took different idealistic social or nationalist routes to counter a dominant British empire that controlled distribution, and this is a clue to his thinking. The demand-side advantages bestowed on those who controlled shipping led to the inevitable creation of industrialization, out of British mercantilism. In this light, he rightly identifies capitalism, communism, and fascism as being the same in terms of industrialization, merely a dispute over who decides what…
Wow there's a lot of reading here, it will take me a couple of hours to read it!
…
Looks like the type of book that would cost me $30 down at the bookshop so I'm not complaining.
I'm suspicious of 30,000 feet overviews in general, after being burned by grand explanation more than once, but I think this is helpful in the sense of providing a brief overview of the history of economics. I'm not sure I'd build anything on its assertions very much, but I still found it useful in contextualising things I already knew (the Bretton Woods agreement being vitally important and its dismantling being a root cause of The Mess We're In) and provided a new perspective on things that I've been suspicious about but haven't been able to articulate (drawing a line between the tech industry and feudalism).
A beautiful essay on how everything works. Of course, not fully accurate because it is impossible [to create] a framework that unites the entire economic history / meta-geopolitics.
Editor’s note: have to use Google Translate to read this one, but this “wykop.pl” site (Polish reddit?) is now responsible for a good portion of my Polish reader base.
On The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth:
This is such an interesting article! It sheds so much life on why our background levels of financial anxiety are so high: “I’m making good money, my career is progressing, I’m doing everything right, why do I feel so stretched? We are so fucked!
god that’s all so well-reasoned and bleak.
This is such an excellent article! It sheds so much light on the why our background levels of financial anxiety are so high: "I'm making good money, my career is progressing, I'm doing everything right, so why do I feel so stretched?"
We are so fucked!
What the linked article is trying to explain is that the opposite is true. It isn't that everyone wants to live in the trendiest areas, it's that they _have_ to in order to find a job that has any hope of paying off their debts fast enough for them to save up enough so that when the next huge expense comes through they can afford it... likely taking on more debt even so.
It isn't that everyone wants a degree - certainly not, given the price - but if you don't have one then you don't even have a chance of making enough savings to afford housing, healthcare, education for your children, et cetera.
People _can't_ "set their expectations a bit lower". Your options are to have no expectations, and accept that you're not going to be able to provide for your children, or to join the same rat race as everybody else and get locked into this cycle of wildly increasing prices. There isn't a middle ground for people to aim at any more.