Next to a shooting, NYC
New York on my birthday. Nashville, a growth vibe. Pod: Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese Food. Life: 6 lessons working at an art gallery. Econ: End of oil?
Travel: New York, next to a shooting
Nashville, a growth vibe
Pod: Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese Food
Life: 6 lessons working at an art gallery.
Econ: End of oil?
Travel: Trying to travel to every country
Tech: Microsoft turnaround
My Death show, Jan 8th Do Come
A person was shot. I was meant to listen to him at a conference today. Instead, I am writing this about 20 metres away from where he fell.
I walked passed the site of the shooting two hours ago. I thought the police cars were there because they were filming a movie. The day seemed like it might have been a typical New York day. The morning sky was bright. The breeze sharp and fresh. Early December in New York. A good day for filming.
Before we heard the news. Before the conference was stopped. The main stage speaker was presenting. He wore bright orange trainers and a company branded sports top, in contrast to most of the room in financial investor shirts. On a less generous day, his words would seem like corporate-speak. On a kind day, the mission to improve the healthcare system would seem a worthwhile purpose, a bright north star to follow. In his speech, certain words which came around again and again. Long term. Resilience. Relentless. With the fluff words removed, the speech could be almost a poem.
Messages came in to our devices. People started looking round. There were a few minutes where on the surface the conference was proceeding. A few more moments of normalcy. We all knew the news was about to upend the day. Let’s try and pretend for a few moments more. A December day in New York. One day after my birthday.
I was in New York over September 11th. Every time I pass through New York, there are a few moments where I reflect on the randomness of life. New York is one of those places for me where this randomness echoes for me. I have been in touching distance of catastrophe. Twice now in New York. Once on the Thai beaches. Twice in London.
Friends ask me why I wrote a show about death. I begin my show with the aphorism about death and taxes both being inevitable. Except if you are a billionaire you might escape tax…
I think I lull myself into thinking life is more planned and less random than it is. I think we have to trick ourselves because it is hard to live with the constant thought of randomness around us. Yet, still I think we can be a little more prepared for when inevitable randomness strikes. We cannot predict; only prepare. Perhaps My Death show will help. Jan 8th, London - Do Come.
When I was last stuck in Manhattan with unexpected free time, I ended up in a bar. This time I went to the library. Not the grand library of weddings and films, but the smaller 53rd St library that was redeveloped in 2016. I found it cosy. Well-used with places for children and teens. Free wifi, plenty of spaces to read and hang out. I tucked myself into the corner of the grand staircase and read until it was time to go to the airport.
Nashville has seen enormous growth over the decade. While I heard some complaints over traffic, I didn’t hear complaints over tourists (which I was expecting). I sensed that tourists were thought to bring in money and were kept in a downtown zone so didn’t impact the locals so much. My Uber drivers were optimistic. Their favoured politicians have won power. They are expecting great things. In town, companies are moving in, creating jobs, new buildings are going up, and everyone mentioned that there is no state income tax. The airport is expanding. More international flights are coming. The vibe is growth.
There are cultural twists that jar. A sign warning that no knives and guns allowed. The doorman doing an ID and metal detector check as a normal routine. You need a car to travel any significant distance. A 10 - 15 min taxi ride would take 1 hour by public transport. Still, the few people I met seemed to tilt towards optimism. The city reflects that, or perhaps they reflect the city.
Preparing for a Chinese food feast next week, relistening to Fuchsia Dunlop.
Fuchsia Dunlop is a cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine. She was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, and has spent much of the last two decades exploring China and its food.
In her latest book, Invitation to a Banquet, Fuchsia explores the history, philosophy and techniques of China's rich and ancient culinary culture. Each chapter examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a singular aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it's the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine.In this podcast episode, Fuchsia joins host Ben to dive deep into the history, culture and techniques behind Chinese cuisine. From the ancient origins of steaming to the finer points of knife skills and texture, Fuchsia provides fascinating insights into what makes Chinese food so unique.
Henrik Karlsson on 6 lessons working at an art gallery. (He is going to be a full time substack writer).
It is possible to turn a mediocre job into a great one
The best artists I’ve worked with remind me of the best startup founders I know
The worst exhibitions take the most work
If you care about beauty, you should care about economic growth, too
There are places in the incentive landscape where the incentives are aligned with your values, and your job is to find them
Most people are not serious
(My comment on the first point, is you can definitely get stuck in and what you put in is what you can get out of your job) Henrik writes:
...you don’t say, “This is my job and that thing is outside my area”—no, if the value you are trying to promote requires you to go outside your role and learn new skills and politick to get the authority to go ahead: then that is your job.
… I made an agreement with my boss, who liked me, that she would let me sit in on the board meetings, and I began mapping out who was who and what they wanted and made sure to talk to all stakeholders when they passed through the gallery, and in 6 months I had a good enough model of what their values and goals were so I could align myself to the mission and make legible to them what I was doing.
And on point 4 - that is partly why I work on the for-profit work as well as the art. In the world today (maybe since forever?) getting the economics to work is a big part of being sustainable over the long-term…
If we want to make the world a better place, we can’t just think about the lofty stuff: we have to get our hands dirty and make sure the economic engine works.
End of Oil?
It is now plausible to envision scenarios in which global demand for crude oil falls to essentially zero by the end of this century, driven by improvements in clean energy technologies, adoption of stringent climate policies, or both. This paper asks what such a demand decline, when anticipated, might mean for global oil supply. One possibility is the well-known “green paradox”: because oil is an exhaustible resource, producers may accelerate near-term extraction in order to beat the demand decline. This reaction would increase near-term CO2 emissions and could possibly even lead the total present value of climate damages to be greater than if demand had not declined at all. However, because oil extraction requires potentially long-lived investments in wells and other infrastructure, the opposite may occur: an anticipated demand decline reduces producers’ investment rates, decreasing near-term oil production and CO2 emissions. To evaluate whether this disinvestment effect outweighs the green paradox, or vice-versa, I develop a tractable model of global oil supply that incorporates both effects, while also capturing industry features such as heterogeneous producers, exercise of market power by low-cost OPEC producers, and marginal drilling costs that increase with the rate of drilling. I find that for model inputs with the strongest empirical support, the disinvestment effect outweighs the traditional green paradox. In order for anticipation effects on net to substantially increase cumulative global oil extraction, I find that industry investments must have short time horizons, and that producers must have discount rates that are comparable to U.S. treasury bill rates.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Ryan Kellogg.
Links:
The FT has a piece on the rise and fall of Shanghai as a global financial center …China's economic growth was slower than what many global financial companies underwrote when they opened offices there, even though China still outgrows the rest of the world. The country doesn't want to relax capital controls, which places limits on how big their financial sector can get. *H/T Bryne Hobart)
Meet the Extreme Travelers Trying to Visit Every Country in the World. They are collecting the world—country by country. Most Traveled People (MTP) is an online group founded in 2005 by Charles Veley, one of the world’s most traveled people (according to a rule book he created, but still, he’s done a lot). More than 30,000 people have joined and are ranked by points, according to destinations they have reached from the MTP list. Some locations are easy—regular tourist spots—and some are damn hard.
Wired on the microsoft turnaround. When Satya Nadella took over as CEO, the company was lumbering and uncool. He cleaned up a toxic culture, crafted the deal of the decade, and put Microsoft back on top.