Theatre sad redux; bad jobs, what crypto options tell you, sustainability podcast
I chat with Jason Mitchell on sustainability and poetry. I explore thoughts on crap theatre jobs. What crypto options tell us.
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The questions on my mind this week are:
What song(s)/music would you like at your funeral?
What would you like someone to say about you or read at your funeral?
Do you have something unsaid? If you were to die this week, is there something you have unsaid to someone ? Or if someone else were to die? Would you like to write it here now?
Is there anything you’d like to confess?
If you have any answers to those questions, you’d like to share. Let me know. If you want to come to the show or watch the live stream please book here. (26 Nov, 7pm, Theatre Deli, London nr Liverpool st.) It would be excellent to see you if you could make it.
This week:
My chat with Jason Mitchell covering poetry and sustainable investing
Theatre sad redux and home
Crap jobs, inflation and the great quitting
Be the Exec Director of Improbable
Bad Fried Rice (funny video)
What crypto options can tell you
Matt Levine is very good on weirdness of markets
Up to $250K Grants programme (Astral Ten Codex)
Spread the word Non-Fiction grants
And links: lack of support for ASD children, how to think about range of cliamte models; academics have no other skills.
I highly rate skills and knowledge that go deep in at least two domains. I noted this in my idiosyncratic life advice. I follow this advice myself (majors in investing, healthcare, sustainability, theatre; minors in food, culture, writing, poetry and a few other small areas).
Jason Mitchell is a poet and has a line in photography and as an essayist. Within investing world, he is known for his thinking on sustainability particularly from a quantitative and hedge fund view point as well as strong involvement in policy and regulation thinking.
We have loosely collaborated in both writing for the CFA ESG text book and I take part blame for roping him in to writing his chapter. Both our chapters go well when read together.
It was excellent to be able to find time to have a chat with him on his sustainability thoughts.
We started with poetry and ended with many of the hot topics in sustainability.
We chat on his poetry and how he witnessed refugees in the Mediterranean sea. We discussed what poetry has taught him.
“rescued by our boat one morning, the man asked me, is it true what they tell us, the traffickers, about these waters, that the sea has no bottom? I told him no, there is indeed a floor, half a mile or more below us. And Europe is a much farther, more difficult journey than the traffickers promised you”.
I asked whether fund managers on average know enough outside finance and about his journey into sustainability.
Jason discussed the Jevons paradox. How we use something more the more efficient it becomes.
Jason gives his views, overrated/underrated, on:
Carbon Tax
Divestment as a social political tool
Shareholder activism as a theory of change
Carbon offsets (and shorting as a tool)
Sustainable finance regulation
Stakeholder capitalism
We end with Jason’s favourite podcasts that he has hosted, what people misunderstand and his advice for others.
“no doesn't mean never”
Transcript and video here plus link to podcast or below.
I am still feeling theatre sad, but I thought I would try and articulate more about why. This is incomplete and as I’m working on my show and lots happening within investing world, I’m going to slowly put these thoughts out here, incomplete as they are. I’m hoping to end with a moderate radical proposal for what we could do in another post/newsletter.
Theatre sad, theatre oblivion
There are many forms of wealth for a person or an organisation. Typically, we think of financial wealth or, to borrow from accounting, financial capital. Financial capital is related to natural capital, social and relationship capital, human capital, intellectual capital, manufacturing capital and so.
The people, ideas, relations and money that go into creating art, products, and services.
Under a long-term sustainable framework. The combination of these capitals need to produce more outputs than inputs otherwise the model of the organisation ultimately fails, as no entity continues to fund the deficit forever.
The planet or society won’t fund the destruction of natural capital, human capital or even financial capital forever under this model. (Or, if it does it can eventually perish like bacteria in a petri dish).
Currently, theatre has a problem across arguably ALL or at least most of its capitals.
Theatre has treated and is treating much of its human capital with poorly paid jobs and with little extra-financial benefits. Theatre audiences are mostly unwilling to pay for ticket costs to cover the expenses of most theatre.
Society/governments/charity/(artists/theatre workers) are picking up the gap in the expense bill. Theatre is mostly (as far as I can see) not doing much about its impact on natural capital, nor is it, in the main, meeting ambitions to represent society or unheard stories; or reach new audiences, or representative audiences. I admit there are exceptions (and I’ve worked with some), but to me they seem few.
You can argue that mainstream media has been relatively quiet until late on climate, or on many of the other sustainable development goals such as food, or poverty or justice. Overall, to my mind, theatre has been equally quiet (although again, a little more urgency in the last couple of years). The magical potency of its stories and performances are – to borrow a poet – going quietly into the night. Into a slow oblivion.
Thinking about a home…
Most of my day I think about long term investing for pension funds and the like, in particular, healthcare.
But I have created a small body of theatre-making. Plays at Camden People's Theatre, Oval House Theatre, The Finborough Theatre, and The Gate Theatre; Theatre Deli and non-theatre spaces.
I have been on the board and chaired Talawa Theatre Company, Coney and now I’m helping Improbable.
During my time Talawa wanted a home and has now found one. Coney makes its home wherever it makes its work. Improbable are now on a quest for a home and I’m helping them in this journey.
I’ve seen Bunker Theatre make a home and lose a home.
I’ve had a few people write into me that this is on their minds. And Improbable are posing the question of what a home means.
A home is a place you feel loved and nurtured. Your home will challenge you but always be there for you. It will show the best of you and be a safe spot, and hopefully will always forgive your mistakes and help you onwards.
I sense that theatre makers and the industry views themselves as progressive, diverse, inclusive and fair.
Perhaps anecdotes I hear from #metoo, to the Bunker, to the recent RC mistake on racism are exceptions.
But from afar from what I can observe the huge challenge is that many if not the vast majority of theatre jobs are crap. Badly paid, insecure, bad for mental health, and bad on working hours, bad for family, bad for the worker.
These are the qualities you’d like in your job:
Secure
Speak up/safe culture.
Fairly paid
Growth (form new social and intellectual capitals)
Purposeful
Creative
Challenging but doable
And too many theatre jobs (a long with many other low paid jobs) do not have these qualities. It’s simply the higher calling of theatre - its purpose - that has driven people along.
This is what Alice Saville’s has recently written:
As an anonymous senior backstage professional who’s struggling to hire technical roles put it, “It’s a perfect storm. People were made redundant during the pandemic and have found other roles. People have retired. And people who are still working in theatre don’t want to work the same hours as before, because the working conditions are worse and the money is less.” When the pandemic hit, theatres made redundancies swiftly and often painfully: many chose not to take advantage of the furlough scheme which would have allowed them to retain staff. And now, they’re feeling the burn. They’re committed to staging productions planned before the pandemic hit, but often with less money and less time. And their once-dedicated permanent staff have been replaced with a scramble to find workers, often on short-term contracts.
TV and film opened up before theatre, and they soaked up large numbers of talented technicians. Not everyone has fallen into new jobs they actually want to keep long term. But workers who want to return are faced with a stark choice: stick with their secure non-theatre job, or chance it on a badly-paid, short-term theatre contract that may not be followed up by more work. One anonymous designer explained that a leading Scottish theatre can’t persuade its casuals to return after it programmed a series of short run works coming out of the pandemic: “it’s heartbreaking to me that there are workers getting more out of a full-time job in a supermarket chain than they do by coming back to this industry.”
Where salaried roles are being offered, they can’t hope to compete with other sectors. Leeds Playhouse are currently advertising a senior lighting technician job at £18,000 – a surprisingly low salary for a role that requires a high level of experience and specific expertise. Meanwhile, the average salary for a professional electrician is £35,000, and a lighting technician in film or TV can hope for a similar or higher rate – as can similarly experienced staff in other departments of many theatres. As one designer said of the role: “the application package for the role talks in detail about the importance of diversity but we’ve seen again and again and again that the biggest barrier to diversity backstage is money.”
The current situation definitely isn’t the “building back better” scenario a lot of people hoped for during the pandemic.
Alice Saville here for Exuent.
What you can see acutely in the technical and stage management part of theatre, is also true in the “creative/artistic” part (though I think stage management and the like is creative) excepting the high end artistic directors and those who have more “star” status.
Now while you can observe this in well paid football players vs average players, or blockbuster writers vs non-blockbuster writers - and so the observation is across the country (or world) - it’s acute across theatre.
The economics of theatre make it hard to work… So my core work is very market based focus. Markets are great at growing the pie and allocating capital to new ideas. Redistribution policies are great at fairness - essentially more socialist leaning ideas are better at splitting the pie.
Theatre is conflicted between these two forces. Highly paid actors or artistic directors are tilted to market forces whereas the majority of theatre world, particularly in the subsidised space is a public good - almost a socialist type idea (or at least state backed). So, my idea would be to see if theatre were to be more equalised, if that could work.
I’d also highlight that while “good” jobs (secure, fair, creative etc.) do not have to be well-paid, often they are, so at the least poorly paid jobs need to be better. Any thoughts on this let me know, more from me in another post.
The family sat round and had a laugh watching “Uncle Roger”. There is some X-rated profanity, but essentially everything he has said about making fried rice and Jamie Oliver’s “westernisation”of it (or for Uncle Roger a really bad attempt at fried rice) is pretty much true. If you have a SE Asia background this is particularly funny.
Crypto options. What they tell you and asset pricing thought on (low probability x high value event) in general.
There is a tremendous amount of happening around crypto. Much of it is a scam (eg ponzi schemes for NFTs) but some of it might have real use cases.
In any event, it is still quite a wild west out there. I wanted to highlight one small aspect about asset pricing to show certain market expectations because I was surprised by the answer.
An asset might have a price of 100 because the sum of people believe there is a 90% chance that the asset is worth 111.
So X = 100 because 0.9 x 111 is market expectation.
But, asset might have a price of 100 because the sum of people believe there is a 10% chance that the asset is worth 1,000 or a 1% chance the asset is worth 10,000.
Again
X = 100 as 0.1 x 1,000
X = 100 as 0.01 * 10,000
These are very different ways of deriving X for the same 100 price.
You can also get there if half the market believes X is worth 50 and half the market believes X is worth 150.
The distribution of those returns particularly in widely contested markets (potentially divorced from a fundamental value or with a hard to judge fundamental) can tell you something about “market expectations”.
The price of an asset gives you this point estimate, but the range of option values around an asset gives you an idea of what other market participants think. And if there are enough market participants, and trading is not too costly, the price of an asset can not deviate too much from what you derive from options else there is “arbitrage”. (If some one is selling X for 100 and another is selling the same X for 150, you can simultaneously buy and sell X and make a clear 50 profit with no risk).
Now without delving into the pros/cons of Bitcoin re: environment, use case etc. as pure market phenomenon I think this data is fascinating. Lots of caveats on size of market etc (recall you need another participants to arbitrage to “true” pricing) but if true you can observe calls/puts.
Calls are rights to buy.
Puts are rights to sell.
So lots of high priced calls are positive (aka bullish), puts are negative (aka bearish) or used as “insurance”
In the Bitcoin (BTC) market there are many more calls than puts. The ratio is approx 0.5
In the BTC market it is almost 2 calls for every 1 put. (see below)
While you can argue that option traders may generally get forecasts wrong, I was surprised about the number of bullish bets.
What was also a surprise to me, was the “strike” of these bets. Many of these bets are far “out of the money” at prices of 100,000 or 200,000. This is the “low chance (0.1)” x high price example above.
Bitcoin option market graphic (source gvol, note Derbit is 80%+ of market, so this is entire bitcoin option market)
So, these market traders are saying the price today is justified by a small/moderate chance of a very high price, or at least that’s where the betting has gone.
I have no idea about what to make of that except it is an intriguing observation.
These concepts as an aside is why in forecasting or markets you can or should bet if you can accurately assess a scenario as a 40% chance (ie more likely to fail than not), but the market is assessing the probability of success at 10% chance. If you are correct than that is actually a money making bet which you should make even if overall the outcome is still less likely than not to occur.
If that type of thinking feels very intuitive to you you should explore more market and pricing thinking!
If you are moderately versed in finance and markets, Matt Levine is amazingly astute in what frontier ideas mean for markets. His latest on the questions that Elon Musk raises is full of insight. He is great on law, ESG and crypto. His newsletter is free. Also good if this seems bewildering and you want to learn more in a deep/frontier way as an opposed to a surface tabloid mag way.
This grant programme is worth going for, if you have moonshoot or effective altruism type ideas.
Links:
On severe mental illness. Very moving.
Why all models are wrong, or part right.
Note the range is now 1.8c to 2.7c at the mid- this is much lower than 3c-4c from a few years ago. Yes, not enough. Yes, great movement in the right direction.
65% of academics think they have no other skills (or are too expensive for those skills)
Come join Improbable
Help Coney
Key note from Mark Ravenhill
Sad, but not surprised.
If you have an idea for a non-fiction book
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