gwgundersen

But I'm curious: given your reading of "Debt", what ordering would you change in my post besides the myth of barter? My sense is that people are reacting to the first couple sentences and missing the entire rest of the post. I don't really see how Graeber is related to the Fed funds rate or currency pegs, e.g. Of course money is political, and I could have framed everything in terms of state violence and control, but that's essentially a different blog post. I don't think that adds a lot of clarity for what mechanically happens at Jackson Hole. Happy to hear how I'm wrong.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785213

That said, I would not find a full Graeber-ization helpful. It wouldn't change the structure of the post, and I don't think Graeber's framework is useful for understanding much of the content, such as the Fed funds rate, the intra-bank clearinghouse, or correspondent banking.

1. Motivate the very beginning with social obligations -> debt -> money.

2. Motivate more of the development via the state/taxes/power/violence. Soldiers get paid in money, the village needs money to pay tribute, etc.

This would change some of the narrative bits, but I don't think it structurally changes much beyond the first three nodes. If you disagree, I'd be curious to hear what you think I'm getting wrong?

Also, for what it's worth, I fully enjoyed "Debt" but Graeber is far from authoritative. His book is well-argued, but there are a lot of opinions here.

Re: why, I don’t think most people understand the very basics of the global economy in mechanical terms, and this was my attempt to explain those mechanics. I wanted the various pieces of the system to be motivated by understandable problems, hence the fable-like story.

I now see some folks were triggered by this stylized approach. Which is a pity. I think the simple setup is worth the payoff. My explanation of money creation, for example, matches the Bank of England’s whitepaper, and I am especially pleased with how the idea of a reserve currency both develops naturally and rhymes with earlier ideas lower in the hierarchy.

- For intuition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNk_zzaMoSs

- For rigor: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010...

- For code: https://codingthematrix.com/

- For numerical/algorithmic details: https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/trefethen/text.html

http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2020/12/09/matrix-inversion...

Simple research blog on ML, stats, etc.

[1] http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2017/02/24/cnns/

> A life too full of excitement is an exhausting life, in which continually stronger stimuli are needed to give the thrill that has come to be thought an essential part of pleasure. A person accustomed to too much excitement is like a person with a morbid craving for pepper, who comes at last to be unable even to taste a quantity of pepper which would cause anyone else to choke. There is an element of boredom which is inseparable from the avoidance of too much excitement, and too much excitement not only undermines the health, but dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure, substituting titillations for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom, and jagged surprises for beauty... A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young.

In graduate school, I worked for 2+ years before my first paper was published. In that time, I passed my PhD qualifying exam, took classes, wrote code, read papers, learned math, and so forth. Yet when I applied for internships, I received no interest from employers. I suspect this was because I had no concrete signal that I knew anything in my field.

While working on my second paper, I started blogging. In the language of this article, I started generating public intellectual capital for myself. I have definitely experienced the effects of this capital on subsequent job hunts. Now I can point people to my blog to demonstrate knowledge, technical skills, and communication skills beyond the scope of my peer-reviewed work. Furthermore, there is no question about who contributed to my blog, and when I learn something new, I can externalize that quickly.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22033792

> Strangely, I could feel myself drawn towards the temptation of giving up, even though I knew failure meant certain death. In hindsight, I think it's because the act of giving up feels so similar to the sensation of success, at least in a superficially immediate way.

Over the years, the mantra that "giving up feels like success" has really helped me not give up simply to access that feeling.

[1] https://moxie.org/stories/brink-of-death/

[1] https://github.com/gwgundersen/anno