NYT article: A Different Kind of Homework for Singapore Students: Get a Date

In a successful, benevolent, conformist, paternalistic state, risk avoidance is an optimal strategy for personal success. However, those who succeed may come to apply this strategy much too widely. Having kids is a big investment entailing lots of risk, no matter who you are. It is a risk which managed society in Singapore has not yet formulated an effective insurance policy for.

The decision to enter a marriage and have children is a personal one, the expense and success of which are determined in large part by how your personal conditions for happiness are structured. If you were truly conformist, there would be no problem with settling, but I would guess that that is hard to jibe with the self-image of the young single professional. People underestimate the difficulty of being happy AND unique.

Hoover Institution Policy Review

Peter Thiel writes the coolest apocalypse story that I have read in a while. It draws the opposite conclusion from Paul Seabright's The Company of Strangers, but from pretty much the same observations. The observation common to both - globalisation has provided amazing boosts in human wealth, but the resulting complexity has also made holistic understanding impossible, leaving blind optimism as the only motivating factor. That lack of understanding, according to Seabright, lends a certain robustness to the dynamics, whereas Thiel claims that it perches the world on a cusp dividing utopia from apocalypse, an unstable point from which the smallest deviation would bring either eternal paradise or the terminal abyss.

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I imagine the suspicion that international macro finance is an elaborate fraud to be a natural response from those aspiring to take charge, but who reach the bridge and find no controls available. Those with responsibility act regardless of ignorance, and the great power exerted by central banks is often done with little certainty as to the consequences. Steve Waldman on Interfluidity writes

Each central bank, while trying to stabilize its own bit of the world, found itself with little choice but to support and expand unsustainable financial flows on a scale so massive they have reshaped the composition of every major economy on the planet.

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Corporate entities and government agencies are agents too, but more rational and with less risk adversity. That is one thing that doesn't percolate up too well, I guess.

HT: Marginal Revolution

Econtalk Podcast

Fascinating podcast about the incentives of leaders. Main thesis: institutional constraints select for and strongly define leadership behavior.

Each leader is faced with the same problem - that of staying in power, usually accomplished by gifting the "selectorate" with resources gained from taxation. When this group is small, dictatorship results, and when this group is large, societies are more democratic. There is an interesting mention of several leaders - King Leopold in Belgium and the Congo, and Chiang Kai-Shek in China and Taiwan, where different institutional constraints led to really different leadership styles by the same leader, sometimes simultaneously. Also mentioned are Lee Kuan Yew and Mao Zedong.

At the end of the podcast, he advances an argument against term limits, which seems to approve of the way governance in Singapore works - the argument states that term limits cause lame duck terms, when leaders are no longer incentivized by re-election and are then free to give out political favors.