Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

I write about the history of technology & industry at . Previously: co-founder & CEO, ; engineering manager at Flexport and Amazon

Joined April 2007

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  1. Pinned Tweet
    28 Oct 2019
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  2. attn : “the increasing prevalence of unwantedness across birth order explains a substantial part of the documented birth order effects in education and employment” (via )

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  3. ~30 years (if this speculation is correct) is a long lag time from discovering an opportunity to training a generation for it.

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  4. Does, say, someone like have the clout to pull this off if he wanted to? Is anyone with good advice to give people age ~16–20 trying to do so?

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  5. If you wanted to reach the top ~10% of high school students in their junior and senior years in order to give them advice about how to manage their careers, how could you do it? Who or what has their attention, where a serious message would fit?

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  6. Obviously we can't predict future opportunities decades out in much detail or with high confidence, but shouldn't we be trying harder? Are we basically placing the future in the hands of high school guidance counselors?

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  7. Example: “In 1928, 17% of all graduates entered the investment business; in 1940 only 4.4% did” (B. Mark Smith, A History of Global Stock Markets, p. 141)

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  8. Seems to me that kids choosing a major in school are doing so based on current events (t = 0) and the advice of elders (t = -10 to -20 years), when it should be based on long-term future opportunities (t = +10 to +20 years)

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  9. Feb 1

    Why do so many books describe statistics in words instead of giving you a damn chart? I could understand this much better and faster with a simple line chart. 📈

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  10. Feb 1

    Last names were nothing; the ultimate “legibility” is how we're all forced to come up with universally unique alphanumeric identifiers for ourselves on every social network and messaging app. James Scott eat your heart out

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  11. Feb 1

    I’m highly amused that early books about the stock market had titles like *Confusion of Confusions* and *Ye Outside Fools!* (Not making those up)

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  12. Feb 1

    Around the 18th & 19th centuries, seems that people were grappling with randomness in at least two quite disparate areas: finance, and scientific experiment. Has any book made connections between these two? How probability & statistics were applied to solve both?

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  13. Feb 1

    Basically the whole thing was a Ponzi scheme (and Ponzi himself wouldn't come along for another 200 years). Fortunately today we have accounting standards that don't let you play this particular trick. Again, fascinating to see all the mistakes we had to make along the way

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  14. Feb 1

    Oh, another wacky thing: During the South Sea Bubble around 1720, when the South Sea Company sold shares above par value, they booked the excess as *revenue*. So they could report *profits* from doing nothing other than selling shares—and then pay those out as dividends!

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  15. Feb 1

    Fifteen miles an hour! The reckless daredevils cc ⁦

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  16. Feb 1

    In any case the whole model certainly seems suboptimal compared to today's model of having multiple rounds of investment, each of which is paid in full, each priced separately. But when and how did we figure this out?

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  17. Feb 1

    I haven't figured out yet if you paid the rest in regular installments, or if there were capital calls by the company when they needed cash. Also not sure what happened if you failed to make payments—did you forfeit your equity?

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  18. Feb 1

    I *think* this was called “subscription”, but today a “stock subscription” means something different, so it's hard to Google for.

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  19. Feb 1

    So here's a weird thing about the early stock market: It was common for a long time to buy stock in a company by paying only a fraction of the share price, and to pay the rest in installments over time. When did we end this, and why?

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  20. Jan 31

    Oh and how could I forget: money and trade themselves seem to go back to prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes

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  21. Jan 31

    So, yeah. In finance there is nothing new under the sun.

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