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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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      I think I have "equity head"... all my finance/economics instincts are built around a default condition of equity >> debt. I don't really grok how a world awash in debt behaves. At some level I think I operate as though the answer is "no differently" but I can't see the steps.

      6 replies 8 retweets 67 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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      I think this is wrong because a dollar of debt contains more information than a dollar of equity. Also, a dollar of debt has a relatively legible, fragile and fixed relationship to money via interest rates. A dollar of equity otoh has an illegible, robust, and fluid relationship

      1 reply 2 retweets 17 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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      Good point. At some level, my lack of understanding of debt is due to strong personal aversion to carrying it. Except for one emergency period, I've never carried a credit card balance. Paid off one car early, never bought a house (and now couldn't qualify for a mortgage prob)

      1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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      There is a big social difference. While there is always risk of default, in theory, a creditor is not seeking to participate in your risk, while an equity partner is. There is stigma/consequences to not paying one's debts that there isn't to not generating a return for investment

      1 reply 1 retweet 13 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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      Funny how perceptions can attach to money even without clarity on whether it is debt or equity. I could probably have technically qualified for an SBA loan or even PPP if I'd structured a claim cleverly. But it is heisen-money. Equity if you use it for payroll, debt if you don't.

      2 replies 2 retweets 11 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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      Also, even within debt, my mental model is off. I think by default in terms of private debt to specific creditors who operate within a money system, not public debt owed to nebulous creditors including "the public" and "china" who are in control of the money system the debt is in

      8:56 AM - 1 Jun 2020
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      • David Shaw Billy Smith Rahul Ramchandani ajinomoto GP Warren Koch ☃️A Thousand Merry F**kin Plateaus🎄 coldtusker
      2 replies 1 retweet 7 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          So this world is double jeopardy for me. Not only is it a debt > equity world which I don't understand, it is public debt > private debt which I understand even less. The best way I can understand it sociologically is in terms of a collectivist huddle against shared risks.

          1 reply 1 retweet 11 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          The philosophical theory behind the world basically bailing itself out via money printer go brrr --> buy up any sort of ridiculous debt anybody cares to issue is "we're all in this together." That somehow pooling risk/resources makes survival likelier and better for all.

          3 replies 1 retweet 13 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          This of course gets us heavily distorted money and prices because essentially the entire world has retreated into a single household where money is managed like a household budget (congrats people who like that wrong metaphor... this stopped clock tells your time)

          1 reply 2 retweets 11 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          If you think prices for medical care in the US ($18k for a Covid test billed to Cigna by UCSF in one tweet that I saw!) are insane, wait till you see how prices for *everything everywhere* end up in that same insane zone.

          2 replies 1 retweet 9 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          This might be the biggest problem with debt. High debt levels distort prices dramatically by collectivizing interests. Money gets spent the way it does within a marriage for instance -- driven more by the pair psychology and co-dependency pattern rather than any sense of value.

          1 reply 2 retweets 13 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          Within a marriage, this is a good thing. Husband might ignore wife's spending to keep the peace. Wife might ignore husband's crazy man cave for the same reason. Parents might give in to kids demands for toys to avoid tantrums and exhaustion rather than to raise kids well.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          But the cost of this is all spending is towards the stability of the collective rather than the ostensible value of things being bought from the outside world. The price of the wife's cosmetics or husband's man cave or the kid's toys is set by the value of "avoid conflict"

          1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          The collective that has bound itself in mutual obligation like a family using debt mechanisms has heavily overindexed internal signals over external signals. The "family" now no longer knows the cost/value of anything against an external reference.

          1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          Or in terms of design of money, the design reflects inner psychological realities of the collective rather than outer material realities of survival and wealth creation.

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          Or to put it in terms of a sociological metaphor, the "debt huddle" is so inward focused, it behaves like a locust swarm in the external world, feeding unsustainably on anything it can find.

          1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          And opting out of the monetary system with gold or bitcoin is no use because the real base of value is people, and if the majority of people are in a locust-huddle due to economic-environmental stress, a few choosing not to be locusts can't change anything.

          2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          The only way out of locust mode is to get back to equity > debt mode, which means finding new sources of external wealth and value that lower the sense of extreme risk, scarcity, and deprivation and unbundle the "collective family" into independent economic actors.

          2 replies 1 retweet 10 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          Okay that thinking out loud helped. I think I understand debt better now. Not that it helps. Now I'm more convinced I'm very ill-adapted to this world since I refuse to be a locust bound to other locusts via mutual public debt obligations. I'll pay higher taxes, but that's it.

          3 replies 0 retweets 6 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          Now I need complementary mental models for taxes. I think my theory of debt implies people with the highest likelihood of discovering new sources of wealth should pay the lowest taxes, and everybody else should be taxed to the limit of yield while they go hunting.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          In a fucked-up, heavily distorted way, full of self-congratulation and self-dealing, this is what conservatives and libertarians try to do. The imagine themselves to obviously be "essential" workers in wealth creation even if participation is via 3 degrees of tenuous separation

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          For the sake of argument, imagine that all wealth is created by selfless academic scientists making new discoveries, with their students going out and building startups based on those discoveries, invested in by VCs, in turn invested in by LPs.

          1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          In this cartoon wealth pipeline, the scientists would be paid tax-free NSF money just to exist, their students would enjoy low tax rates for building startups, the VCs would pay a slightly higher tax rate, and the LPs higher than that. We're talking net income tax rate here.

          2 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          Past LPs, the case that you're "participating in wealth creation" becomes very tenuous indeed. You're at best just not getting in its way. If you're not adding *information bits* to *equity dollars*, you're not helping. You may not be hurting, but you're not helping.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          The basic principle is: if you're helping make money smarter, you get lower taxes. If you're keeping it constant smart or making it dumber, you get higher taxes.

          3 replies 1 retweet 6 likes
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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          Somebody, not-me, should write a book about all money as equity invested in future ideas/individuality, as a counterpoint to Graeber's model of all money as debt held in a history of obligations/mutuality.

          4 replies 5 retweets 15 likes
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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Nick Pinkston  🌐

          The cartoon pipeline is a cartoon because it doesn't work as advertised. Distortion and capture every step of the way.https://twitter.com/NickPinkston/status/1267493781697249291 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Nick Pinkston  🌐 @NickPinkston
          Replying to @vgr
          Isn't this the current US system? NSF exists (though with income and institutional taxes), startups don't pay taxes until profit, VCs get tax free carried interest, etc., and I think it depends on the LPs what taxes they get, though that's likely closer to VC level.
          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          I think the big missing piece that could make debt less toxic is being able to choose much more meaningfully who you get indebted to. Every individual/group being able to designate debt in their own currency tokens would be a step in that direction. Decouple globally a bit.

          3 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          You kick the global coupling up a level to a much more fine-grained currency market, with much less exposure on the management or mismanagement of the dollar, but higher exposure to smaller-scale bad behavior.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          If instead of a few hundred national currencies and $ as the denoting default, you had millions or billions of currencies, almost all of it backed by small/local patterns of debt holding, what would happen? Like in crypto markets most tokens would have effectively no liquidity.

          2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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        26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          The median currency would have 1-2 market movers. In fact typical case would be “my mom bought all my tokens in exchange for indulgently priced better tokens”

          2 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
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        27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          Heh, @Archivd is running precisely such a closed, illiquid token currency for his young son out of a cookie jar. That idea but broadened.

          2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
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        28. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 1
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          Hehe, my theory of polyglot microservices money might run into demand problems https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1267499651638280203?s=21 …https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1267499651638280203 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          Poll: What creditor are you *least* willing to take on debt from?
          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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        29. End of conversation

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