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Not all consultants do this. There are lazy equivalents to investors (2) who you can call consultants (2). Jump from client to client, never bothering to understand any business, shilling the same “process” workshop regardless of context. Lean, “design thinking”, holacracy 🙄
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Detest those types. They give the rest of us a bad name. There is no such thing as a context-independent business process or function. If you don’t care to learn about a business and adapt your offering, you’re lazily peddling fads the same way investors (2) lazily pump up stocks
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But back to economy after that bit of product placement. This whole point is why I’m not a socialist. I don’t think it matters much who “owns” the capital. Whether it is a workers coop or a fat-cat single rich person, the question is how hard they think.
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A single wealthy person might decide where to put a million dollars by spending 10 hours thinking about it. A collective of 100 people each with a 10k stake in a million might spend an hour each thinking about it, so 100 hours. 100 diverse hours or 10 single-mind hours?
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On paper that’s 10x the hours but most of it will go to solving the coordination problem. The collective will be smarter in some cases, he single mind will be smarter in others. The solution is a mix of concentrated and distributed capital pools driven by both kinds of smarts.
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I’m learning this the hard way with the Some projects I’d take to that consulting collective hive-mind, others I’d do by myself. Very different challenges. Same with money. Distributed investing is very hard. This is why passive investment in everything works.
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You can’t fix the problems of markets and capitalism by changing who gets to be stupid and uninterested in the details of where it goes. Smart money is simply money that is paying attention to what it is doing. No matter what the mechanism and who is investing, attention is key.
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Radical thought: centrally planned Soviet communism and Chinese capitalism aren’t actually that different from Western markets. All suffer from the exact same divorce between invest (1) and invest (2) leading to dumb ADD money. They all just have different externalities.
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In that theory you compare democracies and dictatorships in terms of 3 groups: nominal selectorate, real selectorate, winning coalition. Aka interchangeables, influentials, essentials. In my economic theory: passive investors, investor-2s, investor-1s.
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USSR, modern China, and modern West represent differences in degree, not kind. All 3 are just different points in the 3D vector space of investor-selectorate theory. For USSR, Spufford’s Red Plenty comes highly recommended. I’ve read summaries.
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Okay, after a run and a shower, I have more to say. I probably have among the biggest income source spans on the planet. I’ve been paid directly by billionaires and centimillionaires for consulting, and by starving artists who can barely make rent via newsletter subs/ebook buys
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This makes me part of the direct service class, not that different from butlers or restaurant waiters. Bridging two very different worlds. Each side unconsciously tries really hard to avoid direct, humanizing contact with the other.
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There is a motivated interest in doing this. Humanizing contact falsifies glib generalizations like “the poor are just lazy” or “the rich are just venal” and class-based theories of how things fail. This allows them to blame absolutely everything systemically wrong on other side.
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On both sides I listen more than I talk (which may seem impossible to some who complain that I talk too much), while making it clear that the counterparty should not assume my sympathies. One way or another I’m being paid to think on their behalf, not commiserate. Like a lawyer.
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To both sides I’m slightly suspect. The poor are suspicious of my work with the rich, and I’m often accused outright of being a petit bourgeoisie capitalist shill. Which is 100% true. Equally the rich often suggest I’m a commie in bourgeois disguise. Also 100% true.
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The opposite of every great truth is also a great truth. The poor are exploited. True. The poor are ressentiment driven identitarians who may or may not work hard. Also true. The rich are lazy venal rentiers. True. The rich are burdened with large responsibilities. Also true.
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This is class-based bothsidesism of course, which is why the worst of both sides are the ones who hate people like me the most (“vertical centrists” perhaps?). But for every systemic failure theres plenty of blame to distribute from top to bottom of pyramid.
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Every class is complicit in how the world works. Every class has its full complement of sociopaths, clueless and losers. Every class has lazy and hard working types. Every class has people with fixed and fluid class identities. It’s a fractal thing.
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Despite the fact that rewards of the system working are very unevenly distributed, ironically, every class winning or losing in terms of rewards seems super attached to the identities that keep the system the same. They want more rewards, but don’t want to change their identities
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To bring it back around to investing, there is investing in *yourself* to consider. Self-Investors (1) invest in their own growth, destroying last identities to forge new ones. Self-Investors (2) double down harder and harder on who they think they are.
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There’s also Self-Investors 1.5. People who “grow” in a limited way reducible to class mobility. Start rich, fall into poverty and go commie. Start poor, get rich, and go capitalist. They say you’re the mean of your 5 best friends. These class-movers just change their 5. 🙄
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In Great Tuth terms, these 1.5ers never achieve any sort of integration between opposed great truths. They just go from one great truth to its negation, by cherrypicking a different subset of confirmatory evidence from their experiences.
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There’s a behavior I call default-stereotype switching. Going socialist to capitalist? Switch poor-default from the suffering, exploited people you know to the resentful lazy ones. Going the other way? Switch rich-default from generous entrepreneur to Wall Street scammer.
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So long as you don’t pop out of the class-mobility identity ladder entirely, and drop class-based defaults of admiration and contempt for individuals, you’re part of the problem. Which is fine. It’s not a shaming. It means you’ll be manipulated as interchangeable passives.
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Not a coincidence: every single time anyone has strongly criticized me for my values, politics, or aesthetics (usually lack thereof), when I look, there’s a strong, hardened class identity behind it (this is not true of competence/skill/ignorance criticisms, which I appreciate)
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I’m pretty bourgeois. Petit, not haute. It’s traditionallly been the least admired class, inviting the most contempt. The identitarian poor see it as a snobbish climber class. The identitarian rich see it as a gauche not-even-new-money class. It is the most fluid-identity class.
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The upside of being in maximal contempt zone is that it is the zone where it is most difficult to harden an identity. There are no bourgeois manifestos or middle-class ideological tracts *for the bourgeois*, despite this being the class that writes these things for other classes
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Writing *about* the petit bourgeois is almost universally unsympathetic. Much of it by members of the class themselves, via ritual self-flagellation. This is the world of Babbitts and Karens. They are portrayed as standing for nothing except their own comfort and convenience.
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But middle-class societies tend also to be the ones in which human nature evolves fastest, through identity creative-destruction, as tidal forces of contempt from above and below tear apart and reconstitute the class, every generation. They also staff the investor (1) world.
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Rich and poor usually don’t change and don’t want to change. They have stable identities they aspire to, conform to, and then cling to with hardened determination. The petit bourgeois middle class doesn’t have this psychological luxury. It evolves as a series of tropes and memes.
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I don’t mind this. I’m fine with my life story being a series of bad memes that don’t cohere. Wojack today, Karen tomorrow. Neither world-denting Straussian-Girardian hero n or working class hero. Maybe I’ll title my autobiography “Glub and brrr: the story of a series of memes”
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Positive archetypes are for people who live on maps. Investor (2) types, whether they invest with money or hardened self-congratulatory class identities that make growth an imperative for everybody but themselves. The price of living on the territory is being reduced to a meme.
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