If you’d been clever enough to (say) stock up on DRAM chips or GPUs, you’d be sitting pretty right now. But we’re bad at that sort of thing thanks to decades of lean. We are better at betting on abstract instruments representing things than at holding actual things.
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Even the real estate boom is primarily in the financialized end of higher liquidity properties that can be owned in Vancouver from China. I see people with vague back-to-the-land fantasies struggle yo learn the basics of owning raw land, how to get electricity and water to it etc
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So crap properties in urban cores are caught between depreciation through blight versus appreciation due to uninformed demand. Right now, knowing how to use less developed land is more valuable than having the money to win bidding wars for developed land.
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Owning things is a skill. Inventory management is a skill. Inventory is not rotting, depreciating, work-in-progress tied to a single use or market. It’s a kind of complex potential that can be more or less fungible than money in certain conditions.
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We all got a shock lesson last year that under certain rare but foreseeable scenarios, toilet paper. PPE, and sanitizer have higher fungibility than cash. I bet Wall Street quants are brilliant at modeling scenarios and identifying things *worth* holding. But they stop there.
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Nobody wants to actually acquire the skills of holding things. Just the skills of betting on representations and passing on the actual things as quickly as possible. Preferably not touching them at all. So we buy oil futures with nowhere to put the oil if forced to take delivery.
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The Art of Being Fat
I have my essay title 😎
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Maybe I should NFT this essay and financialize it 🤣
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There’s a broader economic-philosophical point here.
Lean is a natural expression of growthism, which is growth-for-the-sake-of-growth *as measured by money* because in a time-averaged sense, under low-uncertainty conditions, money is the most fungible asset *on average*
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Isn’t this what bureaucracy is for? Bureaucrats are like fat cells in this metaphor. They divert energy from more efficient flows and store it so it will be available later. Thinking of all the career government wonks that ran, eg. the CDC, FDA, etc. Michael Lewis 5th Risk types.
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Kinda but at macro-national scale for base commodities in huge amounts. I’m thinking we all need to become a bit more bureaucratic all the way down.
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Agreed! But there’s a knowledge equivalent too. Lewis tells the story of deep technical expertise stored in government agencies where it was not fully optimized and actually used to slow down optimization in order to hedge against risk.
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Yeah I include the knowledge in my definition. It’s linked to the soecif8c resource being stewarded. Maybe stewardship is a better term than bureaucracy. Bureaucracy too often ends up as robotic rules-knowledge, not appreciative understanding.
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