yungtuccs

On the academia is full of Marxists debate: it’s illustrative to look at Mellon, the largest source of academic humanities funding by orders of magnitude. Projects tagged w/ Marxism in their grant database? 0 Gender studies? 46 Black studies? 25 Social Justice? 42 Latinx? 451

Transracialism in Korea

解放から1990年代まで、韓国と韓国人が抱いていた「日本」というイメージ それを圧縮し、パノラマのように映し出すドキュメンタリー『ポストモダン・コリア』 韓国語を理解できるのであれば、視聴をおすすめします。 youtu.be/e0HcvFroVnE?si…

@carto_graph Living in Oxford and spending this year in Seoul, the KTX (suseo) line is like 20km semi-undergroudlnd to minimize noise etc., having first hand experience of Botley fiasco in Oxford i cannot express the frustration I felt daily. Also they connecting KTX with inner city line now

Ben isn’t exaggerating about the order of magnitude difference. In constant $: 🇬🇧 HS2: $626 mn/km 🇫🇷 LGV to Bordeaux: $43 mn/km 🇮🇹 Brescia–Verona: $63 mn/km 🇰🇷 Suseo line: $89 mn/km. Pricey. But that’s because it’s 87% in tunnel.

@enzoreds @samhaselby My understanding is that Cambridge sorta played the rear guard to this, I recall Dunn hinting at this, paving the way for mini republicanism revival

@samhaselby I don't know. Rawls is the most important midcentury liberal and he had zero theory of history in TJ. In PL he dipped his toes into it.

Mid 20th century American liberals wrote books with big ideas because the competition from socialism and Marxism forced them to have a coherent theory of history and to be bold thinkers. Now they just do half-assed rebrandings of neoliberalism, like abundance.

@SuzanneSmith126 @ghostofchristo1 Certain obsession with 'power' or 'power fluid dynamics' does seem to point that way

As Richard Rorty said in his remarks on the rhetoric of unmasking, "Many self-consciously 'postmodern' writers seem to me as trying to have it both ways — to view masks as going all the way down while still making invidious comparisons between other people’s masks and the way things will look when all the masks have been stripped off."

The cynical, counterintuitive interpretation is now the norm. This “unmasking” mentality is a catastrophically poor tool for understanding how the world actually works.

I tutor English, for free, to senior executives of seven Korean small-cap companies whose stocks I own. It started in 2024 when I cold-emailed the CEO of an industrial valve manufacturer in Busan, asking three questions about his capital allocation philosophy. He replied that he was “embarrassed of my English for the international shareholder,” and I wrote back and offered him an hour of free conversation practice a week. He took me up on it. We have been meeting every Tuesday at 7 AM Korean time for 26 months. We talk about whatever he wants. Sometimes his grandchildren. Sometimes the weather. Sometimes an English idiom he encountered in the Financial Times, like “kicking the can down the road,” which I spent 40 minutes explaining one Tuesday in November and which he has, in the months since, used in three earnings calls. Often, with no prompting, he tells me what the board discussed last month, what his largest customer is doing, why he chose not to raise the dividend this quarter, and which competitor he believes will be acquired within 18 months. He does not consider this disclosure. He considers it conversation, which it is. He considers me a friend, which I have, in some way I am still working out, become. I now do this with seven companies. A CFO in Daegu teaches me Korean tax law in exchange for help with his slide decks. A vice chairman in Seoul walks me through his IR presentations every other week and asks me to flag anything that sounds “robot.” An 81-year-old founder in Ulsan, whose English is too poor for real conversation, mostly just sits in companionable silence with me on Zoom for 45 minutes, pointing at things on his desk and trying to name them. None of these men have ever told me anything that would constitute material nonpublic information, because they are not, in these conversations, in the mode of executives talking to a shareholder. They are in the mode of older men talking to a younger man who has taken an interest in the language they have always wanted to speak better. The returns on the seven positions have been substantial. The price of admission has been the willingness to sit on a video call at 6 PM every Tuesday for two years and talk about the weather with a man whose English is improving, slowly, in a way that brings him visible joy. Almost nobody is willing to do this. That unwillingness is, as it has always been, the entire reason it works.

My Korean friend says the subtle flex in the dating market right now is wearing an SK Hynix jacket to your first date. My Taiwanese friend says he is wearing TSMC shoes to his reunion. Wonder if I can buy both on Taobao and wear them for morning jog at East Coast Park. Semiconductor drip is the new streetwear. No wonder Nike stocks tanking.

Excellent FT chart comparing Japan’s and China’s real-estate busts—and a reminder of how long Japan’s took to reach bottom.

Theatre of Ephesus: Before and After Excavations

critics are raving - “it’s technically a movie”

for this week's piece on whether my 9 year old will go to college, I wrote about the enrollment cliff, the 15% drop in incoming freshmen at UVM, and the huge crisis that will likely wipe out a whole lot of colleges over the next two decades. newyorker.com/news/fault-lin…

The four stages of Simulacra.

Hello! I'm starting a new blog/newsletter thing. First post is about aid and growth, and what I think is missing from the renewed enthusiasm in DC to subsidize private investment in developing countries: i.e., export discipline. 1/

I told a woman at a dinner party last week that I owned 47 Korean small cap deep value stocks, and she asked me, with genuine concern, if I was being held hostage by a North Korean intelligence operation. I said no, I was being held hostage by the mathematical certainty that a forklift bearing manufacturer in Busan trading at 0.3x net cash is going to re-rate when the founder’s daughter, who runs a hot yoga studio in Seoul, finally inherits the shares and sells the entire company to a Singaporean private equity fund in a single afternoon. She nodded slowly, the way you nod at a man who has just told you his cat is the reincarnation of his accountant. Her husband, who works at a hedge fund and is down 23% on the year, asked me what my edge was, and I told him my edge was being the only person at the entire party who could pronounce “Gyeonggi-do,” which is technically not true but felt true in the moment. I have not been invited back, and I have, in the three weeks since, made more money on a single Korean cement company than the host makes in a year, which is, as it has always been in every great deep value trade in history, the entire reason the math works.

From this new APSR, a striking map of precolonial 19th century states in Africa, measured by areas within 8 hours of walking from a political center

Africa's nationalist leaders face a challenge - trying to overcome ethnic diversity to strengthen nation-building. Political scientists emphasise weak state capacity. I suggest that demographics make this even harder Populations have surged at very low incomes, amid weak state capacity, exacerbating stresses.

@B_Eichengreen Its kinda crazy eichengreen gets so little engagements, I think I literally own more books by him than current number of RTs (golden/ European economy/ korean miracle; and I guess now the new book :p