Michael Jackson
23.9K posts
@WorkMJ
Transatlanticist | Deeptech investor @wilbe_science @MultipleCapital @QAIventures | Would much rather be listening to jazz
There are basically 5 ways to accumulate a billion dollars: 1) Profiting from a monopoly 2) Insider-trading 3) Political payoffs 4) Fraud 5) Inheritance Don’t believe the self-made myth.
Welcome to the Home Office @NatalieFleetMP.
We stopped everything to write an answer (link below) to Paul Krugman's two posts of today (one informal, one with a simple model) arguing that Europe is broadly not falling behind the United States. The change measured by the Draghi report, he argues, is mostly due to growth in the technology industry, which has distorted GDP numbers without actually leading to higher standards of living. We should believe our eyes when we walk around France and walk around Mississippi. Krugman is wrong. The measures he uses understate European stagnation. This matters enormously. Divergence with the United States is the strongest evidence for reform in Europe. 1. The growth numbers Krugman compares the United States, France, and Germany at purchasing power parity in current prices. On that measure, France's and Germany's position relative to America has been roughly constant since 2000. But current price comparisons miss productivity gains in sectors where prices fall. If America produces twice as much software while the price of each unit halves, the value of American software output looks unchanged even though the volume has doubled. Most economists therefore use constant prices, which fix the base-year PPP level and apply each country's real output growth on top of it. American output growth has concentrated in tech, where prices have fallen tremendously as productivity rises. In terms of the volume of things produced, America has pulled away from Europe. 2. Is it all the tech industry? Krugman concedes this tech divergence but says it is not welfare-relevant. The American growth lead is an accounting artefact of measuring more iPhones at base-year prices, not a sign that Americans are actually richer, because Europeans buy the same iPhones at the same world prices. This is not the right way to think about the world today, as an earlier Paul Krugman would have argued. His model assumes tradable goods, interchangeable workers, marginal-cost pricing, and no profits. Each assumption fails. Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat. Technology is not priced at marginal cost. Apple's margins are around 40 percent. Anthropic's inference margins are at 70 percent. The major platforms enjoy network effects, switching costs, and lock-in that hold prices well above what a competitive market would deliver. A large share of the productivity gains in technology stays as profit. A lot of the value of American technology dominance shows up in equity, not in wages. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together are worth $21 trillion, more than the entire combined stock market value of all European stock markets. Around 60 percent of US equity is held by American households. The median French or Spanish household holds almost no equity. The median employee at Meta, a company with almost 80,000 employees, earned $388,000 in 2025. This advantage is not going to go away. Krugman's own 1991 paper, cited in his Nobel prize, showed that comparative advantage in modern industries is produced by increasing returns to scale, specialized labor markets, supplier networks and the agglomeration of suppliers, workers, and ideas in particular places. Once an industry concentrates somewhere, the concentration is self-reinforcing. Europe is being pushed away from the next round of technology industries (AI!). 3. What about inequality? Another retort is that GDP per capita hides substantial inequality, and so even if America is rich on average, this is mostly due to the super wealthy. But despite the US's high pre-tax income inequality, it also achieves higher median incomes than Europe, in part because of such a high base, and in part because it actually redistributes more than many European countries. The cleanest comparison is median equivalised disposable household income: income after cash taxes and transfers, adjusted for household size and purchasing power. According to the OECD's 2021 numbers, the median American earns 30 percent more than the median Dutchman, about 31 percent more than the median German, and about 52 percent more than the median Frenchman. 4. What about hours worked? Krugman points out that while American GDP per person is higher, most of this is because Americans work more. For this divergence to be an hours worked story, Americans must work more relative to Europeans now than they did in 2000. The opposite has happened. Birinci, Karabarbounis, and See in a 2026 NBER paper show that about half of the American-European hours gap that existed in the 1990s has reversed by the end of the 2010s. Americans work fewer hours per person than they did in 2000, while most Europeans work more. 5. Is America not a bad place to live? Walk around Alabama and France: surely the former cannot be substantially richer than the latter? American cities often have poorer centres and richer suburbs or exurbs. European cities preserve richer and more attractive historic cores. A visit to a city as a tourist in America compared with a city in France will leave one having seen different spots on the income distribution. Americans in Europe go to the nicest and richest European cities. Rather than a walking around test, do a driving around test. Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a level of new-built material wealth that is extremely uncommon in Europe, with thousands of enormous four- or five-bedroom homes. In the South, in places like Nashville and Austin, drive around the downtowns to see hundreds of luxury apartment buildings springing from the ground. This construction boom is replicated virtually nowhere in Europe today. The other question is generational. Housing often costs more in Europe than in the United States, despite the quality of the housing stock generally being much better. Europe has nice city cores but these are inaccessible to young Europeans. Consider the salaries available to entry-level workers. The starting pay for a London police officer is $57,000. In Washington, DC, $75,000. The entry-level Deloitte consultant job in Madrid pays around €28,000, roughly $33,000 per year. In Charlotte, the entry-level Deloitte job pays $63,000. There are many things to dislike about life in America. But relative to 25 years ago, the gap in material wealth has shifted dramatically in America's favor. siliconcontinent.com/p/european-sta…
We stopped everything to write an answer (link below) to Paul Krugman's two posts of today (one informal, one with a simple model) arguing that Europe is broadly not falling behind the United States. The change measured by the Draghi report, he argues, is mostly due to growth in the technology industry, which has distorted GDP numbers without actually leading to higher standards of living. We should believe our eyes when we walk around France and walk around Mississippi. Krugman is wrong. The measures he uses understate European stagnation. This matters enormously. Divergence with the United States is the strongest evidence for reform in Europe. 1. The growth numbers Krugman compares the United States, France, and Germany at purchasing power parity in current prices. On that measure, France's and Germany's position relative to America has been roughly constant since 2000. But current price comparisons miss productivity gains in sectors where prices fall. If America produces twice as much software while the price of each unit halves, the value of American software output looks unchanged even though the volume has doubled. Most economists therefore use constant prices, which fix the base-year PPP level and apply each country's real output growth on top of it. American output growth has concentrated in tech, where prices have fallen tremendously as productivity rises. In terms of the volume of things produced, America has pulled away from Europe. 2. Is it all the tech industry? Krugman concedes this tech divergence but says it is not welfare-relevant. The American growth lead is an accounting artefact of measuring more iPhones at base-year prices, not a sign that Americans are actually richer, because Europeans buy the same iPhones at the same world prices. This is not the right way to think about the world today, as an earlier Paul Krugman would have argued. His model assumes tradable goods, interchangeable workers, marginal-cost pricing, and no profits. Each assumption fails. Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat. Technology is not priced at marginal cost. Apple's margins are around 40 percent. Anthropic's inference margins are at 70 percent. The major platforms enjoy network effects, switching costs, and lock-in that hold prices well above what a competitive market would deliver. A large share of the productivity gains in technology stays as profit. A lot of the value of American technology dominance shows up in equity, not in wages. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together are worth $21 trillion, more than the entire combined stock market value of all European stock markets. Around 60 percent of US equity is held by American households. The median French or Spanish household holds almost no equity. The median employee at Meta, a company with almost 80,000 employees, earned $388,000 in 2025. This advantage is not going to go away. Krugman's own 1991 paper, cited in his Nobel prize, showed that comparative advantage in modern industries is produced by increasing returns to scale, specialized labor markets, supplier networks and the agglomeration of suppliers, workers, and ideas in particular places. Once an industry concentrates somewhere, the concentration is self-reinforcing. Europe is being pushed away from the next round of technology industries (AI!). 3. What about inequality? Another retort is that GDP per capita hides substantial inequality, and so even if America is rich on average, this is mostly due to the super wealthy. But despite the US's high pre-tax income inequality, it also achieves higher median incomes than Europe, in part because of such a high base, and in part because it actually redistributes more than many European countries. The cleanest comparison is median equivalised disposable household income: income after cash taxes and transfers, adjusted for household size and purchasing power. According to the OECD's 2021 numbers, the median American earns 30 percent more than the median Dutchman, about 31 percent more than the median German, and about 52 percent more than the median Frenchman. 4. What about hours worked? Krugman points out that while American GDP per person is higher, most of this is because Americans work more. For this divergence to be an hours worked story, Americans must work more relative to Europeans now than they did in 2000. The opposite has happened. Birinci, Karabarbounis, and See in a 2026 NBER paper show that about half of the American-European hours gap that existed in the 1990s has reversed by the end of the 2010s. Americans work fewer hours per person than they did in 2000, while most Europeans work more. 5. Is America not a bad place to live? Walk around Alabama and France: surely the former cannot be substantially richer than the latter? American cities often have poorer centres and richer suburbs or exurbs. European cities preserve richer and more attractive historic cores. A visit to a city as a tourist in America compared with a city in France will leave one having seen different spots on the income distribution. Americans in Europe go to the nicest and richest European cities. Rather than a walking around test, do a driving around test. Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a level of new-built material wealth that is extremely uncommon in Europe, with thousands of enormous four- or five-bedroom homes. In the South, in places like Nashville and Austin, drive around the downtowns to see hundreds of luxury apartment buildings springing from the ground. This construction boom is replicated virtually nowhere in Europe today. The other question is generational. Housing often costs more in Europe than in the United States, despite the quality of the housing stock generally being much better. Europe has nice city cores but these are inaccessible to young Europeans. Consider the salaries available to entry-level workers. The starting pay for a London police officer is $57,000. In Washington, DC, $75,000. The entry-level Deloitte consultant job in Madrid pays around €28,000, roughly $33,000 per year. In Charlotte, the entry-level Deloitte job pays $63,000. There are many things to dislike about life in America. But relative to 25 years ago, the gap in material wealth has shifted dramatically in America's favor. siliconcontinent.com/p/european-sta…
I am surprised more people are not paying attention to this update from Anthropic on its stock policy. This seems like a potential bombshell. There is an active secondary market purportedly in Anthropic stock or derivatives including on fairly reputable (or at least well-known) platforms like Forge. Anthropic is calling them out *specifically*, by name, and essentially *saying* 100% of these are illegal. Some may be frauds (people selling Anthropic stock or interests in Anthropic stock that they don't truly own), but more likely many are legit attempts at transferring Anthropic equity (directly, as SPV shares, or as some type of 'beneficial interest' or future, etc.) Anthropic appears to be saying it will treat all these transfers as void. I don't have access to their terms, but it's very interesting to think what this could mean. Do the 'first purported sellers' in the chain potentially have an opportunity to do a double-dip? Does the first seller and all downstream buyers get the entire entitlement nuked? Anthropic is threatening that--are they just bluffing? If they're not bluffing, what litigation is likely to ensue? This can get into really esoteric areas of corporate law that depend on exactly how the transfer restrictions are drafted as well as the language around how violations of transfer restrictions are treated--for example, if they are merely voidABLE then downstream buyers can assert various equitable claims/defenses, but if they are VOID ab initio then in some jurisdictions that forecloses equitable defenses.
no babe, your double layered 5% upfront 3% annual 20% carry SPV is perfect the direct allocations scare me
🔴 NEW: Spain has called for the creation of a European Union army to replace the protections offered by Nato 🔗: telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…
WHAT JUST HAPPENED? Anthropic’s pre-IPO valuation just erased $200 billion in value in ONE HOUR.
POV: estás en la web de una startup española
One gigawatt of new data center load in the San Antonio area could *save* the average customer $64 per year on their electric bills sanantonioreport.org/done-right-dat…
The only 2 places where I felt ambition like this are the US and China Nomad hubs like Bali and Thailand are nice but often people there get stuck coasting at $5K MRR because it's just cheaper to live there, so that puts kind of a natural limit on ambition, very quickly you already make "enough" SF/NYC are so ridiculously expensive to live, so you HAVE to make a lot of money, and the high cost of living is a natural filter that keeps only broke but super ambitious or already successful people (and of course nepo babies esp NYC) China is not so much expensive to live, but there's some natural cultural ambition to become #1 in everything that's very infectious
