The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

Social Capital , simply put, is what makes civilization go . At the neighborhood level, it's what makes you feel at ease with crossing your street to ask your neighbor for that specific wrench you need to tighten that one hinge you're trying to fix. The trust you have in your neighbors --the comfort of knowing your car tires won't be slashed at night or that your house won't be broken into-- allows you to focus on things that are different from security and survival to (hopefully) be more productive. Sure, you can also spend all your time  doomscrolling  and brainrotting , but at least you have the optionality to do something good with that extra time. When it works in harmony, the social contract we tacitly (sometimes expressly) enter into allows us to develop our human capacities.  After all, what is art and the pursuit of knowledge if not just the leisurely, luxurious activity that's permitted only when those with the capacity, the interest, the means and intent ...

If you ask me to name the one thing that makes the United States the most powerful and influential country in human history...  I don't answer its military. Even though the U.S. defense budget is staggering. I don't answer its rule of law. Even though the U.S. ranks very high in the world .  I don't answer its living standards. Even though the U.S. ranks in the top 5  in economic freedom. I don't answer its cultural inclination to dominate and conquer faraway lands , nor the facility (and most importantly, the willingness ) of its citizens to move within its borders in search for a better future. Laudable as that may be.   Even if the % of movers has decreased since the 90's, close to 17MM people moved within the US in 2017 alone.  That's almost  the equivalent of the Netherlands, or Ecuador, or Senegal moving houses in 12 months  🤯 .  I would not even answer its marvelous capacity  to take in immigrants from all other the world for mor...

Gordon Gekko famously quipped “ greed is good ” in his iconic Wall Street 80's movie. The phrase came in the middle of an era of deregulation and liberalization. A phase where "shoot for the fences" was the name of the game. Financial markets then became more of a cumulative distillation of the collective psychological state of its participants. And now, just as then, greed-dominated markets engender euphoria, happiness and (even if only fleeting and paper-based) great wealth. Fear-induced markets are the mirror image of the former, degenerating into panics, wealth destruction and (in some tragic cases) even death .  Fear is connected to the negative. It’s why policemen shoot first and find out later. It's how some autocrats gain power over a very fearful electorate. Why politics have become so toxic as of late, and why the youngest generation these days is  despairing and gloomy  (where 60% of them "experience persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness"...

It's practically impossible to avoid the news of ecological crises (plural) these days. I'm not talking about Russia strangling Europe this winter by cutting gas flows. That will be a politically-made crisis. I'm talking about the epochal droughts afflicting the entire planet. You know it's bad when river flows in Europe are so low that the Rhine can't sustain commercial traffic; when the Tiber water levels in Rome are so low that the foundations of Roman bridges from the times of Nero are exposed.  Resurfaced remains of a bridge in Rome’s River Tiber, in July. Photographer: Alessia Pierdomenico/Bloomberg But you know it's next level bad when the literal "hunger stone" appears in the Czech Republic --an inscription from 1619 at the bottom of the Elbe river that says " If you see me, then weep " Hunger stone on the Elbe in Decin, Czech Republic (AFP/Getty) I wish it was only Europe. The Western US is going through the worst drought in 1200 yea...

Another cycle around our star and we're still stuck in the same rut. Still talking about dealing with uncertainty; about counting your blessings; about stopping and smelling the roses because  life is short  and it's better to appreciate the small things when a virus can snatch your life away any second should you dare step outside. Is Omicron deadlier? More contagious? Resistant to Pfizer? To Moderna? How many mutations did you say it had? Does it evade natural immunity? But it doesn't affect your smell? Oh, the symptoms are the same as the common cold? But masks still work, right? Oh, but not cloth ones?  The noise is  maddening .  Our hyper-mediatized, over-stimulated minds can't think of nothing other than what's in our handheld screens. And at the same time, our hyper-cynical minds won't believe those very same incessant, flickering alerts, either. Somehow our collective mind has entered a sort of  Schrödinger -like, superposition state. We  ...

Today I saw a man wearing a Lionel Messi jersey. It was weird. It was not the ubiquitous blaugrana   jersey that you see everywhere. No. It was the new Paris St. Germain one. It felt foreign . It got me thinking. How dares the emblem of Culés betray his tribe? And how cheap of that guy to jump ship from Barça to PSG just because of a player? The strangeness of seeing the PSG emblem in the same piece of clothing with the letters Messi   in the back hit me. We are nothing but pawns. Cheap imitators who crave for models to follow. Without them, we are lost. This whole post-modernist idea that says " you're unique ", " you're an individual " ,  " you're cool in your own way " is complete bullsh*t.  The man wearing that jersey wants to be like Messi. Why else would he be willing to shell out $200  to signal to the world that he's committed to emulate him? What part of Messi he wants to be, I don't know. The fame? The money? The ability to dr...

We're instinctive animals. We act in accordance to what we feel: anger, happiness, compassion, pain. Your body is an evolution-optimized "soft machine"  whose actions can be traced and explained by specific emotions.  You are cold? You get a blanket. The pain your nerves communicate to your brain prompts you to act and look for warmth. You're angry because somebody flipped you off on your commute to work? Your return the gesture, or even escalate by cutting him/her off at the first chance.   Emotion begets actions. We are slaves to the whims of our feelings. Entire religions and eastern traditions are built around the concept of achieving control over what we feel and emote. Nobel prizes are given to those who invent  new branches of knowledge which merge psychology and economics (“behavioral economics”), based on the idea that our emotions makes us act stupidly.  This is evidently a huge blind spot in all of us. A vulnerability that's been exploite...

We can't predict the future. Chaos always reigns. The unpredictable compounding of events is inevitable, and we can always count on surprises occurring , which is why it pays to build our lives (and invest) with the certainty that something will inevitably go wrong. Accounting for the certitude that something you planned for will not go as planned should prod you to hedge yourself via diversification --or even better, redundancies. Of course, building redundancies takes resources. That insurance policy doesn't pay for itself. You sacrifice current income (and/or effort) to build that safety net in case SHTF.  And although it could very well be that you'll never use it, it's not stupid to build it. An example: Nature, in its infinite iteration game called evolution, gave us two kidneys. I am pretty sure it's not free (evolutionarily speaking) to carry an extra filter behind your belly just in case one clogs with crap you throw at your body. If evolution settles on an...

Knowledge accumulates throughout generations. It travels through time as long as there is always someone at the other end of the arrow of time to absorb it, assimilate it and apply it. Language helped it transcend --first in oral traditions , then in written form. Sure, there were some instances of miscommunication between some generations and knowledge stalled at times, but generally speaking, knowledge compounds itself. It exhibits the same exponential behavior as wealth. For early forager humans, the knowledge to conquer our environment (learning about medicine plants, edible roots, game migrating patters) was as valuable then as it is today to learn what's the next meme stock being hyped on reddit.  At the beginning the band forager culture fomented cooperation. To share what early foragers gathered/hunted was the rational thing to do. After all, the volatility of your returns (one day you'd have a good kill, but then days would go by without a catch) pushed you to share ...

One of the most ironic things about the political revolution that manifested itself with battle cry " Make America Great Again " is its inherent ideological contradiction. Although  Trump supporters   never explicitly explain what " America " they want to bring back, implicit is the notion that they want to see again the dominant, stable U.S. of the post war II period. A country characterized by economic stability, a rising  middle class;  a country where people could pay for their own college education with a waiter's wage, and where corporate employees could rely on the certainty that their corporation looked at them as life partners who deserved to retire with juicy defined benefit pensions.  Where's the contradiction, you ask? Well, the political leaning of the era --the one that allowed stability and prosperity for its middle class--was markedly left-leaning: the New Deal  of FDR, the Great Society of LBJ. Even Republican Eisenhower knew better than go...