The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

Nobody can really  take credit for having solved a problem that never happened. Any attempt at it drags you into the realm of non-existent hypotheticals and becomes moot the moment you open your mouth. This is the position leaders around the world find themselves in when trying to fight this pandemic. It doesn't matter how informed, intelligent, prescient our leaders might (or might not) be, they face the same fog of uncertainty when trying to predict the future while making decisions to fix a problem this complex. For better and worse, we're equipped with minds that can only draw on history to construct patterns when trying to face the future. And in a Bayesian dance , all we can aspire to do is to  tinker with our course of action as that fog of uncertainty chooses to spit the next piece of evidence at us. There is no other way. Leaders (simple humans* that they are) fall prey to the same  Law of Small Numbers ; forced to take action in the face of clouded, sm...

9/11 changed our way of life. It eroded our liberties. The Patriot Act made us slaves to a new reality in which we now gladly accept to be taken pictures that penetrate our clothes by the TSA with the sole objective of confirming we will not hijack our plane and slam it into a landmark. COVID19 will erode our liberties too. Just like 9/11 makes us willfully pose naked in exchange for the right to fly, COVID19 will eventually and make us gladly share our location to cross-reference it with healthcare databases to know if we've been exposed to infected people in exchange for the right to walk into a restaurant, a stadium or visit grandma at the nursing home. Just like life on the streets went on after 9/11 --it in a slightly different way-- life will go on on the streets after COVID19 --in a slightly  different way. The change in the world of economics will be more pronounced, though. The stock market represents the present value of the cash flows to equity, not...

I've been told that I am a negative person. And of course, I don't think I am. My motivated reasoning kicks in and immediately tells me that I can't be that negative . But then I stop to think about it and realize that I might be,  after all . Always looking at the phone for the news-break --which are generally negative. Sharing the latest story about a potential pandemic , or about locust swarms blanketing africa , or about the potential WWIII-triggering assassination of an Iranian Commander . Or about the Puerto Rico earth-quake . Reflecting upon that, I've settled upon a couple of ideas. Yes, I pay more attention to the negative stuff. And I share it as soon as I can (at least the significant parts). But I don't think that makes me negative . I think that makes me human. I am, just like everyone else, equipped with a bunch of mental quirks that make me (and you) gravitate towards anything threatening around you. When we are reminded of all the progress that ...

I am not really sure if we really appreciate the true brilliance of the The Wachowsky brothers'  The Matrix . Its prescience was uncanny. In 1999, they dreamed up a world in which humans were harvested for their energy, for the benefit of machines. A sentient, all-encompassing machine--originally created by humans-- developed a sense of self-interest and built an illusory world available solely to the sensory perceptions of their captive slaves, who were entertained by such illusion and kept in apocalyptic-looking pods --hooked-up to devices that fed the machine with energy. "Reality" was simply too shiny. Too engaging. Too real to look away from. You needed to take the red pill to wake up . At the time --and up until very recently-- my idea of it all was that The Matrix was just a very sophisticated criticism of Capitalism. A " call to arms " of sorts to all nine-to-fivers who despised their monotonous jobs, felt utterly empty and purposeless, and desperate...

You know there's a problem with Capitalism when Ray Dalio, a guy who has made billions in the financial markets is saying that capitalism will explode into an armed revolution if we don't reform it. You know there's a problem with Capitalism when the Business Roundtable announces that they've formally and officially renounced shareholder primacy . If the guys who stand to benefit the most from Capitalism are calling for reform, it is definitely indication that the fire has reached the backyard. Capitalism is akin to nature. Its natural selection process is the free market, in which competition selects winners over losers. Just like Evolution uses natural selection to arrive at fitter species, Capitalism uses the market to arrive at  "fitter citizens" ( wealthy citizens). But Evolution does not know about ethics (it is a mental construct devised by society, after all), nor does it carry a specific purpose (it isn't teleological). Here is where Capita...

You and I are going to die. That much is certain. And --hopefully not much-- before that, we will burden our society and our family with the responsibility of taking care of us. Historically, the burden was carried by the children. That is why many societies have instilled in their members (I can't think of one that doesn't) the value of respect towards their elders --a societal self-preservation mechanism that allows the ageing to finally collect a loan they originally extended to society in the form of productivity when they were young. Be it directly (via familial care) or indirectly (via tax collection), that debt is paid for by the work and effort of those coming behind --kin or not. Younger generations are thus, by definition, cursed (or blessed) by the genealogical accident that assigned them cosmic responsibility of their older generation. Their collective agency with regards to their generational responsibility is stripped from them the same way it was also stripped ...

Societies are an agreed-upon set of collective norms. A bet on everyone else's behavior to cooperate for the benefit of all. Although that set is not really... set . Like any human construct, they evolve. Interact with their environment. They change course when faced with influencing factors. Also, not every member of society fulfills their agreement. Some people invariably defect (misbehave), and the collective agrees that some level of defection is just not worth getting that much worked-up about. Just ask San Franciscans  about car break ins. Or  John Oliver  about robocalls .  Behind all this lies an iterative process. After society determines it can't tolerate certain defection level, it pressures governmental institutions to tighten its grip via the codification of punishments directed at them damn defectors. New laws criminalizing the deleterious behavior arrive. Defection (hopefully) diminishes.  The iterative process is not only about fig...