Month: April 2013

China is overbuilding

China at some points has had investment rates of in excess of 40% of GDP. there is no investment strategy under which this is the profitable thing to do. China is using physical capital as a loss leader in order to grow cities that will produce network effects will in turn foster the human capital that really makes a country rich. In this way China has become like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, a Destroyer-of-Worlds. You can’t win a physical capital accumulation battle against someone whose plan is to overinvest and lose money on the physical capital.

this is not the whole story, but an interesting way to think about china regardless.

Seasonal suicides

google search trends remains an underused tool to create interesting stories. instead we have poorly informed j school dropouts making shit up.

Search terms implied that people are 24% less likely to consider suicide in the summer, among other seasonal fluctuations that may be useful in epidemiology for illnesses that are difficult to track.

Effort != Results

most companies manage inputs, like clock punching or attendance at meetings, instead of outputs (who actually does things). this leads to politics and the sort of theatrics described in this article. the fundamental problem is that most companies can’t tell who actually does something useful. cf also the recent yahoo debacle where marissa was trying to manage inputs because the outputs are so unclear.