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I work in a niche industry. I’ve gotten used to, say, wondering through the business section of a bookstore and seeing nothing particularly relevant to my work in a specific way.

Now, I know I’m in a niche business because nobody’s really ever heard of my business, but what I’m wondering is whether everyone shares this feeling when walking through the business books section.

The economy is a pretty specialized place; doesn’t it have to be? It’s so easy for the best to scale up that most people are driven to the extremes. Farmers become labourers become shopkeepers become Walmart-etteers, back-office administrators, bloggers and frustrated actors. And welfare jockeys, of course.

Ok, so there’s a greater disparity of experience. It hasn’t translated into very much diversity in business books, though.

Homer (the Greek, not the Simpson)  wouldn’t feel out of place with how business knowledge is transferred these days: orally, experientially, heavy with context, narrative and ‘you had to be there’ jokes.  That’s because most of what we do these days is professional socializing: the main difference between industries is the jargon.

Business books publishers get this and so don’t bother with the jargon. They cut straight to it and talk about leadership, networking, social intelligence, reading others, etc. The problem is that writing strips away too much context; social education cannot be scaled.

Not to say you can’t learn from words on a page. It’s just that there’s a lot to learn and supply is hard to find: there are only a few authors in any generation that can rise above the horde of hacks dashing themselves against the wall of literary achievement. It gets easier with interaction and some human touch, but that scales poorly too. At its worst (and it often is) the lecture is little different than reading a book. It takes a helluva teacher to really connect with a large group.

So we rely on mentor relationships to build human capital. But what if you pulled the short straw and your mentor(s) suck?

Well, this isn’t in keeping with the ‘you can do anything’ narratives of our society, but you’re just screwed.

Sorry.

Ageing is the accumulation of habits and routines. The most successful maximize good habits and minimize bad ones.

Everything else is luck.

Network for the Job you Want

The complexity of a system is limited to the intelligence of the stupidest person who uses it/approves it.

I remember soon after Lehman failed, I was at lunch with a manager at a fund of funds. She said that the bailouts forestalled Armageddon. Really, I asked? Like, REALLY?

I backed down eventually because she clearly knew more about credit markets than me and was obviously genuinely, truly rattled by the prospect of all the investment banks going down.

You see that?

Right there, where I backed down.

Right where I overlooked the conflict of interest and focused on the expertise and the fear of a friend?

THAT is regulatory capture, kids.

In Canada, small town downtowns have much in common with one another: packed block-sized developments with shops on the ground floor and two or three levels of apartments above.

And they mostly really suck.

The instances where this model persists yield pretty consistent results: a feeling of dirtiness, a bizarre assortment of low-end businesses (ex. fortune tellers, pawn shops and porno dealers) and, of course, limited parking space. It just ‘feels’ poor, or something. And the trend gets worse as the towns get larger.

Thank God for Walmart

Box stores have convenient parking, better prices and no-nonesense homogeneous offerings (if the suburban economy has done nothing else, the removal of knock-off/junk dealers and astrologers from my shopping experience is enough to win my everlasting gratitude).

This results, my grandparents used to lament from their nice suburban home, in a “doughnut city”. Vibrant auto-driven (ha!) economy surrounding a run-down middle.

Why is this? Well, if BS sociology helps: I learned from Daniel Boorstin that settlers were required to actually live on their land and resulting dispersion made the idea of a ‘town center’ unworkable. Leisure was precious and walking to and from a town center was probably an unpopular hobby. Precedent set.

In any case, when land is plentiful, we live on it. And when we all have so much land, the only ones who live in close quarters are those who can’t afford bigger tracts.

Crappy, poor downtown follows and, bingo! Doughnut city.

So what happens when you can coax the middle class into a city? Manhattan happens, is what.

Extraordinary concentrations of wealth are like micro-economic rocket fuel. Massive spoils fund all kinds of businesses that ‘should work’ everywhere: food delivery, local wine and grocery stores that actually have nice stuff, esoterica for everyone,  renovated and maintained restaurants and pubs (“quaint and comfortable”, not “battered and tired”). All the while feeling like a ‘charming’ ‘authentic’ ‘neighborhood’. Or something.

The rule is that when you try to create this kind of personalized, consumer paradise in every city, you will fail. The Manhattan exception proves it.

It’s not just wealth, it’s the concentration. And that’s not for everybody. You need particular socio/demographic characteristics: under-representation of families with kids, over-representation of wealthy migrants, over-representation of educated people, over-representation of high-income earners and an over-representation of people who desperately WANT to live in the Manhattan of their dreams.

Manhattan isn’t New York. New Yorkers live in the other boroughs like real people. Manhattan is a fantasy land.

No wonder people like it so much.

about his wife:

His wife is devoutly Jewish—she converted after they married and recently changed her name from Jane Hughes to the more biblical-sounding Sarah Brooks—but he rarely attends synagogue.

Mega-bizarre. What does this say about their relationship? I find this creepy.

When the G20 came to town, offices downtown were closed and cops flown in from around the country to patrol the streets. We substituted knowledge workers for security workers.

Under the logic of fiscal stimulus, the govt should have just shut the offices down and hired all the workers as cops.

From Robin Hanson:

Watching this film twice made it clear to me that the main classroom dynamic, at least in inner city classrooms, is status moves. Teachers struggle to maintain control and respect, while students struggle to one-up one another and to avoid being dominated by teachers. When getting lower grades is the price of preserving their pride, it is a price most students are willing to pay.

I like where he’s going with this. Like Robin, vague promises of future ‘success’ were useless as motivational tools in my education. Unlike Robin, however, I didn’t really care for teacher-praise. Parental feedback had an effect, but only to get me to do the minimum to achieve what I now see as a similar relative status to them.

I found the prospect of being a leader intoxicating, however, and the only time I ever really broke out of my shell when working in groups. If I had to do outstanding work to assume leadership, then that was what I would do.

That doesn’t mean that I would do outstanding solo work in the hope of being put in charge of a group. That strategy is way too painful. You get the same result with less work by coasting into the group and turning on the jets to execute a coup.

The only job I seriously ever told anyone I wanted (since age 14 or so) was to be a CEO. Nothing else really mattered. And, contrary to my mother’ admonition, in small group settings you *can* be a CEO without any experience.

Robin Hanson has a great comment that I can’t seem to link through to but have on my RSS reader:

Most people are surprised to hear that the world economy doubles roughly every fifteen years; when they think back fifteen years, the world doesn’t seem that different… In fact, one of the reasons why change can be so fast is that most of it happens behind the scenes. If ordinary people had to notice and deal with more changes, we just couldn’t change this much.

Here’s a contentious thought: what if the 90s tech “bubble” wasn’t in fact a bubble at all, but was rather an accurate prediction for how much an economy will change, but over the wrong time horizon. The Internet and related technologies require adoption by individuals – change you not only can see, but need to implement. The baby boomers were just never cut out for this. It won’t be until people born in the 80s and later, who grew up with computers, take over industry that we can hope to see widespread adoption.

And when I say accurate prediction, I don’t mean general economic growth, but economic growth specifically attributable to technologies developed in the 90s.

Heart Attacks win.