Patrick McKenzie

Sometimes that requires fighting.

sufficient explanation for some of the differences that are achieved in the United States versus Japan, for example.

There's a great book, Making Common Sense of Japan, by a person whose name I'm blanking on at the moment.

An argument he makes in it persuasively and at length, which I don't think is 100% true, but is more true than most people well-informed on either side of the Pacific believe, is that when people say they do this because it is Japanese culture, what they're often saying is, you know,

I usually have a model for why people do things driven by incentives.

And I understand this incentive, this incentive, this incentive.

And then there's some error term in this equation that I don't understand.

I'm going to call that error term culture.

I think culture is a real thing in the world, to be clear.

But I often think that we reach for that error term far faster than we should.

So as my minor observation about culture, with respect to...

You know, there are places and pockets of the United States that have the will to have nice things.

And often they discover, sometimes surprisingly, that the only thing you need to do nice things at the relevant margin without spending more money, without having people like kill themselves over 90 hour weeks for the entirety of the career, you can just choose to have nice things.

Let's choose to have nice things.

Let's not be embarrassed about choosing to have nice things.

I have an enthusiasm for the minutia of banking procedure in a way that few people have enthusiasm for the minutia.

Sometimes banking procedure causes like physically observable facts to emanate into the world.

And if you know that those facts are going to emanate, then like you can have a claim made about a past state of the world.

Like I did this thing or I did not do this thing.

And that claim will, if it is true, cause metadata in other places.