Perfect Days (2023)

 Grad Life.

"Poor Charlie's Almanack" by Charles T. Munger (2023)

The book is a compendium of Munger's talks. The final talk summarises it all. The remaining talks are incomplete drafts thereof. The omissions do not constitute a bug. When addressing a restive audience, it is wise to say less. As Munger observes in a Q&A session after one of the talks, he criticises psychology without saying how exactly psychology should be done because any such revelation would do little for the listener. The lesson will stick only if the listener stumbles upon it himself. Munger's only job is to make the audience curious and sceptical.

These are generalists who succeed in business. Extrapolating from this, Munger finds it hard to understand specialisation in academic departments. Specialisation is liable to generate economies of scale from working on the same topic and favours a status hierarchy that persuades academics that they are better off being paid with status rather than cash. This is a great deal for society. Munger is right, however, in that most students are not going to become academics and, therefore, would benefit from a more generalist perspective than that which universities nudge them into.

Munger is also right about the diminished role that social status plays in social science: economics, politics, and psychology. The final talk in the volume summarises what else is missing from academic psychology. The greatest omission, though, is the lack of a unifying, general-equilibrium theory.

"1923" Seasons 1–2 (2022–2025)

1923 is a soap opera tempered by the dignified presence of Harrison Ford. The story has two subplots, which are never destined to connect. This is an opportunity missed. In one subplot, white man steals land from Indians. In the other subplot, a rich man steals land from a rancher. Parallels could have been explored (and characters could have been intertwined across the subplots), but they never were.

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

The entire franchise is a startup, and Tom Cruise is its founder. He understands the potential for his brainchild to become timeless and, with it, the responsibility to make it so.

F1 (2025)

Brad Pitt (and the team just shy of a thousand people) have pulled off another work of art. The market is a powerful force for keeping politicking out of entertainment. Politicking in entertainment amplifies the loudest and most organised voices at the expense of the plurality of those who care most and who like to proceed with nuance. The market gives entertainment a chance to morph into art.

Brad Pitt is old (in a good way). Yet he is the one to draw the crowds. For one, he is a better actor than (almost) anyone else. He has had the movie-star experience---something scarce. Moviegoers are also getting older on average, with both a higher tolerance for and a higher appreciation of older characters.

"What Technology Wants" by Kevin Kelly (2010)

Humans and technology co-evolve. There is no stopping it. Subcultures can survive with little technology as long as other, early-adopter subcultures support them by trading with them. Markets furnish the freedom to choose to be Amish or to live on an Italian island, traditionally yet comfortably. Country size enhances this freedom to the extent that markets are more vigorous within a country than across countries. Amishness is a matter of degree: all curate which technology and how much technology to consume.

Kelly is an optimist. He believes technology emerges in response to problems, of which it solves more than it creates.

Kelly views innovation as a funnel. The existing state of technology suggests the next obvious steps to all who would listen. It is easy to invent a lightbulb once the technological conditions are ripe, and many do. What is hard to do is to see a project through from an idea to implementation. That is where the true genius of technological innovation lies.

"On Democracies and Death Cults" by Douglas Murray (2025)

The book traces out the empirical implications of a country's policy that puts an arbitrarily high weight on the lives of one's own citizens. The punishment inflicted on the adversary is rather discontinuous. The consequences to the adversary from miscalculating the threshold at which the discontinuity occurs are disastrous.

The book engages with neither theoretical nor empirical implications of the premise that one is dealing with an adversary who values death more than life. The book does articulate this premise, though.

Can it be immoral to do the morally right thing? Perhaps it can be, if the moral act is so traumatic that it will impair one's ability to act morally in future. Is it immoral to refrain from doing the morally right thing in order to preserve the ability to act morally in future? The book rightly refrains from exploiting a human tragedy as fodder for philosophy porn. The book's focus is the recent history of the ongoing conflict.