Tag: review

Book Review: Apple in China

In Apple in China – The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company (Amazon,) Patrick McGee lays out the how, what and why of Apple’s outsourcing efforts in China.

The growth of the manufacturing ecosystem in China resembles the growth of most social networks. First comes the hook: the “wow” factor. Then come the key nodes: the influencers. Before you know it, half your friends are there and you are compelled to join them or be left out. Then comes the theft of property by the owners of the social network (your photos, your activity, your thoughts, etc. are all theirs.) And then the monetization.

Steve Jobs initially wanted all of Apple’s products to be made in America. He was of the opinion that it was the only way in which he could maintain the strict standards that went into making Apple’s products. How did they end up making everything in China?

At first, the hook: Terry Gou of Foxconn.

It reached a point where Apple (the influencer) was co-developing advanced manufacturing processes with vendors in China.

Slowly, and then suddenly, all of component manufacturing shifted to China.

Then, the theft started.

Leading to the final step: monetization.

Apple finds itself enmeshed in China and scaling India in is proving difficult.

Primarily because of language politics, unionization and the perennial election cycle that prevents the Indian government from doing what China did: suppress worker rights.

Facebook did not “die” in the traditional sense, like how MySpace did. It just became unpopular with the next set of cohorts. It is aging out, continuing to monetize its current user base, while Instagram attracts the next generation. A similar thing might happen to the Chinese manufacturing juggernaut because now, everybody know that:

In China, ‘win-win’ means China wins twice.

Book Review: Wanting

In Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (Amazon,) Luke Burgis lays out the “why” behind why we want things.

The gist of it is that we want things that we think others want. Everything else flows from it.

Desire is manufactured. Just look at the influencer marketing industry that grew from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $9.7 billion in 2020 and $13.8 billion in 2021. You might think that it doesn’t affect you but desire is our primordial concern. Long before people can articulate why they want something, they start wanting it.

Are we destined to me miserable, running in an hamster-wheel of desire? The book presents some things that you could try.

Recommendation: Worth flipping through.

Book Review: Money From Nothing

In Money From Nothing: Or, Why We Should Stop Worrying About Debt and Learn to Love the Federal Reserve (Amazon,) authors Robert Hockett and Aaron James present a history of the US Dollar and a case for MMT.

What is money? Money has these four features:

  1. It’s a promissory claim (e.g., an IOU; a promissory note—or what the note stands for).
  2. It’s transferable (e.g., as with an endorsed bank check; a dollar or euro bill or other unit of currency; or what lawyers call a “negotiable promissory note”).
  3. It’s widely accepted in the community for settling accounts.
  4. It fulfills a large share of market obligations, debts, or other liabilities.

What it is not: a store of value.

Dollars are continually spent into existence by federal spending and bank lending. They are then pulled out of circulation by federal taxing and “borrowing” (i.e., sales of Treasury securities). Dollars are constantly being created and destroyed, in hopes of keeping just the right amount of money in circulation.

Milton Friedman explained, quite rightly, that there is no absolute right amount of money. The money supply must grow with rising transaction volumes, lest deflation starve an economy of money needed for rising production.

So far, so good.

The second half of the book makes no sense. The crux of MMT seems to be that you can print how many ever dollars people want and just give to them. Inflation can be controlled by bureaucrats in the Fed who can fix prices, if they want. The logic of the whole thing is very circular. And the authors clearly haven’t met enough career bureaucrats. Their naïveté is terrifying.

Recommendation: Read it to know thy enemies.

Book Review: The Laws of Trading

The Laws of Trading: A Trader’s Guide to Better Decision-Making for Everyone (Amazon,) Agustin Lebron is a must read for anyone remotely interested in trading and trading-linked philosophy.

What it is not: a book that promises to teach you a trading strategy.

What it is: a sort of memoir where the author weaves together his experiences while trading different markets, anecdotes and financial history.

If you think your costs are negligible relative to your edge, you’re wrong about at least one of them. This rule is saying that magical super-profitable trades don’t really exist in the real world. If a trade appears to have far more edge than other available trades, then that appearance is illusory.

I personally found the the author’s attempt to apply trading analogies to real life a bit tedious. But, @naval has 1.4 million followers, so maybe that works.

Recommendation: Must Read.

Book Review: The Birth of Plenty

In The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern Work was Created (Amazon,) author Bill Bernstein illustrates how the prosperous west got that way and presents a hypothesis on how growth happens.

Prosperity flows naturally once a society acquires the four crucial factors—property rights, scientific rationalism, capital markets, and modern transportation and communication.

The wretched masses of the third world suffer not because they are deficient in factories and machines but because they lack institutions—property rights, a scientific outlook, and capital markets—while at the same time their countries experience explosive population growth from their glancing encounter with the advances of modern medicine.

It is a fascinating book and you should read it even if your interest in developmental economics is tepid, at best.

Recommendation: Must Read.