Reading – Page 2 – Christopher Wink

Katalin Karikó on “Breaking Through”

Katalin Karikó’s neurosurgery department chair kept asking her about hitting his preferred metric of “dollars per net square footage,” in terms of funding her lab time with grants, or even prestigious publication. It’s amusingly anodyne and corporate when recounted by a now eminent scientist, who had just told her boss about beginning to collaborate with a cross-disciplinary immunologist Drew Weissman, with whom she would later share the Nobel Prize.

That’s from Breaking Through: My Life in Science, the October 2024 autobiography by biochemist Katalin Karikó, who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine for her work on mRNA which contributed to the rapid deployment of the covid-19 vaccine. I admire her greatly.

In an over-simplification, cell and gene therapies directly influence DNA, whereas her research focused on using mRNA to send a temporary message to cells. mRNA is considered more unstable and difficult to work on, so it had long been dismissed as not an effective means of treatment. She’s become a canonical example of a delayed payoff for hyper-fixation on a particular problem (almost 20 years with limited academic or industry recognition).

The autobiography is an enjoyable read, starting with her being raised in Soviet Hungary. She criticizes the surveillance system, but remembers fondly its elevation of science and spotting kids with promise from households with less education. She remembers that her school transcripts always had an “F”, for “fizkai” to clarify her parents had worked “physical” jobs and were low educated, which got her extra attention from educators in communist Hungary.

She says half of her elite biology college cohort came from this working class tradition: can any elite American institution claim this?

Below I share my notes for future reference.

How not to invest

Public stock markets are exchanges to buy and sell shares in big companies. Most days most people involved are trying to solve some problem. Share prices go up when there is more demand, reflecting market conditions, innovations and/or a story about the future, and they go down when there is less demand.

Shorter-term business cycles (a few years) rotate longer-term secular trends (decades). Investors try to make money by putting this all together into a theory about the world. Different eras call for different strategies. For example, more than three-quarters of the gains in the American stock market between 1982 and 2000 were from rising price-to-earnings multiples (how much more expensive stocks got), rather than rising corporate profit (how much more efficient companies got). Over those 20 years, one could have called stocks “too expensive” and been wrong, until the very end, when a correction brought a big reset. “Fair value” is just just a mark in a continuum on the path from the start to the end of a bull market. Gotta pick your bets.

That’s from How Not to Invest, a book out this year from the investor Barry Ritholtz, who is a frequent writer and speaker.

The reason his book as a negative title? His big idea? A tiny sliver of any competitive field, including wealth accumulation, play the “winner’s game,” in which they’re competing on expertise. The rest of us play the “loser’s game,” as an analyst called it, in which we just try to avoid unforced errors. It’s true in tennis, and in money management. Just be smart, cautious and consistent and you’ll outperform most of the rest.

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The book’s foreward was written by Morgan Housel, another wealth manager who is active online and whose Psychology of Money was a bestseller in this tradition of the approachable personal finance books. Ritholtz’s book is longer and more tactical, but continues the tradition of introducing broader strategy and worldview.

He brings up lots of familiar, but effective, truths from psychology and other social sciences.

For one, he brings up the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis, which suggests that traits beneficial in our ancestral past, like craving sugar or storing fat, become detrimental in the rapid, modern world, leading to modern diseases like diabetes, obesity, and inflammation, because our ancient biology hasn’t caught up to today’s vastly different environments (e.g., sedentary lifestyles, abundant processed foods, constant stress). It’s also why basic personal finance strategies are so hard, even if the research has been so dependably clear for decades: put little bits into a diversified portfolio with the lowest fees possible.

Then again, when it goes wrong, as investor Howard Marks wrote: “Experience is what you got when you didn’t get what you wanted.”

Below I share my notes from the book for future reference.

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

The Gulf War was a seemingly decisive military action led by the United States against Iraq in 1991.

Over a series of essays, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued the war was an expression of his concept of “hyperreality,” in which emerging visual media could be used to create something false that appears even realer than reality itself.

By 1995, he assembled these essays into a final, short book called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.

The “housing affordability crisis” is really a mobility crisis

What Americans call a “housing affordability crisis” is really a mobility crisis — economic, geographic and social. Housing is where that immobility becomes most visible, and so expensive housing is more a symptom than the disease.

That’s from a new book by historian and Atlantic journalist Yoni Appelbaum called “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.“

In healthy economies, including for much of the American golden age, people move to better jobs, cheaper places, growing regions. In the US today, people are increasingly trapped in place. When people can’t move, demand piles up in a small number of “winning” metros. Prices explode there, while other places stagnate or hollow out. I’ve written on the topic this year myself here and here.

Appelbaum’s book recounts the long trends that are piling up today. He recounts how American zoning regulations were introduced for race and class control, not for genuine health or safety concern. Early 20th century leaders, including eventual-US President Herbert Hoover, misunderstood crowded tenements and single-family homes as the obstacle and the accelerant, rather than what they really were: the launching pad and the eventual destination for those who made it out.

That history has persisted to today, where regulation and competing priorities strangle what might naturally occur. As famed mid-century urbanist Jane Jacobs said, over-planning a community is “attempting to substitute art for life”

Below I have notes for my future reference from Greenbaum’s detailed book. It’s wonky, and less colorful than I expected, but for anyone invested in the topic, it’s worth it.

Of Boys and Men

A very small number of men dominate the most powerful and wealthiest positions, and are among the most aggressive humans alive.

But though this tiny number accounts for many disparities, and men have not taken enough domestic imbalances, their trend lines are worrying. Boys and men are going the wrong direction fast.

That’s from the 2024 book by Richard V. Reeves: “Of Boys and Men Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.” It’s one of a growing collection of research and literature.

As Reeves writes: “We have an education system favoring girls and a labor market favoring men. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Pronoun Trouble by John McWhorter

The singular use of “they” is entirely consistent with other linguistic shifts, and even familiar to older periods of English. The term’s partisanship may come more from how quickly and forcefully the change, rather than the change itself.

That’s from linguist John McWhorter’s new book Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.

I’m a fan, and have read most of his other books. This one is consistent with his growing style: Using credible linguistics research to guide us through today’s language changes. It’s a quick and approachable read, I recommend it.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

The CIA Book Club

In the 1980s, the American government spent billions of dollars on paramilitary campaigns to advance Cold War objectives. They also spent something like $20 million on a series of information campaigns.

Effective as it was, few are interested in celebrating the effectiveness of what more often got laughed about in military circles, including funding secret newspapers and distributing banned literature within the Soviet system, Poland in particular.

This is documented in The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature, a book published this summer and written by Charlie English.

The book is not really about the CIA, that’s just a particularly compelling subplot. Rather the bulk of the book is a thorough rehashing the Polish underground resistance and how that intersects and was often funded in part by the CIA. The subterfuge is inspiring in a sense, the power of free information. I enjoyed the book and recommend it to other history fans.

Below find my notes for future reference.

The Big Myth of the “free market”

“Market fundamentalists aren’t wrong about everything.”

Sometimes the right solution is to do nothing until there’s more information. Some markets do resolve themselves. Prohibition was a worse cure than the very real disease of alcohol abuse.

“But competition doesn’t mean we don’t have rules.”

That’s from The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, a 2023 book from Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes. They’re the journalist-researchers behind the influential 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, which identified the strategy of disinformation used to defend cigarettes and then climate denial.

When they wrote their 2010 book, they assumed those blocking interventions into tobacco addiction and then climate change were motivated by greed. Later, they realized it was because of a true and ideological market fundamentalism. This new book is answering how that pathological fundamentalism came to be.

A binary choice between the market and the state, between unconstrained capitalism and Soviet central planning is a myth, they argue. The “free market” category, and spirit, was a manufactured marketing and propaganda campaign. Instead, a sensible approach balances market and government interventions.

It’s not the problem that corporations don’t do more for society, they write, it’s that they stop governments from doing so. “If efficiency were our only goal, then market fundamentalism might make sense. But efficiency is a tool not an end.”

Below notes for my future reference.

We’re all journalists now: Scott Gantt wrote in 2007

The 20th century “hardened an artificial distinction between professional journalists and everyone else.” The 21st century has crashed that down.

That’s from “We’re all journalists now,” a book written almost 20 years ago in 2007 by lawyer and constitutional law scholar Scott Gantt. As he wrote: “In a sense, we are returning to where we started.”

Gantt’s thin volume is a valuable representation of what was changing then. Below I share notes for future reference.

Careless People: a Facebook whistleblower’s account

Mark Zuckerberg could reign “like the Queen,” writes Sarah Wynn Williams.

She’s the former Facebook exec turned whistleblower who’s new book Careless People details her time working closely with Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and other international staff.

“I’m struck by the impermanence of importance,” she writes. “And yet, Mark could conceivably continue to hold his place cheering world leaders for another 50 years. He’ll see these leaders off in the generations of leaders that follow them.”

Other former staff at Facebook, later renamed Meta, were critical of Wynn Williams’s portrayal. But the book is detailed and riveting. It portrays not evil-doers, but, like the characters in the Fitzgerald novel that originates the book’s title, self-interested and vain people who have more power than they’ve earned.

“A different path was possible,” she writes. “We all would be better off.”

Below I have notes for my future reference.