All Epsilon Theory Content
Everything we have published at Epsilon Theory since 2013, an archive of more than 1,000 evergreen notes.
China is fighting nCov2019 exactly like the US fought North Vietnam … with policy driven more by Narrative control than by what’s best to win the war.
That was a disastrous strategic mistake for the US then, and it’s a disastrous strategic mistake for China today.
Because the danger of powerful memes, cartoons and narratives is not that they demand our acquiesence. It is that they demand our participation.
Every once in a while, narrative-world gives you a gift that just keeps on giving. So it is with outgoing CEO Ginni Rometty’s regime of despair at IBM.
Today my focus is on the IBM-sponsored hagiography that is springing up like slime molds on the underside of rotting swamp cabbages.
Two weeks ago we were being told about the coronavirus outbreak. This week we are being told how we should think about it. Right or wrong, it is important to have Clear Eyes about this kind of Fiat News.
Axioms to live by in baseball and in investing!
1) Outsiders to an organization can never know in real time what goes on inside it.
2) Human labors can never be gauged fully and dispositively in real time.
3) Chains are never stronger than their weakest links.
Outgoing IBM CEO Ginni Rometty has filed 167 SEC Form 4s detailing her stock transactions in the company.
So I downloaded and compiled all of them to see how much money she has sucked out of IBM, just like I did for outgoing Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg.
There is a median narrative theorem that can serve as a central pillar of a NEW approach to social choice theory, an approach less pedantic in its assumptions about human nature and less naive in its assumptions about modes of social power.
The median narrative theorem generates powerful predictive hypotheses about elections, hypotheses that predicted Trump’s Republican primary victory in 2016 and – if current data holds – predicts Sanders’ Democratic primary victory in 2020.
Forget about impeachment and its partisan Kabuki theater. It’s a joke.
If there’s some rich dude who bought his way onto that Wuhan evacuation flight, and you know there is … if this Administration is forsaking its ONE JOB to protect American citizens, and you know they are …
THAT’S what brings down this government.
There are many roads to serfdom, and they have all become faster and more perilous. We are walking down one of them now.
It’s the one thing that Donald Trump and Rachel Maddow can agree on … “who the hell cares about the budget?”
If you don’t see that every government in the developed world is about to embark on a massive deficit spending spree, with modern-day ziggurats constructed in every burg and hamlet … you’re just not paying attention.
On MLK, Jr. Day, we present an excerpt from a powerful and under-read sermon about status delivered to the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
I know, I know … it’s me being mean to Neel Kashkari again.
Sorry, not sorry. Belittlement and scorn is the only weapon we have against the creeping ensorcellment of the Long Now.
More from the world of universities-as-guilds and the weird war between the merely rich and ultra-rich.
So I downloaded and compiled every SEC Form 4 filing that former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg has ever made, to answer one simple question:
How much money did Dennis Muilenburg suck out of Boeing over the last ten years?
We are emerging from the year end, so the language shared across financial media articles is performance language. How did stocks, markets, benchmarks, funds and strategies perform in 2019?
Frequent readers will recognize Gell-Mann Amnesia as a favorite topic here at Epsilon Theory.
There is a chart I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and I want to tell you about it. Before I do, I also wanted…
I feel like the Billy Crystal character in Analyze This all the time. There’s always some mob boss politician or central banker or CEO or asset manager pinching my cheek and telling me that it’s all gonna be okay, that I’ve just gotta understand how things are.
My god, I am so tired of having my cheek pinched. I am so tired of being nudged in such an artless, heavy-handed way. I am so tired of being told that 2 + 2 = 5.
Every day we run The Narrative Machine on the past 24 hours of financial media to generate a list of the most linguistically-connected and narrative-central…
The Long Now has severed the tether between taxation and spending – the most important macroeconomic policy relationship in our social lives as both investors and citizens.
Here’s what that means.
And here’s what we’re going to do about it.