Chris Worfolk's Blog

Boomerang is almost a follow-up book to Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, looking at the fall out of the global recession across the rest of the world. And by the “rest of the world”, it is basically Europe.

He first looks at Iceland in which he talks to a fisherman that became an investment banker. The whole financial crises can be summed up in the following conversation.

“You spend seven years learning to be a fisherman?” “Yes.” “And after that, you spent months training at the feet of a master before you felt you were capable?” “Yes.” “So why did you think you could be an investment banker without any training?”

He then moves on to Greece and talks about how they got into their financial mess. He claims that almost nobody on Greece pays their taxes, every government official takes bribes and that public employees have completely overrun the government to the point where they now get paid two or three times what any sensible country would pay them. I do not know how true all of that is. He finishes up by discussing Ireland.

It is an interesting, and quite a concise book which made it pleasurable to read. Some of it seems rather shallow though. How much can you rely on the stereotypes of Icelandic and Greek people that are put forward in the book? Probably less than our narrative-over-statistics obsessed minds would allow by default. Especially when he begins to talk about the German’s apparent love of shit. I even read what I would interpret as a Holocaust joke. Several times.

Further, he seems to contradict his earlier writing. The final part of the book talks about how much Germany lost in the sub-prime mortgage collapse. In The Big Short he talks about how American banks created credit default swaps that they did not really understand and how one of the people who saw it coming was Greg Lippmann from Deutsche Bank. In Boomerang he proposes the exact opposite – that the American banks knew exactly what they were doing in selling worthless assets to German banks.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that what Michael Lewis has written in this book is actually complete bollocks. The collective lesson I took from Silver, Watts, Kahneman and Taleb is that the financial crisis was too complicated to predict, but humans have a tendency to add a narrative after to try and explain it to themselves in simple terms. Then Lewis comes along and says the financial crisis happens because the Greeks are lazy, the Irish are stupid and the Germans have a shit-fetish.

Leonard of Quirm, Rincewind, Captain Carrot, and a chance to save the world! What more could you want from a Discworld novel? Plus a little bit of Death too. I really enjoyed The Last Hero. It did not have too much substance to it, but it was only half the length of a typical Discworld novel and the short format worked really well for it.

Ah, the problems of eighteenth century women, how plentiful they are. Luckily, though I hate to spoil it for you all, everyone ends up with a husband. So that’s nice.

While the Nordics should be applauded for there for their peaceful egalitarian societies, they do have the added advantage that nobody else really wants to live there.

Recently I have been trying out various running socks to try and stop my toes blistering.

More Mile

Very impressed with these. They provide a lot of cushioning for my feet. I did not notice the difference until I went back to socks without that cushion and they felt a lot rougher.

They don’t entirely stop my toes from blistering, but they’re an improvement on regular socks.

Karrimor

These were rubbish. They did not feel or produce results any better than just a regular cotton socks; they might well have been worse.

Nike

These were special toe-socks (they had individual toe holes) to stop them rubbing together. This seems to have produced good results on the 5km I did today, however they felt quite rough on the rest of my feet, particularly the balls of my foot, so without the padding of the others I am not sure I prefer them. They are also quite difficult to get on.

I was recently planning a route on Google Maps when I noticed that the roadworks were due to finish at 5:30am on the 11 May, three years from now.

Dan Petro explains how he did this in a blog post and talk.

Makes sense, eliminating heterosexuals would be the most effective thing we can do to prevent further climate change…

In 2012 I wrote about the economic advantages I had experienced by moving companies. Although it is, of course, an extremely limited data set, I had witnessed a consistent and pronounced difference between increases in my income when I stayed with the same company and moved to a different one.

Some of this could perhaps be explained by the concept of reference points, as discussed by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

One of the issues with gaining a large salary increase with your current employer is that your current salary forms a reference point. Say you are a graduate and took a £18,000 a year job. It is now a year or two after and your skills are now worth £28,000. All of that seems reasonable in the software industry.

The problem is that to your current employer, they would have to accept a £10,000 increase in costs – a 56% increase! So they probably make you a far more modest offer of £23,000. This then also becomes a reference point. When you ask for £28,000 that is not only £10,000 more than they pay you now, but £5,000 more than they had mentally prepared themselves for. They are left feeling like they are losing £5-10,000 a year.

In comparison, a different company can come at this from a neutral perspective. They look at what someone with your experience is worth and price you accordingly. This could result in a wider range of offers. Some high, but some even lower. However, this is of no consequence as obviously you will cherry-pick the high offers and pursue those.

Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. His book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” summarises a lot of the research he has done and proves to be a fascinating reading.

As someone who isn’t a psychologist I found some of it heavy going, but very interesting. The book is arranged into sections and these are then broken down into short chapters, which made it more readable.

Some of it was shocking too. For example, when it comes to making parol decisions, one of the biggest factors is how recently the parol office has eaten! Just after a meal they are far likely to grand you parol than just before a meal.

His discussion on priming reminded me a lot of what Richard Wiseman talks about in his book Rip It Up. Behaviour can drive emotion, even though we always think of it as emotion that drives behaviour.

The question of how effective pure branding advertising is gains some support. “Familiarity is not easy to distinguish from truth”. The more you show something to people the more confident they feel about it. Other times a lack of clarity is helpful. For example, using a bad font makes exam scores go up, because people have to concentrate more than they normally would and so make less mistakes.

Much of the book discusses the differences between System 1 (that does the fast thinking) and System 2 (that does the slower, more considered thinking). Elina often reproaches me for not noticing snails on the path, suggesting that I need to notice things or one day I will be eaten by a lion (metaphorically, these days). I now maintain that my System 1 is keeping an eye on things and simply not bothering to engage my System 2 because there is no danger.

Kahneman also adds weight o Burton Malkiel’s book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which both discuss how the stock market is almost entirely unpredictable and therefore stock market traders actually add no value to what they do. Indeed, as 60% of mutual funds do worse-than-guessing, they actually subtract value.

Ultimately, people are just really bad at making judgements. 90% of drivers rate themselves as above average. Similarly, the majority of new businesses fail, yet the people who start them almost always believe they are exempt from such rules.

The answer to many of these issues is to replace judgement with a formula. This is essentially the entire point of Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball. Even a simple formula will do, according to Kahneman multiple regression does not even make it much more accurate.

One of the most useful points I took away from the book (almost certainly not the objectively most useful) is the idea of taking small gambles. In one chapter, Kahneman describes how people are unwilling to take profitable one-off gambles, such as a 50/50 chance of winning £20 or losing £10, but would be willing to take it if they knew they could take it 100 times in a row. The larger sample size means they are very likely to come out on top. However, they fear doing it once because there is a 50% chance they will lose and that will go down in their mental accounting.

Kahneman makes the point that we are “not on our death bed” and thus we will get chance to get even with the universe over time. Extended warranties are a great example of this. You pay a premium to insure your products, so it costs you money in the long term. A better strategy is not to buy the warranty and accept that sometimes you are going to have to replace a product – but over your lifetime you will almost certainly be up.