Best articles I’ve read in 2020 (List)
- Almost every political/social comment by Mike Rowe, but this post about how we undervalue the skilled trades is especially gold:
Our current skills gap isn’t a mystery, and neither is the student loan crisis. Both are reflections of what we value, and what we believe. And right now, a lot of people believe that good jobs are for college graduates, and the rest are for dummies. This belief should be challenged wherever it appears, by anyone who shares my addiction to reliable electricity, smooth roads, heating, air-conditioning, indoor plumbing, and three meals a day.
2. Strangest Thing About the Debate, by Jeffrey Tucker
No longer is the presidency the person who presides over the affairs of state. All of life has become an affair of state. The president is not just an administrator of things related to the federal government. He or she is the head of the whole country and everything and everyone in it, plus sizable parts of the rest of the world.
So they are all up there talking about what? They are talking about what they plan to do with your life and your money. That’s what was so painful. They have no clue about any possible limit to their planning.
3. This great article about chess and its relation with real-life history. Or, another one from The Economist “side-gig”, 1843 Magazine, “How Donuts Fueled the American Dream”.
4. Why I am Reading No Books in 2020, by Tim Ferris.
…look for single decisions that remove hundreds or thousands of other decisions.
5. America’s Racial Progress, by David French. One voice of reason in a sea of hysterical politicized world.
The lesson of those two historic moments has been repeated time and again throughout American history. It took white Americans and black Americans to end slavery — and not through a revolt against the Founding but rather through a defense of the Founding. It took white Americans and black Americans to end Jim Crow. Again, not through a revolt against the Founding but rather through a defense of the Founding. Through appeals to America’s founding promise, every marginalized American community has muscled its way into more-complete membership in the American family.
6. Salary Negotiation, by Kalzumeus. Tone of good practical advices.
7. Early Work, by Paul Graham.
The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won’t work to trying to think of ways it could.
Curiously enough, the solution to the problem of judging early work too harshly is to realize that our attitudes toward it are themselves early work.
8. Uncanny Vulvas, by Diana. Something totally different than I usually read, but this was such an enjoyable take on future of sex and its impact on society (or, vice-versa?), I loved it.
Underpinning feminist anxiety is the specter of female replaceability. Men can build alternatives to a sexual market that has been made less navigable because of ideology. Substitutes are built and bargaining power dissipates. Sex robots are to gender politics as scabs are to labor relations.
Facing one’s own market-driven replaceability results in existential dread. But market innovation has already created something dreadful on the other side of the coin: a large segment of men that have no prospect of satisfying their most basic desires.
9. The Big Lessons from History, by Morgan Housel. This is a must-read.
The second kind of history to learn from are the broad behaviors that show up again and again, in multiple fields and different eras. They are the 30,000-foot takeaways from events that hide layers below the main story, often going ignored.
How do people think about risk? How do they react to surprise? What motivates them, and causes them to be overconfident, or too pessimistic? Those broad lessons are important because we know they’ll be relevant in the future. They’ll apply to nearly everyone, and in many fields. The same rule of thumb works in the other direction: the broader the lesson, the more useful it is for the future.
10. What libertarianism has become and will become — State Capacity Libertarianism, by Tyler Cowen. Written on the first day of 2020, it was one of the most discussed articles among the libertarians. The thesis is that libertarianism is “hollowed out” for various reasons and we can’t provide any convincible programme for many of the modern major issues, foremost climate change. Moreover, the history shows that although capitalism and markets are most powerful economic models, for them to function, we need highly functional / strong / capable State. And, I agree — the history shows that. We don’t have alternative successful an-cap model.
