Jeff Hui
There's a lot of useful value here - even though the writing style and target audience is a bit too narrow:
- has some assumption of a teacher/student context
- assumes a more mathematical context
- generally assumes an academic context is most parts
But it's a good articulation of how to solve problems.
I think the argument he makes applies primarily to African countries. His arguments skew heavily to this demographic which the author then applies to “global” south. His arguments aren't wrong, just his generalizations.
For example, if you had resources to help the poorest people in the world, how would you employ it? Help the very poorest and the expense of other less poor? Help all poor people equally, albeit a little? Or help the most number of people? Many of the programs and efforts have been focused on helping as many people as possible. This means a disproportionate amount of aid will be in countries that have the most density of impoverished people to make that a aid the most impactful. Where are those people? India and China - the countries data which he often discounts and excludes to make his numbers more convincing. But organizations like the gates foundation focus most of their efforts there.
In fact, if you look at the data by country, it's difficult to say any country is getting worse - only that some countries are improving faster than others (eg China having improved dramatically). It might not come off as that in this book, but the authors own recent blog post agrees and poverty rates have been dropping - just not as much as he world like.
In regards to the World Bank's Metric itself, I think there is good reasoning why it could be changed, but it's less useful year to year if you change the metric (the World Bank's adjustment accounts for individual purchasing power, but tries to keep it unchanged). Also the metric improved by 4%/yr and not 2%/yr as described. The world bank also added other benchmarks with higher daily cost of living (the highest being $5/day).
There's one thing that I wonder, Keynesian Economic policies seem to help individual countries. But it doesn't stop foreign tampering. While Western Countries can and should stop this practice, it doesn't stop other countries from doing this (eg China and Russian). Because there are benefits to the country that tampers. The trade policies of the WTO or the World Bank are an attempt to minimize foreign countries from employing military action against smaller nations.
But overall, a good book to make you think.
This book is targets people that don't really want to know the details, but only what to do. Because of that, it's explanations are simplistic and addresses more emotional concerns than analytical criticisms.
The fundamental ideas underlying the formula is reasonable: drawing from Benjamin Graham's Value Investing ideas. I don't think it's a matter of will is be profitable in the long run or not, but how much that compares to the market (eg S&P500). He did note how difficult it was to get historical data, and doesn't talk about overfitting or going beyond just back testing performance that he references all the time.
The author dismisses a lot of the criticism of the formula without supporting evidence. Only claiming that - less people will believe it and therefore it will continue to work. Which isn't a compelling argument.
This book is misleading because of it's mixture of accuracy (what is money, gold) with opinion and factual inaccuracies. I personally view that mixture of a accurate facts with skewed ones more negatively as it's more deceptive.
The best way to treat it is, the first and last parts of the book are most accurate, while the middle is a narrow, fringe opinion that is far from the general consensus. There's a lot of cherry-picking evidence (ignoring other important evidence that doesn't fit the author's narrative well).
For the title of the book, and how little the author talks about it, the Bitcoin chapters were mostly reasonable. I think a lot of the other material in the book has to been evaluated with a lot of skepticism.
Some interesting questions to ponder related to the book:
- In 2018, Platinum has less total supply (~10,000 tons), has a current growth rate of 2% (~200 tons/year) and has the same industrial uses as gold (electronics). Why shouldn't platinum be better than gold for money?
- In 2018, ~3,200 tons of gold was mined in a year (https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/historical-mine-production) which marks an increase from amounts in the book by ~30%. This also applies to previous years (2016, 2017) being roughly around ~3,200 tons. Is this production (slowly?) adapting to demand of Gold?
- How can the Modern Austrian School of Economics make sound arguments when critics argue the school averse to mathematics, statistics; rejects empirical data, and scientific method? (The Author hints at this referring to Keynesian towards Scientism)
- Commodity money is always inflationary (at least, until max supply is reached), but with Fiat Money, one can also perform deflationary policies. Isn't it possible to separate the argument that Fiat Money is bad from the Keynesian policies?
- Bitcoin has a way to “destroy” currency: to lose the private key wallet that holds it. Doesn't that make it not like Gold since it's less than indestructible? (its estimated that, about 23% of bitcoin is currently lost forever
- Bitcoin also has a significant energy cost. Doesn't this imply that Bitcoin has a passive maintenance cost equivalent to the energy use of some countries as an effective tax on the system to use it?
- Wouldn't an economy on the Gold Standard, while also having advanced credit/borrowing systems still be susceptible to problems of Fiat Money?
