Top all-time · #3566
Conrad Bastable
Personal blog · conradbastable.com/essays · on HN as cjmbeconomicspolitics
Conrad Bastable's personal blog at conradbastable.com covers economics and politics. Since 2018, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 28 times, most often “The Uncharity of College: The Big Business Nobody Understands”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link these essays on economics, US college costs, trade and currency. Commenters cite the college-cost essays as a source, and some call them enlightening or fascinating.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Conrad Bastable spent time building products to serve the PC-building gaming market. Previously, he worked for Dropbox on their Strategic Finance team, JP Morgan in TMT Investment Banking, a Boston real-estate startup, and American Industrial Partners. Conrad graduated from MIT in 2013 and from Phil
Most-linked posts?
- The Uncharity of College: The Big Business Nobody Understands9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-12-31
- How Germany is able to run the world’s second largest export economy5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-01-17
- The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-10-09
What Hacker News says?
>compete Have as your "goal" less the desire to "win" the global competition for corporate profits & corporate headquartering of multinationals in your nation simply on grounds of labor/profit competitiveness, and take a more nationalist view of, where necessary, having state run enterprises or "free market" competition within your borders but not complete free trade in a global sense. In other words, do no necessar…
Comment linking /essays/the-germany-shock-the-largest-economy-nobody-understands
on “The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system”Submitted How Germany is able to run the world’s second largest export economy as a story · 403 points
HN discussionAbout colleges... this was posted some days ago: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...
Comment linking /essays/the-uncharity-of-college-the-big-business-nobody-understands
on “Talent Is Everywhere, Opportunity Is Not”Submitted The Uncharity of College: The Big Business Nobody Understands as a story · 292 points
HN discussionWell, is there a psychological factor that makes people disregard observable reality and seek fake safety in numbers? The census data don't show anything of the kind of "doubling" for the average american. The table is "per capita". And even at that, it doesn't take into account the cost of college, house, services, etc. relative to 1970s. https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-bermuda-triangle-o... https://www.c…
Comment linking /essays/the-uncharity-of-college-the-big-business-nobody-understands
on “Wage Stagnation”Submitted The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth as a story · 192 points
HN discussion>or that the labour costs are too high (also true for Germany, which has a thriving manufacturing export industry) Germany can get packaged cheap labor from East of Europe when they need it. Infact, a lot of German companies have their labor intensive units in East. Only highly automated manufacturing and management/finance and R&D work in done in Germany. Australia doesn't have the same advantage which Germany have…
Comment linking /essays/the-germany-shock-the-largest-economy-nobody-understands
on “The economics of cheaper batteries”Submitted Elite Underproduction: Why We Can’t Solve Hard Problems Anymore as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI hate to plug my own writing here, but if you'd like a much deeper exploration of the topic, you'll probably enjoy reading The Full Stack of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier? https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-full-stack-of-soci... A lot of folks on HN have liked and shared it before so I feel like it's okay to share again. My core thesis is that there's a stack of wealth-building strategies:…
Comment linking /essays/the-full-stack-of-society-can-you-make-a-whole-society-wealthier-full-version
on “How do poor countries get rich?”Submitted The Germany Shock: The Largest Economy Nobody Understands as a story · 7 points
HN discussionhttp://greyenlightenment.com/college-a-necessary-evil/ In spite of increased debt and tuition, no matter how you crunch the numbers, college grads--especially 'high-ROI' subjects such as computer sci, econ, math etc.--do better than non-grads. And the gap in wages and employment between grads and non-grads, especially since 2009, is the widest it has ever been and shows no signs of narrowing. In the aftermath of the…
Comment linking /essays/the-bermuda-triangle-of-wealth
on “Increasingly Competitive College Admissions: Much More Than You Wanted to Know”Submitted The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAgreed. Don't forget the massive implosion of the real estate market 30 years ago that turned a whole generation off of buying property and bankrupted vast swathes of the population. Said "breathless articles" usually just grab some "rate of price increase" chart benchmarked to the most severe recession in recent decades and start celebrating just because Tokyo also has good housing policy. But in trying to advocate…
Comment linking /essays/japans-housing-crisis-what-the-yimbys-dont-understand
on “Maybe Treating Housing as an Investment Was a Colossal Mistake”Submitted The Full Stack of Society: Can You Make a Whole Society Wealthier? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is actually a picture of national failure, tantamount to celebrating a blowout losing scoreboard. It is not a model for others to copy. Productivity and inflation are very related to each other. Per your chart, "Japan enters the chat" in the mid 1980s. If you're curious what has happened to Japan since the mid 1980s you can read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades (this wikipage was pluralized from "Deca…
Comment linking /essays/unequal-growth-the-zero-sum-games-you-dont-see
on “Why the government took home prices out of its main inflation index”Submitted Colleges Make More Money Than God by Giving It Away as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSchools have all the info and yet they still are more than happy to sign kids into mountains of debt. Nothing would have lowered tuition because it doesn't take all of the money brought in to school the kids, most of the money is going into growing the school's endowment and to maintain their status as a charity so they don't pay taxes. So 58% of kids MUST take some form of aide or charity. And as society has plumme…
Comment linking /essays/the-uncharity-of-college-the-big-business-nobody-understands
on “Two-thirds of American employees regret their college degrees”Submitted Video Games and Professional Society: What Older Generations Don’t Understand as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere's the technical essay on this: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-germany-shock-the-... If people are against Chinese currency manipulation, they should be against what Germany does.
Comment linking /essays/the-germany-shock-the-largest-economy-nobody-understands
on “Amazon is handing out 'Thank you' t-shirts to warehouse workers as it cuts pay”If it didn't work this way, protectionism wouldn't exist. There are various economics models which show Germany has benefited the most from creation of EU Sure countries in middle of Europe and east are improving their baseline but it's nothing compared to what Germany has achieved. Germany is effectively china of EU. It's funny to see the same people who oppose China's currency manipulation are in favour of EU I su…
Comment linking /essays/the-germany-shock-the-largest-economy-nobody-understands
on “German government to bail Lufthansa out of bankruptcy with nearly $10B state aid”Look at the working age male labor force participation rate. We have plenty of unemployed, and underemployed workers, especially in specific geographic regions that have proportionally suffered the most through globalization and exporting of domestic production. These places have steadily lost population. Meanwhile, more people have crowded into a subset of metros in US chasing the remaining jobs leading to real est…
Comment linking /essays/the-germany-shock-the-largest-economy-nobody-understands
on “Twenty-year truck driver: America’s “shipping crisis” will not end”From hacker news circa 2019: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...
Comment linking /essays/the-uncharity-of-college-the-big-business-nobody-understands
on “Harvard and its peers should be embarrassed about how few students they educate”If you aren't paying, you're the product, per https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...
Comment linking /essays/the-uncharity-of-college-the-big-business-nobody-understands
on “Harvard and its peers should be embarrassed about how few students they educate”I strongly believe that going to college in the US is a good financial investment and that this will become increasingly true over time. I don’t believe that it’s just, but there are fewer decent jobs for people without a degree every day. That said, everyone should also read this post explaining why college costs so much. It’s probably not what you think: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle…
Comment linking /essays/the-uncharity-of-college-the-big-business-nobody-understands
on “Bottom line, a college degree is worth the cost and then some”I found Conrad Bastable‘s essay [1] on the subject fascinating. [1] https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-germany-shock-the-...
Comment linking /essays/the-germany-shock-the-largest-economy-nobody-understands
on “Brexit Could Be Reversed - Here's How”Yes they are real, though harder to achieve without something amazing on the student's resume. This article was enlightening for me: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...
Comment linking /essays/the-uncharity-of-college-the-big-business-nobody-understands
on “Are Scholarships Real?”The claim of this article that real college prices are not increasing is at odds with the well-known fact that student loan debt at graduation has been rising steadily, especially relative to income: https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt-by-year There has certainly been more sticker price growth than real price growth due to scholarships/aid but this article is the first I've read to assert that the re…
Comment linking /essays/the-uncharity-of-college-the-big-business-nobody-understands
on “The Truth about College Costs”