desu_

The value of a good education lies in its signalling power too.

There are plenty of good professors in non-elite schools, many undergrad classes are approachable enough that a self-motivated student could absorb a lot of content with little supervision, and a lot of schools make their material available through online platforms. All these are great for learning but replicating the signaling part is more difficult.

Viewership statistics of movies do not take into account pirated movies mostly because it's difficult to count. Tax offices might only care about movies sold, but producers regularly try to estimate their losses due to pirate channels, and I am sure that people who measure viewership as a proxy for impact on the popular culture would love to have to be able to count everyone.

The article's author makes some observation on employment volumes in Southern Europe, then decries "the Eurozone's failure to implement meaningful pro-growth reforms". In that context, It makes sense to try to estimate how much of the economic activity has simply been reclassified. The fact that it isn't taxed makes it, once again, more difficult to measure (if that's what you meant by your "Taxes exist for a reason" truism) but not irrelevant.

I searched for "underground", "black" (market/economy) and "undeclared" in the article, but it yielded no results. I am surprised given that (1) the rise of the underground economy is common knowledge for people knowing a bit about the region and (2) measuring its size is a mainstream academic question.

Tangentially related but very good read.

Thanks for sharing.

As a French, it saddens me a bit to say that but you also missed one point: culture. My background includes some grad school experience at a top French university and then at a top US university. One big difference, which became even more obvious to me after I crossed the Atlantic, is that there is (almost) no hustle culture in France.

Make fun of the stupid apps and the copycats but so many undergrads at my American alma mater were trying something, and that is already so much more than what I saw in France. I have seen some undergrads in America make serious money through their side projects and big companies are more often seen as a stepping stone towards something else. In France, the holy grail is to get a CDI (permanent employee contract) at a big company and that’s often pretty much it. They can be great employees but making money within a structure simply does not require the same resourcefulness. I don't know if the culture is contagious once you arrive in a country, or if universities attract different profiles (probably both), but I thought it was also interesting to note that the immigrants were often resembling the locals in both countries.

In my opinion, even the best version of Macron’s plan is bound to produce underwhelming results. While French taxes and bureaucracy might not help entrepreneurship, I do not think that’s why France isn’t a startup nation. Rather, it’s the fact that France isn’t a startup nation that explains why bad policies and bureaucracy have been tolerated for so long. Understand me well: my comment is the opposite of an attempt to diminish the accomplishments of French entrepreneurs, who exist and face higher administrative hurdles than their American counterparts, but is simply written to share some observations on campus culture and entrepreneurship at two top schools.

Agreed. If one thinks about it broadly (not just the clichéd look-I-made-it cars) and one might see it more often: having a considered socially desirable spouse/partner, going to certain places on vacation, signalling/posting on SNS. It's really broad, and there is a whole meta. Take a simple thing such as the tech hoodie or t-shirt for instance. Behind the I just like to wear comfortable garments, there is often an attempt to signal that I am making money thanks to my skills, not my look, my company is less boring than yours, etc. I am not saying that there are no true anti-social status people, just that they are likely contrarians and minorities (at least in circles that have escaped the survival mindset).

You need to consider the following elements: -You compare the S&P and two Six Sigma funds over different timelines. The index yielded much less than 9% on 2004-2015 (you can halve the performance). -What’s the common feature between: the S&P, the formal idea of passive indexing, and the emergence of passive investment funds? None of them are 80 years old. -Retail customers (Joe Blow) rarely have access to hedge fund products directly (they might still be exposed through pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, etc. but it makes the allocation change almost out of their hands). -Stating performance figures alone is mostly a Bloomberg-reader thing. In practice, there is usually at least an attempt to incorporate some kind of risk measure when selecting hedge funds.

I am not even anti-passive funds but you are memeing a bit too hard.

You might be right to believe that Facebook's PR team is weak or that Experian's practices are bad, but the Experian comparison isn't stunning. Experian's name recognition is nowhere near as strong as Facebook's and it makes the potential loot for journos less interesting.

Some (off the top of my head, Taleb) advance the argument of survival bias: Smarter criminals are less likely to get caught and so, are less likely to be offered a seat by Chris Hansen.

I think the implication is that Japanese companies in Japan pay generally less than American companies in Japan, which seems true at least when comparing Japanese and American big names. It's also the case outside engineering/tech. It's fairly common knowledge among Japanese workers and foreign residents living in Japan. One hypothesis (which I like) is that Japanese companies offer a higher non-monetary compensation (I am not talking about flex-time).

It's not a fallacy fallacy since I point out one weakness in the article but do not assume the proposition is wrong for that reason. Actually, if you read my last paragraph, it's obvious that I even agree with the author's argument to some extent. I only attack him for making a boring claim more clickbaity through his credentials.

From my quick skimming, mostly apo questioned the credentials. Yes, you are using ad hominem against the one you accused (rightly of doing so).

Ad hominem is wrong, but so is argument from authority.

My professional opinion as a blockchain researcher I’ve spent the last 15 months researching the implications and possibilities of blockchains and related “distributed trust technologies” from a business and societal point of view.

And dirtyaura's comment consolidates the author is some figure we can trust mantra.

In the end, the article states that people should not put their savings into coins but smart contracts are nice. Something others have said before but it's more clickbaity to state that it's coming from a professional blockchain researcher.