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I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote
How to Be Successful
blog.samaltman.com
The agricultural economist Ronald Herring noted that the most common defence for doing the minimum possible to enforce land redistribution – as has been the case throughout south-east Asia – is that one must be realistic about the difficulty of doing more. The counter to this argument, Herring pointed out, is that ‘the political realists seem to assume, rather curiously, that it is politically realistic to leave the status quo in place’.103 In south-east Asia, the agricultural status quo has proven to have very high costs. In the Philippines, the state has repeatedly been confronted by peasant-based revolutionary and terrorist groups. In Indonesia in the 1960s, Suharto suppressed a rural-based communist movement with the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. In Malaysia, the British fought a ruthless campaign in the countryside to suppress a communist insurgency in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And in Thailand, land policy failure is contributing to a state of near civil war even as this book is being written.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
Alas, the first texts of history contain no philosophical insights, no poetry, legends, laws, or even royal triumphs. They are humdrum economic documents, recording the payment of taxes, the accumulation of debts and the ownership of property.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
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