I like thinking about new things, and so I like this recent post by Vitalik (the Ethereum crypto guy) talking about what he calls "the tree ring model of culture and politics." The basic insight of the model is the following:

How a culture treats new things is a product of the attitudes and incentives prevalent in that culture at that particular time.

How a culture treats old things is primarily driven by status quo bias.

To explain why the world seems to work like this, he uses the analogy of tree rings, which are also called annual rings or growth rings. Trees grow in diameter each year and the result is a set of successive rings.

Importantly, each tree ring is a result of the conditions that the tree experienced during its growing season. A wide ring typically suggests a favorable growing season and a narrow ring suggests a stressful growing season.

Once the growing season is over, the ring becomes set, which is why dendrochronology is a thing, and why tree rings can be used to tell us about what happened in the past.

The parallel with culture and politics is that it's far easier to shape new things during their initial growth cycle, then to try and do it later. Because once the growth cycle is over and it becomes an old thing, attitudes are then guided by the status quo. They become set.

To quote Vitalik: "What is easier is to invent new patterns of behavior that outcompete the old, and work to maximize the chance that we get good norms around those." This makes a lot of sense to me and it's a reminder to stay open to new things.

Cover photo by Aleksandar Radovanovic on Unsplash

A few years ago I wrote a post talking about "depression babies." In it, I cited a research paper that looked at the impact of macroeconomic shocks on people's willingness to take on financial risk in the future. The term "depression babies" stems from the Great Depression and how it is believed to have impacted risk taking, savings rates, and probably many other things.

I was reminded of this when I read this recent article in the WSJ talking about how the Chinese have started spending -- and taking on the debt -- like Americans, particularly among Chinese under 30. It is the inverse of the depression baby phenomenon. In this case, it is arguably years of economic expansion leading to greater comfort around financial risk.

Here are a couple of figures from the article:

JPMorgan estimates China’s ratio of household debt to gross domestic product will climb to 61% by 2020. That’s up from 26% in 2010 and higher than current levels in Italy and Greece.

The level in the U.S. is about 76%, after falling from 98% in 2006, according to the International Monetary Fund.

By another measure—the ratio of household debt to disposable income—China appears to have already surpassed the U.S. Its ratio reached 117.2% in 2018, up from 42.7% in 2008, according to calculations by Lei Ning, a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Research at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. The U.S. peaked at 135% in 2007 and dropped to 101% in 2018.

Not surprisingly, the article goes on to talk about how this dramatic increase in household debt might be something to worry about. Maybe. I'm not an economist. But I do think this is designed to boost the Chinese growth machine and I do think it makes them less reliant on other countries -- such as, maybe, the United States.

Shaping Cities in an Urban Age is the third book to come out of the London School of Economic's Urban Age project. It was published last fall. The first two titles were, Living in the Endless City (2011) and The Endless City (2007).

If you're familiar with the first two publications, you'll know that these books are heavily illustrated. Lots of maps, charts, and diagrams. So they make great coffee table books. But they're also filled with insightful essays -- this one has 37 of them.

In this particular book the focus is on the following:

"It identifies current trends that are making cities more fragmented, less equitable and environmentally more damaging, and argues powerfully for a more integrated social, environmental and spatial approach that can inform and inspire city-makers that are shaping an increasingly urban world."

I am sharing this with all of you today because I have always really enjoyed these books. They have a way of quickly putting things into perspective globally.

Around 2.5 billion more people are expected to live in an urban agglomeration by 2050. And 90% of this growth is expected to happen in just two places: Asia and Africa. This is an unprecedented shift that will obviously create many challenges and many opportunities.

This book is about that.

Image: Phaidon