Monthly Archives: February 2019

7 Hard Problems, Personal Information Management, Tradecraft, Workhacking

Last Week and This Week: ZettelKasten, Income Inequality, and I-Corps

I’ve had a pretty good run for January on Deep Work. But February will not be so kind.

This upcoming week I’m going to be training some new I-Corps instructors at GW, so I’ll be working most of the day Wednesday through Friday.

It doesn’t rule out doing any Deep Work on those days, but it’s not going to make it easy. So there’s really Monday and Tuesday only this week.

The week after that I’m joining my wife in Hawaii for her meetings and some… potentially Deep Work, perhaps. We’ll see how it goes.

And the week after that I’m doing more work on the I-Corps trainees as well as returning from Hawaii via SF for a couple of days.

You get the idea.

So I have the same agenda — flesh out the 7 Hard Problems chapter on “Individual Wealth and Commonwealth” — but it’s going to go more slowly than January. I’ll be lucky to finish the Piketty book this week.

And what about the week just past, you may well ask?

Last week I had a big diversion. I immersed myself in the Zettelkasten technique for note-taking.

Huh?

Well, I’ve been unhappy with the quality of my notes for 7 Hard. And the unhappiness came to a head maybe the week before last.

Coincidentally — I think it was from Lifehacker or some other PIM-ish source — I ran across a book about “Smart Notes”, by Sonke Ahrens.  Needless to say, I bought it at once and dug right in.

Ahrens does not have the most straightforward presentation of his subject, but the book eventually covers a note-taking system of stunning interest. I devoted most of the Deep Work last week to grokking it and only on Friday did I take a pass on continuing my Piketty note-taking with the new system.

I will report more as I get more familiarity with it.

(Cool aside: I was googling around for Zettelkasten and found the name of an academic friend who was YouTube-ing as an expert on some of the Zettlekasten software. I viewed his videos with great interest. Nick Cifuentes-Goodbody, thanks!)

7 Hard Problems

More Income Inequality, More Piketty

I’m continuing this week with Capital in the 21st Century.

Last week was reading Parts One and Two of the argument. Part One defined the methodology and gave some results about how Piketty measures Income (mainly national income, derived from income-tax government sources) and Wealth or Capital (mainly derived from intelligent-observer estimates over a long period at least in the cases of England and France). Piketty devotes a fair amount of air time to discussing the merits of his sources.

Part Two deals with the changes in the capital/income ratio over time, showing among other things, that the 20th century was not kind of capital anywhere in Europe, including some estimates of where the destruction of capital came from (SPOILER: not mainly from physical destruction).

This week we are looking at Part Three which deals with the nature and structure of inequality in both labor income and capital ownership. And, with any luck, we’ll get to Part Four dealing with Piketty’s prescriptions for regulating capital going forward.

Uncategorized

Income InEquality: A Week of Thomas Piketty

I’ve just spent a week digging into Capital in the 21st Century, and I’m taking away a few points:

  • Piketty seems less “kneejerk-Leftish” than I had thought. He has been pretty much misrepresented. He is no lover of Marxism in any case, but his data are pretty nuanced.
  • Above all, he has attempted, and sort of delivered, an attempt to really quantify the changes in national income, national wealth, and national distribution of income between capital and labor over a long historical period. He has numerous caveats about the potential inaccuracies in his sources, and is careful to draw attention to only the most salient takeaways.
  • Probably the most salient takeaway is that the 20th Century was a disaster for capital. The 21st century has capital’s share of things returning to pre-20th-century levels.
  • I’m satisfied — this third time around trying to read him — that he is a worthwhile source. Whatever role the argument about income inequality plays in 7 Hard Problems, Piketty is a good choice for one of the sources. I’m not sure which others I’ll want to use.