Writing like Stephen Elliott and the end of the Dollar
Elliott, Yudkowsky and the global reserve currency
Today I'd like to recommend to you another Substack: Stephen Elliott. His blog has been very influential on me. He taught me that you can write anything.
Not just that you can write anything you want. But you can write anything you want in any paragraph you want. If you do it smoothly, it will be more fun to read.
For example, I could now talk about the Fermi Paradox or a certain theory of mind. But I won't, because I really want to talk about writing today.
I'm not sure what the whole controversy about Elliott is, or if there is any at all, but he's good at writing, and that's all I need to know.
On his Substack, Elliott writes a sort of self-help book about real estate investing where he almost never talks about real estate. I don't even agree with his investing philosophy, but he doesn't talk about that anyhow. And his writing is humble and gentle, and funny enough that it doesn't matter.
I'll explain briefly why I don't agree much with his investing: I'm Italian. Americans are very good, and also a bit lucky. Being lucky, they can afford to be a bit blind: they can assume the value of their homes will be stable or growing, and even if it won't, the size of their economy will keep growing indefinitely anyhow. And that will fix their real estate valuations. Also, probably, Americans will be lucky enough for it to actually keep happening for many years to come.
But any other nation with declining productivity, declining demographics, and growing debt, knows that these things don't last forever if you don't have the world reserve currency.
Every country keeps a lot of US dollars under their sovereign mattresses, just in case something goes wrong. This is in part because people trust US institutions, and in part because of historical inertia. This gives the US a disproportionate advantage: when the US needs money and they print some, they also print everybody else's money. It's like a superpower, and this superpower might get challenged by an increasingly multipolar world. I don't know if it will happen next month or in twenty years, but it will happen. That said, I own a lot of Dollars. I think it's because, ultimately, I like America. To me, it's a bit like Europe but more optimistic, energetic and naive. So, not at all like Europe.
When you can't print as much money as you want any more, things change a lot. Italy is a good example: we had double-digit inflation for years (in the 70s Italy was the China of Europe, and we loved to print money to ease exports) and Italians invested a lot in real estate. Then productivity declined, we made too much debt, we switched to the Euro (a stronger currency which we couldn't inflate), and we didn't make enough babies. Now everyone in the middle class owns or inherits empty homes that return zero and are greatly taxed because it's the only thing we have left to tax and the easiest for the state to tax (houses can't leave the country on electric wires or aeroplanes).
Homes are ultimately just bricks. What's the value of a brick? Not much. The value of bricks depends on the economy around the land the bricks have been laid upon. In Italy, you can now find homes for 50 thousand dollars, because nobody around those bricks can find a job to justify living there. Also, if the population is decreasing, and you don't get enough immigration, the value of the bricks decreases, because there are fewer people for the same amount of bricks, hence less demand.
So the problem with buying actual homes, is that you must buy them in a specific country (or city) that might experience some specific problems. On the contrary, buying real estate allows for state-subsidised leverage (a mortgage), which has its advantages, but it's leverage nonetheless. I don't like leverage: to me it sounds like the opposite of freedom. Freedom means that I can do what I want no matter what the world will look like. Leverage means that the world has to look a certain way for me to be free. And the more leverage, the less margin for error. So I agree you should probably buy the house you will live in, but I don't like real estate as an investment. Also, it's a lot of work, and I never got a phone call because my globally diversified portfolio of ETF locked itself out.
I'm not saying the US is Italy in the 90s. I’m saying that I'm Italian and I know that a real estate investment is just another trade, and trades can go bad.
Ok, this wasn't brief. But you see, in some meta way, I wanted to talk about writing but instead, I wrote about the end of the Dollar and investing. This is a taste of what Elliott does all the time.
Writing is really just the best way to think. It's thinking on rails. And the hidden secret of people that write a lot, is that they just write, and they like it. Now, writing good essays is really hard. People that write a lot, as in "too much for me" (like for example Eliezer Yudkowsky), often forget to do the second step of writing.
The first step of writing is writing. The second step of writing is trying to delete half of the things you just wrote until things get as simple as possible. Paul Graham explains very eloquently why writing is really more about trying to remove words than adding them. I was never rewarded in school for writing less, but it's so important.
So, Stephen Elliott taught me you can write anything, and Paul Graham taught me you should delete a lot of words. Dante Alighieri instead taught me you can go mystic crazy and write three tomes in rhymed endecasillabi, like it's the dopest beat ever dropped.
If you manage to remove words, it means you managed to compress information into fewer bytes and, as the Machine Learning trope goes, intelligence is just compression in disguise.
Removing words is hard. When writing feels too easy, it probably means I'm not removing enough words. Especially while drafting, it's good to type a lot. In my experience is better to write a lot and then remove whole paragraphs, than to delete as you go. Because by the end of the draft, you know where you were going. Writing is just shedding light on an unknown landscape of ideas: you must try many paths to see where they lead to. Once I've written a substantial draft, finding the courage to delete a lot of paragraphs, means acknowledging I know a better path now. I don't need all those previous attempts. And that's what good writing is to me, a map for finding the route to clear ideas.
I'm not sure if Stephen Elliott deletes a lot of paragraphs from his drafts, but if he doesn't, he doesn't need to. Yudkowsky instead could try to delete more words. Because boy, he loves to type.
Writing like Stephen Elliott and the end of the Dollar
I hope I am right in saying this article was inspired by my comment on your previous post. If so, this is great.
I have a list of phrases 'to use in future articles' (never will) that I've culled from previous ones.