Booooks 22
Existential Crisis Issue: Butcher's Crossing and More on Polish Elections
Hey hey, look who's back in a surprisingly regular fashion!
I am writing this issue still from Portugal, but as this issue will reach your inboxes I will be slowly packing my bags (again) to embark on a little Central European Tournee: Warsaw-Vienna-Prague-Krakow. Catch me if you can.
In the Meantime
N sends you a meme, related to my recently favourite trend:
I will most likely bore you to death with this section for the few coming weeks, but I will covering the only story in town: The Polish Parliamentary Election
Dispatch from the trenches
The most important (in terms of actual significance) news from the past week is a relatively unprecedented use of generative AI in the trenches of Polish politics. The underdog opposition party - The Civic Platform used AI to generate the voice of the current PM Mr Morawiecki in a spot where it reads emails leaked over the last summer.
Funnily enough they seem to be calling him out as a hypocrite regarding his attitudes to his junior coalition partner Mr (Zero) Ziobro. Who (according to people familiar with the matter) is an actually dangerous sociopath. Now in the emails, Mr Morawiecki seems to be addressing that and other activities of his partner slandering him mercilessly. Around the time of these emails publication he gave a speech defending Mr Ziobro against a parliamentary vote of no confidence.
The importance is not the actual contents of the said video, but rather the fact that the utilised technology might open doors to more outrageous deep fake clips being perpetrated across the internet.
Okay, when I started writing this part of the newsletter it was before the weekend happened. Well, you know weekends bring a lot of new things onto the campaign trail. This time around: a Polish-Belarusian activist was crossed out for her to forthcoming abortion stance and yet another former Law and Justice ally was brought into the liberal (KO) camp.
All this, being probably important and showing that Mr Tusk cares more about victory than women rights is not interesting as much as what will follow.
One good thing that the campaign made me realise
But we need to start from the beginning. Hamilton is a great musical, and my friends and I were completely brainwashed by it on the eve of our departure to the UK. Inspired by the example of previous generations of Polish students we thought that studying abroad will open opportunities to make our own country better, that our experience will be sought after by everyone.
Maybe it is still true, especially on the more fancy end of the THE ranking. But one thing probably isn't true and never was. The experience gained at university, no matter how fancy does not entitle us to anything special. Most likely we will get to learn the ropes of our chosen trade along people who ‘stayed behind’ and worked their way through structures of already existing organisations.
Recently I was confronted with the fact that one should look for the most efficient ways to achieve goals. It seems obvious, but really isn't. If I would want to become a management consultant I would not need to go into a grad school, since I can pick that career here and now, especially if I wanted to go back to Warsaw. If I would want to stay in methane policy space graduate education might not be the most cost effective way to do it.
I need my life to be more than a checklist of titles and CV entries it was up to this point. The reason I know this is a campaign by an Aid Worker to become an MP.
I am sure Aleksandra is a great and charismatic leader. But the relative similarities between our social milieus (she is in the top percentile I am in the bottom one) made me think a bit more about my own goals in life. Over the past few years I was working from gig to gig on a route to achieve goals: a BSc from one of the top Econ schools in the UK, job at EY, RWE and in the end Ember. It makes for a miserable life to live it like this. It also makes for a fake-looking career if you are young enough. I faced it too.
On the News
It's Science, stupid
What does it even mean to do Science? With capital S, since that's the title of one of the most respectable journal in the world. Three economists from Chicago (and Mannheim) published a study in which they weight the impact of the declared GHG emissions of publicly listed corporations.
But how is that anything new? Good question. The article does not suggest a new way to measure the ‘social cost of carbon‘. They just calculate it using the existing EPA framework. (Huge shout out to EPA for their fantastic job on everything environmental).
But I am not snotty about it anymore. The article puts forward the arguments we made at Instrat (see: Instrat 2022; Instrat 2023) and Sabina did at Ember (see: Ember 2023). Data matters, clarity is key and monitoring makes for better markets.
Briefly Noted
It was the Jackson Hole weekend! That means some people got to stay at Grand Teton and made speeches about stargazing (Jay Powell) and about Soren Kierkegaard (Christine Lagarde). I am actively trying to come up with some Kierkegaardian quips about monetary policy and macro. So far I got the simplest ones:
It’s Either (cut) / Or (pause); September is going to be full of Fear and Trembling in the central banks; We are looking for some Repetitions, to know what might happen next.
All in all Lagarde speech was a very thoughtful piece of insight, despite the very helicopter view language. I like her commitment to clarity and humility and the forward looking nature of the policy going forward. What will it mean can only be seen in the coming quarters.
On the Shelf
I was very weirdly committed to reading only Oppenheimer related things over the first two weeks of August (maybe watching the movie twice was too much). The main reading is of course The American Prometheus the Pulitzer winning biography.
Quite surprisingly however, I got hooked by a piece of fiction that brings some thoughts of Oppose to mind. Butcher Crossing was supposed to be N’s blind date. It’s a concept run in some of London’s bookstores where you buy a book in a brown paper cover without knowing what the title of it is based on some vague descriptions.
Accidentally it turned out to be the second of the Three Great American Novels by John Williams, author of Stoner (see Books 21). The book takes us in a completely different direction from the previous one.
We follow a smart Harvard drop-out who decides to go into the Bison Country after reading too much Emerson. The kid is loaded enough to start his own outfit and goes hunting! Big time. His team kills so many animals it's impossible to remember and carry it out of the valley where they camp. The trip turns out to be teaching, its outcomes frustrating. Being with the nature was the protagonist goal but his employees seem to not understand that urge. He leaves the valley enriched, they loose their minds or livelihoods.
The resemblance to young Oppenheimer is striking. His outdoorsy adventures are featured in countless anecdotes. Even the movie does justice to it by making a point of showing his love to the mountains of New Mexico. Combing an academic pursuit with the opportunity to constantly appreciate the landscape is a common feeling of at least few people (Tracy Alloway and me).
I do not wish to kill bison, but boy I wish I had a log chalet to discuss macro economics in and to serve for a base on countless multi-day hikes!