shanen's Journal: Michael Lewis always writes so well

As a good read, you can't beat Going Infinite by Michael Lewis.

Okay, I confess I'm scrambling for a good opening, but I've read a lot of his books and can't recall a bad one. So it's supposed to be a joke about infinity being too big to beat. And I'm not joking that it's a good read.

It's basically the story of SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried) and the implosion of FTX. The infinite part is actually about imaginary money, and I think we are seriously screwed on that side of things. Though the book only addresses that part in passing, I want to start by focusing on it because it has become part of a fundamentally untenable background situation. It's not infinite, but close enough to destroy us?

Maybe the historical perspective is best? Value was originally defined quite narrowly. "Here is a loaf of bread. What's it worth to you? What can you offer in exchange?" Before that level of barter it's hard to argue that "economics" existed at all. Later on "value" grew up to consider pieces of land, then factories and other more complicated things, but there was still something there.

I think "economics" broke down when the future got involved. It wasn't the thing anymore, but the future value of the thing that mattered. As implemented in terms of stock markets, people started "valuing" stocks based on increasingly wild guesses about "future sales" and "future earnings" and "future mergers"... But when they started gambling on future values of everything, then they got too close to infinity. So now we have stock markets with "values" of a relatively small number of trillions of dollars (whatever that's supposed to mean) underlying speculative markets with "values" that are vastly larger based on wild speculations on the future.

And all of that is legal? Well, mostly, but SBF apparently crossed a line somewhere and wound up in jail for it. The book wraps before sentencing... When I checked (and the google returns Sam as the first hit (via Wikipedia) for "SBF") the bottom line was 25 years. No mention of when he might get paroled...

In terms of funny, SBF was trying to be legal, even for the cryptocurrency stuff where the values are completely imaginary and bogus. But he is also rather more crazy than the average bear. At least those are the feelings Michael Lewis left me with.

Anyway, the book is a very friendly treatment. Maybe Michael Lewis is everyone's friend? I actually thought the most interesting part was in Chapter 8, where the psychiatrist creates the organization chart. Not so much the chart itself as the shocking things the shrink seems to be saying about some of his patients. In public? What happened to protecting the privacy of the patients? One theory is that SBF picked an unethical doctor, but I suspect the reality is more complicated. I think Michael Lewis got the personal information from the patients and the psychiatrist didn't disavow it. Presentation issues dogging the author?

The overall quality of the writing and editing was up to the usual high standards. Only had three page-linked reactions. There were mistakes on pages 63 and 64 that made me wonder if there was some kind of production hiccup at that point in the book. Page 63 says "millions" where it must have been "thousands" in reality and page 64 has "2104" as a year that must have been "2014". More interesting is on page 164 where it refers to that org chart. It's printed on the inside of the dust jacket, but I read a library's copy and the dust jacket is taped down, so I had to use websearch to see the chart.

'Nuff said. I predict you'll enjoy it, though the story is fuzzy and I didn't detect any solutions here.