Patrick McKenzie: preference

Transcript context

…The broader question is, why does finance have a greater concentration of writing talent? Not just for current bloggers, but finance histories are some of the best history books out there. I’m thinking of those by Bethany McLean and so forth. Is it an intrinsically more interesting subject, or is there some other reason? There’s some path dependence. If I had ended up working in a water treatment plant, I'd probably be writing about water treatment plants because I enjoy writing. I know enough about myself to say that a discussion about how alum works in water treatment plant — something I read about when I was six — could captivate me for years. I'd write about it if I was captivated by it. I agree with a point Matt Levine made once. Finance and the tech industry have for a while been relatively reliable ways to turn intelligence into money. Many good writers are very intelligent. Not all intelligent people are good writers. It's a skill that more intelligent people could learn. If we create an incentive system that tends to allocate many of the country's top minds into specific fields where they become experts, I'd expect a lot of writing talent to emerge there as well. Good writing is good thinking. That's a Paul Graham quote I believe, and it's broadly true. If I remember correctly, you went to Japan because you thought that after the dot-com boom, the demand for programmers alone would diminish and a combination of skills would be required. You weren't the only one who thought this way.…

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