Ryu's Blog

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman. Hirschman lived an extraordinary life. He’s an intellect with original ideas and on-the-ground experience as well as talents to make the most out of life. His Exit, Voice, Loyalty still provides a useful framework for me to think about things.

Pleasure disappoints, possibility never!

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Being open to many possibilities meant accepting uncertainty and embracing the fact that one could learn from experience in the world by forfeiting presumptions that one could not know it all.

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Hirschman’s odyssey can be read as a journey with no particular end, the life of an idealist with no utopia because he believed that the voyage of life itself yielded enough lessons to change who we are and what we aspire to be; to require and stay on course toward an abstract destination threatened to deprive the journey of its richest possibilities.

The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success. Many good advice from Megan. I clearly suffer from the impostor syndrome. Here‘s Megan on EconTalk.

The fear of being unmasked as the incompetent you “really” are so common that it actually has a clinical name: impostor syndrome.

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The metaphor for our age is the disappearance of high monkey bars from playgrounds across the country. We have made it impossible for children to fall very far–and in so doing, we have robbed them of the joys of climbing high.

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Dweck encourages parents and teachers to praise children for their effort, rather than their intelligence, talent, or looks.

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As anyone who has raised a kid can attest, the same is true of children: swift and consistent punishment is by far the best way to change behavior…Consistency is probably the most important tool of parenting.

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Learning to fail well means learning to understand your mistakes, because unless you know what went wrong, you may do the wrong things to correct it…Most of all, learning to fail well means overcoming our natural instincts to blame someone–maybe ourselves–whenever something goes wrong. Societies and people fail best when they err on the side of forgiveness. Not forgetting: the information gained by failing is far too valuable to be lost by pretending that nothing happened.

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The secret to catching your mistakes quickly is simple: treat outside information as if it were inside information. When someone tells you you’re off track, don’t look for reasons why they may be wrong; listen for reasons why they might be right.

Rethinking Housing Bubbles: The Role of Household and Bank Balance Sheets in Modeling Economic Cycles. The authors’ main argument seems to be that asset bubbles in durable goods (housing in particular), when financed with excessive debt, have been the main driver of US business cycles. I wish they had focused more on the insights gained from experiments and how well they fit with historical events, or ways we could apply those insights to analyse various situations.