Okay, last year didn’t work out, but we keep trying.
Author: Calvin Kasulke
Date published: August 31, 2021
Date read: June 4, 2025
Perhaps not the “romp through the haunted house of late-stage capitalism” that one blurb claimed, it certainly might capture the fuzzy, absurd memory of peak pandemic work from home culture that some might have at this point, several years out. Gerald is perpetually wfh, online at all sorts of hours of the day, with nothing better to do than to peruse internal work threads. Living through COVID was kind of like getting trapped in Slack itself, right?
The gimmick could easily overstay its welcome, but the author keeps it short. It is experimental, silly, and bizarre. A kind of creative fever dream that one can appreciate for its creative fever dream properties. And there’s a couple of memorable quips that one can save in their workplace comedy back pocket.
doug smorin
working from home
you’re producing some of your best output in the year you’ve been here
gerald
actually, I’ve been with the company for two years
doug snoring
in that time you’ve produced only a year’s worth of output
at best
gerald
oh
Edited: Michael Lewis
Authors: Michael Lewis and others
Date published: March 18, 2025
Date read: May 29, 2025
I have a friend who works for the government. When talking heads discuss government workers, there are two extremes: the “inefficient, lazy, lucky to have a government job” type and the “giving up a multimillionaire dollar position at a prestigious law/consulting/trading firm to labor for the common good” type. My friend is the latter. Their parents constantly remind them that they could and should be making far more money in the private sector. It’s the kind of perspective that Lewis captures in a profile of Chris Mark, who decided to become a coal miner despite his father’s position as a professor at Princeton.
When his father told a friend of the curious path that Chris had put himself on, the friend had said, “You must be so proud of him.” To which Robert replied, “I’d be proud of him if he was your kid.”
The stories make obvious something that is obvious. Government can solve problems that the private sector can’t. Take Chris, our Princeton son turned coal miner. He spends years to research and write regulations to save coal miners from collapsing roofs. And perhaps too apropos for the book’s broader claim that there are problems that the private sector won’t fix on its own, the critical tool to save lives was not one that needed to be invented. It was one that just needs to be used–roof bolts.
And so, amazingly, for the first 20 years of its use, the main effect of the most important lifesaving technology in the history of coal mining was to increase the efficiency of the mines while preserving existing probabilities of death and injury. Taking advantage, essentially, of people conditioned to a certain level of risk by failing to ameliorate that risk. “No one puts people’s lives at risk per se,” Chris said. “It’s not obvious most of the time that people’s lives are at stake. You’re always playing probabilities. But they knew what they were doing. They could see people dying. Even in a union mine they did it. That is what is so extraordinary. These were not dumb guys. This was a conscious decision.”
Roof collapse was a problem that the free market just didn’t want to solve because it got in the way of profits. There was an uneasy equilibrium that had traded lives for money that everyone, consciously or unconsciously, had simply accepted. But not Chris Mark. And, by extension, not the government.
I thought the story of Chris Mark heroic, but I can imagine another conclusion. After all, if coal mining is being phased away in favor of different energy sources, would the resources used to fund Chris Mark have been better used to simply advance green energy, or to fund research into a disease that affects far more people than the small coal mining sector? Is this not evidence that the government is inefficient?
Part of me wants to be able to directly defend this investment in Chris Mark from this critique of efficiency. That, actually, one does not know the future, so one should invest broadly in many areas. That the marginal dollar spent in one area might not move the marginal benefit as much as another. And on and on. But the other stories in the book perhaps remind me that this is the wrong approach. After all, I did not resonate with every single one of the programs that were portrayed. And that might be a point the book is attempting to make by selecting such a diverse set of profiles. The government may save lives, but it isn’t trying to optimize for saving lives. It might look for alien life in the universe, but it is not trying to optimize for that. It might try and comfort the nation’s veterans but it clearly isn’t optimizing for that. Government should be trying to make lives good, for some hotly contestable and elusive definition of good.
And even if it is impossible to define good, it is clear to me that the private sector optimizes for something different–even if the two sometimes align. And I am proud of my friend for believing in the good and I think we are better off for it.