The Bible; I know people usually assume it means I'm religious, but that's simply not the case. It's an interesting book in its own right, and it has had the most meaningful contribution to my life because it's one of the most influential books of all time. Reading it grants one better insight into art, cinema, literature, music, etc. etc. etc. Even creations that disagree with it have been influenced by it - obviously, since they disagree with it - so reading it allows you to understand why someone disliked the book. You also expand your vocabulary by reading it. And the stories in it are generally very interesting; it has its dry parts obviously.
I believe it's the most bang for your buck, or I guess bang per number of pages.
Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
61–70 of 101 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#62A couple of books here. 1. Caesar by Adrian Goldsworthy. This is a biography of Julius Ceasar. There’s a story in here about a teenage Ceasar, with no institutional authority and effectively a student at this point, raising a navy to go capture pirates who had previously kidnapped him. I spent many years thinking about influence without any authority after reading this story and it’s probably had a significant shift…
> Buying stocks in a company is effectively loaning money to the company. It really is not though. Unless you muddle the definitions of debt, equity and ownership to the point of uselessness. Then again, this is the same book that blithely conflates credit with benevolence.
You are right that it does muddle definitions. However, in this case, it actually helps to squint and see a blurry picture to get a better sense of the bigger picture.
Unless you are buying enough of a company to get access to a board seat, you effectively have zero control over a company. Buying 1 share of Google gets you such an insignificant fraction of a company.
Yes, buying shares is theoretically equivalent to buying an ownership into a fraction of the company.
But that’s not actually a useful model. Asking “do I want to give money to this company that they may choose to never return?” helped me understand a lot of what investing really was much much better.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Buying stocks in a company is effectively loaning money to the company. It really is not though. Unless you muddle the definitions of debt, equity and ownership to the point of uselessness. Then again, this is the same book that blithely conflates credit with benevolence.
You are right that it does muddle definitions. However, in this case, it actually helps to squint and see a blurry picture to get a better sense of the bigger picture. Unless you are buying enough of a company to get access to a board seat, you effectively have zero control over a company. Buying 1 share of Google gets you such an insignificant fraction of a company. Yes, buying shares is theoretically equivalent to…
> Unless you are buying enough of a company to get access to a board seat, you effectively have zero control over a company. Buying 1 share of Google gets you such an insignificant fraction of a company.
I have zero interest in having control over any company I'm invested in. Which I assume is the case with the overwhelming majority of retail shareholders.
> But that’s not actually a useful model. Asking “do I want to give money to this company that they may choose to never return?” helped me understand a lot of what investing really was much much better.
I am having a hard time understanding why this is a useful way of thinking about equity investment. In the most common case i.e. in secondary markets, you aren't giving the company any money by buying stock. And in the most common case you don't want the company to return the money.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by serious? The main value of the book I see is rejecting very common misconceptions based on ignoring supply and demand. I've read a microeconomics textbook afterwards and the book still doesn't seem too bad. What would be your suggestion of a book for introducing laypeople to economic thinking?
Read the micro 101 and macro 101 textbooks used by good universities. Principles of Economics by Taylor is one of the common textbooks. Macroeconomics by Mankiw is another one. Intro courses on any subject tend to be very accessible to laypeople. Sowell is unserious because he misrepresents the other side. He basically argues that when you leave everything for the market to figure out it will automatically turn out a…
From chapter 17 of Basic Economics:
“Economic decisions made through the marketplace are not always better than decisions that governments can make. Much depends on whether those market transactions accurately reflect both the costs and the benefits which result. Under some conditions, they do not.
When someone buys a table or a tractor, the question as to whether it is worth what it cost is answered by the actions of the purchaser who made the decision to buy it. However, when an electric utility company buys coal to burn to generate electricity, a significant part of the cost of the electricity-generating process is paid by people who breathe the smoke that results from the burning of the coal and whose homes and cars are dirtied by the soot. Cleaning, repainting and medical costs paid by these people are not taken into account in the marketplace, because these people do not participate in the transactions between the coal producer and the utility company.
Such costs are called “external costs” by economists because such costs fall outside the parties to the transaction which creates these costs. External costs are therefore not taken into “account in the marketplace, even when these are very substantial costs, which can extend beyond monetary losses to include bad health and premature death. While there are many decisions that can be made more efficiently through the marketplace than by government, this is one of those decisions that can be made more efficiently by government than by the marketplace. Clean air laws can reduce harmful emissions by legislation and regulations. Clean water laws and laws against disposing of toxic wastes where they will harm people can likewise force decisions to be made in ways that take into account the external costs that would otherwise be ignored by those transacting in the marketplace.”
He goes on to spend the rest of the chapter talking about limitations of the market. Maybe you should try reading the book before you criticize it.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are right that it does muddle definitions. However, in this case, it actually helps to squint and see a blurry picture to get a better sense of the bigger picture. Unless you are buying enough of a company to get access to a board seat, you effectively have zero control over a company. Buying 1 share of Google gets you such an insignificant fraction of a company. Yes, buying shares is theoretically equivalent to…
> Unless you are buying enough of a company to get access to a board seat, you effectively have zero control over a company. Buying 1 share of Google gets you such an insignificant fraction of a company. I have zero interest in having control over any company I'm invested in. Which I assume is the case with the overwhelming majority of retail shareholders. > But that’s not actually a useful model. Asking “do I want t…
> I am having a hard time understanding why this is a useful way of thinking about equity investment. In the most common case i.e. in secondary markets, you aren't giving the company any money by buying stock. And in the most common case you don't want the company to return the money.
I don’t know how well this translates to different people with different approaches to life and investing styles, but here’s my thoughts on it.
If you want to start with first principles and understand how to invest, you need a foundational model to start building theory on.
Modeling investing as a loan made to a company where the company can choose to not return money at all comes with all sorts of nice properties. The first question you ask is “if I give them money, will they eventually be able to return it?” which will make you look into their business and figure out how much money they need to make to pay you back and when they can pay you back and who else they need to pay back and ultimately how much paying everyone back will cost them. Share buybacks then look a lot like companies paying back some investors and dividends look a lot like interest payments. This is fits very cleanly into all sorts of other models we have today.
Take a look at a plot of number of outstanding apple shares over the past 15 years. It’s abundantly clear that they’ve been “paying back” consistently over time. If that were a person looking to borrow money, you would happily lend money to them!
Take a look at American Airlines. They have a monumental amount of corporate debt and then they need to pay $10B back to all share holders. They were “paying back” their share holders at a steady clip until around covid and then they had to “borrow” more from investors and doesn’t look like they’re ready to go back to “paying” back just yet.
Obviously these are very unsophisticated models. But as a simple approximation, they work really well (for me).
If I were to go to a VC and “borrow” money from them, it’s very helpful to think about how much I can pay them back - it’s super easy to model that like borrowing any other amount of money.
And ultimately, it really does function as a loan from the investor’s perspective. You give away money to an entity expecting to get back that amount and then more. If that entity goes broke, you will not get your money back. If that entity does really really well, they can pay you back a lot more money and so on.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unless you are buying enough of a company to get access to a board seat, you effectively have zero control over a company. Buying 1 share of Google gets you such an insignificant fraction of a company. I have zero interest in having control over any company I'm invested in. Which I assume is the case with the overwhelming majority of retail shareholders. > But that’s not actually a useful model. Asking “do I want t…
> I am having a hard time understanding why this is a useful way of thinking about equity investment. In the most common case i.e. in secondary markets, you aren't giving the company any money by buying stock. And in the most common case you don't want the company to return the money. I don’t know how well this translates to different people with different approaches to life and investing styles, but here’s my though…
> Modeling investing as a loan made to a company where the company can choose to not return money at all comes with all sorts of nice properties.
Debt and equity are both modes of investment. We have different words for them because they mean different things. You are not Modeling investing as a loan, you are describing investing in equity.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#67LaVey
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#68For me it's a book I am reading now: Outlive, the science and art of longevity, by Peter Attia MD. The book is a summary of the many podcasts which I have been listening to for a couple of years now, a result of which I am happier, healthier (by arguably the right metrics), fitter, and better able to navigate life and the prospect of getting older. If you are over 40 I highly recommend it, and if you're over 50 it's a must read.
If I could sum up, I would say that so much of health and fitness is just trying to figure out the right thing to do - this book applies an appropriate level of skepticism to say what we know and what we don't on this subject, and teaches you how to assess for yourself what you need to do to improve your odds of a long healthy life. Finding it is like finally finding the a great text book on subject that you haven't been able to wrap your head around.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#69When I was seven years old, my mom got ensnared by a door-to-door World Book encyclopedia sales pitch. That set, in turn, ensnared me. It was the closest thing in the 1970s to today's internet. I could look up almost any topic that came to mind. I could research any topic we were learning in grade school. When I was bored, I could flip through any volume and learn about whatever subject happened to present itself. I…
Ditto! In perhaps 1974 my parents acquired a used recent-edition (1972?) World Book encyclopedia set for my sister and I to leverage in our pre-college studies, and until perhaps 1980 that was by far my most-read (set of) books. I fondly remember the pseudo-topographic colored state maps with their geographic-region delineations and associated region descriptions. I think this was how I developed my (apparently relatively atypical) affinity for consuming reference manuals.
Re: Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?
#70As a white CIS male from a middle class family in Western Europe I've found it eye opening reading studies and articles based around global gender studies. For example the journal Gender, Place and Culture https://genderplaceandculture.wordpress.com/ . It's an analytical window to a world that would otherwise pass me by and has helped me be more empathetic to the struggles that of those born in different situations.
What’s the point of specifying “cis” ? That’s the default. Because it appears that adding that bit serves as a low effort social grift.
Cis means I identify now as I did when I was born. I was born male and still identify as male. As such I haven't had the struggles of someone who has had to discover their identity.
"Low effort social grift", sorry I thought we were in a place of normal conversions with like minded nerds, I didn't realise this was actually twitter.