Emergent Ventures
The proposal should consist of a proposal no longer than 1500 words. You may also attach supplementary materials, but we will read the proposal first and it must stand on its own.
Also (if applicable) tell us how long you have been working on this project or idea, whether you will be working on it full time or part time, any existing formal or informal partnerships or supporters, and how you might intend to reach your users or audience.
I’m an 18 year old serving national service(NS) in Singapore. I do two things: I write a substack newsletter and host a podcast both about economics and history. My interest in economics started because there were several books in my local public library when I was in the 9th grade. I took it more seriously after I had a difficult time with it in school, fixed that, and then jumped into the econ blogosphere.
I sporadically wrote in March 2020 when I tried to write one article a week. This ended shortly and I continued in May 2021 when I graduated from high school. I wrote with more depth and started to focus on economic history. My podcast started around the same time and has been roughly consistent at one episode a week since then. The combination of doing things I didn’t like in school, ample free time after I graduated and near-free content on the internet and public libraries made it costless. Now that I’m in NS the only thing different is that I’ve less free time but the other motivators remain.
My story with regards to writing is that I was (and am) curious about a few things: economic history - specifically on how high growth periods happened, how this affected them on the micro level (biographies of companies in high growth periods are something I’m looking forward to work on) and miscellaneous other things that strike me (like the post on GDP linked bonds).
The first reason I write is because I need my thoughts in one place either for myself to refer to later on or to link to other people as a summary of my thoughts on that issue. The other good reason to write is that it connects me with interesting people who read my work. And finally it also forces me to think more clearly and put my confused thoughts in a more clear way.
On my podcast my main reason for starting it was the same as before: lack of stimulation. And I realised that while I had no connections, with the internet I could meet interesting people and get the benefit of sharing my conversation for others to hear
The consensus view I most strongly believe is that discipline is important. I’d like to reframe the militaristic connotation with the idea of internal coordination. Good discipline is just coordinating over multiple versions of yourself day after day. My opinion lies on two facts: increasing returns to effort and my experience with the military. In almost every field the first few units of effort don’t lead to much output. Initial programs are full of bugs, initial articles have logic leaps and initial maths problems are just inscrutable. But what separates those who’ll make it through is just showing up and ignoring your initial emotions of failure and despair. It’s to continue doing something without the existence of immediate reward. How do you do this?
I think the best bet is to commit yourself to do something for a period of time and just to do it. You have to temporarily suppress feelings of annoyance and keep doing that activity. What’s key here is the framing: saying it as internal coordination makes it easier and less stressful to think about. (Also underrated here is realising that you can be nice to yourself and be firm with yourself - there’s no tradeoff).
The other thing that sold me on discipline being very important was National Service. The military puts a different set of expectations. You’re expected to wake up every single day at a certain time, clean your room, exercise, have food and do exactly whatever is demanded of you. And when you enter, it's no fun but the routine starts to become part of you. The real importance of it kicks when you end up in a job. It is hard to do any critical tasks without the level of discipline this imposes on you, even harder to ensure other people do it and far harder to do the latter without being harsh on them. When you are not able to push yourself to do something at repeated intervals, it is very hard to take responsibility for tasks. Examples include being responsible for multiple people younger than you, dealing with patients at wee hours of the day, or working with armaments that can cause damage to hundreds of people. Seeing people do this (and doing small but increasing levels of it myself) made me realise that on the margin we could all do better with 10% more discipline.
I’m applying for a EV grant for general career development so I’m not sure to what extent this applies to me.
For the podcast here it goes : First there are several people whose knowledge is illegible. They might write op-eds and blog posts but those are usually refined and filtered. Whatever they write is only a subset of what they know. And that is why I like to talk to them. I get a great deal of implicit knowledge spelled out directly to me. Talking to people in the media industry about new business models is an example, or journalists talking about stories they haven’t yet got the space to publish is another one. A related but separate benefit is that I get to ask them about their writing. Most of my guests have written books or blog posts that I’ve enjoyed, and the main benefit is getting them to explain more about what they wrote. Typically more is left unsaid in between the lines than is written, and the best part of my podcast is doing a deep dive on ideas I already know about.
Several podcasts have the above two, but mine takes people who aren’t very well known and haven’t gone on too many podcasts before. This means I’m more likely to get good content from them than repeated boilerplate.
About the newsletter: my model now is infrequent long form pieces. I try to spend some time researching about the topic in great depth. Usually there are a few books that give multiple perspectives on the issue, and reading them to triangulate the facts. Then comes other blog posts, podcasts etc. I think there are a few things unique about my writing. I’ve tried to avoid talking about topics that are frequent in the media but are very important.
So this means avoiding talking about America and the American macroeconomy. That implies a larger focus on East Asia (and India). Second, I think economic history is underrated both in explaining the current world and in building your economic intuition for prediction. So that means that I write about long run economic growth in countries rather than a focus on the news (which was what I did previously). And while this still remains a plan at the moment I think that the blogosphere would benefit a great deal from looking at what stock analysts and SEC filings say both in terms of microeconomic phenomenon and as a complement to macroeconomic data.
So if you were talking about monopoly power, you would look at both standard market share data (or corporate share of income) along with earnings reports, analyst reports and conference calls with executives. To a small extent my post on Vodafone India from Jan 2020 is about this, but I think there’s great scope for more for me to write about this.
Because I’m in military service I’ll have to work on these part time. I work on this on evenings and nights on weekdays and almost full time on weekends. The only other commitment to my time is that I’m learning to code, but that hasn’t hurt so far. Along with that a large portion of my reading happens on the way to and from work and there are some days where I can write or read during NS. On reaching my audience for my writing, there isn’t much of a problem. I’ve 558 email subscribers and post my blog on reddit and twitter which gets some attention. Occasionally someone famous tweets about my writing (or links to it like Tyler did on MR), and this gets more people. My podcast is a lot trickier. Anchor tells me I have an audience of ~100 but by my estimate this number is around 70 because that’s how many listen to it in the first 24h of the episode. For more popular guests this number multiplies by 3 and 7 times (200 to 500 plays).