Reading note 10/08/2018–10/14/2018
对《Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower》一书的总结。结论是美国综合国力比中国和其他国家强太多，虽然美国也有很多相对劣势。美国的领先优势至少还能延续十年，甚至知道世纪末。
尽管美国在基础设施、政府效率等指标上不具有全球领先优势，但以“资源”作为衡量实力的方法，基于决定全球影响力（国力）的财富和军事能力两项指标，美国是人类有史以来最强大的国家，也是当今世界唯一的超级大国，这种格局将持续数十年，甚至延续至世纪末，而目前正处于这种格局的中继。
中国自1990年以来，全要素生产率（TFP）的提高仅贡献了经济增长的3–10%，而美国过去一个世纪的经济增长，TFP贡献了20–25%。且近年来，中国的TFP走负，这意味着产出不及投入。不断提高的GDP因此不是在创造财富，而是在消耗财富。
从决定国力的三个方面 — — 区位、制度和人口，他认为美国仍是优势多于劣势。比如美国地理位置使其有着天然的军事缓冲带，同时也减少了防御周边国家的国防开支，而这是中、俄一笔庞大的成本；自然资源方面更是潜力巨大。人口结构方面，美国的优势甚至胜过印度。他同时指出了美国的不足，认为美国在政权能力（state capacity）（比如医疗开支等）方面要弱于德国和日本；另外是美国的基础教育差强人意。
尽管美国在基础设施、政府效率等指标上不具有全球领先优势，但以“资源”作为衡量实力的方法，基于决定全球影响力（国力）的财富和军事能力两项指标，美国是人类有史以来最强大的国家，也是当今世界唯一的超级大国，这种格局将持续数十年，甚至延续至世纪末，而目前正处于这种格局的中继。
中国自1990年以来，全要素生产率（TFP）的提高仅贡献了经济增长的3–10%，而美国过去一个世纪的经济增长，TFP贡献了20–25%。且近年来，中国的TFP走负，这意味着产出不及投入。不断提高的GDP因此不是在创造财富，而是在消耗财富。
从决定国力的三个方面 — — 区位、制度和人口，他认为美国仍是优势多于劣势。比如美国地理位置使其有着天然的军事缓冲带，同时也减少了防御周边国家的国防开支，而这是中、俄一笔庞大的成本；自然资源方面更是潜力巨大。人口结构方面，美国的优势甚至胜过印度。他同时指出了美国的不足，认为美国在政权能力（state capacity）（比如医疗开支等）方面要弱于德国和日本；另外是美国的基础教育差强人意。
Stories of Fannie and Freddie. They have two businesses:
1. They collect a fee for guaranteeing mortgages
2. They earn a net interest margin by borrowing money and buying MBS(mortgage backed security)
They had cheap cost of funds because Fannie’s lenders viewed their debt as essentially government credit. That drove them to buy riskier and riskier mortgages to make more and more profit, and eventually blew up.
What’s crazy about this is that one division of Fannie’s business was buying these securities for investment while the other segment determined those same loans were too risky to guarantee.
Their existence represents government’s role in the mortgage market. Americans in general don’t like that, but 30 year fixed rate mortgage is the “sacred cow” for American homeowners. Without a government guarantee, not only would the cost of an average mortgage rise, but there would likely be no lenders willing to finance a house at a fixed rate for 30 years.
1. They collect a fee for guaranteeing mortgages
2. They earn a net interest margin by borrowing money and buying MBS(mortgage backed security)
They had cheap cost of funds because Fannie’s lenders viewed their debt as essentially government credit. That drove them to buy riskier and riskier mortgages to make more and more profit, and eventually blew up.
What’s crazy about this is that one division of Fannie’s business was buying these securities for investment while the other segment determined those same loans were too risky to guarantee.
Their existence represents government’s role in the mortgage market. Americans in general don’t like that, but 30 year fixed rate mortgage is the “sacred cow” for American homeowners. Without a government guarantee, not only would the cost of an average mortgage rise, but there would likely be no lenders willing to finance a house at a fixed rate for 30 years.
WhatApp did localisations in India much better than WeChat and defeat WeChat.
WeChat’s approach of enforcing “add-friend-requests” was similar to how Facebook works even today. This added a layer of friction to starting a chat interaction on WeChat, especially in the case of group chats. WhatApp, however, assumes any number in your phone contact is your friend. That grealy leveraged the users’ existing phone number networks. WeChat didn’t have this issue in China, because it copied its QQ networks during the cold start.
Another design feature in the app allowed users to look up and send add-friend requests to WeChat users nearby. “Women used to get a lot of unwarranted messages from men, which was a major turn off and many of them left the platform,” Gupta says. “China probably didn’t have this stalking problem.”
When WeChat launched in India the size of WeChat app was 40 MB. Most popular mobile phones in India at the time came with less than 200 MB of internal memory.
In China, where the internet was cheaper than in India in 2012, sending video files of, say, 4 MB was not a challenge. WhatsApp compresses a 5 MB photo to 40 kilobytes. WeChat did not compress the files and took many minutes and data to send and receive media files.
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