Weekend Food For Thought WFFT
On today's menu: (1) Intellectual Capital, (2) Deep Dive in Japan Election, (3) Actual Manifestations of the Politics, (4) Chinese EV industry, (5) The Process of Writing, and more...
Hello from Lisbon,
I hope you had an interesting and productive week.
Erwin Schrödinger stated that: “The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everyone sees.”
May what you see below lead you to thinking in new and different ways…
1 Getting Visual
2 If You Read One Thing Today - Make Sure it is This
3 Consequential Thinking about Consequential Matters
4 Big Ideas
5 Big thinking
6 Your Time On Earth is Limited
1 Getting Visual
The Long View: A Key Trend: The shift from tangible to intangible - “Within the last quarter century, intellectual capital has emerged as the leading asset class. The term “intellectual capital” refers generally to traditional Intellectual Property assets – patents, trademarks and copyrights. At Ocean Tomo, we uniquely include within the definition of “intellectual capital” special client intangible assets, especially corporate and government preference rights. In the 2025 release, the Study now reflects a panel of 50 years of data in the U.S. market and 20 years of data in foreign markets. The growth in the value of Intellectual Capital Equity® can be seen when evaluating the market capitalization of the S&P 500 as shown in the chart below. The composition of corporate value has undergone a fundamental transformation over the past five decades. In 1975, tangible assets—property, plant, equipment, inventory, and other physical capital—represented 83% of the market value of companies comprising the S&P 500 index, with intangible assets accounting for only 17%. By the end of 2025, this relationship had completely inverted: intangible assets now constitute approximately 92% of S&P 500 market capitalization, while tangible assets have been reduced to a mere 8%. This 75 percentage point shift represents what Ocean Tomo has defined as “economic inversion”— a wholesale transformation in the nature of value creation whereby economic worth has migrated from what can be “touched” to what can be “thought.”
Learn more: https://oceantomo.com/intangible-asset-market-value-study/
Macro Spotlight: The US Productivity Paradox - “Ever since Robert Solow’s pioneering work in the 1960s, economists have recognized that long-term economic growth depends primarily on rising total factor productivity (TFP)—how efficiently an economy transforms inputs into outputs. Innovation driven by R&D investment has long been considered the primary engine of TFP growth in advanced economies. This link appears to have weakened for the US in recent years (Figure 1). While US companies continue to invest heavily in R&D—maintaining a steady 3 percent of GDP over recent decades - the payoff from these investments appears to be shrinking. TFP growth fell from 0.5 percent annually during 1975–95 to just 0.3 percent during 2005–18. This disconnect raises a fundamental question: If we’re spending as much as ever on R&D, why is productivity growth slowing down? The problem may not be insufficient investment in innovation, but rather poor distribution of that investment across firms. Think of it this way: If venture capital flowed primarily to mediocre start-ups while breakthrough companies struggled for funding, or if the most talented engineers were stuck in companies where their skills were under-utilized, the total amount invested might look healthy, but the outcomes would disappoint. This is essentially what appears to be happening across the US R&D landscape: Growing misallocation of R&D resources across firms appears to draw those resources away from their most productive use, leading to disappointing results even as investment remains high.” - IMF
A Big Alpha Bet - The Kings of the “Intangible” Hyper Scaling into the “Tangible” - “Since 2023 Google’s capital expenditure has gone from $25-30bn to $185bn for 2026. Google said it plans to double its capital expenditure this year to as much as $185bn as strong growth in its advertising and cloud businesses added to the search giant’s financial firepower for its huge bet on AI. Investors have been sensitive to trends in AI spending, with fears spreading about a bubble developing in public and private markets as revenues lag far behind the cash being pumped into the technology. When Microsoft also disclosed a big jump in capex last week — now set to exceed $140bn this year — its shares fell more than 10 per cent. By contrast, Meta rose even as it forecast annual capex of $135bn because the social media giant was able to show that AI was improving advertising efficacy. Google’s net income increased 30 per cent to $34.5bn in the fourth quarter from the previous year, beating analysts’ expectations of $31.9bn compiled by FactSet. Alphabet made $132bn of profit in 2025. Revenue rose 18 per cent to $113.8bn, beating the average estimate of $111.3bn. Annual sales surpassed $400bn for the first time. Its core search and advertising business grew 17 per cent year on year in the quarter to bring in $63.1bn in revenue, beating estimates of $61.3bn. This helped to quell fears that AI chatbots from rivals including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s Grok are poaching users.” - FT
Key Input - The Indian-origin computer workforce in the US is huge. Will Silicon Valley be able to shift to Silicon Workers?
Spotlight - Private Credit heading for di-SaaS-ter? “Signs of SaaS trouble in the private markets had been building well ahead of the stock market’s ah-ha moment. An increasing share of loans backing software firms are trading at “distressed” levels, or below 80 cents on the dollar, according to data from PitchBook. By the numbers: $25 billion in software loan volume was marked at distressed levels by the end of January — more than double what it was in December. 30% of all the distressed debt in this loan market is coming from the software sector, which makes up an outsized share of the overall market. Between the lines: These are companies heading toward trouble, says Rachelle Kakouris, director of LCD Research at PitchBook. Think bankruptcies, restructuring, etc. During the pre-inflation days of 2020 and 2021, many of these companies were borrowing money at very low rates. “Now, the halcyon days are behind us,” she says. The bottom line: AI is disrupting the investment picture for the software business, but no one truly knows what will happen next.” - Axios
A Liquidity Mismatch? The term ‘Venture debt’ is an uncomfortable combination of what appear to be poorly aligned timelines and risk…Servicing debt with low or no cash-flow tends not to end well…In the US we have just seen back-to-back record years of this fragile financial engineering…
Zombie Watch - Private Markets Pain - “The growing cohort of private equity zombie firms (sponsors that can’t raise new capital and are stuck holding unsaleable portfolios). Too many funds, too little capital. With roughly 18,000 PE funds in the market seeking ~$3.3T, only ~1/3 of that is likely to be raised. Much of it is flowing into credit and infrastructure, not traditional buyouts. Fundraising is slowing. The average buyout fund took 23 months to close in 2025 vs. 16 months in 2021, and the total number of funds raised has dropped sharply. Performance dilution is real. Many mid-tier funds are posting single-digit IRRs that trail public markets, and holding periods are extending as exits fail to materialize. Survival vs. growth. Some firms are opting for continuation vehicles but that doesn’t generate fresh dry powder for new deals. Meanwhile, blue-chip megafunds continue to raise capital normally, accentuating the divergence between winners and everyone else.” - Forbes
A Different View on “What Everyone Sees” - Balance sheet Japan: “I look at the Japanese government balance sheet. We know it’s awful, right? WRONG! - “(…) if the Japanese government had raised a bazillion yen on the bond market and funnelled it all into, say, a successful forex trading operation and a long-only stock portfolio which has gone to the moon, maybe we should consider these assets too when trying to work out what sort of parlous state Japan is actually in? The researchers found that if you consolidated Japan’s whole public sector balance sheet in Q322, the government’s assets and liabilities come to only 119 per cent of GDP. This is still a big number, but it’s less than half the IMF’s gross government debt number. Scary, but not so scary. Alphaville have covered some of these in the past, but let’s recap. They’ve scored healthy profits on its FX interventions since 1991, which we reckon could be worth around eight per cent of GDP: The Bank of Japan’s most outlandish version of QQE has involved building a huge position in stocks, and we estimate the unrealised P&L could be worth 11 per cent of GDP. And that’s before we chalk up jumps in the value of GPIF, Japan’s $1.8tn public pension reserve fund that is maintained to help the government pay pensions. This has benefitted bigly from a combination of a slide in the yen and booming stocks. Bottom line: once we count all the stocks, the foreign assets acquired, etc — the net figure sits at only around the 65% of GDP level. And Japan’s use of “cheap domestic funding to take highly-levered long positions in risky assets” has earned the government “an additional 6 percent of GDP per annum above its funding costs” over the past decade.” Toby Nangle
Learn more: https://www.ft.com/content/f7d3f20c-b303-4f6c-b4a0-8ee8906ae155
2 If You Read One Thing Today - Make Sure it is This
Jacob does a deep dive into the recent election in Japan and it’s far reaching implications - as per usual it is a balanced and insightful exploration into a key component of the global economy, financial system and technological stack - hence it is a must read - go do it here in full:
Some Takeaways
“On February 8th, Japan held a general election. The result may be is the most important in the history of modern Japanese democracy. Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae and her Liberal Democratic Party became the first party to secure a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives, a supermajority that allows it to bypass the upper House of Councillors.
The result shocked even the LDP, which literally ran out of candidates for the number of seats it won, forcing it to give 14 seats to rival parties. The only possible critique of the LDP’s victory is that voter turnout was a paltry ~56 percent. But that, frankly, is nitpicking.
By any other metric, it was an astonishing and total victory for the LDP, and especially for its leader, Takaichi Sanae, who shocked everyone by calling for the election in the first place, and is by far the most popular Japanese leader of her era.”
“If geopolitics is the study of how constraints shape the actions of nations, Japan is a study in how those constraints don’t always matter.
Japan is a country that imports ~60 percent of its food, ~90 percent of its energy, and most of the raw materials necessary to manufacture its goods. Japan is also one of the oldest countries in the world — almost 30 percent of its population is over the age of 65.
Despite this, Japan has the 4th largest GDP in the world. Despite this, Japan almost conquered Asia in the first half of the 20th century (and if things had gone a little differently at the Battle of Midway, maybe would have).
It is doubly ironic because most of Japan’s history is rife with domestic infighting and overall instability — but punctuated by brief but overwhelming moments of power, unity, and fierce national pride that enable Japan to rise up and punch far above its weight.
The question, then, is a deceptively simple one: Is Takaichi’s victory a sign that Japan is rising again? Is Japan about to attempt another reinvention — or is this simply the last confident gesture of a country learning to manage decline? The answer will determine the geopolitics of Asia for a generation.”
“Takaichi’s victory means the domestic political constraints that hampered her mentor, former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, are now irrelevant. That is not to say they are non-existent: For one thing, to change Japan’s pacifist constitution, she would need a two-thirds majority in the upper house and a simple majority in a national referendum. For another, Japan’s Finance Ministry in particular will attempt to block her from her ambitious fiscal and monetary goals (my recent podcast episode with Tobias goes deeply into just that topic). But Takaichi has the kind of support that allows her to reshape Japan’s institutions if she so chooses.
The consensus view on Takaichi is that she is a sort of “Abe 2.0.” That reading misunderstands Takaichi’s ambition. If Takaichi becomes Abe 2.0, it means she will have failed in her goals to reinvigorate the Japanese economy and the relationship between the Japanese state and its people.
If Takaichi is successful, it will be more appropriate to invoke the era of the Meiji Restoration, a period of explosive growth and strength marked not by a new leader but by a new state that was built quickly under external pressure and which dismantled the old social order and drove rapid institutional change.
Takaichi wants to rebuild the Japanese state for a dangerous century.
She is not some policy wonk tinkering at the margins: She aims to be a transformative figure, one who will restore Japan’s national strength in a world where she believes no one will save Japan but Japan itself.
She (accurately) sees Japan as strategically vulnerable: dependent on foreign energy, foreign technology, foreign protection, and falling behind in industrial capacity. Her answer is neither liberal nor conservative in the way we understand those categories today. Her solution is unapologetically statist. She wants to use public spending to pull private money off the sidelines and into her project of national rejuvenation, to rebuild key industries, to expand defense capacity, and to prioritize economic security over fiscal orthodoxy.
In Takaichi’s view, Japan’s survival, let alone its flourishing, can only happen through national reinvention, even if it means more debt and institutional confrontation to get there. Japan accomplished this post-Meiji via force. That is likely not an option for Japan today: Meiji 2.0 must be more than martial.
To work, it must be a technological revolution, a society that responds to vulnerability not with expansion but with invention.”
Ultimately, Takaichi wants three things:
Cheap government borrowing. This is effectively maintaining the status quo. Since the 1990s asset bubble collapse, Japan has lived in a world of low growth, low inflation, and persistent excess savings, the so-called “Lost Decade(s)”. That allowed the Bank of Japan to steadily cut rates to zero, then below zero, and eventually cap long-term yields through yield curve control. For much of the past decade, 10-year Japanese government bond yields hovered around 0% — sometimes even negative. This happened while Japan’s public debt climbed above a whopping 200 percent of GDP. Normally markets would demand higher yields to compensate for that risk. But because most of the debt is domestically held and because most countries in the West maintained low interest rates post-2008 financial crisis, inflation was subdued, and the Bank of Japan (BoJ) was willing to buy large amounts of bonds, borrowing stayed cheap.
A stable and strong yen. Remember, Japan is a country that imports everything. A weak yen is good for Japanese exporters as it makes Japanese manufactured products more competitive in global markets, but a weak yen also means the purchasing power of the average Japanese citizen declines. In Japan, this is felt more deeply than it is in most countries and magnifies the pain of inflation. In recent years, the yen has been both volatile and weak — and in general has been in a steady weakening trend since 2012. The affordability crisis in Japan is what foiled her predecessors and is what led the electorate to be open to a change candidate with a confident vision of the future like Takaichi.
Higher growth and defense spending. These goals are inextricably linked for Takaichi. They aren’t separate goals, they are the same project. In her worldview, Japan cannot be strategically sovereign if it remains economically stagnant, and it cannot deter China or hedge against U.S. unreliability without materially expanding its defense capacity. Growth funds power; power protects growth. Defense spending, in her conception, isn’t just about security — it’s industrial policy, technology development, and supply chain resilience rolled into one. If Japan doesn’t grow and doesn’t rearm, then all the rhetoric about autonomy is hollow.
And herein lies the rub. She cannot have all three, at least, not in any way I can see. To achieve her vision for Japan, she will have to sacrifice one variable to secure the other two, and then hope that success eventually redeems the one she gave up. She can influence borrowing costs in Japan, but she cannot control the Federal Reserve or global capital flows. She can lean against yen weakness, but only temporarily and at rising cost. And while she can deploy public money toward growth and defense, she cannot command private firms to follow — she has to entice them. Each objective is theoretically attainable. Achieving all of them at once, however, requires threading a needle through forces far larger than any one prime minister. Moreover, aspects of these constraints are beyond her capacity to control.”
My base cas is that Takaichi will accept yen weakness to achieve cheap borrowing rates and higher growth/defense spending.
“This path will not be easy, but I see it as the most probable because it is the path of least resistance and the one most consistent with success on her own terms. For it to work, cheap borrowing and pro-growth, pro-defense policies must translate into sustained wage gains. Japan’s headline inflation does not look alarming in isolation, but that misses the real constraint. A weaker yen, layered on top of inflation, becomes politically toxic if wages do not rise faster than prices. If purchasing power erodes, the entire strategy begins to unravel.”
“In simple terms, that means yen depreciation (year-over-year) minus nominal wage growth (year-over-year) will tell us how Takaichi is doing. If depreciation is (relatively) modest and wage growth outpaces it, the system stabilizes. If depreciation accelerates and wages lag, purchasing power erodes and Takaichi’s industrial strategy starts colliding with household reality.
In other words, what matters is not 160 versus 150. What matters is whether Japanese paychecks can outrun the depreciation of the currency.
And that brings us to an uncomfortable place for any geopolitical analyst, because as elegant as the scenario and its signposts may be, what we are really talking about here is belief.
Are Takaichi’s approval ratings the reflex of a weary electorate gambling on one last throw of the dice (think Javier Milei in Argentina without the theatrical…eccentricities, shall we call them), or do they reflect something deeper — a willingness to vest authority once again in a state that promises national restoration?
In the Meiji era, renewal was sanctified; the emperor was not merely political but divine, and belief in the state carried metaphysical weight. Does a 21st-century democracy still possess that capacity for civic faith, minus the theology (or plus a new theology?) but with the same surrender of doubt?
Or is Japan too secular, too aged, too materially cautious for that kind of collective leap — destined not for revival but for dignified management of decline, humming softly along while the demographic clock runs down?
Put slightly more tongue-in-cheek…has the rising sun already dipped below the horizon, and all that’s left to Japan is robots to take care of old people and Hello Kitty?
“And all of this is before we get to the classical geopolitical question, namely: what does Takaichi mean for Japan’s relationship with China? A few months ago, China tried to punish Takaichi for some fairly mundane commentary about Japan’s strategic interest in Taiwan.
Did China simply have a Wolf Warrior relapse? Or was China playing three-dimensional chess and hoping for a Takaichi victory because it would drive a wedge further between Tokyo and Washington (Trump is going to visit Xi four times in 2026, according to him…not Tokyo), and China will be able to deal more pragmatically with even a more remilitarized and wary Japan?
As for Japan, this election was about economics, but it was also about a public that senses China’s rise and feels the ground shifting under the U.S. alliance. Is it quite a Commodore Matthew Perry–level threat…or is it?
This is what makes the Meiji comparison all the more apt. Takaichi can do what Abe couldn’t because he was too early. The world has changed, and it is a more dangerous place for Japan than at any time post–World War II. Might Takaichi have known what she was doing all along, and be planning to use China’s inability not to overreact on the Taiwan issue to paper over the economic pain that is coming as she attempts to execute her strategy? I.e., she needs a China boogeyman to pull off her domestic rejuvenation?”
“As you can tell, I have more questions here than answers.
But when I am confused about Japan, I always return to something John Toland, author of The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945, once wrote about Japanese politics: “Unlike Westerners, who tended to think in terms of black and white, the Japanese had vaguer distinctions, which in international relations often resulted in ‘policies’ and not ‘principles,’ and seemed to Westerners to be conscienceless. Western logic was like a suitcase, defined and limited. Eastern logic was like the furoshiki, the cloth Japanese carry for wrapping objects. It could be large or small according to circumstances and could be folded and put in the pocket when not needed.”
Japan can live in a world where China is its economic partner and the U.S. is its security ally without having to pick a side. It is more comfortable with contradictions because it has always had to live with them, rather than with the luxury that overwhelming resource wealth or demographic strength conveys.
But I digress. Tl;dr — watch the rate of the yen’s depreciation to Japan’s wages. Watch if the Finance Ministry and BoJ can stop this train, or whether they will be reshaped by a transformative leader.
The more likely scenario is Takaichi fails.
Structural constraints usually win. But Japan’s previous ascents were never the more likely scenario. And it is very likely that if Takaichi succeeds, she won’t just change Japan’s trajectory — she will reorder assumptions about power, sovereignty, and industrial revival in the 21st century for the world.”
Here are a few additional reads if you want to dive into the Japan rabbit hole:
3 Consequential Thinking about Consequential Matters
As an investor I tend to remain intellectually and emotionally uninvolved with the noise of Politics and to focus on the actual manifestations of the policies not the politics. Here Nature takes a look at the shredding or at least dramatically altering of the knowledge fabric and related deep research eco-system of the US - It’s an eyeopening “Watch what they do, not what they say” lens into the new shift to industrial policy that is supposed to secure strategic dominance…It should lead you to consequential thinking about consequential matters pertaining to science, geopolitics, economics and financial markets…Go explore it here in full - insightful visual storytelling will unfold…
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.html?utm_
Some Takeaways
“More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.
These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.”
Cancelled grants
In an unprecedented move, officials began terminating already-funded grants at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in February, and later at the National Science Foundation (NSF), two of the largest public supporters of scientific research in the United States. A total of 5,844 NIH grants and 1,996 NSF grants were cancelled or suspended.”
“Courts have ordered that thousands of grants be reinstated, and some universities have settled with the government to unfreeze funding. But it is unclear how many scientists have received those funds.”
Grant reductions
The Trump administration has substantially reduced the number of new grants issued by the NSF and the NIH, which means that fewer researchers are getting support.”
“In 2025, the total number of new grants funded by the NSF dropped by 25% relative to the average of the previous ten years. In part, this resulted from uncertainty about future funding, and the agency’s decision to provide multi-year funding — in which a project’s budget is awarded all at once, rather than year by year.
A similar story played out at the NIH, which issued 24% fewer grants in 2025, compared with the average of the previous ten years. After delays early in the year and with reduced staff levels, the agency raced to award grants by the end of the fiscal year. It achieved this in part by providing multi-year funding to a smaller number of new grant applications than usual — sharply reducing the number of scientists that received support.”
Squeezing the pipeline for new scientists
During the 2025–26 academic year, new international-student enrolment at US universities fell markedly. The Institute of International Education (IIE), a non-profit organization in New York City, released preliminary data, based on a subset of universities, showing a 17% decline from 2024 to 2025. This would result in the smallest number of new international enrolments in a decade, except for in 2020–21, during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Gutting government science agencies
In total, federal science agencies lost about 20% of their staff in 2025 relative to the previous year, after modest increases over the past few years.
Among the hardest hit are the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA, both of which have been targets of the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science. The Food and Drug Administration also lost more than 20% of its staff.
Some employees were fired during mass layoffs in early 2025, but most left voluntarily through a programme that offered incentives for federal workers to resign. Across the science agencies, there was an exodus of more than 25,000 people, many of whom were at early career stages.”
The fight over funding cuts
In its proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year, the Trump administration requested historic cuts of 35% to the budget for research and development not related to defence. The final funding levels will be determined through spending bills passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate in an ongoing process.
After adjusting for inflation, the president’s proposed decrease in funding for non-defence research would be unprecedented over the past half century and would reduce spending to 1991 levels.”
“The Trump administration shocked the science community when it proposed slashing more than $18 billion, or around 40% of the total, from the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world.
By contrast, legislation moving through the Senate and the House — both of which are controlled by members of Trump’s own Republican Party — would provide a slight increase for the agency. The House of Representatives and the Senate have yet to reach a compromise on a final funding level.
The Trump administration also sought steep cuts at the National Science Foundation (57%) and NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (47%). In final budget agreements that are likely to be adopted by the House and the Senate, lawmakers agreed on much smaller cuts of 3.4% for the NSF and 1.1% for NASA’s science directorate.
The House and the Senate must finish negotiating final budgets for the remaining agencies, such as the NIH, and the actual funding levels will probably be somewhere in the middle. That would mostly protect the country’s total budget for research and development from the Trump administration’s drastic cuts for the current fiscal year.”
4 Big Ideas
Kyle Chan of the High Capacity blog and pod speaks with Tu Le, founder and Managing Director of Sino Auto Insights about the rapidly evolving Chinese EV industry here - go listen here:
Some Takeaways:
Chinese EV makers are transforming auto manufacturing. They’re taking a page from consumer electronics and compressing timelines for launching new models.
Geely is planning to enter the US market. Despite US tariff barriers and security restrictions, Chinese EV makers still want to reach the US auto market, likely through investments in the US.
Western automakers are using Chinese EV tech. Through partnerships and investment deals, some legacy automakers are leveraging Chinese EV platforms and battery technology.
Chinese EVs are not just cheap; they’re packed with features. Megawatt charging, in-car fridges and theaters, drone selfies, karaoke systems.
China is pursuing intelligent driving on multiple fronts. Robotaxi services like WeRide and Pony.ai are launching in cities around the world. Meanwhile, smart driving systems for Chinese EVs are moving up the autonomy scale.
5 Big thinking
Paul Graham writes about good writing here - it’s an interesting exploration into the process of writing as a means to better thinking and distilling ideas…Go read it here in full - it is good writing:
https://paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html
Some Takeaways
“There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions about important things. It might seem as if these two kinds of good would be unrelated, like the speed of a car and the color it’s painted. And yet I don’t think they are. I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.
So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true.”
“You can’t simultaneously optimize two unrelated things; when you push one far enough, you always end up sacrificing the other.
And yet no matter how hard I push, I never find myself having to choose between the sentence that sounds best and the one that expresses an idea best. If I did, it would be frivolous to care how sentences sound. But in practice it feels the opposite of frivolous.
Fixing sentences that sound bad seems to help get the ideas right.
By right I mean more than just true.
Getting the ideas right means developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail.
So getting the ideas right is not just a matter of saying true things, but saying the right true things.”
How could trying to make sentences sound good help you do that?
The clue to the answer is something I noticed 30 years ago when I was doing the layout for my first book. Sometimes when you’re laying out text you have bad luck. For example, you get a section that runs one line longer than the page. I don’t know what ordinary typesetters do in this situation, but what I did was rewrite the section to make it a line shorter.
You’d expect such an arbitrary constraint to make the writing worse. But I found, to my surprise, that it never did.
I always ended up with something I liked better.”
“The best analogy for this phenomenon is when you shake a bin full of different objects. The shakes are arbitrary motions. Or more precisely, they’re not calculated to make any two specific objects fit more closely together. And yet repeated shaking inevitably makes the objects discover brilliantly clever ways of packing themselves. Gravity won’t let them become less tightly packed, so any change has to be a change for the better.
So it is with writing. If you have to rewrite an awkward passage, you’ll never do it in a way that makes it less true. You couldn’t bear it, any more than gravity could bear things floating upward. So any change in the ideas has to be a change for the better.”
“When I’m working on an essay, I spend far more time reading than writing. I’ll reread some parts 50 or 100 times, replaying the thoughts in them and asking myself, like someone sanding a piece of wood, does anything catch? Does anything feel wrong? And the easier the essay is to read, the easier it is to notice if something catches.
So yes, the two senses of good writing are connected in at least two ways. Trying to make writing sound good makes you fix mistakes unconsciously, and also helps you fix them consciously; it shakes the bin of ideas, and also makes mistakes easier to see.”
“When writing sounds good, it’s mostly because it has good rhythm. But the rhythm of good writing is not the rhythm of music, or the meter of verse. It’s not so regular. If it were, it wouldn’t be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they’re simple and you just state them. But other times they’re more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications.
An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation, and a train of thought has a natural rhythm. So when an essay sounds good, it’s not merely because it has a pleasing rhythm, but because it has its natural one. Which means you can use getting the rhythm right as a heuristic for getting the ideas right.”
“The sound of writing turns out to be more like the shape of a plane than the color of a car. If it looks good, as Kelly Johnson used to say, it will fly well.
This is only true of writing that’s used to develop ideas, though.
It doesn’t apply when you have ideas in some other way and then write about them afterward — for example, if you build something, or conduct an experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such cases the ideas often live more in the work than the writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas are good. The writing in textbooks and popular surveys can be bad for the same reason: the author isn’t developing the ideas, merely describing other people’s. It’s only when you’re writing to develop ideas that there’s such a close connection between the two senses of doing it well.”
Is it not notoriously possible for a smooth-tongued liar to write something beautiful that’s completely false?
It is, of course. But not without method acting.
The way to write something beautiful and false is to begin by making yourself almost believe it. So just like someone writing something beautiful and true, you’re presenting a perfectly-formed train of thought. The difference is the point where it attaches to the world. You’re saying something that would be true if certain false premises were. If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs.
So it’s not quite right to say that better sounding writing is more likely to be true. Better sounding writing is more likely to be internally consistent. If the writer is honest, internal consistency and truth converge.
But while we can’t safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it’s usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.
Indeed, the two senses of good writing are more like two ends of the same thing.
The connection between them is not a rigid one; the goodness of good writing is not a rod but a rope, with multiple overlapping connections running through it. But it’s hard to move one end without moving the other.
It’s hard to be right without sounding right.”
6 Your Time On Earth is Limited
Have a Great Weekend when You get to that stage,
Sune