Steve Stewart-Williams on Personality Traits; Tej Parikh on the intangible economy; Dan Wang on China and the U.S.; Curtis Yarvin on philanthropy and power
“Although significant efforts to ramp up artillery ammunition production — efforts that have cost billions of dollars — the U.S. has still not reached its planned output targets. As of June 2025, the total monthly production volume of 155mm artillery rounds stands at 40,000 units.
This was reported by John Reim, head of the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office for Ammunition and Armaments, in an interview with Defense One. According to the Pentagon’s plans announced in February 2024, the target for April 2025 was set at 75,000 rounds per month, with a goal of reaching 100,000 by October 2025.”
“The United States Navy’s industrial base is facing a full-blown crisis, threatening America’s status as the world’s dominant naval power… … The US Navy Is Losing the Warship Race to China—And It’s a National Crisis”
“The US defense industrial base—the layered network of manufacturers, foundries, suppliers, and skilled workers that builds our military—needs major improvements. Raw material costs are rising. Many contractors rely on sole-source suppliers. And nearly all are constrained by labor shortages and limited surge capacity. These weaknesses are emerging at a time of rising global tension, particularly amid intensifying strategic competition with China.”
Re: "neuroticism is genetically linked to depression, openness is genetically linked to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and extraversion is genetically linked to ADHD. These findings fit with the idea that at least some so-called disorders represent the extremes of the distributions of ordinary personality traits, rather than discrete syndromes." — Steve Stewart-Williams (quoted by Arnold)
At the risk of confirmation bias, I am reminded of Thomas Szasz's theory that most of what is labelled "mental illness" is, instead, unusual or extreme preferences that violate social norms (and so cause friction or disruption).
I know people with schizophrenia and I also know neurotics that can’t stop drinking alcohol since it eases their extreme anxiety issues. They probably wouldn’t classify their problems as mere preferences and the suicide rates for both groups tell a different story.
Heavy drinking has selection effects (i.e., tends to attract some personalities more than others) and treatment effects (i.e., changes a person's social status over time, and her states of mind when craving and when inebriated).
The treatment effects bear on suicide prevalence. Heavy drinking tends to increase social isolation and personal dysfunction (employability etc). It thereby makes what Szasz calls "problems of living" harder. Inebriation causes disinhibition and impairs judgment, and thereby increases propensity to suicide in the moment.
Disinhibition is a crucial psychotropic effect of alcohol.
It might seem paradoxical that a person who feels isolated would hesitate to violate social norms against suicide, but it is so. This is why the disinhibiting effect of alcohol plays a causal role in a large fraction of suicides.
Neuroticism and alcohol use disorder are highly correlated. For the neurotics that are low on agreeableness and/or conscientiousness, this prevalence holds true vs. the general population. These neurotics use alcohol to self medicate.
I lack expertise but find Thomas Szasz's theory plausible. And (like Szasz) I keep an open mind about new research, which in future might find e.g. that brain lesions cause some extreme preferences.
The mere fact that some personality traits have genetic components does not establish that those traits are diseases ("illness"). There might be genetic components to preferences.
"This may be my biggest concern about personality psychology. To what extent are an individual’s traits domain-independent? What if someone saw us in different domains and concluded that we have multiple personalities?"
I totally agree. I've noticed this about personality type quizzes. Makes me wonder how much the experts really know about psychology.
“it is estimated that around 90 per cent of their assets are intangible, ranging from intellectual property, brand value and networks, to code, content, talent and knowledge.”
I would say that not all intangible assets are created equal. “Brand value” is probably the ugliest one of the bundle we call intangible assets since it creates no inherent economic value and it can disappear overnight as tastes change. See Bud Light, Target, TGIFs, Neiman Marcus and Hooters for more info.
The problem with valuing IP like WIPO does is that the value of IP is heavily determined by differing laws and the differing values of monopolies in different markets. There is a lot less harmony and enforceability across borders than treaty language would lead you to think. Additionally the concepts of trademark are often radically different even between the US and Europe. The “bundle of rights” you get in Germany is not the same bundle you get in the US. The bundles might be called “trademark” but the courts will treat them totally differently.
“Recent research shows that AI can predict people’s Big Five traits from nothing more than a photo. At this stage, the accuracy isn’t mind-blowing.“
Similar hyped up claims were made for the Human Genome Project, which was completed over 20 years ago. As far as I can tell, the HGP has not had any success in predicting personality because the concept of personality is way too complicated to summarize genetically.
I wish that the AI cheerleaders would be more humble as opposed to being driven by hype.
The Big 5, without Honesty/humilty, nor the Dark triads, does track success better than other systems. But there is little effort so far to put folk into the 32 boxes implied by high/low amounts of the 5 traits.
For most folk, most of the time, the 16 boxes of MBTI work better for “understanding” and, importantly, communicating with different folk.
I’m sure that ai LLM models trying to be a tutor to teach some subject will have more success personalizing the lessons based on MBTI than on Big 5–which is why I’m a bit frustrated that the psyche pros actively dislike it. Rob H says, wrongly, “it doesn’t predict anything”. Yes, for life outcomes Big 5 is better. However, in small talk at a party, knowing their MBTI box, or boxes (for the middle folk), makes talking to them in “their” language easier than knowing their Big 5 scores.
Pro psychologists are interested in helping folk with problems, and in publishing papers about psychology. Big 5 is better for both of those. But already too complex at 32 combos, rather than 16. The 4 Key boxes are simple enough that most who learn them a bit, and their differences, can quickly figure out what the traits are of who they’re talking to, if they want to. NT, NF (abstract Thinkers & Feelers), or SJ, SP (concrete closure or open ended).
Besides Introversion &Extroversion, making decisions based on Feeling or Thinking are good terms. The other four terms aren’t so good, iNtuition (abstract) vs Sensitive (concrete), and especially Judging vs Perceiving (closure vs open ended, clean vs messy desk), many who first look at MBTI dismiss it based on the J-P terms & mushy meanings of those terms.
A huge advantage of MBTI is that there is no “morally better” trait, while most folk would want to be seen as more agreeable, conscientious, and less neurotic.
IQ remains the single most dominant trait, tho height is often very important as is weight, and age, race, & sex. We’re all individuals, but mass communication/ manipulation / education is more effective with personalized messages.
“The purpose of philanthropy is to convert money into power: more specifically, structural or ‘soft’ power.”
Arnold, can you explain why you think this is almost always true?
I do get why this is sometimes, or even often, true. Or even *partially* always true.
And if it *is* mostly true, it’s just about the most powerful defense I’ve ever heard for leftists’ preference that government take money from taxpayers to fund charitable causes rather than leaving much of it to the private sector.
"Recent research shows that AI can predict people’s Big Five traits from nothing more than a photo. At this stage, the accuracy isn’t mind-blowing. But AI is already better at it than we are. And who knows what it’ll be like in ten years (which is about half a century in AI years)?"
[SNIP]
We see AI everywhere but in the productivity statistics.
Almost all psychological phenotypes result from some combination of genetics and life experience (which is to say epigenetics and other chemical forces.) Most psychological traits are on a continuum. One is not a psychopath "yes or no" we are sit somewhere on the psychopathic scale. A diagnosis of psychopathy results from exceeding an extreme threshold. Also, psychopaths are not necessarily evil. Psychopaths tend to make great surgeons, because they can operate without strong empathy with the patient.
By the way, NYU is often pilloried as a "Woke Institution" but that was not my daughter's experience in the psychology department. No one was less woke than professors Wallisch and Jonathan Haidt.
Haidt refers to himself as a social psychologist and teaches classes in the psych department, or at least used to when my daughter was in school. Similarly, Pascal is in the Data Science Department.
And yes, I understood that the school encouraged students to call people by preferred pronouns. That did not bother me at the time, nor does it today.. To my knowledge, this did not affect the teaching of either Haidt or Wallisch.
Yeah, anytime my wife and I seeing someone dropping their pronouns, we are instantly out. See ya and good luck. It’s like an easy shortcut to screen for everything we despise about wokeism. The goal of psychology ought to be about helping and making people better rather than gender mutilation for minors.
How valuable would Apple, for example, be if the factories that make their products were gone or denied to the company? Could they even rebuild them were they denied access to the construction firms responsible for building the present ones? Taken from the other side, how valuable would the factories be without Apple to bring it all together in a smart phone/computer?
In short, what I am asking is this- is there any value to trying to define two kinds of assets such as tangible and intangible?
It’s the recipes that define the inputs, processes and outputs. Those recipes are infinitely more complex and therefore influential from an economics perspective than mining the raw materials that comprise the final product. Otherwise, the countries of Africa and many other 3rd world countries would be much wealthier than they are currently.
The kitchens and utensils are a result of recipes for producing such things. The raw materials themselves in those tangible items without the recipes to transform them are nearly worthless.
To use a canonical example, turning sand on the beach into semiconductors is a process that converts a nearly worthless input into something magical. The magic is in the recipe.
If your only point is that we would all be incredibly poor if we couldn’t trade, and so take advantage of specialization and division of labor, of course.
Otherwise, you’re really not saying anything substantive with your implicit/explicit claims that intangible assets aren’t really worth anything separate from tangible ones.
Owning the Beatles catalog and the rights to Seinfeld are both highly valuable even absent any physical/ tangible assets along with them.
Yes, if we were living in prehistoric times their value would be fairly limited. So what?
As we see most cleanly with the fabless semiconductor industry, a company can indeed become incredibly valuable in that space without building a single chip themselves, but instead outsourcing the physical production of the chips to a 3rd party (e.g. TSMC, itself a very valuable company, with completely different specialization).
Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, despite doing *none* of its own physical production.
And that’s without even discussing software companies like Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc.
So yes, there is enormous value in distinguishing tangible assets (factories, equipment, buildings) from intangible ones.
Nvidia is worth a lot because the chips can be manufactured even if Nvidia doesn't actually own the factories. All I am saying that trying analyze a company by breaking out intangible and tangible assets isn't telling you anything you don't already know from the market value of the company and its financial reports.
lol. the market value of software companies and especially of fabless semiconductor companies like Nvidia is primarily the estimates of the value of the intangible assets! Proper evaluation of those assets is far more important than anything on the financial reports.
For other companies - e.g. a Coca Cola - it is a mix of various intangible assets and tangible assets.
And for some companies it is mostly (though rarely entirely) about the value of tangible assets. Mining companies, e.g.
it is easier to measure tangible assets and harder to value intangible ones, but your claim that it is unimportant to measure them separately is either circular or vacuous.
You are not understanding my point and maybe it is my fault. I am attacking the idea that it is meaningful to break out the intangible vs tangible assets. They can only be considered as a whole since one isn't worth much without the other. What would happen to the market value of Apple and Nvidia if a war happened over Taiwan and the semi-conductors manufactured there were no longer available for 3-5 years? All of those intangible assets would be valued at a far lower number.
"They can only be considered as a whole since one isn't worth much without the other."
No, I DID indeed understand that this was your main claim, and I am saying that the claim is completely wrong.
Nvidia is a case in point. It is worth 4 trillion dollars despite the fact that Nvidia is fabless.
TSMC is separately worth a lot of money despite the fact that they don't have much in the way of the same kind of semiconductor IP.
Now it is in fact the case that each of those two companies' valuations do impact the other somewhat, but either one would be worth a large fraction of what it is now even if the other specific company ceased to exist, or never existed.
Nvidia's value can absolutely be considered independent of the value of any fabrication company or assets.
The fact that they are RELATED doesn't make it the case that the value of any company's intangible assets cannot be considered separate from tangible assets - and in particular, the tangible assets of any other specific company.
By the way, I happen to understand this space more than a little bit, having worked at a fabless semi company myself for a few years. Nvidia's valuation would indeed take a major hit if China invaded Taiwan. But this is as much because of the intangible know-how that TSMC has within its employee base in the production of advanced semiconductors as it is the capital equipment TSMC owns that enable it to manufacture those semiconductors. [That intangible knowledge is a big part of why TSMC is worth as much as it is. though the value of its capital equipment is *also* a decent chunk of its valuation as well, unlike for Nvidia.]
So I say again, unless your point is the most basic of all that absent specialization and trade and the division of labor we would all be poor, and intangible assets would be worth very little, your claims that the value of intangible assets cannot be considered separately from the value of tangible assets is just incorrect on multiple levels.
The fact that different things are interrelated and interdependent does not mean that it is either impossible or nonsensical to value / evaluate them separately.
Because to suggest otherwise is to claim that a pencil company cannot be valued, since no pencil company can or does itself have the knowledge to create / gather / etc. all of the elements that go into actually producing that pencil.
No, Andy, you are not getting my point- I know this because you keep bringing up Nvidia- I am saying you don't analyze Nvidia as a good or bad value because it is fabless- that fact is meaningless- that is my point. You analyze its value by what the market pays for a share and it financial position- that it is fabless doesn't enter into it all. That it is fabless is just a trivial aspect of its corporate structure. I bring this up because I see lots and lots of people talk about intangible values as being some sort of new aspect of corporate structure and mostly to minimize the value of manufacturing itself but that is just silly- Nvidia would have no value if there were no factories to produce its chips. The flip side is TSMC would have not much value if there weren't chip designs it could manufacture. Splitting these aspects out pointless- that was my point- don't worry about intangible assets vs tangible ones since they need each other at all times, even in music and software.
Re: "This may be my biggest concern about personality psychology. To what extent are an individual’s traits domain-independent? What if someone saw us in different domains and concluded that we have multiple personalities?" — Arnold Kling
Domain-dependence is evident also in personality traits that economists emphasize in the theory of rational choice. Two key traits are "risk preference" and "time preference." A person might take risks at sea but refuse an experimental vaccine. And a person might indulge in short-term pleasures at the expense of longevity but play the long game with investments.
Walter Mischel made similar points about the situation’s importance and damaged personality psychology’s reputation for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person–situation_debate
“Although significant efforts to ramp up artillery ammunition production — efforts that have cost billions of dollars — the U.S. has still not reached its planned output targets. As of June 2025, the total monthly production volume of 155mm artillery rounds stands at 40,000 units.
This was reported by John Reim, head of the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office for Ammunition and Armaments, in an interview with Defense One. According to the Pentagon’s plans announced in February 2024, the target for April 2025 was set at 75,000 rounds per month, with a goal of reaching 100,000 by October 2025.”
--https://en.defence-ua.com/analysis/us_is_falling_short_on_155mm_artillery_shell_production_current_output_and_1_million_goal_timeline-14894.html
“The United States Navy’s industrial base is facing a full-blown crisis, threatening America’s status as the world’s dominant naval power… … The US Navy Is Losing the Warship Race to China—And It’s a National Crisis”
--https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/the-us-navys-shipbuilding-crisis-is-real/
“The US defense industrial base—the layered network of manufacturers, foundries, suppliers, and skilled workers that builds our military—needs major improvements. Raw material costs are rising. Many contractors rely on sole-source suppliers. And nearly all are constrained by labor shortages and limited surge capacity. These weaknesses are emerging at a time of rising global tension, particularly amid intensifying strategic competition with China.”
--https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-the-defense-industrial-base-is-so-hard-to-fix
With apologies to the late Lou Reed,
Vicious
You hit me with intangibles
You do it every hour
Oh baby you’re so vicious
Re: "neuroticism is genetically linked to depression, openness is genetically linked to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and extraversion is genetically linked to ADHD. These findings fit with the idea that at least some so-called disorders represent the extremes of the distributions of ordinary personality traits, rather than discrete syndromes." — Steve Stewart-Williams (quoted by Arnold)
At the risk of confirmation bias, I am reminded of Thomas Szasz's theory that most of what is labelled "mental illness" is, instead, unusual or extreme preferences that violate social norms (and so cause friction or disruption).
I know people with schizophrenia and I also know neurotics that can’t stop drinking alcohol since it eases their extreme anxiety issues. They probably wouldn’t classify their problems as mere preferences and the suicide rates for both groups tell a different story.
Heavy drinking has selection effects (i.e., tends to attract some personalities more than others) and treatment effects (i.e., changes a person's social status over time, and her states of mind when craving and when inebriated).
The treatment effects bear on suicide prevalence. Heavy drinking tends to increase social isolation and personal dysfunction (employability etc). It thereby makes what Szasz calls "problems of living" harder. Inebriation causes disinhibition and impairs judgment, and thereby increases propensity to suicide in the moment.
Disinhibition is a crucial psychotropic effect of alcohol.
It might seem paradoxical that a person who feels isolated would hesitate to violate social norms against suicide, but it is so. This is why the disinhibiting effect of alcohol plays a causal role in a large fraction of suicides.
Neuroticism and alcohol use disorder are highly correlated. For the neurotics that are low on agreeableness and/or conscientiousness, this prevalence holds true vs. the general population. These neurotics use alcohol to self medicate.
Yes, I agree (and said in my previous comment) that heavy drinking tends to attract some personalities more than others.
So, is that a mental disorder or an extreme preference? That was my initial question about neurotics and those with schizophrenia, which you ignored.
Lastly, we know from twin studies that neuroticism and schizophrenia are highly genetic.
I don't see where you posed that question.
I lack expertise but find Thomas Szasz's theory plausible. And (like Szasz) I keep an open mind about new research, which in future might find e.g. that brain lesions cause some extreme preferences.
The mere fact that some personality traits have genetic components does not establish that those traits are diseases ("illness"). There might be genetic components to preferences.
See Robert Plomin's book, "Blueprint."
"This may be my biggest concern about personality psychology. To what extent are an individual’s traits domain-independent? What if someone saw us in different domains and concluded that we have multiple personalities?"
I totally agree. I've noticed this about personality type quizzes. Makes me wonder how much the experts really know about psychology.
“it is estimated that around 90 per cent of their assets are intangible, ranging from intellectual property, brand value and networks, to code, content, talent and knowledge.”
I would say that not all intangible assets are created equal. “Brand value” is probably the ugliest one of the bundle we call intangible assets since it creates no inherent economic value and it can disappear overnight as tastes change. See Bud Light, Target, TGIFs, Neiman Marcus and Hooters for more info.
The problem with valuing IP like WIPO does is that the value of IP is heavily determined by differing laws and the differing values of monopolies in different markets. There is a lot less harmony and enforceability across borders than treaty language would lead you to think. Additionally the concepts of trademark are often radically different even between the US and Europe. The “bundle of rights” you get in Germany is not the same bundle you get in the US. The bundles might be called “trademark” but the courts will treat them totally differently.
“Recent research shows that AI can predict people’s Big Five traits from nothing more than a photo. At this stage, the accuracy isn’t mind-blowing.“
Similar hyped up claims were made for the Human Genome Project, which was completed over 20 years ago. As far as I can tell, the HGP has not had any success in predicting personality because the concept of personality is way too complicated to summarize genetically.
I wish that the AI cheerleaders would be more humble as opposed to being driven by hype.
I can predict your genes with just a photograph.
The Big 5, without Honesty/humilty, nor the Dark triads, does track success better than other systems. But there is little effort so far to put folk into the 32 boxes implied by high/low amounts of the 5 traits.
For most folk, most of the time, the 16 boxes of MBTI work better for “understanding” and, importantly, communicating with different folk.
I’m sure that ai LLM models trying to be a tutor to teach some subject will have more success personalizing the lessons based on MBTI than on Big 5–which is why I’m a bit frustrated that the psyche pros actively dislike it. Rob H says, wrongly, “it doesn’t predict anything”. Yes, for life outcomes Big 5 is better. However, in small talk at a party, knowing their MBTI box, or boxes (for the middle folk), makes talking to them in “their” language easier than knowing their Big 5 scores.
Pro psychologists are interested in helping folk with problems, and in publishing papers about psychology. Big 5 is better for both of those. But already too complex at 32 combos, rather than 16. The 4 Key boxes are simple enough that most who learn them a bit, and their differences, can quickly figure out what the traits are of who they’re talking to, if they want to. NT, NF (abstract Thinkers & Feelers), or SJ, SP (concrete closure or open ended).
Besides Introversion &Extroversion, making decisions based on Feeling or Thinking are good terms. The other four terms aren’t so good, iNtuition (abstract) vs Sensitive (concrete), and especially Judging vs Perceiving (closure vs open ended, clean vs messy desk), many who first look at MBTI dismiss it based on the J-P terms & mushy meanings of those terms.
A huge advantage of MBTI is that there is no “morally better” trait, while most folk would want to be seen as more agreeable, conscientious, and less neurotic.
IQ remains the single most dominant trait, tho height is often very important as is weight, and age, race, & sex. We’re all individuals, but mass communication/ manipulation / education is more effective with personalized messages.
“The purpose of philanthropy is to convert money into power: more specifically, structural or ‘soft’ power.”
Arnold, can you explain why you think this is almost always true?
I do get why this is sometimes, or even often, true. Or even *partially* always true.
And if it *is* mostly true, it’s just about the most powerful defense I’ve ever heard for leftists’ preference that government take money from taxpayers to fund charitable causes rather than leaving much of it to the private sector.
"Recent research shows that AI can predict people’s Big Five traits from nothing more than a photo. At this stage, the accuracy isn’t mind-blowing. But AI is already better at it than we are. And who knows what it’ll be like in ten years (which is about half a century in AI years)?"
[SNIP]
We see AI everywhere but in the productivity statistics.
Almost all psychological phenotypes result from some combination of genetics and life experience (which is to say epigenetics and other chemical forces.) Most psychological traits are on a continuum. One is not a psychopath "yes or no" we are sit somewhere on the psychopathic scale. A diagnosis of psychopathy results from exceeding an extreme threshold. Also, psychopaths are not necessarily evil. Psychopaths tend to make great surgeons, because they can operate without strong empathy with the patient.
I am no expert, just an enthusiast, so all this may not be entirely accurate. For more depth, refer to Pascal Wallisch, a neuroscientist / data scientist and all round genius at NYU https://www.tiktok.com/@lecturesontap/video/7450237545436220714
By the way, NYU is often pilloried as a "Woke Institution" but that was not my daughter's experience in the psychology department. No one was less woke than professors Wallisch and Jonathan Haidt.
Sorry, but psychology departments are some of the easiest to parody from a woke perspective. They love to drop them pronouns on the rest of us.
https://www.nyu.edu/life/global-inclusion-and-diversity/learning-and-development/toolkits/pronouns.html
Btw - Haidt is part of the business school and not the psychology department.
Haidt refers to himself as a social psychologist and teaches classes in the psych department, or at least used to when my daughter was in school. Similarly, Pascal is in the Data Science Department.
And yes, I understood that the school encouraged students to call people by preferred pronouns. That did not bother me at the time, nor does it today.. To my knowledge, this did not affect the teaching of either Haidt or Wallisch.
Yeah, anytime my wife and I seeing someone dropping their pronouns, we are instantly out. See ya and good luck. It’s like an easy shortcut to screen for everything we despise about wokeism. The goal of psychology ought to be about helping and making people better rather than gender mutilation for minors.
Sorry that link was a snippet. The whole thing is out there somewhere. Here is a more extensive podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzFVdg6WjKU
How valuable would Apple, for example, be if the factories that make their products were gone or denied to the company? Could they even rebuild them were they denied access to the construction firms responsible for building the present ones? Taken from the other side, how valuable would the factories be without Apple to bring it all together in a smart phone/computer?
In short, what I am asking is this- is there any value to trying to define two kinds of assets such as tangible and intangible?
It’s the recipes that define the inputs, processes and outputs. Those recipes are infinitely more complex and therefore influential from an economics perspective than mining the raw materials that comprise the final product. Otherwise, the countries of Africa and many other 3rd world countries would be much wealthier than they are currently.
But the recipes are worthless without the inputs or the kitchens with utensils.
In short, it’s the recipes and not the ingredients
The kitchens and utensils are a result of recipes for producing such things. The raw materials themselves in those tangible items without the recipes to transform them are nearly worthless.
To use a canonical example, turning sand on the beach into semiconductors is a process that converts a nearly worthless input into something magical. The magic is in the recipe.
If your only point is that we would all be incredibly poor if we couldn’t trade, and so take advantage of specialization and division of labor, of course.
Otherwise, you’re really not saying anything substantive with your implicit/explicit claims that intangible assets aren’t really worth anything separate from tangible ones.
Owning the Beatles catalog and the rights to Seinfeld are both highly valuable even absent any physical/ tangible assets along with them.
Yes, if we were living in prehistoric times their value would be fairly limited. So what?
As we see most cleanly with the fabless semiconductor industry, a company can indeed become incredibly valuable in that space without building a single chip themselves, but instead outsourcing the physical production of the chips to a 3rd party (e.g. TSMC, itself a very valuable company, with completely different specialization).
Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, despite doing *none* of its own physical production.
And that’s without even discussing software companies like Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc.
So yes, there is enormous value in distinguishing tangible assets (factories, equipment, buildings) from intangible ones.
Nvidia is worth a lot because the chips can be manufactured even if Nvidia doesn't actually own the factories. All I am saying that trying analyze a company by breaking out intangible and tangible assets isn't telling you anything you don't already know from the market value of the company and its financial reports.
lol. the market value of software companies and especially of fabless semiconductor companies like Nvidia is primarily the estimates of the value of the intangible assets! Proper evaluation of those assets is far more important than anything on the financial reports.
For other companies - e.g. a Coca Cola - it is a mix of various intangible assets and tangible assets.
And for some companies it is mostly (though rarely entirely) about the value of tangible assets. Mining companies, e.g.
it is easier to measure tangible assets and harder to value intangible ones, but your claim that it is unimportant to measure them separately is either circular or vacuous.
You are not understanding my point and maybe it is my fault. I am attacking the idea that it is meaningful to break out the intangible vs tangible assets. They can only be considered as a whole since one isn't worth much without the other. What would happen to the market value of Apple and Nvidia if a war happened over Taiwan and the semi-conductors manufactured there were no longer available for 3-5 years? All of those intangible assets would be valued at a far lower number.
"They can only be considered as a whole since one isn't worth much without the other."
No, I DID indeed understand that this was your main claim, and I am saying that the claim is completely wrong.
Nvidia is a case in point. It is worth 4 trillion dollars despite the fact that Nvidia is fabless.
TSMC is separately worth a lot of money despite the fact that they don't have much in the way of the same kind of semiconductor IP.
Now it is in fact the case that each of those two companies' valuations do impact the other somewhat, but either one would be worth a large fraction of what it is now even if the other specific company ceased to exist, or never existed.
Nvidia's value can absolutely be considered independent of the value of any fabrication company or assets.
The fact that they are RELATED doesn't make it the case that the value of any company's intangible assets cannot be considered separate from tangible assets - and in particular, the tangible assets of any other specific company.
By the way, I happen to understand this space more than a little bit, having worked at a fabless semi company myself for a few years. Nvidia's valuation would indeed take a major hit if China invaded Taiwan. But this is as much because of the intangible know-how that TSMC has within its employee base in the production of advanced semiconductors as it is the capital equipment TSMC owns that enable it to manufacture those semiconductors. [That intangible knowledge is a big part of why TSMC is worth as much as it is. though the value of its capital equipment is *also* a decent chunk of its valuation as well, unlike for Nvidia.]
So I say again, unless your point is the most basic of all that absent specialization and trade and the division of labor we would all be poor, and intangible assets would be worth very little, your claims that the value of intangible assets cannot be considered separately from the value of tangible assets is just incorrect on multiple levels.
The fact that different things are interrelated and interdependent does not mean that it is either impossible or nonsensical to value / evaluate them separately.
Because to suggest otherwise is to claim that a pencil company cannot be valued, since no pencil company can or does itself have the knowledge to create / gather / etc. all of the elements that go into actually producing that pencil.
https://cdn.mises.org/I%20Pencil.pdf
No, Andy, you are not getting my point- I know this because you keep bringing up Nvidia- I am saying you don't analyze Nvidia as a good or bad value because it is fabless- that fact is meaningless- that is my point. You analyze its value by what the market pays for a share and it financial position- that it is fabless doesn't enter into it all. That it is fabless is just a trivial aspect of its corporate structure. I bring this up because I see lots and lots of people talk about intangible values as being some sort of new aspect of corporate structure and mostly to minimize the value of manufacturing itself but that is just silly- Nvidia would have no value if there were no factories to produce its chips. The flip side is TSMC would have not much value if there weren't chip designs it could manufacture. Splitting these aspects out pointless- that was my point- don't worry about intangible assets vs tangible ones since they need each other at all times, even in music and software.
Re: "This may be my biggest concern about personality psychology. To what extent are an individual’s traits domain-independent? What if someone saw us in different domains and concluded that we have multiple personalities?" — Arnold Kling
Domain-dependence is evident also in personality traits that economists emphasize in the theory of rational choice. Two key traits are "risk preference" and "time preference." A person might take risks at sea but refuse an experimental vaccine. And a person might indulge in short-term pleasures at the expense of longevity but play the long game with investments.