Why software is more profitable than content (tldr: “Content products talk to humans, while software products talk to computers. That’s why the value of content decays faster than the value of software.”)
Alex Zhu (TikTok) also discusses the challenges of online content and learning at the beginning of this interview:
His key insights:
people want light content, both as consumers and as creators
education goes against human nature: most people use their smartphone for communication and entertainment, not to learn
Neil Patel wrote a very instructive blog post about creating and selling online courses. By giving away the course for free (for a limited time), you can generate publicity and collect an email list for future courses.
You don’t have to study economics to get into banking. Many bankers have degrees in philosophy, geography, mathematics, civil engineering, law, or history.
Bank managers don’t care that their employees have studied Old French poetry or Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft. To employers, a university degree indicates perseverance and an ability to learn new things.
Do you think banking is too hard for you? Are you convinced that all bankers are crooks? Would you like to follow the financial news, but you always get stuck on terms like derivatives, cryptocurrency or quantitative easing?
Banks create money. To be more precise, when a bank grants a loan, it simultaneously creates a deposit. Bank deposits are functionally equivalent to cash.
Economics education apparantly fails to pass on some elementary knowledge to students.
It doesn’t help that the activities of banks are often described as ‘monetary intermediation’. Intermediation implies that bankers are the middle men between borrowers and savers.
The English description of NACE code 64.1 is ‘monetary intermediation’. Source
However, there exists a much better description for banks. In Dutch, the formal description of banks is “geldscheppende financiële instellingen”, which literally means “money-creating financial institutions”:
The Dutch description of NACE code 64.1 means ‘money-creating financial institutions’. Source
As far as I can tell, Dutch is the only European language in which banks are described as active money creators1. All other languages use ‘monetary intermediation’.
Maybe everybody should take a cue from Dutch and start saying ‘money creating institutions’ from now on, so we don’t have this debate a hundred years from now 😛
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I explain how banks create money in Bankers are people, too. After you’ve read my book, you’ll know more about banking than many PhD economists!
Update 20 October 2019: the link to the Bank of England paper was broken. It’s fixed now, thanks to Anna for notifying me!
