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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Zvi has an excellent review of the same book, with additional observations including some you've noted

From Zvi's review:

Michael Lewis roots for the wicked smart, impossibly hard working, deeply obsessed protagonist taking on the system saying that everyone else is an idiot, that has unique insight into and will change the world. It all makes too much sense, far too much for him to check.

I read The Big Short by Michael Lewis, which is about the 2008 housing and financial crisis, and the 4 hedge fund managers that predicted it and profited from it. I relished in Lewis' writing style; emphasizing how the world had gone mad, how the so-called experts knew nothing, and how the people who made accurate observations were ostracized and punished up until the minute that they were proven right.

The book version of "The Big Short" had more details than the star-studded 2015 movie, including details about the day of the collapse of New York's financial industry, how that day compared to the 9/11 attacks, and how one of Steve Eisman's employees (Eisman was re-named to Mark Baum in the movie, for those keeping track) was hospitalized for a heart attack during both the 9/11 attacks and the day that the stock market crashed.

Based on my enjoyment of The Big Short, and the similarities between the writing style of The Big Short and the writing style of Going Infinite that people here are criticizing, I'm being led to conclude that I would enjoy the latter, and that everybody here is selling this book short (no pun intended).

Although, I do have this nagging feeling that Going Infinite sounds a lot like a version of The Big Short where the 4 prescient hedge fund managers ended up being wrong and losing all their money; I probably would not enjoy a version of the Big Short that ended similarly to the SBF saga.