3 Comments

The median Asian Tiger parent pushes kids (including grownup kids) to pursue career liquidity, because highly legible and competed-for achievements are the best token of bragging currency in tiger parenting parent circles.

Not a bad bet at least to start, not least because highly legible achievements makes you reliably employable. But if you truly believe in your own excellence, you need to scare your parents a little and turn down the FANNG offer to pursue the “illiquid” path tailored towards you.

The same is for many dating market optimization problems. There are the obvious (legible/liquid) personal attributes that you can and should improve, like becoming more witty, communicative, and rich, and maintaining a healthy weight. But if you have high standards you might need to physically relocate to the market that best suits your niche (high supply Swiss hunks love low supply Asian twinks) or network explicitly for matchmaking purposes.

Ultimately I think young people should build a mixture of liquid and illiquid capital suitable to their risk tolerance.

Expand full comment

Interestingly, it’s been argued that when an entire society (of Tiger Parent) competes for the same career and dating liquidity you end up with a high-pressure low-fertility society like South Korea, because parents feel like they need to give every last advantage to their one child, if they have children at all. Otherwise the child cannot compete.

Expand full comment
author

Yeah I’m not sure what the magnitude of this effect is but it seems more than plausible. I didn’t mention this but one problem with these liquid paths is that they’re much more likely to be zero sum.

Expand full comment