My morning train WFH reads:
• There Is Growing Segregation In Millennial Wealth Baby boomers and Gen Xers have faced their fair share of calamities — stagflation, the double-dip recession of the 1980s, disco — but millennials have had it really rough. Millennials who got college degrees exited school deep in debt and entered a job market ravaged by the Great Recession. Millennials who didn’t get college degrees found it harder to get a well-paying, blue-collar job, after trade and automation closed avenues that past generations had used to get to the middle class. Child-rearing and first-home-buying years interrupted by a pandemic, all the while slogged through an economy muddied by growing inequality, stagnation and a fading American dream. (NPR)
• Why Jamie Dimon, Walmart and McDonald’s Want to Hire Ex-Convicts The more than 70 million Americans with criminal records may be a valuable pool of employees as companies juggle labor shortages and jockey for more diverse workforces. (Bloomberg)
• NBA Top Shot customers can’t get their money out. Experts are confounded NBA Top Shot is the hottest NFT marketplace on the planet. It’s also got a big problem: Customers are complaining about exceptionally long wait times to get paid from sales of digital tokens that can often cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. (CNN)
• The Lumber and Chip Shortages Have the Same Root Cause: Underinvestment Perhaps no manufactured good is less technologically sophisticated than a 2×4, while none is more complex than the latest microprocessors. Yet the U.S. economy is currently suffering from shortages of both lumber and chips—and for similar reasons. In both cases, today’s shortages are the legacy of past busts, which then led to years of underinvestment that has left producers unable to respond to sudden surges in demand. (Barron’s)
• The Psychology of Fighting the Last Crash The future never completely lines up with the past but anyone who has studied market history knows crashes are typically followed by recoveries. That’s just how this works. The problem I witnessed among most endowments and foundations is they couldn’t bring themselves out of the bunker mentality of the crisis. All of the so-called smart money continued to load up on hedge funds, tail-risk strategies and conservative investments following the crash. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• The empty promise of pop psychology A new book by Jesse Singal explains why self-esteem fads never work (UnHerd)
• Here’s the nuclear option to opt out of tracking on iOS App Tracking Transparency is here, but many apps aren’t offering it yet. (Vox)
• ‘He’s bland’: Republicans struggle to find line of attack that sticks to Biden Republican lawmakers are struggling to define him. The conservative base is more agitated about “cancel culture.” And even former President Donald Trump is turning his attention elsewhere. Right now, nobody inside the GOP knows quite what to do with President Joe Biden. In the nearly 100 days since Biden took office, Republicans have not yet mounted a sustained, vigorous opposition to the new White House, slowed by a president who has avoided being villainized thanks — at least in part — to a low-key style that stands in stark contrast with his immediate predecessor. (McClatchy)
• Paleontologists: Billions of T. rex likely roamed the Earth On average, researchers estimate that some 20,000 T. rex lived at any one time and that about 127,000 generations of the dinosaurs lived and died. Those averages imply that a total of 2.5 billion T. rex lived in the species’ native North America over a two- to three-million-year timespan. (National Geographic)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Jonathan Miller, co-founder of Miller Samuel. Miller is the go-to expert on real-estate appraisals and transactions, running one of the most prominent real-estate data analytics firm, and their data engine powers numerous real estate brokerage research nationally. He is also sought after as the go-to appraiser for many of the most expensive penthouses in Manhattan.
C.E.O. Pay Remains Stratospheric, Even at Companies Battered by Pandemic
Source: NYT
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