My back to work morning train WFH reads:
• The Woman Who Shattered the Myth of the Free Market Joan Robinson upended the misogynistic good-old-boys’ network of economists and devised theories around competition and labor vital to the antitrust debates of today. (New York Times)
• Everybody Wants To Be A Used Car Billionaire Competition to sell used cars online is great for consumers. But will the financial returns match the high valuations of Carvana, Cazoo et al? (Bloomberg)
• The Next Chapter of Money: The Greatest Story Ever Told In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari describes humans (aka homo sapiens) as being different from other animals in one very distinct way: We have the ability to create, tell, and remember stories. Money is also a story. Humans created currency. Gold was an abundant and malleable metal that could easily be forged into coins, which were easy to carry around and trade. But the glue that bound these monetary systems together was belief in a common story; that the coins had a specific value.(The Belle Curve)
• Classic Motorcycles Worth Collecting: Classic motorcycles from the U.S., Europe, and Japan are on the upswing as high-value collectibles. Prices tend to be very affordable compared with collector cars, but they can be substantial. A restored 1936 Indian Four sold for $77,000 at a Mecum auction in Glendale, Arizona, last year. (Barron’s)
• Jack Ma Shows Why China’s Tycoons Keep Quiet High-profile business leaders have been detained, sidelined or silenced as the Communist Party moves forcefully to keep companies in line. Today, the best strategy is to lie low. (New York Times)
• Why Don’t Some TV Shows Sound the Way They Used To? Licensing issues have gutted the soundtracks of many beloved series on streaming services, resulting in bewildering music cues and missing theme songs. (New York Times)
• The Hot-Hand Fallacy Fallacy Fallacy? Gilovich’s initial assertion is almost certainly still very true. People do not have a good sense of randomness, and tend to see patterns (and causality) when they don’t exist. None of this stuff is as intuitive as we’d like it to be. (Albert Bridge Capital)
• The corporate income tax is a jobs program For any given corporate tax rate, a rational firm will “overpay” workers as long as the value captured from an additional dollar in “efficiency wages” is greater than (1-t), where t is the tax rate. With a 21% tax rate, the firm will pay efficiency wages until it captures back less than 79¢ of value it sends to workers. Firms’ selfish generosity can take the form of higher payments to its existing workforce, amenities or upgrades to working conditions that engender employee loyalty and morale, or new hiring to lighten the load and improve output quality. (Interfluidity)
• The dark side of our age of fitness Technology has now brought such advanced convenience that it has immobilised us. We have become sedentary victims of the efficiencies of our own innovations, paper-pushers who have to discipline ourselves into moving for movement’s sake. Especially for those in the white-collar world now able to work remotely, there are vanishingly few occasions for necessary motion. (New Statesman)
• The Essential Philip Roth Looking to read one of his books? Let us help: You cannot accurately measure a writer — or any person — until the moment after his death. A life can stretch out in front of you, but until it’s over, you don’t know how the beginning truly informed the end; you won’t quite understand the poetry of the person’s story until its themes match up and you know exactly where and what the entire murky middle was. This is what biography is for. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Jack Brennan, former CEO and Chairman of the Vanguard Group. When Vanguard founder and investment legend John Bogle decided to step down as CEO, Brennan was his hand-picked successor for the job, and ran the firm from 1996-2008.
Last time capital-gains taxes rose (2013) wealthiest households sold 1% of their equity assets
Source: Marketwatch
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