My end of week morning train WFH reads:
• Building a Home in the U.S. Has Never Been More Expensive From lumber to paint to concrete, the cost of almost every single item that goes into building a house in the U.S. is soaring. In some cases, the price increases have topped 100% since the pandemic began. Fom rock-bottom mortgage rates to city dwellers’ rush to the suburbs to shortages of materials—but the simplest explanation is that there is just too much demand for builders and their suppliers to handle. (Bloomberg)
• Libor’s US replacements: no one rate to rule them all Several alternatives are vying to replace the doomed benchmark. And it’s complicating the transition. (Financial Times)
• A New Era Dawns for Harley-Davidson The feature-stuffed Pan America is a stark diversion for a company long associated with bulky, expensive cruisers. Early impressions suggest a potential blockbuster. (New York Times)
• How Covid Inspired a New Generation of Entrepreneurs The pandemic forced everyone to adopt new technology and rethink their jobs, spurring our economy to lean in to independent work. (Bloomberg)
• The Huge Tax Break for Home Sellers: What to Know About the $500,000 Exemption A tax exclusion allows millions of Americans to skip taxes when they sell their homes at a profit. A Biden administration proposal would take a larger bite from some sellers with the biggest gains. (Wall Street Journal)
• America Has a Drinking Problem A little alcohol can boost creativity and strengthen social ties. But there’s nothing moderate, or convivial, about the way many Americans drink today. (The Atlantic)
• Who gets a park? Cities are finally being analyzed for the equity of their green space. For the first time in its history, a national ranking of urban green space in America is not only looking at the number and quality of parks within the country’s 100 largest cities, but also the equity of their distribution — shining a spotlight on the glaring gaps between access to nature along racial and socioeconomic lines. (Grist)
• Dunning-Kruger meets fake news: People who overrate their media saviness share more misleading material Inspired by the widespread sharing of blatantly false news articles, a team of US-based researchers looked into whether Dunning-Kruger might be operating in the field of media literacy. Not surprisingly, people overestimate their ability to identify misleading news. But the details are complicated, and there’s no obvious route to overcoming this bias. (Ars Technica)
• Commuting is psychological torture: Not doing that commute gave me 15 hours per week of my life back “I am never going back to that commute five days a week every single week again,” a friend told me recently. Before Covid he was spending about three hours a day in his car driving back and forth. When things started to shut down last year his employer was staunchly against people working from home at first, but before long it became unavoidable. (Welcome to Hell World)
• Wolfgang Van Halen shares a famous name. His music is his own. He joined Van Halen at 16. Now he’s going it alone, with a debut album that was in the making before his father’s death. (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Harindra de Silva, of Wells Fargo Asset Management. He is a pioneer in low volatility and factor-based investing, and leads the Analytic Investors group, running quantitative strategies, and managing $20 billion in client assets.
The U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index (JQI)
Source: Job Quality Index
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