My mid-week morning train WFH reads:
• Why Bother With Active Management When Mechanistic Passive Does Best Historically? You want a helping of alpha along with beta-hugging index funds? We asked some shrewd allocators how they get it. (CIO)
• Why Is Everyone Else Quitting? Sometimes, as in a collective bargaining situation, you do have to think about other people at work. Other times, it’s better to focus on what you really want. (New York Times) see also Immigrants could fix the US labor shortage The US has more jobs than it can fill. Fixing the immigration system could boost the economy. (Vox)
• You Could Be Competing With Bots to Buy Gifts This Christmas: As shortages of sneakers and other goods persist, the digital cat-and-mouse game between retailers and resellers is intensifying. (Businessweek)
• Ownership Inequality in the Stock Market This data is kind of depressing. The top 10% owns 45% of the housing market while the bottom 90% owns 55% of real estate in this country. Just wait until you see the ownership numbers for financial assets: The top 1% now owns $22 trillion or about ~54% of the total in stocks and funds. The top 10% owns 89% of the stocks in this country, meaning the bottom 90% owns just 11% of the stocks. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• The Billionaire Tax: The Worst Tax Idea Ever? In conjunction with widening inequality, the perception is building that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share in taxes. If you focus just on federal tax dollars paid by each group, the wealthy are actually paying a larger share of federal taxes collected than ever before in history. The counter argument: they are paying a lower percent of their taxes than they were 50 years ago. (Musings on Markets)
• The vinyl straw: Why the vinyl industry is at breaking point The industry is at its strongest since the advent of the CD disk, so why has it become near-impossible to get music pressed onto wax?(Mix Mag)
• Asbestos could be a powerful weapon against climate change (you read that right) Scientists are exploring ways to use mineral waste from mines to pull huge amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air. (MIT Technology Review)
• 11 Un-Magical Secrets I Learned While Working at Disney World From parents leaving their kids with “Mary Poppins” to ladies lusting after Captain Jack Sparrow, the most magical place on Earth is also one of the most colorful places to work.(Bloomberg)
• In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan America’s premier science institute has been less than forthcoming about risky research it has funded and failed to properly monitor. (Vanity Fair) see also The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory Did the virus spring from nature or from human error? (New Yorker)
• The Music Critic Who Tried to Disappear I’m sharing the essay that won the 2021 Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism (announced yesterday by ASCAP) (Ted Gioia)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Sukhinder Singh Cassidy author of “Choose Possibility” hailed as one of the Top 100 People in the Valley by Business Insider and a Power Woman by Elle. She has 25 years of experience founding, scaling, and running companies: She was an early hire at Junglee (acquired by Amazon), helped to build Google Maps and Local before developing Google International, was CEO of StubHub, and a co-founder of the firms Yodlee and Joyus.
Nobody Wants Cash Flow
Source: Irrelevant Investor
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