The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of BeanBox coffee, grab a seat int he den, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• LaGuardia Airport Is No Longer the Worst. This Team Fixed It: An elite squad was tasked with making sure the gleaming Terminal B was ready to open. There are lessons from LaGuardia for every business. (Wall Street Journal)
• The robots are here. And they are making you fries. Meet Flippy, Sippy and Chippy, the newest technology stepping in to address a protracted labor crunch in food service. (Washington Post) see also Grapes, berries and robots: is Silicon Valley coming for farm workers jobs? The global ag-tech revolution has sped up in recent years, spurring a debate on how it will affect the workforce. (The Guardian)
• Liquid Venture Capital: Venture capital has delivered great historical returns but is illiquid and hard to access. Fortunately, innovation does not occur only at venture-backed startups. We replicate venture capital returns using liquid small-cap public equities and find the underlying innovation premium also exists at large innovative firms. We also show that crypto tokens can provide a liquid complement to blockchain venture equity. (Sparkline Capital)
• We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model: Behavioral economics today is famous for its increasingly large collection of deviations from rationality, or, as they are often called, ‘biases’. While useful in applied work, it is time to shift our focus from collecting deviations from a model of rationality that we know is not true. Rather, we need to develop new theories of human decision to progress behavioral economics as a science. Behavioral economics has identified dozens of cognitive biases that stop us from acting ‘rationally’. We need a new model: Heliocentrism. (Works in Progress)
• What Canada’s Largest Art Heist Reveals about the Art World’s Shady Side: The stolen masterpieces have never turned up—and nobody’s really looking for them (The Walrus)
• A Chinese Spy Wanted GE’s Secrets, But the US Got China’s Instead: How the arrest of a burned-out intelligence officer exposed an economic-espionage machine. (Businessweek)
• We need a new philosophy of progress: We have been naive about progress in the past, but that doesn’t mean we have to be cynical about progress in the future. Progress is not inevitable but that simply means it’s up to us. Are we up for the challenge? (Big Think) see also Defective Altruism: The repugnant philosophy of “Effective Altruism” offers nothing to movements for global justice. The first thing that should raise your suspicions about the “Effective Altruism movement” is the name. It is self-righteous in the most literal sense. Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffective and un-altruistic, we who either do not care about other human beings or are practicing our compassion incorrectly. (Current Affairs)
• Eric Idle: I Survived Pancreatic Cancer. It’s a Funny Story: We immediately decide that pancreatic cancer is such a scary term and freaks people out so much that we will call my diagnosis Kenny. Kenny is far less threatening. Kenny is manageable. Kenny is something we can talk about publicly. The next day I have an appointment at The Kenny Center. In the Kennyology parking lot, as the valet takes away my car, I say to Tania: “This is the Valet of the Chateau of Death.” (Time)
• Did Neanderthals Make Art? Experts continue to debate whether Neanderthals were painters and jewelry-makers. A paleoanthropologist explores the evidence for Neanderthal art and the sources of people’s skepticism. (Sapiens)
• How to give good news: The art of telling a prospect he’s going to the big leagues: Yet unlike the hidden ball trick or some of the game’s other relatively rare displays of chicanery, Kelly and minor-league managers use the same gag with regularity. Multiple times a year, those managers get to tell a player that he’ll soon be making his major-league debut. And every single time — sometimes with precious little notice, often in front of a room of players who keep one eye on any big-league openings — those managers do everything they can to make that moment surprising. (The Athletic)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Steve Case, co-founder of America On-Line (AOL), founder of investment firm Revolution, Char of the Smithsonian, and author of The Rise of the Rest: How Entrepreneurs in Surprising Places are Building the New American Dream.
The best performing stocks in the S&P 500 over the last 5, 10, 15, and 20 years
Source: @charliebilello
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