My Tuesday morning back-to-work train reads:
• The Inconvenient Truth About Electric Vehicles: The experience of owning, charging, and driving an electric vehicle makes the rising inequality of America more visible in new and subtle ways. (The Atlantic) but see Electric Vehicles Could Match Gasoline Cars on Price This Year: Competition, government incentives and falling raw material prices are making battery-powered cars more affordable sooner than expected. (New York Times)
• The stock market’s pullback is healthy: Wall Street’s mood is surprisingly subdued—and that’s bullish • The stock market’s pullback is healthy (Marketwatch)
• The return to the office could be the real reason for the slump in productivity. Here’s the data to prove it: U.S. productivity jumped in the second quarter of 2020 as offices closed, and stayed at a heightened level through 2021. Then, when companies started mandating a return to the office in early 2022, productivity dropped sharply in Q1 and Q2 of that year. Productivity recovered slightly in Q3 and Q4 as the productivity loss associated with the return to office mandate was absorbed by companies–but it never got back to the period when remote-capable employees worked from home. (Fortune) see also WFH vs RTO: One of the big reveals of the pandemic was just how much time we collectively waste commuting from ever longer distances. The shorter the commute, the more expensive the housing, and vice-versa. Not many people cared much about this before. Now, its become a problem for corporate America, and so it is slowly moving up the priority list. (The Big Picture)
• US Housing Market Is Overvalued by Billions Due to Ignored Flood Risk: Home values don’t currently reflect expected losses from flooding, a new study finds, leaving low-income homeowners especially vulnerable to price deflation. (Bloomberg)
• Poor, Busy Millennials Are Doing the Midlife Crisis Differently: They don’t really have a choice. But the internet generation might just be making some improvements to that cliched mashup of paunch and panic. (Businessweek) but see The First Car: Where We Are is a series about young people coming of age and the spaces where they create community. (New York Times)
• That’s Tory Burch? Over the last few seasons a new energy has emerged at the preppy American label. Fashion insiders are taking note. (New York Times)
• The incredible shrinking future of college: The population of college-age Americans is about to crash. It will change higher education forever. (Vox) see also Tuition Revenue Has Fallen at 61% of Colleges During the Pandemic: A likely factor in the dip was colleges’ struggle to bring back students two years into the pandemic, according to a Chronicle analysis of finance data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which examined how net-tuition revenue fluctuated from 2019 to 2021. (Chronicle of Higher Education)
• AI porn is easy to make now. For women, that’s a nightmare. Easy access to AI imaging gives abusers new tools to target women. (Washington Post) see also She discovered a naked video of herself online, but it wasn’t her: The trauma of deepfake porn. (USA Today)
• A ‘Distinctly Human’ Trait That Might Actually Be Universal: Disgust is surprisingly common across nature. (The Atlantic)
• Florence Pugh’s Radical Self-Acceptance: When Pugh was three, the family moved to an international enclave in southern Spain, near Gibraltar, partly for the adventure, partly for the weather, which the family thought might help with her tracheomalacia, or “floppy trachea,” a condition that had made Pugh something of a sickly child. She was in and out of the hospital when she was a baby, though she is adamant that this didn’t define her. “I never want this to be a sob story.” (Vogue)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Tim Buckley, CEO of the Vanguard Group, which manages $7.2 trillion in assets. He began his career at Vanguard 32 years ago as an assistant to then Chairman John Bogle. He previously served roles as Chief Information Officer, as well as Chief Investment Officer.
Covid-19 Is Now Harder to Stop and Easier to Survive
Source: Bloomberg
