10 Weekend Reads

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of  coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

• This is the most consequential technology in America: (Spoiler alert: It’s YouTube.) It’s the most popular social app and music service, the healthiest economy on the internet and AI training fuel. (Washington Post)

• What I Learned from Daniel Kahneman. What’s the best way to get better investment returns? Should you study markets more deeply and analyze every asset more carefully? Should you try to anticipate other people’s mistakes and exploit their stupidity? I believe that’s necessary, but not sufficient. You must also try to predict, minimize and learn from your mistakes. Blindness to our own blunders is the biggest single obstacle to investing success. (Wall Street Journal)

• What Makes Housing So Expensive? Looking at housing costs chiefly through the lens of single-family homes, we see the costs of building them largely map to US housing costs generally. There’s also a large amount of data available on single-family home construction that doesn’t exist (or is much less accessible) for other types of housing. And most multi-family apartment buildings in the US will be built using the same basic technology, light-framed wood, used to build single-family homes, so much of what we learn about single-family costs, particularly on the construction side, will apply to multi-family apartments as well. (Construction Physics)

• How a Pioneering Blackjack Master Beats the Odds of Aging: Legendary gambler and hedge fund manager Edward Thorp, 91, shares what he’s learned about exercise, diet and managing risk in all areas of life. (Businessweek)

• The Podcast Host Who Also Manages a $1.6 Trillion Investment Fund: Top CEOs talk to Norway’s sovereign-wealth fund manager. This week’s guest was Elon Musk on the future of AI. (Wall Street Journal)

• Behind the Curtain: America’s reality distortion machine: What if we’ve been deceived into thinking we’re more divided, more dysfunctional and more defeated than we actually are? (Axios)

• Dark Matter: For twenty years, PostSecret has broadcast suburban America’s hidden truths—and revealed the limits of limitless disclosure. (Hazlitt)

• The Eclipse That Ended a War and Shook the Gods Forever: Thales, a Greek philosopher 2,600 years ago, is celebrated for predicting a famous solar eclipse and founding what came to be known as science. (New York Times)

• Is Jackson Holliday the best baseball prospect we have ever seen? His stats —at every level — are, frankly, amazing. In his senior year of high school — in Stillwater, Oklahoma — Holliday had 89 hits in 40 games. He hit .685. He hit 17 home runs and had 79 RBI. In 40 games!!! After being the #1 overall pick in the 2022 Major League Baseball draft, Holliday played at several levels of the minors. Here were his combined stats: 477 AB , 154 Hits, 113 Runs, 12 HRs, 51 XBH, 75 RBIs, 101 Walks, .323 AVG, .442 OBP, .499 SLG, .941 OPS. He was voted minor league player of the year in 2023. This year, he hit a home run in his first at-bat for the Orioles AAA affiliate. (The Replay)

• Larry David’s Rule Book for How (Not) to Live in Society: He’s a wild, monomaniacal jerk. He’s also our greatest interpreter of American manners since Emily Post. (New York Times)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Samara Cohen, Chief Investment Officer of the ETF and Index Investments (EII) roughly $6.6 trillion of BlackRock’s index funds and iShares ETFs. She is also a member of the firm’s Global Executive Committee.

Ten Economic Facts About Rental Housing

Source: Brookings