Articles of the week
The Bear Market Has Nearly Been Erased, Fewer Than 20 Months After It Began: S&P 500 closer to erasing 2022’s loss after nine-month rally Gains in risky assets reflect growing optimism in soft landing (Bloomberg)
How to Invest Like the 1%: In 1989, the top 1% of households in the United States controlled a little less than 23% of the wealth in this country. That number has now reached nearly 32%. By contrast, the bottom 90% have seen their share of wealth drop from 40% in 1989 to 31% today. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation: Investors seeking to generate excess returns can benefit from understanding the demographics of public companies and their patterns of wealth creation: 60% percent of the stocks of U.S. public companies failed to earn returns in excess of Treasury bills; only 2% created more than 90% of the aggregate wealth. The skewness in wealth creation suggests two approaches for investors: seek broad diversification or build a portfolio that tries to avoid the
Inflation undershoot? Narrative shifts again. But as impressive U.S. disinflation sweeps through 2023, without a cratering of employment or the wider economy so far, the narrative is shifting again – and encouraging hopes that bruising central bank tightening may be short-lived too. With a ‘soft landing’ now majority thinking again, phrases like ‘immaculate disinflation’ abound and raise questions about whether underlying price dynamics have changed very much after all – even if geopolitical and supply chain maps are redrawn. (Reuters)
This Statistic Could Be Distorting How We Think About Inflation: The apparent causal link between unit labor costs and inflation is far weaker once you understand how the statistical sausage is made. It’s honest but crude. One of the two inputs into the calculation is inflation itself. So if inflation rises and nothing else changes, the unit labor cost will go up. By definition (New York Times)
Commercial Real Estate Is in Trouble, but Not for the Reason You Think: As far as weak spots go, there are reasons for concern. Offices comprise 80% of new delinquencies in commercial real estate loans, and occupancy rates in major cities consistently hover around 50% of capacity. But the towers we once commuted to comprise just a tiny fraction of the overall commercial real estate market. Commercial real estate market is big, diverse, and highly regional, valued at about $20 trillion (Q2 2021). This $20 trillion is fairly evenly spread across its component sectors. (Morningstar)
14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture. These are the key indicators that you might be living in a society without a counterculture: A sense of sameness pervades the creative world The dominant themes feel static and repetitive, not dynamic and impactful Imitation of the conventional is rewarded Movies, music, and other creative pursuits are increasingly evaluated on financial and corporate metrics, with all other considerations having little influence. (The Honest Broker)
She Was the Oppenheimer of Barbie. Her Invention Blew Up. Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler engineered a new way of selling toys. Then she created the most popular doll in history. (Wall Street Journal)
Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating? The OpenAI CEO’s ambitious, ingenious, terrifying quest to create a new form of intelligence. (The Atlantic)
AI and the automation of work: ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption? (Benedict Evans)
Why Generative AI Won’t Disrupt Books: Every new technology from the internet to virtual reality has tried to upend book culture. There’s a reason they’ve all failed—and always will. (Wired)
How AI is bringing film stars back from the dead: Celebrities such as James Dean can be brought back to life as digital clones thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, but it is raising troubling questions about what rights any of us have after we die. (BBC)
Autoenshittification: Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on. (Pluralistic)
5 Ways That Buying a Car Has Drastically Changed: Car sellers and car buyers confronted a whole host of challenges in the pandemic, and now it’s clear that some of the challenges are here to stay. ‘Normal is not our benchmark anymore.’ (Wall Street Journal)
The Best Way to Save American Lives on the Road: France, unlike America, but like almost every other rich country on earth, has worked out how to make its roads safer. They have reduced the speed limits on minor roads, and installed thousands of speed cameras to ensure people stick to them. But they have also literally rebuilt the roads to make it harder to crash. And one of the ways they have done so is by installing roundabouts. (Time)
The Safety Dance: Autonomous vehicle companies claim that “humans are terrible drivers” and their tech is needed to save lives. Don’t buy it. (Slate)
The Five Things Keeping Us From Going All-Electric: The ‘electrification of everything’ gets talked about a lot these days. But it isn’t going to happen soon. Nor should we want it to. (Wall Street Journal)
Extreme Heat Is Deadlier Than Hurricanes, Floods and Tornadoes Combined: When dangerous heat waves hit cities, better risk communication could save lives. (Scientific American)
Property Owners Ignore Climate Risk Amid Insurance Meltdown :As major underwriters abandon vulnerable states, people keep moving into danger zones. (Businessweek)
Americans Are Moving Toward Climate Danger in Search of Cheaper Homes: Migration to places at high risk from heat, floods and fires rose over the last two years, a new analysis by Redfin finds.. (Bloomberg)
Why did it take psychedelics so long to become popular? Some lessons from history and archaeology (Res Obscura)
Jim Gaffigan’s Quintessentially American Comedy Gets Darker and Better: He’ll still joke about fast food. But on “Dark Pale,” his 10th stand-up special, his evolution as a comedian is apparent. (New York Times)
Masters of Their Own Realities: Taylor Swift isn’t the only one rerecording classics. A wide range of musicians are heading back to the studio to retrace the past and reclaim ownership of their work. (The Ringer)
Women are superstars on stage, but still rarely get to write songs: In 2022, hit songs had 6 songwriters on average: 5 men and 1 woman. But the average conceals a remarkable fact about the 42 songs that cracked the Top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100. While half of the songs had a songwriting team of all men… Only one had a songwriting team of all women. (The Pudding)
The one baseball’s been waiting for: So far, the two-way sensation is living up to Ruthian expectations. But how will he possibly keep this up? We trace his journey back to Japan in search of the surprising answer. (ESPN)
What it’s like to play with and against Lionel Messi: A privilege and a nightmare: “You knew the team were going to create chances, and that the opposition were going to be on top of him, sometimes two, three players. And that meant that the other players on our team were free. They couldn’t stop us.” (The Athletic)