Attention Economy


Wednesday, December 21, 2022

BOJ Signals Monetary Policy Shift

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China's EV Boom

Cutthroat competition and state support power China’s electric car revolution
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/21/china-electric-vehicles-tesla-byd/ 

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Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Physics - Book Recommendations for Self-Study

How to learn Quantum Mechanics on your own (a self-study guide)

Want to study physics?

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EM Trouble Spots

IMF Sees Further Decline in Kenyan Foreign Reserves on High Borrowing Costs
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-20/imf-sees-further-decline-in-kenyan-foreign-reserves-on-high-borrowing-costs
 
Ghana halts payments on large swaths of foreign debt
https://www.ft.com/content/2cffb07c-828c-400d-a51a-2c52a00bb8e0
Highly indebted African nation is facing a ‘major economic and financial crisis’ 

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Healthcare Distortions

Many Hospitals Get Big Drug Discounts. That Doesn’t Mean Markdowns for Patients.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/340b-drug-discounts-hospitals-low-income-federal-program-11671553899
Through a government program aimed at helping low-income patients, some hospitals buy medications at reduced prices. They can sell them to patients and their insurers for much more. 

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How Should Crypto be Regulated?

Crypto Is Money Without a Purpose
https://www.wsj.com/articles/crypto-is-money-without-a-purpose-ftx-crash-trading-banking-finance-exchanges-brokers-lenders-money-profit-11671479669
It isn’t a financial service and shouldn’t be regulated as one. Laws on gambling are more relevant. 

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Seeking the Real Adam Smith

Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism
Review: https://www.wsj.com/articles/adam-smiths-america-book-review-wealth-of-a-nation-11671222557 

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Economic Models versus Economic Reality

Trust the Models? In This Economy?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/business/economy/recession-economy-forecast-2023.html
Years into the pandemic, it is still difficult to get a handle on what comes next for the economy by looking at examples from the past. 

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The TikTok Conundrum

How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/20/magazine/tiktok-us-china-diplomacy.html
A Chinese app conquered the planet — and now the U.S. is threatening to shut it down. Can the world’s biggest virality machine survive? 

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Monday, December 19, 2022

Cost of Higher Education

The reasons why higher ed costs so much to produce also explain why historical esteem for higher education has shifted to resentment
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/12/19/why-production-cost-and-resentment-rising-opinion



Rural universities, already few and far between, are cutting majors

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Central Banks and Financial Markets

Investors Would Be Better Off Believing the Fed
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/investors-would-be-better-off-believing-the-fed/2022/12/19/661238a4-7f8c-11ed-8738-ed7217de2775_story.html
If markets remain optimistic, the central bank will just have to tighten more to achieve its inflation objective.

Financial risks grow in shadowy corner of markets, worrying Washington

 
Fractured markets: the big threats to the financial system

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Sunday, December 18, 2022

Housing Downturn - 2022 versus 2008

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Rise of Problem Gambling

Problem Gambling Is on the Rise Among Young Men
https://www.wsj.com/articles/problem-gambling-is-on-the-rise-among-young-men-11671388600
More time spent online, more states legalizing sports betting and an increase in gambling-like elements in videogames contribute to problems. 

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Climate Change and Human Migration

Who Will Be the Next Climate Migrants?
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/who-will-be-the-next-climate-migrants
How Dust Bowl–era data may help us understand an expected, massive movement of people 

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India's Business Leaders Think Big

India's new corporate chiefs are thinking bigger and more boldly
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/India-s-new-corporate-chiefs-are-thinking-bigger-and-more-boldly 

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A Broken Immigration System

Trump, covid slowed down immigration. Now employers can’t find workers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/12/15/immigration-reform-congress-worker-shortage/
Reducing the Immigration Backlog
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/reducing-immigration-backlog
 

The Hidden Consensus on Immigration

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The Long Wait is Over – Messi Gets His World Cup


Argentina Just Won the World Cup, and Lionel Messi Is the Perfect Man for This Moment
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/09/opinion/lionel-messi-argentina-world-cup.html
 
World Cup Final Caps a Complex Saga Between Messi and Argentina
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/world/americas/world-cup-final-messi-argentina.html
 
Why Lionel Messi is the best male athlete of all time
https://www.espn.com/sports/soccer/insider/story/_/id/35259622/lionel-messi-world-cup-proves-best-male-athlete-ever

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Stock Market Investing for the Long-Run

Forget Stock Predictions for Next Year. Focus on the Next Decade.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/business/economy/stock-market-forecast.html
 
Individual Investors Hang On in Wild Year for Stocks While Pros Sell
https://www.wsj.com/articles/individual-investors-hang-on-in-wild-year-for-stocks-while-pros-sell-11671322856
Small investors dive into markets as institutional ones grow more bearish 

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Saturday, December 17, 2022

SFO Downtown - Will Businesses Ever Return?

What Comes Next for the Most Empty Downtown in America
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/business/economy/california-san-francisco-empty-downtown.html
Tech workers are still at home. The $17 salad place is expanding into the suburbs. So what is left in San Francisco? 

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The Crypto Crisis

The great crypto crisis is upon us
https://www.ft.com/content/76234c49-cb11-4c2a-9a80-49da4f0ad7dd
Hyun Song Shin, Head of Research at BIS, notes:
There is a bitter irony in the turmoil currently gripping the crypto universe. Crypto was born in the depths of the great financial crisis of 2008 as a backlash against the failings of the conventional financial system, with its overleveraged shadow banks and daisy chain of leverage and maturity mismatch. The original Bitcoin white paper published that same year sold a vision in which money was refashioned as a self-sustaining system of peer-to-peer transfer without the need for intermediaries. However, today’s upheaval bears all the hallmarks of precisely the failings that the industry’s early proponents railed against. As firms collapse and coin prices crash, the unravelling of this new daisy chain of over-leveraged shadow crypto banks is now in full flow. 

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Friday, December 16, 2022

Changing Fortunes

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International Affairs - Interesting Items

For Washington, self-imposed restraint will always be a contradiction in terms.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/12/13/the-united-states-couldnt-stop-being-stupid-if-it-wanted-to/
Stephen M. Walt, the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard University, notes:
“…defenders of U.S. primacy underestimate how hard it is for a powerful liberal country like the United States to limit its foreign-policy ambitions. I like the United States’ liberal values as much as anyone, but the combination of liberal values and vast power makes it nearly inevitable that the United States will try to do too much rather than too little”.
 
Tooze on the ‘Dramatic Reconceptualization’ of Europe
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/12/16/tooze-ukraine-russia-economy-reconceptualization/
 
Policymakers Can’t Afford to Spurn the Science of Prediction
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/fumbling-crystal-ball 

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Thursday, December 15, 2022

Brain Implants

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Quant Finance/Finance Readings

School of Quant: At $29,000, a Public NYC College Outclasses Princeton
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-12-15/school-of-quant-at-29-000-an-nyc-college-outclasses-princeton
New York’s Baruch College offers a no-frills financial engineering course that’s feeding some of the world’s most elite global trading firms.
Call it Quant U.
Baruch, it turns out, has built a pipeline to Wall Street that rivals those at many richer, more prestigious institutions. Its faculty includes pros from the likes of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Its students routinely graduate into six-figure jobs at big banks or, more likely, head to hedge funds such as Citadel and Millennium Management.
Similar top-rated programs at Princeton, MIT, Cornell and Carnegie Mellon? They’re good, yes — but Baruch bests them all, according to annual surveys by QuantNet, an online forum for financial engineers.
 
QuantNet - Ranking of MFE Programs:
https://quantnet.com/mfe-programs-rankings/ 



BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS FOR BUDDING FINANCE PROFESSIONALS:

Financial Theories and Quant Finance:

  • The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution
  • In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest
  • Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
  • An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets
  • Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets
Venture Capital: The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

Classics:

  • Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
  • Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street
  • Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation

Basics:

  • A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Best Investment Guide That Money Can Buy by Burton G. Malkiel (new edition coming in Jan 2023)
  • Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies (Sixth Edition) by Jeremy Siegel

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History Lesson: Fed's 1994 Soft Landing

The last time the Fed curbed inflation without crashing the economy, explained
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/12/15/23508155/federal-reserve-inflation-recession-soft-landing 

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History Lesson: The Failure of Perestroika


Related:
How China Escaped Shock Therapy
https://youtu.be/mpv2Xjfh9No 

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US Economy is Cooling Down

Retail Sales Fell in November, Despite Black Friday
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/business/retail-sales-november.html

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The Interest Rate Regime Change Debate

Sea Change
https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/sea-change
 
The past two decades of low inflation and near-zero interest rates were an ‘aberration,’ BofA says. Get ready for an economic ‘regime change’
https://fortune.com/2022/10/13/low-inflation-interest-rates-aberration-economic-regime-change-bank-of-america/
 
New era of inflation will bedevil central banks and bond markets
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3543857-new-era-of-inflation-will-bedevil-central-banks-and-bond-markets/
My Take from July 1, 2022:
We are facing an extraordinary moment of uncertainty regarding the future inflation (and interest rate) outlook. Will we relatively soon return to the low rate, low inflation and low growth (characterized as secular stagnation) dynamic that was the hallmark of the post-financial crisis era? Or are we entering a new era of sustained higher rates and elevated inflation? Nobody knows the answer for sure, but we shouldn’t underestimate the probability that we are in the midst of a consequential inflation regime change. 

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Markets versus the Fed – The Battle Continues

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Wednesday, December 14, 2022

America’s K-12 Education Crisis

There’s a Reason There Aren’t Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actually.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/opinion/teacher-shortage-education.html 


Academic performance among students has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/18/virginia-school-test-scores-pandemic/ 

Guessing C For Every Answer Is Now Enough To Pass The New York State Algebra Exam (HT to Tyler Cowen)

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Inflation and Government Debt

Related:

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Cryptos and Asset Bubbles

Crypto Was Always Smoke and Mirrors
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/cryptocurrency-ftx-collapse-dirty-bubble-media/672440/
The vast majority of people who got involved in this have no interest related to the technology or in the political or ideological aspects of crypto. They just see an opportunity to get rich. And a lot of those people end up absorbing and parroting some of the crypto ideals back to you, but they don’t really care to understand what’s going on. It’s just their excuse for what they’ve already done, which is gamble on something they thought was going to make them wealthy.

Crypto was meant to solve financial corruption. The FTX scandal shows it’s got worse
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/15/crypto-financial-and-corruption-making-it-worse-ftx
David A Banks:
Like any radical, a true believer in crypto could argue that FTX is what happens when the revolutionary DeFi program is not fully implemented. But here again crypto bros are hoisted by their own trustless petard. The reality is that the 21st-century crypto industry – automated or not – must follow the same capitalist market physics that were endemic to 20th-century energy markets, or 19th-century London banks: ruthless competition winnows an industry down to a few key players and then, as Marx wrote in 1847, there comes a phase “when everybody is seized with a sort of craze for making profit without producing”.
And so it should come as no surprise that, as the New York Times put it, the crypto industry quickly “started assuming some of the same characteristics as the Wall Street institutions that it was designed to replace”, with the majority of trading happening on just a few exchanges – including FTX and Binance. Sure, you could write a bit of code that says at some point the organisation must cleave into multiple competing ones, thus staving off centralisation, but it only takes one actor to decide not to play by those rules to dominate the market. The only thing preventing that from happening is, well, a central authority. Like a government.


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Tuesday, December 13, 2022

China's Haphazard Zero-Covid Exit

Zero-COVID exit throws China's economy into disarray
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Zero-COVID-exit-throws-China-s-economy-into-disarray
Surge in cases depletes workforce, from factories to food delivery 

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EU Corruption Scandal

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Disinflation and the Debate Surrounding the Fed's Rate Hike Path

The Federal Reserve signals more to come even as it slows rate increases.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/business/economy/interest-rates-inflation-fed.html

How Long Should Powell Keep Raising Interest Rates? Fed Officials Are Divided
https://www.wsj.com/articles/powell-federal-reserve-interest-rates-inflation-11670859520 

Inflation Forecasts Were Wrong Last Year. Should We Believe Them Now?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/business/economy/inflation-forecasts-historical-outlook.html
That is where Fed policy could come in. Companies can only charge more if their customers are able — and willing — to pay more. The Fed can stop that chain reaction by lifting interest rates to slow demand.
Policymakers have raised interest rates from near-zero at the start of 2022 to nearly 4 percent, and are expected to make another interest rate increase this week. Those moves have made it more expensive to borrow money to buy a house, finance a big purchase or expand a business.
The knock-on effects are now trickling through the economy: Fewer house sales could eventually mean less hiring in construction and manufacturing, which in turn would mean less spending in the local economies where would-be builders and factory workers live. As the job market slows down and wage growth moderates, demand is expected to weaken for everything from dinners out to air travel.

From chicken wings to used cars, inflation begins to ease its grip
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/12/04/inflation-prices-going-down/ 

Related:

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Curbing China

Can India build a military strong enough to deter China?
https://www.ft.com/content/333aa07e-93ff-4e97-95c4-548bdccb5661

Modi's silence on China's land grabs will not be India's last word
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Modi-s-silence-on-China-s-land-grabs-will-not-be-India-s-last-word
While downplaying territorial losses, New Delhi is modernizing its military

 
Why America Is Getting Tough on Trade
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/opinion/america-trade-biden.html
On one side, America is now subsidizing domestic production of semiconductors, aiming to reduce reliance on China among other suppliers. Even more drastically, the U.S. has imposed new rules intended to limit China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology — that is, we’re deliberately seeking to hobble Chinese technological capacity. 

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Monday, December 12, 2022

AI and Higher Education

The End of High-School English
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/openai-chatgpt-writing-high-school-english-essay/672412/
 
A.I. Could Be Great for College Essays
https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/chatgpt-college-essay-plagiarism.html
 
Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay?
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-ai-writing-college-student-essays/672371/
 
Did a Robot Write This? We Need Watermarks to Spot AI
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/did-a-robot-write-this-we-need-watermarks-to-spotai/2022/12/12/067c6206-79e3-11ed-bb97-f47d47466b9a_story.html
OpenAI is exploring ways to stealthily label words generated by its new chatbot. It can’t happen soon enough.
 
Related:
https://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2022/12/ai-automation-and-future-of-jobs.html
https://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2022/12/rise-of-ai-beware-of-unintended.html 

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Can Japan Compete for Indian Tech Talent?

Japan Needs Indian Tech Workers. But Do They Need Japan?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/business/japan-indian-tech-workers.html
Recruiters call the push a crucial test of whether the world’s third-largest economy can compete with the U.S. and Europe for global talent. 

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Sunday, December 11, 2022

China's Economic Challenges

Even as China Eases Covid Rules, Some Youths Still Fear a Grim Future
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/business/china-protests-students-jobs.html
A sluggish economy continues to leave many young people unemployed, with few job prospects or hopes to tap into the rising incomes their parents enjoyed during boom times. 

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Natural Gas Boom Transforms Qatar’s Fortunes

A rare look inside a Qatari home offers a glimpse at how the lucrative gas industry has transformed the formerly poor, barren country.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/world/middleeast/qatar-wealth-world-cup.html
 
Qatar Extends Its Natural Gas Dominance at Russia’s Expense
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/09/business/energy-environment/qatar-gas-oil.html 

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Saturday, December 10, 2022

AI, Automation, and the Future of Jobs


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Shifting Global Alliances

China’s alliance with Saudi Arabia signals a potential shift in the global order
https://www.vox.com/2022/12/10/23502903/chinas-saudi-arabia-united-states-relations-strain 
Saudi’s MBS rolls out the red carpet for China’s Xi, in a not too subtle message to Biden
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/07/middleeast/xi-saudi-arabia-china-mbs-mime-intl/index.html 
The Middle East in a Multipolar Era
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/middle-east-multipolar-era
Why America’s Allies Are Flirting With Russia and China

The Global Zeitenwende
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/olaf-scholz-global-zeitenwende-how-avoid-new-cold-war
How to Avoid a New Cold War in a Multipolar Era

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Reconsidering Bonds


What Types of Bonds Deliver the Best Returns?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bonds-types-best-returns-11670019458 

Junk Bonds Are Worth a Look: They Now Yield Over 8%.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/junk-bonds-high-yield-investing-51670537665

Related:
The 24 Hours of Hikes That End Year of Fighting Inflation

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Consequences of US Economic Sanctions – The Case of Cuba

‘Cuba Is Depopulating’: Largest Exodus Yet Threatens Country’s Future
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/world/americas/cuba-us-migration.html
The pandemic and tougher U.S. sanctions have decimated Cuba’s economy, prompting the biggest migration since Fidel Castro rose to power. 

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Friday, December 9, 2022

The Bureaucratization of Higher Education

The Misguided Drive to Measure ‘Learning Outcomes’
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/opinion/sunday/colleges-measure-learning-outcomes.html
Molly Worthen notes:
"... more and more university administrators want campuswide, quantifiable data that reveal what skills students are learning. Their desire has fed a bureaucratic behemoth known as learning outcomes assessment. This elaborate, expensive, supposedly data-driven analysis seeks to translate the subtleties of the classroom into PowerPoint slides packed with statistics — in the hope of deflecting the charge that students pay too much for degrees that mean too little.
It’s true that old-fashioned course grades, skewed by grade inflation and inconsistency among schools and disciplines, can’t tell us everything about what students have learned. But the ballooning assessment industry — including the tech companies and consulting firms that profit from assessment — is a symptom of higher education’s crisis, not a solution to it...
Learning assessment has not spurred discussion of the deep structural problems that send so many students to college unprepared to succeed. Instead, it lets politicians and accreditors ignore these problems as long as bureaucratic mechanisms appear to be holding someone — usually a professor — accountable for student performance".
 
Other pieces from Molly Worthen:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/opinion/sunday/lecture-me-really.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/opinion/college-oral-exam.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/opinion/sunday/empathy-school-college.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/03/opinion/sunday/can-i-go-to-great-books-camp.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/opinion/tenure-college-university.html

Related:

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Long-Term Economic Growth Projections

GOLDMAN SACHS: The Global Economy in 2075: Growth Slows as Asia Rises
https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/pages/the-global-economy-in-2075-growth-slows-as-asia-rises.html
The world’s fastest years of economic growth are likely already behind it — expansion is slowing as population growth weakens, according to Goldman Sachs Research. But emerging economies, and powerhouses in Asia in particular, are forecast to keep catching up to richer countries. 

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An Example of Irrational Behavior?

The $42 Billion Question: Why Aren’t Americans Ditching Big Banks?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-42-billion-question-why-arent-americans-ditching-big-banks-11670472623
Big banks still pay next to nothing on savings, but their customers aren’t yet moving much money to higher-yielding alternatives 

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Economic History: Knowledge Flows and Economic Growth

The importance of access to knowledge for technological progress in the Industrial Revolution
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/importance-access-knowledge-technological-progress-industrial-revolution
 
Flow of Ideas: Economic Societies and the Rise of Useful Knowledge
https://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/Workshops/HistoryCultureandPopularBeliefs/Hornung.pdf 

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Thursday, December 8, 2022

Deciphering the US Housing Market

What’s Going on With the Housing Market?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-going-on-with-the-housing-market-11670430769
Home buyers and sellers are trying to make sense of a downturn that’s full of contradictions: Demand has seized up but supply is still low; prices are sliding but not plummeting; and no one can agree on what comes next 

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The Meaning of Life

Agnes Callard on Meaning, the Human Quest, and the Aims of Education 

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Restarting China's Economy

How Will China Turn Its Economy Back On? The World Is About to Find Out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/08/business/china-economy-covid.html 

Related:
The New China Shock
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/new-china-shock
How Beijing’s Party-State Capitalism Is Changing the Global Economy

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India's Decade


‘Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’: How a mass lockdown at the world’s biggest iPhone factory is India’s big chance to beat out China as Apple’s favorite supplier
https://fortune.com/2022/11/12/china-lockdowns-affecting-apple-business-move-to-india/
 
India’s coming decade of outperformance
https://www.ft.com/content/489cc92c-c950-47de-ad5f-586b9da33b70
Chetan Ahya – Chief Asia Economist at Morgan Stanley – notes:
Over the next decade, while the US and China will remain just as important to global investors, we think the ascendancy of India’s economy will mean it features more prominently on their radars.
The key lies in the size and scale of India’s opportunity set. We forecast that India will be the third-largest economy by 2027, with its GDP more than doubling from the current $3.4tn to $8.5tn over the next 10 years. 

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The Changing Nature of the Stock Market

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Failed Coups

Peru’s President Tried to Dissolve Congress. By Day’s End, He Was Arrested.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/world/americas/peru-pedro-castillo-coup.html
Peruvian Sol Rebounds as Congress Votes to Impeach Castillo
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-07/peru-sol-rebounds-as-congress-votes-to-impeach-castillo-chart
 
Reichsbürger: the German conspiracy theorists at heart of alleged coup plot
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/07/reichsburger-the-german-conspiracy-theorists-at-heart-of-alleged-coup-plot 

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Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Deflating Asset Bubbles


Chamath Palihapitiya, once a relentless cheerleader of special purpose acquisition companies, blames the Federal Reserve for the end of SPAC mania.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/business/chamath-palihapitiya-spac-investors.html
 
Related:
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/538921-have-misguided-policies-led-to-recent-asset-bubbles-and-boom-bust-cycles/ 

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Strikes Bring Chaos to Britain - Downside of Unionization?


Britain Counts Down to Christmas with a List of Labor Walkouts
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/business/uk-labor-strikes.html

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Female Pioneers in Asia’s Rapidly Changing Labor Market

Female pioneers make their mark as combat pilots, cricketers and chip technologists
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Women-s-Wealth/From-Pakistan-to-the-Philippines-women-break-open-closed-industries 

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The Best States in America

Which states have the highest living standards? (And more!)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/12/02/best-states-to-live/
 
A COMPARISON OF LIVING STANDARDS ACROSS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA by Elena Falcettoni and Vegard M. Nygaard
https://doi.org/10.1111/iere.12604
Abstract
We use an expected utility model to examine how living standards, or welfare, vary across the United States and how each state's welfare has evolved over time, accounting for cross-state variations in mortality, consumption, education, leisure, and inequality. We find considerable cross-state heterogeneity in welfare levels. This is robust to allowing for endogenous interstate migration and to computing welfare conditional on education, gender, and race. Although states experienced heterogeneous welfare growth rates between 1999 and 2015 (1.68–3.73% per year), there is no evidence of convergence in welfare levels, including during the subperiods preceding and following the Great Recession. 

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The Attraction of Bahamas to Seedy Characters

FTX’s Bahamas Headquarters Was the First Clue
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ftxs-bahamas-headquarters-was-the-first-clue/2022/12/07/7dcc1686-7627-11ed-a199-927b334b939f_story.html
Bankman-Fried is just the latest in a long string of notorious characters who moved their business to the island nation, from the pirate Blackbeard to organized crime figures and assorted “financial wizards.” 

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China Ends its Zero-Covid Policy

China eases covid testing and health-pass rules in wake of protests
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/07/china-covid-easing-restrictions/
 
China Scraps Most Covid-19 Testing, Quarantine Requirements
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-scraps-most-testing-quarantine-requirements-in-covid-19-policy-pivot-11670398522 

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Tuesday, December 6, 2022

CS Grads Deal with Big Tech Layoffs

Computer Science Students Face a Shrinking Big Tech Job Market
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/06/technology/computer-students-tech-jobs-layoffs.html
A new reality is setting in for students and recent graduates who spent years honing themselves for careers at the largest tech companies. 

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Germany Needs a New Economic Model

Germany confronts a broken business model
https://www.ft.com/content/50a462b3-0e8b-49e1-873c-9505760d4a66
Can the country’s industrial economy reinvent itself for an era without cheap gas from Russia?

Europe is racing to build natural-gas facilities to keep its economy afloat
https://www.wsj.com/articles/natural-gas-terminal-engineering-feat-germany-11670513353

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Monday, December 5, 2022

Beauty and the Human Brain

THE TRANSCENDENT BRAIN
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/12/how-the-human-brain-is-wired-for-beauty/672291/
Humans are evolutionarily drawn to beauty. How do such complex experiences emerge from a collection of atoms and molecules? 

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Questioning the Future of the Crypto Industry

The Crypto Industry Struggles for a Way Forward
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/05/technology/crypto-future-ftx.html

Blockchains, What Are They Good For?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/opinion/blockchains-what-are-they-good-for.html
Paul Krugman notes:
The romance of high tech also played a role, with the very incomprehensibility of crypto discourse acting, for a while, as a selling point. And then, as prices soared, fear of missing out — plus large outlays on marketing and political influence-buying — brought many others into the bubble.
It’s an amazing story, and also a tragedy. It’s not just the small investors who have lost much if not all of their life savings. The crypto bubble has had huge costs to society as a whole. Bitcoin mining alone uses as much energy as many countries; I’ve been trying to estimate the value of the resources consumed in producing fundamentally worthless tokens, and it’s probably in the tens of billions of dollars, not counting the environmental damage. 

The Unbearable Uselessness of Crypto
https://www.ft.com/content/028e0109-6e87-42ed-8480-996cf645ce04
“Cryptocurrency is a giant scam, although a complicated scam . . . ” So begins Stephen Diehl’s diatribe against the crypto industry…
He argues that crypto assets’ price is based largely on there being an even greater fool who believes the hype.
“After 14 years, it is still a solution in search of a problem. It’s not building a new financial system. It’s not building a new internet. It’s not an asset uncorrelated with the market. It’s not a hedge against inflation. It is a vehicle for pure, naked speculation detached from anything in the economy. It’s a casino that’s wrapped in all of these lies. When you tear back those lies, what’s left looks like a net negative for the world.” 

Crypto probably isn’t dead, but should it be?
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2022/11/23/23473340/crypto-ftx-sam-bankman-fried-contagion-bankruptcy-coinbase
For those who have been paying attention to the sector, this sort of feels like waking up from a worldwide hypnosis. The metaverse thing, which is basically Zoom meetings with legless cartoons, never made sense. Neither did this idea that images of pixelated punks and weird-looking monkeys were worth millions of dollars as NFTs. Thousands of crypto tokens and coins spun up out of thin air have been revealed to be nothing more than magic beans. Project after project has fallen apart, often taking customers’ money with them, and then there’s the multitude of outright crypto scams.

Crypto’s house of cards is falling down fast

Bitcoin - Digital Gold?
Foreign Central Banks Prefer Gold Reserves
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/12/01/why-central-banks-are-stockpiling-gold 

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Sunday, December 4, 2022

UK – Geographic Inequality

Health and wealth divides in UK worsening despite ‘levelling up’ drive, report finds
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2022/dec/04/health-and-wealth-divides-in-uk-worsening-despite-levelling-up-drive-report-finds 

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Recession versus Soft Landing


New Residential Investment is often a leading indicator:
A US housing recession has already arrived
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/housing/3764226-economists-a-us-housing-recession-has-already-arrived/

‘Soft landing’ is a terrible name for what’s coming
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/04/economy-soft-landing-prediction/ 

My take from July 25, 2022: Is a recession inevitable?
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3572084-is-a-recession-inevitable/

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