What we’re reading (1/1)
“Money Has Never Felt More Fake” (Vox). “If NFTs and crypto, as a concept, prevail, it’s unlikely all of the current projects and fads will. Everybody’s hoping they’ve got a golden ticket, or at least a gold-plated ticket, that they can sell before everyone else realizes what they’ve got is a fraud. Some people in the industry acknowledge that most of this stuff is likely to implode.”
“An Engineer's Hype-Free Observations On Web3 (And Its Possibilities)” (PSL). “The history of the Internet is, in part, the history of the birth, adoption, and stewardship of distributed protocols by the broader community. Blockchains follow in this tradition, but also break radically from it: they are the first protocols to arrive with an asset class attached. Protocols like SMTP (1981; email), TCP (1983; reliable packet transmission), HTTP (1991; web), and XMPP (1999; chat) all created immense value while capturing little for their inventors. Blockchains upend this, allowing inventors to capture considerable value for themselves.”
“71 Years Of Stock Market Data Reveals Investors May Be Happy In The New Year” (Yahoo!Finance). “Truist Advisory Services co-chief investment officer Keith Lerner found that going back to 1950, when the S&P 500 had a total return of at least 25% in a year, stocks usually rose in the following year. The outcome during that 71 year stretch: stocks advanced 82% of the time, or 14 out of 17 instances. “
“The Impact Of The COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution On Mental Health Outcomes” (Agrawal, et. al, NBER Working Paper). “While vaccines are primarily aimed at reducing COVID-19 transmission and mortality risks, they may have important secondary benefits…[w]e estimate that COVID-19 vaccination reduces anxiety and depression symptoms by nearly 30%. Nearly all the benefits are private benefits, and we find little evidence of spillover effects, that is, increases in community vaccination rates are not associated with improved anxiety or depression symptoms among the unvaccinated. We find that COVID-19 vaccination is associated with larger reductions in anxiety or depression symptoms among individuals with lower education levels, who rent their housing, who are not able to telework, and who have children in their household.”
“Who Won in Afghanistan? Private Contractors” (Wall Street Journal). “Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, military outsourcing helped push up Pentagon spending to $14 trillion, creating opportunities for profit as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq stretched on…[t]he Pentagon spent $6 million on a project that imported nine Italian goats to boost Afghanistan’s cashmere market. The project never reached scale. The U.S. Agency for International Development gave $270 million to a company to build 1,200 miles of gravel road in Afghanistan. The USAID said it canceled the project after the company built 100 miles of road in three years of work that left more than 125 people dead in insurgent attacks…[b]y the time President Donald Trump left office four years later, 18,000 contractors remained in Afghanistan, along with 2,500 troops.”
