What we’re reading (12/11)
“The Next Age Of The Internet Could Suck Power Away From Big Tech While Living On The Same Backbone As Cryptocurrencies. Here's What To Know About Web3.” (Insider). “In the next era of the internet, you won't have a social account for each platform. Instead, you'll have a single social account, able to move with it from Facebook and Twitter, to Google, shopping websites, and more. Your moves may be cataloged on the same digital backbone that supports cryptocurrencies like bitcoin — blockchain — instead of massive corporate servers like Amazon Web Services. And this new iteration of the internet won't be controlled by a central power, meaning no single entity will govern it as Facebook, Google, and others govern their own empires.”
“This Surprising Investing Strategy Crushes The Stock Market Without Examining A Single Financial Metric” (MarketWatch). “I am not a professional stock picker, but over the past decade my portfolio has beaten the stock market by a factor of three to one. Unlike Peter Lynch, who advocated investing in the makers of products you love and who, in my estimation, stands out as one of the greatest of all stock pickers, I did not examine a single financial metric to build my portfolio. Instead, I simply ranked competitors in each industry based on customer love and then bet on the winner. My portfolio has performed so well because the market undervalues the economic power of customer love.”
“Managing Across The Corporate Life Cycle: CEOs And Stock Prices!” (Prof. Aswath Damodaran, Musings On Markets). “The notion that there is a collection of characteristics that makes a person a great CEO for a company, no matter what its standing, is deeply held and fed into by both academics and practitioner…[but] [i]f there is a take away from bringing a life cycle perspective to assessing CEO quality, it is that one size cannot fit all, and that a CEO who succeeds at a company at one stage in the life cycle may not have the qualities needed to succeed at another.”
“Why Are Lawyers Doing The Work Of Lawmakers?” (DealBook). “For aficionados of high-stakes litigation, this legal 3-D chess can be pretty exciting. But how should others think about these kinds of lawsuits? Plaintiffs’ lawyers say that they step in to redress wrongs because, far too often, the government won’t — and because there is no other way to get compensation to victims. But critics contend that using class action suits is far from an ideal way to obtain justice. For one thing, they say, the potential multimillion-dollar fee is too often the main motivation for the lawyers. For another, the results are often uneven[.]”
“The Cultural Origins Of The Demographic Transition In France” (Guillaume Blanc, Brown University). “This research shows that secularization accounts for the early decline in fertility in eighteenth-century France. The demographic transition, a turning point in history and an essential condition for development, took hold in France first, before the French Revolution and more than a century earlier than in any other country. Why it happened so early is, according to Robert Darnton, one of the “big questions of history” because it challenges historical and economic interpretations and because of data limitations at the time. I comprehensively document the decline in fertility and its timing using a novel crowdsourced genealogical dataset.”
