What we’re reading (6/24)
“The Green Wave Is Here…Don’t Get Left Behind” (American Consequences). “Whether or not you agree with the climate-change movement is irrelevant as an investor. The reality is the so-called “cool kids” – from Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, and Angela Merkel… to Mario Draghi and Yoshihide Suga… to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and President Biden – have designated this as their project du jour. And you want to be poised to benefit from the increased investments in the sector.”
“Restaurants Can Solve Their Staffing Crisis, But Higher Pay Alone Isn’t The Answer” (Dallas Morning News). “Anyone who believes that higher pay or federal policy changes alone will solve the industry’s hiring issues is missing the point…[i]n 2007, I founded Edwins, a French restaurant and culinary institute in Cleveland that employs and educates formerly incarcerated people. Of those leaving Edwins, 95% walk straight into new jobs, and less than 1% ever go back to prison. (Compare that to the national recidivism rate after three years, which is higher than 50%.)…unlike our struggling friends in the industry…we’re not experiencing labor shortages.”
“U.S. Power Reliability: Are We Kidding Ourselves?” (T&DWorld). “The average U.S. customer loses power for 214 minutes per year. That compares to 70 in the United Kingdom, 53 in France, 29 in the Netherlands, 6 in Japan, and 2 minutes per year in Singapore. These outage durations tell only part of the story. In Japan, the average customer loses power once every 20 years. In the United States, it is once every 9 months, excluding hurricanes and other strong storms.”
“What Crypto People Get Wrong” (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg). “The irony is that so many of the arguments made by crypto types imply especially low pecuniary rates of return on crypto. To the extent crypto is useful as collateral or for liquidity purposes, people will be more willing to hold crypto at lower pecuniary rates of return…If we eventually arrive at a world in which equities are expected to rise by say 5% to 7% a year, and Bitcoin by say 1%, then that will be a sign crypto has made it. The more general point is that while crypto has been a highly unusual asset class for its entire history, it won’t act like an unusual asset class forever.”
“Signs That We Face An Epistemological Crisis: Book Titles, 2021” (askblog). “[W]hat does it say about contemporary culture that so many heavyweights are writing on epistemology? This seems to me an indictment of: social media, certainly; political discourse, certainly; higher education, probably; journalism, probably. This may fit with a historical pattern. The barbarians sack the city, and the carriers of the dying culture repair to their basements to write.”
