Blog

An extra long list this week to catch up after Hurricane Dorian. Favorite quote this week: “Thus, accumulating evidence shows that over-representation of males in STEM fields is perhaps better framed as under-representation of males in reading fields and the latter is driven by relatively low reading achievement among males.”

• Circumstances in Which I Will Not Pet Your Dog. New Yorker. Yep, pretty much.
• Girls’ comparative advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in math-related fields. Marginal Revolution. Evidence that the gender gap in math/science is primarily caused by boys being terrible at reading in school.
• Active Learning Works But Students Don’t Like It. Marginal Revolution, again.
• The American Working Man Still Isn’t Working. Foreign Affairs. I was quite shocked by the fact that 13.7% of men age 25-54 are not working, up from 12.8% in 2007.
• Greta Thunberg Is the Anti-Trump. New Yorker. When I was sixteen I mostly played Mortal Kombat Trilogy all day after school. Inspiring!
• A crack just emerged in the financial markets: The NY Fed spends $53 billion to rescue the overnight lending market. CNN Business. Odd.
• A Lunar Space Elevator Is Actually Feasible & Inexpensive, Scientists Find. Observer. Science is so cool.
• Physicists Finally Nail the Proton’s Size, and Hope Dies. Quanta Magazine. Even when science is kind of boring, it’s still so cool.
• The boring technology behind a one-person internet company. Wenbin Fang, ListenNotes. Not investment-related at all, but I loved this article and found it encouraging as a fellow one-person internet company.

I really enjoyed the article about Google’s internal culture, but the key article this week is a short blog from PIMCO on the possibility of negative interest rates in the U.S.

• How Government Prolonged the Lobotomy. AIER. Super creepy.
• What is Amazon? Zack Canter. HT Tyler Cowen.
• Study: many of the “oldest” people in the world may not be as old as we think. Vox. I feel like this type of thing is going to pop up more and more as people do Big Data things.
• Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech. Wired.
• How One City Saved $5 Million by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm. Route Fifty.
• GitHub Stars Won’t Pay Your Rent. Medium.
• Interest Rates: Naturally Negative? PIMCO. The world is not prepared for a negative dollar interest rate.

Support for minimum wage hikes, food stamps, passive indexing, and free trade. I’m kind of all over the place this week. Plus an engraving of Adam Smith wearing one of those cool wigs like a boss.

• Congress has never let the federal minimum wage erode for this long. Economic Policy Institute.
• Verdict Is In: Food Stamps Put Poor Kids on Path to Success. Bloomberg.
• Trump Says U.S. Will Hit China With More Tariffs. NY Times.
• Winner Takes All Applies to Stocks, Too. Barry Ritholtz. Barry interprets this data as providing encouragement to both active investors and passive indexers, but I see it as strongly supporting indexing, and no support for active investing.
• The progressive case for free trade. Vox. This is an interesting piece. I agree with all of it, but this is most definitely NOT a “progressive” case for free trade. It’s a concise outline of the basic economic, moral, and libertarian case for free trade. A+ on the article, F- on picking a title for the article.