January 4th. First Monday of 2020. There’s enough in the web about The Call, so I’ll leave that to the experts.
Why Markets Boomed in a Year of Human Misery (NYT)
Neil Irwin and Weiyi Cai say it’s because of disposable income.
Job loss came from the lowly-paid workers.
Families without wage-losses received stimulus.
P.P.P. was received by farms and owners of businesses.
When it’s all tallied up, Americans’ cumulative after-tax personal income was $1.03 trillion higher from March to November of 2020 than in 2019.
Simultaneously, Americans were spending less on services such as restaurants and vacations, and started to spend on other goods. Still, however, there was a net positive in savings. These savings, in turn, went into either the stock market (up 16%) or a new house (prices up 8.4%).
There’s no indication that this money will be removed from the system, but the meteoric rise will certainly come to a halt.
Is an infrastructure boom in the works? (The Economist)
According to the IMF, increasing public investment by 1% of gdp across advanced and emerging economies would create 20m-33m jobs and lift gdp by 0.25-0.5% in the first year, and up to four times that after the second.
Governments are spending in two ways: maintenance and upgrades, and new capabilities including green projects. But the spending as a portfion of GDP is falling everywhere except China, where public-capital stock rose from 154% of GDP in 1992 to 165% in 2017, compared to the US which only spends 2.3% of GDP.
PPPs, or Public-Private Partnerships are rather risky because governments oftentimes pull, or people oppose them altogether. Still, though, some profitable enterprises such as green energy or 5G are profit-worthy enough to warrant a PPP.
So, can we predict who will get contracts maybe by seeing who has ties with government incumbets and bet that those companies will rise in value?
Would love to see the economics, risks, and implications of these PPPs aside from the ones mentioned above. Of course, Odebrech comes to mind, but not every PPP story has to be that way.
Did Irrigation Entrench the Patriarchy? (Blog)
Areas with low irrigation potential have higher female labour force participation and female property rights!
Irrigation increased a land’s value so people needed to defend it -> strong males.
Irrigation caused centralized control -> autocracy -> low female property rights.
Fostered collaboration (shared water and tech) -> less individualism -> less need for women to play a role in the fields.
The 2021 Crystal Ball for Emerging Tech (Morning Brew)
SPACs will help EVs go to market.
Telehealth will rise (UpWork data also explored.. interesting source of data!)
NLP growth.
Last mile deliveries from gig-economy.
Democratized AI/ML tools (DataRobot and H2O.ai)
The latter is the most interesting. Find a tool that only experts use, package it up nicely, and make the layman person use it. This helps tools reach far. Helps nascent technologies make the impact they should be making.