What We’re Reading
A few good posts the Collab team came across this week …
Population
The provisional report, based on a review of more than 99 percent of the birth certificates filed nationwide, counted 3.853 million births last year. That’s the lowest tally since 1987.
Births have been declining since 2014, but 2017 saw the greatest year-to-year drop — about 92,000 less than the previous year.
Doing good
A tear-down of B Corp performance:
Experience
Not as good as it seems:
Young people typically start out as analysts, working in sales, or some other support staff role. They’re doing grunt work and learning on the job. How many of these 13.4 million are portfolio managers or advisors who have trading or investing discretion? I would venture a guess that it’s not that many.
You know who makes the big-time investment decisions? People with experience!
You know who made the most impactful mistakes leading up to the financial crisis? People with experience!
Reboot
Papua New Guinea, a nation of over 8 million, has announced that it will shut down Facebook for a month. The PNG government says that the shutdown will give it time to assess the spread of objectionable content on the site like porn and fake news. The government also said that it’s exploring the creation of its own social media site to replace Facebook.
Scrutiny
Good philosophy from Jeff Bezos:
“My own view on this is that all large institutions of any kind whether they be government agencies, nonprofits, universities, and certainly including big corporations, deserve to be inspected and scrutinized,” he said. “It’s normal.”
Bezos said he talks about this inside Amazon. “I say, ‘Look, we are a large corporation. We deserve to be inspected. It’s going to happen. Don’t take it personally.’ Because when you take it personally, you start to do things that are counterproductive.”
Concentration
Wow:
The Big East, Ivy League, Pac-12, Big-12, ACC, and Big Ten are all over 70% in sending college grads to major metro areas.
The Ivy League grads are even more concentrated. A quarter of all Ivy League grads live in New York, Washington, or San Francisco.
Have a nice weekend.