What’s behind the productivity slowdown?
“The key theoretical result of the model is that the strategic effect dominates the traditional effect as the interest rate approaches zero; as a result, a given industry spends almost all of the time in the monopolistic region at a low enough interest rate. This implies that as the interest rate declines, the fraction of industries in the monopolistic region of the state space expands and aggregate productivity growth falls. This induces an inverted-U shaped production-side relationship between economic growth and the interest rate. Starting from a high level of the interest rate, growth increases as the interest rate declines because the traditional effect dominates the strategic effect. However, as the interest rate declines further, the endogenous investment response of the leader and follower causes the strategic effect to dominate, and economic growth begins to fall. The key theoretical result shows that this positive relationship between the interest rate and economic growth must happen before the interest rate hits zero.”
3G slash and burn out of vogue
“The firm’s top executives themselves sounded the alarm on the shift last year. “I’m a terrified dinosaur,” said 3G co-founder Jorge Paulo Lemann at the Milken Institute conference in April. “I’ve been living in this cozy world of old brands [and] big volumes. You could just focus on being very efficient and you’d be OK. All of a sudden we are being disrupted in all ways.” He added: “We bought brands and we thought they would last forever. Now, we have to totally adjust to new demands from clients.”"
“In my 23 years in the State Capitol, three as Budget Director, Amazon was the single greatest economic development opportunity we have had. Amazon chose New York and Virginia after a year-long national competition with 234 cities and states vying for the 25,000-40,000 jobs. For a sense of scale, the next largest economic development project the state has completed was for approximately 1,000 jobs. People have been asking me for the past week what killed the Amazon deal. There were several factors.”
Family first in autobiographies, but whom?
"Imagine that you are writing the story of your life. Almost sure you will make allusions to your parents, but will both of them have the same prominence in your biography or will you spend more words in one of them? In that case, which one will have more relevance? Your father or your mother?
This experiment analyses 118 autobiographies from the Project Gutenberg and count how many times do authors make allusions to their fathers and mothers."