June 28, 2020

Tulsa, Goldman's font, communion, and bicycles

A note for the reader: Before this newsletter moved to Substack it was an email thread between friends. I’m posting the previous emails here for completeness, and so that if I invoke a previous comment readers can refer to them.

Oh, Hello….

First, a correction to the correction: in fact it was Emily Thai who introduced me to the Sound of Colleagues that I shared last week. Ata simply did what he does best and memed it.

Next, an update: back in Chicago (for now) after a long stay in NC. The traveling yesterday precluded me from getting this out on Saturday, as I would have preferred.

Its been really nice to be back in my apartment; last time I was here there was snow on the ground.

Finally, next week will be the start of the 2nd half of 2020. It is hard to believe that I am now on my thirteenth installment of these newsletters. Even harder to believe nobody has asked me to take them off the list!

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1) Under-taught History: The small Trump rally last week brought into focus the Tulsa Race Massacre, which I personally did not learn about in my history class, and suspect many people didn’t. This account from the New York Times is difficult to read but important piece on the continuing challenges of fully comprehending the horror. (Thanks to Aren for sending)

2) Price-to-Book (Antiqua): Goldman Sachs released their own font. I hate how much I love it.

3) Scrollytelling: New heights have been reached in this digital medium by the New York Times. This article on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is as beautiful as it is poignant.

4) 2020 Viz-ion: I don’t know this person, I don’t trust their analysis, but this should win an award for best data viz. [Relatedly, I don’t trust the Economist anymore]

5) Holy, Holy, Holy Zoom: I find communion to be a fascinating practice in the Christian tradition. Due to COVID, churches everywhere have stopped being able to offer their parishioners this cannibalistic ritual of their savior. What has now taken its place for many catholics is the old tradition of ocular communion, a feast for the eyes, if you will. Which is too bad for our President, because communion is his only form of asking for forgiveness.

6) Silver Linings: Bicycles were invented as the result of a volcanic eruption. Maybe COVID will give us clubs where we can feel surrounded by people but don’t come into contact with the type of people who frequent clubs. Or just more of this, which has been 100 years in the making.

7) Push, then pull: Consider the door handle

8) Fun, or, Upending American Theaters: How a 29-minute movie filmed on Zoom topped the box office.

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Your weekly recommendation: Chernobyl is a masterpiece.

A word of caution: when I watched it, I felt myself becoming more and more opposed to nuclear energy. To my knowledge, this wrong-headed. The weight of research I have seen largely points to the safety of modern nuclear power. And we should be weary of acute incidents (Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island) that calcify in our reasoning while less salient deaths do not. While we can think of all the deaths from Chernobyl, it is much harder to think of the 9% of all deaths, every year, caused by air pollution. Or the deaths that result from downstream impacts of a lack of access to cheap, reliable energy. We need to take bold action on climate change, and we need to address global pollution. Nuclear, I believe, can and should play a complementary role with other renewables in the future of energy (perhaps leading us towards net zero/net negative by powering massive Direct Air Capture?). Open to other thoughts on this, if folks have strong, conflicting feelings.

This is similar to another persistent issue I refer to as “governing from the counterfactual.” When there are (bad/good) instances on one side and a steady drip (of bad/good) on the other, we are biased in our reasoning to overweight the instances, and worse, our institutions are similarly designed to protect against acute incidents for which they could be blamed. For example, coming out of the financial crisis many lenders were concerned with the ramifications of lending to “subprime” borrowers, both for political and financial reason.

As we’ve seen (page 6) this hesitation has prevented the market from rebounding to pre-crisis levels. This is incredibly concerning, as credit scores are correlated with income and race (the income paper understates the correlation between subprime status and income, as there can be lots of variation within prime and subprime status that is not explained by income). While it is not for everyone, always, in every geography, homeownership was, and is, on average one of the best deals for building wealth for low-income Americans. By shutting these consumers out of the market we cause a small and steady drip of people failing to reach economic stability. This drip has its own impacts downstream.

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Graphs of the week:

1) [WSJ] Protests and riots didn’t have a long-term impact on the economy in Minneapolis, defying expectations. Looks like all those takes about the restructuring of the police force being a scary and bad thing that will bring about lawlessness/gangs/whatever are not held by the good citizens of Minneapolis.

2) [WSJ] We’re seeing cautioned behavior due to opening too fast. I expect that this will be more psychologically scarring on many than we think. On the other side of this, many will not believe it is safe to return (in a restricted fashion) to their daily lives even if it is.

Slow. Long. Painful recovery.

PPP is expiring soon while people should be staying home; Congress needs to make the money machine go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Infrastructure. Digital education. Green energy. Wrap it all in some consols and call it a day.

Our children are being undereducated, the planet is on fire, cars are annoying and I hate them. Too long we’ve treated deficits on paper as more important than deficits in the components of our real economy — human capital (health, education), social capital (communities), physical capital (trains! and robots), natural capital (the air we breathe, the fortitude of our ecologies).

Your friend,

Harrison