Geopolitical Risk Has Little Stock Market Impact

https://piie.com/commentary/op-eds/historically-geopolitical-risk-has-had-little-market-impact

15 Best-Educated Congressional Districts and Why They Matter

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/upshot/this-list-of-well-educated-districts-explains-why-georgias-election-is-close.html

Replica Food in Japan

https://www.economist.com/news/business/21723163-digital-menus-and-food-blogs-are-taking-toll-plastic-replicas-how-sham-food-became-big

How the Federal Reserve Serves US Foreign Intelligence

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-fed-accounts-intelligence-specialrepo-idUSKBN19H198

Twitter & News

Via Farhad Manjoo:

"Twitter is making the news dumber.  The service is insider and clubby.  It exacerbates groupthink.  It prizes pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious."

Do White House Meetings Boost a Firm's Market Value?

Benefits of political access:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-white-house-meetings-boost-a-firms-market-value-1494006706

Can Soda Soothe Your Stomach?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-fizzy-soda-help-an-upset-stomach-1494068403

Making Big $ Tweeting Facts

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/16/25-year-old-kris-sanchez-makes-500000-a-year-from-uberfacts.html

Underreported Stories

https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/11/12/18850/fuel-nuclear-bomb-hands-unknown-black-marketeer-russia-us-officials-say

Oxford Comma Helps Win Labor Dispute

https://qz.com/932004/the-oxford-comma-a-maine-court-settled-the-grammar-debate-over-serial-commas-with-a-ruling-on-overtime-pay-for-dairy-truck-drivers/

"Tariff Engineering"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/06/why-a-weird-legal-dispute-about-whether-the-snuggie-is-a-blanket-actually-matters-a-lot/?utm_term=.c7bd9eb14e0f

The "Winner Effect"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/world/europe/sweden-fraud-fox-news-commentator-trump.html

Bling Diplomacy - Saudi Style

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/world/middleeast/saudi-king-indonesia-wealth.html?_r=0

The Wisdom of Wiser Crowds

How to make better predictions with crowds/groups.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wisdom-of-even-wiser-crowds-1487265722

The Triffin Delemma

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-real-trade-problem-is-money-1485302886

The Major Blindspots in Macroeconomics

"In retrospect, the failure of the discipline to predict and prevent the crisis was based on deep conceptual faults.  One of these concerned a mysterious refusal to engage with the role of the banking and finance system in the economy.

Has the profession borrowed too little from other disciplines and become a methodological monoculture?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/magazine/the-major-blind-spots-in-macroeconomics.html

Are We Counting Economic Growth All Wrong?

"As the economy has shifted from one that primarily produced things - refrigerators and cars, guns and shoes - to one that now deals largely in services and information, economists have grown more and more skeptical that the traditional measure of gross domestic product, the nation's total output, is accurately capturing much of the economy's innovation and improvements."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/business/economy/what-is-gdp-economy-alternative-measure.html?_r=0

Humans Only Meant to Live Until 40

"Our bodies evolved to live about 40 years."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/opinion/sunday/the-conversation-placebo.html

Negative Trump Tweets Don't Necessarily Hurt Corporations

http://www.wsj.com/graphics/trump-market-tweets/

Marilyn vos Savant on Stock Prices

Q: You once wrote that shares of stock are not actually worth their stated price on the market. Can you elaborate?

A: First, when you buy stock, your money usually doesn’t go to the company. Instead, you buy stock from other investors. When more and more people buy stock, the price goes up because buyers outnumber sellers. And as brokerage statements indicate the latest selling price, portfolios inflate. But investors can’t buy the same stock back and forth numerous times, inflating its price, and think they’re creating real dollars.Say that 10 million investors each own 100 shares of stock in a company. Then I pay $1 more than the last person for a share. As a result, the stock price goes up by $1 and all 10 million shareholders see their portfolios rise by $100. But did I just create $1 billion of wealth, the total of that increase? Of course not.
The apparent $1 billion is generated by what I call the “Cheshire multiple” (after the disappearing cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). Only a small percentage of investors can sell their shares at the price on their brokerage statements. As soon as sellers outnumber buyers, the price will fall, and portfolios will shrink due to that same multiple. So it works both ways. Most of this so-called wealth simply vanishes. It never really existed.

https://parade.com/541112/marilynvossavant/taking-stock-of-the-market/

Logic to a Fear of Flying

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-logic-of-our-fear-of-flying-1486738105

Interesting Jobs of the Week

• The "Click Doctors" at Jukin media
• The oil industry analyst (Gary Ross) who knows everybody.

Why People Drink Bloody Mary's & Tomato Juice on Airplanes

Altitudes impact on our taste buds:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2017/02/spirits-sky

Inside the Mind of a Mugger

http://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/Inside-the-Mind-of-a-Mugger-414027763.html

Human Attention Span vs. Goldfish

Is a human's attention span really just 8 seconds?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-your-attention-span-shorter-than-a-goldfishs-1487340000

Fact of the Day: Institutional Investors

"Blackrock holds a stake greater than 5 percent in 75 of the 100 largest companies, according to data compiled by Jerry Davis, a professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.  State Street has more than 5 percent of 23 of the largest companies, while Capital Group owns more than 5 percent of 20 of the biggest companies."

Betteridge's Law of Headlines

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Chef Mark Miller and Tyler Cowen

Food as the ultimate intellectual exploration: https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/mark-miller-chef-chez-panisse-taco-chile-aba3c579e3c2#.bncu6mfq5 (video)

Trump in Perspective

http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/trump-perspective/

Stock-Buying Myths Dispelled

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sell-in-may-and-go-away-mostly-a-myth-but-not-entirely-1486350540

Weirdest Meal Ever?

"It's hard to top Greenland's kiviak.  This unique dish is created by taking a bunch of seabirds known as little auks and stuffing them into a hollowed-out sealskin - beaks, feet, feathers, and all.  That rubbery package is then sewn up and shoved under a rock, where it ferments and disintegrates for up to 18 months, before being dug up and served straight from the seal.  The resulting mush is said to have the flavor of an extremely pungent Gorgonzola cheese."

Another food fact: KFC is so popular in Japan on Christmas Day that the fast-food restaurant takes reservations months in advance - and some franchises even offer table service and alcohol.

Only 3,000 People in World Cann Afford $250 Million Mansion

https://www.yahoo.com/news/250m-los-angeles-home-most-expensive-listed-us-064744920.html

The Global Secrets Trump is About to Discover

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/top-secret-government-documents-confidential-intelligence-214665

Word of the Day: Sprezzatura

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura

Japan's Obsessive Train Culture

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/if-you-thought-japans-trains-were-something-else-wait-until-you-see-its-trainspotters/2017/01/05/1049fe38-c5c6-11e6-a22f-f4d703887285_story.html?utm_term=.038ac7e205ab