Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Shareholder vs. Stakeholder Capitalism

It’s the 50th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s essay arguing that the chief responsibility of public companies is to increase profits for the shareholder. The occasion has prompted a surge of both celebration and handwringing. Veteran Wall Street observer Joe Nocera makes a case for why the current enthusiasm about “stakeholder capitalism” is misplaced:

As a matter of practicality, asking CEOs to make society better — the environment cleaner, working conditions safer, compensation higher — is beyond their competence and ability. It also invites inconsistencies. For example, doubling workers’ wages would make them better off, but it would require raising prices, making customers worse off. And if stakeholder capitalism has any teeth, it must mean that executives should on occasion act against the interest of their company’s owners. How is that a defensible management strategy?

2. Sweden’s Social Strategy

Sweden’s nonconformist approach to COVID has made the country a hero to some and a villain to others. Dr. Anders Tegnell, a bureaucrat working in a “drab backstreet building” in Stockholm, has become the reluctant face of the Swedish strategy. In an interview with The Financial Times, Tegnell outlines Sweden’s public health rationale:

At the outset, we talked very much about sustainability, and I think that’s something we managed to keep to. And also be a bit resistant to quick fixes, to realise that this is not going to be easy, it is not going to be a short-term kind of thing, it’s not going to be fixed by one kind of measure. We see a disease that we’re going to have to handle for a long time into the future and we need to build up systems for doing that…Sustainability, to a certain extent, is to have ice in your stomach because you need to believe in the long-term effects of what you’re doing and not start doubting them too early.

3. How Do Writers Get Style?

After teaching writing at Northwestern University for 30 years, master essayist Joseph Epstein reaches a writerly conclusion: writing cannot be taught. But, he adds, it can be learned:

Every superior writer I have known, or known about, was a slow reader. The reason is that writers read differently than non-writers. People without literary ambition might ask what a book means, whether it is significant, whether it gives pleasure. Writers ask these questions along with two others, which slow them down considerably: How exactly did the author achieve his effects, and what from his work can I appropriate—a euphemism, of course, for “steal”—for my own writing?

4. Scalia/Ginsburg: The Opera

In 2015, Derek Wang composed Scalia/Ginsburg, a modern comedic opera. It was based on the friendship that endured between the two Supreme Court Justices despite their opposing philosophies of constitutional interpretation. The Columbia Journal of Law & the Artspublished the libretto and asked each justice to write a preface. Two excerpts:

J. Ginsburg: My grade school music teacher, with brutal honesty, rated me a sparrow, not a robin. I was told to mouth the words, never to sing them.

J. Scalia: I, alas, have the nagging doubt that I could have been a contendah—for a divus, or whatever a male diva is called. My father had a good tenor voice, which he trained at the Eastman School of Music. I sang in the Georgetown Glee Club…I have sung in choirs and choral groups much of my life, up to and including my days on the D.C. Circuit. I suppose, however, that it would be too much to expect the author of Scalia/Ginsburg to allow me to play (sing) myself—especially if Ruth refuses to play (sing) herself.

You can listen to a broadcast of the opera on November 7th, 2020.

5. Suburban Sprawl: A National Defense Priority

Last Month, Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute tweeted out two photos showing that an average highway interchange in Houston takes up the same landmass as the city center of Siena, Italy. Texas Monthly hits back:

Cold War–era urban design philosophy in the U.S. prioritized sprawl because older cities that had urbanized pre–World War II—New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit—were seen as being susceptible to nuclear strikes. Less-dense cities such as Los Angeles and Houston were less likely to be targeted for a nuclear attack. Sprawl was a deterrent against Soviet aggression. The highways themselves were specifically intended to facilitate the reasonable objective of Houstonians not to get annihilated by a nuclear blast.

6. Raj Chetty’s Big Data

Bloomberg Businessweek offers an excellent summary of “Opportunity Insights” – Raj Chetty’s big data analysis of the American economy. The project goes beyond major government measurements and brings in significant private sector data, creating what is probably the most significant collaboration between business and economists in the modern era. The result is a comprehensive look at economic status and mobility – especially since the pandemic:

In today’s world, almost every economic transaction—a debit-card swipe, a direct deposit from an employer, an electronic bill of lading for a shipment of steel—has a digital fingerprint that’s captured and stored somewhere. Pull enough of this data together and, in theory, you have a God’s-eye view of the economy.

Chetty’s new co-authored paper on how COVID is shaping the US economy can be found here.

Websites Worth Reading

Meeting Money: Classic calculator of meeting costs 

Window Swap: Since we can’t travel

Zoom Work Station: Professor's online workspace

Feeds We Follow

@NYTTypos: A novice finds and shares typos 

@JeanieBuss: Part-owner and president of LA Lakers 

@ArchitectureHub: Cool architecture