Bloomberg (via Mint): “Hybrid work is the norm. The idea of a tug-of-war between managers and workers over attending office has been exaggerated. Polls shows that employees do value some degree of face time and want to be in the office roughly two days a week. Managers prefer three. “Overwhelmingly, managers are pretty much aligned with employees,” Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom says. The exceptions are people who have “30-plus years of work experience and have been successful and have done that all in person… but they are real outliers.” Instead, most bosses are becoming comfortable with managing and evaluating employees they don’t see every day—and not with creepy surveillance tools. As evidence, Bloom points to data he said surprised him: that after resisting giving employees Mondays and Fridays at home in 2021, in 2022 managers seemed to become more comfortable with an in-office schedule that allows for remote work on four or more contiguous days.”
WSJ: “When it comes to money and real estate, most of us make careful arrangements for what will happen after we die. Why not take equal care of our stories, which can’t be retrieved once lost? Think of the stories you’ve heard your partner or parents tell a thousand times. They are precious. When someone dies, we need those stories—not in a vague, half-remembered, secondhand form but in the original version, with all the plot twists, nuances and personal storytelling quirks. Your own words and insights are more illuminating than others’ eulogies and tributes. Preserve your stories now, while the memories are vivid. The best stories show not just what you have done but why and how. Starting points include how you got on a career path; what you are trying to do with your life and how it is working out; your biggest triumphs and failures, and what you have learned from them. Also worthwhile: the oddest, funniest, most wonderful and awful things that have happened to you.”
David Perell: “Our kids have neither agency nor autonomy because the system is explicitly designed to strip it away from them. Contemporary schools, like Ford’s factories, dehumanize the people within them. Their individuality is squashed. Their passions are silenced. These were the explicit goals of the Prussian system, which we so readily adopted. Our school system is a failure because it succeeded in its original mission.”
Arnold Kling: “Government does not stay limited…The theory of checks and balances is that by standing up multiple government institutions with differing goals and powers, we can turn competitive human nature against the natural tendency to abuse power. Each branch of government will be held accountable by the other branches. Unfortunately, checks and balances run afoul of the human tendency to seek authority without accountability. It is in our nature, or at least in the nature of some of us, to seek power and to evade checks on our power. Just as businessmen love competition in theory but try their best to avoid it in practice, public officials do their best to subvert whatever accountability mechanisms are in place.”
Giorgio Castiglia: “Given the inherent uncertainty of our world, producers will often be mistaken in their evaluation of what consumers’ wants and needs will be. The result of such mistakes is leftover product on which they must take a loss. If the firm does not incorporate such losses into future decision making, it may continue to make losses, eventually reaching an untenable financial situation. In other words, if producers are forced to bear the costs of their own mistaken choices, such losses have a purpose in a market economy. They tell the firm that what it is producing is not of sufficient value to undergo the costs of its production. Thus, “waste” from mistaken production decisions is part of a critical feedback loop in market economies. If producers were protected from bearing the costs of such waste, we would expect more of it to occur.”
