A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a subreddit called Wallstreetbets. The stock shot up to crazy valuations and eventually plummeted back down. Along the way the hedge funds nearly went under and the popular trading app Robinhood suspended trading in Gamestop, which in turn fueled a narrative that Wall Street was b...

We like to put things in categories: public versus private company; for profit versus charity; professional versus amateur; creator versus consumer; journalist versus blogger; teacher versus student; and so much more. Of course not all categorizations are binary. In academia, for instance, we have the faculties (e.g., chemistry, biology, physics) and degrees (Bachelor, Master, Doctor). Categories are a way of aggregating information. If I tell you that a company is public that is a shorthand ...

This will be the topic for my talk at DLD New York this coming Thursday. Here is the rough outline. If anyone has data to contribute I would much appreciate it since I am admittedly long on anecdotes and short on statistics. 1. Disappearance of growth. Here I will talk about how GDP is increasingly a bad measure for economic growth as we are moving to a world with lots of positive externalities. For instance, as Khan Academy grows it will reduce the number of traditional textbooks sold. That ...

I am still not finished reading “Capital in the 21st Century” but the following introduction to Chapter 11 really got me thinking:The overall importance of capital today […] is not very different from what it was in the eighteenth century. Only its form has changed: capital was once mainly land but is now industrial, financial and real estate.One of my main intuitions about the coming changes is that “information” will become more important than industrial, financial and real estate assets. O...