Your Woman
w.242 | Repeal the Laws of Economics, Rising Storm: Labor Markets, Mr. Beast, Schooling Survey
Dear Friends,
I’m a bit late this week because I got waylaid listening to Moby on Saturday morning. He has some dark tunes. And it was a good reminder for me of the impact that music can have and what prompted me to do “Song of the Week” in the first place.
Today's Contents:
Sensible Investing: Trends
Song of the Week: Your Woman
Sensible Investing: Trends
Shall We Repeal the Laws of Economics? New Howard Marks Memo. It’s obvious to anyone who has studied economics or political science, but it’s said well and a useful reminder in our current political economic climate and the resulting choices we see.
Anyone who thinks it’s better to live in a centrally planned economy that prefers evenly distributed benefits over free markets hasn’t studied history (or read Animal Farm). It may sound good in theory, but it has never worked. The laws of economics will always win out eventually. Nations can respect them and reap the associated benefits, or they can try to contravene them and pay the price in terms of underperformance. In the world of politics, there can be limitless benefits and something for everyone. But in economics, there are only tradeoffs.
The Rising Storm: Building a Future-Ready Workforce to Withstand the Looming Labor Shortage. This is a good report from LightCast summarizing all the data we already know about increased dependency ratios (see below). And our demographic challenges are further complicated by the impact of drugs on prime-age men: Between substance addiction and current incarceration, a total of 4.6 million Americans are out of the labor force. The majority of these are prime-age men—the demographic that many of the occupations facing critical labor shortages rely on.
One of the challenges with venture-backed labor marketplaces and staffing companies is that the market sorts out the imbalances fairly quickly in the medium term (i.e., 1 to 3 years, 5 years max). The profit or arbitrage opportunity exists only initially, giving false hope for securing long-term profits from an enduring monopoly.
There might be other opportunities, though. Productivity will need to go up.
I’ve been digging into different work trends and values. A selection of sources that are worth sharing from the last few weeks:
How to Succeed in Mr. Beast Production. This is a leaked memo written by Jimmy Donaldson, the eponymous YouTube star. It contains lots of good ideas and concepts written bluntly.
Derek Sivers. I hadn’t read his work before, but I read Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur this week. It combines Derek’s tales of starting, building, and selling CD Baby into an entertaining and useful one-hour read. I got it on Libby from the Austin Library. Worthwhile.
The Most Successful and Influential Americans Come from a Surprisingly Narrow Range of ‘Elite’ Educational Backgrounds. A study published in Nature.
Obviously, this is information is highly backward skewed and not reflective of the world today, but still interesting as a snapshot in history.
2024 SCHOOLING IN AMERICA: Public Opinion on K–12 Education, Transparency, Technology, and School Choice. A good source of recent survey data shows strong support for alternative education formats in schooling. It’s all on an avalanche trend line.
Song of the Week: Your Woman
Here on YouTube.
It’s a one-hit wonder, but one-offs can have greatness. This song has a new life as Duo Lipa has remixed the sample.
Your Woman was written by White Town's sole performer, Jyoti Prakash Mishra, a self-described straight-edge Marxist, as a gender flip in which he sang from the point of view of a woman in a bad relationship. It’s funny that the album is called Women in Technology.
White Town: Yeah. Obviously growing up Asian in all-white towns has always been big on my brain. And for me, I’d meet Asians and I wouldn’t be Asian enough, and I’d meet whites and I wouldn’t be white enough, so it’s like, ‘Well, what is my actual identity? What’s my narrative?’ When I started writing ‘Your Woman’, I was thinking that I need to open myself up to try and see things from as many different perspectives as possible. Can I write this song so it’s one thing, but it’s not one thing? And if you look at it another way, it’s confusing? And if it’s about me, why am I singing, ‘I could never be your woman,’ as a man? And if it were written from a female point of view, why are there a few other lines that don’t actually fit?
The YouTube comments give you a sense of a song’s cultural meaning. Everyone agrees: this song is timeless.
1997: Nostalgia
2020: Nostalgia
3020: Nostalgia
“Your Woman” by White Town
Just tell me what you've got to say to me
I've been waiting for so long to hear the truth
It comes as no surprise at all you see
So cut the crap and tell me that we're throughSelfie of the Week
This is an old picture. But it was from a fun night out in Beirut in 2018. I went with a group of Kauffman Fellows to explore the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Lebanon. My dear friend Yousef (BECO Capital) organized the trip with his then-partner Amir (COTU VC). As we walked on the streets from one bar/club to the next with our group, I exclaimed to my friend Bianca that this (what we were doing) was ‘the essence of existence.’ She thought that was the most hilarious thing to say and kept repeating it.
Beirut is a super cool city with a sophisticated style that comes from a rich cultural heritage existing under a daily existential dread from the political deadlock, escalating violence, and extremist undercurrents.
This week, Lebanon is on the mind due to the incredible communication device targeting Hezbollah. I can only hope that this act will, in the long term, be a step toward increased stability and peace in the region. Thinking of my friends always.
Thanks for reading, friends. Please always be in touch.
As always,
Katelyn