Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

Harrowing:

A crewman on a commercial tuna-fishing boat was the first to spot it: something shiny and metallic in the water off the ship’s bow. The crewman alerted the navigator, and the 280-foot San Nikunau slightly altered course to avoid a collision. As the ship came closer, the object revealed itself to be a small boat, an aluminum dinghy. It was late in the afternoon on November 24 of last year. The New Zealand–based San Nikunau was in open water, a couple of days out of Fiji, amid the vastness of the southern Pacific—an expanse the size of a dozen Saharas in which there are only scattered specks of land.

The dinghy, fourteen feet long and low to the water, was designed for traveling on lakes or hugging a shoreline. There was no way it should’ve been in this part of the Pacific. If the San Nikunau had passed a quarter mile to either side, likely no one would have noticed it. Anyway, it appeared empty, another bit of the ocean’s mysterious flotsam. But then, as the big ship was approaching the dinghy, something startling happened. From the bottom of the tiny boat, emerging slowly and unsteadily, rose an arm—a single human arm, skinny and sun-fried and waving for help.

There were, as it turned out, three people on the boat. Three boys. Two were 15 years old and the third was 14. They were naked and emaciated. Their skin was covered with blisters. Their tongues were swollen. They had no food, no water, no clothing, no fishing gear, no life vests, and no first-aid kit. They were close to death. They had been missing for fifty-one days.

More here.

While all sorts of strange correlations have been found between the stock market and real world… [cont.]

[Full post at my Bloomberg blog]

Fun question:

You live in the dorms and your upstairs neighbor, LeBrian Skinner, is a serious basketball player.  He is about to declare for the NBA draft, but he fears that his merely average height will put him at a disadvantage.  To compensate for his relative shortness, LeBrian decides that he needs to have a vertical jump of at least 36 inches.

In the evening you can hear LeBrian practicing his vertical leap, since he lives directly above you: you hear a loud creak when he first jumps followed by a loud thump when he lands again.  You use a stopwatch to time the interval between the moment he first leaves the floor and the moment when he lands again.  You measure this interval as 0.8 seconds.

Assuming that LeBrian lands with his legs fully extended (in the same position as when he leaves the floor), how high is he jumping?  Is it enough?

Give it some thought, and then find the answer here.

One of the more remarkable unintended consequences of combining the commodity boom,… [cont.]

[Full post at my Bloomberg blog]

The Speed Desk at Bloomberg has the quick-witted folks who read headlines in an eye-blink and… [cont.]

[Full post at my Bloomberg blog]

Interesting list of the most marketable athletes in the world. It’s led by sprinter Usain… [cont.]

[Full post at my Bloomberg blog]

• Vancouver industrial property prices up 20-fold in six years (Source)
• Ira Sohn conference contest (Source)
• Death Derivatives Emerge From Longevity Risks(Source)
• How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect (Source)
• Mystery life everyday (Source)
• Commodity Prices and Paradigm Shifts (Source)
• Bobby Fischer: from prodigy to pariah | Sport | The Observer (Source)
• Food Like You’ve Never Seen Before  (Source)
• Microsoft’s Bill Gates says he advocated Skype takeover (Source)
• China’s sugar rush may be ending (Source)
• The trouble with Bitcoin (Source)

Interesting new paper argues that the pace of creative destruction in the U.S. economy has accelerated and changed in last few decades:

Creative Destruction and Finance: Evidence from the Last Half Century

Abstract:

The rate of creative destruction among public firms increases in the U.S. during the period 1960-2009. We document statistically significant increases in big business turnover, changes in market share, the difference in growth rates between firms that gain and lose market share, and other measures that show an increasingly dynamic economy. The increase in economic dynamism is driven by increasingly fast-growing firms that exhibit increasingly high growths in total factor productivity, value-added, and profit margins, and have increasingly high R&D spending and patent grants. The type of firm that generates this creative destruction changes during the sample period. Creators are increasingly smaller and younger, and increasingly issue shares and debt; the average creator would have run out of cash by year-end had it not raised capital, and this financial dependence increases throughout the sample period.