- “There is no amount of growth that can’t be destroyed by an investor’s temptation to grab too much of it. And there is no opportunity so appealing that it will catch the eye of someone who refuses to look.But greed and fear aren’t always character flaws. People with the best intentions and ethics fall for their temptation. The two traits evolve from something innocent: the amount of confidence we have that our actions influence our outcomes.”
I am currently teaching, at the Gokhale Institute, a course on Behavioral Finance. This blog post will be a part of the required reading when I teach the section on overconfidence (and it’s mirror image) - “A Facebook press officer said, in a prepared statement: “This is one study of many on this topic, and it should be considered that way.” The statement quoted from the study itself, which noted that “Facebook produces large benefits for its users,” and that “any discussion of social media’s downsides should not obscure the fact that it fulfills deep and widespread needs.”
What happens if you go cold turkey on Facebook? I haven’t read the paper itself, but this article from the NYT is a useful read – but not for the usual Facebook bashing reasons. There are benefits to using Facebook, for all of us. I myself no longer have the Facebook app on my phone, but freely admit to checking Facebook every now and then on the browser on my phone. - “Mere hours into the first day of the Google block, my devices have tried to reach Google’s servers more often than the 15,000 times they tried to ping Facebook’s the entire week before. By the end of the week, my devices have tried to communicate with Google’s servers over 100,000 times, comparable to Amazon, at 293,000 times during its block. Most of Google’s pings seem to be in the form of trackers, ads, and resources built into websites. ”
Speaking of which, what might life look like if you decided to go cold turkey on Google? Much worse, it turns out – your productivity takes a direct hit, as the article above makes clear. - “We’ve made the case for the divergence among equipment manufacturers before: Ultimately robots and excavators aren’t dependent on the same business cycles. This is now playing out.”
Partially because my own research during the PhD was on this topic, but also because it is a useful way to start thinking about which sectors in the economy tend to move together, and which don’t. More – does this relationship hold over time? - “But the rental market is largely fragmented and unorganized. The build-to-rent model that has worked well globally in many countries hasn’t even scratched the surface here. It is a space ripe for disruption.And in the past 3-4 years, a slew of startups have begun to do just that, particularly targeting young adults and millennials (those in their 20s and early 30s) who need a place to stay when they move out of their parents’ nest or are moving to a new city.”
This had to happen sooner or later in India – it was simply a function of the way the real estate market is, and has been in India for some time. Watch this space – I’d argue that future growth in India’s real estate sector will happen in this fashion.
EconForEverybody 