Innovation & Productivity

A weekly commentary on current events. Follow populyst to receive notification. Please contact us for data or other information concerning the views below. High growth companies As long as there is no shortage of liquidity in the market, growing companies that exemplify secular shifts in consumption could see a boost in their valuations. This includes … Read more Wednesday Briefs – 13 May 2020

There is plenty that we do not know about the coronavirus. But let us take stock of the things that we do know for sure, and of some other things that we will soon know. Real-world Exponentiality By now, a child understands exponential growth. If you start with one apple on March 1st and double every … Read more A Few Certainties About Covid-19

Or how Greta Thunberg can create more converts. “Nature is not a temple. It is a workshop, and a human being is the worker in it.”                               _                           … Read more De-Politicizing Climate Activism

“You go to some of these places [Midwestern cities], the question they ask when they meet you is ‘where did you go to high school’?… The fact that where you went to high school is a social marker places you in a community. You go to Washington DC and nobody cares where you went to … Read more Talking About Cities, with Aaron Renn

A user’s content and browsing history are monetizable assets. Rather than tax, regulate or break up Facebook and Google, we should ask that they pay for the monetizable assets that they have so far mined for free. These assets are a user’s content and browsing history. As with all types of mining, the tech giants … Read more Tech Giants Should Pay Users

The Wharton Africa Business Forum took place in Philadelphia on November 3-5, 2017. Present were the Finance Minister of Nigeria, the CEO of Ethiopian Airlines and other business leaders (notably from lead sponsors McKinsey & Company and the Boston Consulting Group) and educators. The event was attended by hundreds of participants including Wharton faculty, students … Read more Notes from the Wharton Africa Business Forum

This post will be continuously updated as we learn about new projects. Go to the bottom of the page for new entries. On the three main vectors of wealth creation, African countries have lagged other developing nations for several decades. Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest region of the world and suffers from poor infrastructure, uneven … Read more New Infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa

This article first appeared at Foreign Affairs. How countries hit the demographic sweet spot. Demographics are among the most important influences on a country’s overall economic performance, but compared with other contributors, such as the quality of governance or institutions, their impact is underappreciated. Demographic factors, such as the age structure of a population, can determine whether a … Read more The Economics of Dependency

A decision that could fix Twitter or hasten its demise. This is not the first article to suggest that Twitter can generate some revenues by charging its users, but perhaps we can offer some new angles to the discussion. To begin, it is helpful to differentiate between the different types of Twitter users. These seem to … Read more To Save or Ruin Twitter

If you and your neighbor have the same income and expenses except that he rides the bus for free every day while you pay a fare, he will be richer than you. Until recently, this was obvious: the neighbor is a free rider while you pay your way. But now, the obvious is presented as … Read more Passive Funds Are Just Free-Riding Active Funds

by Ravi Srinivasan (Ravi discussed this post at the BreakingBank$ podcast. His segment starts at 20:10.) Modi’s demonetization was the other November 8th global earthquake. A thorough historical record will show that not one but two man-made events shook the world on 8 November 2016. One was of course the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency … Read more India’s Disruptive Gamble

In constructing the populyst Index™, we use multiple sources to arrive at a rating for two of the index’s three pillars: Innovation & Productivity and Society & Governance. However our Demographics rating is developed by populyst. The score ranges from -2 to +2. Countries of the West and of the former Soviet bloc all rate at or below … Read more 2016 populyst Index™ First Quartile Demographic Scores

The idea of the populyst index™ is that there are three main vectors of wealth creation in any economy: Innovation & Productivity, Demographics & Health, and Society & Governance. Innovation & Productivity encompasses education, infrastructure and the creation of intellectual property assets. Demographics & Health includes population growth, the age profile of the population and health … Read more Sweden Tops populyst Index™ Ranking

Aaron M. Renn, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal, invited founder Sami J. Karam to discuss populyst and the populyst index. Topics include the economies of America and China, Europe’s demographic stagnation and Africa’s population explosion. TO HEAR THE PODCAST, CLICK HERE OR ON THE TIMELINE BELOW:

“I think, if you want to write a new narrative at some specific moment in the story of a city, it is important that you have to feel the transformation and see the transformation. So the physical transformation is important but always there is more a spiritual thing, as happens with emotional connections and inspirational … Read more Learning from Medellín with Alejandro Echeverri

In the first installment, I made a case that hedge funds can regain their popularity by reverting to their initial mandate which was to be hedged. I examine here how such a model hedge fund would have performed in the past 50 years if it had returned: 0% in all years when the market was down. 75% … Read more The Way Forward for Hedge Funds – 2

Hedge funds should go back to hedging and also consider lower fees. Equity hedge funds are under tremendous pressure, having underperformed their benchmark in nearly every year since 2008. But can it really be true that the average equity hedge fund is no better over the long run than granny’s passive indexed ETF or mutual fund that tracks … Read more The Way Forward for Hedge Funds – 1

Something a little different for our readers in this holiday season. Happy holidays to all! The phrase “management by walking around” became popular in business circles in the 1980s and 1990s. Its import was that a corporate manager at any level, even the CEO, should not just manage from his distant marbled office at the top … Read more Architecture by Walking Around