Investing

It’s not often that anyone — much less an academic — writes a book that launches a revolution, but that’s exactly what Burton Malkiel did in 1973 when the Princeton economist published a short, potent book called A Random Walk Down Wall Street. As of 2023, the book is in its thirteenth edition. Malkiel famously insisted that “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at the stock listings could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one selected by the experts,” and then he spent his entire career doing his best to prove that hypothesis.

Dealing with the writer, statistician, Twitter warrior and self-described flâneur Nassim Nicholas Taleb is no simple matter. First there was the initial approach, months ago. I ventured to email him and ask for an interview despite his long-held and often-expressed low opinion of journalists. (Heuristic: those who make the biggest deal out of disliking the media care about it the most.) To my surprise, Taleb agreed to it almost immediately even though he “doesn’t do interviews.” Some logistical back and forth ensued. Then a twist: he would only agree to be interviewed if he wasn’t photographed. Why? Because in photos he is “made to look sickly and weak.

For more than thirty years, Scott Adams has captured the absurdity and humor of office life in his popular syndicated newspaper cartoon strip “Dilbert.” The title character, an oblong-headed, cubicle-dwelling everyman, is one of the most familiar cartoon characters in America, but last September he vanished from more than seventy newspapers. Shortly before Dilbert’s partial disappearance, his opinionated creator had set his sights on ESG. Adams’s views on the vogue for “Ethical, Social and Corporate Governance” investment strategies weren’t exactly difficult to discern. In one strip, for example, Dilbert asks, “What is this ‘ESG’ thing I keep hearing about?

When I was in high school, I worked at an ice rink in the winter and a swimming pool in the summer. My friends toiled at Target and gofered at golf courses, making minimum wage and spending it on gas and low-rise jeans from Abercrombie: it was 2008, after all. These days, gas may still cost $4 per gallon, but now the jeans are high-waisted and the teens are more ambitious. My youngest brother Ted is 18. He spent the summer before his first year in college working in a cheese shop, sweeping floors and straining ricotta: a classic summer job, tedious and stress-free. Yet some of his friends are taking a different route. Ted’s buddy Tom just cashed out $3,000 in bitcoin winnings to buy a weeklong Airbnb in Ocean City, Maryland for all his friends.