10 Friday AM Reads – The Big Picture

My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:

• The Journalism Lesson I Learned on September 11: Why the most effective preparation for a crisis lies in empowerment. (Second Rough Draft)

• America Alone Can’t Match China. But With Our Allies, It’s No Contest. For the first time in its modern history, the United States faces a rival — China — that has greater scale in most of the critical dimensions of power, and American national capacity alone may not be enough to rise to the challenge. (New York Times) see also ‘China Is the Engine’ Driving Nations Away From Fossil Fuels: Its vast investment in solar, wind and batteries is on track to end an era of global growth in the use of coal, oil and gas, the researchers said. (New York Times)

• Risk Factors Are Rising in Private Credit, Performance Harder to Predict: Private markets are more sensitive to interest rates, inflation and tariffs, while there are questions about how private credit will hold up in a significant correction. (Chief Investment Officer)

• Process knowledge is crucial to economic development: The message of Dan Wang’s new book, title notwithstanding, is about America nearly as much as it is about China. The book is fascinated with how America and China resemble each other, their sharp differences, and how both help fuel their mutual incomprehension. I imagine that most responses* will focus on two big questions: how America’s misunderstanding of China fuels geopolitical confrontation, and how America’s misunderstanding of itself leads it to miss out on material abundance. (Programmable Mutter)

• Sick as a Dog: The cheapness of US healthcare stocks, and the battle over publicly funded science research: For three decades until 2020, US healthcare stocks generated roughly the same returns as the tech sector, and with much less volatility. Things have changed a lot since then as the tech sector has barreled ahead while healthcare has stagnated. In this special issue, we take a closer look at the many factors dragging down the healthcare sector to among the lowest relative valuations of the last 30+ years, and some possible catalysts for a rebound. To conclude, the latest in the battle over publicly funded US scientific research and a section on longevity drug studies in mice. (J.P. Morgan)

• Is Partying Dead, or Are You Just Old? Gen Z was alive during a week of supper clubs, daytime raves and rooftop ragers in New York City. (New York Times)

• Autism Has No Single Cause. Here’s How We Know: Scientists will not find a simple answer to how autism arises, despite Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s promise to announce its causes sometime this month. Here’s what makes the condition so staggeringly complex, (Scientific American)

• ‘Prolific alien invaders’ threaten waters in the West: Zebra mussels are now in the upper Colorado River system, and the minuscule mollusks can wreak massive damage. (Washington Post)

• Your Zodiac Sign Is 2,000 Years Out of Date. Over millennia, our view of the stars has shifted, because of Earth’s wobble. It may be time to rethink your sign. (New York Times)

• ‘Only Murders in the Building’ peaks with a bouncy fifth season: As the Hulu murder comedy takes on billionaires and the mob, its stable of colorful suspects includes Téa Leoni, Bobby Cannavale, Renée Zellweger and Christoph Waltz. (Washington Post)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Heather Boushey, previously a member of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Biden, and chief economist to the president’s Invest in America cabinet. She is currently a senior research fellow at the Reimagining the Economy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School.

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