Good Entropy

All About Pete | Current Affairs

It also provides irrefutable evidence that no serious progressive should want Pete Buttigieg anywhere near national public office.

What every CEO needs to know about superstar companies | McKinsey

Among the world’s largest companies, economic profit is distributed unequally along a power curve, with the top 10 percent of firms capturing 80 percent of positive economic profit.

As economic profits grow larger, so do economic losses at the other end of the distribution. The bottom 10 percent of companies destroy as much value as the top 10 percent create, and today’s bottom-decile companies have 1.5 times more economic loss, on average, than their counterparts of 20 years ago (Exhibit 1). That means for every company that creates economic value, there is another company that destroys economic value. Yet these value-destroying companies continue to survive, holding on to their resources for increasingly longer durations and continuing to attract capital. A growing number are turning into “zombie” companies, unable to generate enough cash flow even to sustain interest payments on their debts. The impact of these economic losses goes beyond these companies’ investors, managers, and workers: it drives down the returns for healthy companies that compete for the same resources or profits.

The Challenge of Going Off Psychiatric Drugs | The New Yorker

Millions of Americans have taken antidepressants for many years. What happens when it’s time to stop?

Immigration, inequality and intergenerational mobility in the US | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal

A growing literature finds that the persistence of economic status is strongest in unequal societies such as Britain or Italy, and weaker in countries like the Scandinavian welfare states. While the US ranks among the least equal and mobile countries in the developed world, recent work shows that it contains places that span the global mobility distribution. In this column, we linked these two observations by studying the microcosm of Europe that arose as millions of immigrants crossed the Atlantic and settled over a century ago.