This week in charts
U.S. home equity withdrawals
Brand loyalty dipped during the Financial Crisis
Packaged foods relying on price increases over volume for sales
A tough year for tech workers
Shareholders back away from green petitions in US proxy voting season
“It’s the board’s role to oversee and direct corporate strategy,” said Ben Colton, who heads stewardship at State Street Global Advisors. “As long- term shareholders, we need to be as pragmatic and consistent as possible.”
Proposals asking management to report on several environment-related options drew significantly higher backing than those that sought to restrict management behaviour. Seven resolutions asking for reports on plastic pollution garnered an average of 45 per cent support. However, 10 demands that banks and insurers stop financing new fossil fuel development received average support of just 10 per cent.
“Overall numbers don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole story for this proxy season,” said Merel Spierings, The Conference Board researcher who analysed the numbers. She said that when the most prescriptive proposals are excluded, support for climate-related resolutions was largely unchanged from 2021.
US College Students Are Shunning Oil-Industry Degrees for ESG Future
Historically, however, petroleum schools have seen influxes of new students when oil booms and the sector goes on hiring sprees. But with US crude up more than 30% so far this year, the link appears to be broken.
“Personally, I think we are heading to a bit of a crisis,” said Jennifer Miskimins, who leads the petroleum-engineering department at the Colorado School of Mines, one of the world’s premier oil universities. “As petroleum engineers age, the industry will need to replace a retiring cohort of Baby Boomers. But we are not seeing enough petroleum engineers to fill the demand.”
Germany’s Union Head Warns of Collapse of Entire Industries
Top German industries could face collapse because of cuts in the supplies of Russian natural gas, the country’s top union official warned before crisis talks with Chancellor Olaf Scholz starting Monday.
“Because of the gas bottlenecks, entire industries are in danger of permanently collapsing: aluminum, glass, the chemical industry,” said Yasmin Fahimi, the head of the German Federation of Trade Unions (DGB), in an interview with the newspaper Bild am Sonntag. “Such a collapse would have massive consequences for the entire economy and jobs in Germany.”
The energy crisis is already driving inflation to record highs, she said. Fahimi is calling for a price cap on energy for households. The rising costs for Co2 emissions mean further burdens for households and companies, Fahimi added. The crisis could lead to social and labor unrest, she said.
“But in training, you tend to build the best athletic machine when longevity is favored over intensity, when your body gets a signal to adapt vs. thinking it’s been temporarily tortured, and when you’re less subject to in jury and mental burnout.
“For the highest levels to be attainable over time, the process has to be sustainable.
“Which is exactly how good investing works too, isn’t it?
This week’s fun finds
EdgePoint Golf Day 2022
At the end of June, 16 EdgePoint partners golfed at Granite Ridge Golf Club. Four groups competed for the best round, with the title going to Heather, Greg, Derek and Ryan.
And congratulations to the winners of the longest drive – Ben and Sarah!
People Are Dating All Wrong, According to Data Science
This may be the most consequential decision of a person’s life. The billionaire investor Warren Buffett certainly thinks so. He calls whom you marry “the most important decision that you make.”
And yet people have rarely turned to science for help with this all-important decision. Truth be told, science has had little help to offer. Scholars of relationship science have been trying to find answers. But a few years ago, a young, energetic, uber-curious, and brilliant scientist, Samantha Joel, aimed to change that. Joel, like so many in her field, was interested in what predicts successful relationships.
After building her team and collecting and analyzing the data, Joel was ready to present the results—results of perhaps the most exciting project in the history of relationship science.
So, as discovered by both a team of 86 scientists and whoever writes Daily Inspirational Quotes, one’s own happiness outside a relationship is by far the biggest predictor of one’s happiness in a romantic relationship. But what else predicts romantic happiness beyond one’s own preexisting mental state? What qualities of a mate are predictive of romantic happiness? Let’s start with the qualities of one’s mate that are least predictive of romantic happiness.
Among more than 11,000 long-term couples, machine learning models found that the traits listed below, in a mate, were among the least predictive of happiness with that mate. Let’s call these traits the Irrelevant Eight, as partners appear about as likely to end up happy in their relationship when they pair off with people with any combo of these traits:
- Race/ethnicity
- Religious affiliation
- Height
- Occupation
- Physical attractiveness
- Previous marital status
- Sexual tastes
- Similarity to oneself
If I had to sum up, in one sentence, the most important finding in the field of relationship science, thanks to these Big Data studies, it would be something like this (call it the First Law of Love): In the dating market, people compete ferociously for mates with qualities that do not increase one’s chances of romantic happiness.
Moreover, if I had to define the qualities that are highly desired even though they don’t lead to long-term romantic happiness, I would call many of them shiny qualities. Such qualities immediately grab our attention. Just about all of us are quickly drawn to the conventionally beautiful, for example. But these attention-grabbing, shiny qualities, the data suggests, make no difference to our long-term romantic happiness. The data suggests that single people are predictably tricked by shininess.
How artists get paid from streaming
Do you ever wonder how much an artist makes when you listen to a song on your favourite streaming service? This article breaks down the math behind the royalties with some fun animation.
