What We’re Reading
A few good pieces the Collab team came across this week …
Reality
It sounds good on PowerPoint and it was terrible in reality. Everything sounds good on PowerPoint. You could have a great PowerPoint presentation about a teleportation system to the Andromeda galaxy. But guess what? You cannot teleport to the Andromeda galaxy. That is nonsense.
Truth
The Census Bureau compared what people say their income is vs. their actual incomes. They found that when wives earn more than their husbands, the couple lies to the Census, saying the man makes more than he does and the woman makes less then reality.
Understanding
We assume that another person thinks or feels about things as we do, when in fact they often do not. So we often use our own perspective to understand other people, but our perspective is often very different from the other person’s perspective.” This ‘egocentric bias’ leads to inaccurate predictions about other people’s feelings and preferences. When we imagine how a friend feels after getting fired, or how they’ll react to an off-color joke or political position, we’re really just thinking of how we would feel in their situation, according to the study.
Market share
Texas is pumping so much oil that it will surpass OPEC members Iran and Iraq next year, HSBC predicted in a recent report.
If it were a country, Texas would be the world’s No. 3 oil producer, behind only Russia and Saudi Arabia, the investment bank said.
Space
Over the past 95 years, average [residential home] floor area has increased from 1048 square feet to 2657 square feet, which equates to a 2.5x increase. Furthermore, the average floor area per person has more than quadrupled, from 242 square feet to 1046! Essentially, it’s likely that one person nowadays has the same amount of space as a family back in the 1920s.
Deflation
It’s real:
This kind of blew me away. Assuming 8 slices in a 1/4 lb banana, the price of a banana has dropped from roughly $18 to $0.12 over the past 142 years. Thank you, technology. pic.twitter.com/2J00ccf01r
— Tim Hanson (@timhanso) July 17, 2018
Have a good weekend.