#Banks & #Mortgage Market have not adequately priced-in #ClimateChange

“Financial Markets today have not adequately priced-in the likely near-term policy response to climate change”



A UN-supported entity called Principles for Responsible Investment, PRI — whose membership includes some 500 global asset managers — predicts a market “response by 2025 that will be forceful, abrupt and disorderly because of the delay”. In plain English, they expect a market shock.



A McKinsey consultant gave the UN a couple of examples of where “disorderly” repricing might occur. Coastal regions such as Florida, he warned, could deliver asset price shocks for lenders, insurers and homeowners. So, too, in places such as Spain, southern France, Greece and Italy which are projected to see eye-popping increases in drought. 

...



Using a synthetic portfolio of 100,000 residential mortgages in southern Florida — based on the exposure of a real bank — Jupiter, a climate advisory group, forecasts a tripling of losses from flood damage in the next couple of decades.

...

American households typically use 30-year mortgages to buy properties, [but] the price of insurance is reset annually. There is, in other words, an embedded maturity mismatch in risks in the Florida property markets that could spark mortgage defaults, hurting borrowers and lenders.





See the full article on the FT here:  Climate change could cause a new mortgage default crisis

#PropTech #Startup #Cadre Flipping #RealEstate Like A Pro Hits $100M in Investor Returns

Cadre was most recently valued at $800 Million. 

In the five years since launching in 2014, the startup now has roughly 20,000 investors who have stakes in more than $3 billion worth of real estate assets.

With the recent sale of two apartment complexes in the Chicago and Atlanta metro areas, respectively, Cadre says it's hit a new milestone—$100 million in returns to its investors, to date.

VC Backers includes Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund. The company is among a wave of "proptech" companies that have sought to disrupt the commercial real estate industry via tech-enabled platforms and products.

Read the article on Fortune here: https://fortune.com/2019/09/26/proptech-startup-cadre-investor-returns/

#Politics and #Advocacy Are Tainting #Science #LongReads

This is a great research report showing how Politics and Advocacy are tainting Science and Academia.  A sad story. 

"advocacy is not scholarship; the former is specifically concerned with advancing human rights, the latter with the production of knowledge. To insist that scholars of a particular discipline adhere to and even advance preordained social politics looks to me frighteningly like the situation Galileo found himself in."

Darkness's Descent on the American Anthropological Association

A Cautionary Tale

Author: Alice Dreger

Human Nature September 2011, Volume 22, Issue 3, pp 225–246

Open AccessArticle

SpringerLink

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-011-9103-y

Abstract

"In September 2000, the self-styled "anthropological journalist" Patrick Tierney began to make public his work claiming that the Yanomamö people of South America had been actively—indeed brutally—harmed by the sociobiological anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist-physician James Neel. Following a florid summary of Tierney's claims by the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) saw fit to take Tierney's claims seriously by conducting a major investigation into the matter. This paper focuses on the AAA's problematic actions in this case but also provides previously unpublished information on Tierney's falsehoods. The work presented is based on a year of research by a historian of medicine and science. The author [Alice Dreger] intends the work to function as a cautionary tale to scholarly associations, which have the challenging duty of protecting scholarship and scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges in the era of the Internet and twenty-four-hour news cycles."

…

"if the life's work of your colleague is on the line, can you not take some extra time to produce a report you feel comfortable showing to the membership of your supposedly democratic scholarly organization? Apparently not if you think your job is utilitarian public relations damage control."

…

"justice that is meted out according to politics and not according to facts is the justice of the Middle Ages. If justice is not based on the facts, if principles of justice are not applied universally, there is no real justice. Forms of "scholarship" that deny evidence, that deny truth, that deny the importance of facts—even if performed in the name of good—are dangerous not only to science and to ethics, but to democracy. And so they are dangerous ultimately to humankind."

Read the full research report here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-011-9103-y

#Neumann’s Party’s Over at #WeWork

Out as CEO. Just in time ....

WeWTF, Part Deux 

No Mercy / No Malice

Scott Galloway

@profgalloway

"it's as if the lights have been turned on at a cocaine-fueled party that ended several hours too late. Everyone and everything suddenly looks bad, scary even."

…

What's worse than spending all day every day at home with two baby boys or downtown at AMEX? Engaging in fraud.  

The two most senior corporate communications exes, Jennifer Skyler and Dominic McMullan, both left recently, right before the IPO. Ok, so think about that. You are the belles of the ball of a firm about to IPO at $50 billion, and (in the case of Dominic) you announce, weeks before the IPO, "I've decided to take time off to spend with family in Brooklyn for now." Yep, that makes sense. You know us men, always leaving right before the IPO to spend more time with our families. 

The head of comms, Jennifer Skyler, left a few weeks ago for AMEX. ....Who wouldn't want to bolt from the second-most-anticipated IPO of the year to go flack about the new American Express Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant Card???

…

Predictions:

• In the next 30 days, a series of explosive investigative journalism pieces will document breathtaking malfeasance at We.
• In the next 60 days, a state attorney general, SEC, or other regulatory body will launch a formal investigations into We.
• Over the next 12 months, SoftBank's Vision Fund will be shuttered.

See The Whole piece here: 

WeWTF, Part Deux | No Mercy / No Malice https://www.profgalloway.com/wewtf-part-deux/

bit.ly/MasterFeeds

#NYC #PublicSchools’ Moral Absolutism on #Progressivism & #PoliticalCorrectness, Leaves Little Tolerance for Dissent

This is disheartening. When reality hits these kids, it will not be pretty...  

When you have time,  Read this long- where was the editor?-, but worthwhile piece on the situation with education in NYC, the US and Sadly elsewhere as well. 

The piece takes you on the writer's path placing his son/children in school in NYC, from the ridiculousness of the private schools to the ultimately disfunctional new NYC public school curriculum. 

Sad....

Here are some excerpts from the article:

New York City Public Schools have embraced The New Left

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/when-the-culture-war-comes-for-the-kids/596668/

When the Culture War Comes for the Kids

Caught between a brutal meritocracy and a radical new progressivism, a parent tries to do right by his children while navigating New York City's schools.

By GEORGE PACKER

The Atlantic

OCTOBER 2019 ISSUE

…

Only New York would force me to wake up early one Saturday morning in February, put on my parka and wool hat, and walk half a mile in the predawn darkness to register our son, then just 17 months old, for nursery school. I arrived to find myself, at best, the 30th person in a line that led from the locked front door of the school up the sidewalk. Registration was still two hours off, and places would be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. At the front of the line, parents were lying in sleeping bags. They had spent the night outside.

I stood waiting in the cold with a strange mix of feelings. I hated the hypercompetitive parents who made everyone's life more tense. I feared that I'd cheated our son of a slot by not rising until the selfish hour of 5:30. And I worried that we were all bound together in a mad, heroic project that we could neither escape nor understand, driven by supreme devotion to our own child's future.

…in recent decades, the system has hardened into a new class structure in which professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with little chance of seeing their children move up.

When parents on the fortunate ledge of this chasm gaze down, vertigo stuns them. Far below they see a dim world of processed food, obesity, divorce, addiction, online-education scams, stagnant wages, outsourcing, rising morbidity rates—and they pledge to do whatever they can to keep their children from falling. They'll stay married, cook organic family meals, read aloud at bedtime every night, take out a crushing mortgage on a house in a highly rated school district, pay for music teachers and test-prep tutors, and donate repeatedly to overendowed alumni funds.

…

Two years later we transferred him to a public kindergarten.

We had just had our second child, a girl. The private school was about to start raising its fee steeply every year into the indefinite future. As tuition passed $50,000, the creatives would dwindle and give way to the financials. I calculated that the precollege educations of our two children would cost more than $1.5 million after taxes. This was the practical reason to leave.

But there was something else—another claim on us. The current phrase for it is social justice. I'd rather use the word democracy, because it conveys the idea of equality and the need for a common life among citizens. No institution has more power to form human beings according to this idea than the public school. That was the original purpose of the "common schools" established by Horace Mann in the mid-19th century: to instill in children the knowledge and morality necessary for the success of republican government, while "embracing children of all religious, social, and ethnic backgrounds."

...

Who was driving the new progressivism? Young people, influencers on social media, leaders of cultural organizations, artists, journalists, educators, and, more and more, elected Democrats. You could almost believe they spoke for a majority—but you would be wrong. An extensive survey of American political opinion published last year by a nonprofit called More in Common found that a large majority of every group, including black Americans, thought "political correctness" was a problem. The only exception was a group identified as "progressive activists"—just 8 percent of the population, and likely to be white, well educated, and wealthy. Other polls found that white progressives were readier to embrace diversity and immigration, and to blame racism for the problems of minority groups, than black Americans were. The new progressivism was a limited, mainly elite phenomenon.

…

In 2013, four families at our school, with the support of the administration, kept their kids from taking the tests. These parents had decided that the tests were so stressful for students and teachers alike, consumed so much of the school year with mindless preparation, and were so irrelevant to the purpose of education that they were actually harmful. But even after the city eased the consequences of the tests, the opt-out movement grew astronomically. In the spring of 2014, 250 children were kept from taking the tests.

The critique widened, too: Educators argued that the tests were structurally biased, even racist, because nonwhite students had the lowest scores. "I believe in assessment—I took tests my whole life and I've used assessments as an educator," one black parent at our school, who graduated from a prestigious New York public high school, told me. "But now I see it all differently. Standardized tests are the gatekeepers to keep people out, and I know exactly who's at the bottom. It is torturous for black, Latino, and low-income children, because they will never catch up, due to institutionalized racism."

Opting out became a form of civil disobedience against a prime tool of meritocracy. It started as a spontaneous, grassroots protest against a wrongheaded state of affairs. Then, with breathtaking speed, it transcended the realm of politics and became a form of moral absolutism, with little tolerance for dissent.

We took the school at face value when it said that this decision was ours to make. My wife attended a meeting for parents, billed as an "education session." But when she asked a question that showed we hadn't made up our minds about the tests, another parent quickly tried to set her straight. The question was out of place—no one should want her child to take the tests. The purpose of the meeting wasn't to provide neutral information. Opting out required an action—parents had to sign and return a letter—and the administration needed to educate new parents about the party line using other parents who had already accepted it, because school employees were forbidden to propagandize.

We weren't sure what to do. Instead of giving grades, teachers at our school wrote long, detailed, often deeply knowledgeable reports on each student. But we wanted to know how well our son was learning against an external standard. If he took the tests, he would miss a couple of days of class, but he would also learn to perform a basic task that would be part of his education for years to come.

Something else about the opt-out movement troubled me. Its advocates claimed that the tests penalized poor and minority kids. I began to think that the real penalty might come from not taking them.

In the name of equality, disadvantaged kids were likelier to falter and disappear behind a mist of togetherness and self-deception. Banishing tests seemed like a way to let everyone off the hook. This was the price of dismissing meritocracy.

Adults who draft young children into their cause might think they're empowering them and shaping them into virtuous people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents post of their woke kids "selflessies"). In reality the adults are making themselves feel more righteous, indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiating their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anxious battles onto children who can't carry the burden, because they lack the intellectual apparatus and political power. Our goal shouldn't be to tell children what to think. The point is to teach them how to think so they can grow up to find their own answers.

Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn't taught the principles that had been betrayed. He got his civics from Hamilton.

…the writing was minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn't been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries, answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.

...

I wanted the plan to succeed, but I had serious doubts. It came festooned with all the authoritarian excess of the new progressivism. It called for the creation of a new diversity bureaucracy, and its relentless jargon squashed my hope that the authors knew how to achieve an excellent education for all. Instead of teaching civics that faced the complex truths of American democracy, "the curriculum will highlight the vast historical contributions of non-white groups & seek to dispel the many non-truths/lies related to American & World History."

"Excellence" was barely an afterthought in the plan. Of its 64 action items, only one even mentioned what was likely to be the hardest problem: "Provide support for [district] educators in adopting best practices for academically, racially & socioeconomically mixed classrooms." How to make sure that children of greatly different abilities would succeed, in schools that had long been academically tracked? How to do it without giving up on rigor altogether—without losing the fastest learners?

We had faced this problem with our daughter, who was reading far ahead of her grade in kindergarten and begged her teacher for math problems to solve. When the school declined to accommodate her, and our applications to other public schools were unsuccessful, we transferred her to a new, STEM-focused private school rather than risk years of boredom. We regretted leaving the public-school system, and we were still wary of the competitive excesses of meritocracy, but we weren't willing to abandon it altogether.

The Department of Education didn't seem to be thinking about meritocracy at all. Its entire focus was on achieving diversity, and on rooting out the racism that stood in the way of that.

Many had just heard about the new plan, which buried the results of an internal poll showing that a majority of parents wanted to keep the old system. We were presented with a slideshow that included a photo of white adults snarling at black schoolchildren in the South in the 1960s—as if only vicious racism could motivate parents to oppose eliminating an admissions system that met superior work with a more challenging placement. Even if the placement was the fruit of a large historical injustice, parents are compromised; a policy that tells them to set aside their children's needs until that injustice has been remedied is asking for failure. Just in case the implication of racism wasn't enough to intimidate dissenters, when the presentation ended, and dozens of hands shot up, one of the speakers, a progressive city-council member, announced that he would take no questions. He waved off the uproar that ensued. It was just like the opt-out "education session" my wife had attended: The deal was done. There was only one truth.

De Blasio's schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them "silence" him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled "White Supremacy Culture." It included "Perfectionism," "Individualism," "Objectivity," and "Worship of the Written Word" among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.

… calling out racism and getting rid of objective standards won't create real equality or close the achievement gap, and might have the perverse effect of making it worse by driving out families of all races who cling to an idea of education based on real merit. If integration is a necessary condition for equality, it isn't sufficient. Equality is too important to be left to an ideology that rejects universal values.

When his teacher assigned students to write about how they felt about their identity, letting the class know that whiteness was a source of guilt for her, our son told her that he couldn't do it. The assignment was too personal, and it didn't leave enough space for him to describe all that made him who he was.

"Isn't school for learning math and science and reading," he asked us one day, "not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?" He was responding as kids do when adults keep telling them what to think. He had what my wife called unpoliticized empathy.

Read the whole piece here:

New York City Public Schools have embraced The New Left

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/when-the-culture-war-comes-for-the-kids/596668/

The Law Was Aimed at Deadly Machinery. It Hit Her Washer.

Another example of the state abusing its position of authority to harass and intimidate the very citizens they are meant to serve and protect.





New York set out to protect against fatal building accidents. A decade later, thousands of homeowners have been saddled with snowballing fines.


The Law Was Aimed at Deadly Machinery. It Hit Her Washer.: