Things I Learned - August 2023
💡 Last month I started a new monthly blog post that includes things I learned over the prior month that I found interesting. This is July’s edition. Note: I’m always in search of new things to learn, so please send any interesting graphs/facts my way!
All female grandmasters in the history of chess are currently alive (cite)
64% of the drinks sold at Starbucks last year were cold beverages. This is up from 47% in 2018 (cite).
The airport code for O’Hare is ORD because it used to be called Orchard Field Airport (until 1949, when it was renamed O’Hare to commemorate a WWII flying ace). Newark is EWR, because “N” is reserved for US Navy ships, so its IATA code used the remaining letters in its name.
Cheerios are the best selling cereal in America (cite)
Americans spent $679 per household on lottery tickets in 2019. Americans spend more on lottery tickets than they do on cigarettes, and more than they do on music, sports tickets, movie tickets, books, and video games combined. (cite)
Norway, Japan, Iceland, and South Korea are the only countries where whale hunting is permitted. (cite)
Barry Bonds has more career intentional walks than the entire Tampa Bay Rays franchise in history. (cite)
The word “gobbledygook”, meaning gibberish, was coined by US congressman Maury Maverick in a memo to his staff. Maury Maverick was grandson of the rancher Samuel Maverick who, in opting not to brand his cattle, gave rise to the word “maverick” meaning a nonconformist. (cite)
In 1900, 75% of men in the US aged 75 or older were still in the labor force. By 1960, it was 30%. Today it is below 10%. (cite)
There are no land mammals native to New Zealand (cite).
Professional hockey players are the only athletes in North America still required to wear suits before games (cite)
Half of Berkshire Hathaway’s stock holdings are in a single stock, Apple (roughly $179 billion). (cite)
Roger Federer played 97 ATP singles matches in 2006. In that year, he lost a total of one match to players not named Rafael Nadal (cite)
The prophetic perfect tense is a literary technique used in the Bible that describes future events that are so certain to happen that they are referred to in the past tense as if they had already happened (cite)
Singapore is the only country in Asia with an AAA sovereign credit rating from all major rating agencies. (cite)
The largest landowner in the world currently is King Charles III of England (and the British Royal Family), whose 6.6 billion acreage includes 90% of the land in Canada. (cite)
“Jumping the shark” — the phrase used to describe a creative work that takes an outrageous or absurd turn, often signaling a decline in quality — dates back to 1985, when the show Happy Days featured its main character jumping over a live shark on water skis in an attempt to revive viewership. (cite)
" 🍕" is the most used "word" in Venmo transaction descriptions. (cite)
Cumulatively, Americans have wagered $245bn on sports since 2018. (cite).
There were no movie theaters in Saudi Arabia before 2015. (cite)
42% of US homeowners own their homes completely (i.e, with no mortgage at all) (cite)
In 1789, roughly only half of French people spoke the French language. Other languages included Breton (Brittany, West), Basque (South-West), Catalan (South), Flemish (North), Italian (Corsica) or German (Alsace), or patois. (cite).
Seats on Spirit airlines do not recline (cite)
Individuals can transmit up to $12.9 million to heirs, during life or at death, without incurring any federal estate tax. (cite)
For any distribution, the mean and median of a distribution are within one standard deviation of one another. (cite)
The average Chick-fil-A store brings in more revenue than any of the world’s top 50 largest chains. It brings in roughly 5x as much as the average KFC, 4x as much as the average Starbucks, 3x as the average Chipotle, and 2x as much as the average McDonalds. (cite)
11% of Yale’s incoming class are legacies. (cite)
American Airlines brings in $1.2 billion of revenue a year from checked bag fees alone. (cite).
Graphs I liked:
Description: I’m a sucker for work from home graphs (and pandemic graphs more broadly). There’s three interesting thing about this graph: (1) work from home has dropped about 20 percentage points since 2022 (2) Friday is clearly the day that sticks (3) to the extent there are even longer weekends, it extends to thursday (not monday, as I would have guessed).
Description: One of the great financial trends is the near elimination of fees for mutual funds (and other indices/ETF that retail investors invest in). For passive funds, the (asset-weighted) average fund fee has declined 60% since 1994 to at 0.12% in 2022. For active funds, its 0.59% in 2022—a 40% decline over the same period. This seems to be an unmitigated good for household investors. (Note for interpreting this graph: you can think of “asset-weighted” as the fee the average investor pays, and “equal-weighted” as the fee the average fund charges.) (cite)
Description: I find low frequency / long term changes in trends very interesting. I simply had no idea that Volkswagen was so popular in the 1970’s. I’m also somewhat surprised that German cars have become more popular, not less popular post 1995.
Description: the Americas are much less dense than the rest of the world (height of bars is population density)
Description: The stock market has done well in 2023, but it turns out that this is mostly due to just a couple tech stocks. The average return of the stock market in 2023 was actually negative in the first half of the year (shown in dark blue below). Stock market indices give more weight to larger positions, which is why the value-weighted average (light blue) is positive. The chart below illustrates beautifully this divergence. It’s also a good lesson for why randomly buying stocks is not akin to buying an index!
Description: Another market share graph, this time for internet browsers. I suspect many of us have seen some version of before, but still interesting to stare at.
Description: Lots of talk about “Rich Men North of Richmond”, including at the recent GOP debate. But it turns out that per capita, there’s only slightly more wealth north of Richmond than south of Richmond. Fun chart from Owen Zidar.
Description: Self explanatory from the title, but not something we always hear about in the news.