Paper Planes
w.232 | Consumer Trends, Great Reset in VC & PE, Home Healthcare Jobs, Bull Market for Humanities
Dear Friends,
Hope you are staying cool as we enter the summer months. Here in Austin, the forecast is for 10 straight days of sun and touching 100 degrees with humidity that makes it feel even hotter than that. I’m plotting my escape north for the summer months and getting some ‘visas in my name.’
Today's Contents:
Good Reads: Sensible Investing
Song of the Week: Paper Planes
Good Reads: Sensible Investing
Consumer Report Trends 2024 from Forerunner Ventures. It's worth a browse of this 200-page behemoth. It’s the first time I’ve seen a generalist investor pick up on the potential impact of Education Savings Accounts. It also had nice terminology on the move from ‘gig-economy’ to ‘working for self’ and the need for education to enter a ‘zone of productivity’. Two of the more interesting charts from their consumer survey:
The Grand Reset: VCs and LPs Are Starting To Internalize Reality and Landing The Plane: A Necessary Choice For Many Startups by Frank Rotman. The CIO of QED Partners writes on X.com about what many in the industry have talked about over the last year.
‘Everything Is Not Going to Be OK’ in Private Equity, Apollo’s Co-President said at the SuperReturns conference in Berlin this week.
Private equity firms didn’t take significant markdowns during the recent period of rapid rate hikes which means that “investors of all sorts are going to have swallow the lump moving through the system,” he said, referring to assets that private equity firms bought up until 2022. Funds are now holding on to these companies and will eventually have to refinance at higher rates.
That means “fewer realizations and lower returns” are on the horizon for much of the industry, said Kleinman.
A Bull Market in the Humanities. Luke Burgis explains the argument, also recently made by Peter Thiel, eloquently:
The real world is never going to get outdated or automated. I feel bad for those recently trained for very specific STEM jobs these past few years which AI is already encroaching on. Imagine spending four years learning to code Python, graduating in 2021, only to see AI code in 5 minutes what would have taken you 500 hours. Traditional education, especially technical education, is still training people for jobs that may no longer exist by the time they graduate.
The education of the future is going to be an education in sensory perception, and therefore an education in the humanities—especially in the arts—because artistic training is training in how to see, how to perceive, and how to communicate.
The humanities, rightly understood, are the things that technology cannot take away or substitute for. Of course, I don’t mean ‘humanities’ in the way that they’ve been hijacked as ideological programs of cultural change by many elite universities. I mean humanities broadly understood as the exploration of what it truly means to be human and the skills and practices of being and doing those things. The humanities are “the study of history, philosophy and religion, modern and ancient languages and literatures, fine and performing arts, media and cultural studies, and other fields.”1 The thread that unites them all is the training of the senses—helping humans to be able to see, hear, touch, feel, and taste in a way that helps us enter into the mystery of the human experience at a deeper level.
NYC’s Job Boom Fueled by Taxpayer-Funded $38,280 Health Gigs. I thought this was an eye-opening set of data out of New York state. Almost all the job growth in the last couple of years has gone to home healthcare. I’ve seen several startups over the last couple of years that facilitate reimbursements for people entering this field, including enabling family members to provider for their elders. While the intent is noble, the facts below also suggest what has been apparent for a while: there can be an incredible amount of fraud in these programs.
Economists attribute the astronomical growth in New York’s home health care sector to a state policy change made in 2015 that loosened eligibility rules for a Medicaid benefit known as the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, or CDPAP. The program allows people eligible for home health care services to hire family members or close friends to care for them and be paid for their work through state Medicaid funds.
New York state Medicaid spending on CDPAP alone has grown to an estimated $9.1 billion from $2.5 billion in 2019. And the number of people receiving care through the program has surged to 247,538 in 2023 from 19,512 in 2016.
Meanwhile, jobs in home health are making up an increasingly large share of the city and state’s overall economy. Between 2014 and 2024, home health aide jobs went from comprising 6% of New York City’s total private-sector jobs to 12%. The sector accounted for 57% of all private-sector job growth statewide over the past decade, said Hammond of the Empire Center.
Song of the Week: Paper Planes
Video on YouTube.
I debated using many songs from MIA’s Kala album for song of the week and landed on her most popular single. The album has incredible energy and feels original as MIA blends sounds and beats from her global heritage. This penultimate song me a merges an airy beat with lyrics about tourist-murdering passport-counterfeiting thieves, so, you know, kind of intense.
“Paper Planes” by MIA
I fly like paper, get high like planes
If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name
If you come around here, I make 'em all day
I get one done in a second if you wait
Selfie of the Week
I was enjoying the long days near water with old friends and new.
Thanks for reading, friends. Please always be in touch.
As always,
Katelyn