👋 ASB Partners Nuggets
This is a short weekly email that covers a few things I’ve found interesting during the week.
Interesting Links/Reads
Many links are sourced from Marginal Revolution (bold and italics are my own to highlight what I found particularly interesting)
We explore the role of immediate next door neighbors in affecting children’s later life occupation choice. Using linked historical census records for over 6 million boys and 4 million girls, we reconstruct neighborhood microgeography to estimate how growing up
next door to someone in a particular occupation affects a child’s probability of working in that occupation as an adult, relative to other children who grew up farther away on the same street. Living next door to someone as a child increases the probability of having the same occupation as them 30 years later by about 10 percent. As an additional source of exogenous variation in exposure to next door neighbors, we exploit untimely neighbor deaths and find smaller and insignificant exposure effects for children who grew up next to a neighbor with an untimely death. We find larger exposure effects when intensity of exposure is expected to be higher, and document larger occupational transmission in more connected neighborhoods and when next door neighbors are the same race or ethnicity or have children of similar ages. Childhood exposure to next door neighbors has real economic consequences: children who grow up next to neighbors in high income or education occupations see significant gains in adult income and education, even relative to other children living on the same street, suggesting that neighborhood networks significantly contribute to economic mobility.
3.What Should Jews Do? Further Thoughts on the Pattern Russ Roberts Jan 19, 2026
I’ve become fascinated by this very simple, almost simplistic idea. Part of that fascination is the frustration of this moment—the rise in Jew-hatred after October 7th rather than outpouring of sympathy; the insane journey of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and others into an obsession with Jews and Israel; the killing of Jews around the world.
Deutsch sees it differently:
I think it’s the other way around. I think the impulse to massacre Jews came first, and the Jews killing Jesus was an excuse invented afterwards, after that impulse, in order to legitimize it.
And, the fact that this excuse absolutely doesn’t make sense, that is the beginning of what I want to understand, the pattern I want to understand--which is not the pattern of pogroms and massacres. Those are things that only happen occasionally. The thing which happens all the time, which I call the Pattern, is the impulse to legitimize hurting Jews…
So, the first lesson of the Pattern:
1. Jews aren’t attacked because of the traits of the Jews or the alleged nefarious deeds of the Jews. Causation is reversed: because of a desire to legitimize attacking Jews, Jews are defamed or belittled or condemned.
The Pattern cuts the Gordian knot of trying to unravel why people hate the Jews. Working on that unraveling is a red herring. This is lesson #2:
2. Trying to figure out why people denigrate the Jews or treat them as less than fully human is a waste of time. It just is, it’s like gravity. It’s around all the time. It’s more important to deal with it than to try to fix or eliminate it.
8. China fact of the day: “Put differently, there were fewer births in China in 2025 than in 1776”
5. Ozempic is bad for business Matt Levine
6."In one of his final acts in office, Gov. Philip D. Murphy signed a bill on Monday requiring third, fourth and fifth graders to learn cursive." (NYT, why?)
Podcast/Videos
Patrick
Can you tell me about Ludwig Jesselson?
He believes in certain basic concepts and in Judaism. He was Jewish, Orthodox Jew. It was a lot about morality. It was about ethics. It was about right and wrong and about certain things are not gray. They are either black, or they are right. Murder is out. Murder is not good. He saw life in terms of honesty. He saw life in terms of people who he could trade with, who would be reliable trading partners and people who were, in Yiddish, they called it ganefs, “thieves,” and he tried not to do business with the ganefs.
And when he had a trading partner that was honest, that was ethical, he did a lot of business with them. Because back then, remember, there was no e-mail. There wasn’t even a fax machine. There were just telexes and TWXs that barely worked. And so your word really was your bond. And you needed to trade with people that were going to perform because if you bought a cargo of oil for $23, and then the market went up to $25, you didn’t want a partner that said, “I’m not honoring that deal, there is nothing in writing.”
So you needed people who would honor their word, had integrity. He placed a very high value on integrity in dealing with people. And he put a lot of emphasis on dealing with people who would perform what they said they were going to perform.
Patrick
If you could have a five-hour session around a nice fall fire with Mr. J and two or three other people, who would you pick, who would you add to that conversation?
Brad
I was fortunate to hang around with his family, a lot of times on Shabbat, but unfortunately, on Shabbat, you can’t talk business. So I couldn’t talk business, but that’s okay, we talked about life. But I had many lunches with him and his son, Michael, who’s a good friend of mine now, and I’ve spent a lot of time with his wife, Mrs. Jesselson, Erica Jesselson, who has an amazing story.She came out of the Holocaust and before the Holocaust, she had dozens and dozens of -- she had a pretty big family, the Pappenheim family in Austria in Vienna. She had dozens and dozens of cousins. And after the Holocaust, she had a handful. There was a large majority of her family had died, and that really formed her worldview. That wow, evil in the world exists, and it can have very serious consequences if it’s not addressed right away. I spent a lot of time with Mr. Jesselson and his family. I was very fortunate to do so.
Tech Trends
Patrick
Pretty wonderful. If you think about the process of employing technology in your businesses, what lessons have you learned there? Because you said before, you’re not a technologist, but you use a lot of technology. I imagine that today, AI is probably on the front of your mind in some way, shape or form if you’re a user of technology.
How do you approach problems like this? Okay, there’s a toolkit out there in the world that keeps getting better. It’s pretty cool. I get to use that stuff. When do you know how to be an early adopter, a late adopter, quasi technology business, the atoms versus bits question for you, in particular, seems very interesting.
Brad
So one of the things I learned from Mr. Jesselson, and I write about this in the book, is you can mess up a lot of things if you get the major trend right. And if you get the major trend wrong, you can do a lot of things right, and you’re not going to make a lot of money. So getting the major trend right is very important in any business. You can’t be on the wrong side of the trend. The biggest trend of them all is technology.
👇Tyler flips the script that religious people are more conformist…
👇This interview made me bullish on the Pharma/biotech complex
I hope you enjoyed it.
Adam