New ep is up! An interview with Samuel Evan Milner, economic historian and author of Robbing Peter to Pay Pau: Power, Profits, and Productivity in Modern American. Mr. Milner has a degree in history from Harvard, master’s degrees in history and philosophy from Yale, a PhD in history from Yale, and more recently, a J.D. from University of Chicago Law School. Think about how much inflation generally and wage inflation specifically are in the news today. Overlay 900 lb corporate gorillas, and you understand the relevance of this story from the last century to today’s environment. From the back jacket: “Concentrated market power and the weakened sway of corporate stakeholders over management have emerged as leading concerns of American political economy. Samuel Milner provides a historical context for contemporary efforts to resolve these anxieties by examining the contest to control the distribution of corporate income during the mid-twentieth century. During this “Golden Age of American Capitalism,” apprehension about the debilitating consequences of industrial concentration fueled efforts to ensure that management would share the fruits of progress with workers, consumers, and society as a whole. Focusing particularly on wage and price determination in steel, automobiles, and electrical equipment, Milner reveals how the management of concentrated industries actually understood its ability to distribute income to its stakeholders as well as why economists, courts, and public policymakers all struggled to curtail the exercise of that market power at its source.” Buy the book here, and follow Samuel on Linkedin here. Full New Books Network interview here.

New Ep is up! This one has the potential to deliver the highest potential return on either 60 minutes or $20 to any parent thinking about helping a child with college. No joke. Think about it. The three biggest investments you could make in your life are for your retirement, for a home, and if you have children and decide to help them, their college education. The top line cost of 4 years of private college is over $300k. That’s just the first kid. But it doesn’t have to cost you that much. So, if you know of anyone that’s expecting a child or has a child that is looking at college but hasn’t taken off yet, please forward them the link to this podcast. Author Ann Garcia is both a Certified Financial Planner and the parent of twins that have gone through the college application and financial aid application process. She brings the full weight of her professional and personal experience to bear on the topic of How To Pay For College: A Complete Financial Plan for Funding your Child’s Education. Again, if you know anyone from -9 months to +18-years old please share this podcast episode with them. Then buy the book here. Check out Ann’s How To Pay For College website here, and the website for her registered investment advisory here. Follow Ann on Twitter. And, follow Ann on Linkedin. The Kick the Dogma podcast can be found on the KTDpod.com website, as well as Spotify, Amazon, Apple, and Google.

The book is an 800-year history of inflation. Three hundred pages in 35 minutes, with as much of the author’s original work quoted or referenced as possible. Learn the recurring themes in all Four Waves starting in the 12th century and ending (but not really) in the 20th century. Demand-side shocks, supply-side shocks, wages initially keeping up with inflation, then real wages falling, creating unsustainable inequality. Is there anything new under the sun? Not pandemics, climate volatility, or war. Listen and find out about the recurrence of stagflation, the importance of inflation expectations, and where we are in the Fourth Wave. The third installment in our Inflation Series, starting with the Feb 1 Morning Kick, continued in the March 4 Weekend Kickoff, and ending with this summary of The Great Wave, which you can buy here. Follow us on Twitter and Linkedin.

“Let cannabis be kale.” The licensed weed business is more than about states generating tax revs, it’s about supporting small businesses, social justice, and more. Ag economists Dan Sumner and Robin Goldstein explain The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics. I share a story from my firefighter days, reading books in bars, and we compare California, Colorado, and Oklahoma. KTD short available on KTDpod.com as well as Spotify, Amazon, Apple. Full interview available at New Books Network. Buy Can Legal Weed Win here. Buy The Wine Trials (Robin’s other book) here. Vanderbilt University Medical Center held a panel on medical marijuana, CBDs, and Delta 9 called In the Weeds shown on YouTube, or at the VUMC website. Just found this documentary on a Vanderbilt alum and the 30 year journey towards legalization. Looks interesting! Follow Robin on Twitter here. Follow Kick the Dogma on Twitter and Linkedin.

On today’s episode we have a discussion about the evolution of human behavior and how it can be used in engineering, corporate strategy, marketing, and so much more. Sam Tatam joined us from Sidney to talk about his new book Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation to Solve Tomorrow’s Challenges. It is such an interesting book, the most rewarding and thought-provoking book I’ve read this year. If you can imagine a bunch of overlapping circles for disciplines such as behavioral science, evolutionary biology, psychology, marketing, business strategy and product design, you would find this book right in the middle touching them all. Sam shows how behavioral science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something the world has never seen, but by borrowing from yesterday’s solutions – often in the most unexpected ways. Buy Sam’s book here, and follow him on Linkedin and Twitter. Follow Kick the Dogma on our website, Linkedin, or Twitter. Full interview at New Books Network.

All About ESG. That is, investing based on environmental, societal, and governance criteria, and it’s exploding. ESG has taken over from SRI, or socially responsible investing, and interested investors need to understand both impact investing and sustainable investing. But there’s a new book out by Sam Adams and Larry Swedroe that does a fantastic job bringing it all together. After going over some current activity on ESG on social media from Cliff Asness, Alpha Architect, and William Green’s podcast, as well as a clip from the KTDpod interview with Robin Wigglesworth, we get into an abbreviated discussion with Sam and Larry about their book. The complete interview is available on New Books Network. The new book is the Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing: How to Live Your Values and Achieve Your Financial Goals with ESG, SRI, and Impact Investing, can be purchased here. Larry has written a bunch of other books, and currently writes three newsletters for Evidence Based Investor, AlphaArchitect, and Advisor Prospectives. Sam can be followed on the website for his company Vert Asset Management, as well as Linkedin. I referenced two papers from AQR that can be found here from 2017, and more recently on shorting here, and check out William Green’s Meet the Masters interview with Aswath Damodaran through We Study Billionaires – The Investors Podcast Network. Here’s a link to the paper on returns and momentum in ESG rankings called Sustainable Investment – Exploring the Linkage between Alpha, ESG, and SDGs. KTDpod is also available on Amazon, Apple, Spotify, Google and Stitcher. Here is a direct link to the Robin Wigglesworth interview. Follow Robin on Twitter and Linkedin, and buy his book Trillions, you won’t be disappointed. Follow KTDpod on Twitter & Linkedin as well. Sam and Larry’s book talks about Iroquois Valley Farms, but you can learn more about the private REIT on the IVF website.

From the host of NPR's Planet Money, the deeply-investigated story of how one visionary, dogged investor changed American finance forever. The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost it All, is the story of how Bill Gross turned the sleepy bond market into a destabilized game of high risk, high reward; founded Pimco, one of today's most powerful, secretive, and cutthroat investment firms; helped to reshape our financial system in the aftermath of the Great Recession--to his own advantage; and gained legions of admirers, and enemies, along the way. Like every American antihero, his ambition would also be his undoing. Check out the full interview on New Books Networks. Buy the book on Amazon. Follow Kick the Dogma on Twitter and Linkedin. And listen and sign up for notifications on our website KTDpod.com.

Today’s topic is the intangible economy, what it means for competition, policy, inequality, and so much more. For fifty years, the percentage of investment in corporate America and elsewhere allocated to intangible assets has risen slowly but steadily as a percentage of the total. An increasingly intangible rich economy has a meaningful impact on the way companies are valued, how startups are financed, how economic data is measured and reported, and the effectiveness of policy makers’ tools to manage the economy. A paper from McKinsey states that over the past 25 years the share of total investment in intangibles increased by 29 percent in the United States and ten European countries. Rising investment in intangibles has been linked with increasing total factor productivity of entire economies. This could indicate that the deceleration of productivity growth over the past decade partly reflects a slowdown in investment in intangible assets. That is one of the many contentions of co-authors Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake in their fascinating new book Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy. I caught up with Professor Haskel for the New Books Network, and here is a portion of that discussion.

Kick the Dogma wraps up its first quarter. Enjoy this quick look back at prior episodes, with updates on performance, inflation, and coverage of the yield curve inverting between 2’s and 10’s. What does that mean? What are better indicators of coming recession? Enjoy, and have a great weekend. Look out for our first guest host interview on New Books Network available April 5. The subject, Jon Haskel, co-author of Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy.

Rick Ferri’s career is itself a history of the investment management industry, with one notable exception. He tended to be years if not decades ahead of the pack on where the profession, the products, and the services needed to go. Rick has been an analyst and financial advisor for over 30 years, and the author of several books, including The Power of Passive Investing, All About Index Funds, and All About Asset Allocation, the main focus of my interview this time around. Rick is also the host of the Bogleheads on Investing Podcast. You can learn more about Rick on his website. Hopefully we can talk to Rick again after his new book, A Few Good Funds, comes to market. Welcome to Kick the Dogma, and my interview with Rick Ferri. Follow us on Twitter, Linkedin, and KTDpod.com.