Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA), Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN): Golden Years

Humility
Economist Ronald Coase, who died this week at age 102, talked to NPR last year about China: 

Coase is a legend in economics. He won the Nobel prize. He has a theorem named after him. But China’s rapid emergence as a global economic power — one of the most important developments of the past generation — took him completely by surprise.

“I thought it would take 100 years, if not more,” Coase said.

It seemed striking that an economic legend could be so wrong about such an important subject. I asked Coase what he made of this.

“I’ve been wrong so often I don’t find it extraordinary at all,” he said.

Americans are back to having babies, writesThe Wall Street Journal:

America’s baby bust may be over.

The nation’s fertility rate stabilized last year for the first time in five years, according to early data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That follows four years of big declines during the economic downturn that pushed the rate—the number of births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 — to the lowest levels on record.

Has-been
James Suroweicki writes about Nokia’s decline:

It wasn’t just that Nokia failed to recognize the increasing importance of software, though. It also underestimated how important the transition to smartphones would be. And this was, in retrospect, a classic case of a company being enthralled (and, in a way, imprisoned) by its past success. Nokia was, after all, earning more than fifty per cent of all the profits in the mobile-phone industry in 2007, and most of those profits were not coming from smartphones. Diverting a lot of resources into a high-end, low-volume business (which is what the touch-screen smartphone business was in 2007) would have looked risky. In that sense, Nokia’s failure resulted at least in part from an institutional reluctance to transition into a new era.

Enjoy your weekend.

The article 8 Fascinating Reads originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Morgan Housel.

Fool contributor Morgan Housel has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Amazon.com and Tesla Motors (NASDAQ:TSLA). The Motley Fool owns shares of Amazon.com and Tesla Motors.

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