Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. The Humble Brags of LinkedIn

Written posts on social media are fading. But not on LinkedIn. According to Rob Price, the number of posts on LinkedIn grew 41% from 2021 to 2023. But just as written self-promotion has soared, so has a cottage industry of parody:

Jack Raines, an MBA student at Columbia Business School, has perfected the art of LinkedIn parodies. After New York announced a $100 incentive to encourage residents to get vaccinated, he posted that he'd earned $100,000 by getting 1,000 jabs in 16 days. "Opportunities like these are rare, but you have to capitalize on them if you want to successfully build wealth," he sagely advised his followers.

2. Murdoch’s Competitive Edge

Former press baron and provocative political columnist Conrad Black declares that Rupert Murdoch was his fiercest competitor. After learning that Murdoch stepped down as chair of News Corp., Black recounts with grudging admiration how Murdoch created a revolution in tabloid media following his takeover of The Sun:

The Sun eclipsed The Mirror in circulation in nine years, reaching and for a long time remaining at about five million daily — the Western world’s largest daily newspaper circulation. It was a renowned source of humorous headlines and stories; page 3 featured a sexy naked or scantily clad young woman. In advising against voting for the Labour Party in 1992, The Sun warned that, if it were elected, for the next four years “the page 3 girl will look like this”: an under-dressed woman of approximately 300 pounds on a bicycle. When a summer strike in the French ports for the cross-Channel ferries effectively stopped traffic to France other than by air, The Sun headline was: “BLOODY FROGS SCUTTLE OUR HOLS.”

3. He's Lit

Novelist Gary Shteyngart makes a hard case for how Walter Isaacson’s run of success as a biographer hits a wall with his new tome on Elon Musk:

 Isaacson comes from the “his eyes lit up” school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter…To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best.

4. Is the Threat of Big Tech Overstated?

In the wake of recent cases launched by the FTC, the libertarian magazine Reason offers a lively intellectual history of anti-trust regulation. The author emphasizes that mergers – like the Amazon-Whole Foods combination – only rarely eliminate consumer choice and create monopolies: 

In the years since Amazon's merger, multiple large retailers have grown faster or performed better in the stock market; direct competitors in the online grocery sales sphere have grown significantly. Meanwhile, Whole Foods and Amazon only control a small percentage of the grocery market. Similarly...Google's acquisition of Fitbit was expected to "reinforce Google's position in the ad industry and prevent new entry; harm user privacy by enabling Google to integrate Fitbit health data into its other ad services (or sell this data to health insurers); and crush burgeoning rivals in the wearable-device industry." Instead, the exact opposite has occurred: Google's share of the online-advertising industry has declined, as has Fitbit's position in the wearable-devices segment. 

Former FTC economist Luke Froeb adds this funny story about the reality of business price-fixing schemes.

5. For Sale: A Slightly Damaged NFT

Remember the NFT boom? At the height of crypto mania, business pages were filled with stories about how NFTs – or non-fungible tokens, which are basically encrypted digital images – would one day be worth more than the genuine item. It hasn’t turned out that way, according to the crypto site Dappgambi:

 Of the 73,257 NFT collections we identified, an eye-watering 69,795 of them have a market cap of 0 Ether (ETH). This statistic effectively means that 95% of people holding NFT collections are currently holding onto worthless investments. Having looked into those figures, we would estimate that 95% to include over 23 million people whose investments are now worthless.

6. Rise of the iPhone

In an interview with the Richmond Federal Reserve, economics professor Melissa Kearney makes a provocative suggestion that there is a connection between the rise in the iPhone and the decline in fertility:

 A lot of social changes happened in the years after the iPhone came out: the decline in birth rates, a delay in marriage, the rise in mental health challenges. I find the notion that these are linked to the introduction of the iPhone completely plausible...I have heard from many young women that they are trying to decide whether they want to have kids, that they're going online and seeing all of these posts on Instagram, TikTok, etcetera, suggesting that people who don’t have kids are saying how kids are a burden to freedom and their life. 

Websites Worth Reading

The World’s Biggest Oil Producers: Infographic of where oil comes from

The Enlightened Economist: Book reviews by an economist

50-Homer Seasons: From 1920 – Present

Feeds We Follow

@energybants: Microsoft and nuclear power

@BestofLinkedin: LinkedIn mockery

@USAmbJapan: Rahm Emanuel’s lively feed