Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The Truth About Musk, From His Biographer: A viral Bluesky thread introduced tens of thousands around the world to a first glimpse of a forthcoming biography of Elon Musk. Here—in a single essay—is some of what the world just learned. (Proof)
• The California Job-Killer That Wasn’t: The state raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers—and employment kept rising. So why has the law been proclaimed a failure? (The Atlantic) see also The Minimum Wage Claims You Keep Hearing Are Totally Fake. We Can Prove It. In September 2023, California passed a law to bring fast food workers’ minimum wage up from $16 to $20 an hour. A flurry of reports predictably followed from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, Employment Policies Institute, and the Hoover Institution claiming that restaurants and other businesses were already laying off workers based on the new law. This December, Ohanian retracted his claim; Hoover retracted 8 additional Ohanian claims. (Drop Site)
• America’s Health Insurance Grinches: A Scathing Indictment of “Market” Economics: The country’s flawed insurance model, driven by greed, leads to inefficiency, inequality, and denied care – a colossal scam that has sparked fury across the nation. (Institute for New Economic Thinking)
• Insurance and Taxes Now Cost More Than Mortgages for Many Homeowners: Ballooning expenses rewrite the math of homeownership. (Wall Street Journal) see also Migration Into America’s Most Flood-Prone Areas Has More Than Doubled Since the Start of the Pandemic: Nearly 400,000 more people moved into than out of the most flood-prone counties in 2021 and 2022—a 103% increase from the prior two years. The counties most vulnerable to wildfires and heat have also seen more people move in than out as the housing affordability crisis pushes Americans into disaster-prone areas. (Redfin)
• She Blew Her Life Savings. How Tech Is Turning Casual Spenders Into Binge Shoppers. The rise of affiliate links, Buy Now buttons, and other technology has made it easier than ever to binge, often with dire consequences. (Barron’s)
• Substack Has a Nazi Problem: The newsletter platform’s lax content moderation creates an opening for white nationalists eager to get their message out. (The Atlantic) see also Antisemitism, False Information and Hate Speech Find a Home on Substack: Platforms with more lenient content moderation policies, like Substack, provide fertile ground for the spread of hateful rhetoric and false information – a known catalyst for offline harm and violence. (ADL)
• How Syria’s rebels overcame years of a bloody stalemate to topple Assad: The Syrian regime’s collapse came more quickly than the rebels had dreamed — the circumstances were both serendipitous and part of a larger global realignment. (Washington Post)
• Is There Something More Radical than MAGA? JD Vance Is Dreaming It. In a candid series of conversations, Vance revealed an ominous philosophy behind his first year in office. (Politico)
• How America Created the Enemy It Feared Most: The United States killed its own allies, sabotaging itself in a part of Afghanistan where it never needed to be. (New York Times)
• Legalization of online sports betting generates an 8% increase in credit card debt among sports betters. The poor are disproportionately affected: low income households spend 32% more on betting than high income households. (“Gambling Away Stability: Sports Betting’s Impact on Vulnerable Households“) (SSRN)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Sunaina Sinha, Global Head of Private Capital Advisory at Raymond James. She was named one of the 50 Most Influential People in Private Equity for 2 years in a row by Dow Jones Private Equity News, and earned a spot as one of the Twenty Trailblazing Women in Private Equity in 2023.
U.S. Wealth Inequality: Gaps Remain Despite Widespread Wealth Gains
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
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