first Derivative [77]
February 20, 2023
It’s been almost a year since the last issue fD but after some thinking and recent subscriber feedback, I realized how much I missed sharing these. There were a bunch of articles in a draft I started for this issue last year. Obviously, a lot has happened since then chief among them the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. I decided to start over this time with things I’ve read more recently. I’m aiming keep a weekly pace to these and to do that we might have fewer pieces here with less commentary. I know some of you thought 10 per issue was too many to get through anyway. As always, let me know what you want to see more of whether it’s articles, commentary/analysis, different media (podcasts, videos, etc.).
Happy reading :)
-TK
You can find old issues here.
💊⚖️ The Weight-Loss-Drug Revolution Is a Miracle—And a Menace (Atlantic) by Derek Thompson (Jan 2023)
High confidence that this new class of weight-loss drugs is going to be a game-changer for obesity and American/global health.
One Morgan Stanley model projected that semaglutide and similar weight-loss drugs could be a $30 billion market by 2030. That’s about 10 percent of all U.S. drug spending. This level of prevalence is inconceivable without insurance coverage…
These drugs will also scramble our relationship with the basic concept of willpower in ways that aren’t cleanly good or bad. How long should doctors recommend that their patients press forward with “diet and exercise” recommendations now that pills and injectables may safely and more consistently keep off weight?
🏛📈 Financialization and the Problem of Mutually Assured Capital Destruction (American Affairs) by Marc Rohatyn (May 2022)
Our own fD subscriber, Marc writes about the asset management and management consulting industries as under-examined contributors to a paradigm of underinvestment and an economy regulated by corporate coordination over competition.
The most powerful economic force financialization has unleashed to benefit shareholders is not greed, but consensus. By creating incentives to maximize overall industry profit pools and minimize competitive investment, a shareholder-centric asset governance model has undermined the competitiveness of markets and encouraged a de facto coordination among firms that benefits asset owners at the expense of broader prosperity.
👾💬 ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web (NYer) by Ted Chiang (Feb 2023)
Ted Chiang offers a measured skeptical take on ChatGPT and large language models (LLMs), analogizing them to lossy compression algorithms for the Internet.
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable.
For a more in-depth but still somewhat layman accessible read on ChatGPT check out this piece from Stephen Wolfram.
🛢💰 The Getty' Family’s Trust Issues (NYer) by Evan Osnos (Jan 2023)
Interesting behind the scenes look at the maneuvering involved to keep massive inheritances from being taxed, and the scale of the game at play.
The arc of an American fortune, it is often said, goes from “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” Other cultures have similar admonitions. The Japanese version is bleak: “The third generation ruins the house.” The Germans dwell on the mechanics: “Acquire it, inherit it, destroy it.”
And yet, in recent times, the fortunes of many prominent American clans have soared. Between 1983 and 2020, the net worth of the Kochs, who prospered in fossil fuels and became right-wing mega-donors, grew twenty-five-fold, from $3.9 billion to $100 billion. The Mars-family fortune, which began in the candy business, grew by a factor of thirty-six, to $94 billion. The Waltons, of Walmart, expanded their fortune forty-four-fold, to $247 billion. The financial triumph of such clans helps explain how the imbalance of wealth in the United States has risen to levels unseen in a century. In 1978, the top 0.1 per cent of Americans owned about seven per cent of the nation’s wealth; today, according to the World Inequality Database, it owns eighteen per cent.
📺🌏 How Much Netflix Can the World Absorb? (NYer) by Rachel Syme (Jan 2023)
Interestingly timed profile of top Netflix creative Bela Bajaria
I asked Bajaria about her own favorite shows, but she was noncommittal. “I mean, I’m a fan of TV. I work in TV. I watch everybody’s things,” she said, adding, “People have very different tastes, and I have no disdain for whatever those things are. What is quality? What is good versus not? That’s all subjective. I just want to super-serve the audience.”
In what feels like a very PR-controlled piece, you can sometimes get the writer’s very dry take on the subject:
She was less guarded about her proclivities during a private jet ride to the Netflix offices in Madrid. A company publicist had intended to be present during all of our travels, but she had tested positive for COVID, so Bajaria and I were alone on the plane. A flight attendant wearing a small black beret offered us hot towels, and Bajaria perused the wine list.
“You don’t have Sauvignon Blanc?” she said. “Do you have anything like a Sauvignon Blanc? Maybe a rosé?”
The flight attendant suggested a very dry Chardonnay, and Bajaria wrinkled her nose. “O.K., I’ll try it,” she said. Then she turned to me and added, “If you write this part, you have to say that I drank the Sauvignon Blanc, because it cannot be my reputation that I drank Chardonnay.”
Really glad these newsletters are back! I’m a huge fan