Good thread on commercial real estate if you want to follow-up on the reading from last issue. As Iām finishing this up, Iām realizing the articles this week are all kind of downers. Going to try to balance that out in the future but sometimes thatās just what I ended up reading, sorry!
-TK
š±š„š§ Social media use is a major cause of the mental illness epidemic in young girls according to psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, who go through the latest available research and lay out a strong argument that a significant, gendered, causal relationship exists, despite what Facebook says.
most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011)
Some have argued that these increases reflect nothing more than Gen Zās increased willingness to disclose their mental-health problems. But researchers have found corresponding increases in measurable behaviors such as suicide (for both sexes), and emergency-department admissions for self-harm (for girls only). From 2010 to 2014, rates of hospital admission for self-harm did not increase at all for women in their early 20s, or for boys or young men, but they doubled for girls ages 10 to 14.
Haidt looks at the commonly cited research on the subject, specifically a 2019 study by Orben and Przybylski which found that the relationship was negative but so tiny as to be equivalent to āeating potatoesā. But he finds that previous studies lumped together all screen use vs. looking specifically at social media and looked at boys and girls together, obscuring the gendered effect.
Facebook would have you believe that merely cutting back the time that teens spend on social media will solve any problems it creates. In a 2019 internal essay, Andrew Bosworth, a longtime company executive, wrote:
While Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation.
Bosworth was proposing what medical researchers call a ādose-response relationship.ā Sugar, salt, alcohol, and many other substances that are dangerous in large doses are harmless in small ones. This framing also implies that any health problems caused by social media result from the userās lack of self-control. Thatās exactly what Bosworth concluded: āEach of us must take responsibility for ourselves.ā The dose-response frame also points to cheap solutions that pose no threat to its business model.
But another point Haidt makes here is that social media use is not like an individualās dose-response relationship. Social media affects cohorts and communities such that individuals canāt simply opt-out because the environment around them has changed. (Substack | Jonathan Haidt \ Feb 2023)
I recently saw Michael Mannās movie The Insider, which is about a researcher in Big Tobacco who decides to become a whistleblower about the industriesā lies and professed ignorance about nicotineās addictiveness. Between that and rewatching the first season of Mad Men, Iāve been feeling more and more that the cigarette analogy of Big Tobacco and social media companies is very appropriate. Thereāve been whistleblowers, but we havenāt reached the point in the public conversation where the health effects are being framed as substantively and the companies as villainously, in no small part because of the lack of transparency. Hopefully, this is a step in that direction.
š²šš°Sports betting is up 10x in 4 years in NJ since it was legalized. 60% of industry profits apparently come from the top 5% of users (Vox | Jack Meserve | Mar 2023)
An extensive report by Bloomberg cataloged the harms since legalization: Sixty percent of industry profits come from the top 5 percent of users; the industry, supposedly regulated, has an estimated 36,000 children addicted to it; the government estimates 8 percent of suicides are gambling related.
In 2016, the situation was already so bad that the co-founder of Paddy Power, an industry leader, resigned from the companyās board while āfighting back tearsā because he believed he was complicit in an immoral industry, Bloomberg reportedā¦
Hereās the thing: A multinational profit-making industry and responsible gambling by customers are mutually exclusive. This is not hypothetical. The specific event that spurred Stewart Kenny, the Paddy Power co-founder, to resign from the board of directors was learning that āsenior managers shelved a safer gambling campaign it was running in Australia because it had proved too effective and was costing them money.ā
Hard to think of good social reasons for legalizing sports gambling. Even harder to see the last few years being rolled back anytime soon. Instead of the same volume of sports gambling simply becoming taxed and regulated weāre seeing the industry and the culture of it dominate our sports leagues and push itself on new gamblers.
šš¤š On the class politics of Instagram face and its paradoxical ubiquity. (Tablet | Grazie Sophia Christie | Feb 2023)
The success of Instagram Face, its ubiquity, isnāt the start of cyborg aesthetics. Itās the end of it. Because what might save us from such apocalyptic beauty is something almost too ugly to say out loud: When in history have rich women ever wanted to look like regular ones?
One interesting thing I think the piece touches on is not only the proliferation of these procedures but the reversibility of most of them. The ability to try on new features like clothes and shed them later. I wonder if weāre only at the beginning of an era of increasing capacity for body modification that we see here satisfying long-standing cosmetic impulses but that in the long-term, might generate new impulses and uses for new capabilities.
Beauty has always been exclusive. When someone strikes you as pretty, it means they are something that everyone else is not. Oversize lips depend on undersize ones. Thick hair exists only in reference-distance of thin. Itās a zero-sum game, as relative as our morals. Naturally, we hoard of beauty what we can. Itās why we call grooming tips āsecrets.ā
I donāt fully agree on this. I see the point about beauty operating in competition in and in relation to others but I also think perhaps many of the people who chase it in these ways are chasing an absolute standard and donāt see any contradiction with its ubiquity? After all thereās that theory about averaged faces looking more attractive.
šØš³š§āāļø Xi Jinping Brings Chinaās Reform Era to an End (WSJ | Lingling Wei | Mar 2023)
Where Deng introduced a collective-leadership system to protect against one-man rule, gave private enterprise wider room to flourish and marked a separation between the party and the government, Mr. Xi has done away with term limits, narrowed the scope for the private sector and placed the partyāand himselfāat the center of Chinese society.