I am sitting here listening to the actual rain on a Sunday afternoon. It is unbelievable how long I did not take the time to not listen to music or any other background entertainment but to the actual noises. I can really recommend it to you! Let's dive into this week's Rainy Sunday.
Pandemic Learnings
As a few countries in Europe declare an end to the pandemic and reopen everything without any restrictions, I am getting more optimistic about winter in Germany.
Among those countries are Denmark, England, and in the next few weeks, Sweden, as well as Ireland, will follow. The common thing between them is their high rates of vaccinations, as you can see in the chart below. Please, be aware that the ratio is divided by the whole population and not only adults, which is why the numbers may differ from the news. And I just pulled in Germany as a comparison.
So I think it is time to reflect on what we have learned from the past 18 months, which I would like to break down by the random categories I chose. If you are not interested in one, just skip to the next one.
- Physiological (this week)
- Economic (this week)
- Intellectual (this week)
- State of inequality (next week)
- State of incompetency (next week)
- Personal (next week)
Physiological
It seems that it did not make the news, but we have another epidemic which has been growing steadily over the last years: We have an overweight epidemic in the wealthier countries. To give you a feeling of where we are at:
Why does it matter regarding the pandemic? Because especially two groups of people suffered severe consequences from Covid-19:
- Old people and
- overweight people.
Regarding old people: According to a study by the CDC, more than 80% of Covid-19 deaths occur in people over age 65 and more than 95% of deaths occur in people older than 45.
Regarding overweight people: According to another study by the CDC, among ca. 150.000 adults, who were hospitalized, “28.3% had overweight and 50.8% had obesity”. Not sure why "obesity" is not included in the "overweight" category, but hey... What do I know about that stuff? To give you an idea of the nonlinear relationship between the Body-Mass-Index and the estimated risk of severe Covid-19-associated illness, see the chart below:
Therefore, the most obvious, most important societal learning should be to educate and inspire people to eat healthier and do more exercise in order to save lives! This should be included in every political program because every other policy a party tries to push through is only relevant to people who are actually alive. But of course, it would not be very popular when selling it.
Again: This is a fact retrieved from real data. Not about fat-shaming, judging, or anything related to feeling superior to a group of people because I am not overweight. In the end, we can do something about it while age is difficult to change.
Economic
I will make my first public prediction: We - by "we" I mean the US and Europe - have over-outsourced critical infrastructure due to globalism hype which will get undone within the next 30 years. Not completely of course but substantially.
The Suez-Canal incident with a containership blocking the world economy, added up to alarming signals that our infrastructure is critically dependent on foreign countries’ production of semiconductors, rare raw materials, as well as unlikely events impacting the supply chain.
To put it in terms of one of my favorite books: Our economies are fragile. Not robust and far from being "antifragile".
As a final note: From what I see and hear from people working in the economy, I think that re-insourcing competency instead of outsourcing it to service providers will also play a big factor related to organizational planning. Fewer managers who are not really managing, more technical people knowing about the actual content of stuff which needs to be done.
Intellectual
We are not thinking anymore for ourselves. It is unbelievable how much misinformation there is out there and how prone we are to turn off our brains instead of thinking for ourselves.
We are not able to differentiate anymore between our personal preferences & beliefs while acknowledging "the right thing". This is why I like to speak about my sincere, subjective viewpoint and differentiate it from my objective point of view.
To give you an example: In Germany, we have had a discussion ongoing for years about whether we should start limiting the speed on highways and introduce a maximum speed. By the way: I believe that Germany is the only country in the world that still has unlimited speed limits on highways.
My sincerely subjective opinion: I like to drive fast; I own a fast car, I've never had an accident related to speed, I do not know anybody who was severely injured due to a high-speed accident. So, personally, I would love to continue speeding.
My objective point of view is completely different: There is no rational reason why there should be no speed limit: fewer accidents and therefore, injured people, less attrition on the public good (streets) as well as less environmental pollution are the best arguments for it.
In addition, I have the feeling that I cannot trust the media's narrative anymore. There seems to always be an overreaction to everything. An awful lot of those reactions are to stuff that is completely irrelevant to the real problems we should focus on. Was it always like this? I do not think so. So, let's dive in:
First things first: To quote Ezra Klein in his great article:
“You can’t understand the news without understanding the financial and audience forces that shape it.”
Second: The landscape has dramatically changed since internet news came along. The number of potential sources for the consumer has risen exponentially; The TV stations have multiplied; podcasting has started to emerge. And with all that, the business model changed substantially.
What is surprising is that you could think that more information gives people better opinions to make better choices and be more politically informed. Instead, the opposite happened. The reason is that our choices are not "our" choices anymore. The internet has learned what we want more of and gives it to us, leaving us with the impression that we belong to a certain group who share an array of beliefs. As a consequence, people who are following political journalism have a less accurate understanding of politics.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19630089/Screen_Shot_2020_01_26_at_12.50.06_PM.png?ref=lennartorlando.com)
Back to the business model: The competition for audience is nowadays the key to a functioning journalistic business model which gives you three options:
- You try to pull people to your site by using clickbait titles and selling ads for the impression. Easy to acquire, good revenue predictability.
- You write the best content, get found related to a topic by a search engine, and sell ad impressions. Difficult to acquire, low revenue predictability.
- You create a brand that people only get access to when paying for a subscription. Difficult to acquire, high revenue predictability.
As most of the time, most media outlets go for the option with the fastest results, which leads to a vicious circle as outrageous clickbait works better than positive. To give you BuzzFeed’s secret: Identity = virality
- Example 1: “13 Struggles All Left-Handers Know to Be True”
- Example 2: “Signs You Were Raised by Immigrant Parents.”
This makes it much harder to change your opinion because you confuse it with your identity. To quote Ezra again:
“An identity that binds you into a community you care about is costly and painful to abandon, and the mind will go to great lengths to avoid abandoning it. So the more media people see that encourages them to think of themselves as part of a group, and the more they publicly proclaim.”
How to address this issue for yourself? I will share a model with you next week which makes it easier to classify the information you consume upfront.
And of course, I will share the other learnings regarding
- the learnings about the state of inequality,
- the state of incompetence and
- my personal learnings
Movie Recommendation
Just as a side note at the end: There is a real good movie running on Amazon Prime which is called Easy Money and is a Swedish thriller with one of my favorite actors, Joel Kinnaman. I would give it an 8/10. The story is foreseeable, the characters stereotypes, but it increases in intensity, lets the people behave realistically, and starts quite slow.
Summary: Johann is a student at the prestigious Stockholm School of Economics and stuck between two worlds:
- the privileged upper-class of his classmates and
- the underground business where he earns the money to finance his double life.
Then an opportunity emerges to make a lot of money fast. Well, you can imagine the rest.