Links to Consider, 7/25

Ben Thompson on Hollywood economics; Martin Gurri on censorship; Eric Spitznagel on marijuana; the WSJ on Europe's lagging economic performance

Ben Thompson writes,

For the video industry the first step to survival must be to retreat to what they are good at — producing content that isn’t available anywhere else — and getting away from what they are not, i.e. running undifferentiated streaming services with massive direct costs and even larger opportunity ones. Talent, meanwhile, has to realize that they and the studios are not divided by this new paradigm, but jointly threatened: the Internet is bad news for content producers with outsized costs, and long-term sustainability will be that much harder to achieve if the focus is on increasing them.

He points out that there also were strikes in Hollywood back in the days when movies were first threatened by TV and when the VCR came out.

Martin Gurri writes,

The modern Left espoused a radical version of Jeffersonian individualism. Born at Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement in 1964, it considered the primary threat to democracy to lie in the great hierarchical institutions like the university, the corporation, and government. The struggle pitted the individual against the machine-like inhumanity of the industrial age. Mario Savio, the movement’s leader, told his comrades: “You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop.”

A remarkable transvaluation has occurred since that idealistic time. In essence, the postmodern establishment Left has reversed the terms of the Jeffersonian ideal. The threat to democracy is now society—a realm of injustice and oppression, in which human wolves perpetually devour the weak.

Taking a page from Thomas Sowell, I might argue that there is a consistency here. What Sowell called The Anointed are certain of their rectitude. When they felt stymied by the establishment, they wanted the freedom to speak against it, because it did not belong to the Anointed. Once they became the establishment, then they could not accept that others could speak against it, because the others do not belong to The Anointed.

Eric Spitznagel writes,

Humphreys agrees that restricting the strength of cannabis products is the obvious way forward. “We cap potency for other addictive drugs yet have failed to do it for cannabis,” he says. “We’re doing a lousy job regulating the cannabis industry. We regulate it even worse than we do alcohol, tobacco, and prescription opioids.”

…Sabet thinks the solution is more nuanced. We should continue removing the criminal penalties for the possession of marijuana, while also “averting the growth of the next addiction-for-profit industry,” he says. That means limiting the ways cannabis companies can market to customers, especially younger, impressionable customers.

For the WSJ, Tom Fairless writes,

The eurozone economy grew about 6% over the past 15 years, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the U.S., according to International Monetary Fund data. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every U.S. state except Idaho and Mississippi, according to a report this month by the European Centre for International Political Economy, a Brussels-based independent think tank.

The article has a lot of data and anecdotes on European underperformance relative to the United States, mostly since 2018. I recommend taking it all with a grain of salt. Cross-regional differences in economic gains have almost surely been swamped by differences within regions. We don’t know whether someone in, say, the 50th percentile of the income distribution in the US. in 2018 has enjoyed much better improvements in living standards than someone in the 50th percentile in Germany or Italy.

I’m not arguing that Fairless is wrong. I am just saying that measuring living standards is hard, and the greater the geographic and cultural difference between people, the harder it gets.

But if you think that Europe demonstrates that regulation is the path to prosperity, maybe think again.

Substacks referenced above;

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America the Stoned

America the Stoned