Barry Ritholtz

Whenever I hear someone in a privileged job, such as a software engineer, complain about unions or collective bargaining or in fact any form of collectivism, I have to suppress my rage because every concession to the working class, such as weekends, safety standards, overtime pay, PTO, sick leave and so on was paid for in blood by your forebears.

The biggest changes came shortly after Henry Ford conceded the weekend when the ultra-wealthy wrecked the economy (ie the Great Depression) and FDR was elected and, despite being a capitalist, realized he needed to address the very real issues to stave off the perceived threat of Communism. That's where Social Security, the right to join a union and a bunch of other things came from. There was even an attempted coup by the wealthy to avoid all this (ie the Business Plot [1]).

After WW2, the US (in particular) saw this as an opportunity to claw back these concessions. The Soviet Union became the Great Enemy. Former Naxis were recruited to fight Communism, both inside and outside the US. NASA, the FBI, the CIA, NATO, etc all filled with former Nazis despite their "morale lapses" [2] under the Third Reich.

Domestically, we got the Red Scare and McCarthyism. This really went into overdrive in the 1980s when Baby Boomers, whose fears of crime were fuelled by intentional propaganda as well as CIA efforts such as the crack epidemic, voted for Reagan in record numbers. Reagan won 49 states in 1984 (all but Wyoming).

One of the things I…

I think Google was all over the place until roughly covid, but for the past few years the mission has solidly crystallized. Ads (dragging Search along), Youtube, "Platforms & Ecosystems" (Android, Assistant, Play & Chrome), Hardware (Nest, Fitbit, Pixel), Cloud. That's not really a very broad or convoluted set of priorities at the top level.

The problem is the culture. Google is an exceptionally poorly managed company as a rule I claim this is by design from the beginning: as an engineering meritocracy, the technically best ideas won (over time) and employees voted with their feet. That doesn't scale. I'd argue that it began to fail pretty dramatically around the time Diane Greene took over Cloud and Prabhakar moved over (you could probably also argue that those org changes were lagging indicators, and the real start to the "problems" began when Ruth was hired) to run Ads/Search. As the board became increasingly business focused, the lack of solid management or even strategic leadership became more problematic.

What's rule #1 of B2B? Being responsive to your customers' needs and acting predictably. The lack of top-to-bottom management combined with the legacy meritocratic culture have not lent themselves to the same sort of command-and-control hierarchy you see at places like Apple & Microsoft, both of which have been almost entirely market driven for decades.

If you look at this[1] org chart cartoon from about ten years ago, you see what things looked like then.…

This idea goes back several years, and Barry Ritholtz had thoughts on it back in 2015:

> Back to quarterly earnings. Why do we even require them in the first place? The answer is that thanks to the transparency provided by regularly reported earnings and profits, investors can make informed decisions about which stocks to own or avoid. Owners of public companies have hired managers to run the businesses for them, and they want to see with some consistency how healthy the companies that they own actually are. If there are issues with how the business is being managed by the hired corporate executives, the owners want to know sooner rather than later -- and to have a chance to make course corrections. Quarterly numbers allow that to happen.

* https://web.archive.org/web/20151008083649/http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-20/wrong-fix-for-short-term-corporate-thinking

* Via: https://ritholtz.com/2015/08/worst-idea-ever/

And in 2018 he suggested going in the opposite direction—more frequent—to even daily reporting:

> This is exactly backward: More frequent reporting makes the data less significant. In the real world, human behavior emphasizes what occurs less often—meaning doing something less frequently gives it an even greater significance than something that becomes routine or common.

> That is the difference between a New Year’s Eve celebration and a married couple’s weekly date night.

> Twice-a-year earnings reporting will make the event so momentous, with…

> There won't be a war, by the way. I honestly think we're past the point as a species where superpowers duke it out in such a literal fashion.

Although I agree with you, it's worth noting that this sentiment is not a new one. There were plenty of people who believed that WWI marked the end of war, at least in Europe.

Even after WWII, Pax Americana (in Western Europe) was not an inevitability. Today's relative stability in that part of the world was the result of enormous investments in intentional policy. As well as a fair bit of luck.

> Military might today is usually directed from superpowers to third-world countries, but that's a topic for another day

This sentence is a bit of a tautology [1]. But in any case, it's worth remembering that those incursions always find their way back home. Consider the most recent wars. The European migrant crisis has its roots in the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, the USA will eventually feel the economic impact of those two wars. The fact that [2] could happen while the USA ran up enormous deficits (completely unrelated to that growth) is deeply worrying; what will happen in even a slightly less dynamic domestic economy?

> China's influence and dominance will happen through the private sector, ironically.

This view of the world also has a time-honored tradition. Thomas Jefferson was an early proponent of the view that national power flows from economic might rather than hard power. It's worth noting that the…

Not OP but I'm a Canadian who follows the news so I'll pitch in. Canada is suffering a few things right now. Definitely a housing crisis, which seems to be everywhere in the Anglosphere but I'm pretty sure we have it the worst.

Couple charts. Disposable income vs house costs, USA then Canada. https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/s/SIRo14xudI

Relatedly, debt to income ratios, Canada vs USA. https://ritholtz.com/2013/10/household-debt-to-income-ratio-usa-vs-canada/

So Canadians like to spend too much for housing, live credit and thus don't invest. Why do they do that and does that matter? Well, we do that mainly because house appreciation isn't taxed as income (risk aversion in action) and it does matter because it crowds out investment in things businesses use to make money.

WSJ has argued that this is the second leg of the crisis: we can't earn our way out of it, because our productivity is poorer than the USA, at 71%. https://www.wsj.com/articles/canadas-poor-productivity-has-reached-emergency-status-senior-central-bank-official-says-1549142c?st=u7ypu1so0crd9by&reflink=article_copyURL_share

Thirdly, Canada is cold and as a result we need a lot of energy to exist. Are energy prices declining? https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/energy-consumption-per-capita/country-comparison/

Forthly, I'm sure you're aware that the USA is deeply in debt and that the higher interest rates to combat inflation are pinching the ability of governments to operate. What you may…

I liked this article's start but its finish went in a very different direction. Denmark has a ton of things right about it and it's an amazing place - but mostly due to social conditions that don't exist elsewhere in the world.

Denmark was almost entirely homogeneous until the 1990s and is slowly becoming less so - but in a very racially charged way. Their fastest growing political party, the Danish People's Party, is heavily anti-immigration and anti-non-danish folks. It's also has an incredibly well educated population due to decisions made 50+ years ago that would take a massive effort and timescale to implement in the US - even if it would work.

Also the definition of rich in Denmark is equivalent to lower-middle class in the US (with healthcare added). Homes are smaller, cars are fewer, people spend more of their take home salary on food and other basics... The main difference being it is less costly to screw up in Denmark.

Things are overwhelmingly getting better for everyone and even the poorest in America... http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/09/were-living-through-the-greatest-period-in-world-history/

...and the value of improving computers, technology, biology, space travel on a universal time scale is huge on a utilitarian scale. Things have never improved so quickly in so many ways.

Finally - "be the change you wish to see" applies here more than ever. No one is stopping individuals from donating large swaths of their money to causes - in fact almost…