PJH Studios

Tag: economics

  • FAFOnomics

    Kyla Scanlon coins an apt term for our current economic state–FAFOnomics. Fuck Around, Find Out.

    Yes, America needs change. But change without wisdom isn’t reform, it’s recklessness.

    And of course, there is an important point to all of this, which is that it is all noise. It’s what Tyler Cowen and Ezra Klein have both pointed out as strategic chaos: overwhelming the public’s already limited capacity for attention until exhaustion sets in. It’s the attention singularity that I wrote about last week in action, where power, narrative, and wealth merge into a self-reinforcing system of perpetual disruption.

    Welcome to FAFAnomics – F*ck Around and Find Out Economics, something that feels like the policy equivalent of a TikTok influencer doing increasingly dangerous stunts off the side of a building for views. The goal isn’t good governance; it’s capturing attention at any cost. And it’s working! While we debate whether each new crisis is legal, ethical, or even real1(as we should) the broader transformation of American fiscal policy continues.

  • Netflix and creative destruction

    Creative destruction is a concept of capitalism, where the business innovations of today, destroy the innovations of yesterday.  Netflix is finding out that those red envelopes aren’t enough to keep the lights on forever and is investing heavily in video streaming technologies, lest they become like Kodak.

    Kodak just misjudged how fast consumers would give up on film and start snapping up digital cameras. And it misjudged its ability to outrun both trends.

    Plus, they had the foresight to get their company name right:

    But Reed Hastings, the founder and chief executive, and early employees, recognized that delivery of movies over the Internet would replace the mail carrier soon. They named the company Netflix, not Mailflix or DVDs by Mail.