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Fears about joblessness on this scale could jolt markets again. Investors have priced in a recession by now, but may still be processing the size of the hole the coronavirus has blown into the global economy, Jeffrey Kleintop, chief global investment strategist at Charles Schwab, told me.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is now down 35% from its all-time high in mid-February, erasing all its gains since President Donald Trump's inauguration. Between January 20 and last Thursday, $27 trillion was wiped off global stocks, according to Bank of America.

Stocks fell 4.5% in New York

Some pockets of the market reacted positively to the Fed moves. Signs of stress in the corporate debt sector eased, with the CDX Investment Grade index spread tightening. Bond ETFs eligible for central-bank purchases rallied and the dollar retreated versus major peers.

Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank chiefs separately joined an emergency call to work on a joint response to the economic blow dealt by the pandemic.

U.S. unemployment rate may hit 30% in the second quarter, along with a 50% drop in gross domestic product. Morgan Stanley expects the U.S. economy to plummet 30% in the second quarter.

The package included several unprecedented steps for the Fed, including intervention in the corporate bond market, purchases of commercial asset-backed mortgages and exchange-traded funds, and, if Congress clears the way, a significant Main Street lending program directly aimed at aiding small businesses.

emergency facilities will employ a total of $300 billion, backed by $30 billion from the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund.

Fed said a week ago it would buy at least $500 billion of Treasuries and $200 billion of agency MBS. The Fed will now make those purchases unlimited and will take on a slew of new efforts, many aimed at directly aiding employers and households, as well as cities and states.

Trade would revert to the rules of the World Trade Organization, making Britain’s exports to Europe vulnerable to tariffs and other barriers to commerce, including health and safety rules.

Brexit supporters called the outcome a template for how a pragmatic British government would prevent businesses from abandoning its shores — with tax cuts, friendly regulation and deal making.

But consumer spending has been increasingly paid for by debt. The British pound has surrendered 17 percent of its value against the dollar since the referendum, raising the cost of imported goods.

During the campaign, Brexit supporters argued that Europe would ultimately make it happen because its most powerful member, Germany, now sends a parade of BMWs, Audis and Volkswagens to Britain.

Even if European leaders seek middle ground, any one of the member nations could hijack the proceedings with their demands while the clock ticks away.

Britain really is departing the largest consumer market on earth.

Economic literacy contributes to a second class of knowledge.

For some economic decisions, such as buying a home or investing in the stock market, it is possible to hire professional or technical help when making a choice, but in most cases it is neither economical nor practical for an individual to hire a skilled professional every time an economic decision needs to be made.

There are three essential ingredients for effective economic education in the schools.

The development of economic literacy must begin in the schools. Even young children are capable of learning basic economic concepts that help them understand their economic world. In the secondary years, that initial foundation can be expanded to include instruction in a broader set of economic ideas and concepts

Some may think that economics is too difficult a subject to be taught to children and youth, and that such instruction should wait until college

Waiting until students are in college to teach economics is simply a matter of "too little and too late." The majority of students end their formal education with secondary school, and even those students who continue their learning at a college or university may not take an economics course.

Economic literacy improves the competence of each individual for making personal and social decisions about the multitude of economic issues that will be encountered over a lifetime.

First, teachers must be knowledgeable about the subject and be able to help students learn how to use basic economic concepts to analyze personal and social issues. Second, good curriculum guides and instructional materials are needed that present economic content at an appropriate level for the student to understand. Third, economics must have a central place in the school curriculum—similar to math, science, history and language arts—so that substantial classroom time is devoted to economics instruction

Over the past 40 years there has been a significant improvement in each area.

A study of high school transcripts shows that only about 44 percent of high school students take a separate course in economics. This course is usually offered in the 12th grade as an elective and lasts for only a semester.

Given this situation—that fewer than half of high school graduates take a course in economics—it should not be surprising that study after study show that there is widespread economic illiteracy among youth and the American public.

Some 87 percent of high school seniors rated their knowledge and understanding of economic and economic issues as only fair or poor.

Knowing what determines prices in a market economy and accepting the outcomes are two different things. If demand or supply conditions change, prices in a competitive market will rise and fall. Having a basic understanding of how markets work does not always mean that people will like price changes, especially if prices rise, but it should increase the probability of accepting the market outcome

The development of basic economic literacy is an important goal for a democratic society that relies heavily on informed citizenry and personal economic decision-making.

To achieve that goal will require that significant gaps in the economic education of youth be closed by giving economics a more central place in the school curriculum. More economics coursework at the precollege level sets a foundation for economic literacy, but it is only the beginning.

Markets have been roiled in recent weeks as the coronavirus spread. During the White House press conference Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed as much as 1,000 points, rebounding from the worst rout since 1987

Trump's administration also spoke about other "big" plans to aid workers and the economy in the midst of the fallout. Those plans include help for industries such as airlines that have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.

The tumult in the U.S. economy still pales in comparison to the damage being felt in other countries. In China, auto sales cratered 80% last month, while a plunge in tourism is expected to push Italy and perhaps France into a recession.

The U.S. Travel Association predicts that international travel to the United States will fall by 6% over the next three months. "There is a lot of uncertainty around coronavirus, and it is pretty clear that it is having an effect on travel demand — not just from China, and not just internationally, but for domestic business and leisure travel as well," the association's president, Roger Dow, said in a statement.

But the headline-grabbing differences between the findings of these Nobel laureates are less significant than the profound agreement in their scientific approach to economic questions, which is characterized by formulating and testing precise hypotheses

I’m troubled by the sense among skeptics that disagreements about the answers to certain questions suggest that economics is a confused discipline, a fake science whose findings cannot be a useful basis for making policy decisions.

It is true that the answers to many “big picture” macroeconomic questions — like the causes of recessions or the determinants of growth — remain elusive.

As is the case with epidemiologists, the fundamental challenge faced by economists — and a root cause of many disagreements in the field — is our limited ability to run experiments

economists have recently begun to overcome these challenges by developing tools that approximate scientific experiments to obtain compelling answer

Other economic studies have taken advantage of the constraints inherent in a particular policy to obtain scientific evidence

Even when such experiments are unfeasible, there are ways to use “big data” to help answer policy questions

We can't employ an entirely programmatic approach to human affairs. However well we think we might be embedding our technologies with the values we hope to express, more often than not we also get unexpected consequences.

Still, we can't help but do a bit of evil when we build technology upon technology, without taking a pause to ask what it's all for. New technologies give us the opportunity to reevaluate the systems we have been using up until now, and consider doing things differently.

our best Stanford computer science graduates end up writing algorithms that better extract money from the stock market, rather than exploring whether capital is even serving its original purpose of getting funds to new businesses.

When we develop technology in a vacuum, disconnected from the reality in which people really live, we are too likely to spend our energy designing some abstract vision of a future life rather than addressing the pains and injustices around us right now. Technology becomes a way of escaping the world's problems, whether through virtual reality or massive Silicon Valley stock options packages, rather than engaging with them.

. It's not enough to computerize and digitize the society we have, and exacerbate its problems by new means. We must transcend the mere avoidance of the patently evil and instead seek to do good. That may involve actually overturning and remaking some institutions and processes from the ground up. That's the real potential of digital technology. To retrieve the values and ideas that may have seemed impossible before and see whether we can realize them today in this very new world.

By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers

this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.

Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational byproducts of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms

Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.

The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.

So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?

Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.

he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.

internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms “extreme structural independence from people.” When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.

Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well.

In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.

In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.

The researchers recruited 520 undergraduates at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available working-memory capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.

the “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.”

 Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking.

They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.

A study of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.

Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains

Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.

In a 2013 study conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”

The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware o

 Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking — that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.”

even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings — and it is always part of our surroundings.

Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.

The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities that make it so appealing to us — its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability — are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.

Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours

Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said in a recent interview. “[We] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it’s not that simple.

As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores

In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers — led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner — had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.

Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it

The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”

as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.”

Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.

As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”

That insight sheds light on society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.

A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.

When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning

We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.

Google’s once-patient investors grew restive, demanding that the founders figure out a way to make money, preferably lots of it.

nder pressure, Page and Brin authorized the launch of an auction system for selling advertisements tied to search queries. The system was designed so that the company would get paid by an advertiser only when a user clicked on an ad. This feature gave Google a huge financial incentive to make accurate predictions about how users would respond to ads and other online content. Even tiny increases in click rates would bring big gains in income. And so the company began deploying its stores of behavioral data not for the benefit of users but to aid advertisers — and to juice its own profits. Surveillance capitalism had arrived.

Google’s business now hinged on what Zuboff calls “the extraction imperative.” To improve its predictions, it had to mine as much information as possible from web users. It aggressively expanded its online services to widen the scope of its surveillance.

Through Gmail, it secured access to the contents of people’s emails and address books. Through Google Maps, it gained a bead on people’s whereabouts and movements. Through Google Calendar, it learned what people were doing at different moments during the day and whom they were doing it with. Through Google News, it got a readout of people’s interests and political leanings. Through Google Shopping, it opened a window onto people’s wish lists,

The company gave all these services away for free to ensure they’d be used by as many people as possible. It knew the money lay in the data.

the organization grew insular and secretive. Seeking to keep the true nature of its work from the public, it adopted what its CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, called a “hiding strategy” — a kind of corporate omerta backed up by stringent nondisclosure agreements.

Page and Brin further shielded themselves from outside oversight by establishing a stock structure that guaranteed their power could never be challenged, neither by investors nor by directors.

What’s most remarkable about the birth of surveillance capitalism is the speed and audacity with which Google overturned social conventions and norms about data and privacy. Without permission, without compensation, and with little in the way of resistance, the company seized and declared ownership over everyone’s information

The companies that followed Google presumed that they too had an unfettered right to collect, parse, and sell personal data in pretty much any way they pleased. In the smart homes being built today, it’s understood that any and all data will be beamed up to corporate clouds.

Google conducted its great data heist under the cover of novelty. The web was an exciting frontier — something new in the world — and few people understood or cared about what they were revealing as they searched and surfed. In those innocent days, data was there for the taking, and Google took it

Google also benefited from decisions made by lawmakers, regulators, and judges — decisions that granted internet companies free use of a vast taxpayer-funded communication infrastructure, relieved them of legal and ethical responsibility for the information and messages they distributed, and gave them carte blanche to collect and exploit user data.

Consider the terms-of-service agreements that govern the division of rights and the delegation of ownership online. Non-negotiable, subject to emendation and extension at the company’s whim, and requiring only a casual click to bind the user, TOS agreements are parodies of contracts, yet they have been granted legal legitimacy by the court

Law professors, writes Zuboff, “call these ‘contracts of adhesion’ because they impose take-it-or-leave-it conditions on users that stick to them whether they like it or not.” Fundamentally undemocratic, the ubiquitous agreements helped Google and other firms commandeer personal data as if by fiat.

n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way

Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one

but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.

there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on

hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.

Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.

All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”

“The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”

This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists

Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.

it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.

spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.

competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives

“The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.

What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not

Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.

Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public

Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc

As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.

The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,”

Most investors regard Warren Buffett as someone who has parlayed brilliant analysis, hard work and extensive connections into one of the best track records in financial history. Mr. Housel, however, notices that Mr. Buffett accrued at least 95% of his wealth after age 65.

Had Mr. Buffett earned his world-beating returns for only 30 years rather than much longer, he would be worth 99.9% less, notes Mr. Housel. “The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three quarters of a century,” he writes of Mr. Buffett. “His skill is investing, but his secret is time.”

So Mr. Buffett—traditionally viewed as the greatest living example of investing skill—is also proof of the power of luck and longevity.

In a similar vein, “The Psychology of Money” argues the biggest determinant of long-term returns often happens to be when you were born. Adjusted for inflation, people born in 1950 earned essentially nothing in the stock market between the ages of 13 and 30, Mr. Housel shows. Those born in 1970 earned roughly nine times as much on stocks in their formative years. Those born in 2000? They may have to save a lot more than their parents did.

Bubbles form when catchy stories and the human need for imitation and conformity turn investing into a social imperative.

Mr. Housel urges investors to think about what money and wealth are for. He draws a critical distinction between being rich (having a high current income) and being wealthy (having the freedom to choose not to spend money).

Many rich people aren’t wealthy, Mr. Housel argues, because they feel the need to spend a lot of money to show others how rich they are

He defines the optimal savings level as “the gap between your ego and your income.” Wealth consists in caring less about what others think about you and more about using your money to control how you spend your time.

He writes: “The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who[m] you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance.”

a reminder to stay informed and vigilant against groupthink.

A common refrain in battles about Covid-19 and vaccination, politics and conspiracy theories, parenting, drugs, food, stock trading and media, it signals not just a rejection of authority but often trust in another kind.

“Do your own research” is an idea central to Joe Rogan’s interview podcast, the most listened to program on Spotify, where external claims of expertise are synonymous with admissions of malice. In its current usage, DYOR is often an appeal to join in, rendered in the language of opting out.

“There’s this idea that the goal of science is consensus,” Professor Carrion said. “The model they brought to it was that we didn’t need consensus.” She noted that the women she surveyed often used singular rather than plural pronouns. “It was ‘she needs to do her own research,” Professor Carrion said, rather than we need to do ours. Unlike some critical health movements in the past, this was an individualist endeavor.

One of the enticing aspects of cryptocurrencies, which pose an alternative to traditional financial institutions, is that expertise is available to anyone who wants to claim it.

In crypto, the uses of DYOR are various and contradictory, earnest and ironic sometimes within the same discussion. Breathless investment pitches for new coins are punctuated with “NFA/DYOR” (not financial advice), or admonitions not to invest more than you can afford to lose, which many people are obviously ignoring; stories about getting rich are prefaced with DYOR; requests for advice about which coins to hold are answered with DYOR. It is the siren song of crypto investing.

In that way — the momentum of a group — crypto investing isn’t altogether distinct from how people have invested in the stock market for decades. Though here it is tinged with a rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak: We’re outsiders, in this together; we’re doing something sort of ridiculous, but also sort of cool.

“Now it seems like DYOR can only do so much,” the user wrote. Eventually, the user said, you end up relying on “trust.”

“Historically,” says Greg Blatt, the CEO of Match.com’s parent company, “relationships have been billed as ‘hard’ because, historically, commitment has been the goal. You could say online dating is simply changing people’s ideas about whether commitment itself is a life value.” Mate scarcity also plays an important role in people’s relationship decisions. “Look, if I lived in Iowa, I’d be married with four children by now,” says Blatt, a 40‑something bachelor in Manhattan. “That’s just how it is.”

“I think divorce rates will increase as life in general becomes more real-time,” says Niccolò Formai, the head of social-media marketing at Badoo, a meeting-and-dating app with about 25 million active users worldwide. “Think about the evolution of other kinds of content on the Web—stock quotes, news. The goal has always been to make it faster. The same thing will happen with meeting. It’s exhilarating to connect with new people, not to mention beneficial for reasons having nothing to do with romance. You network for a job. You find a flatmate. Over time you’ll expect that constant flow. People always said that the need for stability would keep commitment alive. But that thinking was based on a world in which you didn’t meet that many people.”

“You could say online dating allows people to get into relationships, learn things, and ultimately make a better selection,” says Gonzaga. “But you could also easily see a world in which online dating leads to people leaving relationships the moment they’re not working—an overall weakening of commitment.”

Explaining the mentality of a typical dating-site executive, Justin Parfitt, a dating entrepreneur based in San Francisco, puts the matter bluntly: “They’re thinking, Let’s keep this fucker coming back to the site as often as we can.” For instance, long after their accounts become inactive on Match.com and some other sites, lapsed users receive notifications informing them that wonderful people are browsing their profiles and are eager to chat. “Most of our users are return customers,” says Match.com’s Blatt.

The market is hugely more efficient … People expect to—and this will be increasingly the case over time—access people anywhere, anytime, based on complex search requests … Such a feeling of access affects our pursuit of love … the whole world (versus, say, the city we live in) will, increasingly, feel like the market for our partner(s). Our pickiness will probably increase.” “Above all, Internet dating has helped people of all ages realize that there’s no need to settle for a mediocre relationship.”

Perrow had a fairly simple solution for the problem. High-risk systems, such as nuclear power plants, should be built only as a last resort.

That solution won’t work for financial markets. We need currency hedges, futures markets, and derivatives to keep our economic systems functioning. But we also have to realize tweaking the current system will not fix the problem. Most of the supposedly strong cures implemented by legislators to date, such as prohibiting bank holding companies from proprietary trading, are inadequate as well.

how do we make our markets less danger prone? A good place to start would be to reduce the excessive trading volumes that lie at the root of accidents like the Flash Freeze, Flash Cash, and Goldman debacle. There is no valid reason for high frequency trading to make up more than 50 percent of all stock trades, and there is no pressing need for some $4 trillion in daily foreign currency transactions. A Tobin tax on transactions, first suggested by Noble laureate James Tobin in 1972, of as little as 0.1 percent, would significantly reduce these volumes. Smaller transaction volumes would reduce the size of accidents and possibly their frequency.

But tinkering with the current system and looking for easy ways out, as we are now, is bound to fail. We’re in danger of letting normal accidents in the financial system become all too normal.

Quite apart from the “unbalanced power” of the financial sector, and the tendency of a super-sized financial sector to cause increasingly bad global financial crashes, excessive financialization leads to resources being misallocated. “In many of the financial sector’s segments that have grown fastest since deregulation—like investment banks—the transactions are primarily zero-sum.”

However in times of rapid technological transformation like today, the role of the economic priesthood in protecting its own interests can become a massively destabilizing.

Thus we know from the history of the last couple of hundred years that in times of rapid technological transformation, the financial sector tends to become disconnected from the real economy

This has occurred a number of times in the last few hundred years, including the Canal Mania (England—1790s), the Rail Mania (England—1840s), the Gilded Age (US: 1880s—early 1900s) the Roaring Twenties (US—1920s) and the Big Banks of today.

Getting to safety is not made any easier by the fact the modern economic priesthood—the managers of large firms and the banks—has, like their ancient Egyptian forbears, found ways to participate in the casino economy and benefit from “making money out of money”, even as the economy as a whole suffers.  As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Just as the ancient Egyptian economic priesthood clung to power as the economy stagnated, so today the economic priesthood shows no signs of relinquishing their gains or their power. The appetite and expectation of extraordinary returns is still there.

“Corporate chieftains rationally choose financial engineering—debt-financed share buybacks, for example—over capital investment in property, plants and equipment. Financial markets reward shareholder activism. Institutional investors extend their risk parameters to beat their benchmarks… But real economic growth—averaging just a bit above 2 percent for the fifth year in a row—remains sorely lacking.”

As a result, the economy remains in the “Great Stagnation”(Tyler Cowen), also known as “the Secular Stagnation (Larry Summers). It is running on continuing life support from the Federal Reserve. Large enterprises still appear to be profitable. The appearance, though not the reality, of economic well-being has been sufficient to make the stock market soa

Just as no change was possible in ancient Egyptian society so long as the economic priesthood colluded to preserve the status quo, so the excesses and prevarications of the Financial Sector will continue so long as the regulators remain its cheerleaders.

Just listen to the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Mary Jo White at Stanford University Rock Center for Corporate Governance speaking to directors. In her speech, she makes no secret of her view that the overall corporate arrangements are sound. The job of the SEC, as outlined in the speech, is to find the odd individual who might be doing something wrong. The idea that the large-scale activities of the major banks might be socially corrosive is not even alluded.

Thus in times of transformational technology, there is a huge expansion of investment, driven by the financial sector. Wealthy investors begin to expect outsized returns and so there is over-investment. The resulting bubbles in due course burst

Just as in ancient Egypt, no progress was possible so long as the myths and rituals of the economic priesthood and their offerings to the gods were widely accepted as real indicators of what was going on, so today no progress is possible so long as the myths and rituals of the modern economic priesthood still has a pervasive hold of people’s minds

In the modern economy, the myths and rituals of the economic priesthood are built on the notion that the purpose of a firm is to maximize shareholder value and the notion that if the share price is increasing, things are going well. These ideas are the intellectual underpinnings of the zero-sum activities of the financial sector for “making money out of money”, by whatever means possible

Like the myths and rituals of the priests of ancient Egypt, shareholder value theory is espoused with religious overtones. Shareholder value, which even Jack Welch has called “the dumbest idea in the world,” remains pervasive in business, even though it is responsible for massive offshoring of manufacturing, thereby destroying major segments of the US economy, undermining US capacity to compete in international markets and killing the economic recovery.

If instead society decides that the financial sector should concentrate on its socially important function of financing the real economy and providing financial security for an ever wider circle of citizens and enterprises, we could enjoy an era of growth and lasting prosperity.

That’s the latest among several recent studies by economists working independently, all arriving at similar findings: A few “superstar firms” have grown to dominate their industries, crowding out competitors and controlling markets to a degree not seen in many decades.

Let’s look beyond such obvious winner-take-all examples as Apple or Alphabet, the parent of Google.

Consider real-estate services. In 1997, according to Profs. Grullon, Larkin and Michaely, that sector had 42 publicly traded companies; the four largest generated 49% of the group’s total revenue. By 2014, only 20 public firms were left, and the top four— CBRE Group, Jones Lang LaSalle, Realogy Holdings and Wyndham Worldwide—commanded 78% of the group’s combined revenue.

Or look at supermarkets. In 1997, there were 36 publicly traded companies in that industry, with the top four accounting for more than half of total sales. By 2014, only 11 were left. The top four—Kroger, Supervalu, Whole Foods Market and Roundy’s (since acquired by Kroger)—held 89% of the pie.

The U.S. had more than 7,000 public companies 20 years ago, the professors say; nowadays, it’s fewer than 4,000.

The winners are also grabbing most of the profits

At the end of 1996, the 25 companies in the S&P 500 with the highest net profit margins—income as a percentage of revenue—earned a median of just under 21 cents on every dollar of sales. Last year, the top 25 such companies earned a median of 39 cents on the dollar.

Two decades ago, the median net margin among all S&P 500 members was 6.7%. By the end of 2016, that had increased to 9.7%.

So while companies as a whole became more profitable over the past 20 years, the winners have become vastly more profitable, nearly doubling the gains they got on each dollar of sales.

Why might it be easier now for winners to take all? Prof. Michaely suggests two theories. Declining enforcement of antitrust rules has led to bigger mergers, less competition and higher profits.

The other is technology. “If you want to compete with Google or Amazon,” he says, “you’ll have to invest not just billions, but tens of billions of dollars.”

Still, history offers a warning. Many times in the past, winners have taken all but seldom for long.

But the US also just hit a record 13 straight years without 3% real GDP growth

While the US has had a record period of economic expansion, it's not setting the world on fire. It's been a record 13 straight years without reaching 3% real gross domestic product growth. The US has come close, hitting 2.9% growth in 2018, but America hasn't hit a real GDP growth of 3% since 2005, when it grew 3.5%

The decade-long expansion has generated 20 million jobs

With economic growth stretching the past decade, key figures continue to get better. A 3.4% year-over-year wage growth is the strongest in more than a decade, a good sign as stagnant wages have kept the US middle class at bay

Still, the jobless rate fell to 3.8%

Sleep deprivation costs the US economy billions of dollars

More than a third of the US adult population doesn't get enough sleep, and that costs the US $411 billion through the loss of 1.2 million work days each year.

The lack of sleep can come from a variety of factors, whether it's overworking, poor health habits, or even the horrid blue light from electronics

About $100,000 separates the middle class from the upper class

The sports industry is worth nearly $75 billion

Generation Z might spend as much as $143 billion next year

Generation Z, the population born between 1997 and 2012, will make up 40% of US consumers by next year.

The average car part crosses into Mexico and Canada eight times in production

Mexico is the top trade partner, with the US exporting $21.9 billion worth of products to its southern neighbor and importing $27.7 billion, making up 14.8% of all US trade. Canada, meanwhile, makes up 13.8% of US trade as it imports $22.6 billion worth of American goods and sends in $23.4 billion

If California were a country, it would have the fifth highest GDP in the world

With a gross domestic product of $2.747 trillion, California would only trail Germany, Japan, China, and the US as a whole.

The US spends more on defense than the next seven nations combined

That $610 billion is good for 15% of all federal spending

The US national debt is at an all-time high

In February, US government debt hit an all-time high of $22 trillion

In 2011, 51% of Americans were considered middle class, and that number grew slightly to 52% in 2016

A sports-industry report back in 2015 predicted the market in North America would be worth more than $73.5 billion by this year.

I’ve had other friends tell me that they’re sick and tired of going on Facebook everyday hoping to connect, but ending up feeling only more disconnected. Lost in the hype of the company’s stock-market debut this year is that while Facebook is ubiquitous, it may also be a fad.