The difficulty of managing expectations

At our current moment there are dueling theories about why everyone feels so badly about the economy. Nate Cohn draws a straight line between perceptions of the economy and confidence in the Biden administration. Paul Krugman claims that the media, especially right-wing media, is over-indexing on stories about inflation.

Either way, we’re in a moment that illustrates the difficulty of expectation setting and the power of narrative—and especially the narrative reinforcement mechanisms inherent to our current media ecosystem.

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Decentering the LinkedIn user

Yesterday I wrote a long LinkedIn post with my thoughts about why a new feature it’s testing—the ability to turn on and off political content—is ethically dicey idea at best, and why it has has the potential for harm.

When you create tools for the public, especially when you have the size and influence of a company like LinkedIn, you have a moral responsibility to think beyond the experience of the individual user.

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Sponsored by the revolution

Last year, 16 percent of Americans said they had personally invested in or traded cryptocurrency. Only three percent of all of the vehicles sold in 2021 were all electric (EVs).

But if you watched the Super Bowl, the commercials for crypto trading platforms and EVs dominated the ad space—often with the support of celebrities. (Unless I missed it, there was not a single commercial for a gas-powered vehicle the entire game.) The money is flowing toward big bets on the future.

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Zeros and ones

Shared cultural language can be a boon to movements for change—and a barrier to seeing that change happen.

Bumperstickers and banners establish shared credentials, show us who we can trust, tell us who’s on the inside of the movement. But they’re also off-putting to those who don’t share that language, and can antagonize those whom we need to make the change happen.

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Hard pandemic decisions are hard

DealBook reports this morning that Walmart and other major employers are starting a heavy push toward requiring vaccines for their employees—just not the ones on the front lines, who are most likely to be unvaccinated. The article cites fears over the tight labor market and negotiations with unions as potential suspects for the half measures, but I suspect a more nefarious motive hides just underneath the surface: the fear of “politicizing” the workplace.

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