What we’re reading (5/14)
“The China Trade Deal Doesn’t Solve The Fed’s Problems” (Bloomberg). “The agreement between the US and China to roll back their respective tariffs for 90 days has led to renewed optimism that the worst of America’s trade wars is over. I’m not seeing the ‘breakthrough’: There’s still plenty of scope for economic damage that the Federal Reserve will struggle to contain.”
“Drill, Baby, Dr … Never Mind” (Paul Krugman). “There appears to be a real chance that America will lose its newly reacquired energy independence…[t]o see why, we need to look at the factors responsible for America’s return to energy self-sufficiency. One of these is fracking — extracting oil and gas embedded in shale by fracturing that shale with high-pressure liquids. Yes, there are serious environmental issues involved both in the fracking process and in the fact that more fossil fuel production adds to greenhouse gas emissions…[t]he other factor was the incredible rise of renewable energy. Not that long ago wind and solar power were widely seen as silly, hippy-dippy conceits. Now they’re major contributors to energy supply[.]”
“Warner’s Streaming Service Has New Name: Its Old One. Meet ‘HBO Max.’” (Wall Street Journal). “Warner Bros. Discovery is rebranding its streaming service to ‘HBO Max.’ Again. The entertainment company said Wednesday that it would return to the service’s original moniker from its 2020 launch. It dropped the HBO in 2023, rebranding to Max, to the chagrin of many fans of the well-known HBO brand. After a slow start, the streaming service has gained momentum over the past year by sharpening its focus on adult content like ‘The Last of Us’ and ‘Hacks,’ instead of trying to provide endless entertainment to all types of consumers. At the end of 2024 it had 117 million subscribers worldwide, and the company projects that at the end of 2026, it will top 150 million subscribers.”
“‘Some Weird Elon Musk Shit’: Inside LA’s Young, Testosterone-Fueled Sperm Race” (Vanity Fair). “Soon after that conversation took place, Zhu says he was flown to New York by a billionaire who asked him the craziest idea he’d ever had for a company. Jokingly, and because he couldn’t come up with anything else—again, this is Zhu’s telling—Zhu replied, ‘Bro, if I wasn’t working on my current company, I’d be doing sperm racing.’ Here is where the billionaire did the very thing that billionaires are so uniquely positioned to do, which is to turn glib jokes into unavoidable realities. In the space of 30 minutes, the billionaire convinced Zhu not only that a live sperm race was a very good idea, but that Zhu was the one to do it.”
“‘Nobody Wants To Work Anymore’: Lifetime Wage Experiences And The Decline Of Male LFP In The United States” (Remy Levin and Daniela Vidart). “Male labor force participation (MLFP) has declined sharply over the past 50 years in the United States. We show that a key driver of this decline is changes in mens' beliefs about the returns to work, shaped by their lifetime experiences of aggregate male wages. Using PSID data tracking individual labor histories linked to state-level real male wage time series, we find that prime-age MLFP increases with the average male wage in a man's state of birth over his lifetime, even after controlling for current labor market conditions and a host of fixed effects and covariates. A one standard deviation increase in the average experienced aggregate lifetime hourly wage-corresponding to $0.33 and comparable to the difference in 2000 between being born in 1970 in Louisiana and Texas-raises the probability of labor force participation by 10 percentage points. These effects persist for men who migrate and are stronger when restricting to samerace wages. Our findings suggest that lifetime wage experiences shape long-term beliefs about work, generating lasting spillovers from labor demand to labor supply.”
