THE PLUTOCRATS’ NEED TO NEVER BE CRITICIZED, LIKE, EVER.
East Beach, Santa Barbara, Christmas Day 2024
'It’s not even [plutocrats'] supposed lack of impunity that enrages them against their “enemies.” In fact, Democrats have given the tech bros and other plutocrats de facto impunity for years. Obama failed to hold any of the Wall Street plutocrats accountable for the fact that they brought down the world economy in 2007-8. In fact, he bailed them out.'
. . .
‘No, what really enraged the Wall Street plutocrats against Obama was not that he held them to account, which he didn’t, but that he criticized them. He called them “fat cat bankers.” And in their rage at Obama’s insult, they threatened to seize up the economy again by refusing to loan money. They were still enraged even after Obama backed off his remarks. This is what you get when you join immense wealth and unaccountable power with infinite narcissism.
‘The authoritarian-loving tech bro set is no different. They already have practically unlimited wealth and impunity. What these wounded narcissists demand is to be worshipped, Ayn Rand style. Democrats, liberals, academics will never give that to them. They are too prone to fact-checking, too skeptical, too critical of the established order that put the plutocrats on top.
‘But Trump is happy to flatter the tech bros and all their malignant prejudices if they show love for him in return. Never mind that Trump’s flattery is entirely transactional. Narcissists don’t mind if the flattery is conditional, insincere, or even created by themselves.’
...
‘Where will this end? Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, argued that the central psychosocial motive driving inequalities of wealth and power is the desire for superior esteem. People compete to acquire more wealth and power than others, because that is what people come to admire above all as inequality increases. (As early 20th century oil magnate Haroldson L. Hunt said, “Money’s just a way of keeping score.“)
‘Rousseau claimed that, in the absence of a republican social contract putting brakes on inequality, the rise of private property and commercial society will lead to runaway inequality and ultimately to despotism. In the end, even the rich will become slaves to the despot, forced to bow and scrape before him.
‘We are even seeing it now, before Trump has been sworn in, much less crowned.’
SOURCE: Liz Anderson, Crooked Timber
AUSTERITY YESTERDAY CREATED EUROPE’S WEAKNESS TODAY
'This decline is not the result of a political law of nature. Instead, Europe’s current political constellation owes much to a cohort of politicians and officials who held sway in the 2010s across the continent. Following Angela Merkel’s lead during her 16-year stint as Germany’s chancellor, it was they who set the terms of European politics that have now come back to haunt policymakers. Their response, for instance, to the “euro crisis” — the seemingly never-ending financial troubles that followed the crash of 2008 — was to offer a damaging blend of moralism and technocracy.
'Doubling down on punitive austerity measures, Jeroen Dijsselbloem — Ms. Merkel’s lieutenant as head of an informal grouping of Eurozone finance ministers — claimed that the debt-ridden governments of Southern Europe had wasted their money on “schnapps and women.” For his part, Jean-Claude Juncker, then chief of the European Commission, admonished Greeks that there was “no need to commit suicide because you are afraid of dying.” Led by Ms. Merkel, Europe’s politicians insisted on obeisance to financial markets and European etiquette, no matter the consequences.'
SOURCE: Anton Jäger and Dries Daniels, New York Times
THE SOLAR BOOM HAS NOT BLOCKED THE COAL BOOM IN CHINA
SOURCE: International Energy Agency via Ed Conway, Twitter
CORPORATE-OWNED JOURNALISM IS ESPECIALLY VULNERABLE TO TRUMP
'Without reflection, [The Washington Post story, "Trump signals plans to use all levers of power against the media"] treats the plight of giant media companies as the same as its impact on journalism.
'The article adds a few new details about why a corporation built off nearly a century of Intellectual Property protection for a cartoon mouse settled a lawsuit. But it doesn’t lay out the obvious implication of the story it tells: that ABC was vulnerable to Trump’s attack not, primarily, because of its journalism — because of what Stephanopoulos said — but instead because the mouse company is not primarily interested in journalism.
'That is, it is precisely Disney’s size and scope that rendered it vulnerable to Trump’s threats.
. . .
'For a corporation like Disney — or an oligarch like Jeff Bezos — it’s the other competing interests that may doom the journalism. And journalists need to be clear about that dynamic.'
SOURCE: Marcie Wheeler, Emptywheel
IT'S NOT THE UNIVERSITIES, IT'S THE CORPORATIONS
'Apart from this problem of potentially inconsistent measurement over time, the rush to attribute England’s supposed peculiar problem of overqualification to an oversupply of graduates is misplaced. Our re-examination of OECD’s survey data shows that, in England, graduates face lower risks of overqualification than non-graduates: the overqualification rate among non-graduates is 17 percentage points higher than among those with a degree. This gap between graduates and non-graduates broadly aligns with our own data from the British Skills and Employment Surveys.
'The Director for Education and Skills at the OECD, Andreas Schleicher, has been quoted saying that the UK’s higher education sector is “overextending” itself, with universities offering credentials that lack substantive value. However, with this oversimplified reaction, he is surely aiming at the wrong part of our education system.
'In addition, he is almost certainly targeting the wrong side of the labour market.
'Overqualification in the UK is likely driven, not so much by an oversupply of graduates as by a failure to create enough middle-skill jobs and robust vocational pathways outside universities.
'Overqualification is indeed a pressing issue. Even at a rate nearer 3 in 10, overqualification in England is higher than in most other advanced economies in the OECD. Overqualification depresses wages, diminishes job satisfaction, and undermines long-term productivity as underutilised skills atrophy. But this knee-jerk pinning of blame just on education, particularly on higher education, misses the mark, and forgets about the external benefits that education brings for society and the economy. Instead, England’s policymakers must address the structural deficiencies in the labour market, particularly the lack of opportunities for those with intermediate qualifications.
'Simplistic diagnoses risk distracting from the real challenges. England’s education system is not producing “too many” graduates. Instead, its economy and further education system fail to provide sufficient opportunities to harness the potential of those not bound for higher education.'
SOURCE: Golo Hesenke and Francis Green, Higher Education Policy Institute
COP29 FAILED BECAUSE THE FINANCIAL SECTOR CONTROLS THE PROCESS
'Tina Gerhardt: So in 2009 in Copenhagen, nations from the global north, which both historically and present day, these nations are disproportionately responsible for emissions, thus the climate crisis also, they agreed to pay $100 billion per year between the years of 2020 and 2025 to nations in the global south. Nations in the global south produce negligible amounts of emissions and yet they're on the front lines suffering the brunt of climate change impacts. Those range from drought in the Horn of Africa, which has been prolonged and ongoing last year, the year before, as well as the impacts of sea level rise on low-lying island nations around the world, to name just two examples.
'Payments in that amount of $100 billion per year between 2020 and 2025 never materialized. So as a result of that, at COP29, the first order of business was to renegotiate this amount, and crucially, really crucially, and I want to underscore this because I think this is going to be an issue to track going forward, how it was going to be paid. I'll come back to that in a second.”
'Second, in terms of the issues of finance, was loss and damage. These are two separate issues in terms of the finance issues. Loss and damage was agreed to two years ago at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.
'And with regard to loss and damage, last year, about a dozen countries agreed to pay $720 million. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who's been really terrific in calling out hypocrisies on the issue of the climate crisis, called this amount woefully inadequate.
'Doug Henwood: That was million with an M?
'Gerhardt: Exactly. That's exactly what I was going to understand.
'Henwood: That's pocket change, really.
'Gerhardt: Exactly. Exactly. I couldn't agree more with you, Doug.
'So last year, no, two years ago, there were these floods that your listeners might recall that hit Pakistan, right? In 2022, third of the nation underwater, killing 3,000 people, half of whom are children. And to get back to the finance issue, at least 30 billion with a B in loss and damage.
'So that's one country and that's billion with a B. And the amount of all countries in the global north being offered is 720 million, as you put it, with an M. So, loss and that was a total wash at this year's climate conference.
...
'Every single year right now, nations have to do this kind of a stock taking of what they're doing to rein in emissions. They have to submit that to the UN. But crucially, there has never been a mechanism by which nations are held accountable to those things that they report or submit or that they are punished if they don't submit or they don't hold themselves to what their goals are.
'And that needs to change for this to have any kind of a realistic impact.'
...
'Another issue that I think is not going to go away is that the mechanism by which finance is generated from the global north to the global south needs to change. Specifically, that monies need to be delivered in the form of outright monies and not in the form of loans, because those further in debt countries in the global south. So there's a lot of discussion this year about how monies are supposed to flow from the global north to the global south.
'As I mentioned at the top, the $100 billion per year that was promised in 2009 at Copenhagen never materialized. At COP29 this year, wealthier nations promised $1.3 trillion in climate finance by 2035. But only 30 billion of the 1.3 trillion is going to come in direct monies.
'The rest of it is going to come through multilateral development banks, MDBs, entities like the World Bank, the European Investment Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank. The rest of the monies are going to come from the private sector, other new forms of finance. And this is a really big issue because of the interest and the further indebted that that might lead to.
And I think, you know, to view it cynically from the inverse vantage point, to me it looks like the World Bank and other entities are figuring out that the climate crisis is something that they can financially profit off of, which is totally disgusting and loathsome, but I think that that's out there.'
...
'The climate crisis is obviously a global issue, but it's a global financial issue in that if nations from the global north do nothing to address it, it will eventually impact their bottom lines, right? There's a group in terms of finances during COP29, a group of economists chaired by Nicholas Stern, who's an economist, a banker, an academic at LSE, Amar Bhattacharya, who's at the Brookings Institute, and Vera Songwei at the World Bank, among others. They released this report that said that 30 billion offered directly is far too low and basically 1.3 trillion a year is needed.
'And if there's any kind of holding back, this amount is only going to increase with any kind of dithering. And I think that's important to take note of, too. This amount, 1.3 trillion a year, needed by 2030.'
SOURCE: Tina Gerhardt interviewed by Doug Henwood, Behind the News
NON-CELEBRITY AUTHORS SCREWED BY MAD INEQUALITIES IN THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY
'I think I can sum up what I’ve learned [from the Penguin - Simon & Schuster anti-trust trial] is this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).'
...
'In my essay “Writing books isn’t a good idea” I wrote that, in 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s still the vibe.'
Q. Do you know approximately how many authors there are across the industry with 500,000 units or more during this four-year period?
A. My understanding is that it was about 50.
Q. 50 authors across the publishing industry who during this four-year period sold more than 500,000 units in a single year?
A. Yes.
— Madeline Mcintosh, CEO, Penguin Random House US
'The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
'In my essay “No one will read your book,” I said that publishing houses work more like venture capitalists. They invest small sums in lots of books in hopes that one of them breaks out and becomes a unicorn, making enough money to fund all the rest.
'Turns out, they agree!'
...
We’re very hit driven. When a book is successful, it can be wildly successful. There are books that sell millions and millions of copies, and those are financial gushes for the publishers of that book, sometimes for years to come… A gusher is once in a decade or something. For instance, I don’t know if you know the Twilight series of books? Hachette published the Twilight series of books, and those made hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of time.
Right now the novels of Colleen Hoover are topping the bestseller lists in really, really huge numbers and the publishers of those books are making a lot of money. You probably remember The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo… Or the Fifty Shades of Grey series. So once every five years, ten years, those come along for the whole industry and become the industry driver that’s drawing people into bookstores because there is such a commotion about them.
— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette
...
Top-selling authors were defined as those receiving advances (i.e., guaranteed money) in excess of $250,000. Far fewer than 1 percent of authors receive advances over that mark; Publishers Marketplace, which tracks these things, recorded 233 such deals in all of 2022.
— ken whyte, Publisher at Sutherland House
***
Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House, says the top 4 percent of titles drive 60 percent of the profitability. That goes for the rest of them too:
It would be just a couple of books in every hundred are driving that degree of profit… twoish books account for the lion’s share of profitability.
— Madeline Mcintosh, CEO, Penguin Random House US
Around half the books we publish make a profit of some kind.
— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette
About half of the books we publish make money, and a much lower percentage of them earn back the advance we pay.
— Jonathan Karp, CEO, Simon & Schuster
'According to Hill, 85 percent of the books with advances of $250,000 and up never earn out their advance. (Meaning the royalties earned never covered the cost of the advance.) Many publishers have realized that maybe those big advances aren’t worth it.'
. . .
'Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want? Just like you get all the movies you want from Netflix? Or all the music you want from Spotify?
'Technically, it does exist. Kindle Unlimited is the largest, followed by Scribd. Audible isn’t quite all-access, but then Spotify got into audiobooks and made them so. But none of these players have quite taken off the way Netflix or Spotify has. That’s for one reason: The Big Five publishing houses refuse to let their authors participate.
Q. No books are found on Kindle Unlimited? Because you think that’ll be had for the industry?”
A. We think it’s going to destroy the publishing industry.
— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Publishing House
'He’s right. No one would purchase a book again.
We all know about Netflix, we all know about Spotify and other media categories, and we also know what it has done to some industries… The music industry has lost, in the digital transformation, approximately 50 percent of its overall revenue pool.
— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Publishing House
'There’s one reason.
Around 20 to 25 percent of the readers, the heavy readers, account for 80 percent of the revenue pool of the industry of what consumers spend on books. It’s the really dedicated readers. If they got all-access, the revenue pool of the industry is going to be very small. Physical retail will be gone—see music—within two to three years. And we will be dependent on a few Silicon Valley or Swedish internet companies that will actually provide all-access.
— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Publishing House
'The publishing industry would die, that’s for sure. But I’d be willing to bet writers would get their books read way more.
'And I think it’s on its way. Spotify has already started publishing audiobooks, and my money is on Substack for eventually publishing written books!'
SOURCE: Elle Griffin, The Elysian
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