We Only Look at the Winners

I’m a big Mets fan and am excited for the upcoming season. I think we’re going to have a contending team despite/because of all of the changes. I attended Opening Day.

Yes, this feels frivolous. There’s some part of me that is like, “Man, AI is going to kick off an automation wave unlike anything we’ve ever seen. How are you paying attention to sports at a time like this?”

Now, I know that’s harsh. We all have to enjoy life and appreciate what we have while we have it. I find that I’m more effective when I’m positive.

But there’s something that’s gnawing at me that I’m going to try to express.

9 times out of 10 when we log on or turn on the TV, we are looking at the winners.

The State of the Union, our pro athletes, performers, actors, even influencers and writers. Most people we see and track are at the top of a pyramid, outliers and anomalies.

It distorts our sense of what’s happening.

Perhaps revealing of me - I have a grotesque fascination with pro athletes and celebrities who have gone broke. I watched a couple YouTube videos of this variety and now they get served to me all of the time.

If 10 million white-collar workers were to get kicked to the curb, what would we see change? In the real world, things would be different. The offices would be emptier and our neighborhoods bleaker. Maybe our neighbors would have to sell their house and our friends would need some help. Maybe we would too. But the media and social media we see would probably look just about the same.

One of my great learnings these past years has been that our media organizations are terrible at telling us what’s actually going on out there. Our news networks have become chroniclers of the news-of-the-day in your preferred lighting and flavor. The American standard of living has slipped so far over the past number of years – a record 57% of us are pessimistic and 70% are having trouble affording a decent life – with very little meaningful genuine coverage. I sometimes think that instead of all of the hours of talking headery we are subject to, we should just get graphs and bar charts showing how we are doing free of distractions or commentary.

Yet our favorite anchors have to go out there and perform their task each night, and they’re allowed few flare-ups or failures. It’s a tightrope they walk, and they either become pleasant or inflammatory automatons or they get kicked off the rope.

I’m an anomaly myself now.

We are living in a K-shaped economy that is getting all the more extreme. Oracle just laid off 30,000 workers. What happens when the winners are vastly outnumbered by the losers, but the losers are invisible?

Studies have shown that being successful is less fun in a highly unequal environment. Even if you’re at the top, you’d prefer that it gets spread around a little more. More people have to have a chance to win.

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