Simon Johnson: belief

Transcript context

…The people who said all along that social media are more competitive than they look — haven’t they been proven right? TikTok and Facebook, Google competing with Bing, Amazon laying people off repeatedly. Those companies have lost their luster. They don’t look like unassailable giants anymore, to say the least. Meta shares were down, what, three-quarters in value not too long ago? Well, sure. There’s definitely competition in that sector, and there’s definitely been overexpansion and overexuberance. I think the regret actually there, Tyler, is much more about the impact of social media on political, economic, and social discourse, the way that people talk to each other, the way — what has happened to civility. Of course, there’s lots of concern, which is still concern — I’m not saying this has been completely established — about the impact of social media on young people, young people’s minds, young people’s mental wellness, and so on. I think some of those social media companies could have been, and should still be, much more responsible and much more careful. Perhaps it’s just a natural learning process. Perhaps we have to go through this and figure out how to be more responsible. I think there are some encouraging uses of technology out there. That’s one thing we emphasize in our book, right, Tyler? It’s all about choices. Choices that we make, choices that we make socially, and choices that you and I can argue about or discuss on this kind of show that can impact what people develop and how they use it, in addition to whatever levers the government may find available that, perhaps, could be pulled or not pulled. From my point of view, it seems that you and Daron overestimate how much market concentration matters. There’s one passage you have where you’re criticizing the soft drink market for being highly concentrated. Coca-Cola dominates and so on. But I used Google, I used GPT, and everything I could find tells me the price of soft drinks, in real terms, has been falling. There’s also a lot more choice. You go to an airport, you see this long array of hideously colored things that I don’t even want to touch, but they’re not, in general, put out by Coca-Cola. Variety is going up, and if real price is falling compared to inflation, why be upset about concentration in the soft-drink market?…

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