> The thinking at Disney is presumably that they invested a lot of money in FiveThirtyEight and were left with nothing to show for it. But to my mind, however much they spent on FiveThirtyEight, they never invested a dollar in it. There was never really any effort, or even any pretense of trying, to make it a profitable unit of the company. At one point, other senior staffers and I basically begged Disney to turn on a paywall, figuring this could provide some security, and were told, essentially, that it just wasn’t worth Disney’s bandwidth to figure out the mechanics of one.

I cannot tell you how much of my professional career I have seen this play out again and again and again.

There is an "executive class" in this country that has never had a real job or done real work. They were born to privilege, they went to elite schools, got their first check from a major consultancy, and then spend their whole career bouncing from C-suite to C-suite. They stare at slides all day, occasionally make a meaningful decision, and more or less spend their time insulating themselves from failure.

This may not describe everyone in charge at every major company, but it describes enough to explain why everything in our economy just feels like it's piggybacking off of a handful of actually good businesses.

It's remarkably ironic that we are slowly returning to aristocracy.

Only it's worse this time. Say what you want about those French poofs and British lords: they were expected to do their duty on the battlefield.

Insulation in our society has gone all the way up and down.

It's not the full story, but it's certainly a large part of it.

I'll chime in tangentially with another large part: the disproportionate share of both asset and liquid wealth held by people who are some combination of a) Baby Boomers, b) in the top percentiles of wealth/income, c) politically- or socially-connected. As you say, it's not all of them, but enough of them. At the confluence of the two groups is a desire not to invest in potentially risky ventures, or to spend on consumption, but instead to put as much money as possible into a narrow band of low-risk, often passive investments, and to pull every lever possible to protect those investments, even when they become outmoded in some regard and the income stream or economic activity that supports their high (growing) valuation dries up.

Supporting this paradigm (ostensibly so that seniors don't die in poverty, so that strategically-important businesses and ventures are backstopped, etc., but, crucially, to the detriment of all other concerns) means an erosion of a sort of "constructive inefficiency": "wasted" spending on ventures that might not work out, on employees who are not the best and most productive, on niche services and products, which altogether represent a massive share of potential economic activity that is much better at involving and supporting a diverse population with diverse needs and diverse skill sets that perhaps have not yet found the correct outlet to produce maximal value.

Your C-suite goons and my rich, highly networked seniors don't care about the potential of a paradigm shift to support and enable short-term losers, though. They just want to pile into the sure-thing of your "actually good businesses" (which, in many cases, aren't actually that good).