The Iowa caucus and the bullshit economy

As a scientist, I'm unafraid of the new and novel. Nature favors not the strongest or the swiftest, but the one that best adapts to change. But not all change is good, and when there's a bunch of money pushing the change, it's time to grab your wallet and start asking questions.

"But the spectacle has highlighted a much more consequential problem in America, something I have coined the bullshit economy. We’ve seen elements of it all over the place. When MoviePass offered unlimited screenings for ten bucks a month, when Uber gets an $82 billion valuation for a low-margin taxi business it has never made a dime on, when WeWork implodes after the slightest scrutiny into its numbers, that’s the bullshit economy at work. We have seen the farcical bullshit of Juicero and the consequential bullshit of Theranos.

Even at the highest levels, bullshit pervades, in fraudulent advertising metrics and fake numbers peddled to convince the world to siphon cash through Facebook and Google’s dominant platforms. So many counterfeit goods pass through Amazon that the site might get listed on the U.S. Trade Representative Office’s “Notorious Markets” list.

We have endured the more comprehensive bullshit of the financial industry marking corporate progress by manipulated stock prices and air rather than productive advances for society. We had a financial crisis based on bullshitters telling us housing prices would endlessly rise. We have the bullshit of the private equity industry extracting value from companies through the skillful use of debt and other financial engineering, without regard for whether the companies succeed or fail."

He doesn't even mention cryptocurrency, marijuana stocks or self-driving cars. But as he says, the digital app for tabulating caucus votes in Iowa was a solution in search of a problem. It failed and left egg on the face of the Iowa Democratic party. I hope they abandon caucuses altogether and join us in the 21st century.

Read the rest here:

https://prospect.org/politics/bullshit-economy-iowa-caucus-disaster/