Inequality, Schools, Wages, Follows | #263
April 20th, 2024: Greetings from Austin. I hope everyone is having a beautiful week. This week’s issue is a grab bag of stuff I stumbled upon this week.
Thanks to for hosting the Boston meetup this week and for the one in London. Here’s a pic from Boston:
#1 Death Of The Follow
This talk from Patreon founder Jack Conte was very timely to watch this week.
His argument: the algorithmic feeds, taken to the next level by TikTok, have completely changed how you should think of social media as a creator. It is no longer a place where followers see everything you say. As a creator you are competing with everyone to put out the most engaging stuff.
I’ve seen this happen in Twitter/X more and more over the last couple of years, a place where curiosity and interesting ideas have flourished below the surface of outrage and drama. But lately, it seems more and more of these people are exiting, discouraged by the increasing numbers of content-team-first creators.
This could also be good news for people starting out who genuinely have great stuff. You can find an audience much faster. We saw many people like this break out on TikTok and other platforms during the pandemic.
On substack, I haven’t seen this as much but I have noticed there is. just. so. much. I have been thinking a lot about how often I want to write and what I want to be sharing. As I’ve been writing a book, I’ve noticed how much more joy I’m getting from that right now.
No matter what happens, there always seems to be a place that attracts people who love ideas. In 2008 it was google buzz and Google Reader and then places like Tumblr, Quora, Medium, and Twitter. I’m finding myself spending more time in places like Bluesky, warpcast, airchat, and substack notes over the past couple of weeks.
But what are the implications of this?
I think it just raises the stakes for doing great work.
Great work, done over long periods, is the greatest competitive edge.
Don’t let the algorithm hack you or dictate what matters to you. Because it might eventually nudge you to quit.
What do you think of all this? Drop a comment? What keeps you reading my newsletter?
#2 Is School Optional?
It seems the school is now optional. Chronic absences have skyrocketed since the pandemic in every demographic across the board in the US.
These two charts together are fascinating:
What does this mean? I don’t know but it’s clear parents are taking school attendance a lot less seriously than in the past. I’m guessing this will only continue as more jobs become gigified.
Here’s one thing that stood out from the article:
The Ypsilanti school district has tried a bit of everything, said the superintendent, Alena Zachery-Ross. In addition to door knocks, officials are looking for ways to make school more appealing for the district's 3,800 students, including more than 80 percent who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. They held themed dress-up days - '70s day, pajama day - and gave away warm clothes after noticing a dip in attendance during winter months.
"We wondered, is it because you don't have a coat, you don't have boots?" said Dr. Zachery-Ross.
Still, absenteeism overall remains higher than it was before the pandemic. "We haven't seen an answer," she said.
Once you are trying pajama day, you are fighting a losing battle.
What comes next? I have no idea. I guarantee you’ll see campaigns to reverse this but I suspect it will only make matters worse.
#3 Wage Inequality Reversing?
Some interesting new research from David Autor from MIT (one of the best work economists) shows that wages for lower-income workers rose fasted from 2019:
The paper also highlights that people are moving between jobs and between industries more often driving some of the wage increases. The below chart is a little confusing but if you look at the dark bars, those are HS-educated workers under 40, who saw less wage compression, less of a hit of staying in a job, and more benefit to changing jobs.
This is pretty fascinating and means that at the lower end of the labor market there is likely somewhat of a short-term supply issue.
This reverses some of the trends Autor first talked about 5+ years ago and I wrote about here.
I would guess one thing this shifts is the incentive to invest much more in labor automation, something you’ve already seen a lot in countries where birth rates have shrunk. In the US, we’re headed in that direction too. Bring on the robots!
#4 How I Write (With David Perell)
I joined David Perell for a conversation about my essay on “How I Write,” and how I approached my book.
Angie said it was “the best interview I’ve heard of you.” Which is good news
#5 Convo With Justin Welsh on burnout, solopreneurship, his struggles with goals, and embracing fun
I’ve gotten more comments about this episode with Justin than I have in a while from a podcast interview. We got into his relationship with his ambition and how he’s short-circuited his enjoyment of work at times.
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Buy or listen to my book, The Pathless Path. If you’d like to do a bulk order you can do that here for a discount.
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Sometimes when I start worrying about whether my business is a good idea or not I try to remember the people that I've seen over the years who consistently put out interesting, thought-provoking, just generally GOOD work, and how few of them there really are. It makes me feel more confident that I'll be fine if I just keep at it. This was a great reminder of that; thank you!
I agree that all of this competition is a great incentive to put out great work. I think for me the future has to do with exploring ideas that light me up both personally and professionally and then just hitting publish. At the very least I find that sorting through and summarizing my ideas is fulfilling and the best case scenario is that I will slowly build an engaged audience who will benefit from my work and perhaps even pay something for the value that they receive. This is a labor of love and I think focusing on the numbers too much takes away from the sheer love of creating. Sure the numbers are important, especially if we are trying to make living. But I try to focus on why I came out here to write in the first place which is for the love of writing and thinking more deeply about things.