I am reminded of a passage from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan. NNT is recommended by a friend at college to get a job with ‘leverage’, such as in the financial services industry. The ancillary costs of managing $10bn are not 10x those of managing $1bn, so more money accrues to the successfully manager who has the larger fund. NNT follows this advice, but subsequently concludes that, in the world of ‘leverage’, the rewards are very skewed. He ultimately concludes a better career would be one like medicine, which does not have the same leverage.
Football is similarly leveraged. When watching football meant going to your local stadium, then the leverage was that the clubs with a larger stadium could pay more. But now the leverage comes from the biggest clubs having millions of followers on TV and social media, so the Premiership footballers earn huge sums while those in the lower divisions (still in the best few percent of all footballers) receive a fraction of that.
Managed to post that part way through…. My point is that social media applies great ‘leverage’ and creates a winner takes all scenario in everything from museums to beaches to cafes (though sometimes fatally damaging the winners in the process).
I am reminded of a passage from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan. NNT is recommended by a friend at college to get a job with ‘leverage’, such as in the financial services industry. The ancillary costs of managing $10bn are not 10x those of managing $1bn, so more money accrues to the successfully manager who has the larger fund. NNT follows this advice, but subsequently concludes that, in the world of ‘leverage’, the rewards are very skewed. He ultimately concludes a better career would be one like medicine, which does not have the same leverage.
Football is similarly leveraged. When watching football meant going to your local stadium, then the leverage was that the clubs with a larger stadium could pay more. But now the leverage comes from the biggest clubs having millions of followers on TV and social media, so the Premiership footballers earn huge sums while those in the lower divisions (still in the best few percent of all footballers) receive a fraction of that.
Managed to post that part way through…. My point is that social media applies great ‘leverage’ and creates a winner takes all scenario in everything from museums to beaches to cafes (though sometimes fatally damaging the winners in the process).
So interesting. How can we flatten the playing field (as it were)?
Being 'older generation' means no Instagram or Tik Tok for me, I choose my preferred boulangerie by sampling them all.