King-Size Matters → Crimsonab****

Hey Neighbor. New research into the backgrounds of Nobel winners finds roughly half have had fathers in the top 5% of earners. In 1901, the average father of a laureate was in the 95th percentile of earners. A century of efforts to create opportunities in higher ed later, the average father of a laureate is now in the 88th percentile.

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If we were at a cocktail party, you might hear me say the following....

A few drinks later I might mention that public availability upward mobility data sets now makes it super easy to gauge how well you’re doing compared to your neighbors. Data dives are the new Zillow scrolls..

I might also try to talk about....

→ A new study out of Stanford and Johns Hopkins demonstrates that individuals rarely consider what info they (or others) don’t have. Participants in the study were asked to make a decision based on full or part information. Both groups assumed a parity in information, but the two groups made very different decisions. Participants fortunate enough to have more information were confused as to how this happened. [1]

→ Advising women to “divorce him” is now high-status behavior in heavily female corners of social media. Maybe good advice in some circumstances, but... the suicide rate among divorced women is 2.4x the overall female suicide rate. There are other factors at play here – divorced women take a huge financial hit – but it’s clear perverse social incentives continue to dominated online spaces.

→ According to Bill Ackman’s slides analyzing Harvard as a “buy, sell, or hold” – an odd way to assess an institution that can’t be bought, sold, or held, but w/e – the average student GPA increased from ~2.6 in 1960 to ~3.8 today. Blowhard finds inflation!

In the first episode of “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” Lyle, handing out Halloween candy, admonishes a trick-or-treater asking for an extra bar: “Those are King-Size Snickers. You know how generous that is?” A little bit, sure, but handing out “King-Size” halloween candy was basic late-1980s noblesse oblige. Not so much anymore. Defining generosity – and give our friends and neighbors what they want – has gotten more complicated.

In 2013, Mars discontinued the King-Size Snickers. The company claimed to be working with Michelle Obama to cap calories, but no law mandated the change from “King-Size” to “Share Size” (two bars in one big wrapper). The market for “bigger is better” didn’t disappear – search term-savvy online retailers sell “Share Size” as “King-Size” – but it shrunk. Luxury consumers optimizing for marginal utility (read: pleasure) flocked to brands like Tony’s Chocolonely, which has Fairtrade certified ingredients and B-Corp certification, Alter Eco, which has bitter Ecuadorian cacao, and Mast Brothers, which got caught melting down and repackaging Valrhona bars in 2015. [3]

When options proliferate, preference determines marginal utility. In order for a “Modern Menendez” to settle on the optimal “generous” chocolate bar in 2024, he’d have to ask the following questions:

• What are the options?

• What are the ingredients in those options?

• What ingredients are most closely correlated to consumer pleasure?

• Are any of those ingredients gonna kill that one kid who forgot his Epi-Pen?

• How strongly does branding influence enjoyment?

These are not unanswerable questions, but they impractical for a civilian to run to ground. So the Modern Menendez faces a Halloween quandary: Give out 2.6-ounce King-Size Hershey bars that cost $2 each or give out 1-ounce Alter Eco Blackout bars that cost $4 each? If kids are getting the candy, there’s a logical answer; most kids’ preference in chocolate is “more.” If adults are getting the candy...

Lacking the preference data to effectively optimize for recipients’ pleasure, the Modern Menendez winds up thinking less about the chocolate and more about the messaging. Does he want to be perceived as rich? Thoughtful? Discerning? There is no longer a way for him to make an optimal “generous” choice. He’s adrift on a sea of brands.

BTW, LVMH reported €29.1B in revenue in 2013. The 2023 total will be north of €86.2B. You know how much that is?

→ The new Lincoln Navigator has a “Rejuvenate” mode in which the car (def sub $100K but no listed price yet) plays chill music, shows calming images on its dash display, lowers the lights, and releases aromas via its built-in diffuser. The current pitch is that this allows drivers to have what NPR used to call “driveway moments,” but it sure seems like Lincoln is preparing for a post-autopilot world in which cars become spas/entertainment centers on wheels. Went over big with the wealthy card dorks at Concours d’Élegance.

→ Style Tik-Tok is all in on the Menendez brothers for reasons that have nothing to do with Snickers. That’s good news for the resurgent Italian tennis brand Sergio Tacchini, which sponsored Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, and Martina Navratilova before losing some relevance in the 1990s. Good brand!

→ Ralph Lauren’s new vintage program is a cluttered temple to upscale Americana – 1stDibs via John Ford – but the pricing is going to turn many people off. The cost of a perfectly sandblasted 1960s Hanes shawl collar sweatshirt? $445. It still costs a premium to look like your parents had money.

Photos of post-party tablescapes are going viral on TikTok and Insta right now. Dirty plates. Half-empty glasses. A bit of pâté smeared on the tablecloth. Yes, it’s part of our current cultural fixation on place settings, but it’s also just appealing on a human level – a way to capture the chaotic intimacy of friendship. But what to call it?

In the 1960s, the Swiss-Romanian artist Daniel Spoerri (lots of Swiss people in this issue) got obsessed with post-meal tables and started capturing them by gluing everything to the table, taking off the legs and hanging it on the wall. In 1960, he took over Gallery J in Paris and turned it into a restaurant, stopping one group of diners mid-meal every night and turning the detritus of their meal – lots of ashtrays [3] at the time – into a mixed media collage.

Spoerri called these pieces “tableaux pièges” or “snare pictures.” The idea was to mix artifice and incidence. But also... Spoerri just really liked going to dinner with friends. In 1968, he opened an actual restaurant. The thing about his art was that he couldn’t make it alone. He had to share a meal.

→ Bad news: Markets generally underperform in the October of a presidential election year. Good news: They almost always overperform in November.[4] A little something to look forward courtesy of Callie Cox. 

→ Donations to Columbia University are down 29%+ percent in the wake of anti-Israel protests on campus. Some 23% of Columbia grads (and 2.4% of Americans) are Jewish. The wrinkle: Wealthy jews tend to be far more charitable than any other group, constituting half of the most generous philanthropists in the country. The reason for this is Tzedakah, a religious obligation to redistribute wealth that goes way, way past tithing. This is why anti-Israel posturing – right or wrong – is risky for donation-dependent institutions of all stripes.

→ The “Distraction Economy” is huge and growing. According to a new report from the St. Louis Fed (FRED!) Digital advertising is nearing 1.1% of the U.S. GDP. Google is most of that (and falling). Meta is a big chunk. Amazon is scaling fast as it prioritizes profits made pushing products to selling products

NOTES & FOOTNOTES

[1] The principal piece of information that high-information people seem to lack is how little information low-information people are working with. BTW... they control the weather..

[2] The term “King-Size” can be traced back to the great English portrait artist John Constable’s description of Thomas Lawrence’s full-body portrait of Charles X of France, but it was introduced to America by Pall Mall in the 1940s. By the mid-1950s it was ubiquitous. Then McDonald’s did “Supersize” and every went to shit.

[3] Mast Brothers (now Mast), still exists. Which is wild. The company admitted to not having a real product, but didn’t go under. Indicative of the fact the indie chocolate market is really about packaging.

[4] This runs counter to the “everything is priced in” theory of the market. Maybe relief isn’t?