“Sounds a bit dramatic, I’m sure it’s not that ba- oh shit, Paul Krugman?”
AllAmericanBreakfast on
> If this story strikes you as extreme and implausible, here’s what you should know: replace “heroin” with “social media,” and this is a description of actual events.
I’m sympathetic to both the idea that social media is harmful and that full unregulated drug legalization would be worse than keeping it illegal due to political corruption by the industry. But give me a break.
Social media has a much stronger case than *literal heroin* for being a) nonlethal, b) benefitting users, and c) being a choice rather than an additiction. An important part of Krugman’s case that social media is sufficiently harmful to compare it to heroin is that scams and banned goods are advertised via social media, accounting for $16 billion in revenue. A real harm? Sure. Heroin-serious? Um. No. There were 105,007 drug overdose deaths in 2023.
And Krugman does *not* show in this article that social media companies are engaging in *more* corruption than other companies do — he might have started with crypto, sports gambling, or defense contractors if he wanted to deal with corruption by companies dealing in obvious, concrete harm. That still would be weak without making the case that the harms outweigh the benefit.
Given the propensity for people to just read titles, I also find this one to be appallingly clickbait and deeply misleading. My assumption before clicking was that it was about American crypto companies being used to finance drug deals. As an economist, Krugman should have at least done the work that’s actually in his wheelhouse and quantified the fraction of American GDP that derives from social media. That’s the number we’d need to support a claim that America is a “digital narco”-state (IANAE).
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“Sounds a bit dramatic, I’m sure it’s not that ba- oh shit, Paul Krugman?”
> If this story strikes you as extreme and implausible, here’s what you should know: replace “heroin” with “social media,” and this is a description of actual events.
I’m sympathetic to both the idea that social media is harmful and that full unregulated drug legalization would be worse than keeping it illegal due to political corruption by the industry. But give me a break.
Social media has a much stronger case than *literal heroin* for being a) nonlethal, b) benefitting users, and c) being a choice rather than an additiction. An important part of Krugman’s case that social media is sufficiently harmful to compare it to heroin is that scams and banned goods are advertised via social media, accounting for $16 billion in revenue. A real harm? Sure. Heroin-serious? Um. No. There were 105,007 drug overdose deaths in 2023.
And Krugman does *not* show in this article that social media companies are engaging in *more* corruption than other companies do — he might have started with crypto, sports gambling, or defense contractors if he wanted to deal with corruption by companies dealing in obvious, concrete harm. That still would be weak without making the case that the harms outweigh the benefit.
Given the propensity for people to just read titles, I also find this one to be appallingly clickbait and deeply misleading. My assumption before clicking was that it was about American crypto companies being used to finance drug deals. As an economist, Krugman should have at least done the work that’s actually in his wheelhouse and quantified the fraction of American GDP that derives from social media. That’s the number we’d need to support a claim that America is a “digital narco”-state (IANAE).