Monday Edition

After finishing behind Donald Trump in last week’s Iowa caucuses, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis yesterday suspended his 2024 presidential bid and endorsed the former president. (AP)

It’s now largely a two-candidate race for the GOP presidential nomination. Trump holds a commanding 50-point lead over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who’s polling at around 12%.

Polling suggests Trump benefits the most from DeSantis bowing out.

• A RacetotheWH analysis from November found Trump would gain 5.2 percentage points nationally if DeSantis drops out.

• A poll released Friday by Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio found 68% of voters in South Carolina, Haley’s home state, would vote for Trump without DeSantis in the race.

• Other polls also show DeSantis’ supporters moving to Trump.

A fun fact: An Echelon Insights poll released last week found DeSantis is currently a +8 favorite in the 2028 GOP presidential primary.

Americans are broadly supportive of the Supreme Court’s June 2023 Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling, which barred universities from using race as an admissions factor. (Gallup)

A new poll from Gallup:

• Black Americans are divided on the ruling, with a slim majority (52%) saying it’s mostly a good thing.

• Younger black Americans (18-39) are more positive about the ruling, with 62% seeing it as mostly good.

• Previous Gallup polls showed around 70% of Americans favor merit-based admissions over consideration of racial or ethnic backgrounds.

Who’s actually affected by the Supreme Court’s decision? Less than 15% of students from historically excluded racial groups attended colleges practicing affirmative action before the ruling, according to Brookings Institution researchers. Only 8% of Native American, 13% of black, and 14% of Hispanic students attended colleges using affirmative action. Highly selective colleges were much more likely to use affirmative action, but they enroll just 21% of students.

Affirmative action in admissions is part of a broader discussion Americans are having over how we should balance merit and equity. For instance, there’s been plenty of debate over the gender pay gap, income inequality and the rise of workplace diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

Political analyst and author Joe Duncan argues in a new essay social media is headed for a decline, thanks in large part to users getting fed up with the lousiness of the experience. (Medium)

Duncan: “The problems are fundamental to the platforms themselves. The feedback system — up and downvotes, ‘likes’ and shares, time spent metrics, etc. — has floated the craziest messages to the top. Algorithms consistently reward destructive content at the expense of our enjoyment.”

There’s data to support Duncan’s position:

• Consumers will cut their social media usage in half by 2025, the consulting firm Gartner predicted in December.

• 53% of social media users believe platforms’ quality has gotten worse compared to previous years.

• 70% of consumers think artificial intelligence integration in social media will worsen the user experience.

Others, like author Ian Bogost, have made similar arguments: “Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.”

On the other hand, research shows young people’s social media usage is increasing. Time spent on screens and social media among teens and tweens rose 17% from 2019 to 2021, according to a study by Common Sense Media, a media research organization.

The World Economic Forum’s yearly meeting in Davos, Switzerland gets hyped by the media as an agenda-setting conference of the world’s brightest minds, and by far right and far left conspiracy theorists as a sinister gathering of global elites. But the reality is way less exciting, according to two recent essays cited by the hosts of the Ink Stained Wretches podcast. (Ink Stained Wretches)

Wall Street Journalist columnist Walter Russell Mead: “The real scandal of Davos isn’t that it’s taking over the world. It’s that it’s failing. The Davos agenda—a global security order, an integrated world economy and progress toward objectives including decarbonization, gender equality and the abolition of dire poverty—is controversial in some quarters and on some points but is neither secret nor particularly nefarious. But far from imposing this agenda on a captive world, the Davos elites are wringing their hands as the dream slowly dies.”

Politico global editor in chief John Harris: “It is not that the observations and arguments are notably dumb, though it is rare to hear something arrestingly smart. The signature of most conversations about current events is how emphatically commonplace they are. … Outsiders, however, should liberate themselves from the illusion that these insiders really know the score. Their views are no more banal than the average person who also follows the news, but they are typically no less so.”

New York Times columnist David Brooks argues in a new essay that America’s institutions are drowning in bureaucratic red tape, and the costs are piling up. (NYT)

At the workplace: Research published in 2016 by business experts Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini in 2016 estimated bureaucracy costs the U.S. economy more than $3 trillion annually (approximately 17% of GDP). According to the same study by Hamel and Zanini, organizations now employ one administrator or manager for every 4.7 workers.

In higher education: At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the number of non-faculty employees is nearly eight times greater than that of faculty employees. From 2004 to 2014, the number of managers and senior professionals in the University of California system grew by 60%, whereas the number of tenure-track faculty members increased only 8%.

Healthcare: A 2020 study found more than a third of healthcare spending in the U.S. went to administration, including insurance company overhead and billing.

Brooks: “It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.”