Evan Coopersmith

Who wants to live in a world where the same giant companies win the labor of the best and brightest, the best and brightest all attend the same few schools, and the same teams win championships every season? We dislike concentration of talent and ideas, and love a good underdog story. But juggernauts are more than unappealing, they stifle innovation, creativity, and progress. What happens when the vast majority of the elite talent serves the interest of a tiny number of firms?&nbsp;

For college football fans, each fall brings a sense of deja vu. After punditry, prognostication, transfers, and drama-filled Saturdays, the national championship trophy heads to Athens (GA), Tuscaloosa, Columbus, Clemson, or Baton Rouge. There may be 128 teams in the FBS1, but an even money wager on Georgia, Alabama, or Ohio State vs. the field2 is likely a profitable one.

The “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCAA_Division_I_Football_Bowl_Subdivision" style="">football bowl subdivision</a>,” or to the uninitiated, the highest-level of college football in the NCAA, from which the national champion is crowned. These are the locales in which fall Saturdays attain a status typically reserved for national holidays.

In other words, one party wins the bet if one of those three teams wins the national championship while the other party wins if any of the remaining 125 hold the trophy at season’s end.

Plenty of digital ink has been spent on the subject of FAANG3 companies and their disproportionate influence on what we consume. The FTC is bringing <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/ftc-sues-amazon-illegally-maintaining-monopoly-power">antitrust charges</a> against Amazon and Meta is <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/facebook-instagram-addiction-children-lawsuit-us-meta-b1116014.html">under legal fire</a> for its alleged intent to manipulate and addict children on its platform. Pokemon Go was an elaborate <a href="https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/video/pokemon-go-is-part-of-google-s-behavioural-manipulation-roger-mcnamee~1655292">behavioral manipulation</a> exercise from our friends at Google. And yes, this is a byproduct of industrial oligopoly. I am inclined to whine and opine, but it would be little more than another voice shouting at the wind. But the price of concentration extends beyond <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking#:~:text=Rent%2Dseeking%20is%20an%20attempt,than%20by%20creating%20new%20wealth.">rent-seeking</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism#:~:text=Surveillance%20capitalism%20is%20a%20concept,two%20can%20reinforce%20each%20other.">surveillance capitalism</a>.&nbsp;

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, which yes, I suppose means this ought to be “MAANG,” given “Meta,” but that makes folks wonder if the initials ought to read “MANGA,” which would beget an entirely different essay.

“<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification">Enshittification4</a>” is only possible when coercive extraction from a captive market is a more lucrative strategy than innovation. In a world of numerous, small firms, the path to growth is paved with new products and improved customer experiences. In a world of concentrated dominance, the path to growth is the erection of barriers to entry and squeezing every last drop from those users.

Say what you will about Cory Doctorow, the man can coin a phrase :-).&nbsp;

In high schools around the US, there are elite athletes whose superlative talents are coveted by universities. For the sake of argument, let’s assume there are a couple hundred blue-chippers on the hardwood and the gridiron. Now, let’s assume that, generally-speaking, a high school athlete will attend the highest-ranked university to which they are recruited.&nbsp;

Elite football programs can offer up to 25 scholarships to incoming students.5 For basketball, that figure is 3 or 4.6 In turn, the nation’s best high school football players all flock to, say, ten elite programs (with predictable results in terms of who wins the national championship every year). Conversely, the top hoopers are distributed among 50-100+ programs, simply because they cannot all play ball in Durham, Lexington, Louisville, or Lawrence (KS). What happens as a result? Apart from the office-water-cooler-trash-talk of March Madness, we receive the benefit of stylistic diversity. As a result, I find college basketball appealing and college football appalling.7&nbsp;

It’s actually 85 in total, with a single-year cap of 25 - all things regarding collegiate athletics are complex and <a href="https://www.varsityedge.com/athletic-scholarships-by-sports/" style="">painstakingly-specified</a>.&nbsp;

It’s actually 13 total over all years, but let’s not fixate. We all can agree that 13/4 is between 3 and 4, I hope.

Special thanks to <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/523641-speaking-as-a-christian-i-find-the-apostle-paul-appealing" style="">Adlai Stevenson</a> for that paraphrasing.

Teams explore exotic offensive sets and defensive alignments that leverage their particular distribution of skill sets. Underdogs manage upsets by confronting goliaths with unfamiliar tactics. Gamblers, prognosticators, and backdoor connoisseurs rejoice.8&nbsp;&nbsp;

As the old boxing adage reminds, “styles make fights.”&nbsp;

Some of our most promising students matriculate at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities.9 And once they set foot on these campuses, a stunning proportion are shepherded, recruited, and enticed into careers in investment banking and management consulting. The logic of salary (both present and in terms of exit options thereafter) and prestige is unassailable. And yet, this tends to result in a large number of the most industrious, conscientious, and ambitious young people clustering in a comparatively small number of professions.10

There is a time and a place to wax philosophical about the moral relativism and woke culture of university campuses. There is a time to debate what is truly required to become “educated.” This is not such a digression. There are elite colleges whose seats are pursued intensely by students and parents alike. The top students often aspire to admission at these schools. Fair enough?

And many of those who do not ultimately land at FAANG companies, which brings us back to the original argument.

When I graduated from my elite, august institution of higher learning in 2006, in my department of 52, only one of us (me) headed to graduate school in the sciences (my soul was filled, if not my bank account).11&nbsp;

And I still wound up in Manhattan, starting a hedge fund with two college classmates, so even the contrarian is susceptible to the siren’s song.

How many businesses are never started, how many areas of research remain unexplored, how many innovative products remain figments of wasted imaginations as a byproduct of this concentration?&nbsp;

Amidst the chorus of DEI champions and the affirmative action controversy is a more worthwhile discourse on diversity.

I have little interest in courting my own cancellation by engaging in a discussion of the relative merits of demographic diversity.12

Ok, maybe a little, but I shan’t…for now.

But it is worth noting that society pays a cost when a small number of institutions can hoover up the majority of the elite talent along any axis.&nbsp;

While often, this is little more than an explanation of the hegemony of a few college football teams juxtaposed with the excitement of filling out a bracket, at others, it’s why our most gifted minds spent the early 2000s trading financial derivatives and bringing down the global economy. It’s also why those same elite students spent the next decade helping raise click-through rates on ads by 0.001%.&nbsp;

So while my friends and family know all-too-well the depths of my contrarianism, I might be compelled to argue that the only defense against concentration of ideas, talent, and capital is the occasional deviant who eschews the better-worn path. Make no mistake, this has costs to the individual. Likewise, make no mistake, progress is contingent on the willingness of these folks to pay that cost.&nbsp;

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