In December 2020, the US federal government and 46 state attorneys general sued Facebook, claiming that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp violated antitrust law. But while the government is still struggling to convince a judge that Facebook is in fact a monopoly, Facebook is continuing to buy startups.
As jarring as the transition to remote work was during the coronavirus pandemic, it was modest compared to what’s coming next, says Adam Ozimek, a labor economist at the freelancing platform Upwork. He argues that the next phase of remote work will transform economies, as more companies revise their policies to accommodate employees who have permanently shifted to working remotely, and more workers move to places they’ve always wanted to live but couldn’t.
Facebook announced last week that it is shutting down Forecast, an experimental mobile app that lets users make predictions about world events. The app, which launched in June 2020, will disappear on Oct. 15., marking the end of one of Facebook’s most interesting experiments.
The emergency shift to remote work has been a shocking success, or at least a surprising non-failure. It has converted skeptical CEOs (though certainly not all of them) and ushered in more flexible workplace policies across a wide range of sectors.
Good morning, Quartz readers!
Good morning, Quartz readers!
Whether it’s for our job prospects or for our personal growth, we need to keep learning new skills. It keeps us curious about the world, exposes us to new things, and is critical to the all-important growth mindset.
Welcome to Part Two of our new member email series—this one should feel familiar. For a year now we’ve sent you short profiles of important companies, and that will continue! Stay tuned for more in your inbox on Friday and Saturday, and read more about our new member emails here.
Welcome to The Forecast, a new member email from Quartz. You can read more about our new member series here and look out for new stuff in your inbox every Monday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Good morning, Quartz readers!
Contractors, freelancers, and sole proprietors in the US can now access considerably larger loans from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), following a new rule issued by the Small Business Administration (SBA) on Wednesday. The rule allows entrepreneurs without employees to calculate their loan eligibility using gross income rather than net income, making the loans far more generous, especially for businesses with little or no profit.
Update: The SBA issued the rule covered in this article on Wednesday, March 3. You can read Quartz’s coverage of the new rule on PPP eligibility requirements for sole proprietors here.
The UK and EU have reached a trade agreement, avoiding the specter of a no-deal Brexit and ending years of extreme economic uncertainty on both sides. But economists warn that the costs of Brexit are still large, and will hamper the UK economy in particular for years to come.
In the 1990s, researchers at business schools became fascinated with the question of why so many large, seemingly dominant companies were being supplanted by startups. The incumbents had more money, more staff, and more know-how—what were they doing wrong?
The antitrust suit filed against Google by the US Department of Justice this week contains echoes of the government’s case against Microsoft 22 years ago, but it will hinge on the ways in which the two cases are different.
The Democratic leaders of the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee released a 449-page report this week alleging a lack of competition in digital markets. The report proposes countless remedies, including specific suggestions for Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. But one recommendation stands out for its simplicity and potential efficacy.
With the death of justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the US Supreme Court may have lost its least business-friendly member.
Cassie Kozyrkov is the chief decision scientist at Google, serving as an expert within the company in both data science and decision making, so when Quartz asked her for insights for our field guide on decision making, we cut to the chase. If you could suggest one way to improve my team’s decision-making, we asked, without knowing much about our domain or industry specifically, what would you suggest?
Making decisions is a part of every job, but something we often do without much thought. However, it is possible to improve decision-making skills with practice. And when making hard decisions or particularly important or contentious ones, it helps to follow a deliberate process. For our field guide to decision making, Quartz spoke to more than a dozen experts, and reviewed books and research to distill the critical steps.
For Quartz members only, here’s your chance to practice one of the biggest decision-making mistakes: overconfidence. (Psychologists Don Moore, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Max Bazerman of Harvard, call it “the mother of all biases” in their textbook on decision making.)
In the early 2000s, a wave of overconfidence spread through the US housing market and the global financial industry. Home buyers were confident that prices would increase, investors were confident they were making safe bets, and banks were confident that they weren’t overextended. Their errors sparked a global financial crisis and a series of prolonged recessions that scarred the lives of hundreds of millions.
As summer was coming to a close, Elaine Rich and her team were poring over data on the pandemic, trying to determine how much the decision to close schools would help contain it. They were consulting epidemiologists and their own internal modeling, but the complexity of the question was still staggering. Just how important were schools to the virus’s spread?
Mark Zuckerberg thinks Facebook has plenty of competition. In what market, you ask? “The space of connecting with other people is a very large space,” Zuckerberg said during Wednesday’s hearing before the US House of Representatives Antitrust subcommittee.
