Power of girl pop culture

Every Sunday at 8pm Eastern, tween and teen girls across the country check Crumbl Cookies’ social media to discover the week’s newest flavours. Then they start begging their parents to take them to the bakery for a five-dollar, 700-calorie cookie. Crumbl has its own 30-plus person social-media team with professionals who film and photograph the cookies for the weekly flavour announcements. Crumbl has 9.6m TikTok followers. Starbucks, by comparison, has 2.2m. There are more than 1,000 franchise-owned Crumbl cookie shops in the US and 18 in Canada. Together, those franchisees are generating more than $1bn in annual sales. As Taylor Swift and the movies “Barbie” and “Wicked” have shown, the economic power of girl pop culture is mighty. Crumbl’s weekly menu changes spark a constant flow of TikTok, YouTube and Instagram videos featuring reviews of the latest cookie drops.

(Adapted from “The $1 Billion Cookie Empire That Teens Love And Parents Hate,” by Julie Jargon, published on December 12, 2024, by the Wall Street Journal)

xAI vs OpenAI

As the artificial intelligence industry continues to attract attention, power, and billions of dollars in funding, two major players — Elon Musk’s xAI and Sam Altman’s OpenAI — are locked in a contentious battle over talent. Musk filed a lawsuit in August accusing Altman’s company of offering “lavish compensation” to “starve competitors.” The documentation that companies must file when hiring foreign workers on speciality visas like the H-1B provides a window into otherwise private compensation data at both firms and gives rare insight into the expensive war for AI talent. xAI is only a fraction of the size of OpenAI; the company employs about 100 workers, compared with about 3,000 at OpenAI, PitchBook reported. xAI reported pay data for 10 worker applications, compared with OpenAI’s 86 worker applications. The companies paid 37pc and 87pc, respectively, above the typical industry wage — or “prevailing wage” — for the roles surveyed, based on data from US Customs and Immigration Services.

(Adapted from “Public salary data reveals how much xAI pays some workers compared to OpenAI,” by Grace Kay, Katherine Long, and Andy Kiersz, published on December 12, 2024, by Business Insider)

Declining populations

The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep the population constant. It may have already happened. Fertility is falling almost everywhere for women across all levels of income, education and labour-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers. Some estimates now put the number of babies each woman has below the global replacement rate of about 2.2. Many government leaders see this as a matter of national urgency. Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the US, China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.

(Adapted from “Suddenly There Aren’t Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed,” by Greg Ip and Janet Adamy, published on May 13, 2024, by the Wall Street Journal)

Useless degrees

Roughly half of college graduates in the US end up in jobs where their degrees aren’t needed, and that underemployment has lasting implications for workers’ earnings and career paths. That is the key finding of a study tracking the career paths of more than 10m people who entered the job market over the past decade. Of the graduates in non-college-level jobs a year after leaving college, the vast majority remained underemployed a decade later, according to researchers at labour analytics firm Burning Glass Institute and nonprofit Strada Education Foundation, which analysed the résumés of workers who graduated between 2012 and 2021. More than any other factor analysed — including race, gender and choice of university — what a person studies determines their odds of getting on a college-level career track. Internships are also critical.

(Adapted from “Half Of College Grads Are Working Jobs That Don’t Use Their Degrees,” by Vanessa Fuhrmans and Lindsay Ellis,” published on February 22, 2024, by the Wall Street Journal)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, January 6th, 2025