Moral Reflections on Economics, Vol 4, Issue 2
February 2024 issue of Moral Reflections on Economics is online. It features:
Article on Liquidity Risks in Islamic Banks by Salman Ahmed Shaikh
Highlights of Al Baraka Forum 2024 by Muhammad Hammad
IEP Public Poll results on Al Baraka Forum 2024
Book review of Economics of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) by Syed Fazlur Rehman
Research paper in focus on Cash Waqf in Malaysia by Zaki Ahmad, Mushtaq…
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Really good Twitter thread originally about Elon Musk and Twitter, but also applies to Netflix and a lot of other corporations.
Full thread. Text transcription under cut.
John Bull @garius
One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone. So, with everything going on at Twitter rn, time for a thread about the Trust Thermocline /1
So: what's a thermocline?
Well large bodies of water are made of layers of differing temperatures. Like a layer cake. The top bit is where all the the waves happen and has a gradually decreasing temperature. Then SUDDENLY there's a point where it gets super-cold.
That suddenly is important. There's reasons for it (Science!) but it's just a good metaphor. Indeed you may also be interested in the "Thermocline of Truth" which a project management term for how things on a RAG board all suddenly go from amber to red.
But I digress.
The Trust Thermocline is something that, over (many) years of digital, I have seen both digital and regular content publishers hit time and time again. Despite warnings (at least when I've worked there). And it has a similar effect. You have lots of users then suddenly... nope.
And this does effect print publications as much as trendy digital media companies. They'll be flying along making loads of money, with lots of users/readers, rolling out new products that get bought. Or events. Or Sub-brands.
And then SUDDENLY those people just abandon them.
Often it's not even to "new" competitor products, but stuff they thought were already not a threat. Nor is there lots of obvious dissatisfaction reported from sales and marketing (other than general grumbling). Nor is it a general drift away, it's just a sudden big slide.
So why does this happen? As I explain to these people and places, it's because they breached the Trust Thermocline.
I ask them if they'd been increasing prices. Changed service offerings. Modified the product.
The answer is normally: "yes, but not much. And everyone still paid"
Then I ask if they did that the year before. Did they increase prices last year? Change the offering? Modify the product?
Again: "yes, but not much."
The answer is normally: "yes, but not much. And everyone still paid."
"And the year before?"
"Yes but not much. And everyone still paid."
Well, you get the idea.
And here is where the Trust Thermocline kicks in. Because too many people see service use as always following an arc. They think that as long as usage is ticking up, they can do what they like to cost and product.
And (critically) that they can just react when the curve flattens
But with a lot of CONTENT products (inc social media) that's not actually how it works. Because it doesn't account for sunk-cost lock-in.
Users and readers will stick to what they know, and use, well beyond the point where they START to lose trust in it. And you won't see that.
But they'll only MOVE when they hit the Trust Thermocline. The point where their lack of trust in the product to meet their needs, and the emotional investment they'd made in it, have finally been outweighed by the physical and emotional effort required to abandon it.
At this point, I normally get asked something like:
"So if we undo the last few changes and drop the price, we get them back?"
And then I have to break the news that nope: that's not how it works.
Because you're past the Thermocline now. You can't make them trust you again.
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Thinking about how Victor Hugo wrote one of the most famous portrayals of prostitution that is sympathetic to the prostituted woman (Fantine from Les Miserables) and shows how she is forced by poverty to sell her body, how it clearly is a traumatic experience, and how much disrespect the pimps have for her in reality... And yet he continued constantly visiting brothels and using the women's bodies - so much so that a very famous rumor was created that all the brothels in Paris closed down to mourn him after his death... Kill all men?
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A summary of that long post on ads
According to staff, unfortunately tumblr is still not profitable, and it NEEDS to at least break even to keep itself alive. Advertisers may be a necessary evil, and if you’d like to avoid them, please buy the blue checkmarks or crabs or pooping horse or ad-free or anything else that will keep this site functional.
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A Reflection of Divine-based Islamic Economics
Paper Title: A Reflection of Divine-based Islamic Economics (D-BIE)
Author: Mustapha Hamata, Mohamed Aslam Mohamed Haneef, Mustafa Omar Mohammed, Salina Kassim
Publisher: Journal of Islamic Finance Vol. 12 No. 1 (2023) 109 – 115.
This paper provides reflection on Islamic economics and rightly concludes that a lot of work needs to be done in providing distinct story of why financial…
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I saw this whole long thread of people hand-wringing about "anti-intellectuals" on tiktok and how scary it is that they're believing sourceless claims other people on tiktok tell them, because they claim they have the same chance of being correct as anything that "science says."
and said hand-wringers were waxing poetic about the scientific method and replicability and how everything that's published in an academic journal is guaranteed to be true and correct because of a little thing called peer review whereby scientists (naturally a petty and pedantic people) are encouraged to tear each other's conclusions apart.
and I just have to say. if you believe (in the midst of a major replicability crisis amongst scientific journals, no less) that everything published in a scientific journal is de facto factual or trustworthy, and if you believe that peer review of all things is a process that is guaranteed to prevent papers with anything from flaws in experimental design to full-blown fraud from going to print (as if publishers don't have a literal profit motive to publish studies that yield novel, startling conclusions),
then you are 100% as "anti-intellectual," foolish, & averse to thinking for yourself as the tiktokers you're making fun of. actually I think I like you less. at least their ideas might be bizarre enough to be interesting
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