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Mean world economy
Happy Sunday {{first_name}},
Watching The Odyssey this week was an excellent reminder of how crazy the journey of human civilisation has been. Today we sit and complain about AI risks to our jobs and how hard it is to raise children, yet we’ve technically never had it easier.
Let’s face it: fending off wild animals on a daily basis is somewhat harder than staying on top of the class WhatsApp group.
So what is driving all this anxiety and lack of perspective?
In her column this week, Dominique Olivier digs into this topic by referencing George Gerbner’s study in the early 1970s about the effect of television on how we perceive the world and the risks to our daily lives. As you’ve probably guessed, the answer wasn’t promising.
Gerbner died in 2005 at the age of 86, so he didn’t live long enough to see the launch of the first iPhone in 2007. One can only imagine how utterly horrified he would be to see what the world looks like today.
Yes, it’s a mean world out there, but there are also many businesses that profit off the anxieties driven by access to social media and infinite on-demand streaming. Get ready to challenge your own perceptions in this great article.
To be fair, if anyone deserves to be anxious, it’s the actors who have been involved in the Superman franchise over the years. Our resident ghost certainly hopes that ex-Superman Henry Cavill will be left alone by fate, as bringing the Warhammer IP to life is a gift that the world needs. Other prior heroes haven’t been so lucky, with Christopher Reeve as the most famous example.
Curious? Read on for the “curse of the cape” and a few near-misses as well. Then to close us off, Dominique’s Fast Facts are themed around “things to feel good about” - something we all need.
From article links to the Iberian lynx in the Fast Facts, we hope you have a great Sunday!
The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)
The economy of a mean world
We've never had more access to information, and we've also never been more anxious.
Dominique Olivier explains why a frightened population is very good for business.
Warmly Ran GTM With No Sales Team. Here's How.
That's what Warmly proved. They defined ICP, scored buying intent, and surfaced the right accounts before a human ever touched a lead. HubSpot noticed.
On August 12, Max and Keegan are rebuilding it live in HubSpot — and showing you how to replicate it this week. HubSpot Credits included when you join HubSpot for Startups.
The curse of the cape
TL;DR: For decades, playing the world's most invincible man seemed to leave the actors who did it strangely… breakable.
Superman cannot be hurt. Bullets flatten against his chest, he outruns trains; nothing on Earth can touch him. This is a cruel joke when you consider that several men who played him kept getting touched by everything.
The story of the Superman Curse starts with George Reeves, television's first Superman, who was found dead in his bedroom in 1959 with a bullet in his head. His death was ruled a suicide, though enough oddities lingered that people are still arguing about it. He was 45, and by many accounts frustrated at being trapped inside the cape, unable to land other roles. He wasn't even the first to feel the cape's weight: Kirk Alyn, who played Superman in two cheap 1940s serials, found himself so thoroughly typecast afterward that the work dried up, and he saw out his career in voice parts, commercials, and roles too small to earn his name in the credits.
Christopher Reeve, who made audiences believe a man could fly, was thrown from a horse in 1995 and paralysed from the neck down. The invincible man was rendered unable to move at all. He spent his last nine years as an advocate for spinal research before dying in 2004. Believers in the Superman Curse even reference his widow, Dana Reeve, who never smoked and yet died of lung cancer in 2006 at the age of 44.
Lee Quigley, who played the infant Superman, died of an overdose at 14.
The superstition soon grew elastic enough to swallow almost anything: when three people involved in the Superman Returns DVD were hurt in quick succession - one down a flight of stairs, one mugged and beaten, one straight through a glass window - director Bryan Singer joked that his DVD crew had absorbed the curse on everyone else's behalf.
Not everyone played along though. Margot Kidder, who was Lois Lane to Reeve's Superman and had her own well-documented struggles, thought the whole idea was nonsense. She pointed out that nobody ever tallies the near-misses that go the other way - like the time her car rolled three times and was stopped by a telegraph pole inches from a 50-foot ravine.
Where, she wanted to know, was the Superman Curse in that story?
She'd put her finger on exactly the trick your mind is playing.
The curse feels real because these disasters are vivid and easy to recall, and we mistake how readily an example springs to mind for how common it actually is. It’s called the availability heuristic, and you’ll read more about it in this week’s column.
The dramatic cases come to mind instantly, while the dozens of actors who wore the cape and then lived long, unremarkable lives never come to mind at all. Kidder's telegraph pole doesn't make the list. The ravine she avoided isn't a story anyone tells.
Dominique’s Fast Facts - “Things to feel good about”
Brazil's Atlantic Forest hit its lowest deforestation on record. The forest that's home to Rio, São Paulo, and 80% of the country's population recorded just 8,658 hectares of deforestation in 2025, which is the lowest since monitoring began in 1985. It represents a 40% drop from the year before, with some environmentalists saying zero deforestation could be within reach in three years.
The Iberian lynx has gone from nearly-extinct to over 2,000. In 2002, there were just 94 Iberian lynxes left in the wild, and experts thought they'd be the first feline species to go extinct since prehistoric times. Today, their numbers have crossed 2,000.
The Netherlands has closed over 20 prisons in the last decade due to a falling prison population, lower crime rates, and a strong focus on rehabilitation.
The ozone layer is on track to be fully restored within our lifetimes.
Since 2003, a man named Chen Si has spent every weekend patrolling the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, a notorious spot for those looking to commit suicide. To date, he has stopped at least 469 people from jumping off the bridge.
Six white rhinos that were rescued in 2017 after their mothers were killed by poachers have defied all odds by giving birth to their own calves in the wild.
Engineers in Japan have found a way to recover 90% of the lithium from used EV batteries. Before this discovery, only about half of the lithium could be recovered.