E31: Post-vaccination virtue signaling, pandemic lessons, immigration, Caitlyn Jenner for CA Governor, Big Tech earnings & more

The prediction’s horizon is ~30 years from 2021 (i.e., until about 2051), and as of now (late 2025) we are only ~4 years into that window. It is therefore too early to judge whether globalism will be substantially “undone” over the full period.

That said, current evidence shows mixed but notable de‑globalization pressures, not a clear, completed reversal:

• Global trade as a share of world GDP fell after the 2008 crisis but has been relatively flat since, with a modest recovery post‑COVID. This suggests a slowdown or plateau in globalization rather than a sharp unwinding so far.
• There are strong de‑risking / friend‑shoring trends: U.S.‑China trade tensions and export controls, semiconductor and supply‑chain reshoring efforts, and more regional trade/investment blocs. Major institutions like the IMF and World Bank describe this as geoeconomic fragmentation and warn it could reduce long‑term global growth if it deepens.
• At the same time, cross‑border data flows, services trade, and digital integration remain robust, indicating that certain dimensions of globalization are still expanding even as goods trade and supply chains become more politically constrained.

Because the claim is about a substantial reversal over three decades, and current data only cover a small early slice of that period—and show partial, not decisive, unwinding—the prediction cannot yet be classified as clearly right or wrong. Hence: inconclusive (too early to tell).

Sacks’ claim (normalized) is that roughly a year of COVID-era school closures may cause learning loss and social isolation whose negative effects persist across an entire generation of affected students, i.e., for decades.

What we know by late 2025:

• Severe and persistent learning loss is well documented. Global analyses by the World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF estimate that this cohort of students stands to lose around $17 trillion in lifetime earnings, warning that learning losses from COVID-19 school closures could “impoverish a whole generation” of students. These estimates project long-run income and productivity losses over their working lives, not just short-term setbacks. (unesco.org)
• Long-run economic and social impacts are explicitly expected to last for decades. World Bank work on learning loss projects that school disruptions have permanently reduced learning-adjusted years of schooling for the current cohort and will lower their lifetime earnings; recent summaries state that these learning losses can translate into lower productivity, greater inequality, and increased risk of social unrest “for decades to come,” unless aggressively remediated. (blogs.worldbank.org)
• Educational recovery has been slow, not complete. In the U.S., 2024 NAEP assessments show high school seniors’ math and reading scores at their worst levels in roughly two decades, with large shares of students below basic proficiency, and experts noting that the pandemic exacerbated an already downward trend rather than being fully reversed by 2024–25. Five years after the initial disruptions, many students remain significantly behind pre‑pandemic benchmarks. (apnews.com)
• Youth mental health and development show sustained harm. Studies and surveillance data indicate marked increases in anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and other mental health problems among adolescents associated with pandemic isolation and disruption. Some research links post‑shutdown adolescents to worse mental health and signs of accelerated or stress‑like brain aging relative to pre‑pandemic peers, and CDC data show substantial burdens of poor mental health and suicidal behavior tied to pandemic‑era adverse experiences. (nimh.nih.gov)
• Five years of follow‑up is still far short of a “generational” timescale. Some longitudinal and follow‑up work finds that many adolescents are still experiencing elevated mental health problems and functional difficulties about five years after the first lockdowns, suggesting multi‑year consequences but not yet documenting outcomes across their full adulthood. (dw.com)

Putting this together:

• The evidence already strongly supports multi‑year, potentially lifetime impacts on learning and earnings for the cohort exposed to prolonged school closures, and it shows sustained mental health consequences. These findings make Sacks’ warning about a possible “generational consequence” plausible and well‑grounded.
• However, the core of the prediction is about decades‑long, generation‑wide outcomes (e.g., actual lifetime earnings, adult health, social stability). As of 2025, the affected students have only advanced a few school grades; their full working lives and long‑term adult outcomes have not yet unfolded.

Because the crucial part of the claim concerns effects spanning an entire generation over decades, and we are only about four to five years past the closures, the prediction cannot yet be definitively judged as right or wrong. The best characterization is “too early to tell,” even though current data point strongly in the direction he feared.

By late 2025, it’s too early to definitively judge a prediction framed as playing out “over roughly the coming decade,” and the evidence so far is mixed.

1. China’s demographics are unfolding as he expected. China’s population is now shrinking, and the working‑age share continues to fall as the society rapidly ages, a direct legacy of the one‑child policy. Official and UN‑based analyses show the working‑age population declining and the over‑60 population exceeding 300 million, with projections of continued steep demographic contraction through 2030 and beyond. (cnbc.com) This supports the premise of his argument (demographic headwinds), but not yet his downstream conclusions.

2. China’s low‑cost manufacturing dominance and global “over‑dependence” have not yet “solved themselves.” Despite these demographic pressures and some labor‑cost increases, China’s manufacturing role has, if anything, intensified: it accounts for about 29–31% of global manufacturing output and roughly 20% of world manufacturing exports, with 2024 exports slightly exceeding the combined total of the U.S., Germany, and Japan. (statista.com) China has also offset labor issues via heavy automation and domestic industrial‑robot deployment, helping preserve cost competitiveness. (ft.com) Meanwhile, “China‑plus‑one” diversification is real—production is expanding in Southeast Asia, Mexico, and elsewhere—but most analyses describe it as partial diversification rather than a full unwinding of dependence on Chinese manufacturing and inputs. (pfe.express) So by 2025, the global over‑reliance on China has not clearly “solved itself” via demographics alone.

3. Inflation and commodity prices did spike, but not in the sustained, demographic‑driven way implied. Global inflation and commodity prices surged in 2021–2022, driven largely by pandemic recovery, supply‑chain bottlenecks, and the energy shock from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, since mid‑2022, broad commodity indices have fallen sharply (around 40% from the peak by mid‑2023), and the World Bank now projects further declines in 2024–2026, with many prices returning to or below pre‑COVID levels. (worldbank.org) That is the opposite of a clear, ongoing upward push in global commodity prices attributable primarily to China’s demographics.

4. U.S. manufacturing is experiencing a notable boom, but “Rust Belt rejuvenation” is uneven. U.S. manufacturing construction has reached record levels—roughly double pre‑2020/2021 levels by early 2024—driven by the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and related industrial‑policy and infrastructure laws. (jec.senate.gov) Major semiconductor and battery investments are indeed landing in parts of the traditional industrial Midwest (e.g., large chip and EV‑supply‑chain projects in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana). (reuters.com) At the same time, research on the new “Made in America” wave finds that a disproportionate share of these dynamic, high‑tech manufacturing investments is flowing to Southern and Sun Belt metros (Phoenix, Austin, Raleigh, Houston, etc.), not just classic Rust Belt cities. (oxfordeconomics.com) So there is a reindustrialization trend, but whether it ultimately produces the broad “rejuvenation of the Rust Belt” he envisioned remains uncertain.

5. Net assessment relative to his full causal story. Some early pieces of Chamath’s thesis are aligned with observed trends (China’s demographic squeeze; partial diversification of supply chains; a significant U.S. manufacturing/investment boom), while other key elements have not materialized in the way he framed them (China’s manufacturing dominance remains very strong; global commodity prices are now falling; and the geography of U.S. reindustrialization is broader and more Sun‑Belt‑oriented than a simple Rust Belt revival). Crucially, though, his prediction was explicitly about dynamics “over roughly the coming decade,” and we are only about four years into that window. Given that central parts of his claim are inherently long‑run (demographics reshaping global manufacturing structures), there is not yet enough elapsed time to judge whether China’s over‑dependence will in fact “solve itself” and whether the ultimate pattern of U.S. reindustrialization will match his vision.

Because the forecast horizon extends to around 2030–2031 and major structural pieces are still evolving, the fairest classification today is inconclusive (too early to tell) rather than clearly right or wrong.

Jason said Amazon’s advertising business would be “bigger than AWS in three years at this rate,” i.e., by around May 2024. In reality, Amazon’s reported segment results show AWS stayed much larger. For 2021, AWS net sales were about $62.2 billion, while advertising services were about $31.2 billion. (fool.com) In 2022, ad revenue rose to roughly $37.7 billion, still well below AWS’s $80.1 billion. (ir.aboutamazon.com) For full-year 2023, AWS reached $90.8 billion in net sales versus $46.9 billion from advertising services. (markets.financialcontent.com) For full-year 2024, AWS climbed further to $107.6 billion, while ad revenue was about $56.2 billion—roughly half of AWS. (businesswire.com) By May 2024 (three years after the May 2021 statement) and even through the latest available data, Amazon’s annual advertising revenue never surpassed AWS’s annual revenue, so the prediction did not come true.

The prediction’s deadline is “end of decade” → December 31, 2029. Today is November 30, 2025, so there are more than four years remaining in the 2020s. Even if we perfectly identified which four “enormous monopolies” Chamath was referring to among the FAANG‑type platforms (e.g., Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Google/Alphabet), we cannot yet say whether they will or won’t be structurally broken up by the stated deadline. Because the prediction is explicitly about the state of these companies by the end of the decade, and that date hasn’t arrived, its correctness cannot yet be evaluated. Therefore the only appropriate status is: inconclusive (too early to tell).

Sacks predicted that, at some unspecified future time, dominant U.S. tech platforms such as Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook/Meta would be broken up or otherwise knocked down because they are too powerful.

As of 30 November 2025, none of these firms has actually been broken up or forced to divest major businesses by a final, implemented antitrust remedy. In the main U.S. search-monopoly case, a judge has ruled that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, and the DOJ has formally asked for structural remedies such as forcing Google to sell the Chrome browser and potentially Android, but the remedies phase is still underway and no divestiture order has yet been issued. (en.wikipedia.org) In a separate U.S. ad-tech case, a court found Google illegally monopolized parts of the open‑web ad‑tech stack; the DOJ is now seeking divestiture of key ad‑tech units, with a remedies hearing scheduled, but again no breakup has yet been ordered or carried out. (en.wikipedia.org)

Apple, Meta, and Amazon are likewise facing major antitrust actions, but outcomes are still pending. The DOJ’s 2024 smartphone‑monopoly case against Apple survived a motion to dismiss and is moving forward with no remedy determined. (en.wikipedia.org) The FTC’s case against Meta, which seeks structural relief around Instagram and WhatsApp, only went to trial in April 2025 and has not yet produced a decision. (en.wikipedia.org) The FTC’s large antitrust suit against Amazon’s marketplace is scheduled for trial in 2027, while a separate case over dark patterns in Prime signups ended in a monetary settlement and conduct changes, not a breakup. (barrons.com)

Outside the U.S., the EU’s Digital Markets Act has imposed tough conduct rules and significant fines on gatekeepers such as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta, and it allows for structural remedies (including breakups) in cases of systematic non‑compliance. However, enforcement to date has consisted of fines and behavioral orders, not forced divestitures or corporate breakups. (commission.europa.eu)

Given that (1) the companies have not yet been broken up and (2) the major antitrust and regulatory proceedings that might eventually produce such outcomes remain unresolved, the prediction cannot currently be called right or wrong. It is simply too early to tell whether these actions will ultimately break up the firms or significantly reduce their consolidated power, so the result is best classified as inconclusive.

As of November 30, 2025, the time window of the prediction (“within ten or so years” from a 2019 statement, i.e., by around 2029) has not yet elapsed, so it cannot be definitively judged.

What we can say so far:

• Governments have indeed begun enacting significant regulations and bringing major enforcement actions against large tech platforms since 2019:
  • The EU has passed and begun implementing the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), which impose strict obligations on large “gatekeeper” platforms such as Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and others, including interoperability, self‑preferencing limits, and content‑moderation and transparency rules.
  • The U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission have brought major antitrust suits against Google (search and ad tech), Meta (acquisitions and competitive conduct), Amazon (marketplace practices), and others, seeking structural or behavioral remedies.
  • The UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act and the Online Safety Act similarly assert strong regulatory control over large online platforms.
• However, these actions are publicly justified mostly on grounds such as competition, consumer protection, privacy, and online safety—not explicitly as measures to “protect incumbents’ power,” even if one can argue that political self‑preservation is an underlying motive. That motive is interpretive and hard to prove empirically.
• Despite regulatory headwinds, the largest U.S. tech platforms’ earnings as of 2025 remain very strong, with companies like Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta reporting robust revenues, high margins in key segments, and large market capitalizations. Markets continue, on balance, to price in long‑term earnings durability rather than a sharp collapse attributable to regulation.

Because (1) the deadline (around 2029) has not yet arrived, and (2) it is too early to say whether regulation will ultimately undermine the long‑term durability of these firms’ earnings trajectories in the way implied, the correct status today is “inconclusive (too early)”, not clearly right or wrong.