Why TikTok Should Worry Economists
The most popular website in the world features a lot of videos that take a pretty dim view of economics.
Where to go to learn about the sunk-cost fallacy.
Photographer: Brent Lewin/BloombergTikTok is now the most popular website in the world, by one measure, and as such its influence on how young people see and think about themselves is attracting ever more attention. I am an economist, so I would like to focus on a considerably more narrow subject: what TikTok’s videos say about how young people see and think about economics. The news — for my profession, not necessarily for TikTok — is not good.
For the purposes of this experiment, I typed “economics” into the TikTok search bar and simply watched what came up. Of course my feed was governed by the site’s algorithm, which is not transparent, but it is reasonable to assume that on average it guides users to videos that are engaged with, liked and widely shared.