America faces a privacy reckoning, millennials are redefining charity, and more insights from The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson

Hello! Derek Thompson here as your guest editor today. I cover economics and technology for The Atlantic. During the week, the Daily Rundown brings you the day’s trending professional news. On the weekend, we try to keep you current on the big ideas that can help you see what’s coming. Read on and join the conversation.

How economics can save American lives: U.S. life expectancy is declining, for the first time since World War I and the Spanish influenza. The cause? Drug overdoses, chronic liver disease and suicide — otherwise known as deaths of despair. “Increased death rates for unintentional drug overdoses in particular—a subset of unintentional injuries—contributed to the negative change in life expectancy observed in recent years," a CDC report says. How to reverse the trend? A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that a 10% increase to the minimum wage or the Earned Income Tax Credit clearly reduces suicides among less educated adults. According to the authors, those boosts to wages and tax benefits could save more than 1,200 lives a year. ? Here's what people are saying.

Why do we care so much about privacy? This week, The Atlantic’s tech podcast Crazy/Genius returns for its third season, themed “Unbreak the Internet.” In this first episode, we ask: Are Americans really victims of privacy infringement—or just whiny hypocrites? In the last 150 years, Americans have had privacy freakouts about the telegraph, the telephone, the postcard, and even the intrusive nature of background music on buses (seriously, it was a Supreme Court case). But today, the threat is of a different nature. Harvard researcher Shoshana Zuboff says the desperation of tech giants to harvest our personal data could lead to a flurry of Cambridge Analytica-type scandals, which strikes at the heart of our idea of democracy. In the final analysis, privacy may be the “climate change of the Internet”—an invisible collective threat, whose risk grows with each data emission.

Millennials are givers, after all: Millennials are often derided as the "Me Me Me Generation," and they’re said to be entitled, narcissistic, greedy, self-absorbed and wasteful. A new paper from Princeton economists Peter Koczanski and Harvey Rosen suggests otherwise. Using panel data on charitable donations to analyze the philanthropic behavior of the millennial generation, the researchers found that members of this much-maligned generation are just about as likely to make any donation as previous generations. And those that do give, "give substantially more than members of earlier generations." I guess you could say: Millennials are killing selfishness.

Is Slack ruining work? On average, employees in large companies send more than 40 Slack messages per weekday—in an eight-hour day, that’s one message every 12 minutes. And this was supposed to replace email? The modern office place suffers from a TMI problem, Vox reports. The emphasis on new technology to moderate our workdays isn’t making our work more productive. Like open-floor plans, the software is meant to break down barriers that divide different parts of a company and unleash innovation. But instead, it unleashes a chaos of incoming messages. ? Here's what people are saying.

Winner-take-all economics has taken over in music: In 1982, 26% of all global concert ticket revenue went to the top 1% of performers. Today, it’s 60%, according to research from the late Princeton economist Alan Krueger. “The middle has dropped out of music, as more consumers gravitate to a smaller number of superstars,” Krueger writes in his book, “Rockonomics.” This hollowing out of the middle is happening as performers increasingly rely on concerts to make a living, as streaming technology devalues recorded music. Performers today make about three-fourths of their income from concert tours, compared with around 30% as late as the 1990s. ? Here's what people are saying.

One last idea: To begin is human; to quit is divine. Our culture valorizes grit. But it is simply inevitable that many of the projects on which we embark — business developments, relationships, amateur pottery pieces — reveal themselves to be utter wastes of our precious time. So, quit why don’t you? Rather than fall prey to the infamous sunk-cost fallacy, Seth Godin suggests, we ought to recognize that our future choices need not be shackled to our past mistakes.

“Once you realize that whatever you’re quitting is a gift from your former self, you don’t have to accept.”

Want to get ahead at work? Looking for advice from the pros? Share your burning career questions in the comments with #YouAsked and we’ll get experts to weigh in.

— Derek Thompson