Can We Move Past a Materialistic, Consumption-Driven Economy?

One important question that arises, during this difficult time, is, can we move past a materialistic, consumption-driven economy?

Most present economic models result in rising inequality, impacting income, wealth, education, health, and social perceptions.

"... [a] materialistic social contract rests on philosopher and economist Adam Smith’s principle of the invisible hand, whereby people pursuing their own self-interest in free markets are led—as if by an invisible hand—to make everyone in society as well off as possible. The popular appeal of capitalist economies relies heavily on this principle, since people usually support capitalism because it is alleged to deliver higher living standards and more economic freedom than alternative economic systems."

The underlying assumption is that human needs can be satisfied through material prosperity and that decentralized, self-interested market decisions tend to generate such material prosperity more efficiently than more centralized, coordinated approaches. Too often, assessments of capitalism aim to focus on so-called "triumph" over socialism. Be real -- there is no such thing as a pure capitalist system. Humans embrace many different forms of capitalist economies; since money was invented about 5,000 years ago, people understand that trading improves both parties' position.

The current institutional capitalism and corporatism represents one of many different versions. And, around the globe, there are many iterations of capitalism right now. Singapore, for example, is the fourth richest country in the world in terms of per-capita GDP with an unemployment rate of 2.2 percent or lower since 2009. Who doesn't regard this city-state as one of the most free and open, pro-business economies in the world? Yet the government in Singapore routinely guides investment policy, and government-linked firms dominate telecommunications, media, and finance. Such intertwining would be unthinkable in America, Norway, Japan, or Canada. Like Singapore, many countries’ form of capitalism is steered not by that unseen hand — but by defined policy.

Human-centered capitalism: Utilizing market forces (capitalism) to benefit society, measured in gross national well-being instead of domestic product (human-centered)

What activities add up what might be considered a "normal life," one that is well-rounded? Could our model for consumption and interaction be more accommodating to a lifestyle where care of each other, of personal character development, can be fostered? We all benefit from lifestyles influencing community in a positive way, infused with personal creativity and work-life balance.Economics enables us to explore why people sometimes make irrational decisions, and why and how their behavior does not follow the predictions of so-called experts. Humans are emotional, oft times making decisions that are not in their self-interest. We should aspire to get away from viewing capitalism as some cold, numbers-only thing or a zero sum game that pits business profits against government taxes or capitalist bosses vs socialist workers.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/toward-human-centered-capitalism/

Universal basic income -- Another Supporting Study

The Green Institute has released a new paper, Views of a UBI: Perspectives from Across Australia, that records the views of different Australians on universal basic income (UBI), a contentious policy idea that is slowly gaining international currency.

read more...

Why Taxis Need Uber...

The so-called "gig economy" is picking up steam... freelancers replacing full-time staff, companies focus on profits and shareholder value rather than hiring new permanent employees. With this type of work arrangement, geographically diffuse and independent workers are paid piecemeal for completing tasks -- facilitated by the connections from internet-based apps.

Amazon of course has Mechanical Turk, the original "piece work over the internet" freelancers platform. Another Amazon effort riffs on Uber: package delivery. Mechanical Turk is a platform where workers complete microtasks (such as transcribing, proofreading or answering surveys) for, many times, cents on the dollar. These internet denizens work on their own time and can pick up gigs on-demand.

But with the competition to taxis, Uber is really reshaping how the freelance economy works. People forget, in the U.S., most taxi companies retain drivers as 'contractors,' and require the drivers to pay for fuel, maintenance, etc. Regulation has come about to make a partially-public service (shared rides) more consumer-friendly (taxi meters, inspections, licensing). Tim O'Reilly says,

Regulation is not a good in itself. It is a means of achieving public goods. And so far, it is pretty clear that Uber and Lyft (and in particular, the competition between them) are improving the transportation options in American cities. Regulators should be using the opportunity to revisit the old way of doing things rather than trying to make the new conform to outdated rules that no longer serve their purpose...

Read more...

Steve Jobs' Thoughts on the Impermanence of All Things

From the CNN site: This article is the second of a three-part series adapted from the new e-book "Letters to Steve: Inside the E-mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs," written by CNN tech writer Mark Milian.

Steve Jobs wasn't eager to disclose details of his health issues over the years.
That the Apple co-founder contracted a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2003 wasn't disclosed until after his return from surgery more than nine months later. Another health problem, which was innocuously described at first as a "hormone imbalance," turned into a six-month leave during which Jobs underwent a liver transplant.
Yet Jobs' views on existence, as he increasingly faced his own mortality, became ever more poetic and less concealed toward the end. These could be seen in the rare interviews he'd grant but also in e-mail correspondences with acquaintances and strangers, which he often took the time to partake in.
"I don't think of my life as a career," he told Time in 2010. "I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That's not a career -- it's a life!"
Jobs also shared his condolences and personal revelations with others facing similar pressures. A man named James told the news site Business Insider that he e-mailed Jobs on April 20, 2010, to thank him for supporting an organ donor program. James mentioned that his girlfriend had died of melanoma two years before.

Jobs replied: "Your [sic] most welcome, James. I'm sorry about your girlfriend. Life is fragile."

"Letters to Steve: Inside the E-mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs," by Mark Milian is available for download on Amazon.

The rare moments when Jobs publicly waxed philosophical were among his most memorable. Perhaps the most widely quoted is his 2005 commencement address to Stanford University's graduating class: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important," he said.

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
He continued: "No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent."
People often looked to Jobs for advice on dealing with the inevitable, and he seemed eager to offer his guidance.

One of the first calls Bob Longo, a former sales chief for the failed computer company Jobs founded called NeXT Computer, made after getting diagnosed with cancer was to Jobs. (They shared the same oncologist and radiologist.) The pair kept in touch, Longo recalled to the Pittsburgh Business Times, and Longo received an exuberant e-mail from Jobs after telling him the news that Longo's surgery was successful.

Longo told the Business Times: "Messages from him were generally laconic. This one had 20 exclamation points. I have a cousin who's a pretty well regarded cancer research doctor and told him the doctor Steve referred me to; he said, 'Don't even ask for a second opinion. Start your treatment.'"
Even in 1995, Jobs seemed undeterred in the face of death. He said in an interview with the Computerworld Honors Program: "We're all going to be dead soon; that's my point of view. Somebody once told me, they said, 'Live each day as if it would be your last, and one day you'll certainly be right.' I do that. You never know when you're going to go, but you are going to go pretty soon. If you're going to leave anything behind, it's going to be your kids, a few friends and your work. So that's what I tend to worry about."

Jobs set out to "put a dent in the universe," as he would say, and many believe he did just that. He transformed industries, improved important tools and changed the daily lives for billions of people.
But as much as the world may have needed a visionary like Jobs, he apparently needed us, too.
"You know, there's nothing that makes my day more than getting an e-mail from some random person in the universe who just bought an iPad over in the U.K. and tells me the story about how it's the coolest product they've ever brought home, you know, in their lives," Jobs said at the All Things Digital conference in 2010.

"That's what keeps me going. And it's what kept me going five years ago. It's what kept me going 10 years ago, when the doors were almost closed. And it's what'll keep me going five years from now, whatever happens," he said. Jobs died 16 months later to a public outpouring of grief.

Steve Jobs was a Buddhist and thinker beyond just technology, design and human capital management. In The Zen of Steve Jobs
">], we learn the story of Jobs' relationship withKobun Chino Otogawa, a person of great import to Steve. The story moves back and forward in time, from the 1970s to 2011, but centers on the period after Jobs' exile from Apple in 1985 when he took up intensive study with Kobun. Their time together was integral to the big leaps that Apple took later on with its product design and business strategy.

Health care and capitalism -- together like haggis and stout

The basic need for insurance and pension arrangements stems from personal risk and uncertainty -- and it is not a modern phenomenon. Even ancient civilizations fostered early versions of the concept of the insurance fund, with the grant of pensions in ancient Greece and the formation of burial societies in ancient Greece and Rome. In the Middle Ages it was sometimes possible to secure one's old age with a pension or even to purchase a room at a monastery with board and lodging provided. Marine insurance was invented, in order to help the expansion of trade, and this was followed by the beginnings of life insurance. Inevitably this is partly a book about "firsts".
Of course, the concept of deceit is not new, either. The earliest insurance fraud apparently was attempted in 350BC, when the owner of a ship tried to sink it.

Other examples of early insurance can be found: The earliest insurance policy seems to have been issued in 1350, on a cargo of wheat supplied from Sicily to Tunis. Life insurance goes back at least as far a 1399, when a policy was issued covering someone on a voyage from Barcelona to Italy. Astonishingly, the first occupational pension fund was established as early as 1590, the Chatham Chest, which paid pensions to disabled seamen and was financed by members' contributions deducted from their pay.

There was a great concern about the losses which people suffered in the Great Fire of London and in other fires in towns, and the first British fire insurance company was founded in 1680.
Many believe Napier, the Scottish inventor of logarithms (1614), may have been inspired to do so by studying the properties of compound interest tables. And Scotland provides the source of many a source about the use of insurance: the grant of pensions by Edinburgh Burgh Council in the 17th centuries; the pensions payable by Leith Trinity House in 1747; and, of course, the pioneering pension fund for Scottish ministers' widows (established 1743). Later, some prominent Scotsmen gathered in the Royal Exchange Coffee Rooms in Edinburgh to discuss setting up ‘a general fund for securing provisions to widows, sisters and other female relatives’ of fundholders so that they would not be plunged into poverty on the death of the fundholder during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Scottish Widows Fund and Life Assurance Society opened in 1815.

One might recall that Scotland is the home of Adam Smith, father of capitalism. Today's state of capitalism might, for Smith, demonstrate not the intrinsic faults of the system, but what happens when the moral dimension is neglected. In his 1759 book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith takes on social and moral psychology and sociology: how one might understand how individuals and societies function not in separate compartments, but as parts of a complex whole. One of the key themes of the book is an opposition to the view that all morality or virtue is reducible to self-interest, as if individuals operated in isolation only concerned with their own particular well-being. Failure to craft an insurance approach to our society's medical needs is one such example of moral failure -- we need to look out for one another. When Smith later wrote The Wealth of Nations, he made it clear that the 'wealth' lay in the well-being of the people.


Want to learn more? Read Pensions and Insurance Before 1800: A Social History By C.G. Lewin and look up Adam Smith.


- Posted by Tom/Bluedog

I never thought I'd See This: Consultants are, gasp, Good?!

In a recent Slate article, we read that management consultants are actually a boon to business!

A recent experiment by World Bank and Stanford researchers illustrate the dramatic impact of management “technology” on the way companies are run. The researchers randomly assigned a management makeover to a handful of Indian textile firms, while at the same time following a set of control textile factories to benchmark the effects of good management.
Out of chaos, order arose: Supply closets were no longer strewn about with yarn, factory floors were cleaned up, inventory and control processes improved production line efficiency. The benefits of good management were such that Accenture’s services—which were provided to the companies for free as part of the experiment—would have paid for themselves through greater profitability within a year: The researchers estimated a profit increase of more than $300,000 annually as a result of management improvements, as compared with the $250,000 market price of the consulting services they received.
What brought about these changes? Exactly the sorts of things that the managers of Davos are good at: designing incentives, ensuring clear and well-defined assignments of tasks and responsibilities, putting in place protocols to manage and track inventory and production. These are not new ideas. They have been the standard protocols of much-maligned managers since they first appeared on the scene with the advent of transcontinental railroad. It’s just that management, despite its age, is not evenly distributed around the world.

Slate's assertion: Better management stands a far greater likelihood of making the world wealthier and healthier. And that's a good thing.


- Posted by Tom/Bluedog

Telework - the future. And more productive

(Tom paraphrasing/citing here...)

Many firms are uncertain about what policies on home working to adopt. As a result, firms in very similar industries adopt extremely different practices. For example, in the U.S. airline industry Jet Blue allows all regular call-center employees to work from home.

The trade-off between home-life and work-life has also received increasing attention as the number of households in the US with all parents working has increased from 25% in 1968 to 48% by 2008 (Council of Economic Advisors, 2010). These rising work pressures are leading governments in the US and Europe to investigate ways to promote work-life balance. For example, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) published a report launched by Michelle and Barak Obama at the White House in summer 2010 on policies to improve work-life balance. One of the key conclusions in the executive summary concerned the need for research to identify the trade-offs in work-life balance policies, stating:

“A factor hindering a deeper understanding of the benefits and costs of flexibility is a lack of data on the prevalence of workplace flexibility and arrangements, and more research is needed on the mechanisms through which flexibility influences workers’ job satisfaction and firms’ profits to help policy makers and managers alike” (CEA, 2010)

First, the performance of the home workers went up dramatically, increasing by 12.2% over the nine month experiment. This improvement came mainly from an 8.9% increase in the number of minutes they worked during their shifts (the time they were logged in taking calls). This was due to a reduction in breaks and sick-days taken by the home workers. The remaining 3.3% improvement was because home workers were more productive per minute worked, apparently due to the quieter working conditions at home.

Second, there were no spillovers on to the rest of the group – interestingly, those remaining in the office had no change in performance.

Third, attrition fell sharply among the home workers, dropping by almost 50% versus the control group. Home workers also reported substantially higher work satisfaction and attitudinal survey outcomes.

Finally, at the end of the experiment the firm was so impressed by the impact of home-working they decided to roll the option out to the entire firm, allowing the treatment and control groups to re-choose their working arrangements. Almost one half of the treatment group changed their minds and returned to the office, while two thirds of the control group (who initially had requested to work from home) decided to stay in the office. This highlights how the impact of these types of management practices are also ex ante unclear to employees.

Read the full report here...


- Posted by Tom/Bluedog

Harry Harrison - prolific, imaginative. Via con Dios

I'm sorry to see one of my favorite sci fi authors has died... Harry Harrison was an awesome writer. Read a decent obituary here...


- Posted by Tom/Bluedog

Dogs in the Workplace

It's no secret that the mascot for Bluedog hangs around the offices. After all, she has to earn her dog treats.

Rebecca Johnson, director of the Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction at the University of Missouri's College of Veterinary Medicine, reports: dogs in the workplace are "a growing phenomenon" in America. "People are realizing we need to do things to reduce stress in the workplace," she said.

Dogs can build connections among co-workers and create a healthy diversion from work, Johnson said. People interacting with dogs experience a hormonal reaction that causes them to "feel more relaxed and more positive," she said.

At our facilities, dogs are prohibited from certain rooms -- eating areas and restrooms. And we only allow only dogs who get along with people and other animals. Here's some excellent tips for having your pooch or hound at the workplace.

I happen to agree with The Economist's assessment, having been a dog-at-work advocate since my first company, Enigma. Back then, ACDs were not as well known around Ireland (and Silver Spring), but they still made people feel at home, at work.

Now is not the time to give up on the Internet

The opposite of liberal is, well, IMHO, the desire to inflict on others a reduction in 'adaptive potential'. I would suggest this means the ability to choose between a range of attractive opportunities. Barriers to social mobility, relentless mega-corporation dominance, endless growth of government, restrictions on human sexuality and freedom of expression all qualify as narrowing.

I find the Internet has proven to be a means to facilitate growth in adaptive potential. Opening markets globally for large and small businesses. Amplifying peoples' voices. Reducing cost of public service delivery.

Supply chain and e-commerce improvements are contributing to overall economic growth. With the size of the global market getting bigger, the rewards for uncovering lucrative new ideas grow -- a multiplier effect. Moreover, as new ideas flow across national boundaries faster and more easily, humans all benefit.

Public officials, potential laws, and other public policy issues are scrutinized and influenced by Internet-organized movements.

Public spending should focus on broad-based, pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment.

Trying to be libertarian, but mostly just being reasonable...

Noam Chomsky on Ron Paul: Ron Paul's a nice guy. If I had to have dinner with one of the Republican candidates, I'd prefer to have it with him -- but, his policies are off the wall.

Kutztown University Nov. 21, 2011

Night Owl - best Watchmen character, and very creative kind of people

Scientists at the University of Alberta have found there are significant differences in the way our brains function depending on whether we're early risers or night owls. Neuroscientists in the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation looked at two groups of people: "morning people," those who wake up early and feel most productive in the morning, and those who were identified as "evening people," who typically felt livelier at night.

Surprisingly, morning people's strength tends to remain constant throughout the day, but night owls have peak performance in the evening, said researchers from the University of Alberta in Canada.

"We thought that morning people would be better at this in the morning, but they never changed," said study co-author Olle Lagerquist, a Ph.D. candidate in neurophysiology at the University of Alberta.

That may be because evening people show increased motor cortex and spinal cord excitability in the evening, about 9 p.m., meaning they had maximal central nervous system drive at that time, Lagerquist said.

Morning people, on the other hand, never achieve this level of central nervous system drive because the excitability of the motor cortex does not coincide with the excitability of the spinal cord. In other words, these two measures never peak at the same time, he said. Early birds' brains were most excitable at 9 a.m. and slowly decreased throughout the day.

Researchers don't know whether this means evening people who are athletes are necessarily better off.

Amber case on the Role of Technology - Robots are our friends

Amber Case raising an interesting thesis -- technology like social media serves to relieve the isolationism enhanced by the industrial revolution.

"Good technology should make you superhuman," claims Amber Case, a cyborg anthropologist. Cyborg anthropology is a way of understanding how we live as technosocially connected citizens in the modern era. Case explores questions like: How is human experience evolving with technology? What are the implications to privacy in the digital realm? and How does technology affects our humanity? (more here)

The rise of the machines may come about due to our inherent hubris, but Case suggests the positive aspects of the tools we've built, and she actively investigates the nature of our relationship with those tools. Case believes we all live in the future. "We're able to touch a button and hear something on the other side of the world. We're able to carry a community in our pockets as we walk down the street," she says. By using anthropological methods to study human behavior and discover how people work, play, share and communicate she's able to make better solutions for users for some of the largest companies.

Corporations - should they be treated same as people are? Yes!

The argument against corporate personhood seems reasonable -- after all, corporations are legal entities, but how can they be treated the same as people? The word "corporation" comes from the Latin Corpus (body), a "body of people." That is, a group of people authorized to act as an individual (OED).

In the U.S. (and in some jurisdictions abroad, mostly who follow Scottish or English styles of lawmaking), corporations have been considered "artificial people" for a very long time. Certainly from a legal standpoint, corporations can do many of the same things that people do -- buy and sell property, hire / fire staff, sue and be sued, etc. After an important ruling in the 1880s, corporations' status became ensconced in case law, mostly through a bizarre set of circumstances.

Is this status as an "artificial person" really that bad? After all, the concept of corporate democracy is a key aspect of the form of capitalism practiced in the U.S. (and other places, like the Republic of Ireland). Corporations, like it or not, are an integral aspect of the economic (and broader) world we live in. If the notion of this personhood were dispelled, would there be negative impacts? I heartily say, yes!

When (not if, but when) artificial intelligence becomes viable, and robotics, married with the computing power of quantum computing, yields autonomous artificial people (be they androids or other forms of robots), will we not see a huge legal (and possibly physical) fight to deny or confirm such artificial persons' rights? What about clones? Would they become second class citizens? Laugh now, these Star Trek scenarios may not be so far off…

So let's refine the concept of corporate personhood -- it is probably the model for how we treat our robot/belly-buttonless brethren in the future -- and not throw the "artificial" baby out with the bath water.

Avoiding 'groupthink' -- decision making for teams

There are three main components to consider in consulting a group for decision making:

• Sharing knowledge and related content
• Discussing and overlaying knowledge on the data at hand
• Collectively deciding the best course of action from the choices that are presented.

There are several alternatives to consider:
 
• Should the leader make the decision?
• Should the leader delegate the decision to some other member of the group?
• Will the group make the decision through some form of majority vote?
• Should all decisions involving the group be made by consensus?
 
Even when a consensus approach is used, there is a danger that the decision may represent a false consensus.  A false consensus occurs when members of a group appear to accept a proposed course of action but actually have private reservations which, for whatever reason, they choose not to share with the other members of the group.

References:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/facilitators-guide-book-review
http://www.sal.tkk.fi/vanhat_sivut/Opinnot/Mat.../group_decision_making04.pdf
http://dssresources.com/history/dsshistory.html

Five Men and a Little Shady

So anger must be managed.  And if you can't manage it yourself, someone will step in to manage it for you.  For instance, say you're just super-pissed.  And you punch a wall.  No worries, that's why we have sheetrock, drywall or gypsum.  Right?  But if someone *see's* you punch the wall.  And you're standing anywhere near your spouse, you're looking at a few weeks of anger management training.