7 things from the Forum

Grüezi! I’m Adrian Monck and welcome to a LinkedIn newsletter from the World Economic Forum, with 7 things that made us think this week.

1?? How Star Trek drove Jeff Bezos to create a business empire

There are aliens, but are there billionaires in the Star Trek universe? There’s no sign of aliens in the 21C but plenty of billionaires. What movitates them? Is it insatiable avarice, or is there something deeper at work? A fascinating profile of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos reveals that what’s driving him might be – excuse the pun – a little ‘warped’. Bezos is a huge Star Trek fan, so much so that the online enterprise he leads was almost labelled MakeItSo.com.

When reporters tracked down Bezos’s high-school girlfriend, she said, “The reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space.”

From the story: ‘...Bezos used his graduation speech to unfurl his vision for humanity. He dreamed aloud of the day when millions of his fellow earthlings would relocate to colonies in space. A local newspaper reported that his intention was “to get all people off the Earth and see it turned into a huge national park.”’ [The Atlantic]

? The World Economic Forum’s own space mission is working with partners to help clean it up.

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2?? Vegetarian butchery

The growing demand for meat cannot be met. Can turning plants into patties kid carnivores and save the planet?

? Read more about plant-based meat here.

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3?? China is waking up to data protection

When Robin Li, founder of Baidu, told Chinese consumers they were “trading privacy for convenience”, they didn’t like it.

Now China’s netizens want their side of the bargain evened up. [WEF]

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4?? What’s wrong with globalization and how to fix it.

The IMF’s top economist Gita Gopinath explains.

Q: Has this wave of globalized trade been a net positive or a net negative?

A: If you say, I’m going to look at it from a measure of overall effect on a country’s income, on its purchasing power, on the prices that its people pay, overall I think the evidence that we have all points to it being a net positive.

If you frame the question as – Has international trade been good for the manufacturing worker in the US? Then the answer to that would be “not fully.” It’s been very costly in terms of jobs and wages for them. [WEF]

? Want to find out more about globalization? Start here.

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5?? Milan is a poster-child for the post-industrial city

Milan is a metropolitan success story. But like many successful cities in the 21C, its dolce vita is disconnected from its hollowed out homeland. The global fashion and luxury capital “sits on top of a long global chain that has low-paid garment workers in Vietnam at the bottom. The problem is that this miracle in Milan only really involves the million or so people at its very heart. The city has shaken off the industrial hinterland that made it great in the 20th century. In the end this creates a problem of dignity for other places.”

“The ‘Milanese’ don’t exist anymore. Milan is made up of the professionals who have come here because there are opportunities that don’t exist back home. They’re the best of Italy. It’s a kind of natural selection that goes on, creating a community which is much more European, open and tolerant in its mindset. Milan is not Italy.” [Guardian]

Also from Italy. High speed trains don’t just make journeys faster – they make company boards better... [LSE]

? Interested in the future of cities and urbanization? Check this out.

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6?? Is stagnation the future of productivity?

Vaclav Smil is not like the rest of us. He doesn’t hedge his bets to avoid looking silly. He will go out on a limb where other academics will tell you “on the one hand and then on the other...” And when it comes to economic growth, he believes we can’t have our cake and eat it. If that sounds depressing or puritanical, Smil has a more positive example: Japan.

This is from James Crabtree’s review of Smil’s new book, Growth: “Where many view Japanese society as stagnating, Smil sees a country that is learning to make do with fewer people while consuming more efficiently and investing in areas such as public transport.

Ultimately, the only solution is to become radically less wasteful and consume far less.

“Before it is too late, we should embark in earnest on the most fundamental existential (and also truly revolutionary) task facing modern civilisation, that of making any future growth compatible with the long-term preservation of the only biosphere we have.”

What he leaves unsaid is obvious: that task is barely begun.” [FT] ??

If you’re not an FT subscriber, here’s Smil talking about growth to David Wallace-Wells. He is not a fan of rampant consumerism.

Smil: Technically speaking, we are nearly at the limit. Everything simply has their limits. That’s the message of this book. Everything has its limits. This is why I’m so irritated by this Kurzweilian nonsense — just say it aloud, by 2047, human intelligence will be expanding into the universe at the speed of light. Really? And he is the chief scientific adviser to Google.

DW-W: Yeah.

Smil: I mean, I’m speechless. As a scientist, I’m speechless. These loonies. These people are flying around the world and preaching the vision of singularity by 2047. It’s like, what’s her name? That Goop lady, what’s her name?

DW-W: Gwyneth Paltrow.

Smil: The actress. This is unbelievable, right? The scientific version of Goop. [NYmag]

Never heard of Goop? Well, if you want to experience the consumerist fantasy Smil is criticising, here’s their Christmas gift list.

? Go deeper on the New Economy and Society.

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7?? Did not marrying your cousin kickstart capitalism?

It might sound weird, but there’s growing evidence that social norms have driven big economic changes over time.

The Church played a big part in starting the kinds of institutions that gave birth to modern capitalism. Don’t believe it? “Italians from provinces with higher rates of cousin marriage take more loans from family and friends (instead of from banks), use fewer checks (preferring cash), and keep more of their wealth in cash instead of in banks, stocks, or other financial assets.” [Science]

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If you’d like to recommend us to a friend, here’s what they can expect from this newsletter:

• The Fourth Industrial Revolution: the impacts and opportunities of tech change.
• Economy: From global trends to the skills new generations will need to cope.
• Environment: The climate crisis. Scientists got it wrong. They under-estimated its speed and scale.
• Geostrategy: The global problems driving countries together, the tensions tearing them apart. What should the US-China trade relationship look like?

A final thought:

That’s all for now, I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition! Any feedback? Please drop me a comment below.

Uf Widerluege!

Adrian

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