The Most Powerful Thing I read this week – WARNING – it’s long. The Metal that means Murder! Getting Big Fishing to change its Tuna – and more!

Gru?zi! I’m Adrian Monck – and welcome to this World Economic Forum newsletter!

Also this week... Heaven in Moominland. Micro-breaks to boost memory and learning. And rest easy, Hannibal Lecter can now eat lab-grown liver!

Need an excuse to reach out??Share this newsletter! And we’re now on LinkedIn in Japanese!

–––

1?? The Decline and Fall of the American Dream

How the America of American Graffiti imploded and how to bring it back.

The most powerful thing I read this week was from Doug Ludlow who grew up in the town George Lucas made famous in American Graffiti. Ludlow is now a Silicon Valley guy with a blue chip tech resume.

Here’s his story:

“A third of the kids I grew up with are dead. A third of them have been, or are, in prison. The other third live paycheck to paycheck.”

• “I grew up in the 80s and 90s in Modesto, CA, a mid-sized city in the heart of the Central Valley of California. Modesto has always been primarily agricultural – Gallo Wine, Blue Diamond Almonds, and other food companies are based there.
• George Lucas (another Modesto native) captured the spirit of the city in the 60s in his movie American Graffiti. The movie paints a city with low crime, tight community bonds, and lots of opportunity. That was the Modesto the boomers grew up in.
• When hundreds of Modesto men were drafted to witness the horrors of Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, they were able come back to jobs, and the safety net of a strong community. It was going to be okay.
• Then came the 1980s.
• The 80s brought with it wave after wave of economic devastation to the area. Food processing factories – places like the West Coast Hershey’s plant, or Tri-Valley Growers, and dozens like it, were shut down and relocated to Mexico.
• Thousands of people lost their jobs.
• Call centers – places like Pacific Bell, AT&T that paid people without college degrees $50K+ in the 80s – were first shipped overseas, and then completely digitized. Hundreds of great jobs were lost.
• And finally, virtually all of the local farms, the lifeblood of the Central Valley, were consolidated by large industrial farming conglomerates. This meant that the profit from the land no longer circulated in the community – instead, it went to billionaires in LA & NY.
• Our society often talks about this type of economic contraction and collapse in sterile, academic terms.
• It wasn’t sterile to us.
• Here’s what I witnessed as a kid during the economic contraction of my city and neighborhood. I grew up in the La Loma neighborhood in Modesto. This was, at the beginning of the 80s, a middle class neighborhood.
• Things changed.
• By the end of the 80s every single one of my friends’ Dads in the neighborhood had lost their jobs. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
• These men didn’t have college degrees. Once they lost their good jobs at the factory, they were never again able to get back on their feet, or find a job that paid as well.
• Alcoholism was rampant amongst the Dads of my neighborhood. I’ll always remember coming over to my friends’ house in the afternoon, to find their Dad nearly passed out on the couch drinking heavily by noon – this happened almost every day. Drug use, suicide, messy divorce, and abuse were common amongst the parents of my friends...
• I honestly didn’t really think anything of it at the time. I was a kid – this was our normal.
• As I got older, I was accepted into the gifted program at a school across town, and quickly started to lose touch with my neighborhood friends. I went to UCLA, married my high school sweetheart, and began my career in tech...
• Each year, the updates I’d get on my childhood friends got grimmer and grimmer. It started with kids not making it through high school... A few years later, I’d start hearing about prison... Modesto was, for a while, the car theft capital of the USA – stealing cars to support a drug habit was insanely common.
• A few weeks ago, I learned the stunning stat I shared at the beginning... ? of the kids I grew up with are now dead. ? of them have been, or are currently, in prison. The other ? largely live paycheck to paycheck.
• There are no words for this.
• The economic contraction of the 80s and 90s in my hometown wasn’t academic to us – literally two generations of people, mostly young men, were completely destroyed as a result.
• Jobs mean security, pride, and stability – when you have no jobs, you lose your foundation.
• For the last decade, I’ve been obsessed with the following, simple question – what could have been done, and what CAN be done, to help Modesto? To help the kids now living in my old neighborhood who deserve their fair chance. The answer is just as simple – GREAT jobs.
• This is why I co-founded MainStreet – to help create the jobs that will help restore and stabilize the economies of not only my hometown, but of thousands of hometowns across the world.
• I truly believe that if in the 80s and 90s Modesto’s economy – my hometown – had been supported and powered by strong small businesses, that the collapse and contraction wouldn’t have been as painful, as devastating. Many of my childhood friends might still be alive.”

Modesto in the US, M?nchengladbach in Germany, Middlesbrough in the UK. There are plenty of places where this story has played out. Until politics moves beyond harvesting anger for votes, we’ll need more people like Doug to step up.

??Leave no one behind: reskilling the workforce, one person at a time.

–––

2????The Metal that makes Murderers

Here’s a clue. It’s lead.

Cities that used lead pipes had homicide rates 24 percent higher than in cities without lead pipes.

Now America is trying to muster billions of dollars to get rid of its remaining lead pipes.

Read this to learn more.

? Another way to protect children: tackling harmful online content.

–––

3?? Big Fishing vs Little Islanders

Trawler fleets changed their tuna – and everyone was a winner.

??Meet the team cleaning up one of the world’s most polluted rivers.

–––

4?? Liver Transplants Grown in the Lab

No need for donors if this technology gets going.

??Other innovations: this mask will tell you if you have COVID-19.

–––

5???It’s not Hell in Helsinki

The Moomin capital has the world’s best work-life balance.

??That balance should help achieve what everyone needs: enough sleep.

–––

6???To Learn Faster, take more Breaks

The breaks aren’t enough by themselves though, you have to do the learning.

??A new survey on the skills needed for the future of work

–––

7?? China’s Communist Party is 100

Colonialism, Racism and Teen Rebels made it what it is.

In 1920, Deng Xiaoping was a smart 16-year-old from a good family when he was packed off to France to study. Once he got there, racism and China’s weakness meant academic doors slammed shut in his face and he and other would-be Chinese students found themselves stuck in France’s lowliest factory jobs.

• “Deng arrived in France three years after the Russian Revolution, and what he learned from his more studious fellow workers in discussion groups about capitalism, imperialism, and the Soviet Union gave a deeper meaning to what he had seen and experienced while traveling to, and living in, France.
• European imperialists were humiliating China, the [French] bourgeois were exploiting workers, and Chinese workers were treated worse than local workers. A vanguard of elites was needed to organize movements to change the situation.
• Just as young Chinese in France were beginning to work in factories in late 1921, word came of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in July of that year. The initial party was small:

In 1921, there were only fifty some members of the Communist Party in China, and in 1922 there were still fewer than two hundred.

• Its presence, however, was to have a profound effect on the Chinese student-workers in France. In 1922 an organization was formed in France that members referred to as Communist, and in November 1922, one of the student leaders, Li Weihan, was dispatched from France to China to seek approval for affiliating this young Communist organization with the Chinese Communist Youth League...”
• — From ‘Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China’ by the late Ezra F. Vogel, which is a fantastic read/audiobook if you want to understand how modern China was made.

??More great audio in the latest?Radio Davos?– tune in!

–––

If you enjoy this newsletter – please recommend it to people who are nice, who you think are nice, and even those you suspect of niceness!

Best,

Adrian

For more from the Forum,?sign up for our weekly email.

With thanks to?all those colleagues without whom this would not happen.