Pandemic optimism - we need some! Where to find the world’s best minimum wage; What would it cost to protect the planet AND tips on burying pets...

Grüezi! I’m Adrian Monck and welcome to this World Economic Forum newsletter.

This week... a little pandemic optimism; The world’s best minimum wage? The Vegan chef championing the cult of crazy in Germany; plus the American Dream is more likely to be found in the home of fondue.

Newsletters are for sharing – so please share this one!

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1??  Some Good Pandemic News

Coming middle of 2021...

Veteran health reporter Donald McNeil sees a little light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, and it’s not a train:

• “Since January, when I began covering the pandemic, I have been a consistently gloomy Cassandra, reporting on the catastrophe that experts saw coming: that the virus would go pandemic, that Americans were likely to die in large numbers, the national lockdown would last well beyond Easter and even past summer. No miracle cure was on the horizon; the record for developing a vaccine was four years.
• Events have moved faster than I thought possible. I have become cautiously optimistic. Experts are saying, with genuine confidence, that the pandemic in the United States will be over far sooner than they expected, possibly by the middle of next year.”

The pandemic has also caused an Indian novelist to turn his back on cynicism and pessimism.

Some good news for parents of teens: more sleep in the pandemic improved their mental health.

? How to rebuild post-COVID? Move on from neoliberalism, says my boss.

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2?? Is Your Minimum Wage $50k pa?

If it isn’t, don’t get angry – do like Geneva, Switzerland, and vote it higher.

Genevans just cast their ballots for a minimum wage of $25 an hour. That’s more than three times what the US guarantees.

Will this make Switzerland uncompetitive? Probably not. Switzerland routinely tops the World Economic Forum’s list of the most competitive countries in the world.

Also, the ‘American Dream’ is more likely to happen in Switzerland. More Swiss make it from the bottom to the top of the income scale than in the US of A.

? Our Jobs Reset Summit is next week. Click here to find out more.

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3?? Here’s What to Expect From Climate Change If We Do Nothing

? Climate concerns are rising fast on the list of risks to doing business.

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4?? What Would it Cost to Protect a Big Chunk of Planet Earth?

? The global economy is worth $88 trillion. This map shows how it’s distributed.

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5?? Germans are buying crazy, helped by a Vegan Chef

Vegans like nuts, but Attila Hildmann, a Vegan celebrity chef, really is nuts.*

Hildmann is a convert to crazy.

• “[He] vents against the ‘new world order’ and the Rothschild banking family. He no longer recognizes Germany’s postwar democratic order and darkly predicts civil war.}[‘
• ‘[The cult] doesn’t openly fly the colors of fascism, it sells it as secret code,’ said Stephan Kramer, head of domestic intelligence in the eastern state of Thuringia. ‘This gives it an access point to broader German society, where everyone thinks of themselves as immune to Nazism because of history.’”

The whole New York Times piece is like a dystopian satire, only no one is laughing. It makes grim reading, and you really have to cling on to your faith in humanity.

*with apologies to Vegans everywhere, you are mostly lovely people.

? One way to fight crazed conspiracy theories? Invest in mental health.

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6?? The History of Creativity

How the 2oth century gave up on managing geniuses and turned creativity into an industrial process.

From Harvard historian Stephen Shapin:

• “In 1920, a reflective director of industrial research at Eastman Kodak acknowledged the reality and value of genius, though he doubted that any company could expect to secure an adequate supply of such exceptional people.
• No matter: scientific workers who were well-trained and well-motivated could make valuable contributions even though they were ‘entirely untouched by anything that might be considered as the fire of genius’. At mid-century, corporate and bureaucratic employers varied in their opinions about whether the organisational difficulties attending genius were worth putting up with; some insisted that they were; others thought that the disruption caused by genius was too big a price to pay; and still others reckoned that a properly organised team of people of average abilities might constitute ‘a very good substitute for genius’.
• Organisations should be designed to induce scientists from different disciplines to focus on a common project; to keep them talking to each other while maintaining ties with their home academic disciplines; and to get them to concentrate on commercially relevant projects while permitting enough freedom to ‘stare out the window’ and to think ‘blue sky’ thoughts. If you want profits, then – it was widely conceded – one price you pay is a significant amount of intellectual freedom, allowing the scientific workers to do just what they wanted to do, at least some of the time.
• The one-day-a-week-for-free-thought notion is not the recent invention of Google; it goes back practically forever in industrial research labs, and its justification was always hard-headed.”

? These 5 creative hotspots may be beating the US in another way: tech innovation.

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7??  When You Say Goodbye to a Much-Loved Pet...

When Eric Schmidt’s family cat went missing, a small saga unfolded...

? No pets died making this week’s World vs Virus. Robin and the team also have a new podcast series out – The Great Reset. Take a listen!

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If you enjoy this newsletter – please share it with friends, family, co-workers and pets!

Hope you’ve liked this week’s content, 

Adrian

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With thanks to all those folks without whose encouragement and critical feedback this newsletter would never get written.