Uncommon Knowledge

This week in long reads about people not making babies

The decline of fertility is now a near universal phenomenon. The world’s population is slated to start declining in fifty years, an unprecedented event. People are noticing and, unsurprisingly, the topic has been absorbed into the culture wars. And yet, “anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong. Fertility connects perhaps the most significant decision any individual might make with unanswerable questions about our collective fate, so a theory of fertility is necessarily a theory of everything—gender, money, politics, culture, evolution. “

So, what’s happening? The New Yorker has the moving, and deeply philosophical, story.

This week in the future of employment

2025 started with a string of layoffs in the private and public sectors – the highest surge since July 2020.

Emblematically, Amazon has been getting rid of middle managers.

Says Amazon CEO Jassy: “you add a lot of people and you end up with a lot of middle managers. And those middle managers, all well-intended, want to put their fingerprint on everything. So you end up with these people being in the pre-meeting, for the pre-meeting, for the pre-meeting, for the decision meeting, and not always making recommendations and owning things the way we want that type of ownership.”

Amazon wants fewer bosses and more autonomy for employees, but also more proactive collaboration. Apparently, this is exactly what Gen Z wants.

What Gen Z is less happy with: the company’s 5-day RTO mandate, but they seem to be coping.

To wit, in this Forbes piece, Roger Trapp takes on remote work and challenges the belief that remote work equals freedom and opportunity. What’s really at play, he says, is that technology now dictates how we work, and to a large degree the terms of our employment. He argues that in the deeply unstable world we live in world, folks may turn to the workplace as their last source of stability.

He quotes Kris Kristofferson (so we don't have to): “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

This week in the future of capitalism, maybe

Employee Ownership, EO for short, has been having a moment. There is evidence and further hopes that EO can help foster less unequal economies and address issues of “workforce engagement, productivity, and turnover.”

Much of the focus has been largely on the developed world, so the smart folks at the Predistribution Initiative have developed a playbook for EO in Sub-Saharan Africa.?

The playbook discusses “how to ensure that programs are accessible to local workers, create near-term benefits, invest in worker engagement and education, leverage the unique resources of each market, and develop the right incentives.”

This week in ‘scuse me while I touch the grass

A guy developed an app that literally? forces you to touch grass before selected phone apps are unlocked.

The app uses a Google’s image-labeling tool to verify that “the grass has, indeed, been touched.”

Said the app creator: “I was sick and tired of my reflex in the morning being to reach for my phone and scroll for upwards of an hour.”

Related: Monopoly Maker Hasbro is replacing the banker and cash with an app to handle transactions.

Which means you won’t be able to cheat.

Which raises the question: why bother playing?

Might as well just touch grass.

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