Would You Do the Right Thing at Work? The Risks of Rubbish Robots – and Why is Global Growth Grinding to a Halt?

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

This week too... lemons into lemonade, locusts into – chicken feed? Street light from artificial suns, plus relieve your pandemic-punished brain with this week’s whacky video.

Today is Maha Shivaratri, the Hindu festival that celebrates “overcoming darkness and ignorance” in life and the world. We could all use a bit of that.

Need an excuse to reach out? Drop someone a note sharing this newsletter!

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1?? How Hard is it to Do The Right Thing?

The man who tried to stop the 1986 Challenger launch knew.

Allan McDonald led the team that built the booster rockets for the Challenger space shuttle. He had concerns that freezing temperatures would make the January 1986 launch unsafe.

The safety protocol required his sign off. He refused, so his manager signed and the launch went ahead.

Challenger exploded two minutes after take off, destroyed by the problem McDonald had warned about. Seven astronauts died. At the official investigation McDonald raised his concerns again. He was demoted.

How hard is it to do the right thing at work? This is what McDonald said reflecting on his experience:

“Regret for things we did is tempered by time. But regret for things we did not do is inconsolable. That’s absolutely true.”

McDonald died this week. He blighted his career, but he never regretted that he did the right thing.

Incidentally, McDonald’s story is also one of education overcoming inequality. He was a boy from a rural store who ended up in rocket science, thank to the U.S. government.

McDonald graduated in chemical engineering from Montana State. It was a land-grant university – colleges financed by land sales to boost technology uptake and propel the U.S. forward in the industrial revolution. By 1980, these universities produced two thirds of U.S. PhDs.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could take someone from small town Montana to Mission Control at Cape Canaveral. There’s a lesson there too.

? Shaping a better future: meet the newest class of Young Global Leaders.

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2??  Why has Economic Growth Slowed Down?

An Irish billionaire has thoughts.

Patrick Collison and his brother launched Stripe. Being a billionaire gives you time to think about the big stuff.

• Science. The idea that science could have gotten worse in significant ways sometimes sounds strange to people ... but I think that misses the many examples of sensitivity of scientific processes to institutions and culture. Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science Nobels per capita than Italians have... And yet they’re neighbors... Given that science has changed a lot, we should push ourselves to really understand the effects of those changes, and we shouldn’t assume too casually that they’re all good.
• Culture. We perhaps shifted from placing emphasis on our collective effectiveness in advancing prosperity and opportunity for people to the perceived fairness that was embodied in whichever particular steps we happened to take.
• Institutions and first mover disadvantage. The early twentieth century was an era of building in the broadest sense, from universities to government agencies to cities to highways. The byproduct of this period of building is maintenance and we haven’t figured out how to meta-maintain – that is, how to avoid emergent sclerosis in the stuff we build...
• Talent allocation. “Allocation of talent across sectors” is a big question and seems plausibly the source of a significant effect. Maybe people are just working on the wrong things. I wish there were more analyses here.
• Problems are wickeder. The major open problems in many domains involve emergent phenomena and complex/unstable systems that often have lots of complex couplings and nonlinear effects and so on. In biology, cancer, autoimmune conditions, anything involving the microbiome... these are all just intrinsically harder problems than individual infectious diseases...

You can read much more here.

? To relaunch growth, it’s time for a fourth-sector economic strategy.

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3??  The Rubbish Robot Revolution

So-so automation risks replacing jobs without creating them.

Kevin Roose of the New York Times explains:

• “A common example of so-so automation is the grocery store self-checkout machine. These machines don’t cause customers to buy more groceries, or help them shop significantly faster — they simply allow store owners to staff slightly fewer employees on a shift.
• Only the most devoted Luddites would argue against automating any job, no matter how menial or dangerous. But not all automation is created equal, and much of the automation being done in white-collar workplaces today is the kind that may not help workers over the long run.
• During past eras of technological change, governments and labor unions have stepped in to fight for automation-prone workers, or support them while they trained for new jobs. But this time, there is less in the way of help. Congress has rejected calls to fund federal worker retraining programs for years, and [none of] the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill ... is specifically earmarked for job training programs that could help displaced workers get back on their feet.”

? Will rubbish robots take our jobs? Lessons from Japan.

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4?? Part Art. Part Artificial Sun. 100% Weird

I’m going with weird.

? Post-vaccine COVID transmission and new variants: top questions answered.

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5?? From Corn-Fed to Bug-Bred

Anyone who’s ever walked round a farmyard knows chickens love bugs.

Now Kenyan farmers are turning crop-killing locusts into lunch for livestock.

Personally, I prefer munches with less crunches.

?  We don’t need to all eat insects, but we do need to transform our food system.

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6??  Vintage Fashion Moguls

It’s helping women in South Africa get ahead.

? Breaking the glass vial: the women leading COVID-19 vaccine work.

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7?? People Have Too Much Time on the Internet

See evidence below.

Maybe we all need a break after what the pandemic’s done to our brains.

(Also – this might also be why economic growth has slowed.)

?  Can listening make things better? Try House on Fire – our podcast series!

For audiophiles, our Podcast Club is on *whispers* Facebook.

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If you enjoy this newsletter – please share it with co-zoomers, and bubble buddies!

Best,

Adrian

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