Strategic CSR - Happiness

The article in the url below discusses the relationship between wealth and happiness:

 

"In America (and also in other countries), an impressive postwar rise in material well-being has had zero effect on personal well-being. The divergence between economic growth and subjective satisfaction began decades ago. Real per capita income has more than tripled since the late 1950s, but the percentage of people saying they are very happy has, if anything, slightly declined."

 

The reasons for this, the article argues, are twofold. First, happiness depends on your day-to-day context:

 

"According to World Bank data, the share of the world's population living on less than $1.90 a day (inflation adjusted) declined to under 10 percent in 2015 from 44 percent in 1980, an astounding achievement. But ordinary people's well-being depends mainly on their immediate surroundings."

 

In other words, if you are a coalminer in West Virginia, or a steel worker in Pennsylvania, or an automaker in Michigan, you may be less enthralled with the rise in living standards of workers overseas when it has been at your own expense. It matters more that you are absolutely worse off than you were previously. The second reason is that happiness depends on how you are faring relative to others:

 

"Although moral philosophers may wish Homo sapiens were wired more rationally, we humans are walking, talking status meters, constantly judging our worth and social standing by comparing ourselves with others today and with our own prior selves."

 

In other words, even if you are doing better than you were ten years ago, that is little consolation if those around you are doing much better than you are. The only exception to that is if individuals see potential in their own future to rise:

 

"Absolute standing is not irrelevant, and people will tolerate and sometimes even embrace inequality if they believe the system is fair and lets them get ahead. Still, the witticism (frequently attributed to Gore Vidal) that 'it is not enough for me to succeed; others must fail' is uncomfortably accurate."

 

The human element of all this is that we are not very good at being content with our own situation and are quick to evaluate our progress in terms of relative perception, rather than objective reality:

 

"Inequality, in short, is immiserating. One could cite more evidence in the same vein. Places in the United States with more inequality have higher stress and worry, more political polarization and lower social connectedness, even among the wealthy. Moreover, what counts for subjective well-being is not just reality but also perception. If social media and reality TV disproportionately depict millionaires and amazing homes, or if talk-radio pundits insist that government takes from hard-working whites to subsidize lazy minorities, resentment grows, never mind what the statistics may say."

 

The author discusses these attributes of happiness in the context of rising nationalism across countries, today. It could just as easily explain the headwinds facing the development of a more sustainable economic system.

 

Take care

David

 

David Chandler

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Sustainable Value Creation (4e)

© Sage Publications, 2017

 

Instructor Teaching and Student Study Site: https://study.sagepub.com/chandler4e

Strategic CSR Simulation: http://www.strategiccsrsim.com/

The library of CSR Newsletters are archived at: https://strategiccsr-sage.blogspot.com/ 

 

 

More Wealth Has Not Made Us Happier

By Jonathan Rauch

August 22, 2018

The New York Times

Late Edition – Final

A19

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/opinion/happiness-inequality-prosperity-.html

 

Strategic CSR - Welcome back!

Welcome back to the Strategic CSR Newsletter! The first newsletter of the Fall semester is below. I am on sabbatical this semester and travelling, so Newsletters may be more intermittent than usual. As always, your comments and ideas are welcome.

 

The radio segment in the url below contains a fascinating statistic that reflects the pace of change in the nature of work:

 

"… 6 in 10 children starting elementary school today will end up in jobs that don't yet exist."
   

This statistic, which comes from the World Economic Forum, inevitably leads to the question:

 

"How do you get a student ready for a future that you can't really describe?"

 

Naturally, this has implications for the education system, in general, but also in terms of specific issues/subjects, such as CSR:

 

"It means that you have to be training them on how to adapt to many tough situations, how to think critically and how to immerse them in today's real world problems. Today it's very different than maybe two decades ago, where you learned just a specific skill, and you had that skill and stayed in that career for the rest of your life. The economy is changing so rapidly, not just with tech but with globalization ... You use textbooks, but you also have to create real world situations to which they react."

 

I wonder how business schools are responding to these evolving needs? They need to be part of the solution, but are inhabited by the same inertial forces that characterize any organization.

 

Take care

David

 

David Chandler

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Sustainable Value Creation (4e)

© Sage Publications, 2017

 

Instructor Teaching and Student Study Site: https://study.sagepub.com/chandler4e

Strategic CSR Simulation: http://www.strategiccsrsim.com/

The library of CSR Newsletters are archived at: https://strategiccsr-sage.blogspot.com/

 

 

Retiring Colorado Education Titans on How to Keep Schools Relevant in a Changing World

By Joella Baumann

July 25, 2018

Colorado Public Radio

http://www.cpr.org/news/story/retiring-colorado-community-college-denver-public-schools-nancy-mccallin-tom-boasberg

 

Strategic CSR - Robots

The article in the url below offers a calming perspective on the current hyperventilation about the threat to employment of artificial intelligence. In doing so, it presents two points that help me better process the flood of opinion about this topic from all sides of the debate. First, is the need to place AI in some context. For example, it is a fact that "the field of artificial intelligence is now more than a half-century old," but we have managed to survive (if not exactly thrive) so far. As a result of this long history, automation has been a constant in the evolving nature of 'work' to an extent that we often forget (emphasis added):

 

"… despite centuries of progress in automation and recurrent warnings of a jobless future, total employment has continued to increase relentlessly, even with bumps along the way. More remarkable is the fact that today's most dire projections of jobs lost to automation fall short of historical norms. A recent analysis … quantified the rate of job destruction (and creation) in each decade since 1850, based on census data. They found that an incredible 57% of the jobs that workers did in 1960 no longer exist today."

 

Beyond this fundamental context, a more subtle distinction is between the potential for robots to replace jobs verses the potential to replace specific tasks. In other words, rather than replace workers, they enable existing workers to do their jobs more effectively. Recent studies in this vein suggest that:

 

"… by 2055, more than 50% of all work-related tasks will be subject to automation. Such studies naturally raise concerns that we may be on the brink of an unprecedented employment crisis. But robots aren't mechanical people. They are a new wave of automation, and like previous waves, they reduce the need for human labor. In doing so, they make the remaining workers more productive and their companies more profitable. These profits then find their way into the pockets of employees, stockholders and consumers (through lower prices). This newfound wealth, in turn, increases demand for products and services, compensating for lost jobs by employing even more people."

 

Ultimately, there is a pattern to the encroaching use of AI in work – one that should help society, rather than necessarily threaten it:

 

"As the logic goes, if artificial intelligence is getting so smart that it can recognize cats, drive cars, beat world-champion Go players, identify cancerous lesions and translate from one language to another, won't it soon be capable of doing just about anything a person can? Not by a long shot. What all of these tasks have in common is that they involve finding subtle patterns in very large collections of data, a process that goes by the name of machine learning. The kinds of data vary, of course. It might be pixels in cat photos, bytes streaming from a dashboard camera, millions of computer-generated games of Go, digital X-rays or volumes of human-translated documents. But it is misleading to characterize all of this as some extraordinary leap toward duplicating human intelligence. The selfie app in your phone that places bunny ears on your head doesn't 'know' anything about you. For its purposes, your meticulously posed image is just a bundle of bits to be strained through an algorithm that determines where to place Snapchat face filters. These programs present no more of a threat to human primacy than did automatic looms, phonographs and calculators, all of which were greeted with astonishment and trepidation by the workers they replaced when first introduced."

 

Robots, AI, machine-learning, etc., will increase productivity, which will result in greater wealth, which will then be spent:

 

"Luxury hotels are not prized because they are more efficient but because their staff is more attentive. People pay more to watch a barista brew their latte than for a comparable product from a vending machine, and I somehow doubt that our grandchildren will want to tell their troubles to a robotic bartender or prefer to stick their hands in a manicure machine. In the future, the masses may make do with simple-minded domestic robots while the upper crust hires ever more butlers and maids. The Jetsons, after all, were a middle-class family."

 

The key, of course, is to make sure the wealth is more evenly distributed, rather than narrowly distributed. This, of course, is the essence of the current debate that is causing so much political upheaval. But, that is a different issue as to whether AI is to be welcomed and encouraged, rather than feared. We know that humans do not handle change very well. We are currently undergoing a period of concentrated change, the turmoil from which is beginning to show up in political elections/structures. The article reinforces my sense that, while progress always represents a dislocation that will effect some sections of society more negatively than others; in general, the majority will benefit. For example, I do not see many people suggesting we should return to an agrarian economy, even though the shift to an industrialized society caused massive upheaval for the 40% of society that used to work on farms.

 

Take care

David

 

David Chandler

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Sustainable Value Creation (4e)

© Sage Publications, 2017

 

Instructor Teaching and Student Study Site: https://study.sagepub.com/chandler4e

Strategic CSR Simulation: http://www.strategiccsrsim.com/

The library of CSR Newsletters are archived at: https://strategiccsr-sage.blogspot.com/


Don't Fear the Robots

By Jerry Kaplan

July 22-23, 2017

The Wall Street Journal

Late Edition – Final

C3

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-fear-the-robots-1500646623

 

Strategic CSR - Robots

Following-up on an earlier Newsletter arguing that a dramatically higher minimum wage should be re-labeled "the Robot Employment Act" (Strategic CSR – Minimum wage), the article in the url below suggests that, rather than killing jobs, "robots aren't killing our jobs fast enough":
 

"From Silicon Valley to Davos, pundits have been warning that millions of individuals will be thrown out of work by the rapid advance of automation and artificial intelligence. As economic forecasts go, this idea of a robot apocalypse is certainly chilling. It's also baffling and misguided."

 

The problem, the author argues, is that too many industries are resisting the advance of atomization, which ultimately reduces overall value creation:

 

"Too many sectors, such as health care or personal services, are so resistant to automation that they are holding back the entire country's standard of living."

 

The author also argues that, if robots were increasingly replacing employees, we would expect job creation to be declining (it is increasing) and productivity to be increasing (it is decreasing):

 

"Monthly job creation has averaged 185,000 this year, more than double what the U.S. can sustain given its demographics. This has driven unemployment down to 4.4%, a 10-year low and below most estimates of 'full employment.' Growing labor shortages have boosted the typical worker's annual wage gain to more than 3% now from 2% in 2012, according to the Federal Reserve Back of Atlanta."

 

In short, the author explains these trends arise due to the shift in overall economic activity from manufacturing jobs (which are more easily automated) to services (less easily automated). In addition, whether overall productivity rises depends as much on which jobs in which sectors are being created/destroyed:

 

"Since 2007, low productivity sectors such as education, health care, social assistance, leisure and hospitality have added nearly seven million jobs. Meantime, information and finance, where value added per worker is five to 10 times higher, have cut or barely added jobs."

 

The author concludes that the solution is to push robots into more and more industries, if for no other reason than containing overall inflation levels.

 

Take care

David

 

David Chandler

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Sustainable Value Creation (4e)

© Sage Publications, 2017

 

Instructor Teaching and Student Study Site: https://study.sagepub.com/chandler4e

Strategic CSR Simulation: http://www.strategiccsrsim.com/

The library of CSR Newsletters are archived at: https://strategiccsr-sage.blogspot.com/

 

 

Robots Aren't Killing Our Jobs Fast Enough

By Greg Ip

May 11, 2017

The Wall Street Journal

Late Edition – Final

A2

https://www.wsj.com/articles/robots-arent-destroying-enough-jobs-1494434982

or

http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/10/robots-arent-destroying-enough-jobs-capital-account.html

 

Strategic CSR - Welcome back!

 

Welcome back to the Strategic CSR Newsletter! The first CSR Newsletter of the Fall semester is below. As always, your comments and ideas are welcome.

 

The article in the url below contains a map that shows the extent to which robots have transformed manufacturing in the U.S. In particular, the map shows the density of robots per worker in each county of the U.S.:

 

"The upper Midwest, particularly Michigan, was ground zero for the robot explosion from 1990 to 2007. That makes sense, since the automobile industry uses more robots than any other. The other hot spots also make sense on closer inspection. In Beaumont, Texas, lots of workers are employed in the plastic, chemicals and pharmaceuticals industry, another big user of robots. Wilmington, Delaware, has a big chunk of workers in that industry and others in car manufacturing, according to Restrepo, one of the researchers."

 

A second chart demonstrates the effect a higher density of robots has had on employment:

 

"Those increases tended to mean fewer jobs. Of course, lots of factors weigh on employment. Foreign competition, overvaluation of the dollar and rising productivity all play a big part, too. But even after taking all those other factors into account, [research] found that additional robots in an area reduces workers and cuts local wages."

 

The article also does a good job of identifying industry-specific trends. As you might expect, certain industries are more negatively affected by an influx of robots than others and, contrary to general perceptions, the effects are still pretty localized:

 

"The first industrial robots were developed for the auto industry, which still accounts for over half of U.S. robot orders."

 

There is no indication that robots have started teaching CSR classes, … yet!

 

Hope you all have a great semester.

David

 

David Chandler

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Sustainable Value Creation (4e)

© Sage Publications, 2017

 

Instructor Teaching and Student Study Site: https://study.sagepub.com/chandler4e

Strategic CSR Simulation: http://www.strategiccsrsim.com/

The library of CSR Newsletters are archived at: https://strategiccsr-sage.blogspot.com/

 

 

More Robots, Fewer Jobs

By Mira Rojanasakul and Peter Coy

May 8, 2017

Bloomberg Businessweek

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-more-robots-fewer-jobs/