Irving Wladawsky-Berger

The Digitalization of the American Workforce

“Over the past half century, wave after wave of digital innovation has ensured that digitalization - the diffusion of digital technologies into nearly every business and workplace and pocket - has been remaking the U.S. economy and the world of work,” said the Brookings Institution in Digitalization and the American Workforce.  The digitalization of everything has both increased the potential of individuals and societies while contributing to widespread anxiety about its impact on jobs and economic inequalities.  “And yet, for all of the evidence that big changes are underway, surprisingly little data exists to track the spread of digital adoption.”

The Brookings report quantified the spread of digitalization by analyzing the changes in the digital content of 545 occupations between 2002 and 2016 based on O*NET, the most comprehensive data on US occupations sponsored by the US Department of Labor.  O*NET includes highly detailed, task-level information on hundreds of occupations, and includes quantitative measures of knowledge requirements, skills, tools, education, training and work activities. In addition, the report collected information on the occupations’ particular industries, pay, growth rates, geographical locations and distribution across educational and demographic groups.

Each of the 545 occupations, - which encompassed 90% of the US workforce, - was assigned a digital score between 0 and 100 based on the required digital skills.  High digital occupations are those with scores over 60.  They include software developers - with a score of 91; computer system analysts - 79; and financial managers, - 61.  Medium digital occupations scored between 33 and 60, and include lawyers - 58; automative service technicians - 55; office clerks - 55; and registered nurses - 55.  Low digital occupations have a score below 33, and include security guards - 31; restaurant cooks, - 18; construction laborers - 17; and personal care aides - 14.

Free-Market, Free-Trade Capitalism at a Crossroads

The global economy has undergone considerable change over the past few decades.  Results have been mixed.  On the positive side, the digital revolution has significantly improved the quality of life of billions around the world.  Technology advances like the smartphone and wireless Internet, and the economic development brought about by globalization have led to the dramatic decline of extreme poverty around the world.  However, these benefits have been accompanied by major dislocations in labor markets, benefiting workers in low-cost developing nations while severely impacting workers in advanced economies.

The promise of technological progress and globalization as drivers of growth and prosperity has been a reality for many, but it’s also created winners and losers within nations, leading to rising economic inequality and fueling the rise of populism in countries around the world.  What’s going on?  I believe that part of the answer to this very important question can be found by exploring the evolution of free-market, free-trade capitalism over the past couple of centuries.

Adam Smith, the 18th century Scottish economist and philosopher, is the father of free market, free trade capitalism, and one of the major figures of The Enlightenment.  In the The Wealth of Nations, considered the first modern work of economics, he explained that in a free market, an individual pursuing his own self-interests tends to also promote the good of his community as a whole, and that the free market, while appearing chaotic and unrestrained, is actually guided to produce the right results by a so-called invisible hand.

The past 200 years have seen many variants of capitalism.  They’re all generally based on the private ownership of the means of production, their operation for profit, and the accumulation of capital.  Neoclassical economics, first formulated in the 19th century, led to a laissez-faire model of capitalism, based on the premise that given all relevant information people will make rational decisions, markets on their own will achieve the right results, and government interventions, - e.g., regulations, subsidies, tariffs, - are almost always a bad idea.

Faith in neoclassical economies was shattered in the 1930s by the Great Depression, giving rise to Keynesian economics, named for British economist John Maynard Keynes.  His pragmatic, mixed model of capitalism, based on a predominantly private sector economy but with an appropriate role for the public sector, dominated economic thinking for the next four decades.

Despite All the Bad News that Surround Us… Is the World Actually Getting Better?

The World is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better is the title of a recent WSJ article by its chief economics commentator Greg Ip.  “If you spent 2018 mainlining misery about global warming, inequality, toxic politics or other anxieties, I’m here to break your addiction with some good news: The world got better last year, and it is going to get even better this year,” writes Ip in his opening paragraph.  “Poverty around the world is plummeting; half the world is now middle class; and illiteracy, disease and deadly violence are receding.  These things don’t make headlines because they are gradual, relentless and unsurprising.”

Ip’s article is mostly based on data insights from Our World in Data, a comprehensive website that quantifies the evolution of our global living conditions over the past few centuries.  Our World in Data (OWID) is an initiative of the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development, led by economist Max Roser at the University of Oxford.

OWID analyzes longitudinal data on how the world has been changing over decades and centuries, as well as explaining the causes and consequences of those changes in its accompanying articles. It makes extensive use of visual aids, including interactive graphs and maps, to present its analyses and insights.  Its content is organized into 15 main sections:  population, health, food, energy, environment, technology, growth & inequality, work & life, public sector, global connections, war & peace, politics, violence & rights, education, media and culture, -  each of which further includes a number of subsections.

Let me summarize just a few of the key trends in the OWID website.

The 2018 MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge

In 2016, MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy launched its first annual Inclusive Innovation Challenge (IIC).  The key objective of the IIC is to help create greater shared prosperity around the world by awarding over one million dollars in prizes each year to to entrepreneurs that are leveraging technology advances to reinvent the future of work.

“The IIC believes that Inclusive Innovation is an economic and moral imperative, and that the key question of our era isn’t what technology is going to do to our economy and society, but what we will do with technology.  By identifying and promoting the powerful global community of future of work visionaries, the IIC proactively accelerates the technology-driven solutions enabling greater economic opportunity for working people around the world facing the challenge of rapidly advancing digital progress.”

Entrepreneurs from around the globe compete for awards in four categories: income growth and job creation, skills development and opportunity matching, technology access, and financial inclusion. Approximately 1,500 organizations registered to compete this year, and 500 judges reviewed their applications.   

In 2018, rather than having one global competition as in the previous two years, there were five separate regional competitions, - North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, - each region selecting its own category winners.  A Grand Prize winner was then selected in each category from among the regional winners and each awarded $250,000.  The winners were announced at a gala event that took place in MIT on November 8.

The Complex Relationship Between Science and the Public

More than ever, scientific and technological innovations touch every aspect of our lives and influence the choices we make in a wide variety of areas.  A 2015 study by the Pew Research Center revealed that most Americans have a positive view of science and of the accomplishments of scientists.  But, despite broadly similar views about the place of science in the country, there were large differences between the general public and scientist across a number of important issues, including genetically modified foods, vaccine safety and climate change.

Two years ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences launched The Public Face of Science, an initiative whose objective is to better understand the complex relationship between scientists and the public in America.  A few weeks ago, the Academy released Perceptions of Science in America, the first in a series of reports from the Public Face of Science initiative.  The report aims to analyze the public’s perception of scientists, explore how opinions vary among different populations, and shed light on how public opinions are shaped.  Its analysis is based on survey data from multiple sources, including the Pew Research Center, the National Science Board Science and Engineering Indicators, the National Opinion Research Center, Research!America and ScienceCounts.

What do we mean by science?  “The term science encompasses a range of disciplines in the physical, social, and life sciences, along with applied fields, such as engineering and medicine,” notes the report. “Science can be defined as ‘the use of evidence to construct testable explanations and predictions of natural, as well as the knowledge generated through this process.’”  But, one must keep in mind that the word science is interpreted differently by different individuals, - e.g., medical treatments, technological advances, fundamental research.  “When interpreting the available survey data, it is important to consider the range of responses a question might prompt.”

The Rise of Winner-Take-All Urbanism

Earlier this year, Richard Florida published Why America’s Richest Cities Keep Getting Richer in The Atlantic.  Florida is a leading urban studies author and researcher, professor at the University of Toronto and Director of Cities at its Martin Prosperity Institute.

“The most important and innovative industries and the most talented, most ambitious, and wealthiest people are converging as never before in a relative handful of leading superstar cities that are knowledge and tech hubs,” wrote Florida.  “This small group of elite places forge ever forward, while most others struggle, stagnate, or fall behind.  This process is one I like to call winner-take-all urbanism.”

Winner-take-all urbanism is another manifestation of the winner-take-all economics of the past few decades, in which a relatively small number of players reap a very large share of the rewards, upending whole industries with their outsized returns.

Gender Diversity, Empathy and Technology

What’s the value of gender diversity in technology-based disciplines?  Is gender diversity an asset for technology-based companies?  Are men inherently better than women at technology-based jobs?

These are questions that have long been discussed.  Lots of progress has been made in addressing them.  But they recently resurfaced following an internal memo by Google engineer James Damore that criticized the company’s diversity initiatives, for which he was subsequently fired by Google.

Let me attempt to explore these questions based on relatively recent academic research in three key areas: gender-based behavioral differences; how to create smarter working groups; and the changing skills requirements in the digital economy.

The True State of Globalization

The July-August issue of the Harvard Business Review features an article by NYU and IESE professor Pankaj Ghemawat, - Globalization in the Age of Trump: Protectionism Will Change How Companies Do Business - But Not in the Ways You Think.  Ghemawat has long been conducting research on globalization, and has written extensively on the subject.  His latest book, The Laws of Globalization, was published in October of 2016.

“Business leaders are scrambling to adjust to a world few imagined possible just a year ago,” notes the article’s opening sentence.  “The myth of a borderless world has come crashing down.  Traditional pillars of open markets - the United States and the UK - are wobbling, and China is positioning itself as globalization’s staunchest defender.  In June 2016, the Brexit vote stunned the European Union, and the news coverage about globalization turned increasingly negative in the U.S. as the presidential election campaign progressed.”

What should companies do?  Should they pack up and return home?  Is this the end of globalization, only a dozen years after Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat became a prominent international best-seller?  “Not according to my research,” says Ghemawat. 

Peering into a Confusing, Paradoxical Future

Every four years since 1997, the US National Intelligence Council has been publishing a Global Trends report on the key trends that will shape the world over the following twenty years.  This unclassified strategic report is intended to provide the incoming administration and other senior leaders with a framework for long-range policy assessment.

Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, released four years ago, identified four overarching megatrends that are expected to shape and transform the world by 2030: the empowerment of individuals - which will accelerate the reduction of poverty and raise the standard of living around the world; the diffusion of power among states, - which will shift power to networks and coalitions in a multipolar world; changing demographic patterns especially rapid aging, urbanization, and increased migration; and growing demands on resources such as food, water and energy, - which might lead to scarcities.

The latest Global Trends report, Paradox of Progress, was released earlier this year.  It begins by explaining its title. “We are living a paradox: The achievements of the industrial and information ages are shaping a world to come that is both more dangerous and richer with opportunity than ever before… The progress of the past decades is historic - connecting people, empowering individuals, groups, and states, and lifting a billion people out of poverty in the process.  But this same progress also spawned shocks like the Arab Spring, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and the global rise of populist, anti-establishment politics.  These shocks reveal how fragile the achievements have been, underscoring deep shifts in the global landscape that portend a dark and difficult near future.”

Technology, Capitalism and “The American Way of Life”

Much has been written about our digital technology revolution and its impact on economies, societies and individuals.  But few have brought the kind of historical perspective to the subject that helps us better understand our turbulent times like scholar and consultant Carlota Perez in her 2002 book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital:  The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages and related publications.

According to Perez, over the past few centuries, we’ve had a technology revolution every 40 to 60 years, starting with the Industrial Revolution in 1771, which was characterized by the emergence of machines, factories and canals.  This was followed by the age of steam, coal, iron and railways starting in 1829; steel, electricity and heavy engineering in 1875; and oil, autos and mass production in 1908.  Our present age of information and communication technologies (ICT), whose starting point she pegs at 1971, is the fifth such major revolution.

Technology revolutions have two distinct periods, each lasting 20 to 30 years.  The installation period is the time of creative destruction, when new technologies emerge from the lab into the marketplace, entrepreneurs start many new businesses based on these new technologies, VCs encourage experimentation with new business models, and the new ventures attract considerable investments and financial speculation.  Inevitably, this all leads to bubbles and crashes like the recent dot-com and subprime mortgage bubbles.

After the crash, comes the deployment period, a time of institutional recomposition.  The now well accepted technologies become the norm.  New paradigms emerge for guiding innovation and for determining winners and losers in the marketplace.  Over time, these new paradigms significantly transform the economy and everything around it, as well as re-shaping social behavior and the institutions of society.

Last year Perez published Capitalism, Technology and a Green Global Golden Age: The Role of History in Helping to Shape the Future.  In this recent article, she argued that we’re going through a crucial moment in history similar to the 1930s, which requires the kind of creative thinking and bold measures for which we justifiably celebrate statesmen like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Maynard Keynes.  Let me summarize her argument.

The 2016 MIT Inclusive Innovation Awards

Several months ago, MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy launched its first annual Inclusive Innovation Competition (IIC).  MIT is one of the world’s top research universities, renowned as well for its entrepreneurial culture.  But the objectives of the IIC are quite different and unique.  Instead of competing on creating the most advanced technologies or compelling startups, the IIC is focused on innovations aimed at improving the economic opportunities of middle- and low-income earners around the world.

Applicants competed for $1 million in prizes to be awarded in four main categories: Skills, - how employees were re-skilled for new types of jobs; Matching, - how qualified people were connected to new types of jobs; Humans + Machines, - how technology is used to augment human labor; and New Models, - how new business models revolutionize labor markets and job opportunities.  In each of these categories, the grand prize winner was awarded $125,000, while each of the four runner-ups received $25,000.  In addition, four additional $25,000 Judges Choice Awards were given to organizations deemed by the judges to be uniquely inventive.

I’m a Fellow of the Initiative on the Digital Economy, and served as one of the judges in the competition.  243 applications were received from around the world, from which we selected 24 finalists.  I personally reviewed around 20 applications, and was really impressed not only by their innovative ideas, but also by their courage and determination as they addresed some of society’s toughest problems.

How is the Real America Doing?

Listening to cable news, talk radio, and our heated election campaigns, you might quickly conclude that the US is going to hell, that the best days of America are behind us and that the country is unraveling right in front of our eyes.  To a greater or lesser extent, these sentiment are to be expected in a presidential-election year, when the out-of-power party always argues that things are bad and getting worse.  But for the last several years, the apocalyptic sentiments are coming not only from most on the right but from many on the left as well.

Beltway Washington is going through a particularly polarized, volatile phase, as has sometimes been the case through the country’s history.  Moreover, the amplifying effects of social networks and 24/7 information channels make it even harder to find common ground and get anything done.

But, what’s going on beyond the beltway, - in cities and towns across America?  Beyond the surreal world of Washington politics, is the country truly falling apart?  How are Americans faring, despite the hard times so many have been going through?  What’s going on in the real America, where real people live and work and where the proverbial rubber meets the road?

Capitalism and Social Issues in the 21st Century

A recent NY Times article, The Sunny Side of Greed by Op-Ed columnist Frank Bruni, argues that corporations may well now be among the strongest socially progressive forces in the country.  In issue after issue, - e.g., marriage equality, the confederate flag,  immigration reform,  - the business community has supported what we generally think of as the more socially progressive position. 

“Are these companies acting in their own interests?,” asks Bruni. “Absolutely.  They’re trying to make sure that laws and local customs don’t prevent them from attracting and retaining the best work force.  They’re burnishing their brands in a manner that they hope will endear them to customers.  But those efforts, coupled with whatever genuine altruism and civic obligation some corporate leaders feel, have produced compelling recent examples of companies showing greater sensitivity to diversity, social justice and the changing tides of public sentiment than lawmakers often manage to.” 

While our politicians are paralyzed by ideological arguments and partisan bickering, corporations seem to have little trouble embracing the more pragmatic positions that seem to better reflect the overall mood of the country on social issues like immigration and same-sex marriage.  The reason isn’t all that difficult to understand.  Many politicians must respond to the wishes of a few big donors and of small, single-issue interest groups in their districts.  But companies, especially those with national and global brands, must be responsive to a much larger, diverse constituency, namely their customers.

The Science of Innovation

 “Innovation - identified by MIT economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow as the driver of long-term, sustainable economic growth and prosperity - has been a hallmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since its inception.”  Thus starts The MIT Innovation Initiative: Sustaining and Extending a Legacy of Innovation, the preliminary report of a yearlong effort to define the innovation needed to address some of the world’s most challenging problems.  Released earlier this month, the report was developed by the MIT Innovation Initiative, launched a year ago by MIT President Rafael Reif.

I found the report quite interesting, both because I’ve been closely involved with innovation activities through a great part of my career, and because since 2005 I’ve been affiliated with MIT.  Beyond MIT, the report should be of value to anyone interested in the growing importance of innovation to institutions, economies and societies around the world.

A decade ago I was part of the National Innovation Initiative, a major effort convened by the Council on Competitiveness to develop a US innovation agenda.  Its final report, - Innovate America: Thriving in a World of Challenge and Change, - was released in December of 2004.  The report did an excellent job in explaining the role innovation plays in US competitiveness.  It included more than 60 detailed recommendations in three major areas: talent, investment and infrastructure. 

Since then, technology has continued to make dramatic advances.  But for a variety of reasons, job creation, entrepreneurship and US global competitiveness, - the key measures of a thriving innovation economy, - have not fared so well.  A number of recent studies have observed that startup rates, - the nation’s job creative engine, -  have been declining across the country, especially since 2000.  And while US employment keeps improving, serious questions remain about the impact of the digital revolution on the job prospects and wages of a large fraction of the workforce.  In addition, the US is now in 10th place in R&D investments as a percentage of GDP among OECD nations, - having fallen from 2nd place in 1992.  Innovation remains a subject in need of serious attention, especially given the emergence of our highly complex and unpredictable digital economy.

Why Are Americans so Divided? Why Are We so Angry?

In a column recently published in the NY Times, Robert Reich, - UC Berkeley professor, author and former Secretary of Labor, - wrote about his experience while in an airport to catch a flight.  A well-dressed man approached him and said: “You are a Commie dirtbag,” actually using an unprintable profanity.  Reich was taken aback, but decided to respond as civilly as he could.

“You’re wrong.  Where did you get your information?,” he asked the man.  “Fox News.  Bill O’Reilly says you’re a Communist,” the man replied and walked away irritated. 

“It’s rare that I’m accosted and insulted by strangers, but I do receive vitriolic e-mails and angry Facebook posts,” wrote Reich.  “On the Internet and on TV shows, name-calling substitutes for argument, and ad hominem attack for reason.” 

“Scholars who track these things say the partisan divide is sharper today than it has been in almost a century.  The typical Republican agrees with the typical Democrat on almost no major issue.  If you haven’t noticed, Congress is in complete gridlock.”

Governance and Pragmatism: Moving Beyond “The Culture of No”

Checks and balances is one of the most important principles for making decisions and getting things done in a highly complex organization.  While we primarily associate checks and balances with the US system of government, I believe that it equally applies to any other complex organizational system.  It implies an organizational structure and a set of procedures to ensure that no one unit or individual has too much power over major decisions, especially those decisions that, if wrong, could have serious consequences.  It forces the different parts of the organization to cooperate.  It trades off short term efficiency and speed in favor of the longer term stability of the institution. 

Most large companies have set up some form of check-and-balances organizational structure, often embodied in the separation of line and staff management.  There is a built-in contention system in such an organizational structure.  In addition to supporting the line functions, the staffs serve as the checks-and-balances of the company, making sure that the activities of all departments and individuals follow the company’s strategy and are in compliance with business, legal and regulatory requirements.

Reflections on the Nature of Human Organizations

Urbanization is one of the major forces transforming societies all over the world.  The rapid pace of urbanization is succinctly summarized in these sentences from the 2012 World Urbanization Prospects of the United Nations Population Division:  

“Between 2011 and 2050, the world population is expected to increase by 2.3 billion, passing from 7.0 billion to 9.3 billion (United Nations, 2011). At the same time, the population living in urban areas is projected to gain 2.6 billion, passing from 3.6 billion in 2011 to 6.3 billion 2050.  Thus, the urban areas of the world are expected to absorb all the population growth expected over the next four decades while at the same time drawing in some of the rural population.  As a result, the world rural population is projected to start decreasing in about a decade and there will likely be 0.3 billion fewer rural inhabitants in 2050 than today.”

In 1900, less than 15 percent of world’s population lived in cities.  According to the latest UN estimates, 52 percent of the world’s population now lives in urban areas.  That number is estimated to go up to 60 percent by 2030, and near 70 percent by 2050. 

Why are metropolitan areas continuing to grow at such a rapid pace?  After all, back in the 1990s, quite a few people were predicting that the Internet would cause cities to decline.  The Internet would enable people to work from anywhere, so they would choose to live in less populated areas, where lower costs and more space would let them enjoy a better quality of life.  Needless to say, these predictions have not come true.

The Science of Cities

Last April, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYU President John Sexton announced the formation of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), an applied science research institute led by NYU and NYU-Poly in partnership with academic institutions, global companies and New York City government agencies.  CUSP is focused on the grand technical, intellectual, engineering, academic, and human challenges posed by a rapidly urbanizing world.  Several weeks ago, I was appointed executive-in-residence at CUSP by its Director, Steve Koonin. 

Urban systems are the quintessential example of complex sociotechnical systems, the emerging field studying systems that combine powerful and ubiquitous digital technologies with the people and organizations they are transforming.  Such systems exhibit a level of complexity that, until recently, has often been beyond our ability to understand and control.  Not only do we have to deal with the complexities associated with large scale IT infrastructures, but with the even more complex issues involved in human and organizational behaviors. 

This emerging field aims to go beyond the analysis of cities and similar sociotechnical systems.  It aims to be prescriptive in nature, applying its findings to help us design better performing systems and organizations, as is the case with other engineering and management disciplines.  It is multidisciplinary in nature, and should enable us to address a particular domain, - e.g., transportation, energy, finance, - by bringing together a number of different methodologies, including: systems-oriented techniques like optimization, stochastic systems, systems simulation and systems dynamics; social sciences, management and planning; and engineering capabilities focusing on design, development, testing and operations. 

STEM Literacy is for Everyone

MIT professor Richard Larson recently wrote an excellent opinion column - STEM is for Everyone.  In the column, he succinctly made the case for widespread STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) literacy, and explained why it is as important to our 21st century information economy as basic reading-writing literacy has been to the industrial economy of the past two centuries.  According to Larson, STEM literacy is a way of thinking and doing:   

“A person has STEM literacy if she can understand the world around her in a logical way guided by the principals of scientific thought.  A STEM-literate person can think for herself.  She asks critical questions.  She can form hypotheses and seek data to confirm or deny them.  She sees the beauty and complexity in nature and seeks to understand.  She sees the modern world that mankind has created and hopes to use her STEM-related skills and knowledge to improve it.” 

Larson is Professor of Engineering Systems and Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT.  He is a pioneer in applying STEM capabilities to a wide variety of problems in services industries, from urban systems to online learning.  He is the founder and director of LINC - Learning International Network Consortium, a collaboration involving educators from around the world who share best practices on how to best organize higher education distance learning projects in developing countries.  Among LINC’s key projects is Blossoms  - Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies, which is developing a large free repository of video modules created by gifted volunteers from around the world to assist school teachers with math and science courses.

An Emerging Platform for Digital, Inclusive Innovation

The Internet era was born in the mid 1990s.  On August 9, 1995, Netscape’s IPO caught the world by storm.  It marked the passage of the Internet from a network primarily used by universities, research labs and geeks in general, to a platform with a vastly expanded reach and connectivity.  Anyone with a personal computer and Web browser, was now able to access all kinds of content, communicate with people all over the world, and conduct a variety of transactions over the Internet.  

The Internet became an incredible platform for innovation, enabling startups, large institutions, and everyone in between to quickly develop and bring to market many new digital products and services.   Its reach and connectivity led to the creation of all kinds of innovative, digital applications.  It enabled individual and institutions to do all the things they did much, much better.  It transformed all kinds of every day activities, including the way we work, shop, learn, bank, listen to music, watch films and deal with government.

But, getting online and being able to access the Web and the many applications built around it required a personal computer and an Internet account.  And, e-commerce transactions required a credit card or bank account.  So, while the Internet was truly empowering for those with the means to use it, it led to serious concerns about the growing digital divide both within countries and across the world. 

The reach and connectivity we were all so excited about in this initial phase of the Internet era was in reality not so inclusive.   As our economy was becoming increasingly digital, major new inequalities were now arising because so many around the world could neither afford a PC or an Internet account and had no bank relationship or credit card.  It was disconcerting to have a digital revolution and new information-based economy that left out the majority of the world’s population.

The Economic and Cultural Polarization of America

Coming Apart: the State of White America 1960-2010, a recently published book by scholar and author Charles Murray, has generated some very interesting and important discussions about America’s increasingly polarizated society.  In a January NY Times Op-Ed, David Brooks wrote that Coming Apart will prove to be one of the most important books of 2012 because it “so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.”

The key premise of the book, as described by Murray in this Wall Street Journal column, is that “America is coming apart. For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world - for whites, anyway.”  For most of its history, a major hallmark of American democracy has been the comfortable mingling of the social classes.  “Americans love to see themselves this way,” writes Murray.  “But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.”

Fifty years ago, there were large income gaps between rich and poor, but the differences are much bigger today.  More important, those income gaps did not lead to differences in behavior.  There was a common civic culture, - the American way of life, - “that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace.  It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.”

Blogging and Personal Feelings

In November of 2008, Andrew Sullivan published an excellent article in The Atlantic, - Why I Blog, - in which he discussed the unique characteristics of a blog by reminding us what a web log shares in common with its namesake, the ship log.

“In journeys at sea that took place before radio or radar or satellites or sonar, these [ship] logs were an indispensable source for recording what actually happened.  They helped navigators surmise where they were and how far they had traveled and how much longer they had to stay at sea. . .  A log provided as accurate an account as could be gleaned in real time.”

“As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages - the opposite of a book.  As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems - and is - more truthful.  Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction.  They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them.  Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending.  So they have plot as well as dramatic irony - the reader will know the ending before the writer did.”

“Anyone who has blogged his thoughts for an extended time will recognize this world.  We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges.  We blog now - as news reaches us, as facts emerge.  A reporter can wait - must wait - until every source has confirmed.  A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world.  For bloggers, the deadline is always now.  Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive.  It is, in many ways, writing out loud.”

I have now been blogging since May of 2005.  As Andrew Sullivan observes about blogs in general, my blog is a record of my changing interests over that time span, of the key items that were catching my attention, and how I felt about them at the time.  Looking back at the many blogs I have posted, I am reminded of some of the major events of the past seven years.

Politics, Women and the Talmud

A couple of months ago a story out of Israel caught my attention.  It concerned an incident that, while extreme, illustrates the tensions between groups with very strong religious beliefs and the larger, much less religious society that does not embrace these views.  As we know, such discussions are now taking place in the US as part of the 2012 Presidential Campaign.  But I prefer to comment on the situation in Israel because it concerns my own religion - Judaism.  In something as personal as religion, you should be sensitive about directly commenting on religions other than your own.

An 8 year old girl, the daughter of observant but modern Orthodox Jews, was harassed by ultra-Orthodox Jewish men as she walked on her way to school.  The men felt that her modest dress did not adhere to their more rigorous dress code for girls and women.  They spit on the girl, insulted her and called her a prostitute.

“The country was outraged,” said the article.  “For many Israelis, this is not a fight over one little girl’s walk to school.  It is a struggle that could shape the future character and soul of the country, against ultra-Orthodox zealots who have been increasingly encroaching on the public sphere with their strict interpretation of modesty rules, enforcing gender segregation and the exclusion of women.”

Would a Distributed Model of Government be More Suitable for a Complex, Diverse 21st Century Democracy?

Last week I wrote about the forces that, in my opinion, are contributing to an increasingly polarized America.  I mentioned three such key forces:  the structural changes and employment challenges our economy is going through; the changing demographics and emergence of a kind of new establishment in US society; and the technology-amplified, free-for-all conversations taking place through our multitude of information and communication channels.

How should government evolve to better adapt to these forces?  Are there innovative government models that might work better than our present ones?  Can we look at the evolution of organizational models in business over the past twenty years for inspiration and guidance?

Companies, especially large, global companies have been going through dramatic changes in the last couple of decades, driven by a combination of advances in information technologies, the Internet, the fast-changing market environment, and the heightened competitive pressures brought about by globalization.  In particular, companies have had to move away from the hierarchic, centralized management models that prevailed in much of the last century and embrace a more distributed organizational style.

“One Nation” in an Increasingly Polarized America

Among America’s most cherished ideas is the notion that, despite all our differences, we are one nation.  It is embodied in the Pledge of Allegiance:  “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  E Pluribus Unum - out of many, one, - appears in all our coins and in the Great Seal of the United States.

But, watching the heated political and social debates taking place all around us causes one to wonder what it means to be one nation in our fractious times.  The ideological polarization of our political parties reflects the deep divisions in the country as a whole.  It is more likely than not that the political volatility of the past decade will continue, barring some rare, high impact black swan event like a severe economic depression or 9/11-like terrorist attack.

What are the implications of living through an extended period of deep social divisions?  How will our idea of one nation evolve over such times?  Has the country ever gone through similar politically volatile times in the past?  Given that the future is so unpredictable, can we at least look at our history for some guidance?

My Upcoming 50th High School Reunion

I graduated high school in 1962 from the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, usually referred to as U-High.  This June we will be celebrating our 50th class reunion, and, this being 2012, some classmates set up a social media group site that any member of the class of '62 can link to and participate in an online conversation.

Through the years, I have been involved with the University of Chicago (U of C), which I attended after high school for both college and graduate school.  In particular, I have been a member of the Physical Sciences Division Visiting Committee for years.   But, I have not been involved with U-High, perhaps because I only went there for my junior and senior years.  I have not attended previous class reunions, and was not sure if I would attend the 50th reunion when I first heard about it.  But I joined the online group site, as a way to learn about high school classmates which I have not heard from in almost fifty years. 

The group discussions started slowly, but after a few days, I was really looking forward to the postings.  It has proved to be fascinating, not only because of what I am learning about my classmates' lives, but because the discussions of teachers, neighborhood places, and class events have brought to mind many long forgotten memories.  I feel like a character in a coming-of-age film, who as an older man, is reminded of an important period of his youth, which he then proceeds to narrate.

The US Economy in 2012 - Two Big Problems, Two Ready Solutions

What should the US do in 2012 to address its tough economic problems?  We will hear many answers to this question through this presidential election year.  Many will be based on ideological conviction and/or political opportunism.  They will likely not lead to any kind of workable solutions.  But some will be more pragmatic and might perhaps stand a chance.

The January 1 Sunday Business section of the NY Times asked six economists to give their best advice for 2012 on a variety of issues.  Among them was Christina Romer, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley and former chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors.  Professor Romer wrote an excellent article, - Two Big Problems, Two Ready Solutions - offering practical advice for the US economy in 2012.

“The United States faces two daunting economic problems: an unsustainable long-run budget deficit and persistent high unemployment,” she writes in the opening paragraph.  “Both demand aggressive action in the form of fiscal policy.  Waiting until after the November elections, as seems likely, would be irresponsible.  It is also unnecessary, since there are plans to address both problems that should command bipartisan support.”

Innovation in Higher Education

A glance at the latest US employment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals sharp differences in unemployment rates by educational attainment: college degree or higher: 4.3%; associate degree or some college: 8.2%; high school graduates, no college: 9.6%; and no high school diploma: 14.3%.  Moreover, while the overall unemployment rate remains over 9 percent, a recent McKinsey report found that employers are having trouble filling specific positions because they could not find applicants with the right skills.  The report projects that if economic conditions improve, there will be a shortage of 1.5 million workers with college degrees by 2020, but a surplus of almost 6 million of workers with no high school degree.  It also projects a continuing shortage of workers with technical and health care skills not necessarily requiring a college degree.

Just about every such study points to a similar trend: for the foreseeable future, the US economy will need better educated workers with specific skill requirements.  Workers without a post-secondary education face a contracting set of job opportunities.  Those with higher educational attainments will be in the best position to obtain good jobs with good pay. 

Thus, we need to significantly increase the number of students receiving post-secondary education.  However, our colleges and universities, the very institutions to which the country should turn to help us address these increased educational demands, are facing problems of their own. Tuition costs have risen much faster than the rate of inflation and keep going up, thus making it harder for them to serve the students most in need of their services.  Many educational institutions are facing financial difficulties.  The financial crisis has been aggravating the situation, at both public and private institutions.  Government education budgets are under huge pressure at all levels, - local, state and national.

Incremental steps will not make much of a dent on the problem. We need to look at higher education through the lens of disruptive innovation, argues a report published last February, - Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education.  The report is written by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, Louis Caldera and Louis Soares.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Large Metropolitan Areas

For several years now I have been thinking about the differences between various models of innovation and entrepreneurship.  In particular, I have been trying to understand the key differences between the innovation and entrepreneurship models that have worked so well in Silicon Valley, the Boston-Cambridge area and similar high-tech, VC-based regions, and the models that might be more applicable to large metropolitan areas like New York and London.

The Silicon Valley model has become the most prominent example of what it means to be a successful innovation hub.   Over the last few decades, it has been the leading region in the creation of new high-tech products and companies based on advanced digital technologies.  A number of regions around the world have tried to become the next Silicon Valley, hoping to develop the right ecosystem mixture, - including technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, - that will establish their region as a world class center of innovation.  Most such efforts have fallen short of their goals, - a number ending in outright failure. 

Why is that?  To begin with, most successful high-tech innovation hubs have been built around the great engineering universities in their midst - Stanford and UC Berkeley for Silicon Valley, and MIT for the Boston area.  Over the years, these regions have brought together and carefully nurtured a large and fluid community of technologists and, entrepreneurs who share ideas as they move from company to company - as founders, employees, managers, board members or investors.  They have achieved a remarkable network effect particularly suitable for high-tech innovation that give them an advantage in scale that is almost impossible to replicate.

Their university-based, high tech innovation model is particularly oriented toward finding The Next Big Thing, - that is, the next big technology, product or service that will take world markets by storm, transform whole industries, and in the process, create considerable wealth for their creators and investors.  They have been at the center of several waves of disruptive innovations and creative destruction over the past few decades, and will continue to do so into the future.

But, beyond a few niche areas, this is not a model of innovation and entrepreneurship generally suitable for a large metropolitan region like New York.  A model that would work for New York has to leverage the key strengths of the region.  Let me briefly discuss three such New York strengths in particular.

IBM's Centennial

IBM is turning 100 years old on June 16.  The company is commemorating its 100th anniversary with a year-long set of activities around the world.  It is using the opportunity to reach out to many of its constituents in business, government and academia and engage with them in a variety of celebratory events, such as seminars and conferences.  In addition, IBM Chairman Sam Palmisano is inviting all members of its extended family - employees, partners, retirees, families and friends - to pledge at least eight hours of community service during 2011.

If you look at the fast changing IT industry, it is hard enough to find companies that have survived thirty years, let alone one hundred.  It is even harder to find a company that has survived this long, is in great competitive shape and continues to be among the leaders in its industry.  So, as The Economist observed in 1100100 [100 in binary] and Counting in its June 9, 2011 issue:      

“The firm’s centenary is an occasion to reflect on many things digital, but one question stands out: why is IBM still alive and thriving after so long, in an industry characterised perhaps more than any other by innovation and change?  This is not just of interest to business historians.  As IBM enters its second century in good health, far younger IT giants, such as Cisco Systems, Intel, Microsoft and Nokia, are grappling with market shifts that threaten to make them much less relevant.”

The 2011 Tapia Conference Celebrating Diversity in Computing

Last week I participated in the 2011 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference which took place in San Francisco, where I had the honor to give the Ken Kennedy Distinguished Lecture.

The Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing conference is quite unique.  It is aptly named, being the most diverse conference in computing anywhere.  This year, 53% of the participants were female, 47% male.  About 40% were African American, 26% Hispanic, 20% White (non-Hispanic) and 8% Asian.  One third were undergraduate students, one third were graduate students and the rest were professionals from industry and academia. 

They came from a wide-range of places, including historically-black colleges and hispanic serving institutions as well as places like Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Rice, UCLA, and so on.  One of its key objectives is to reassure the students that computing is the right career path for them, help them overcome any potential feelings of isolation by being in an environment with many others just like them, - regardless of their ethnicity or gender, - and increase their dedication to complete their degrees.

Why Is Civil Discourse So Important - Yet So Difficult

In his remarks at the memorial service for the victims of the Tucson shooting, President Obama urged us to be more civil in our dealings with each other:

“The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better.  To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents.  And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy - it did not - but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.”

Why is civil discourse so difficult?  This is a very important question, dealing with the very essence of being human.  I think of it as a Darwinian-kind of question.  As this provocative Economist article – “Why we are, as we are” - from December of 2008 observed:  “For a Darwinian, life is about two things: survival and reproduction.”

Humans are social animals, and like all such animals, we are ill-equipped to survive on our own.  Our social impulses cause us to naturally gravitate toward forming communities to help us get the necessary survival strengths from each other.  But our evolution - or at least our history - has also channeled these social impulses into forms that are tribal.  That is, we affiliate with our own kind and against the others.

Principles and Compromises

Last week I posted a blog focused on the tax deal between President Obama and Senate Republicans as a good example of political compromise, - bringing people together with widely different opinions in order to get something concrete done.  Such compromises are the essence of effective governance, especially in highly complex organization, whether in business or government.

Are there limits to compromise?  Are there times when our sense of right and wrong should guide our actions?  Are there occasions when principles should trump compromise?

Absolutely.

For example, in 1953 IBM President Thomas J. Watson, Jr. published the company's first equal opportunity policy letter - one year before the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education and 11 years before the landmark Civil Rights Act - which said:  “It is the policy of this organization to hire people who have the personality, talent and background necessary to fill a given job regardless of race, color or creed.”  And he put IBM’s money where his mouth was – writing to two Southern governors that IBM refused to adopt “separate but equal” policies, and that if those states didn’t like that, IBM would locate its plants elsewhere.

Another notable example is President Lyndon Johnson’s personal leadership in overcoming fierce southern resistance and convincing Congress to pass the aforementioned Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  President Johnson realized that his party was going to pay a huge price for his actions.  “We have lost the South for a generation,” he is alleged to have told an aide right after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  He was only wrong in that support of civil rights has lost the South to the Democratic Party for far longer than one generation. 

e-Media and e-Journalism in the Internet Age

I have been thinking a lot about the Shirley Sherrod case, not so much for what we can learn about the current state of race relations or political discourse in the US, both of which have been extensively discussed by people much savvier than me on the subjects, but for what the case teaches us about the transformation of the media industry in the Internet Age. 

The facts of the case are well known.  On July 19, Andrew Breitbart posted a 2½ minute edited video of a near 45 minute speech that Shirley Sherrod had given in March of 2010 at an NAACP event.  The edited video segment posted by Breitbart to make Sherrod and the NAACP appear racist would not by itself have been too newsworthy.  After all, we know that the blogosphere and the Internet in general are full of rumors and innuendos, as are cable channels and talk radio.  In any event, Breitbart was not a trusted source for news.  He is perhaps best known as an ideologically conservative activist, and had previously been involved in the ACORN controversy, also involving selectively edited videos.

It is also no surprise that Bill O’Reilly on the Fox News Channel called for Sherrod’s resignation shortly after the edited video was posted.  Bill O’Reilly and Fox News in general have a strong ideological bent that colors everything they say.

The Emergence of a “New Establishment”

Several events in the last few years - including the election of Barack Obama as US President, the rise of the Tea Party movement, and the SEC charges against Goldman Sachs - have convinced me that there is a profound changing of the order underway in US society.   We are seeing the emergence of what, for lack of a better term, I will call a New Establishment.

The existence of something like the establishment is a quaint kind of notion, seemingly a remnant from a far away time.  I put together my own definition, based on Wikipedia’s definition of the term: 

“The Establishment refers to the ruling group that defines the conventional social, political and economic principles of a society.  Its members do not just represent the centers of official power - though they are certainly part of it - but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.  Most stable communities of social animals, including humans, have such a visible or invisible ruling group.”

Over the centuries, members of the establishment have come from various centers of power in society, including the church, nobility, feudal lords, the upper classes, the military, politicians, industrialists, financiers and media figures.  In democratic countries, no one group can be said to rule the establishment, which typically represents different segments of society.  

Not all groups are equally represented, and some segments feel left out altogether.  To better appreciate the value people place in being part of the establishment, just consider the fierce social, political and at times armed battles that have been fought through the ages between the groups in control, and those on the outside trying to break in.

What are the Key Qualities of a Great City?

I have always lived in or around cities.  I was born in Havana, where I spent my first fifteen and a half years.  My family then moved to Chicago, where I went to school for the next ten years.  In 1970 I moved to the New York area and have lived there ever since, including 15 years in New York City.

It is thus not surprising that I have become so interested in smart cities initiatives, that is, how to leverage technology-based innovations to help us better understand and improve the way urban areas work.

A major reason why smart cities has become such a hot topic is the rapid urbanization of the planet.  In 1900, about 13 percent of the world’s population lived in cities.  That number is now around 50 percent.  By 2050, over 70 percent of the world’s population will be in cities.  This unprecedented global urbanization is one of the biggest challenges facing everyone responsible for managing city functions, from mayors and police chiefs, to economic planners and school administrators. 

The challenges are enormous.  Urban ecosystems are extremely complex because they are composed of many different kinds of functions and intricate organizations.  A city is essentially a system of systems, and it is the interactions and interdependencies of its many parts that makes it so dynamic and unpredictable.  Their complexity will increase significantly given the expected urban growth over the next decades.  This is why we are now looking at the use of digital technologies, information-based intelligence and sophisticated modeling and simulation to help us better manage the complex challenges involved in the daily life of a city, - e.g, education, health, safety, commerce, transportation and entertainment.

Cities are also particularly interesting complex systems to study and model. What makes cities so fascinating is, - to state the obvious, - the presence of people.  Excellent public infrastructures and services are essential for a good city, but they are not sufficient.  A truly great city needs to be an appealing place to live.  It needs to attract and retain a large pool of local, national and international talent.  Liveability or quality of life is therefore the lifeblood of a good, let alone a great city.

Why are Tea Party Supporters So Angry?

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published the results of a national survey of Tea Party supporters conducted jointly with CBS News. 

The Tea Party is generally described as a populist protest movement that emerged in the US in early 2009.  Given the acute economic pain inflicted on so many by the ongoing financial crisis - e.g., increased unemployment, housing foreclosures and personal bankruptcies - it would be perfectly understandable if the people most hurt by the crisis formed the core of the Tea Party.

But the NYT/CBS poll reveals a very different story, succinctly summarized in the title of this follow-up Times article, Tea Party Supporters Doing Fine, but Angry Nonetheless: “The Tea Party supporters now taking to the streets aren’t the ones feeling the pain. . .   they are better educated and wealthier than the general public.  They are just as likely to be employed, and more likely to describe their economic situation as very or fairly good.”

The Healthcare Reform Debates

The ongoing US healthcare debates - or is civil war a better description? - remind me how incredibly hard it is to bring about disruptive transformations of any kind. 

In my experience, organizing disruptive transformational efforts is very difficult.  I learned this first-hand at IBM with efforts like the Internet initiative in 1996 and the Linux initiative in 2000.  Given that the organizational complexities go way, way up with the size and scope of the initiative, I am not surprised how incredibly difficult it has been to try to bring about the badly needed transformation of healthcare across the whole country.

A transformational initiative is subject to very different organizational dynamics from more incremental ones.  With incremental initiatives, you are looking to improve something that already exists in the marketplace - e.g., better products and services, higher customer satisfaction, increased overall efficiency.  Because you are improving something with a history, there is lots of information that can be analyzed to estimate the impact of the improvements on the business.  You can make a case for the improvements based on quantitative, fact-based, rational arguments.

Not so for initiatives based on disruptive technologies or ideas.  Disruptive transformations are, indeed, disruptive.  They are a break from the past, either because past approaches no longer work and are getting us into deep trouble; because a new technology or idea now offers us much better opportunities; or both.  But, while the changes might be absolutely essential, it is important to keep in mind that you are asking people to move from something that, while imperfect and flawed, they are familiar with, into unknown, most likely uncharted territory.

CNN, Latinos and Brand Values

A few weeks ago CNN broadcast Latino in America, a two-hour documentary that explored “how Latinos are reshaping our communities and culture and forcing a nation of immigrants to rediscover what it means to be an American.”  The documentary was reported by Soledad O’brien, a highly regarded CNN anchor and special correspondent who in 2008 reported the similar Black in America documentary. 

The US has over 50 millions Latinos, and by 2050 the US Latino population is expected to triple.  Latino in America portrays this incredibly complex, diverse, fast-growing community through a series of individual stories.  CNN calls it:

“. . . an ambitious documentary initiative [that] examines the growing diversity of America, revealing insight into a changing nation on the eve of the U.S. census that is expected to officially confirm that Latino Americans are the largest minority group within the country.”

It later adds:

“As the face of America changes profoundly, CNN continues to demonstrate that we are the only cable news network dedicated to delivering a diversity of opinions and coverage,” said Jon Klein, president CNN/U.S. “This landmark series will showcase dramatic personal stories from across the sweep of Latino-American society, and move the dialogue well beyond limited partisan discussions of immigration.”

Latino in America received a number of positive reviews, thanks in large part to the excellent work of Soledad O’Brien.  But Jon Klein’s attempt to move the dialogue beyond immigration has not fared so well.

Designing a Smart Healthcare System

On October 1 and 2 IBM held its second global Smarter Cities conference in New York City.  The first such conference was held in Berlin this past June, and the third will be held in Shanghai next year.

As was the case with Berlin, the New York Smarter Cities event had a very impressive agenda.  It included talks by IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Melody Barnes, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.  The agenda also included panels with governors, mayors, and leaders of cultural institutions. 

In addition, there were break-out discussions to enable participants to share their experiences on what it takes to build a smarter city in six key areas: transportation, education, public safety, energy and utilities, government services and healthcare.  I helped organize and moderated the healthcare session.  Our panel included Denis Cortese - CEO and President of the Mayo Clinic; Ronald Paulus - Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the Geisinger Health System; Chris Coburn - Executive Director of Innovations at the Cleveland Clinic; and Armando Ahued Ortega - Health Secretary of Mexico City.

Reflections from Another Part of the World and a Different Side of My Brain

I spent the first week of September in Chile and Argentina.  Three yeas have elapsed since I last visited Santiago, and I have not been to Buenos Aires for almost four years.  It was very good to be back in these two very nice cities.

I love to travel in Spanish speaking countries, - I go to Spain and Mexico from time to time in addition to Argentina and Chile.  The reason is not just because the people are so wonderful.  After all, in my experience, the people have been very nice in just about all countries I have been to around the world.  But, being totally immersed for days on end in my native language, is a particularly pleasurable experience, and one that, as I have thought about it, is not only personally appealing but also important to my mental health.  Let me explain.

It is well accepted that a good physical exercise plan should include different kinds of workouts, some focused on aerobics to increase cardiovascular endurance, and some anaerobic in nature to strengthen our muscles.  In addition to its benefits on our physical health, a regime of exercise also improves our mental health as well as helping to reduce depression.But, advances in brain sciences have begun to show the importance of also exercising our mental faculties.  Throughout our lives, our brains need stimulation to be healthy, in the same way that our bodies need physical exercise.  A lack of mental exercise and stimulation can result in severe problems, from the time we are born to old age.

I am convinced that as we learn more about the workings of our brains, we will learn how different kinds of stimulation best help different parts of our brain, much as we have learned how to best exercise different parts of our bodies.  Furthermore, I am sure that future advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging will show that for those of us who were immersed in different languages at different times in our lives, we can best reach feelings and concepts stored in our brain by using the language were were speaking at the time we experienced and learned them.

The Health Care Debates, Tribalism and The Golden Rule

Earlier this summer, I was in Berlin to participate in a Smarter Cities conference hosted by IBM.  I had not been to Berlin in a while, and was looking forward to seeing it, especially since it is one of my daughter’s favorite cities in the world.  I was not disappointed.  Berlin is a very nice city indeed, with lots to see and do, full of young people and positive energy.

But, you cannot visit Berlin and not be struck by its history, especially if you are Jewish.  Its Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe is haunting in its simplicity.  Newsreel images of Berlin Nazi rallies sweep through your mind.  And a question keeps coming up.  What happened?

Richard von Weiszacker, - who was mayor of the then West Berlin from 1981 to1984, and President of Germany from 1984 to1994, which included the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of  East and West Germany, - spoke at the conference on the history of Berlin. He reminded us that before the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, the city was the intellectual center of the world.  People everywhere learned German to be able to read the best textbooks and academic journals in their fields, much as they do now with English.  How could such an advanced civilization engage in such monstrous acts?

Numerous books have analyzed this question.  The answer that makes the most sense to me is rather simple.  Civilization is a relatively recent and thin veneer on human behavior.  People are capable of terrible actions against their fellow men, especially when they are under severe stress and are incited to blame others for their fears by skillful demagogues.

Lessons from the "Beer Summit": To Err is Human . . .

There are a number of important lessons, if not downright teachable moments, in the July 16 arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge Police Sargeant James Crowley, and the subsequent involvement of President Barack Obama when he said that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting Professor Gates in his own home.

Clearly, race relations, especially the long history of racial profiling by the police, are a major part of the backdrop for this case.  But perhaps, race acted more as the kindling that caused the relatively minor July 16 incident to flare out of control leading to Gates' arrest.  And then again, the race kindling caused the incident to explode across the nation after the President’s remarks on the arrest. 

All three principals in the case, Prof. Gates, Sgt. Crowley and President Obama, have excellent records when it comes to race relations.  Rather than playing key roles in a racially tinged drama, they are role models for how people should behave in a well-functioning multi-cultural, multi-racial society.

Looking at it in retrospect, the whole incident has the making of a Greek tragedy.  Three good, highly professional, and disciplined men, each made an out-of-character mistake and said and did things that they should not have.  Why?  Because like all human, our emotions sometimes get the better of us and get us in trouble.

Reflections on Empathy

I watched Sonia Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings with mixed feelings, ranging from boredom to anger.  I found some of the questions and comments so off-putting that at times I had to look away and turn the TV off.  But overall, there was a kind of fascination to the hearings, especially in what they told us about the state of the nation’s culture wars.

It was quite a spectacle seeing several middle-aged, white males lecturing Sotomayor about the irrelevance of race, gender and life experiences for a judge.  One such senator brought up Chief Justice John Roberts’ assertion in a recent school integration case that the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.  We also repeatedly heard references to Justice Roberts’ judges are like umpires dictum, declared in the opening remarks of his own confirmation hearings in 2005.

Who needs a wise Latina woman if life is that simple.  No wonder her Republican questioners forced Judge Somomayor to disown her wise Latina remark from a 2001 lecture at UC Berkeley's School of Law, where she said: “. . . I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”

Reflections from a "Mutt" on Empathy and Diversity

In his first press conference as President-elect on November 7, Barack Obama talked about the dog he was going to get for his daughters Malia and Sasha.  He mentioned that since Malia is allergic, the family is looking for a hypoallergenic breed.  “There are a number of breeds that are hypoallergenic, but on the other hand our preference is to get a shelter dog, but obviously, a lot of the shelter dogs are mutts like me,” he said.

Obama referred to himself as a mutt because of his mixed racial heritage.  But his remarks got me thinking about my own mixed cultural heritage.  My father Julius was born in a small town in Eastern Poland called Drohiczyn.  My mother, Rachel was also born in a small town, originally called Pruzana in Poland, now part of Belarus.  They came to Cuba in the 1920's and 1930's respectively, where I was born and grew up until the whole family moved to Chicago in 1960.  I thus combine the Eastern European Jewish background I inherited from my parents, with the Latin roots of my first fifteen years in Cuba, with my American heritage of the last several decades. 

My background is not all that unusual for many immigrants to the US, but it is right up there in the mutt, multi-cultural category.  My native tongue is Spanish, my parents native tongue was Yiddish, and since 1960 I have been immersed in English.  I learned Yiddish as a child, both from hearing my parents speak it at home and in the secular, Jewish school I attended in Havana.  I am fluent in Spanish, and speak it often with family, friends and colleagues, as well as with the large number of people living in the US for whom Spanish is their native tongue.

But, English is the language I speak best by far.  From my third year of high school on, my education was totally in English.  I use English almost exclusively in my work, except when I travel to Spanish speaking countries.  While I give talks and presentations in Spanish during such travels, I am clearly much more fluent in English.  I would be really hard pressed to write this blog in Spanish.

How Can “The Best and Brightest” Get It So Wrong?

Last week I moderated a panel on the societal implications of the financial crisis as part of the Westport Library Community Conversation series.  Our panel discussed a variety of topics, and had a lively dialogue with a very engaged, smart and opinionated audience.

I started out by asking each of our panel members to share with us their personal view of the causes of the financial crisis.  What happened?  One of our panelists, Dan Gross, -  a financial and economics writer and senior editor at Newsweek, - recently published a book on the financial crisis, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation.  I asked Dan to go first.

His answer is along the lines of this Newsweek article that came out around the time his book was published.  He writes in the article

“The people who blew up the system weren't anarchists.  They were members of the club: central bankers and private-equity honchos, hedge-fund geniuses and Ph.D. economists, CEOs and investment bankers.  And the (overwhelmingly legal) con they perpetuated on themselves, their colleagues, their shareholders and creditors, and, ultimately, on us taxpayers makes Madoff's sins look like child's play.”

“. . . during the late, great credit bubble, an Era of Cheap Money devolved into an Era of Dumb Money, and then into an Era of Dumber Money. The culture of Wall Street and the rise of the shadow banking system spawned reckless, largely unregulated lending, borrowing, and trading, a financial culture that preferred short-term fees to long-term gains, and that confused liquidity (access to other people's money) with cash on hand.  Looking back, the investors who believed the stories told by Madoff and Stanford—that they could deliver steady, positive, market-beating returns in any type of climate, despite the manifest failure of virtually every other money manager to do so—were obviously foolish.  But our best financial minds also spun tales and theories with great assurance, making seemingly irrational and unprecedented activity seem completely sensible. And we bought them.”

Gender-based Differences in Behavior

In the last few months, I have been thinking a lot about the potential causes of our global financial crisis.  I have done my best to capture my thoughts in various entries in this blog as well as in seminars I recently gave at Imperial College and MIT.  While doing research on the subject, I came across a few interesting, perhaps somewhat far-out articles that took my thinking in intriguing directions.  Let me share some of them.       

Gender diversity and the financial crisis

Is testosterone to blame for the financial crisis?, asks a Scientific American Science blog, as it writes: “High levels of testosterone are correlated with riskier financial behavior, new research suggests.  Men with more of the sex hormone made riskier investments than guys with lower levels, according to a study published online yesterday in Evolution and Human Behavior.”

An article in The Guardian reports on a separate study of traders in a London bank.  “They found that those traders with higher testosterone levels in the morning were most likely to make money on the day's trading.  One trader hit a six-day "winning streak" during which he made more than double his daily profit.  During that time his testosterone levels went up 74%.  The team also found that cortisol levels among the traders increased when their takings became more volatile and the market generally was less stable.”

Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution

On December 31, 1958 we were celebrating New Year's Eve in the home of a friend, about a block from our apartment on Calle 4 in Miramar, a nice, middle class section of Havana.  I was thirteen, in the second year of high school of our more European-like educational system, which consisted of six years of grammar school, followed by five years of high school.

The previous year, I had spent New Year's Eve gallivanting around Havana with friends, but by December of 1958 the political situation was very fragile.  The battle to overthrow the Batista dictatorship was in full force.  Havana was the scene of frequent bombings, shootings, and police roundups.  We could no longer venture around town to celebrate New Year's Eve.

The following morning, January 1, 1959, we all woke up to the news that Batista along with many high officials in his government had fled Cuba overnight.  Fidel Castro the leader of the Cuban Revolution that had been fighting the Batista regime for the last several years came to power, along with his brother Raul. 

They have ruled Cuba ever since, celebrating their 50th anniversary in power on January 1, 2009.

Life was never the same for me and my family.  Within a few months of taking power, the Castro government started its turn toward communism, nationalizing all private property, from large plantations and industries owned by wealthy Cuban families and foreign companies, to businesses of all sorts owned by middle class families, like my parents’ store.

Do Words Matter?

About a week ago we learned that an Ecuadorian man died from injuries incurred in a beating in New York City in what authorities say may have been a hate crime. CNN reported that:

"Jose Sucuzhanay and his brother, Romel, had left a party on December 7 at St. Brigid's Roman Catholic Church when several men approached them in a car in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, police said. The men allegedly began shouting anti-gay and anti-Latino vulgarities at the two men."

A month earlier, another Latin man, Marcelo Lucero was attacked by a group of seven high school students in Suffolk County and stabbed to death.  The Suffolk District Attorney said that "the seven students charged in the attack admitted they regularly beat Hispanics for fun.  He said one of the accused attackers, Anthony Hartford, 17, of Medford, told police 'I don't go out doing this very often, maybe once a week.'"

If such attacks against Hispanics are taking place in the New York area, among the most open-minded and diverse regions in the world, I can only begin to imagine what might be going on elsewhere in the US.  The picture that emerges is not very pretty:

"FBI statistics show an alarming increase in the number of hate crimes across the nation.  Latinos, the numbers say, have become the racists' target of choice in the last four years.  Since 2003, hate crimes against Hispanics have increased by a shocking 40%.  According to the FBI, almost 67% of crimes motivated by ethnic or national origin are committed against Latinos."

For several years now I have closely followed the immigration debates in the US.  I have seen, with considerable dismay, the negative, mean-spirited tone that powerful figures in politics and the media sometimes display when discussing immigration issues.  In particular, I have become increasingly alarmed at their mean-spirited, anti-immigrant words, especially aimed at poor Mexican immigrants.  Do these words matter?

Elitists and Populists

In a recent post, I wrote about the current meaning of political labels along the liberal - conservative spectrum, especially as they were used in the very long 2008 campaign for US president.  My personal conclusion was: "The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are alive and well when it comes to social issues, but they are increasingly irrelevant when applied to economic policy."

Another set of terms we heard a lot during the campaign were "elitist" and "populist."  Barack and Michelle Obama were cast in the role of chief elitists by a variety of political opponents and commentators.  The populist mantle was primarily worn by John Edwards and Mike Huckabee during the primaries, and even John McCain was cast as a populist toward the end of his presidential campaign.  But without a doubt, the role of populist-in-chief in the recently concluded campaign fell to the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.

The frequent use of these terms caught my attention.  I started hearing that Barack and Michelle Obama lived in the "elite" Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, where their daughters attended the "elite" University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, and that Barack Obama taught constitutional law for twelve years at the "elite" U of C.

Wait a second.  I lived in Hyde Park for almost ten years, from the time I arrived in the US from Cuba in October of 1960 to the time I moved to the New York area to go work for IBM in June of 1970.  I attended the Lab Schools for my last two years of high school, and then went on to study at the University of Chicago for the next eight years.  I think of Hyde Park as a very diverse kind of community anchored by the university, home to many different kinds of people.