Analysis

Jumpstarting a resilient economy

We are at a critical juncture in determining the future stability and health of the world’s economies. How businesses and governments choose to emerge from the Covid-19 crisis will either revert to the short-sighted economic practices of the past or accelerate the transition to a more sustainable, low-carbon economy that is more resilient and better equipped to mitigate and combat future crises. Although the pandemic has brought tremendous hardship, the leaders of today have been afforded a once-in-a-century opportunity to rebuild a better, smarter, more sustainable future. Covid-19 has exposed our fragility to global disruptions, yet the threats that lie ahead from climate change and human encroachment on natural ecosystems could produce shocks of even greater magnitude, spanning even longer time frames. The findings of a special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reads like a plot one might expect in a Hollywood movie, but are in fact clear projections of our current trajectory: the triggering of tipping points, resulting in widespread famine, the collapse of industries, and the displacement of millions of people. Rapid digitisation presents an opportunity to transform operational efficiencies. As with any complex and consequential problem, there is no single solution. In order to usher in a sustainable future for people, planet, and profit alike. We must not only invest public funding in greener technologies, but also match financial support with policies and practices that incentivize innovation and the adoption of efficiency-enabling technologies. Previous economic downturns have ended with a rebound in emissions. This time, we have the unique opportunity to decouple emissions from the resurgence of industry and transportation. For instance, market mechanisms, such as a price on carbon, use the power of the market to incentivize organisations to shift to cleaner technologies and away from fossil fuels, and encourage enterprises to adopt digital tools […]

From invisible hand to invisible heart: Ronald Cohen’s plan to rewire capitalism

Oliver Balch talks to the veteran British impact financier about how impact-weighted accounting would price in negative environmental and social externalities and create a virtuous race to the top. Sir Ronald (‘Ronnie’) Cohen (pictured) is a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist. Just not capitalism in its current form. As the sub-title of his new book ‘Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change’ makes abundantly clear, he believes the time has come for some serious rewiring. Capitalism’s critics are two a penny, but few are closer to the belly of the beast. Co-founder of Apax Partners, one of Britain’s first venture capital firms, Cohen is a multimillionaire Egyptian-born British financier who jets between residencies in Tel Aviv, London and New York. Reshaping capitalism isn’t a retirement project for 75-year-old Cohen. Despite (or, perhaps, because of?) his almost half-a-century at the hard end of finance, Cohen is deeply concerned. As he told the audience during a session at Reuters Events’ Transform event : “We’ve been trying to tinker within our system using different approaches … yet companies are continuing to pollute and to create societal problems.” Cohen’s proposition for getting capitalism back on track can be summed up in three words: impact-weighted accounting Drafted in by the UK government to head up a taskforce on the subject back in 2000, he was prompted by the recommendations of his own committee to set up Bridge Ventures, one of the UK’s first explicit sustainability venture funds. Bitten by the social impact bug, he went on to co-found the non-profit group, Social Finance UK, an early proponent of social impact bonds, and, in 2011, to chair Big Society Capital, the UK’s first social investment bank and, incidentally, another of his taskforce’s recommendations. Today, he chairs the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment, an alliance of leading impact advocates in business, […]

Facebook and Google used to be the future of news

Given the recent commentary about the reforms proposed for the news media sector, you would be forgiven for thinking Google and Facebook are the only game in town. The planned reforms arose from last year’s Digital Platforms Inquiry by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which focused squarely on the corporate behaviour of these two tech behemoths. It is clear Google and Facebook will be the first platforms regulated under the draft mandatory code that will potentially force them to pay for content produced by Australian news media companies. The move is a response to what the ACCC describes as “a significant bargaining power imbalance […] between Australian news media businesses and Google and Facebook”. This idea that news companies are essentially stuck with Google and Facebook, for better or worse, is a common view. Yet while that might have been true a few years ago, media companies are realising there are other ways to cultivate readers, and there’s no need to be beholden to tech platforms that generate clicks but don’t want to pay for the privilege. In the mid-2010s, many news companies seemed to follow Facebook’s every move. When Facebook promoted video, the media invested in video. When it down-ranked clickbait headlines, content writers frantically altered their style to maintain their presence in the news feed. Newsrooms have had a similarly dependent (albeit less direct) relationship with Google. The focus on adapting to Google and Facebooks’s algorithms completely changed newsroom practices over the past decade, as journalists have weighed editorial considerations against audience metrics. Is this still the case? This dependency developed at a time when major platforms, particularly Facebook, were engaging substantially with the distribution of news. But in recent years this trend has declined, as governments have begun to regulate platforms in response to concerns over “fake news”. Facebook performed perhaps the most public pivot, changing its algorithm in January 2018 […]

Wandering in strange lands

From the acclaimed cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing comes this powerful story of her journey to understand her northern and southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America. Between 1916 and 1970, six million black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a movement known as The Great Migration. But while this event transformed the complexion of America and provided black people with new economic opportunities, it also disconnected them from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity, argues Morgan Jerkins. In this fascinating and deeply personal exploration, she recreates her ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California. Following in their footsteps, Jerkins seeks to understand not only her own past, but the lineage of an entire group of people who have been displaced, disenfranchised, and disrespected throughout our history. Through interviews, photos, and hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins braids the loose threads of her family’s oral histories, which she was able to trace back 300 years, with the insights and recollections of black people she met along the way—the tissue of black myths, customs, and blood that connect the bones of American history. Incisive and illuminating, Wandering in Strange Lands is a timely and enthralling look at America’s past and present, one family’s legacy, and a young black woman’s life, filtered through her sharp and curious eyes.

Resetting the way we teach science is vital for all our futures

COVID-19 has forced more than 1 billion students and youth out of school, triggering the world’s biggest educational technology (edtech) implementation in history, almost overnight. Schools and universities are scrambling to redesign their teaching and learning to allow for students of all ages to study from home. While this raises huge practical and logistic issues for students, teachers and parents (especially women), it opens up a world of opportunities to reimagine what learning looks like in the 21st century. The pressures that individuals, organisations and societies face in this crisis are accelerating the Fourth Industrial Revolution, blurring the boundaries between the physical, digital and biological worlds. Are our educational systems preparing students for a world driven by disruptive scientific and technological advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, clean energy, or quantum computing? Are we encouraging students to think critically about how science, technology and innovation can help address – or aggravate – economic, geopolitical, environmental or societal challenges? In many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations or specialties did not exist 10 or even five years ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate. Up to 65% of children entering school today will have a job that does not yet exist. Our educational systems around the world were failing before COVID-19 and will continue to fall behind unless we change the way we teach and learn science. Education can no longer be about transferring explicit knowledge across generations. According to the OECD 2030 Future of Education and Skills Project: “We need to replace old education standards with an educational framework that combines knowledge with the 21st century skills of creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration.” This won’t be achieved by simply moving classes from the chalkboard to a Zoom call, but radically transforming the way we teach and learn science and technology skills, from one-way content dissemination and memorisation […]

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

by Caroline Criado Perez, Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued. If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you’re a woman. Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap – a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives. Award-winning campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the impact this has on their health and well-being. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media, Invisible Women reveals the biased data that excludes women. In making the case for change, this powerful and provocative book will make you see the world anew.

Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 may have been circulating in bats for decades

Research has concluded that the lineage from which SARS-CoV-2 came has been circulating among bats for decades. The researchers found that the virus which causes Covid-19 diverged from other bat viruses about 40-70 years ago. They warn SARS-CoV-2 is likely to include other viruses with the ability to infect humans. The lineage that gave rise to the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that is responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic, has been circulating in bats for decades, researchers report. They also warn it likely includes other viruses with the ability to infect humans. The discoveries, which researchers made by reconstructing the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, have implications for the prevention of future pandemics stemming from this lineage. “Coronaviruses have genetic material that is highly recombinant, meaning different regions of the virus’s genome can be derived from multiple sources,” says Maciej Boni, associate professor of biology at Penn State. “This has made it difficult to reconstruct SARS-CoV-2’s origins. You have to identify all the regions that have been recombining and trace their histories.” A SARS-CoV-2 ‘family tree’ The team used three different bioinformatic approaches to identify and remove the recombinant regions within the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Next, they reconstructed phylogenetic histories for the non-recombinant regions and compared them to each other to see which specific viruses have been involved in recombination events in the past. They were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships between SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known bat and pangolin viruses. The researchers found that the lineage of viruses to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs diverged from other bat viruses about 40-70 years ago. Importantly, although SARS-CoV-2 is genetically similar (about 96%) to the RaTG13 coronavirus, which was sampled from a Rhinolophus affinis horseshoe bat in 2013 in Yunnan province, China, the team found that it diverged from RaTG13 a relatively long time ago, in […]

A revamped wealth tax could fuel the Covid-19 recovery

With Covid-19 support schemes increasing governments’ debt burdens, countries are in search of tax receipts. Wealth taxes mean the rich are taxed on the assets they own rather than their earnings. A smart approach to wealth taxes could boost innovation and investment. Earlier this month, Millionaires for Humanity, a group comprising 83 of the world’s richest people, called on governments to increase their taxes in the wake of COVID’s economic fallout. The idea is promising but to be truly successful it must be implemented in such a way that gains broad support from the rich. Otherwise, it will simply incentivise them to take their capital – and their residency – elsewhere. Wealth taxes – where the rich are taxed on the assets they own rather than their earnings – represent one of the most popular new policy ideas in the last year. American senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both suggested the idea in their respective campaigns for the 2020 Democratic party primary. In the UK, the opposition Labour party has made a wealth tax one of its flagship policies, with public debt reaching record-breaking levels due to COVID-19 relief schemes. Despite strong arguments and some high-profile advocates for wealth taxes, many countries have in fact moved away from them recently. In 1990, 12 OECD countries had a wealth tax. By 2018, it was intact in only three countries. This is, in part, explained by poor economic returns from wealth taxes. French economist Eric Pichet estimated that France lost double the actual revenues they gained from their version of the wealth tax due to capital flight – it was abolished in 2017. It seems that the only effective wealth tax is a wealth tax “by consent”. Left-wing support for wealth taxes can create the impression that they are an attack on capitalism. But smart wealth taxes can […]

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism

by Wendy Liu Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanising argument for why and how we must reclaim technology’s potential for the public good. Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What’s not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it’s hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon warehouse workers or Uber. We’re starting to see the cracks in the edifice, as we realise that the wealth that the tech industry is so good at creating is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality and unsubstantiated lies of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual founders and companies that characterise the industry today, Liu delves into the structural factors of the economy that led to Silicon Valley in its current form, and links them to the economy at large. Ultimately, she proposes a more radical way of developing technology, where innovation is conducted for the benefit of society at large, and not merely to enrich a select few.

Media have helped create a crisis of democracy – now they must play a vital role in its revival

Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. In May 2020, with the world still in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Margaret MacMillan, an historian at the University of Toronto, wrote an essay in The Economist about the possibilities for life after the pandemic had passed. On a scale of one to ten, where one was utter despair and ten was cautious hopefulness, it would have rated about six. Her thesis was that the future will be decided by a fundamental choice between reform and calamity. She saw the world as being at a turning point in history. It had arrived there as a result of the conjunction of two forces: growing unrest at economic inequality, and the crisis induced by the pandemic. It was at such times, she argued, that societies took stock and were open to change. Such a time, for example, was in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, which resulted in radical reforms to international political and economic frameworks. She was writing against a backdrop of a larger crisis – the crisis in democracy. The most spectacular symptoms of this were the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the Brexit referendum. Both occurred in 2016, and both appealed to populism largely based on issues of race and immigration. In the four years since, many books have been written on this crisis, among them Cass Sunstein’s #republic, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die, and A. C. Grayling’s Democracy and its Crisis. Then, somewhat surprisingly, in May 2020 a new spirit of what might be called “economic morality” announced itself. This came from within the Republican Party of the United States. It happened while Trump, that most amoral of Republican presidents, was in office, and reasserted some of the […]

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