Change the Conversation

If more of us work from home after coronavirus we’ll need to rethink city planning

We have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of people working from home as directed by governments and employers around the world to help stop the spread of COVID-19. If, as some expect, people are likely to work from home more often after the pandemic, what will this mean for infrastructure planning? Will cities still need all the multibillion-dollar road, public transport, telecommunications and energy projects, including some already in the pipeline? World’s largest work-from-home experiment Remote working was steadily on the rise well before COVID-19. But the pandemic suddenly escalated the trend into the “world’s largest work-from-home experiment”. Many people who have had to embrace remote working during the pandemic might not want to return to the office every day once restrictions are lifted. They might have found some work tasks are actually easier to do at home. Or they (and their employers) might have discovered things that weren’t thought possible to do from home are possible. They might then question why they had to go into the workplace so often in the first place. But what impact will this have on our cities? After all, many aspects of our cities were designed with commuting, not working from home, in mind. Stress test for NBN and energy networks From a telecommunications perspective, the huge increase in people working from home challenges the ways in which our existing networks were designed. Data from Aussie Broadband show evening peak broadband use has increased 25% during the shutdown. Additional daytime increases are expected due to home schooling with term 2 starting. Research by the then federal Department of Communications in 2018 estimated the average Australian household would need a maximum download speed of 49Mbps during peak-use times by 2026. If more people work from home after COVID-19, the size and times of peak use might need to be recalculated. […]

Australia’s COVID-19 opportunity

COVID-19’s impact on the Australian labour market has been dramatic and multifaceted. Some sectors of the economy have been almost completely shut down by government order. The demand in many industries has collapsed, while a few others have seen an increase. As many as one million jobs are under threat. Such estimates came before the government’s extraordinary JobKeeper scheme, which will undoubtedly reduce this figure considerably. Despite that, many who will keep their jobs may not actually have much to do at work. The economy will be in “hibernation” or on “life-support” for some time to come. We’ve gained about 1 billion hours of time If the economy has shed the equivalent of one million jobs, then we’ve gained about one billion hours of available time, and that’s just over the next six months. The full impact of the crisis could be even larger. What should we do with this time? Many of us are spending more time with children who are no longer physically at school. Some of us are doing tasks which our older relatives previously did. Netflix is also a compelling option. From a human capital perspective, the crisis presents a unique economic opportunity to re-train and up-skill Australia’s labour force. The Australian government jumped on board on Sunday, announcing funding that would cut the price of new six-month, remotely delivered diplomas and graduate certificates in nursing, teaching, health, information technology and science provided by universities and private tertiary institutions. Economists have long observed that investment in human capital (education, skills) tends to increase during recessions, because there aren’t as many well-paying alternatives. We can use it to get ahead of the curve In the current recession, the opportunities for training are greater. Even those of us who will remain employed but have little to do can use the time to invest in training. Our […]

Business leaders: the shift to stakeholder capitalism is up to us

Mireia GinéAssociate Professor, IESE Business School Silvio DulinskyHead of Business Engagement, Latin America; Member of the Executive Committee, World Economic Forum Stakeholders’ demands are forcing executives and decision-makers to rethink their organisations’ goals. Corporate governance is key to define the role of stakeholders within a corporation and to give a concrete meaning to “stakeholder capitalism”. The adoption of collaborative models will require new corporate governance approaches. Business leaders have a unique opportunity to transform their companies for the future. The concept of stakeholder capitalism has been gaining traction against the prevailing shareholder-primacy model of profit maximisation. As the World Economic Forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, asked in a recent editorial: “What kind of capitalism do we want”? Profits are not the sole purpose of a business. Let us remind ourselves that corporations exist to solve problems and provide services. If they are successful at doing this, shareholder long-term returns can increase, as society in general is better served. The debate regarding the role of stakeholders within a firm is, primarily, a governance debate. As in most challenges that require robust leadership to change the way we live, work and interact, transformation starts from the top. Corporate governance sits at the heart of this – and for this reason, the World Economic Forum has recently published a framework structured around seven pillars: 1. Defining corporate purpose 2. Governance mechanisms 3. Corporate risk management 4. Regulation and corporate adaptation 5. Governing disruption 6. Long-term vision, short-term needs 7. Cultivating trust Establishing corporate purpose is not an abstract exercise. A strong purpose guides the complex process of establishing priorities, since all major corporate decisions involve necessary trade-offs. Purpose must not only be explicitly defined, it must also be implemented. Shareholders must understand the organisation’s purpose and be able to identify the metrics related to delivering on it. One […]

Did Tolkien write The Lord of the Rings because he was avoiding his academic work?

By John M. Bowers Umberto Eco has examined our ongoing fascination with the Middle Ages and listed ten different versions including the “shaggy medievalism” of works like Beowulf. Much of J.R.R. Tolkien’s success as a ﬁction writer derives from assimilating several of these fantasies of the past including the decadent Middle Ages described by Faramir at Minas Tirith. Strangely missing from Eco’s literary types was the jolly, earthy, boisterous Middle Ages of the Decameron in his Italian tradition and the Canterbury Tales in ours. This Chaucerian legacy, so clearly embodied in Tolkien’s hobbits, is easy enough to miss because it has been so thoroughly normalized in English literature that it no longer seems “medieval” at all, especially in Oxford where Chaucer had been a steady literary presence for more than ﬁve centuries. Some listeners inside Merton Hall in 1959 might nonetheless have been surprised that Tolkien, best known for his work on Old English poetry, devoted a section of his “Valedictory Address” to recruiting Chaucer to the cause of Language against Literature in a debate still very much alive in the retiring professor’s mind: His merits as a major poet are too obvious to be obscured; though it was in fact Language, or Philology, that demonstrated, as only Language could, two things of ﬁrst-rate literary importance: that he was not a fumbling beginner, but a master of metrical technique; and that he was an inheritor, a middle point, and not a ‘father’. Not to mention the labours of Language in rescuing much of his vocabulary and idiom from ignorance or misunderstanding. Repeating views about Chaucer from his letter to John Maseﬁeld in 1938, this encomium would have sounded surprising only because nobody knew about Tolkien’s efforts at rescuing 14th-century vocabulary and idiom during his own long labors on Selections from Chaucer’s Poetry and Prose.HTMLPreview Like almost all medievalists […]

Mature Man Working On Community Allotment

How access to land plus a participation income could change the world

Samuel Alexander, University of Melbourne and Alex Baumann, University of Western Sydney | 27 February 2020 We’ve spent enough time criticising our broken system characterised by overconsumption and inequality so here’s a solution that should appeal to both sides of the political divide. Our civilisation is facing an alarming barrage of overlapping crises, together presenting an existential threat to life as we know it. Climate breakdown is intensifying; we are decimating wildlife populations; and more generally the life-support system called Earth is trembling under the weight of overconsumption. Just as concerning are the social consequences. The global economic system has produced deep, socially corrosive inequalities; poverty around the world is extreme; and worst of all, perhaps, is that even those who are “winning the rat race” so often find that the promises of consumer lifestyles are unfulfilling. Too much ink has been spilt already criticising this broken system. What about solutions and creative responses? In words often attributed to Albert Einstein, we cannot solve our problems with the same kinds of thinking that caused them. In this article we’d like to offer some new thinking: a policy proposal that we feel has the potential to be transformative. At its simplest, our proposal involves providing self-selecting unemployed public housing residents with a basic, living wage. With housing and other basic needs secured, the goal would be to enable these public residents to participate voluntarily in the creation of “simple living” communities and neighbourhoods that are sustainable, resilient, and consistent with human flourishing. If successful, our “wager” or hypothesis is that these initial examples could be scaled up to support the economically “redundant” and attract progressives across the political divide as a viable alternative for a sustainable society. Central to this vision is the recognition that access to land, just as with air and water, is not a market product. It is a human right and should be recognised […]

A new network of leaders changing the system together

For over 20 years, the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship has recognised social entrepreneurs as a new breed of leader – values-driven, inclusive, compassionate, entrepreneurial individuals who develop sustainable new models in business, social development and environmental initiatives. They have been at the forefront of R&D for society and civilization, accelerating how we solve problems and imagining new futures through experimentation, iteration and practice. In these two decades, we have curated and gathered over 350 leading social entrepreneurs from 70 countries in the Schwab Foundation community and embedded them into the platforms of the World Economic Forum. Together, they have demonstrated significant progress on how we approach environmental sustainability and consumption, health and education, rural development and job training, and finding new ways to advance human rights and equality in different contexts around the world. However, poverty, inequality and climate change are too large and complex for any single social entrepreneur or institution to tackle alone. It should be recognized that many of these issues are interconnected. \The underlying causes also run deep in history, politics and culture, and our best solutions are often constrained by outdated rules and skewed power structures. We are seeing that, in order to create real change, dynamic interactions and multi-stakeholder partnerships across ideological divides are critical to making the radical changes that we know we need. We need social innovation diffused within every sector so we can adopt, adapt, diffuse and scale what this societal R&D has shown to be possible and sustainable – whether it be self-sustaining eco-businesses in the desert, or community-based, tech-enabled healthcare. Those driving the social innovation ecosystem require imagination, compromise, resilience and, above all, committed, courageous innovative people. Therefore, the Schwab Foundation has expanded its remit to recognise and support an ecosystem of pioneering actors who share a common purpose: to accelerate our progress towards the Sustainable […]

What is ‘ecological economics’ and why do we need to talk about it?

Anitra NelsonAssociate Professor, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University Brian CoffeyVice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, RMIT University As environmental crises and the urgency to create ecological sustainability escalate, so does the importance of ecological economics. This applied, solutions-based field of studies is concerned with sustainability and development, rather than efficiency and growth. Also, given that cities account for 70-80% of global economic activity and associated resource use, emissions and waste, they are central to finding solutions to the challenge of sustainability. Ecological economics recognises local to global environmental limits. It ranges from research for short-term policy and local challenges through to long-term visions of sustainable societies. Ecological economists also consider global issues such as carbon emissions, deforestation, overfishing and species extinctions. Core concepts You’re probably familiar with some core concepts of ecological economics. These include “steady-state economies”, “carrying capacity”, “ecological footprints” and “environmental justice”. A steady-state economy is both relatively stable and respects ecological limits. Drawing on the work of mathematician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, economist Herman Daly elaborated the model, editing a 1973 anthology, Toward a Steady-State Economy. In 1990, Daly co-founded the International Society of Ecological Economics (ISEE). It had three key principles: the human economy is embedded in nature, and economic processes are actually biological, physical and chemical processes and transformations ecological economics is a meeting place for researchers committed to environmental issues ecological economics requires transdisciplinary work to describe economic processes in relation to physical reality. Joshua Farley, who has worked with Daly, discusses some of these principles in an opening address to the Australia New Zealand Society of Ecological Economics (ANZSEE) conference at RMIT University later this month. In a partnership program of several North American universities, Farley teaches Economics for the Anthropocene postgraduates. They apply ecological economics to “real-world environmental solutions”. Some will talk at the conference about their research. Today overconsumption is measured against Earth’s carrying capacity. William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel developed the […]

Why the most successful students have no passion for school

Jihyun Lee is associate professor in the School of Education at University of New South Wales in Australia. Her main research area is developing methodology to increase psychometric properties and usability of survey instruments. She publishes regularly in educational psychology journals. In order to be successful, many people believe, one must be passionate. Passion makes challenges enjoyable. It bestows the stamina necessary to excel. However, there are telling counterexamples where passion doesn’t seem to be a necessary ingredient for success. One such case is academic success. You might think that successful students should be passionate about their schooling, and that this passion for school would account, at least partly, for why some students succeed and why some don’t. But this isn’t right. My research has found that there is in fact no relationship between how well students do academically and what their attitude toward schooling actually is. A student doesn’t need to be passionate about school to be academically successful. My research findings derive from the analysis of a large-scale international database called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) makes the dataset available every three years. It’s a treasure trove that gives researchers like myself an unparalleled view into what students across the world think about their education. In the most recent 2015 PISA assessment, 72 countries and economies contributed. Reading, mathematics and science tests, along with a questionnaire about attitudes, beliefs, learning habits and the like, are administered to nationally representative samples of 15-years-olds around the world. In previous surveys, four simple options were used to measure students’ attitude toward school: (a) school has done little to prepare me for adult life when I leave school(b) school has been a waste of time(c) school helped give me confidence to make decisions(d) school has taught me things that could […]

“Harbinger households”

In The Surprising Breadth of Harbingers of Failure (Sci-Hub mirror), a trio of economists and business-school profs build on a 2015 Journal of Marketing Research paper that claimed that some households’ purchasing preferences are a reliable indicator of which products will fail — that is, if households in a certain ZIP code like a product, it will probably not succeed. The original paper calls these “harbinger households.” In the new paper, the researchers consider very large data-sets on consumer goods and fashion purchasing, house-buying, and political donations, to examine whether being a “harbinger household” correlates to other predictors of failure, and find that these households are also likely to buy real-estate that makes lower profits (or generates larger losses) than nearby properties; they are likely to buy fashion and consumer goods that get discontinued due to lackluster sales; and they are more likely to donate to losing politicians’ campaigns than winners. The researchers also claim that harbinger households voluntarily cluster: that when a harbinger household moves, it is likely that it will move to another habringer ZIP code (and nonhabringers move to nonhabringer households). Moreover, harbingers don’t appear to learn their preferences from one another — a nonhabringer household that locates in a harbinger ZIP code doesn’t alter its purchasing and political contributions to “loser” products and candidates. Harbinger households tend to be white, suburban and headed by older, less-educated single parents. They tend to make above-average use of coupons, and the coupons they use have above-average values. The researchers don’t claim a causal relationship between these different factors — donating to losing political candidates doesn’t make you prefer Crystal Pepsi, for example — but rather speculate that there is an “unobserved intervening variable” that explains both factors. Using data from multiple sources, we have shown that the phenomenon of harbingers is surprisingly widespread. […]

Why today's protests are not revolutionary TM website

Why aren’t today’s protests leading to revolutions?

-Peter McPhee, Emeritus professor, University of Melbourne We live in a world of violent challenges to the status quo, from Chile and Iraq to Hong Kong, Catalonia and the Extinction Rebellion. These protests are usually presented in the media simply as expressions of rage at “the system” and are eminently suitable for TV news coverage, where they flash across our screens in 15-second splashes of colour, smoke and sometimes blood. These are huge rebellions. In Chile, for example, an estimated one million people demonstrated last month. By the next day, 19 people had died, nearly 2,500 had been injured and more than 2,800 arrested. How might we make sense of these upheavals? Are they revolutionary or just a series of spectacular eruptions of anger? And are they doomed to fail? Key characteristics of a revolution As an historian of the French Revolution of 1789-99, I often ponder the similarities between the five great revolutions of the modern world – the English Revolution (1649), American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789), Russian Revolution (1917) and Chinese Revolution (1949). A key question today is whether the rebellions we are currently witnessing are also revolutionary. A model of revolution drawn from the five great revolutions can tell us much about why they occur and take particular trajectories. The key characteristics are: long-term causes and the popularity of a socio-political ideology at odds with the regime in power short-term triggers of widespread protest moments of violent confrontation the power-holders are unable to contain as sections of the armed forces defect to rebels the consolidation of a broad and victorious alliance against the existing regime a subsequent fracturing of the revolutionary alliance as competing factions vie for power the re-establishment of a new order when a revolutionary leader succeeds in consolidating power. Why today’s protests are not revolutionary […]

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