David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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Whose Values Will Drive Our Future?

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When people decide what is most important to them—and bother to champion it in conversation, in voting, in how they act everyday—they are helping to build the future.

It’s not just making noise, but that’s part of it. For years, when Emily was in grade school, the argument for an all-girl education was that the boys dominated the classroom with their antics and opinions while the girls were ignored or drowned out. Those making the most noise hog the attention, at least at first.

Later on, it’s about the quality of your opinions and the actions that back them up. Power and money in the commons of public life is not synonymous with good commitments or actions, but it does purchase a position with facts and experts and a platform to share it that can hold its own (if not prevail) in the wider debate over what the future will be like and what its trade-offs will cost. Not unlike the over-powered girls in grade school, it takes courage to stand up against what the best-organized, best-financed and most dominant corporate players want.

Part of the problem with these companies today is that many of them are nurturing, so that they can also cater to, lower-level priorities that we all have. For example, we all want convenience in our daily lives and to embrace a certain amount of distraction. The future that some companies want to deliver to us aims at catering to these (as opposed to other) priorities in the most efficient and profitable manner. For example:

-companies like Amazon profit by providing all the convenience you could ever want as a shopper, or

-when when your aim is relief from boredom or stress, social media, on-line games and search engines like Google provide wonderlands of distraction to lose yourself in.

Moreover, with the behavioral data these companies are harvesting from you whenever you’re on their platforms, they’ll hook you with even greater conveniences, forms of escapism and more stuff to buy in the future. Their priorities of efficiency and profit almost perfectly dovetail with ours for convenience and distraction.

This convenient and distracted future—along with a human yearning for something more—is captured with dazzling visuals and melancholy humor in Wall-E, a 10-year old movie from Pixar. (It’s worth every minute for a first or second view of a little trash robot named Wall-E’s bid to save the human race from itself.) In its futuristic world, the round-as-donuts humans who have fled the planet they’ve soiled spend their days on a We’ve-Thought-of-Everything cruise ship that’s floating through space. Except, as it turns out, the ship’s operators aren’t providing everything their passengers want and need, or want and need even more, like a thriving planet to call home.

Wall-E’s brilliance doesn’t come from an either/or future, but from a place where more important priorities are gradually acknowledged and acted upon too. It’s deciding to have more of some things and somewhat less of others. Back in the real world, that change in priorities might involve diverting some of our national resources away from economic efficiency and profit to support thriving families and communities (January 27, 2019 newsletter). Or, as in Wall-E’s case, using fewer of our shared resources for convenience and distraction and more for restoring an environment that can sustain our humanity in deeper ways.

On the other hand, as anyone who has tried it knows: it can be hard to find enough courage to stand up to those who are dominating (while they’re also subverting) the entire conversation about what we should want most. It’s our admiration for Wall-E’s kind of courage that makes Toronto’s citizens so inspiring today. Why these northern neighbors?  Because they are trying through their actions to meet a primary shared objective—which is to build a sustainable urban environment that protects its natural resources—without losing sight of other priorities like efficiency, convenience and strengthening the bonds of family and community in their city.

And as if that weren’t enough, there is another wrinkle to the boldness that Torontonians are currently demonstrating. The City is partnering with tech giant Google on a key piece of data-driven redevelopment. As we admire them from afar, maybe we can also learn some lessons about how to test-drive a carbon-free future while helping that future to evolve with data we provide as we live and work. This fascinating and hopeful city is raising the kinds of questions that can only be asked when a place has the courage to stop talking about its convictions and start acting on them.

I was walking in lower Manhattan this week when I caught the sign above, encouraging me to bring my hand in for a palm reading.

I knew the fortuneteller wouldn’t find my future there, but she was probably right about one thing. Your prior experience is etched in the lines on your hands and your face. But as to where these lines will take you next, the story that Toronto is writing today is likely to provide better guidance than she will—and more information about the priorities to be weighed and measured along the way. 

1.         A Carbon-Free Future

Toronto has initiated two experiments, one is to gradually reduce its carbon footprint to nothing and the other is to build a community from the ground up with the help of data from its new residents. Both experiments are in the early stages, but they provide tantalizing glimpses into the places where we all might be living and working if we commit to the same priorities as Toronto.
 
When I’ve visited this City, it always seemed futuristic to me but not because of its built environment. Instead, it was its remarkably diverse population drawn in large numbers from every corner of the globe. Only later did I learn that over half of Toronto’s population is foreign-born, giving the place a remarkable sense of optimism and new beginnings.
 
Declaring its intention to radically reduce its use of fossil fuels, Toronto has taken a long stretch of King Street, one of the City’s busiest commercial and recreational boulevards, and implemented a multi-faceted plan that bans most private traffic, upgrades the existing streetcar system, concentrates new residential and commercial space along its corridor, and utilizes these densities and proximities to encourage both walking and public transportation for work, school, shopping and play.
 
In contrast to a suburban sprawl of large homes and distant amenities that require driving, Toronto’s urbanized alternative offers smaller living spaces, more contact with other members of the community, far less fuel consumption, and reclaimed spaces for public use that were once devoted to parking or driving. One hope is that people will feel less isolated and lonely as proximity has them bumping into one another more regularly. Another is that residents and workers visiting daily will become more engaged in public life because they’ll need to cooperate in order to share its more concentrated spaces.
 
Toronto’s King Street experiment envisions a time when all of its streets will be “pedestrianized.” There will still be cars, but fewer will be in private hands and those that remain will be rented as needed—anticipating the rise of on-call autonomous vehicles. Streets and roads will also remain, but they will increasingly be paid for by those who use them most, further reducing the need for underutilized roadways and freeing up space for other uses like parks and recreational corridors.
 
Toronto’s experiment in urban living also promotes a “sharing economy,” with prices for nearly everything reduced when the cost is shared with others. Academics like Daniel Hoornweg at the University of Ontario’s Institute of Technology have been particularly interested in using reduced prices to drive the necessary changes. It’s “sharing rides, sharing tools, sharing somebody to look after your dog when you’re not there,” says Hoornweg. Eventually, the sharing economy that started with Uber and Airbnb will become almost second nature as it becomes more affordable and residents exchange their needs to own big homes and cars for other priorities like a sustainable environment, greater access to nature within an urban area, and more engagement over shared pursuits with their neighbors. 
 
For a spirited discussion about Toronto’s King Street experiment that includes some of its strongest boosters, you can listen here to an NPR-Morning Edition segment that was broadcast earlier this week.

2.         Toronto’s Quayside Re-Development

Much like in Philadelphia where I’m writing this post, some of Toronto’s most desireable waterfront areas have been isolated from the rest of its urban center by a multi-lane highway. In response, Toronto has set aside a particularly lifeless area “of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials” that’s spread over a dozen acres for the development of another urban experiment, this time in partnership with a “smart-cities” Google affiliate called Sidewalk Labs. In October, a coalition of the City, Ontario and Canadian governments contracted with Sidewalk to produce a $50 million design for a part of town that’s been renamed Quayside, or what Sidewalk calls “the world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up”—a sensor-enabled, highly wired environment that promises to run itself.

According to a recent article in Politico (that you can also listen to), Quayside will be “a feedback-rich” smart city “whose constant data flow [will] let it optimize services constantly” because it is “not only woven through with sensors and Wi-Fi, but [also] shaped around waves of innovation still to come, like self-driving cars.” For example, in keeping with Toronto’s other pay-as-you-go priorities, one of Quayside’s features will be “pay-as-you-throw” garbage chutes that automatically separate out recyclables and charge households for their waste output.

Here are a couple of views of the future development, including tags on some of the promised innovations.

The new Quayside neighborhood in Toronto

A truly smart city runs on data that is generated from its inhabitants and behaviorally informed algorithms instead of on decisions that are made by Sidewalk’s managers or public officials. Not surprisingly, this raises a series of legal and quality of life questions. 

On the legal side, those questions include: who owns the data produced by Sidewalk’s sensors and WiFi monitors; who controls the use of that data after it’s been generated; and whose laws apply when conflicts arise?  On the issue of data privacy (and other potential legal differences), the Politico article notes that there are:

few better places to have this conversation than Canada, a Western democracy that takes seriously debates over informational privacy and data ownership—and is known for managing to stay polite while discussing even hot-button civic issues.

Moreover, because Canadians view personal privacy as a fundamental human right instead of one that can be readily traded for a “free” Gmail account or access to Google’s search engine, Sidewalk has already stipulated that data collected in Quayside will never be used to sell targeted advertising. 
 
Undesirable human impacts from machine decision-making have also been raised, and Sidewalk is hoping to minimize these impacts by asking the City’s residents in advance for their own visions and concerns about Quayside. A year of consultations is already informing the initial plan. 
 
Longer term, urbanists like Arielle Arieff worry about “the gap between what data can and cannot do” when running a neighborhood.  Part of the beauty of city living is the connections that develop “organically”–chance occurrences and random encounters that a database would never anticipate. Arieff says: “They really do believe in their heart and soul that it’s all algorithmically controllable, but it’s not.”  As if to confirm her suspicions, Sidewalk’s lead manager seems equally convinced that today’s technology can “optimize everyone’s needs in a more rational way.” 
 
Given the expertise and perspective Toronto will be gaining from its King Street experiment and its citizens’ sensitivity to human concerns (like privacy) over efficiency concerns (like convenience), there is room for optimism that the City will strike a livable balance with its high tech partner. Moreover, Sidewalk Labs has a significant incentive to get it right in Quayside. There is an adjacent and currently available 800-acre lot known as Port Lands, “a swath of problem space big enough to become home to a dozen new neighborhoods in a growing metropolis.”
 
To me, Toronto’s Quayside experiment seems to have little downside, with more serious issues arising in Sidewalk’s future smart city projects. Sidewalk may not be selling its Toronto data to advertisers, but it will be vastly more knowledgeable than other cities that lack either the rich pools of behavioral data it has accumulated in Toronto or the in-house expertise to interpret it. Among other things, this creates a power imbalance between a well-funded private contractor and underfunded cities that lack the knowledge to understand what they stand to gain or to forge a working partnership they can actually benefit from. Simone Brody, who runs the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ “What Works Cities” project, says: “When it comes to future negotiations, its frightening that Google will have the data and [other] cities won’t.”
 
But these are longer-range concerns, and there is reason today for cautious optimism that American regulators (for example) will eventually begin to treat powerful tech companies that are amassing and utilizing public data more like “utilities” that must serve the public as well as their own profit-driven interests. That kind of intervention could help to level the public-private playing field, but it’s also a discussion for another day. 
 
In the meantime, Toronto’s boldness in experimenting its way to a future that champions its priorities through the latest innovations is truly inspiring. The cities and towns where the rest of us live and work have much to learn from Toronto’s willingness to claim the future it wants by the seat of its pants.  

This post was adapted from my March 17, 2019 newsletter.

Men At Work

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What makes your work worthwhile?

Last week economist Edmund Phelps got me thinking about some of the possibilities.  Is you mindset at work to expand your capabilities, to become your “better” self by confronting risks on the job for the possibility of even greater rewards—the fuel of entrepreneurs and everyone else who works to advance their own accounts—OR is it to pursue greater security in your life, accumulate more savings, and earn more time away from work?  OR maybe instead of working for yourself, you are striving to build solidarity with others through the services you provide: to strengthen the social fabric instead of just your strand of it.

Phelps also argued that competitive, entrepreneurial work produced tremendous success in the economy overall, while efforts to divert that energy into engineering a more secure, equal and just society has not only caused people to derive less satisfaction from their work over the past 50 years but also for the economy in general to stall. Phelps chose the values of rugged individualism over more collective social values when making his argument about pursing a good life through work.

Over the past week while I was mulling over some of your reactions to Phelps’ thesis, I discovered Harry’s Masculinity Report for 2018 on Twitter. In an era where gender roles in the American workplace are clearly in flux, what could “a masculinity report” possibly contribute? Was it a company’s marketing ploy or something more than that? Would it champion the rugged individual at work or somebody else entirely?

Harry’s is an on-line company that has carved out a highly successful niche for itself by selling men high quality razor blades and other shaving products more cheaply than market leaders Schick and Gillette. The write-up I caught said that its Report had:

surveyed 5,000 men ages 18-95 across the US, weighted for race, income, education, sexual orientation, military service, and more. The respondents were asked about their happiness, confidence, emotional stability, motivation, optimism, and sense of being in control. They were then asked how satisfied they are with their careers, relationships, money, work-life balance, physicality, and mental health, and also about the values that matter most to them.

The results showed a clear trend: The strongest predictor of men’s happiness and well-being is their job satisfaction, by a large margin—and the strongest predictor of job satisfaction is whether men feel they are making an impact on their companies’ success.

This measure, the study finds, is influenced by whether men feel they are using their own unique talents at work, whether they are surrounded by a diverse set of perspectives, how easily and often they can chat with co-workers, whether they feel their opinions are valued, and whether they’re inspired by the people they work with.

The Report itself seemed a bit thin after all that build up, but there were still some nuggets in it. The first was their data-supported effort to re-brand their customer base at a time when “how men act” and “what men want” has been broadly criticized. Another take-away came from seeing how Harry’s portrayed “the American man” it discovered in an ad campaign the company launched around the same time that the Report came out. And finally, the Report used some interesting words and phrases to describe the most significant component of male satisfaction.

According to Harry’s polling, American men are happiest when they are working.

Men at work are men at peace: everything else flows down from satisfying employment. Men who have high job satisfaction are more likely to feel optimistic, happy, motivated, emotionally stable, in control and confident. Job Satisfaction is by far the strongest predictor of positivity, being around three times higher than the next strongest predictor in every region and across the US overall…This is not primarily about wealth, but a sense of making a difference, being part of something bigger and more meaningful… Job satisfaction and the dignity of labor fulfills men’s desire to provide and protect.

Polling found that “Health” was the second driver of male positivity, while “Income” was the third.

I was initially dubious when the Report said Income was only important because of men’s desire “to provide [for] and protect” their loved ones. In my experience, many men (as well as women) want to make as much as possible so that they can consume as much as possible–or at least more than their neighbors. But the observation gained some legitimacy from how men described the central role that work plays in their lives. Martin Daubney, one of the Report’s authors, found that self-determination was far more important than making money for the majority of men who identified work as their primary source of self-esteem. He noted how frequently “autonomy – such as being a consultant or self-employed – was associated with increased job satisfaction.” On this point, Harry’s Report is both consistent with and different from Edmund Phelps’ assessment. It acknowledges the self-defining satisfaction of entrepreneurial labor but seems to reject the lure of financial reward beyond its ability “to provide and protect.”

In addition to re-branding its customers with this Report, Harry’s also wants to influence American policy makers. After all, this is an era when automation is eliminating many middle class jobs, robotics and artificial intelligence will replace even more of them, and post-industrial parts of America (like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and West Virginia) are struggling with high unemployment rates among mid-career men as well as the epidemics of addiction that seem to be associated with feelings of uselessness.  In this regard, Harry’s Report wants to change the policy-making focus from a negative to a positive one.

When service providers seek to engage men, whether in health, education, community, voluntary activities or any other front of social policy, there is often a temptation to address either the problems men have, at best, or the problems men cause, at worst. Our findings strongly suggest that the values which men aspire to most are traditional, moral frameworks. Men want to think of themselves as honest, reliable, dependable and fair-minded and it is perhaps those traits which agencies should emphasize when they wish to earn the trust and co-operation of male service users. Much previous research into masculinity has negatively focused on the problems men cause, often through the nefarious concept of “toxic masculinity”. This has never been more so than in this post-#MeToo landscape and after every mass shooting or domestic terrorist incident.

Lately, the dialogue has expanded to include the problems men have: such as the male suicide epidemic, depression, anxiety and addiction, while offering scant few solutions.

But Harry’s wanted to progress this dialogue forward, by flipping the telescope and focusing on what gives men a positive outlook. We wanted to find out which American men were the most positive and content, then look at the core values and behavioral attributes that nurture these men’s mental wellbeing. (the emphasis above is mine)

Consistent with Phelps’ predilections in Mass Flourishing, Harry’s Report seems to dictate a jobs-focused approach to addressing our economic problems. Creating new jobs and re-investing in old ones can often tap into a man’s natural motivations to make a positive contribution for himself and for those who are depending on him. This Report makes a powerful argument that every man in America who wants a job should have a job–because a man is a terrible thing to waste.

Consistent with its “accentuate the positive” view of masculinity, Harry’s launched a provocative new advertising campaign earlier this year. A female reviewer writing in GQ had this to say about it:

Selling men razors and shaving accessories often relies on the fact that it’s a rite of passage for men and a symbol of masculinity. That usually means beautiful women, severe cheekbones, and model-grade abdominal muscles [Schick and Gillette again]. Harry’s newly released “A Man Like You” ad doesn’t entirely stray from that tradition, but its statement about manhood feels refreshingly modern. The video follows a boy as he teaches a space alien what it means to be a man: how to walk, dress, and of course, shave. In the process, the kid—who’s got a mysteriously absent maybe-astronaut father—comes to the realization that, actually, “there’s no one way to be a man.” The fact that—spoiler alert for a commercial here—the boy appears to be imagining the alien out of grief or longing for dad adds up to a serious tear-jerker of an ending. Razor advertising has maybe never been softer or sweeter than this.

Harry’s ad is well worth a look because it presents an earnest if unexpected view of what men are growing up to be today.

Philosophers and social scientists talk about human nature, but easily as influential (and maybe even more so) are advertisers, playing with our emotions to make their points about who we are and what we’re like.

We already know about the dangerous side of marketers who are using the data collected from our social media exchanges (Facebook), shopping sprees (Amazon), and information searches (Google) to target us in increasingly precise ways. Harry’s ad is an instance where influencers are using our data to show us our best, or at least our better selves in the course of selling us their products.

Portraying a positive masculinity, their ad feels timely as well as necessary. It simply says: this story about men is real too and overdue for some attention.

This post is adapted from my December 2, 2018 newsletter.

Flourishing in Every Job

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Taking greater satisfaction from your work may be your goal, but it seems that it’s hardly the government’s or the economy’s goal. Not so long ago it felt differently, that those goals were all more aligned—and maybe they could be again–but only if we gain a better understanding of how that alignment came about in the first place and the choices we can make in the workplace and at the ballot box to support it again.

Economist Edmund Phelps provides a powerful argument for how the American worker’s wellbeing and capitalism’s productivity became intertwined in his 2013 book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. His aim in writing it (I think) was to remind us that there used to be more of an alliance between how good we felt about ourselves when we were working and the benefits that our good work produced in the economy at large.

Phelps makes several proposals to restore that sense of equilibrium. But in a wide-ranging argument that relies on history, philosophy and quantitative analysis, his primary objective seems to be an ethical one:  to get us thinking about what is important about our work and how to advance those priorities in the choices we make about the quality of life we want to be working for.

When his book came out, Phelps (who teaches economics at Columbia) gave a lecture with the related title: “Mass Flourishing: How It Was Won, Then Largely Lost.” It summarized several of his book’s arguments in a highly accessible format.  Most of the quotations below come from that lecture. It is only a few pages long and well worth your time to read it in full.

Phelps’ thesis is that modern American capitalism created a culture of innovation, which refers to each worker’s entrepreneurial mindset as well as to the broader economic and social benefits that mindset produced. For the individual worker, this culture fostered:

a spirit that views the prospect of unanticipated consequences that may come with voyaging into the unknown as a valued part of experience and not a drawback.

In other words, at the same time that an innovation culture produces economic growth, it also gives rise to the experience of human flourishing as workers become more powerful and capable both as explorers and creators of the new world where they’ll be living.

According to Phelps, it was the Industrial Revolution (around 1800) that ushered in a period of individual and countrywide thriving that continued in America through at least the 1960’s. It was an explosion of individual and economic energy that would not have been possible without the Enlightenment values that took root, particularly in America, during an overlapping historical period.

The impetus for high dynamism, my book argues, was the modern values arising in Jacques Barzun’s Modern Era – roughly from 1490 to 1940 – particularly the values we associate with individualism and vitalism. They include thinking for oneself, working for oneself, competing with others, overcoming obstacles, experimenting and making a mark. The courage to express one’s self by creating or exploring the unknown and the gumption to stand apart from community, family and friends are also modern values. The thesis is that these values stirred a desire to flourish; they shaped a modern conception of the life to aim for – the good life. A prevalence of these values in a nation tends to generate an economy that offers work gratifying those desires – an economy that delivers flourishing.

How these values changed individual workers and the economy around them may be Phelps’ central insight. The standard argument has been that capitalism or “free enterprise” merely took advantage of discoveries and innovations that had been produced by science. Phelps argues that competition between workers in order to prosper contributed at least as much to individual and economic advancement—that capitalism creates innovation instead of merely feeding upon it. For him, it is the Enlightenment values that we brought to work for more than a century and a half that made “the good life” possible.

As quoted in a Thanksgiving article from a few days ago, this is the vitality and ambition that Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed when he traveled across America in the 1830’s, with its grassroots “religious, moral, commercial and industrial associations” standing in for the nobility and bureaucracy that limited European progress. It is what Lincoln was talking about when he observed that in America, “every man can make himself,” as illustrated in a speech he gave in 1859:

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This… is free labor — the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.

But then says Phelps, starting around 1970 and extending into the present day, the values of “free labor” have been constrained or overtaken by other values. In the wake of the New Deal of the 1930’s and even more so of the Great Society of the 1960’s, “traditional” social values have increasingly challenged what used to be our “vigorously individualistic” ones, including the current preference for  “solidarity, social protection and security.”  Among other things, these society changing priorities gave rise to “a vast canvas of entitlements… [and] to thickets of regulation” that impeded and sometimes overwhelmed the culture of innovation.

Instead of driving an economy that championed a good life from the ground up for individual workers, American policymakers began to manage the economy from the top down so that it would be what they conceived of as good for everyone. For Phelps, the satisfaction that came from realizing yourself through your talents at work along with the explosion of productivity that accompanied it in the economy—a century and a half of “mass flourishing”—was increasingly constrained by the parallel pursuit of other, well-meaning priorities. We tried to do two things at once, with a number of unintended consequences.

For one thing, the personal pride and psychic reward that were yours when you seized the opportunity “to make yourself” through your work were replaced by the promise of material wellbeing. Realizing your potential and learning new things about yourself while you overcame challenges in the rough and tumble working world were increasingly exchanged for the security of income and savings and for your leisure time away from work.  According to Phelps, this trade-off no longer serves the individual worker’s “non-material experience” at all, draining work of everything that had once made it so satisfying.

These [recent] formulations overlook the world of creation, exploration and personal growth. Gone is the conception of the good life as a wild ride through an economy with an open future, an economy offering challenges with unimagined rewards. In this climate, young people are not likely to grow up conceiving the good life as a life of Kierkegaardian mystery, Nietzschean challenge and Bergsonian becoming.

(I know, pretty philosophical for an economist.)

Unfortunately as a result, work today has not only become the 8 hours you have to “get through” on your way to a paycheck and a week of vacation, but it also accounts for the startling pull-back of national productivity over the past 50 years.  If we accept his thesis, “mass flourishing” has been replaced by widespread worker dissatisfaction, a decline in economic opportunity with few “haves” and many “have nots,” and an overall economy that seems to have run out of gas.

According to Phelps, the creative competition inherent in grassroots capitalism and the Enlightenment values that allowed it to thrive are essential to an innovation culture that brings prosperity at the same time that it makes work engaging. For him, Washington and the decision makers in other Western governments may believe that they can create more orderly and just societies by regulating, taxing and reducing economic growth, but by doing so they have nearly killed the golden goose.

When the values of the corporate state overtake the values of an innovation culture, the result is slower wage growth, reduced productivity in the economy, greater inequality among the nation’s stakeholders, less inclusiveness in promises like “the American Dream,” a sharp reduction in individual job satisfaction, and workers who have lots of stuff at the end of the day but little sense of personal meaning in their lives. One of the great virtues of Mass Flourishing is that it backs its arguments with the kinds of statistics that you’d expect from a Nobel Prize-winning economist like Phelps.

Artist Saul Steinberg imagines today’s workers, out to recover what they’ve lost

What Phelps does not provide are any statistics that quantify the loss of individual, work-related “meaning” over the past 50 years. But to me at least, his conclusion seems bolstered by the findings of a Gallop Poll that was taken around the same time that Phelps’ book came out.  Its data proved the sorry state of worker engagement both here and elsewhere, as measured by an employee’s “psychological commitment” to his or her job as well as worker disengagement due to a “lack of motivation” and the disinclination “to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.”

Among North American workers, the Poll determined that 71% of the workforce was disengaged, while globally the level was an even more alarming 87%. Moreover, a substantial subset of checked-out workers was found to be “actively” disengaged. These individuals were not only “unhappy and unproductive,” but also “liable to spread [their] negativity to coworkers.” That all four corners of Phelps’ argument are evidence-based makes it particularly compelling food for thought.

As a result, his thesis challenges my sometimes belief (or is it arrogance?) that greater justice, equality, etc. can be achieved by enlightened government policies, even though experience tells me that there never seems to be a large or robust enough majority to produce real change. Does a tried-and-true system like Phelps “grassroots innovation,” with its mix of individual and system-wide incentives, have a better chance than well-meaning political agendas of producing “a good outcome” for both workers and the country’s economy?

Unfortunately, many of Phelps’ proposals for recovering what’s been lost seem impossible in today’s America. One of them still appeals to me however. It would mandate that members of Congress be people who have done more with their lives than practice law or connive in politics. Phelps’ proposes that all of our legislators be workers who have experienced competition first hand and, therefore, have been forced to innovate on the job. They would bring what they know about flourishing at work to Washington before returning, after term limits, to their highly productive lives.

Today, at the end of 2018, there is still grassroots innovation in America, and not just in the garages of Silicon Valley. When your work goals are in line with Enlightenment values like thinking for yourself, enjoying competition and overcoming obstacles, while experimenting, creating and exploring the unknown, you’ll find the opportunities for innovation at work. But these days, you may need to make a more deliberate effort to find them.

This post is adapted from my November 25, 2018 newsletter. Subscribe today.

Choosing a Future For Self-Driving Cars

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It looks pretty fine, doesn’t it?

You’ll no longer need a car of your own because this cozy little pod will come whenever you need it. All you’ll have to do is to buy a 30- or 60-ride plan and press “Come on over and get me” on your phone.

You can’t believe how happy you’ll be to have those buying or leasing, gas, insurance and repair bills behind you, or to no longer have a monstrosity taking up space and waiting for those limited times when you’ll actually be driving it. Now you’ll be able to get where you need to go without any of the “sunk costs” because it’ll be “pay as you go.”

And go you will. This little pod will transport you to work or the store, to pick up your daughter or your dog while you kick back in comfort. It will be an always on-call servant that lets you stay home all weekend, while it delivers your groceries and take-out orders, or brings you a library book or your lawn mower from the repair shop. You’ll be the equivalent of an Amazon Prime customer who can have nearly every material need met wherever you are—but instead of “same day service,” you might have products and services at your fingertips in minutes because one of these little pods will always be hovering around to bring them to you. Talk about immediate gratification!

They will also drive you to work and be there whenever you need a ride home. In a fantasy commute, you’ll have time to unwind in comfort with your favorite music or by taking a nap. Having one of these pods whenever you want one will enable you to work from different locations, to have co-workers join you when you’re working from home, and to work while traveling instead of paying attention to the road. You can’t believe how much your workday will change.

Doesn’t all this money saving, comfort, convenience and freedom sound too good to be true? Well, let’s step back for a minute.

We thought Facebook’s free social network and Amazon’s cheap and convenient take on shopping were unbelieveably wonderful too—and many of us still do. So wonderful that we built them into the fabric of our lives in no time. In fact, we quickly claim new comforts, conveniences and cost savings as if we’ve been entitled to them all along. It’s only as the dazzle of these new technology platforms begin to fade into “taking them for granted” that we also begin to wonder (in whiffs of nostalgia and regret? in concerns for their unintended consequences?) about what we might have given up by accepting them in the first place.

Could it be:

-the loss of chunks of our privacy to advertisers and data-brokers who are getting better all the time at manipulating our behavior as consumers and citizens;

-the gutting of our Main Streets of brick & mortar retail, like book and hardware stores, and the attendant loss of centers-of-gravity for social interaction and commerce within communities; or

-the elimination of entry-level and lower-skilled jobs and of entire job-markets to automation and consolidation, the jobs you had as a teenager or might do again as you’re winding down, with no comparable work opportunities to replace them?

Were the efficiency, comfort and convenience of these platforms as “cost-free” as they were cracked up to be? Is Facebook’s and Amazon’s damage already done and largely beyond repair? Have tech companies like them been defining our future or have we?

Many of us already depend on ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft. They are the harbingers of a self-driving vehicle industry that promise to disrupt our lives and work in at least the following ways. They will largely eliminate the need to own a car. They will transform our transportation systems, impacting public transit, highways and bridges. They will streamline how goods and services are moved in terms of logistics and delivery. And in the process, they will change how the entire “built environment” of urban centers, suburbs, and outer ring communities will look and function, including where we’ll live and how we’ll work. Because we are in many ways “a car-driven culture,” self-driving vehicles will impact almost everything that we currently experience on a daily basis.

That’s why it is worth all of our thinking about this future before it arrives.

Our Future Highways

One way to help determine what the future should look like and how it should operate is to ask people—lots of them—what they’d like to see and what they’re concerned about. In fact, it’s an essential way to get public buy-in to new technology before some tech company’s idea of that future is looking us in the eye, seducing us with its charms, and hoping we won’t notice its uglier parts.

When it comes to self-driving cars, one group of researchers is seeking informed buy-in by using input from the public to influence the drafting of the decision-making algorithms behind these vehicles. In the so-called Moral Machine Experiment, these researchers asked people around the world for their preferences regarding  the moral choices that autonomous cars will be called upon to make so that this new technology can match human values as well as its developer’s profit motives.  In an article that just appeared in the journal Nature, the following remarks describe their ambitious objective.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence have come concerns about how machines will make moral decisions and the major challenge of quantifying societal expectations about the ethical principles that should guide machine behaviour. To address this challenge we deployed the Moral Machine, an on-line experimental platform designed to explore the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. This platform gathered 40 million decisions [involving individual moral preferences] in ten languages from millions of people in 233 different countries and territories. Here we describe the results of this experiment…

Never in the history of humanity have we allowed a machine to autonomously decide who shall live and who shall die, in a fraction of a second, without real-time supervision. We are going to cross that bridge any time now, and it will not happen in a distant theater of military operations; it will happen in the most mundane aspect of our lives, everyday transportation.  Before we allow our cars to make ethical decisions, we need to have a global conversation to express our preferences to the companies that will design moral algorithms, and to the policymakers who will regulate them.

For a sense of the moral guidance the Experiment was seeking, think of an autonomous car that is about to crash but cannot save everyone in its path. Which pre-programmed trajectory should it choose? One which injures (or kills) two elderly people while sparing a child? One which spares a pedestrian who is waiting to cross safely while injuring (or killing) a jaywalker? You see the kinds of moral quandaries we will be asking these cars to make. If peoples’ moral preferences can be taken into account beforehand, the public might be able to recognize “the human face” in a new technology from the beginning instead of having to attempt damage control once that technology is in use.

Strong Preferences, Weaker Preferences

To collect its data, the Moral Machine Experiment asked millions of global volunteers to consider accident scenarios that involved 9 different moral preferences: sparing humans (versus pets); staying on course (versus swerving); sparing passengers (versus pedestrians); sparing more lives (versus fewer lives); sparing men (versus women); sparing the young (versus the old); sparing pedestrians who cross legally (versus jaywalkers), sparing the fit (versus the less fit); and sparing those with higher social status (versus lower social status).

The challenges behind the Experiment were daunting and much of the article is about how the researchers conducted their statistical analysis. Notwithstanding these complexities, three “strong” moral preferences emerged globally, while certain “weaker” but statistically relevant preferences suggest the need for modifications in algorithmic programming among the three different “country clusters” that the Experiment identified.

The vast majority of participants in the Experiment expressed a “strong” moral preference for saving a life instead of refusing to swerve, saving as many lives as possible if an accident is imminent, and saving young lives wherever possible.

Among “weaker” preferences, there were variations among countries that clustered in the Northern (Europe and North America), Eastern (most of Asia) and Southern (including Latin America) Hemispheres. For example, the preference for sparing young (as opposed to old) lives is much less pronounced in countries in the Eastern cluster and much higher among the Southern cluster. Countries that are poorer and have weaker enforcement institutions are more tolerant than richer and more law abiding countries of people who cross the street illegally. Differences between hemispheres might result in adjustments to the decision-making algorithms of self-driving cars that are operated there.

When companies have data about what people view as “good” or “bad”, “better” or “worse” while a new technology is being developed, these preferences can improve the likelihood that moral harms will be identified and minimized beforehand.

Gridlock

Another way to help determine what the future should look like and how new technologies should operate is to listen to what today’s Cassandras are saying. Following their commentary and grappling with their concerns removes some of the dazzle in our hopes and grounds them more firmly in reality early on.

It lets us consider how, say, an autonomous car will fit into the ways that we live, work and interact with one another today—what we will lose as well as what we are likely to gain. For example, what industries will they change? How will our cities be different than they are now? Will a proliferation of these vehicles improve the quality of our interactions with one another or simply reinforce how isolated many of us are already in a car-dominated culture?

The Atlantic magazine hosts a regular podcast called “Crazy Genius” that asks “big questions” and draws “provocative conclusions about technology and culture” (Many thanks to reader Matt K for telling me about it!) You should know that these podcasts are free and can be easily accessed through services like iTunes and Spotify.

A Crazy Genius episode from September called “How Self-Driving Cars Could Ruin the American City” included interviews with two experts who are looking into the future of autonomous vehicles and are alarmed for reasons beyond these vehicles’ decision-making abilities. One is Robin Chase, the co-founder of Zipcar. The “hellscape” she forecasts involves everyone using self-driving cars as they become cheaper than current alternatives to do our errands, provide 10-minute deliveries and produce even more sedentary lifestyles than we have already, while clogging our roadways with traffic.

Without smart urban planning, the result will be infernal congestion, choking every city and requiring local governments to lay ever-more pavement down to service American automania.

Eric Avila is an historian at UCLA who sees self-driving cars in some of the same ways that he views the introduction of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. While these new highways provided autonomous access to parts of America that had not been accessible before, there was also a dark side. 48,000 miles of new highway stimulated interstate trade and expanded development but they also gutted urban neighborhoods, allowing the richest to take their tax revenues with them as they fled to the suburbs. “Mass transit systems [and] streetcar systems were systematically dismantled. There was national protest in diverse urban neighborhoods throughout the entire nation,” Avila recalls, and a similar urban upheaval may follow the explosion of autonomous vehicles.

Like highways, self-driving cars are not only cars they are also infrastructure. According to Avila, if we want to avoid past mistakes all of the stakeholders in this new technology will need to think about how they can make downtown areas more livable for humans instead of simply more efficient for these new machines. To reduce congestion, this may involve taxing autonomous vehicle use during certain times of day, limiting the number of vehicles in heavily traveled areas, regulating companies who operate fleets of self-driving cars, and capping private car ownership. Otherwise, the proliferation of cars and traffic would make most of our cities unlivable.

Once concerns like Chase’s and Avila’s are publicized, data about the public’s preferences (what’s better, what’s worse?) in these regards can be gathered just as they were in the Moral Machine Experiment. Earlier in my career, I ran a civic organization that attempted to improve the quality of Philadelphia city government by polling citizens anonymously about their priorities and concerns. While the organization did not survive the election of a reform-minded administration, information about the public’s preferences is always available when we champion the value of collecting it. All that’s necessary is sharing the potential problems and concerns that have been raised and asking people in a reliable and transparent manner how they’d prefer to address them.

In order to avoid the harms from technology platforms that we are facing today, the tech companies that are bringing us their marvels need to know far more about their intended users’ moral preferences than they seem interested in learning about today. With the right tools to be heard at our fingertips, we can all be involved in defining our futures.

This post is adapted from my November 4, 2018 newsletter.

One Way That Conviction Works

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As a kid, I loved Otis Redding’s songs, especially “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” I still can’t say too much about that voice, those arrangements. Listen for yourself. Silk degrees.

After his groundbreaking performance at the 1967 Monterrey Pop Festival (“resplendent in a teal-green silk suit”), Redding hosted a bash at his Big O Ranch in Georgia. The local newspapers crowed: “Otis is having a royal barbeque.” He was all of 25.

But it was less upbeat for some in his guests. The Black Power movement was on the rise and many of Redding’s inner music circle were white, like R&B producer Jerry Wexler. “People were talking a lot of trash,” Wexler recalled. “What is whitey doing here?” For his part, Redding wanted everyone he loved to be around him as he moved from his mostly African American fan base and into pop’s mainstream. Redding did what he could to un-ruffle feathers across the divide he was straddling, but his guests could still recall the tensions decades later (from a new book about Redding by Jonathan Gould).

I grew up at a time when you could hear what people were calling “soul music” on the same radio station (WAVZ) as the Beatles and Glen Campbell. (Today, it’s hard to imagine that kind of musical or audience diversity at any point “on the dial.”) But back then it was possible to think that the venues where you could see these performers would have the radio’s audience. That wasn’t even close to being true.

As the Sixties wound down and the Seventies got started, I went with a friend to see the Temptations at the Oakdale Theater. It had gently elevated seating-in-the-round, with a tent overhead and open to the summer breezes down below. Sitting almost anywhere gave you an immediate 360, so it took no time at all to discover that we were the only white boys in the house. As the Temps got going—“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” “I Wish It Would Rain”—maybe the audience was just as surprised to see us, but before long it seemed that everyone had switched to pretending that we just weren’t there. I’d never been a minority before, and it almost felt like I was crashing somebody else’s party. But the next couple of times, there was no doubt about that at all.

Five or so years later, a college friend went with me to see Patti Labelle (and her group Labelle) at Assumption College. I was thinking a good-girls-from-parochial-schools kind of environment. Moreover, Labelle had Top 40 hits with lyrics like “Gichie, Gichie, ya ya dada/Gichie, Gichie, ya ya here…” that they sang in costumes straight out of “Star Trek.” It would be fun, but hardly high-risk entertainment. Still as I settled in, it gradually dawned that once again I was one of only two white boys in the house.

But who cared? Patti was on fire as the set got going, and my second memory of the night was her telling us that fans always brought her drugs after a performance (figuring she had to be “on something” to deliver like that), but what she wished they’d bring her was a good hamburger, “because working this hard makes you so damn hungry.”

Everyone laughed, and the girls slid into a Gil Scott-Heron number called “The Revolution Will Not be Televised.” It’s an angry song, with some spoken word delivery that foreshadows rap. It’s also long, building in momentum and rage as it goes along. A minute or so in, Patti had the room in her hand. But just then, people starting turning around and looking our way, talking loud, leaning over—what are you doing here?—as we clutched our armrests in the middle of a long row. This’ll be just like shooting fish in a barrel, I thought.

And Patti thought so too because she put “Everybody settle down” into the song’s narrative a couple of times, and when no one did, she stopped the music altogether, which left some of the outcries hanging in the air above us. I don’t remember what she said next—maybe “we’re all in this fight together”—and tempers began to cool as the house lights came up. With all eyes looking from Patti to us she said: “Everyone is welcome here,” and that was the heartpounding end of it.

More than a decade later and this time in Philly, I either hadn’t learned or didn’t want to because I was making a beeline for The Rib Crib, a take-out joint one neighborhood away. It was a Friday night, the middle of summer, there’d be a big crowd on a main street, the place was practically “an institution,” and Fran would be with me: what could go wrong?

This time it was Charlie Gray who came to our rescue. Once inside, we were packed like sardines, the only “out-of-towners,” and the crowd in front of and behind us started getting rowdy about whether we belonged. “What are you doing here?” “Go back where you came from.” It was already loud in The Crib but our being there took everything up a notch and Charlie noticed.

Technically, we weren’t the only white people this time. Our shoulders were touching autographed pictures on the wall: Charlie with Al Martino, Charlie with Frank Rizzo, Charlie with Sylvester Stallone, so we recognized Charlie as he tried to break through the crowd towards us. A booming voice preceded his big heart, telling everybody just how welcome we were, how honored he was to have us, what could he do to make us more comfortable, maybe some sweet potato pie on the house, and just like that everyone went back to looking forward to their ribs.

Otis, Patti and Charlie tapped into their power and declared what they stood for when something important to them was at stake. They already knew what to say and how to act because surely they also knew already what it was like to be “different” in a suddenly hostile place.

Your experiences clarify what you value most; how you’ve lived and worked determines your priorities. And it’s with both in mind that you’re able to care for yourself and others the next time around. That’s why Patti and Charlie never hesitated when it came to standing up for me.

I loved great food and music enough to put my pride (and maybe my safety) in the hands of strangers. But it was always about more than the risk. By stepping outside my lines, maybe, hopefully, I would gain enough clarity and power to find my generosity too.

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David Griesing Twitter @worklifereward