Ballplayer Named Katz, Rationing Jobs, Monarch Butterflies, Soccer vs. Baseball and More Wisdom

A West Coast friend tells me that when he heard that San Francisco had signed a new left-hander reliever named Katz, he hurried out to the ballpark and boy, was he disappointed.  Litterally, the only relieving Katz does is his own.

Photo courtesy of www.theguidogazette.blogspot.com


                                                                                                                 

Google CEO on "The Future of the Workforce"

Those of you who follow this blog should remember the numerous times I have offered a solution to our unemployment problem which involved (1) limiting the number of hours a worker can spend at their job and (2) mandating an early retirement age at around 50.  These steps would serve to allocate the decreasing amount of labor required in our economy to our workforce in an equitable manner.  It would amount to rationing jobs.  (Check out the July 8, 2012 posting to see my ideas as to how this would actually work.)

With that in mind, it’s good to see that Google’s CEO ls finally beginning to catch up with me.  Note the following, taken from the website RE/CODE.  Check out his thoughts as well as those of Richard Branson, British business magnate and founder of Virgin Airlines.  (Highlighting is mine.)

The Future of the Workforce May Be Part-Time, Says Google CEO Larry Page

July 5, 2014, 11:56 AM PDT

By Liz Gannes  

What happens as machines and artificial intelligence push humans out of the workforce? It’s one of the more important problems of our time — theoretical as it may seem in some sectors today — as technology makes industry after industry more efficient.

One of the most important tech overlords, Google CEO Larry Page, thinks most people want to work, but they’d be happy working less.

Page’s take: We have enough resources to provide for humanity. “The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people’s needs is just not true,” Page said, in an interview at a private event put on by the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures that was just released online.

In fact, today humanity does dumb things like destroy the environment, in part because people work when they don’t have to, Page contended.

The answer isn’t to just cut jobs en masse, Page said. People want to feel “needed, wanted and have something productive to do.” But most everyone would like a little more time off. So perhaps one solution would be to split up part-time work between people, as Page said Richard Branson is experimenting with in the U.K.

Page’s co-founder Sergey Brin had a slightly different take. “I do think that a lot of the things that people do have been, over the past century, replaced by machines and will continue to be,” Brin said. But after Page opined about his idea of “slightly less employment,” Brin interjected to say, “I don’t think that in the near term, the need for labor is going away. It gets shifted from one place to another, but people always want more stuff or more entertainment or more creativity or more something.”

Here’s the relevant segment:

 
Google CEO Larry Page and Google C0-founder Sergey Brin
 

Sergey Brin: I do think that a lot of the things that people do have been, over the past century, replaced by machines and will continue to be.

Larry Page: 90 percent of people used to be farmers. So it’s happened before. It’s not surprising.

Vinod Khosla, interviewer and long-time technology investor who tried to buy Google when it first started: The vast majority of employment shifted from farming to only needing about two percent of the U.S. workforce. That happened between 1900 and the year 2000. I see the beginnings of that happening again with the rapid acceleration the next 10, 15, 20 years.

Page: I totally believe we should be living in a time of abundance, like the Peter Diamandis book. If you really think about the things that you need to make yourself happy: housing, security, opportunity for your kids. I mean, anthropologists have identified these things. It’s not that hard for us to provide those things. The amount of resources we need to do that, the amount of work that actually needs to go into that is pretty small. I’m guessing less than 1 percent at the moment. So the idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people’s needs is just not true. I do think there’s a problem that we don’t recognize that. I think there’s also a social problem that a lot of people aren’t happy if they don’t have anything to do. So we need to give people things to do. You need to feel like you’re needed, wanted and have something productive to do. But I think the mix with that and the industries we actually need and so on are — there’s not a good correspondence. That’s why we’re busy destroying the environment and doing other things maybe we don’t need to be doing. So I’m pretty worried until we figure that out, we’re not going to have a good outcome. One thing, I was just talking to Richard Branson about this. They have

   Branson

a huge problem that they don’t have enough jobs in the U.K. So he’s been trying to get people to hire two part-time people instead of one full-time. So at least, the young people can have a half-time job rather than no job. And it’s a slightly greater cost for employers. I was thinking, the extension of that is you have global unemployment or widespread unemployment. You just reduce work time. Everyone I’ve asked — I’ve asked a lot of people about this. Maybe not you guys, but most people, if I ask them, “Would you like an extra week of vacation?” They raise their hands, 100 percent of the people. “Two weeks [of vacation], or a four-day work week?” Everyone will raise their hand. Most people like working, but they’d also like to have more time with their family or to do their own interests. So that would be one way to deal with the problem, is if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the work week. And then, if you had slightly less employment, you can adjust and people will still have jobs.

Brin: I will quibble a little bit. I don’t think that in the near term, the need for labor is going away. It gets shifted from one place to another, but people always want more stuff or more entertainment or more creativity or more something.

                              *  *  *

Now if I were sitting in at that session, I would have added the following input to what Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, had to say about the need for labor not going away so fast.  I would have quoted University of Maryland economist Peter Morici who recently pointed out in regard to job creation that:

“The jobs created are mostly near the top or bottom, and too often go to immigrants eager to beat down wages, making the bite of inflation (which is what Morici was writing about) even worse.  Since 2000, all of the 5.6 million jobs created have gone to new arrivals, while unemployment among American-born adults has sky-rocketed.” 

  Morici

  

I feel that it isn't these new 5.6 million low-paying jobs about which we are talking.  Rather, the jobs that might be "rationed" would be the well-paying career positions many of our long-term unemployed once held.  Professor Morici’s full article can be found at http://www.moneynews.com/Peter-Morici/Fed-tax-inflation-middle-class/2014/07/01/id/580206/

JL

                                                             

Monarch Butterflies 101

I've seen a few Monarch butterflies around this week, so perhaps they are making a comeback!  Here's a short course in what to look for.

(stock photo)

If you see a caterpillar resembling the one at the right of the picture, leave it alone.  Usually it can be found on milkweed (which I encourage you to plant) as well as some other bushes.  When it is fully grown to about an inch and a half, it turns into a chrysalis or cocoon as shown in the middle of the picture.  Often the chrysalis is some distance from where you first saw the caterpillar, usually on a surface from which it can hang.  Finally, the chrysalis opens up at the bottom, and over a few hours time, the butterfly to the left emerges.  Of course, sometimes nature interrupts this process and it doesn't successfully run its course.  This year, sadly, I have seen the "cycle" interrupted several times where the butterfly never makes it out of the chrysalis, dying prematurely.

What you can do, besides planting milkweed, is to leave the caterpillar alone if you spot one, and make no attempt whatsoever to help the butterfly once it squeezes out of the chrysalis, usually falling to the ground.  It will flap its wings, flutter around a bit, and after several hours, hopefully, take off in quest of a mate.  If the butterfly is a female, sometimes males are actually hanging around, waiting for the newly arrived female to take to the air.  A few months back, I watched such a male latch on to a newly emerged female withing a few seconds of her first flight.  Unfortunately the honeymooning couple was too speedy for my camera.  Incidentally, here is how one can tell the sex of a Monarch butterfly.  Note the two bulges on the veins of the male's wings.

JL 

                                                             
Worldly Wisdom

And here is another bit of commentary from “The Art of Worldly Wisdom” by Baltasar Gracian, a Seventeenth century Jesuit scholar.  Things haven’t changed much since then.

(195) Know how to appreciate.  There is no one who cannot better someone else at something, and there will always be someone who can conquer even him.  It is useful to know exactly how to enjoy each person.  The wise person esteems everyone, for he recognizes the good in each, and he realizes how hard it is to do things well.  The fool despises others, partly out of ignorance and partly because he always prefers what is worst.

JL

 

                                                    

Baseball or Soccer?

Last week saw Germany win the Football (or soccer as we call it)  World Cup, but also saw New York Times columnist David Brooks write a very interesting column metaphorically comparing that sport, baseball and "life."  There have been a lot of comments on his thoughts, with which I tend to agree.  If you missed the column in the Times (or other papers which carry it), here it is.

JL

By David Brooks  (From the New York Times – July 10, 2014)

Is life more like baseball, or is it more like soccer?

Baseball is a team sport, but it is basically an accumulation of individual activities. Throwing a strike, hitting a line drive or fielding a grounder is primarily an individual achievement. The team that performs the most individual tasks well will probably win the game.

  

Individual effort or teamwork?

Soccer is not like that. In soccer, almost no task, except the penalty kick and a few others, is intrinsically individual. Soccer, as Simon Critchley pointed out recently in the New York Times Review of Books, is a game about occupying and controlling space. If you get the ball and your teammates have run the right formations, and structured the space around you, you’ll have three or four options on where to distribute it. If the defenders have structured their formations to control the space, then you will have no options. Even the act of touching the ball is not primarily defined by the man who is touching it; it is defined by the context created by all the other players.

Brooks

As Critchley writes, “Soccer is a collective game, a team game, and everyone has to play the part which has been assigned to them, which means they have to understand it spatially, positionally and intelligently and make it effective.” Brazil wasn’t clobbered by Germany this week because the quality of the individual players was so much worse. They got slaughtered because they did a pathetic job of controlling space. A German player would touch the ball, even close to the Brazilian goal, and he had ample room to make the kill. 

Most of us spend our days thinking we are playing baseball, but we are really playing soccer. We think we individually choose what career path to take, whom to socialize with, what views to hold. But, in fact, those decisions are shaped by the networks of people around us more than we dare recognize.

This influence happens through at least three avenues. First there is contagion. People absorb memes, ideas and behaviors from each other the way they catch a cold. As Nicholas Christakis and others have shown, if your friends are obese, you’re likely to be obese. If your neighbors play fair, you are likely to play fair. We all live within distinct moral ecologies. The overall environment influences what we think of as normal behavior without being much aware of it.

Then there is the structure of your network. There is by now a vast body of research on how differently people behave depending on the structure of the social networks. People with vast numbers of acquaintances have more job opportunities than people with fewer but deeper friendships. Most organizations have structural holes, gaps between two departments or disciplines. If you happen to be in an undeveloped structural hole where you can link two departments, your career is likely to take off. 

Innovation is hugely shaped by the structure of an industry at any moment. Individuals in Silicon Valley are creative now because of the fluid structure of failure and recovery. Broadway was incredibly creative in the 1940s and 1950s because it was a fluid industry in which casual acquaintances ended up collaborating. 

Since then, studies show, theater social networks have rigidified, and, even if you collaborate with an ideal partner, you are not as likely to be as creative as you would have been when the global environment was more fertile.

Finally, there is the power of the extended mind. There is also a developed body of research on how much our very consciousness is shaped by the people around us. Let me simplify it with a classic observation: Each close friend you have brings out a version of yourself that you could not bring out on your own. When your close friend dies, you are not only losing the friend, you are losing the version of your personality that he or she elicited. 

Once we acknowledge that, in life, we are playing soccer, not baseball, a few things become clear. First, awareness of the landscape of reality is the highest form of wisdom. It’s not raw computational power that matters most; it’s having a sensitive attunement to the widest environment, feeling where the flow of events is going. Genius is in practice perceiving more than the conscious reasoning. 

Second, predictive models will be less useful. Baseball is wonderful for sabermetricians. In each at bat there is a limited range of possible outcomes. Activities like soccer are not as easily renderable statistically, because the relevant spatial structures are harder to quantify. Even the estimable statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight gave Brazil a 65 percent chance of beating Germany.

Finally, Critchley notes that soccer is like a 90-minute anxiety dream — one of those frustrating dreams when you’re trying to get somewhere but something is always in the way. This is yet another way soccer is like life. 

                                                

                                                  

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