If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

| Henry Miller

…

Sometimes it’s helpful — especially when long-held or widely accepted ideas don’t seem to be working — to turn the issue upside down, or, as the physicist Richard Feynman suggested, go back to first principles, and try to explain what appears to be complex in terms as simple as possible. In fact, Feynman maintained you were simple enough unless a 12-year-old could understand your explanation. That’s a very new way to look at things.

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Culture Change? No: Behavior Change.

I read the transcript1 of a discussion led by Bruce Daisley with Rob Briner, professor of organizational psychology at Queen Mary University of London. The title is Stop talking about culture - deal with behaviours.

The transcript is quite long, so here’s the TL;DR.

First of all, Briner is attempting — and seemingly, has been doing so for years — to get people to drop the entire premise that culture can be directed to change behavior.

Daisley seems to have internalized Briner’s work as an attack on the ideology around organizational culture. As he puts it:

At one stage [in the discussion] Rob says: ‘If you tell someone - whose favourite thing is organisational culture - and you tell them it’s not a very useful idea - they don’t like it.’ Well, I felt seen.

I’ve pulled what I think are the most salient points in Briner’s exposition [emphasis mine]

‘I’m not saying you can’t change behavior. There’s hundreds of years of theory and evidence and data that you absolutely can. So I have no doubt about that. So let’s just dispel that. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is, culture is not a good route to doing that. It’s not a good way to do it. In fact, it’s very poor way to do it.’

‘Let’s say we have got good measures and good assessments of these behaviors. […] They are things we want to change. My question is, what is the most effective way changing them? And my understanding is culture is pretty useless [at doing that]. And I’ll tell you some of the reasons why. But you actually mentioned one of the problems that we talked about, of counterculture. One thing is, people assume organizations have a culture. That is highly contentious.’

‘It’s making assumptions. We feel we can see the culture. You go to a new workplace, you go to a new office, you say, can feel this culture. The amount of data you have about that organization is minuscule. So you’re not in a position to judge it. But I guess we know, cognitive biases, we want to see patterns and things that are consistent in the world around everything kind of make may help us make sense of it. It’s kind of a bit ridiculous. It’s a bit like it’s going to the north of England and saying, oh, I went to Sheffield where I lived for six years. Oh, everybody was really friendly, a really friendly culture. It’s just nuts. How can you possibly have enough data to make that kind of judgment? Are there norms of behavior? Sure. But then, like your example, the WhatsApp group in the metropolitan place, the question is, how many people doing that? Is it shared? Is it not shared? What actually is the problem with that?’

‘So the first issue around culture is: is there a culture? And people never really ask that question. They just assume or you just can feel it. It’s just a vibe. You can kind of sense it.’

‘No, you can’t.’

'If you define culture as ‘the way we do things around here’ then saying you want to use culture to change the way we do things around here is circular reasoning, and it’s circling in the wrong direction.’

Briner implies circling the other way: change the behaviors and culture — whatever the hell that is — will follow. And does so by a Millerian switcheroo in how to look at the knot of culture and behavior: putting behavior change foremost, and that nebulous culture-thing will follow along.

‘So if there’s a group of people behaving in a way, and maybe there is a norm for that behavior, what you need to do still -- let’s just put culture out of the picture -- and say, we still need to change those behaviors. Then the real question is, how do we change behavior? And as I say, there’s hundreds of years of research into this in many different kinds of fields, from psychology, from health psychology, to social policy, which is almost never used in organizations.’

That final statement is one of my enduring pet peeves: how little of social science research results are even considered by managers of even the largest and most ‘well-run’ companies.

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More Behavior-First Thinking About Culture

Last year, I cited work from 2018 by Jon Katzenbach, Carolin Oelschlegel, and James Thomas2 who actively tried to blunt the widespread psychobabble about leader-driven cultural change [emphasis mine]:

We don’t believe that swift, wholesale culture change is possible — or even desirable. After all, a company’s culture is its basic personality, the essence of how its people interact and work. However, it is an elusively complex entity that survives and evolves mostly through gradual shifts in leadership, strategy, and other circumstances. We find the most useful definition is also the simplest: Culture is the self-sustaining pattern of behavior that determines how things are done.

Made of instinctive, repetitive habits and emotional responses, culture can’t be copied or easily pinned down. Corporate cultures are constantly self-renewing and slowly evolving: What people feel, think, and believe is reflected and shaped by the way they go about their business. Formal efforts to change a culture (to replace it with something entirely new and different) seldom manage to get to the heart of what motivates people, what makes them tick. Strongly worded memos from on high are deleted within hours. You can plaster the walls with large banners proclaiming new values, but people will go about their days, right beneath those signs, continuing with the habits that are familiar and comfortable.

Their best takeaway: find the positive deviants — people already displaying the desired behaviors — and hold them up as examples, and have those exemplars explain to others why and how they do what they do [emphasis mine]:

The best way to start is to ask yourself a series of questions. What are the most important emotional forces that determine what your people do? What few behavior changes would matter most in meeting strategic and operational imperatives? Who are the authentic informal leaders you can enlist? And what can you and your fellow senior leaders do differently to signal and reinforce those critical behaviors?

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Strategy in service to action.

Strategic thinking can often seem a bit up-in-the-clouds, looking for grand trends and movements, and then laying out plans to meet the identified challenges. This may not take into account modern realities, like the speed which markets can shift, competitors may innovate, or formerly stable principles that turn out to be ephemeral.

In other words, the conventional approach to strategy can be a trap.

Mike Jones3 pulled this sort of strategic thinking inside out in A Strategy that Survives Contact with Reality Starts by Protecting Your Ability to Act:

We spend too much time assuming strategy fails because of poor thinking, faulty plans, or lack of buy-in. But more often, strategy fails in execution because, when it meets the real world, the organisation is unable to act.

Not unwilling. Unable.

Not because of resistance, laziness, or incompetence, but because the structures that once enabled action have eroded by bureaucracy, or been replaced by performance theatre and a lack of freedom to make decisions. The people closest to the work, those most aware of what’s changing, are too often the least empowered to respond. Execution dies not from lack of effort, but from the slow erosion of agency.

So if you want a strategy that survives contact with reality, start by protecting your organisation’s ability to act.

His argument follows this reasoning:

• Orientation without the capacity to act is just awareness. It’s a strategy of observation only.

• The missing link is agency. Strategy lives or dies in the organisation’s ability to move. Not just from the top, but throughout the organisation. To shift direction, to adapt, to seize an opportunity before it disappears, to respond to a threat before it becomes a critical issue.

• Worse, it becomes a blame mechanism. We ask people to be empowered, then give them no viable way to act.

• The point of planning is not certainty. It’s manoeuvrability.

• You don’t plan to predict. You plan to act. And that means your planning process should surface risk, expose assumptions, and create the conditions for movement.

• The organisations that execute strategy well are the ones that stay loose, not locked.

• That is the real job of leadership. Not to command every action, but to shape the environment in which good action becomes possible.

• A strategy that survives contact with reality is not the one with the best plan. It’s the one that enables the most meaningful action, that protects the edges of the organisation from centralised dysfunction, that decentralises sensemaking, and that builds structural autonomy, not just rhetorical intent.

Jones' analysis of the paralysis that can follow the hardening of a company’s arteries echoes that of Richard Rumelt4, who also focuses on the capacity for action as the purpose of strategic thinking:

Despite the roar of voices equating strategy with ambition, leadership, vision, or planning, strategy is none of these. Rather, it is coherent action backed by an argument. And the core of the strategist’s work is always the same: discover the crucial factors in a situation and design a way to coordinate and focus actions to deal with them.

Action follows strategy, yes, but strategic planning — and organizational orientation — has to be dedicated toward decreasing impediments to act.

I’m reminded of Heinz von Foester’s Ethical Imperative!

Act always so as to increase the number of choices.

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The most important discoveries are often not the ones we set out to make. If we build a world that delivers only what is asked for, we will lose the capacity to discover what we didn’t know to ask.

| Anne-Laure Le Cunff

…

We Need Abduction For New Ideas

One of the dead-end rabbit holes implicit in the growing sanewashing of the enormous push into large-language-model AI is that all you can get are answers to the questions you ask.

Roger Martin approached this from the perspective of strategic thought [emphasis mine]:

In business (and the rest of the modern world) students are taught only two forms of logic and then further socialized to rely on only these two forms when making decisions. They are taught and socialized to use deductive logic—reasoning from general principles to a specific conclusion—and inductive logic—reasoning from specific data to a general principle. Those are the only two forms of logic considered admissible in making decisions.

A strategic thinker needs to utilize the third and untaught form of reasoning: abductive logic, or inference to the best explanation, as conceptualized and named by the great American pragmatist philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. To create a future that doesn’t exist today, strategists need to pay attention to his assertion that you can’t use inductive and/or deductive logic to come up with any new idea.

The current understanding in the field of AI (and philosophy) is that current LLM systems can not reason abductively:

Current gen AI/ML doesn’t do abduction, and there’s some reason to believe it will not be general artificial intelligence without such capabilities.

It may be totally reasonable to use AI to figure out your taxes, or analyze aerial video streams to check an oil pipeline for methane leaks, but as Le Cunff says poetically, and Martin says prosaically, discovery requires coming up with possible answers to questions formerly unasked.

We need to dream up solutions and the unasked questions, at the same time.

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Open Tabs

Millennials bailing out.

Caroline Warnes, Why Everyone Wants Out of Corporate

Over the past few months, you might have noticed a particular type of content appearing everywhere on social media: the great Millennial career crisis.

The name changes, but the themes are the same. Millennials are burned out and want out of corporate. Everyone is having a midlife career crisis. At the extreme end, some Millennials think they’ve been sold a lie.

Clearly, something is striking a nerve.

Warnes goes into this trend at some length, which is why it is still an ‘open tab’ (meaning in my case I haven’t done my usual deep read, yet).

There’s a short video summarizing her points, a page in.

…

The enshittification of work.

Anne Helen Petersen (or the editors at Buzzfeed) excerpted1 her book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, back in 2020.

In contrast to Warnes, Petersen’s focus probably goes back 10 years, pre-pandemic. And her focus is more on the hollowing out of stable, full-time work, and the rise of the freelance economy. A few quotes:

‘Uber merely took a trend among corporations — employing as few people as possible — and adapted it for the smartphone era.’ | Sarah Kessler

Uber solved the problem [of employment] by calling their employees “customers” and by officially designating them as “independent contractors.”

The gig economy isn’t replacing the traditional economy. It’s propping it up in a way that convinces people it’s not broken.

Freelance and gigging don’t make drudgery or anxiety disappear. Instead, they exacerbate them.

I love this framing:

Masking exploitation in the rhetoric of freelancing and independent contractors’ “flexibility” avoids talking about why that flexibility is coveted: because the supposedly “thriving economy” is built on millions of people being treated as robots.

…

The Mar-a-Lago Accord

Adam Tooze summarizes the so-called ‘Mar-a-Lago Accord’ that has earwormed the international economics community. Basically, human beings searching for a grand vision behind the chaos of Trump’s policies. Or as he puts it,

Chartbook 363 Stockholm syndrome in Mar-a-Lago: The belief that “something must be done” and the sanewashing of economic policy in the age of Trump

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Elsewhen

A Paradox of Leadership | Stowe Boyd (from 2024)

Sam Walker, Ursula Le Guin | Boreout | Factoids | Elsewhere, Elsewhen

One of the paradoxes of leadership is that the better you are at it, the less people tend to notice you. When leaders remain calm and consistent, and unite people over a sensible course of action, observers may be less likely to recognize their influence or give them proper credit.

| Sam Walker, What Football Can Teach Politics

We don’t have that in the US federal government, at present.

…

On Serendipity in Reading | Stowe Boyd (July 2026)

A medievalist offers wise counsel for broad reading as a means to revelation.

Workings

On Serendipity in Reading

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13 days ago · 3 likes · Stowe Boyd

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When your life feels horribly constrained by forces beyond your control, when it feels as if every possible avenue has been exhausted, socialism arrives with a vision of another way: Here, it says. Here lies the way out.

| Jia Lynn Yang, How American Socialism Changed, and Stormed the Democratic Party1

The Decline of Capitalism

We may have reached a turning point in the US, and it comes under guise of a growing dissatisfaction with unfettered capitalism and the Democratic Party. I will again quote Jia Lynn Yang:

Some Democrats argue that in the face of the rising tide of D.S.A. [the Democratic Socialists of America], the party should affirm its support for capitalism. This may be a tough sell in a time when capitalism is falling in popularity. Under half of Americans say capitalism is working very well or even somewhat well, down from 60 percent a decade ago, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC survey. Whatever you want to call the status quo, many Americans say they simply don’t want it.

I plan to focus over the next few months — leading up to the mid-term elections in November, and beyond — on the implications of growing acceptance of a ‘social democracy’ agenda. Which is not communism, as some pig-headed detractors claim. American socialists today are not advocating for a revolutionary overturning of capitalism and generally advocate an ethics-based — not class-oriented — gradualist approach with the goals of reducing inequality and nationalizing aspects of society that should be universal: health care, child care, access to housing, and a living wage for all.

I will not take on the hair-splitting task of dissecting the literal agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America. But I will be digging in on the clearest voices on a socialist-driven reformation of the economy, government, and, in particular, the growing power of oligarchic corporations, which is the US, are run as ‘private governments’ as Elizabeth Anderson styles it (see The Right To Have Rights, The Unfreedom Of Work, The Struggle For Meaningful Work).

Stay tuned.

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How Corporations Play

Michael Sainato reports on how large corporations game the system, relying on governments to provide public assistance to their workers:

Many workers at some of the largest US corporations have no choice but to rely on healthcare and food assistance because of low wages, even as CEO compensation continues to grow, according to a new report released Wednesday [2026-03-04].

The report, published by the Institute of Policy Studies, focuses on 20 of the S&P 500 corporations that have primarily US-based workforces and report the lowest median wages of the group.

Collectively, this “Low-Wage 20” employs 6.7 million people in the US. The median pay at a majority (75%) of the companies is lower than the income minimum for a family of three to be eligible for Medicaid in most states. At 13 of the companies, median pay was also lower than the Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program income threshold for a family of three.

Nearly a quarter of Walmart employees (29.3%) and half of Amazon workers (48.4%) in Nevada – which collects Medicaid enrollment numbers among employees at large companies – were on Medicaid in 2024, according to the report.

Among the four states that disclose Snap data related to large companies – Colorado, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Michigan – 10,920 Walmart workers and 9,633 Amazon workers were enrolled in Snap in 2024.

The report noted Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is expected to result in some 7.5 million Americans losing Medicaid and 4 million losing some or all of their Snap benefits after budget cuts.

First, corporations underpay front-line workers, who will, of necessity, turn to government assistance to survive, and then the federal government reduces the funds available for programs supporting the powerless. And neither the corporations nor the Feds step up to cover the shortfalls.

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A Duopoly of Wheelchairs

Leila Fadel of NPR reports on private equity-backed wheelchair manufacturers that, in recent years, have acquired dozens of smaller competitors, leading to a classic example of corporatocracy: two competitors acting in concert to steer wheelchair users toward buying new wheelchairs by slowing repairs.

Fadel interviewed Megan Smith of Boston’s WGBH, following a local protest by wheelchair users:

SMITH: So the wheelchair users I’ve talked to say that 10, 15 years ago, there were a lot more options - a lot of mom-and-pop shops that they could go to where technicians got to know them personally. But that’s not the case anymore. The wheelchair repair market is now dominated by two companies - Numotion and National Seating & Mobility. Both companies are owned by private equity investment firms, and each has bought up dozens of companies and competitors.

Critics say the business model prioritizes profits and cost-cutting and that these companies take forever to fix people’s chairs. They’re investing more in the part of the company that brings in more revenue, which is selling new chairs rather than fixing old chairs. For example, critics say they don’t hire enough technicians to keep up with repair work. So I hear stories about people waiting three, five, nine months or more for a part. And the wheelchair users I talked with said the problem gets so frustrating at times that they sometimes order parts online or from a hardware store or even just go to their local bike shop for a fix.

There’s a bill pending at the Massachusetts legislature to require wheelchair repairs to take no more than 10 days, and Representative Ayanna Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced a national bill in the US House.

So, another example of large corporations — that in this case should have been blocked from forming highly concentrated monopolies that only benefit their financial backers, and disadvantage the public — exerting their economic force to coerce customers to cough up money unnecessarily. And, even worse, these folks are blocked from living their lives, going to work, going to school, caring for loved ones, while their wheelchairs are sidelined for weeks or months.

Rather than just calling for regulation of the timeframe for repairs, we should be calling for these companies to be broken up on anti-trust grounds.

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There are tranquil ages, which seem to contain that which will last forever. And there are ages of change, which see upheavals that, in extreme instances, appear to go to the roots of humanity itself.

| Karl Jaspers

Let’s see… what sort of age are we in, I wonder? And what did we think was looming over the horizon, twenty years ago?

…

For a variety of reasons — some of which I hinted at in previous posts — I have been pushed off my normal routines. Forgive my absence.

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Short Takes

‘Dating’ at work?

Juno Kelly reports:

More than 90 percent of people who have had sex with a colleague didn’t regret it.

Higher than I would have expected.

…

But, meanwhile, no hugging.

Just 29% of Gen Z workers say casual hugs are acceptable in the workplace, while 28% say colleagues should stick to handshakes only, and 4% say there should be no touching at work, according to a survey from EduBirdie, an online writing service.

| Kevin J. Delaney

Well, no ‘casual’ hugs.

…

Americans can’t find jobs.

Americans can’t find jobs.

The number of Americans not in the labor force who currently want a job rose +76,000 in May, to 6.2 million, the 3rd-highest since July 2021.

These are people who are not officially part of the labor force, meaning they are not actively looking for work, but say they want a job.

This marks the 4th consecutive monthly increase, totaling +349,000.

Since March 2023, this figure has surged by +1.2 million people and is now above 2008 Financial Crisis levels.

As a % of total employment, this metric is up to 3.8%, the 2nd-highest since October 2021.

By comparison, the 2001 recession and the 2008 peaks were 3.6% and 4.3%.

Labor market conditions are deteriorating beneath the surface.

| The Kobeissi Letter

…

A China wind is blowing.

Keith Bradsher, Qilai Shen report on China’s dominance in wind power:

Last year, China installed three times as much wind power capacity as the rest of the world combined, even as its turbine exports jumped. The global industry’s center of gravity has shifted decisively: All of the world’s six largest wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese, displacing once-dominant European firms and companies like General Electric.

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Elsewhen

Because of changes in my work process, I have been uncovering and re-exploring old materials. I thought I’d share some things from the archive that were predictions or pronouncements about the future of work, and which largely haven’t panned out.

…

How Anti?

Reading Even With a Dream Job, You Can Be Antiwork1, by Farhad Manjoo, is a dizzying experience, since it was written in 2021, when employers were hiring like mad, and workers felt like the balance of power had shifted:

The world’s long-suffering workers have finally gained some measure of leverage over their bosses, and their new power is a glorious thing to behold.

In South Korea this week, tens of thousands of union members staged a one-day strike to demand better benefits and protections for temporary and contract workers. In Britain, where Brexit has contributed to severe shortages of goods and labor, Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has been taking dubious credit for what he calls a new era of higher pay.

And in the United States, a record nearly 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August, according to the Labor Department, and more than 10 million positions were vacant — slightly down from July, when about 11 million jobs needed filling. The shortage of workers has led to a growth in wages that has surpassed many economists’ expectations, and seems to have discombobulated bosses who are used to employees leaping at their every demand.

How things have changed, in this brave new world.

Manjoo borrowed ‘antiwork’ from kathi weeks, the originator of the term, who shared this with him:

“The pandemic gave us a kind of forced separation from work and a rare critical distance from the daily grind,” Kathi Weeks, a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University, told me. “I think what you’re seeing with people refusing to go back is a kind of yearning for freedom.”

And remember the surge in Reddit’s /antiwork?

You can get a peek of a post-job world at /antiwork, a Reddit forum “for those who want to end work” that has gone viral in recent months, with hundreds of thousands following its subversive cause. /antiwork teems with posts from workers who are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore — including many screenshots from folks saying they are telling off their managers, quitting in a rage after years of abuse.

That rage has died down, a few years later (which seems like a lifetime, nowadays), now that we are in the ‘hire slow, fire slow’ era, and people are hunkered down, hoping to weather the storm of the 2020s economy.

Manjoo lands on a relatively mild and uninsightful truism:

Even a dream job is still a job, and in America’s relentless hustle culture, we have turned our jobs into prisons for our minds and souls. It’s time to break free.

Break free of what? Like most of those living inside the prison of work, he still wants to make it a personal quest, like people thinking they have to become more resilient instead of smashing the machinery that’s driving them like chattel.

…

The edge of chaos.

In 1999, Richard Pascale wrote Surfing on the Edge of Chaos2, making the argument that we were — then — entering a new era of ‘management science’.

I started out dubious, since he refers to the era immediately preceding — Michael Porter’s Five Factors and Competitive Advantage, and other now discredited models — as the ‘strategic era’. (At least he left out Clay Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation baloney.)

He states, [emphasis mine],

During the 1980s and 1990s, performance improvement (e.g., total quality management, kaizen, just-in-time, reengineering) succeeded the strategic era. It, too, has followed the S-curve trajectory. Now, as it trails off, an uneasiness is stirring, a feeling that “something more” is required. In particular, disquiet has arisen over the rapidly rising fatality rates of major companies. Organizations cannot win by cost reduction alone and cannot invent appropriate strategic responses fast enough to stay abreast of nimble rivals. Many are exhausted by the pace of change, and their harried attempts to execute new initiatives fall short of expectations.

The next point of inflection is about to unfold. To succeed, the next big idea must address the biggest challenge facing corporations today — namely, to dramatically improve the hit rate of strategic initiatives and attain the level of renewal necessary for successful execution. As in the previous eras, we can expect that the next big idea will at first seem strange and inaccessible.

So, did the unnamed ‘It’ succeed?

He names it: complex adaptive systems.

“Unlike the earlier advances in hard science,” writes economist Alex Trosiglio, “complexity deals with a world that is far from equilibrium, and is creative and evolving in ways that we cannot hope to predict. It points to fundamental limits to our ability to understand, control, and manage the world, and the need for us to accept unpredictability and change.

He spends a great many paragraphs outlining the interconnected notions of complexity, complex adaptive systems, and emergence. And while I confess that I was one of many who likewise looked to that body of science for insight and understanding for the world of work, my judgment in 2026 is that it has not meaningfully percolated into the average Fortune 1000 company, nor has it notably formed a new ‘era’ for management strategy that had moved into wide use. There may be a large cadre of consultants, academics, and even within-the-walls-of-the-corporation practitioners, but it is hard to see foundational change in management thinking across the board, alas.

His characterization of ‘old’ management approaches sound a lot like today’s management approaches:

As executives move up in organizations, they become removed from the work that goes on in the fields. Directives from the top become increasingly abstract as executives tend to rely on mechanical cause-and-effect linkages to drive the business: strategic guidelines, head-count controls, operational expense targets, pay-for-performance incentives, and so forth. These are the tie rods and pistons of “social engineering” — the old model of change.

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We need to stop evaluating corporate leaders simply on the basis of how much wealth they create for investors. A healthier yardstick would be this: the extent to which leaders create firms that are economically, ethically, and socially sustainable.

| James O’Toole, Warren Bennis, A Culture of Candor1 (2009) [emphasis theirs]

…

O’Toole and Bennis mostly discuss organizational transparency — and its absence — in A Culture of Candor, but I am focused on their proposed yardstick for evaluating leaders more broadly. And, alas, there are so many examples of corporate leaders falling short of this yardstick, it’s honestly hard to find many that measure up.

A case in point: many of the corporate overlords provide a stream of psychobabble about their hardened post-pandemic Return To Office (RTO) strategies, and very few offer actual data or research to support that move, which few observers deem economically, ethically, and socially sustainable.

But as Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliott spell out in the section below, those promoting RTO are liars. And maybe they can’t help it, because they are narcissists before anything else, and they see remote work as ‘a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.’

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RTO Is A Form Of Worship, Not A Productivity Boost

The bottom line on RTO, from the authors:

When the pandemic came to an end, many people who had been working from home assumed they would be allowed to maintain that habit at least a few days a week. But today in the U.S., a third of companies have forced everyone back to the office full time and have banned remote and hybrid work.

Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.

The authors undertook a major research study that shows a strong correlation between narcissism of leaders and enacting RTO policies:

Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.

They go on to detail the many defects in these policy decisions, and how they manifest:

• ‘Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a drug — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.’

• ‘When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control.’

• ‘Self-centered leaders often respond to these threats by tightening their grip. They declare that people are shirking from home instead of working from home. They threaten to fire people who aren’t on site five days a week.’

• ‘Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.’

Remember the O’Toole/Bennis yardstick? Do these sound like the results of economically, ethically, and socially sustainable policy decisions? Grant et al. don’t explicitly mention the financial benefits of not commuting or the ecological impacts, but they matter. And they should matter more than the sensitive egos of puffed corporate honchos.

There are some downsides to remote work, true, but these can be countered:

• ‘Research suggests that working from home for more than half the week can be isolating — it’s harder to build connections and cultures. It’s also more difficult to encourage creative collisions, informal learning and mentoring. But it doesn’t take five days a week to accomplish these goals. In fact, it turns out that people are most collaborative and creative when they work remotely part of the week.’

• ‘Coordination counts. Teams need anchor days when everyone shows up — especially to welcome newcomers and mentor junior people.’

• ‘Intensity beats frequency.’ Companies like Atlassian have shown that quarterly team gatherings can do more for team building and connection than daily commuting.’

• Being flexible — based on circumstances, type of work, and individual lfe situation (like care-giving) — is better than a blanket remote work policy, especially for women.

The authors close with what is likely to be a call for reason that narcissistic leaders will be unable to hear:

The responsibility of leaders is not to mold the world to their needs. It’s to adapt themselves to the world’s needs, even if it means learning to live without the thrill of a live audience.

In my experience, people can’t change their personalities past adolescence, short of cataclysmic psychological events. So the authors’ words may really only influence those who aren’t narcissists to not adopt the draconian dictates of the C-suite egomaniacs running so many large and prominent corporations.

There are those who feel that O’Toole and Bennis’ yardstick should be adopted as a golden rule and take precedence over other considerations in policymaking. Those people are unlikely to be narcissists.

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Other Inputs

Management doesn’t do science

In a stark expose of the anti-scientism in today’s management, Eryn Brown investigates the sad state of affairs in ‘evidence-based management’, where findings from scientific research could be applied to critical management initiatives and decisions, but generally are not.

| On Evidence-Based Management | Stowe Boyd (2018)

…

Red-Collar Crime

A Shocking Number of Killers Murder Their Co-workers | James Graham (2018):

In a 2010 study, researchers administered a test frequently used to gauge psychopathy to 203 managers and executives at seven companies. On a 40-point scale, the average person scores 3 or below. Shockingly, eight subjects pulled a score of 30 or higher, which is serial-killer territory. “Their excellent communication and convincing lying skills, which together would have made them attractive hiring candidates in the first place, apparently continued to serve them well,” the researchers concluded.

How many office psychopaths turn violent is less clear: The FBI doesn’t track red-collar crime, nor does OSHA. Richard G. Brody, another CFE and an accounting professor at the University of New Mexico, sometimes trawls the web for murder trials involving white-collar defendants, and has become convinced that red-collar crime is more prevalent than most people suspect. Detectives don’t always spot such homicides, he told me, so crime scenes may be contaminated and murders may pass for suicide. “Whenever I read about high-profile executives who are found dead, I immediately think red-collar crime,” he said. “Lots of people are getting away with murder.”

…

Your boss may actually be a psychopath.

Yes, Your Boss Is A Psychopath | Stowe Boyd:

If you find yourself working for a manipulative, cold, irresponsible boss, you are not alone. But you might not think he’s a realio-trulio psychopath. But he truly could be. (And it’s almost always ‘he’, not ‘she’.)

And when you ask yourself how could this psychopath been promoted into a role theoretically based on sound judgment and acting responsibly, you have to realize that senior executives in the company may have quite different perceptions of your manager than you and your co-workers do. In particular, the traits your boss is demonstrating to his superiors may be considered the hallmarks of management potential, because a surprisingly high number of managers — especially senior executives — are looking for people with psychopathic traits to promote.

Clive Boddy, in A Climate Of Fear: Stone Cold Psychopaths At Work, summarized research on the numbers:

Estimations are that while about 1% of junior employees are corporate psychopaths (assuming an even distribution of psychopaths across society) they exist at a higher incidence of about 4% at senior organizational levels. Notably, these percentages may be even higher in certain types of organizations, as corporate psychopaths are thought to gravitate towards organizations where they can acquire money, power and control, as well as honours and prestige, rather than to the less rewarded and less well-remunerated caring professions. Caring for other people is simply not on their agenda.

Estimates for the proportion of senior executives go even higher.

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Every fall is an excuse to rise.

| Gia Kourlas

…

Resilience v. Doom Trolling

I think this is the first time I have featured a quote from a dance critic, a field perhaps uniquely suited to discuss the fall-and-rise dynamic inherent in mastery and confronting challenges: being resilient in the face of disruption and uncertainty.

Interest in resilience in the business context has been steadily growing in recent years, peaking earlier this year:

Looking at the queries involved, we see very high growth on all sorts of facets of resilience. Note the spike in operational resilience:

As I wrote in 2023,

Put into everyday terms, resilient systems are designed with as many points of failure in mind as possible and organized to withstand adverse circumstances. And, since a system isn’t self-aware, each is a reflection of the thinking of their designers who must consider the adversities the system confronts. Those who build resilient systems are pessimists. But being a pessimist isn’t enough: you have to build pessimistic systems, as well.

And organizational resilience adds the human factor. Not just as system designers, but as agents in the system:

Organizational resilience is even more complex, since organizations involve the intersection of the human (like social networks, partnerships, governments, markets and customers) and artificial (computer systems, software systems, facilities, and information).

One clue to organizational resilience is the root word for resilience. It’s based on the word salire, which means to jump (while resalire means to jump back).

Unlike systems, the human parts of organizations can be self-aware. And in recent decades we’ve learned that organizations that seek to become more resilient work to incorporate certain capabilities: they create emergent organizations, where decision-making is distributed, groups and individuals have high degrees of autonomy to create and execute plans, they invest in high degrees of learning and well-being, and where leadership — like decision-making — is distributed across the organization.

As in system resilience, resilient organizations continue to carry out their mission in the face of adversity, but along with jumping back they can also jump ahead: they can adapt and improve when confronted with challenges. In this way, those who work to shape resilient organizations are optimistic: they plan for the worst, but they believe they can overcome it, through the capabilities they have developed organizationally.

I suspect that the spike in interest in organizational/business resilience is driven by increased uncertainty: climate change and its increased risks, political turmoil, economic disruption, and — perhaps most central — the emergence of AI.

In years gone by, I would argue that personal resilience requires us to embrace uncertainty:

Those who design resilient systems are pessimists, and those who shape resilient organizations are optimists, but we as individuals must rely on hope, ‘the embrace of the unknown and unknowable’1. Resilience is, in the final analysis, to reach beyond certainty to our capacity for hope, and the acceptance of uncertainty as a counter to adversity.

I remain aligned with hopecore, but I confess I see mounting uncertainty and risk with growing concern.

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Consider the recent essay by Cal Newport, Dear A.I. Companies: The Doom Trolling Needs to Stop, about the efforts of AI companies to scare the shit out of everybody, unlike earlier prophets of tech:

Technology revolutions in the digital age are typically accompanied by optimism and excitement — recall Steve Jobs basking in thunderous applause as he introduced the iPhone in 2007. The major A.I. companies seem to be following a darker and weirder strategy: They like to solemnly describe the harms that their models will cause, while acting helpless to do anything about it.

He singles out statements by Anthropic and OpenAI, and gives a name to this mirror-world, downer, prophetic forecasting:

Let’s call this strategy “doom trolling.” It’s one of the defining and most arresting properties of our current A.I. moment, and I’ve come to believe that it’s morally indefensible.

There are really only two options for the intentions of A.I. companies when they engage in doom trolling. The first is that they actually believe that the systems they’re building have a nontrivial chance of producing massively disruptive events — from destroying the economy in the best case to wiping out our species in the worst. If this were true, every reasonable ethical system would argue that there is only one acceptable response: to immediately stop working on any product that might accelerate such a future, and lobby with all of your resources to help force other A.I. companies to do the same. From a moral perspective, any other reaction would be monstrous.

The second option is that these A.I. companies aren’t really concerned about these risks, and that they’re injecting these doses of unresolvable doom for other reasons. They might want to amplify the perceived power of their technology at a time when they’re setting up their initial public offerings. Or they hope their performative reports and somber interviews will help them compete for top engineering talent coming from a Silicon Valley culture that’s steeped in this type of doomerism.

He goes on at length, handicapping why these AI firms might want to carpet-bomb the popular zeitgeist like this. He then ties the last ligature in his argument:

As a computer scientist and a digital ethicist, I’m both optimistic about the possibilities of A.I. and confounded by the terrifying and grim way that current technology leaders insist on talking about it. This could have been a period of hopeful innovation, but instead our emotions are being manipulated by Silicon Valley’s self-serving and morally untenable addiction to doom trolling. This communication strategy has to stop. The harm it’s causing to the public’s mental health has arguably outweighed the benefits that A.I. has so far delivered.

And possibly leading business leaders to search for ways to increase resilience in a world undergoing an earthquake, disturbing the foundations of the economy, business, and society. I am uncertain how we can build resilience when the ground is shaking so much.

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Elsewhen

Constructive Uncertainty

A few years ago, I wrote about constructive uncertainty, a skill which is relevant to the discussion above, but from a different angle:

One of the paradoxes that reveals a great deal about making sense of the world is the tension between uncertainty and action. On one hand, we are often told that being effective relies on decisive reasoning, and quickly choosing a course to pursue even with incomplete information. However, opting to eliminate the discomfort of an uncertain or ambiguous situation by making a quick decision can often backfire, and in predictable ways.

When I recall events in my life where my decisions went sideways, they were often hurried, and driven more by my desire to end a period of stress and insecurity than actually determining what could go wrong… before finding out the hard way.

And the world is more complex than ever, more ambiguous, less predictable. As Margaret Wheatley points out in Willing to Be Disturbed,

we live in a complex world, we often don’t know what’s going on, and we won’t be able to understand its complexity unless we spend more time in not knowing.

Wheatley’s formulation, that we need to spend more time in not knowing, is a first step in deconstructing uncertainty. One aspect of contemporary emotional maturity is to accept the state of not knowing. Not having a quick answer for complex questions. Being willing to admit being confused by new situations, or rapid changes in the context we are living and working in. Remaining open to spending more time listening to alternative viewpoints before shutting down gathering inputs. These are all aspects of constructive uncertainty, a term I learned from Howard Ross: ‘learning to slow down decision-making’.

You might want to read the whole thing. I made constructive uncertainty open to all.

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When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.

| Bob Dylan1

…

I’ve been distracted this past week, partly because of a menagerie of visitors passing through in homage to my mother-in-law, Erna Hoover, who celebrated her 100th birthday last Friday. With all the comings and goings, I was pulled away from my daily patterns, which can be both positive and negative simultaneously.

The pleasant distraction of the World Cup, and great conversations with family and friends led me back to Dylan’s observation that time is actually standing still while we are the ones moving, an echo of ‘time is a flat circle’ from True Detective. Everybody I spoke to — even 100-year-old Erna — spoke about where they are headed, new directions and new impulses.

And I discovered a new move that I will be making, in a series of discussions with one of my sons, Blake. You’ll be hearing more about that soon.

In the larger context of the Dylan quote about being 80, he also wrote about attaining freedom ‘from the lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore.’

Well, I realized that I am not 80 — or 100 — and I still have a parade or two left in me. More to follow.

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I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the present time, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 from $6. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

AI Threatens The Back Office

Ben Casselman reports2 on a group that may be more vulnerable to displacement by AI than the often-discussed, higher-degreed knowledge workers like IT staff, lawyers, consultants, and radiologists: namely, back-office workers:

Many economists are more concerned about a different, larger group of white-collar workers: customer service representatives, bookkeepers, payroll clerks and human resources specialists who fly under the radar but collectively account for tens of millions of jobs.

These jobs typically offer a middle-class salary or a pathway to achieving one — much as manufacturing jobs did for men before decades of globalization and automation wiped many of them away.

“I worry that A.I. will be to high-school-educated women what deindustrialization was to high-school-educated men,” said Molly Kinder, a former researcher at the Brookings Institution who is starting an organization focused on A.I.’s impact on workers and the economy.

Like manufacturing in the early 2000s, when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (leading to what is known as China Shock 1.0), Kinder is referring to the potential for outsourcing back-office jobs that provide a possible path to the middle class for many:

“If you think about the back office, that’s not the main function of the company, so they might think of it as a cost center,” said Jung Ho Choi, an accounting professor at Stanford.

Economists at Northwestern University recently recalculated measures of A.I. exposure based on the makeup of the total work force, not just the people using the technology. Administrative and frontline roles, such as customer service representatives, rose to the top of the list.

“The most affected jobs are secretaries, are routine clerks,” said Michelle Yin, one of the working paper’s authors. “They’re not computer scientists or data scientists at all.”

Widely cited measures of A.I. exposure, she added, “give the wrong impression” about who will be most affected — and, in particular, tend to understate the impact on people without college degrees, older workers and people of color.

[...]

“My worry is that the lesson from deindustrialization is that many of these women will be able to get another job, but it might be a much worse job,” Ms. Kinder said. “It might be more precarious.”

This is parallel to the IT revolution of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when typists, filing clerks, bookkeepers, and secretaries were displaced by office suites, email, and web services.

And even if AI comes on slowly enough for these millions of workers to make a transition to the new economy, so long as they get the chance to gain skills to take the next step on a new career ladder, like a receptionist moving into human resources.

If A.I. eliminates that middle step, it could be harder for workers to move up the career ladder, said Justin Heck, a coauthor on a recent article with Mr. Muro.

“What happens if we’re no longer building those skills on the job? Where is there available to move up?” Mr. Heck asked. “What are the ramifications three years from now, when workers remain stranded in low-wage work, and employers are struggling to fill high-wage roles because we’ve carved out the middle?”

What, indeed.

…

Meanwhile

Tech workers not using AI are three times more likely to be laid off, according to Gallup:

In the same survey, only 1% of laid-off workers claim AI was the reason. But consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas reported in March that AI had been cited in over 12,000 job cuts in the U.S.

Maybe people were laid off without being told AI was the supposed reason?

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Short Takes

The Luddites are back.

In Understanding the Luddites in the age of AI, Brian Merchant writes

The Luddites are back in fashion, but too many people still get them all wrong. This is what they really stood for, fought against, and why they matter now more than ever.

I haven’t read it all yet, but looks like a long and detailed treatment of what neo-Luddism is, or might become, not just a Wikipedia entry on loom smashing.

…

Nothing about us, without us.

I’ve downloaded this report from CircleForward.us, entitled Nothing About Us, Without Us: A Protocol for Decision-Making with Consent. May be more material for my series on Deciding How To Decide.

…

Something You Buried Might Still Be Breathing

Circling back to the teaser at the top of this issue — where I wrote that I ‘still have a parade or two in me’ — I am reading and rereading this post by Anna from Back to Senses, who describes herself as the human equivalent of a psychedelic, entitled Something You Buried Might Still Be Breathing.

She warns that ‘the word reinvention is a little misleading’, and when I read a few paragraphs down, I felt like I’d fallen into a deep well [emphasis hers]:

Here’s the thing: the thing you set down doesn’t leave. It goes quiet, but it doesn’t go away. It often shows up as a small persistent pull toward something you can’t quite justify. A faint ache when you see someone else doing the thing you used to do. A restlessness that doesn’t respond to any of the reasonable fixes. We’re very good at not noticing these signals, or noticing them and looking away, because they don’t add up on paper and we’ve built whole lives on the principle of only taking seriously the things that add up on paper. But the not-adding-up is sometimes the most honest information you’ve got. It’s the part of you that was overruled, still filing its objection.

There’s a catch in all this, which is that the part you’re listening for doesn’t speak the language you’re listening in. We usually go looking for it the way we look for everything — by thinking more. We sit down and try to reason our way to it, make a list, weigh the options, wait for it to present a coherent case. But it doesn’t deal in thoughts. It deals in energy, in flow, in the particular and slightly embarrassing joy of doing something for no reason. It shows up as experience, not as argument. Which means you can’t usually find it by sitting still and reflecting harder. You find it by doing things and watching what happens to you while you do them.

So the better instrument isn’t analysis, but paying attention.

Again, more to follow.

Takeaway:

The part you’re listening for doesn’t speak the language you’re listening in.

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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

| H.L. Mencken (1920)

…

One hundred years later, Mencken’s prophecy has been borne out.

While we have to concede that Trump has a ‘feral genius’1 for turning grievance into a political movement (like other authoritarian populists), and thereby getting himself elected, he’s clearly out of his depth when trying to actually steer the nation in a positive direction, to put it mildly. Less mildly, he’s a ‘downright moron’, which he has demonstrated over and over again: the tariffs, ICE, gerrymandering, antagonizing our allies and trading partners, and most notably, an absolutely unnecessary war with Iran that will cost us $100 billion at the minimum, with absolutely none of the supposed war aims met.

And, to top it off, the ludicrous UFC fights staged on the White House lawn, yesterday. I couldn’t even bring myself to hate-watch it.

Everyone Hates Data Centers, But Isn’t AI the Real Culprit?

It seems that every day, I encounter another story about growing opposition to data centers, ranging from citizens shouting at their elected local officials at town halls, to states barring their construction after dozens or hundreds have already been built.

To me, though, that’s akin to blaming sewing machines for the fast fashion trend. Yes, sewing machines are employed to make all those cheap, and unsustainable clothes, but the root cause are the businesses that have souped up supply chains to smother the world in a glut of throwaway clothing.

Shouldn’t our anger and opposition be directed to the tech companies contracting for all this computing power, instead of the buildings housing the bazillion server racks that AI requires?

Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about data center hatred2, recently [emphasis mine]:

Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them.

A Gallup poll from May found that 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area. In rural communities in Utah and North Carolina, regular people are organizing to stop data center construction, speaking out at public hearings and pressuring politicians for bans. They are passionate enough to attend political education sessions about water rights, land use and thermodynamics. Cities like Tulsa, Okla.; Birmingham, Ala.; and New Orleans have recently passed temporary moratoriums on data center construction. Last week, lawmakers in New York passed a statewide pause on large-scale data centers; other states, including Maryland and Michigan, could be next.

According to polling by Heatmap News, more than half of all Americans support a national ban on data centers. The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.

She goes on to make an impassioned case for the Democrats mobilizing this anger as a central aspect of their platform. She cites some Democrats efforts versus data centers:

Senator Elizabeth Warren has made a proposal that focuses on taxation of A.I. firms and mandating transparency about how the A.I. boom is shaping companies’ financial risks. All of these are good-faith attempts to respond to voters’ anger, but Warren’s message is too wonky to match the moment.

Senator Bernie Sanders has gone further, floating a big idea that’s consistent with his brand of democratic socialism. He called for a national data center moratorium and labor protections for workers displaced by A.I., and he is proposing the “American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act” to give the American public shared ownership, and therefore control, over A.I.’s expansion and its profits. But, Alex Hanna, director of the Distributed A.I. Research Institute, told me that a wealth fund act would enshrine the tech sector’s as-yet-unproven claims of its importance. This is the risk of treating A.I. as something that is as important as humans discovering fire and inventing the wheel. That’s zealotry. It has no place at a tent revival.

Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ro Khanna of California are going after data centers with an organizer’s flair for spectacle and an anti-oligarchy message. Khanna has called data centers extractive and uses them as justification for his proposed wealth tax.

This all feels like a rear-guard action to me. Apparently, the Democrats have ceded the high-ground of AI’s inevitability to the Tech Overlords. She spells that out, to some degree:

Data center infrastructure is a marriage of the technology and energy sectors. Separately, the two industries are economic powerhouses; united, they are a behemoth. A.I. interests are well on their way to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on state and federal elections in this midterm cycle, when there are far too few competitive races to influence. The A.I. industry’s deep pockets are making candidates on the left and the right cagey.

Important, too, is the seductive cultural narrative that flows from the pro-data center camp. A powerful bench of celebrity C.E.O.s, exuberant financiers, developers and futurists consistently present artificial intelligence as an inevitable technology Americans must adopt, lest they be left behind. If you accept the inevitability thesis, you are likely to believe that data centers are necessary and public dissent is naïve or, worse, un-American.

To which I say fuck them, and fuck that shit. Instead of bracing for lifelong membership in Jasmine Sun’s ‘permanent underclass’, or tinkering around the edges with anti-data center protests, we should demand AI regulation so that jobs are not lost in order to make billionaires richer.

China — of all places — is leading in this fight, as reported3 by Catie Edmondson:

When a Chinese court ruled late last month that a tech company had illegally laid off a worker after replacing him with artificial intelligence software, it delivered an implicit warning to other employers.==

“The development of artificial intelligence technology should be applied to liberating labor, promoting employment and improving people’s livelihood,” the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court wrote. “Labor law allows employers to undertake technological changes and upgrade their operations, but it should also take into account the protection of workers’ legitimate rights and interests.4

The case — the third time the Chinese government has highlighted a ruling siding with workers displaced by A.I. — underscores how Beijing is contending with the need to balance its ambitions for the widespread use of A.I. with the unemployment that might accompany it.

China has invested billions to become an artificial intelligence superpower and raced to integrate the technology across a broad range of industries. But those aspirations have run headlong into a growing political problem: anxiety over the workers who could be displaced by the realization of Beijing’s technological drive.

This issue is singularly acute for China, where more than 200 million workers are stuck in gig economy work, with a weaker safety net than in the US. Youth unemployment is 17% there, and growing. Instead of considering universal basic income — as is being discussed in South Korea, Japan, and the UK — China’s courts are taking a hard line on employers: you can deploy AI, but don’t use it to cut jobs.

Again, Edmondson:

The three court rulings have offered an early glimpse of what that response might look like. In each case, the court said employers remained responsible for keeping workers on the payroll, even if A.I. had rendered their jobs redundant. Judges have repeatedly ruled that replacing workers with A.I. is voluntary cost-cutting that does not justify mass layoffs.

Chinese policymakers appear eager for both workers and employers to get the message. The Hangzhou ruling in favor of the tech worker replaced by A.I. was given a special designation signaling that it should serve as a model for future cases.

In that case, an employee identified in filings only by the pseudonym Zhou had worked as a quality assurance supervisor at an A.I. company until the technology replaced him. When the company offered him a new role that would cut his salary to 15,000 renminbi per month from 25,000, he refused and was fired. The court ruled his employer had failed to properly accommodate him.

We should emulate China, as soon as is possible.

In earlier eras, US unions fought for similar resolution of job-killing technological advance. For example, the International Typographical Union (ITU) was part of the Columbia Typographical Union (CTU) which at its peak had over 120,000 members.

In 1974, the [Washington] Post had about 1,000 printers on the payroll, working some 700 “situations.” But another revolution in printing was taking place and the Linotype machines and the jobs involving hands-on contact with pieces of type begin to disappear.

With some sections already converted from “hot metal,” Post CTU members in 1974 signed their first contract to include a “lifetime job guarantee” that recognized the inevitable disappearance of their craft.

Decades later, only a few hundred ‘printers’ remained, having made the transition from Linotype to cut-and-paste compositing and photography, and then to computer layout software.

But that approach allowed a social transition without dumping 100,000s of ‘printers’ onto the streets. Somewhere between that union-led generational retreat, and Chinese judicial policy to hold onto all jobs threatened by AI, is a human-first answer to the looming AI jobs apocalypse.

If we leave it to the Tech Bros and the corporate finance corps, millions might be laid off over the next decade. We need more time — more breathing room — and a better response than is being offered by even the most left-wing progressives.

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Brace yourself for bad news.

In The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter on X) June 14, 2026 we learn some bad news:

Americans can’t find jobs.

The number of Americans not in the labor force who currently want a job rose +76,000 in May, to 6.2 million, the 3rd-highest since July 2021.

These are people who are not officially part of the labor force, meaning they are not actively looking for work, but say they want a job.

This marks the 4th consecutive monthly increase, totaling +349,000.

Since March 2023, this figure has surged by +1.2 million people and is now above 2008 Financial Crisis levels.

As a % of total employment, this metric is up to 3.8%, the 2nd-highest since October 2021.

By comparison, the 2001 recession and the 2008 peaks were 3.6% and 4.3%.

Labor market conditions are deteriorating beneath the surface.

Meanwhile, our federal government is firing workers, closing agencies, and cancelling Joe Biden’s efforts toward industrial policy.

We are on a sharply downward trend.

…

What about bringing back manufacturing jobs?

Back in January, David Uberti looked at factory jobs in the US:

The manufacturing boom President Trump promised would usher in a golden age for America is going in reverse. After years of economic interventions by the Trump and Biden administrations, fewer Americans work in manufacturing than any point since the pandemic ended.

Manufacturers shed workers in each of the eight months after Trump unveiled “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to federal figures, extending a contraction that has seen more than 200,000 roles disappear since 2023.

An index of factory activity tracked by the Institute for Supply Management shrunk in 26 straight months through December, but showed a January uptick in new orders and production that surprised analysts. The Census Bureau estimates that manufacturing construction spending, which surged with Biden-era funding for chips and renewable energy, fell in each of Trump’s first nine months in office.

This is one part of a larger trend: a decline in blue-collar jobs:

It’s not a pretty picture.

…

Young people can’t get started.

Molly Jong-Fast was writing about commencement speakers being booed5 when they waxed lyrical about the wondrous future of AI, but she dropped some stats, too:

Young people are facing what M.I.T. Technology Review calls a “ looming crisis in entry-level work,” and college, once assumed to be a prerequisite for a secure job, no longer feels worth it. The general gestalt coming from a certain sliver of affluent Americans is that college graduates are more liberal trouble than they’re worth and perhaps could be replaced by bots. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and G.O.P. megadonor, mused to Joe Rogan that a bot “never gets drunk, never gets sick, never gets high” and “never files H.R. complaints.” (It never boos a smug commencement speaker, either.)

According to a recent working paper from researchers at Harvard, hiring for entry-level roles at companies that have adopted generative A.I. has dropped each quarter since 2023. What is not clear is whether A.I. is taking people’s jobs or if companies are using A.I. as an excuse for not hiring. Either way, A.I. is not exactly popular with people entering the work force for the first time.

Time to smash the looms?

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I want to be the owner of my own trouble.

| Louise Bourgeois

…

Bourgeois’ quote reminded me of the distinction between positive and negative liberty, as delineated by Isaiah Berlin.

There are supporters of “negative” liberty, best defined as freedom not to be interfered with. Negative liberties ensure that no person can seize his neighbour’s property by force or that there are no legal restrictions on speech. Then there are backers of “positive” liberty, which empowers individuals to pursue fulfilling, autonomous lives—even when doing so requires interference. Positive liberty might arise when the state educates its citizens. It might even lead the government to ban harmful products, such as usurious loans (for what truly free individual would choose them?).

| The Economist, Berlin, Rawls and Nozick

I suppose Bourgeois’ wish is an example — perhaps a shining example — of the overlap of negative and positive liberty: the freedom to be unmolested while pursuing a ‘fulfilling, autonomous’ life.

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Short Takes

Employer concentration is an enormous social ill.

Large corporations are both keeping their low-wage employees at or below the poverty line, and playing the American public as suckers, since our taxes are diverted to provide a social safety net for them, as Michael Sainato reports:

Many workers at some of the largest US corporations have no choice but to rely on healthcare and food assistance because of low wages, even as CEO compensation continues to grow, according to a new report released Wednesday [March 04, 2026].

The report, published by the Institute of Policy Studies, focuses on 20 of the S&P 500 corporations that have primarily US-based workforces and report the lowest median wages of the group.

Collectively, this “Low-Wage 20” employs 6.7 million people in the US. The median pay at a majority (75%) of the companies is lower than the income minimum for a family of three to be eligible for Medicaid in most states. At 13 of the companies, median pay was also lower than the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program income threshold for a family of three.

Nearly a quarter of Walmart employees (29.3%) and half of Amazon workers (48.4%) in Nevada – which collects Medicaid enrollment numbers among employees at large companies – were on Medicaid in 2024, according to the report.

These corporations should be regulated to pay a living wage. We should raise minimum wages, and impose additional regulations and taxes on giant corporations acting as cartels to immiserate the most powerless. More links in the footer.

…

ChatGPT Health.

ChatGPT Health regularly misses the need for medical urgent care and frequently fails to detect suicidal ideation, a study of the AI platform has found, which experts worry could “feasibly lead to unnecessary harm and death”.

OpenAI launched the “Health” feature of ChatGPT to limited audiences in January, which it promotes as a way for users to “securely connect medical records and wellness apps” to generate health advice and responses. More than 40 million people reportedly ask ChatGPT for health-related advice every day.

The first independent safety evaluation of ChatGPT Health, published in the February edition of the journal Nature Medicine, found it under-triaged more than half of the cases presented to it.

| Melissa Davey, ‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies

Isn’t this one of the areas where LLMs were supposed to excel?

…

Speaking of health care.

Jena McGregor reports that some young, healthy workers are opting out of employer health-care plans:

Some 61% of workers who have the option to enroll in a company health plan did so in 2025, down from 64% in 2020, according to health policy organization KFF.

Workers dropping employer-based health insurance cite rising costs, and experts warn employers may see health-care costs rise if plans lose too many young, healthy members.

Economists warned this would happen as health care costs continue to rise, even for those with employer-provided plans. If we had universal healthcare this would not be an issue, note.

…

The case for year-round daylight saving time.

Staying on daylight saving time year-round would prevent an estimated 36,550 collisions between deer and vehicles, whereas staying on standard time would add 73,660 of these collisions every year — a difference of more than 100,000. The human toll of staying on standard time would also be significant: Compared with year-round daylight saving time, year-round standard time would cause 100 more deaths, 6,000 more injuries and at least $3.5 billion in costs every year through increased deer-vehicle collisions alone.

Of course, having more crashes with deer is far from the only cost of standard time. The number of fatal traffic accidents at night — caused by deer or anything else — is three times as high as it is during the day, and in the dark the risk of pedestrian accidents is up to seven times as high. Permanent daylight saving time would prevent 366 fatal pedestrian and vehicle accidents a year with the help of brighter evenings during the four and a half months of the year we currently spend on standard time. Conversely, staying on standard time for an extra 7.5 months each year would add about 610 fatalities — a difference of nearly 1,000 human lives.

| Laura Prugh

Year-round standard time shouldn’t even be considered.

…

Got milk?

More than 750,000 immigrants left the U.S. labor force during the first half of 2025, according to the Pew Research Center, creating a growing challenge for industries that rely heavily on those workers. Dairy farming is near the top of that list: Immigrants make up more than half of that sector’s labor force.

Another administration could have promised that shifting away from immigrant labor would deliver real benefits without misleading Americans about the nature of those benefits. It could have sought to help family farms — for example, by providing low-cost financing for automation. It could have dealt openly and fairly with immigrants who will continue to milk many of the nation’s cows for years to come.

| Binyamin Appelbaum, 2026-02-09 Trump Wants More Jobs for Americans. He’s Getting More Robots Instead.

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I’d woken early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

| Fernando Pessoa

…

Since my son Conrad and daughter-in-law Lydia had a new baby (Killian) in September, I have a new role in life: walking their dog when Conrad drops him off around 6 am, Monday through Friday.

This has a few benefits. One, I take a walk in the morning light (at least now that winter is over) and gently mull over thoughts before I sit in front of a screen. Second, this has led me to go to bed an hour or so earlier and get a longer rest. Third, because I am obliged to take the walk, once Rocky and I return, I am already a few thousand steps toward my daily step goal.

I often think about Pessoa’s quote when making that walk, and when 7 am rolls around, and I sit down at my desk with a cup of coffee, I am ready to exist.

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AI is unraveling the social fabric of work.

Aki Ito, who had become one of my favorite writers, has written The antisocial workplace1, and I pulled the lede as the title of this section, although she — or her editor — buried it like seven paragraphs in:

AI is unraveling the social fabric of work.

She uses a marketing director, Daniel Duceuster, as a lens into how AI is attenuating human interaction in the workplace:

Deceuster is early to recognize a profound shift underway as AI tools permeate corporate America [he said he is interacting 50% less with coworkers]. “People are increasingly choosing to work alone,” says Jessica Reif, an incoming professor of management at Wharton who’s been studying AI’s effects on teamwork.

Signs of strain are already emerging. In January, Cisco found that its employees who were the most active AI users trusted their teams less than intermittent users, likely because the power users were spending more time on their own and less time with their colleagues. “AI can unintentionally create isolation,” the company concluded, “when it’s adopted individually rather than collectively.” The coaching platform BetterUp found that some workers are turning to AI for the kind of feedback they used to seek from mentors and managers. Those employees tended to report lower levels of team coordination, along with higher rates of burnout and a greater desire to leave their jobs.

Less contact and socialization with others can lead to a fragmentation of the social glue holding things together:

“If we aren’t thoughtful about this, we risk turning work into something that feels more isolated and atomized,” Reif tells me. “We’ll just be combining our inputs in a way that feels more like an assembly line than a vibrant workplace.”

[…]

If the previous office tools made it easier for colleagues to connect, AI seems to be replacing those connections altogether. “ChatGPT and tools like it are giving us this alternative way to accumulate knowledge that would otherwise be shared interpersonally,” Reif tells me. “It gives people this option of opting out.”

Pre-AI collaboration tools have led to over-communication and overwhelm. Now AI shows up, and users may adopt it to reduce the overhead and friction of collaboration.

Even Ito started to opt out herself, relying on ChatGPT instead of interacting extensively with her editor, Zak.

For a while, I was pleased with my lower-friction ways. But as I reported out this story, I started to wonder what I might be losing in my quest to bother Zak less. I was certainly talking to him less. Was I missing out on opportunities to learn from him? Was I losing my ability to navigate disagreements? Did I feel less close to him? I wondered what being less needy was doing to the most important professional relationship I have — and what that meant for how I ultimately felt about my job.

Collaboration overwhelm is a real thing. But are they throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

The small interactions that our jobs previously forced us to have were what made teams work well together — often without anyone realizing it. They built the goodwill colleagues need to navigate the disagreements that inevitably come up.

[…]

People will still need to coordinate effectively and trust each other — even if their day-to-day work becomes more solitary.

Ito quotes some others who are trying to balance LLM use with social ties, so that the benefits -- like strategic alignment don’t get lost as everyone is talking to the LLM agents, and critical insights never get shared.

The challenge for all of us will be to juggle these new tradeoffs: the immediate productivity benefits of a less interdependent workplace, alongside our need for teams that work well together and jobs that still give us a sense of connection.

I think this personalization of the social impacts of AI is just wrong, much like exhorting individuals to become more resilient in the face of the pandemic or other exogenous forces. Ito does point her finger at the companies:

That’s why it’s ultimately up to our companies — and the people who are redesigning the way work gets done inside them — to figure out systematic ways to preserve the social aspects of our jobs.

And maybe our governments, as well. Regulations to slow or stop the alienation (or replacement) of people by AI could be crucial, but never mentioned. She contrasts the pandemic and remote work upending everything: on one side, post-COVID, some companies forced everyone back to the office, while others retained hybrid/remote work and emulated face-to-face interactions. She also compares the blowback on screens in schools (which is the closest she comes to discussing government stepping in).

How long will it take for our workplaces to figure out how to benefit from AI’s productivity boosts without driving us away from each other? “We don’t even know what we’ve unleashed yet,” says Deceuster, “or how to effectively use it.”

Which is a good reason to slow down.

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Week In Review

The Anti-Social Century

Aki Ito referenced Derek Thompson’s The Anti-Social Century, which draws on Robert Putnam and Eric Klinenberg‘s work detailing how lonely and alone Americans are, but even without bowling leagues and rotary meetings,

we still go to work. Even as all those other communal institutions withered away, work kept bringing us together with other people. If we lose even that to AI, we’ll become more efficient than we’ve ever been — and more alone, too.

…

Soft and Softer

I wrote about the new memes of ‘soft off’ and ‘soft on’ days, where people pretend to be working or work at a slower pace, respectively:

I wrote

My hunch is people are building the four-day workweek organically and bottom-up, since their employers aren’t smart enough to institute it as top-down policy.

…

Gaslighting, not career advice

In Suspended Terror,

the main section was about women being gaslighted, and I gathered insights from Ephrat Livni, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Jessica Grose. An excerpt:

The obstacles that come with working in a sexist culture are beyond any individual’s control. And so advocating a do-it-yourself approach to on-the-job equality may actually be a kind of gaslighting—just one more way for institutions to deflect blame and make women question themselves and doubt their sanity. It’s the society we operate in that needs fixing, not how we ask for money, the tone of our voices, or our outfits.

| Ephrat Livni

Livni’s referenced article, All career advice for women is a form of gaslighting, really says it all.

…

Over at Workings.co

This is really for Obsidian nerds. I wrote

Workings

First Look: Sync Embeds Plugin

I came across the new sync embeds plugin recently. From the repo…

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2 months ago · 1 like · Stowe Boyd

where I explore a new plugin and how I use it in my workings.

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I encountered two complementary terms that are making the social rounds on LinkedIn, TikTok, IG, and Reddit. They share the root word ‘soft’, in distinction with ‘hard’. (Duh).

Soft-Off Day, according to Kara Reinhardt at LinkedIn:

The trend of "soft off days" — where employees engage in personal activities during work hours — has surged as many seek better work-life balance, Fast Company reports. The practice often stems from feeling underpaid and overworked, prompting workers to reclaim their time. Employees typically manage their workloads and monitor their messages to maintain the appearance of productivity. A growing acceptance and lack of guilt suggests a need for workplace cultures that prioritize flexibility and employee well-being.

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The Soft-On Day is a bit more work-focused: instead of indulging in personal activities while on the clock, you continue working at a slower, less aggressive pace. Andrea Navarro links this variant of work/life balance productivity to TikTok creator Sloane (@sloane_wfh) [emphasis Navarro’s]:

According to Sloane, a soft-on day is a day “when you spend the day catching up on all the little things that you’ve been needing to get done.” She claims you “have to do it from your couch, in your cozies, while having your favorite re-runs on in the background.” This is a day when you’re online and getting things done, just at a lighter, lower-stress pace. So you’re available, you’re responsive, and you’re chipping away at the tasks that don’t require deep focus, but you’re not pushing yourself to operate at maximum productivity.

[…]

Her premise is simple: every WFH employee should have at least one soft-on day a week—and she’s not the only one who thinks so. Users in the comments of her videos agree, claiming soft-on days are “mandatory.” Some even say they take up to three soft-on days every week to maintain their sanity and productivity output.

I personally interpret this trend as a presaging of shorter workweeks. There’s growing evidence that workers can get the same amount of work done in four days as in five. See Juliet Schorr’s Four Days A Week, for data-driven case studies and meta-analysis of other research, or listen to her TED talk.

Although her work predates the soft trend, my hunch is people are building the four-day workweek organically and bottom-up, since their employers aren’t smart enough to institute it as top-down policy.

Have you taken soft days, of either flavor? (I’ve made this a free post so everyone can answer the question.)

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People can live in suspended terror for only so long.

| Tressie McMillan Cottom

…

I didn’t provide a citation for Cottom’s quote above because I will be exploring her related thoughts, especially regarding influencers' advice to women to embrace AI as part of a bruising scramble up the corporate jungle gym.

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Will The Gaslighting Never End?

In All career advice for women is a form of gaslighting, Ephrat Livni, back in 2018 in the beforetimes, tore into the double and triple binds that suffocate women in the workplace, and the lies that animate the struggle for work justice in our time:

If you’re a working woman, you’ve likely been inundated with advice about how to ensure that gender double standards don’t impede your brilliant career. Assert yourself boldly at meetings in an appropriately low tone of voice, yet purr pleasingly when negotiating salary. Be smart but never superior, a team player though not a pushover, ever-effective yet not intimidatingly intellectual. Calibrate ambition correctly, so that none are offended by your sense of self-worth, but all seek to reward your value. Dress the part.

Inevitably, even in the most allegedly enlightened workplaces, women contend with subtle biases. And so the fairer sex gets the message that we can’t just work. We must also contort and twist and try not to seem bitchy as we lean in.

But the obstacles that come with working in a sexist culture are beyond any individual’s control. And so advocating a do-it-yourself approach to on-the-job equality may actually be a kind of gaslighting—just one more way for institutions to deflect blame and make women question themselves and doubt their sanity. It’s the society we operate in that needs fixing, not how we ask for money, the tone of our voices, or our outfits.

Here, in 2026, nothing much has changed for the better. In a political climate where DEI is being erased by corporations willing to bow down to political pressure, and where capable senior military officers are pushed from promotion lists because of their sex or skin color, things have only gotten worse.

But that hasn’t slowed the selling of advice about getting ahead. Cottom1 writes about influencers who have now taken to promoting AI as the fast path to being a ‘girl boss’: a term now updated for our time, to go beyond just leaning in. Cottom writes about Emma Grede, who seems the Cruella De Vil of women whisperers [emphasis mine]:

Emma Grede is not a household name, but her literary debut (a self-help “leadership” book) tells a similar tale. The book itself has the hallmarks of the confessional tell-all advice genre that once sent women corporate leaders into the public domain. Grede calls herself a “three-hour mum” because she sees her four children three hours on Saturday and Sunday — 9 a.m. to noon — and she said she believed that working from home is “career suicide” for women who want it all. It’s “Lean In” on steroids. Unsurprisingly, her perspective courted its own outrage, from an audience that knows how hypervisibility, ambition and work obsession is fanfic for a corporate workplace that penalizes women whether they are visible or invisible, ambitious or checked out.

Gaslighting, again.

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Cottom places this ‘Lean In’ on steroids firmly in 2026, and asks the right question:

The girl boss leadership strategy isn’t just outdated; the “how to get ahead” genre is the antithesis of today’s labor market. Getting ahead is for a time when companies are hiring. The A.I. economy we are building promises that companies will be able to make profits without making career paths. That’s the entire selling point.

So how are you going to claw your way to the top of a pyramid that has no middle?

She points out that the influencers like Grede are liars; they

promised us that in a scary world all we needed was a little bit more money to be less afraid. That message belies the truth that women can see with their own eyes. Once, women bought into their message. They earned educational credentials only to be told that they shut men out of schooling. They delayed child bearing to start competitive careers; now their political leaders are telling them that they’re failing at making enough babies. They started businesses and brands and built side hustles; now they’re being told that they did not do it enough or the right way or for the right people.

Women are facing an economic apocalypse.

The old Obama-era platitudes — that empowerment would bring more justice in the workplace — are just laughable now. Cottom points out that Democrats have no answer to her question, and Republicans want women out of the workforce, having children.

Jessica Grose points out that Republicans are calling for a return to higher teen pregnancies, even though older pregnancies have risen:

There’s been an increase in births by college-educated mothers, while births by women without high school diplomas have decreased and women with college educations are more likely to be working than those with less education.

But some conservatives blame women in the workforce as the culprit in this shift toward older pregnancies, rather than a sensible response to market forces. Two partners need two jobs to pay the rent, right?

And Grose notes men are likewise doing more to help in child rearing:

Ariel Binder looked at data from the American Time Use Survey and found that after the Covid-19 pandemic, husbands reduced their paid work time and increased their housework time.

[…]

The dynamic of more housework and less paid work was more pronounced among college-educated men and men with young children. Binder notes that this is a reversal of previous trends, where for decades, women increased working hours and reduced time spent on housework, but men’s behavior remained fairly static.

So, college-educated women continue to push for it all, which translates to later pregnancies — allowing them to dedicate time to work advancement, or at least survival — as well as men finally stepping up to take on more housework, a long-overdue adjustment.

I’ll leave the final word to Grose:

Maybe, instead of yelling at young men and women for making the wrong choices, we should be listening to them talk about how they want to live, and try to figure out the kind of society that would best support them.

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When you think of it, life is an assembly of creative mistakes.

| Roger Rosenblatt, I Ain't Dead Yet

…

Embrace Mistakes or Abandon Hope

When I read Rosenblatt’s recent column, I was reminded of the insights offered by James Bareham in The essential art of making mistakes:

One of the best lessons I learned early on in my creative career was how important it was to not worry about making mistakes; better to embrace them. Not just from the perspective of trial and error to improve my skill set, but sometimes the errors I made were better than any of the original ideas in my head. Making mistakes is being creative.

He clarifies later in the piece:

Making mistakes is my definition of learning, an intrinsic part of the creative process.

What we are wired to do is to learn, and underlying creativity is learning by making mistakes: trying experiments which only once in a while work out. Being creative requires accepting that we can’t know in advance what will work and what won’t. And one part of creativity is to sift out the good mistakes, and use them, like a starter for sourdough.

Bareham intended his piece as a polemic against AI as being inherently uncreative:

GenAI isn’t a genius author channeling their neon imagination through psychedelics; it’s a statistician with a spreadsheet. GenAI is designed to fit the brief to the letter, and any mistakes aren’t “happy accidents” (to borrow the classic Bob Ross phrase) so much as they are muddled, discomforting negative side effects that have become something of a watermark for these generative models. I shouldn’t be surprised that everything that comes out is so metaphorically beige.

The problem with AI is that it makes too many bad mistakes and not good ones.

And when you are working at being creative, a ‘statistician with a spreadsheet’ might not be the best collaborator or muse.

Remember that thinking creatively leads to hope, as Solitaire Townsend pointed out:

This research was shared in 2023 and has played on my mind ever since. Based on a global survey of nearly 2,300 people, the behavioural economists at BEworks discovered that creative thinking isn’t just about making art or telling stories, it’s a way of seeing and shaping the world that naturally leads to hope and action.

In fact, creative people in the study were more likely to believe in humanity’s ability to tackle the climate crisis, to feel personally motivated, and to put effort into sustainable behaviors.

So, don’t outsource your creativity to AI chatbots: you may also inadvertently outsource your hope.

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Week in Review

This last week I published a few interesting bits:

..

I had promised to post something about the renewed interest — and backlash — about ‘Girl Bosses’: it’s in the works.

…

Real income growth down.

Mike Zaccardi shared this dismal news from Goldman Sachs:

Real personal income per worker excluding transfers declined 0.6% over the last year, a pace rarely seen outside of recession.

Uh-oh.

…

Capital beating Labor.

Via Kevin J. Delaney [emphasis mine]:

In the first quarter of 2026, labor’s share of gross domestic income fell to 51%, the lowest level on record, according to a government report. Since 2019, wages have grown by 3% when adjusting for inflation, while corporate profits have increased by 50%.

Note that the Goldman Sachs numbers real income growth dropped by 0.6% last year.

…

Hiring is hard to do.

Richard Thaler, the Nobel laureate in economics, shared this insight on hiring [emphasis mine]:

Hiring decisions are difficult in general, and getting it right becomes harder as you move up the organizational hierarchy. The most reliable predictions about job performance come from what are essentially tests. If you are hiring a chef, ask her to cook something. Predicting whether she can also keep everyone in a large restaurant working together is harder. What test can you give to measure that ability?

In the absence of a suitable proxy for observing someone doing the actual job, many employers resort to some sort of interview. This is problematic, because unstructured interviews provide surprisingly little useful information about future job performance.

One illustration of how hard it is to pick and evaluate successful leaders comes from the dismal record of hiring head coaches in major sports. This past year, nine of the 32 National Football League teams fired their head coaches, and a 10th resigned. All these coaches had gone through rigorous selection processes and had track records. Yet the turnover rate was more than 30 percent in a single year.

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For decades, business leaders have placed innovation as a top priority for business -- if not the top priority. However, they struggle to find people with the skills to innovate.

It hardly needs to be said that innovation requires creativity, transforming existing knowledge, ideas, or objects into something novel and interest…

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Tech is, to put it bluntly, full of people lying to themselves. As countless cult leaders, multilevel marketing recruits, and CrossFit coaches know, one powerful way to convince people that following you will change their life is to first convince yourself.

| Christopher Mims, What I Got Wrong in a Decade of Predicting the Future of Tech

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A Parade of Pundits

Mims wrote the above in the Wall Street Journal in May 2024, as a mea culpa, reflecting on ‘a decade of embarrassing myself in public—and having the privilege of getting an earful about it from readers’.1

His point no. 1 was: ‘disruption is overrated. The most-worshiped idol in all of tech—the notion that any sufficiently nimble upstart can defeat bigger, slower, sclerotic competitors—has proved to be a false one.’

He goes on to credit Jill Lepore for her magisterial debunking of Clay Christensen’s ‘disruption theory’, in which — along with many other observations — she shows why Christensen’s model fails:

Disruptive innovation as a theory of change is meant to serve both as a chronicle of the past (this has happened) and as a model for the future (it will keep happening). The strength of a prediction made from a model depends on the quality of the historical evidence and on the reliability of the methods used to gather and interpret it. Historical analysis proceeds from certain conditions regarding proof. None of these conditions have been met.2

A pragmatic insight is that, in 2007, Christensen and his model predicted the iPhone's failure, which went on to generate 150 billion dollars in revenue in just the next five years and has now generated trillions.

…

But Christensen and disruption theory are not the sole cultish pundits and myths out there, as Jerry Neumann recently laid out in Startup Punditry’s 25 Years of Failure3. Neumann uses an analytic framework similar to Lepore’s in a broadly sweeping condemnation of start-up punditry. However, his argument lies on a stark point of fact: if these pundits — ranging from Michael Porter, Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and others — were offering advice that actually helped start-ups thrive, it should show up in the numbers. But it doesn’t:

Neumann levels his critique against the claims of ‘startup science’:

The New Punditry’s advice was, instead, intuitively rational, apparently well-argued, and offered founders a step-by-step process for building a business amid real uncertainty. Steve Blank’s customer development method in The Four Steps to the Epiphany (2005), for example, taught founders to treat their business idea as a set of falsifiable hypotheses: get out of the building, interview potential customers, and validate or kill your assumptions before writing any code. Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup (2011) built on this with the Build-Measure-Learn loop: Launch a minimum viable product, measure real user behavior, and iterate rapidly rather than waste time perfecting a product no one wants. Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas (2008) gave founders a tool to map the nine key components of a business model and pivot when something isn’t working. Design thinking, popularized by IDEO and Stanford’s d.school, emphasized empathy with end users and rapid prototyping to surface problems early. Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectuation Theory prescribed starting with a founder’s own skills and network rather than reverse-engineering a plan to meet a distant goal.

These pundits were consciously trying to build a science of entrepreneurial success. By 2012, Blank said that the National Science Foundation was calling his customer development framework “the scientific method for entrepreneurship,” and claimed that “we now know how to make startups fail less.” The official Lean Startup website claims that “The Lean Startup provides a scientific approach to creating and managing startups,” and the back cover of his book quotes Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, saying Ries “proposes a scientific process that can be learnt and replicated.” Meanwhile, Osterwalder claimed in his PhD thesis that his Business Model Canvas is rooted in design science (the precursor to design thinking).

His basic conclusion is ‘if there’s one thing we know about startup punditry, it’s that it hasn’t worked’. The science preached by the pundits seems an illusion, and he wonders why [emphasis his]:

Behind these ideas, it seems inconceivable that they have not made a difference. And yet the data suggests that we have learned precisely nothing.

If we are ever to build a true science of entrepreneurship, we need to understand why. There are three possibilities. First, maybe the theories are simply wrong. Second, maybe the theories are so obvious that formalizing them was pointless. Or third, once everybody uses the same theories, maybe they stop conferring an advantage. Strategy is about doing something different from your competitors, after all.

Neumann sets about bursting all three of those bubbles. Most critically, perhaps, he argues that (a la Karl Popper) ‘a theory is scientific only if it can, in principle, be proven wrong’. Neumann points out that very few have applied this test to entrepreneurial innovation. But pundits aren’t motivated to test if their theories are right: ‘they make money and gain influence by selling books’.

The whole enterprise has the structure of what the physicist Richard Feynman called a “cargo cult science edifice that mimics the form of science without its substance, deriving rules from anecdotes without establishing underlying causality. Just because a handful of successful startups conducted customer interviews does not mean your startup will succeed if you do too.

Once again, this echoes Jill Lepore’s takedown of Christensen:

The handpicked case study, which is Christensen’s method, is a notoriously weak foundation on which to build a theory.

Strangely, Neumann’s essay never mentions Christensen’s disruptive innovation or Jill Lepore’s assertive rejection of its widespread adoption in business.

Lepore more or less sums up with this:

Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that. It doesn’t explain change. It’s not a law of nature. It’s an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; it’s the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, it’s blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.

Pundits are not, then, prophets, and their theories go untested because they have no motivation to actually test them.

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Emergent Discovery

I’ve written about Flagship Pioneering and their approach to innovation in biosciences several times. Noubar Afeyan and Gary P. Pisano published What Evolution Can Teach Us About Innovation4 in 2021. I continue to be surprised how little effect their approach has had outside of Flagship.

You might want to look at these two workfutures.io pieces: Emergent Discovery, or Applying Evolution To Innovation and Innovation: How Management Must Change in an Emergent Discovery Culture offer a good summary, starting with this from the first piece:

Noubar Afeyan and Gary P. Pisano have done us all a great service in describing in detail the techniques and philosophy behind the breakthroughs that Flagship Pioneering — the ‘venture-creation’ firm behind Moderna and 100 other life-sciences businesses — has created in applying Darwinian selection and variation to innovation. This technique is Emergent Discovery.

Unlike the charlatan pundits that Neumann and Lepore deride, emergent discovery is based on natural law: evolution. As the authors spell out:

Many people believe that the process for achieving breakthrough innovations is chaotic, random, and unmanageable. But that view is flawed, the authors argue. Breakthroughs can be systematically generated using a process modeled on the principles that drive evolution in nature: variance generation, which creates a variety of life-forms; and selection pressure to select those that can best survive in a given environment.

Maybe I should become an innovation pundit and write a book on how an emergent discovery approach could revolutionize other industries, not just biosciences?

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It is far easier to make war than peace.

| George Clemenceau

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A Bias Toward Action

Clemenceau is also remembered for saying ‘War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory’ and ‘War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men’, which suggests that his experience as Prime Minister of France during World War I led him to a deep understanding of the frailties of peace and traps of war.

The top-most quote can be generalized as ‘It is far easier to take action than to think’, a tendency that is increasingly in vogue in today’s AI-accelerated business climate. How many times have I recently read that the AI economy is moving so fast that slower, more deliberative modes of decision-making must be rejected? A lot.

Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel prize in economics for his breakthroughs in behavioral economics, although trained as a psychologist. He, Dan Lovallo, and Olivier Sibony wrote1 about the two systems we use for navigating the world before his masterpiece, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was even released [emphasis mine]:

According to cognitive scientists, there are two modes of thinking, intuitive and reflective. (In recent decades, a lot of psychological research has focused on distinctions between them. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein popularized it in their book, Nudge.) In intuitive, or System One, thinking, impressions, associations, feelings, intentions, and preparations for action flow effortlessly. System One produces a constant representation of the world around us and allows us to do things like walk, avoid obstacles, and contemplate something else all at the same time. We’re usually in this mode when we brush our teeth, banter with friends, or play tennis. We’re not consciously focusing on how to do those things; we just do them.

In contrast, reflective, or System Two, thinking is slow, effortful, and deliberate. This mode is at work when we complete a tax form or learn to drive. Both modes are continuously active, but System Two is typically just monitoring things. It’s mobilized when the stakes are high, when we detect an obvious error, or when rule-based reasoning is required. But most of the time, System One determines our thoughts.

Lovallo and Sibony, in an additional paper, focused specifically on the need to recognize uncertainty as a way to counter the bias toward action, and to think more slowly [emphasis mine]:

Most executives rightly feel a need to take action. However, the actions we take are often prompted by excessive optimism about the future and especially about our own ability to influence it. Ask yourself how many plans you have reviewed that turned out to be based on overly optimistic forecasts of market potential or underestimated competitive responses. When you or your people feel—especially under pressure—an urge to take action and an attractive plan presents itself, chances are good that some elements of overconfidence have tainted it.

To make matters worse, the culture of many organizations suppresses uncertainty and rewards behavior that ignores it. For instance, in most organizations, an executive who projects great confidence in a plan is more likely to get it approved than one who lays out all the risks and uncertainties surrounding it. Seldom do we see confidence as a warning sign—a hint that overconfidence, overoptimism, and other action-oriented biases may be at work.

Superior decision-making processes counteract action-oriented biases by promoting the recognition of uncertainty. For example, it often helps to make a clear and explicit distinction between decision meetings, where leaders should embrace uncertainty while encouraging dissent, and implementation meetings, where it’s time for executives to move forward together.

Looking at the war that the US finds itself in — by overconfidence and a hubristic bias toward action — we can be certain that those who decided to initiate the war on Iran forgot — or never read — Clemenceau’s thoughts on war and peace. And I would be surprised if President Trump or Secretary Hegseth read Thinking, Fast and Slow, or even considered that a bias toward action is dangerous, especially when the stakes are high, and uncertainty rules the day.

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Week In Review

On a personal note.

I had a singularly unproductive week preceding Memorial Day.

Somehow — I’m not exactly sure how — I managed to injure my right thumb. I woke up one morning, Tuesday last, and the base of my thumb ached, as if it had been ‘stubbed’ (as I have sometimes done with my big toe).

After a bit of research, it appears I was suffering from ‘mommy’s thumb’ or DeQuervain's Tendonitis. One reason for that prognosis is that after icing it for a few hours and two days of no typing, the pain had completely stopped, meaning the swollen tendon in my thumb had worked free from the channel it had caught in. Whew. No surgery required.

The second factor in my lack of productivity was something more pernicious: overwhelm. I am an avid notetaker and daybook curator, relying on the Obsidian platform. To avoid a too-detailed explanation, I have been juggling a long list of works-in-process, source materials, and plans for the future. Last week, I reached the point where things became unworkable.

The solution turns out to be conceptually simple but complicated in practice. I had been managing tasks in several Kanban boards, for example, one for workfutures.io. However, I had over a hundred tasks on that one board alone; other boards were overflowing as well. I resolved to create a dozen or so smaller boards for materials, working notes, and plans related to narrower topics — such as ‘AI backlash’ and ‘girl bosses’ — rather than the entirety of everything workfutures.io.

As I said, easy conceptually. But in practice, it took me a few days to retool those hundreds of tasks, sprinkled all across my Obsidian folders, and create the dozen or so topic-centric Kanban boards.

As I was involved in that activity, I also unearthed dozens of old notes and articles related to the often newly identified topics. A sort of housecleaning, beating down the cobwebs, and also decreasing the background stress I’d been feeling for the past months, as the tasks had been mounting.

I feel I can breathe, again. But I didn’t post much last week. Apologies.

What’s coming next.

I am going to try to share some materials I’ve pulled into my notes prior to writing about them in detail.

I am working on a few front-burner topics:

• The term ‘girl boss’ is getting some play, often as a kind of backlash against the Lean In era stereotype, and the excesses of self-help authors. See, for example: Plot Twist newsletter: This self-help book has hit the zeitgeist | The Economist; The Revolt Against the Girl Bosses Has Finally Come | Tressie McMillan Cottom; It’s Not a Mystery Why Fertility Rates Are Declining | Jessica Grose.

• The backlash against AI is mounting. Even Pope Leo has things to say. Graduating seniors are booing tone deaf convocation speakers lauding AI. One survey found that three-quarters of Americans worry AI could pose a threat to humanity. What are the EU and China doing differently than the US? See, for example: China Wants A.I. to Flourish, but Not at the Expense of Jobs | Catie Edmondson; Empowering American Workers in the Age of AI | Bharat Ramamurti; Gov. Gavin Newsom to Sign Executive Order Aimed at A.I. Job Loss | Cecilia Kang; Resistance | Michelle Kim

• Also tracking other themes: employer concentration, paid parental leave; meritocracy; and, of course, bad bosses.

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On…

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Don’t count out the possibility that people want and need work.

| Nick Bunker

…

The labor market is not just a bunch of numbers. It’s like Soylent Green: ‘It’s people! It’s made of people!’ And people come with strings attached.

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Who To Believe About The (Coming?) Jobs Apocalypse?

The Economist has run an issue focused on the impact of AI on finance, politics, and society. One of the pieces is The jobs apocalypse: a (very) short history. Here, the unknown author sets context:

At no time in polling history have Americans been less optimistic about their long-term employment prospects. The average person believes they have a 22% chance of losing their job in the next five years, according to one survey, a higher share than even during the global financial crisis of 2007-09. The cause of this gloom is artificial intelligence. Nearly one in five American workers recently told another pollster that AI or automation is “very” or “somewhat” likely to replace them.

It isn’t just average people who are alarmed. So are the leaders of the very AI companies causing the anxiety. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has warned that AI could push unemployment to 10-20%. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, said that in an AI world people will not be needed for “most things”. Sam Altman, boss of Open AI, has clocked that talking up the technology’s disruptive power is provoking a backlash, and now speaks of “tools to augment and elevate people, not entities to replace them”. But even he could not resist mentioning “disruption/significant transition as we switch to new jobs”.

The author proceeds to pooh-pooh the notion that AI will be massively disruptive, arguing that no other major technological breakthrough has been. He specifically lodges an argument about Friedrich Engels’ tale of disruption in England at the start of the Industrial Revolution:

One instance of technological change has become notorious: the Industrial Revolution in 19th-century Britain. According to some accounts, it was horribly disruptive to workers. James Watt’s inventions in the 1760-1780s made steam engines efficient enough to power factories. This led to a period of blistering economic growth that appeared to coincide with stagnation in inflation-adjusted wages. Between 1790 and 1840 these barely budged, even as capitalists earned vast profits.

Today’s “thought leaders” in Silicon Valley often invoke this pause. It is associated with Friedrich Engels, a capitalist-heir-turned-communist who described it in “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, his account of Manchester’s slums in the 1840s. Recent scholarship, though, casts doubt on whether “Engels’ pause” is a useful blueprint for what AI may have in store for workers.

But recall, the Luddites who rose up to smash the mechanical looms and burned the mills were not looking ahead to what the result of the industrial revolution would be a hundred years and more in the future. As Neil Postman pointed out in Technopoly:

The term ‘Luddite’ has come to mean an almost childish and certainly naive opposition to technology. But the historical Luddites were neither childish nor naive. They were people trying desperately to preserve whatever rights, privileges, laws and customs had given them justice in the older world-view.

The Economist author never uses the words ‘rights’ or ‘justice’ in his analysis, note.

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The author does take time to hedge his economic optimism with a strawman counter-scenario to his ‘no, there isn’t going to be a jobs apocalypse’ theme:

That does not mean it can never happen at all. The first signs would be sharply rising productivity combined with weak real-wage growth in America, the world’s frontier economy. This would show up as an increase in GDP per person, above Mr Gordon’s ceiling of 2.5%, and a simultaneous jump in corporate profits, reflecting the gains from higher output flowing to capital, not labour. Another signal would be big job losses in lots of industries.

But aren’t those numbers what we are seeing? US GDP is way up, according to another Economist article:

Over the past five years or so American productivity has been growing at the fastest rate in around two decades. Whether you look at output per worker or per hour, it has risen by a lively 2% a year, from a moribund 1% for most of the 2010s (see chart 3). This has led the Federal Reserve to raise its median forecast for America’s long-run GDP growth from 1.8% to 2%. Jerome Powell, the outgoing chair, bore witness at a recent press conference. “I never thought I’d see this many years of really high productivity,” he marvelled in response to a question from The Economist.

Corporate profits are up and rising, says this Economist piece:

Estimates from FactSet, which blends actual quarterly results from companies that have already reported these with analysts’ forecasts for firms yet to report, suggest that aggregate earnings for the S&P 500 rose by 19% in the first quarter, year on year. And the forecasters expect the ink to get blacker still. Their predictions of earnings in the next 12 months are 24% higher than a year ago.

And jobs losses seem to be growing, too:

Whatever the official figures suggest, companies seem to be shedding workers. Amazon, a mighty online retailer, and Verizon, a telecoms firm, have both announced plans to lay off tens of thousands of people. An influential tracker of firing plans maintained by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment consultancy, showed private-sector firings spiking in October [2025] to their highest in over a decade, excluding those during the pandemic. A broader measure, based on official notices that bigger companies must file ahead of big job cuts, also rose a little (see chart 1), as did mentions of lay-offs in earnings calls.

The final reason for concern is glum survey data. Consumer confidence has been dire ever since the post-pandemic inflation surge. It is now near a record low. Over the past few months Americans have also started to worry about what will happen if they lose their job. Respondents to a survey by the New York Fed put their odds of finding a new one in the next three months at under half, worse even than in the midst of the pandemic (see chart 2).

The author’s final hedge, an appeal to Schumpeter’s creative destruction:

History holds a final lesson. If disruption is coming, it will show up in a recession. Downturns cleanse the economy of unproductive jobs. Companies must make radical changes to survive; weak firms go under; capital and labour moves to more productive ones. Almost all of America’s once-routine jobs have vanished during past downturns. Which ones vanish next time will offer a big hint. Until then everyone—including Messrs Amodei, Gates and Altman—will remain none the wiser about the shape of the AI world to come.

And one may be coming, if the Hormuz mess keeps on. We have to keep an eye on the Sahm Rule, a short, steep rise in the unemployment rate compared to its low point over the past year. That often foretells a recession. In April it was 0.13, and 0.5 would (theoretically) signal a recession on the horizon. Fingers crossed.

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Other Things

Purpose is Pointless

Margaret Heffernan was in rare form in Purpose is Pointless, writing about No More Tears: the dark secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris, a chilling tale [emphasis mine]:

What I can’t do is is read No More Tears believing that Purpose or any other fancy face-saving formulation of business buzzwords can have impact on a business culture sufficient to withstand the temptations of profit. But profit alone cannot be the sole culprit here. Widescale abuses of power in organizations whose only business is (or should be) the improvement of human life—charities such as Oxfam, Save the Children, institutions such as the Catholic Church and Church of England—cannot but make any serious student of leadership and management stop and ask: after a century of research, authorship, debate and (apparent) reform, have we learned nothing? What, seriously, can we offer now that defies the cynical conclusion that these businesses and institutions are all the same? And what credible hope can we offer younger generations that working inside organizations will not infect them with wilful blindness? If J&J is one of the most admired corporations in the world, what must the rest be doing?

At the very least, we need to stop reaching too quickly for a consoling bundle of magic words. Purpose has become a smokescreen, a disguise. Pretending to, or encouraging a belief in, a higher value system beyond profit is a feint. Deceptive and mind-numbing at worst, decorative and distracting at best, it is a displacement activity which looks like conscience but cannot induce it. We will get nowhere until business can forswear abstract nouns and learn to use language that is practical and tangible. We also have to call out the suspects that keep making repeat appearances at every crime scene: Scale, Competition, Speed and, yes, Purpose: the over-zealous belief in an organization so devout that it blinds followers.

A must-read.

…

Boos

In Graduation Speaker Shocked When She’s Loudly Booed by Students for Saying AI Is the Future, Maggie Harrison Dupré reports on a Florida executive’s commencement address:

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We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.

| M Gessen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Unimaginable Reality of American Concentration Camps

…

Gessen uses the lens of history to shrink our experience to inconsequence. But others have shared a different take on history making us feel small, like Gary Greenberg:

History’s wheel is indifferent, not unlike cancer or a cheating spouse, and can crush us willy-nilly. Which means, I hear myself saying to my own surprise and dismay, that it falls upon us to cultivate helplessness. That’s not to say we should cultivate inaction or nihilism. It’s to say that we really have no choice but to recognize just how tiny we are, and how much we therefore need one another, and in uncertain times even more. Our minds, as glorious as they are, cannot tell us the future, nor save us from it. The uncertainty we live in right now is only a reminder that this is our lot.

Realizing we are tiny can bring us together.

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Excel and Accountants

Courtesy of Mike Zaccardi, this chart tracks the increase in accountants following the release of Excel 5.0:

Zaccardi mentions this as an example of Jevons paradox — where efficiency gains paradoxically lead to an increase in resource use1 —, saying:

In 1993, Microsoft released Excel 5.0 for Windows, opening up near-unlimited possibilities for automating repetitive tasks, crunching numbers, and presenting data. The result has been more accountants, not fewer.

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What Are We Doing To Kids?

We are making them nearsighted and short-attention spanned.

Unlimited smartphone use among children is leading to an epidemic of myopia.

| Emma Tucker

…

A systematic review of 71 studies with 98,000 participants published in 2025 reached an alarming finding. Across the dozens of studies, heavy short-form video users showed moderate deficits in attention, inhibitory control, and memory. In the chart below, you can see a consistently negative, if also heterogeneous, relationship between heavy short-form video use and problems with attention, memory, and control.

Source: Nguyen, et al

Several studies in the meta-analysis reported structural and functional differences in the prefrontal cortex and reward circuits among high-frequency users, while others found cognitive flexibility reductions and altered dopaminergic reward responses. None of this proves causation. But taken together, they suggest a plausible mechanism: a daily diet of hyper-rewarding, rapid-fire stimuli may gradually reshape attention and regulatory systems in ways that weaken our attentional control. It is, of course, possibly that people with weaker cognitive control are simply more drawn to slot-machine media in the first place.

| Derek Thompson

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Data Center Building Overtakes Office Construction

Via Paul Kedrosky [emphasis mine]:

• Data center construction spending passed office spending for the first time in December 2025, crossing at roughly $3.5B monthly.

• Office construction has fallen ~35% from its 2020 peak.

• Data center spend is up 5x since 2020, with the curve steepening sharply in late 2024.
  

Data center spending in the U.S. just crossed over office construction spending. Granted, office construction spending has been declining for years — down roughly 35% from its 2020 peak — but data center construction is up 5x over the same period.

The Census data excludes racks and servers, so this is purely structural construction: concrete, steel, power infrastructure, cooling systems, etc. That makes the numbers more meaningful, not less. The physical footprint of AI compute is now larger than the physical footprint of white-collar office work, at least as measured by monthly construction spending.

The acceleration in the back half of 2024 and into 2025 is impressive. The curve isn’t linear: it steepened sharply as hyperscaler capex commitments made in 2023 and early 2024 translated into actual ground-breaking.

The office line, meanwhile, has no obvious bottom. Remote and hybrid work permanently destroyed a layer of demand that is not coming back. And AI is changing the shape and scope of future white-collar work. Capital is really and truly replacing labor, in multiple ways.

| Paul Kedrosky, Chart of the Day: Data Centers vs Office Construction

A strange inflection point: more places to park hardware, fewer places to park people.

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When the future loses its promise, the past becomes a refuge.

| Yi-Ling Liu, The U.S. and China Are Hurtling Toward a Shared A.I. Future1

…

The topic Yi-Ling Liu discussed in the paragraph I pulled this quote from wasn’t specifically AI, but rather the growing allure of tarot, Chinese astrology (bazi), and the occult in China. As she asked a friend about it, the friend remarked, ‘No one turns to tarot when times are good’.

According to Theresa Reed (The Tarot Lady) the tarot card of the year 2026 is The Wheel Of Fortune:

She explains:

2026 promises to be a game-changer. It’s governed by the Wheel of Fortune, a card associated with opportunities and luck. Keep in mind that doesn’t mean everyone is about to win the lottery. The Wheel is unpredictable – some folks might experience a twist of fate that turns everything on its head, while others might have “dumb luck,” the ability to be in the right place at the right time. No matter what happens, good or bad, the Wheel keeps turning. You have to roll with the punches and be ready to leap when the doors of opportunity open.

Or leap to one side when events come crashing down. As Svetlana Boym wrote in The Future of Nostalgia:

Nostalgia speaks in riddles and puzzles, so one must face them in order not to become its next victim — or its next victimizer.

Liu’s observations reminded me of something Christopher Brown wrote in a review of Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia:

Nostalgia has accompanied modernization in each new stage, and with the advent of greater and greater technology, which has made the time and space of the world smaller and smaller, contemporary nostalgia is not so much about past as about a vanishing present.

As modernization has sped up, what seems to be vanishing is the solidity of the present, not only an imagined future.

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Employer Concentration

One of the reasons American workers might be turning to tarot, or feeling nostalgic — in the case of younger members of the workforce, perhaps a nostalgia for a time they never lived in — is the hard fact that many Americans’ pay is being compressed: despite contemporary productivity and corporate profits, compensation has not been rising as fast as it did in the post-WWII boom years.

This chart is the centerpiece of research by Niklas Engbom, Aniket Baksy, Daniele Caratelli in The Long-Term Decline of the U.S. Job Ladder:

We quantify how structural changes in the U.S. labor market have contributed to wage stagnation over the past four decades by weakening the job ladder.

[…]

We estimate that employed workers today are about half as likely to receive a better-paying outside offer as they were in the 1980s.

[…]

Cross-state variation suggests that rising employer concentration and the growing use of noncompete agreements have curtailed opportunities for job shopping.

I was turned onto this research by Jessica Grose, in There’s Another Reason Gen Z Can’t Find Work:

Indeed, the job market for the Class of 2026 has been described elsewhere in this paper as the grimmest in years, but it isn’t solely because of A.I.’s impact on hiring for office jobs, and it isn’t just because of the state of the economy. For those who think trade jobs are a cure-all, the employment numbers for non-college graduates are not looking so cheery either — some of them have stopped looking for work entirely. It is true that we are in a period in which not many people are getting hired or fired, which leads to a kind of logjam for new entrants to the work force. But this stasis is just the rancid icing on the spoiled cake of much longer trends.

Grose cites Sydney Ember’s College Graduates Are Facing the Grimmest Job Market in Years, which includes this chart, showing rising unemployment:

So it looks like the job ladder is being particularly weakened at the bottom rungs, hitting youngest workers the most.

The research by Engbom and colleagues identified two primary factors in the deladdering of the US work market: in a discussion with Grose, Engbom said employed workers are ‘increasingly stuck in low-paying jobs’ and ‘they’ve seen a complete collapse of the job ladder’. And people in that situation in a down employment market stay put.

The two major reasons? Employer concentration, and noncompete agreements. Today: employer concentration; at a later date: noncompetes.

As, for example, supermarket chains merge or simply grow dominant, they exert strong anti-growth pressure on compensation. Consider the so-called Walmart Effect, where Walmart harms the communities it ‘serves’ despite low prices. Rogé Karma wrote:

Two new research papers challenge that view. Using creative new methods, they find that the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being.

The bottom line:

In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.

The Walmart effect costs households $5,000 per year, despite lower prices on food and other goods.

Walmart hires so many people when it opens a store in a new community that its wage structure bleeds over, partly because other stores fail and workers take jobs with Walmart. And then, the employer concentration effects spread like a disease:

Workers in counties where a Walmart opened experienced a greater decline in earnings than they made up for with cost savings, leaving them worse off overall. Even more interesting, he [researcher Justin Wiltshire] finds that the losses weren’t limited to workers in the retail industry; they affected basically every sector from manufacturing to agriculture.

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Factoids

The crumbling job ladder, continued.

Junior-level postings on the job site Indeed fell 7 percent in 2025 from the previous year, according to a report the company released last week.

| Sydney Ember, Graduates Reset Ambitions in Pursuit of First Jobs

…

Virginia is the first southern state to adopt paid family leave legislation.

I’m not so sure that Virginia can be considered a southern state, anymore. Politics make it more like southern New Jersey. But still:

When the new law takes effect in 2028, eligible workers will be able to take up to 12 weeks off per year to welcome a new child, care for a sick family member, or receive medical treatment themselves and receive 80% of their typical pay.

While the US lacks national paid family leave benefits, one-third of private-sector workers nationwide now have access to paid leave through state-level programs.

| Jena McGregor

…

Need to change something in the justice system, obviously.

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