Ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?
| Wendell Berry
…
Berry was writing about political decisions and how we — as citizens and politicians — should judge proposed changes in society. And since we honor democracy so highly, we should approach business decisions in a more democratic way, instead of the one-sided, autocratic approach that plagues business culture. Business leaders should be compelled to answer such questions before irrevocable decisions are made.
What Happened To Hybrid?
Two years ago Lauren Hirsch spoke1 with various knowledgeable observers of the hybrid work wave. Her bottom-line question?
So why do so many employers that say they’re data-driven seem to move counter to science?
Because they weren’t thinking scientifically, but emotionally, and in a dark way.
Almost five years since the start of the pandemic, many C.E.O.s are ready to move on from an experiment they never wanted to start. “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” [Andy] Jassy wrote in a memo about ending remote work at Amazon.
[Adam] Grant says C.E.O.s may not always methodically control for whether an effect was caused by remote work, the pandemic or something else, as an academic researcher would.
They also may not want to find out that hybrid work is better.
“Leadership is a lot less fulfilling and a lot less fun when you’re doing it remotely,” [Laszlo] Bock [a former senior vice president for people operations at Google] said.
There’s the darkness: they are justifying their desire for personal fun with a nebulous productivity issue, or claiming their business is unique, when the data show small, measurable productivity increases from hybrid work, and the same pros and cons across all businesses grappling with hybrid work. They just don’t want to.
“There’s a premium on decisiveness in the business world,” [Adam Grant] said. But “if you’re making a highly consequential, irreversible decision, you are supposed to slow down as much as possible.”
Yes, remember Daniel Kahneman‘s recommendation to defer important decisions for as long as possible. See With Decision-Making, You Have to Go Slow to Go Fast, where I quoted him:
Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.
But they jumped to conclusions.
The economy and corporate policies play against individuals who might want to work remotely, and business leaders hold all the cards
A Tribute To Claudia Goldin
Three years ago, economist Paul Krugman wrote An Economics Nobel for Showing How Much Women Matter2, following Claudia Goldin’s receiving the Nobel for Economics. He summarized her work on the Pill and its impact on women’s employment, and ultimately, how women came to view work as central to their identity by the ‘70s, and — to some extent — everyone else did too. Krugman notes that the Nobel committee overlooked her work on the decline in inequality and the rise of the middle class starting in the postwar 1940s.
His highest praise?
Claudia Goldin’s pathbreaking research, deeply grounded in history yet hugely relevant to the present, is a model of what social science should be. This is truly a Nobel to celebrate.
Hear, hear.
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The Tragedy of No Commons
In 2023, Douglas Rushkoff wrote a scathing response3 to a David Leonhardt essay. Leonhardt seemed to accept the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ theory from ecologist Garrett Hardin, in a companion piece to an otherwise rigorous report on the state of groundwater in the US.
Rushkoff wrote:
In the piece, [Leonhardt] correctly explains how if every person and every business use all the water they want, there won’t be enough. But he goes on to call this phenomenon “The Tragedy of the Commons,” crediting ecologist Garrett Hardin — a nativist, anti-immigration eugenicist.
[…]
As for the commons, well, [Hardin] was not writing about the commons at all. He was writing about chaos and over-extraction. His concern was overpopulation, particularly by non-Europeans who would use up all of white people’s resources. So he argued that we should seal up borders, stop giving any aid to poor nations, and purge cultural diversity from the US. Otherwise we risked “passive genocide” of whites by people of color who used up all the stuff. (No, this is not the environmentalist you’re looking for.)
What [Hardin] realized, in a sort of Malthusian, Club-of-Rome-meets-Steve-Bannon way, is that if everyone takes whatever they want, there won’t be anything left. And he called this “The Tragedy of the Commons.” But this situation does not describe a commons at all. A commons is when a group of people make rules about a shared resource, and then enforce those rules together. It’s how grazing land was managed in late medieval Europe, so that farmers wouldn’t overgraze. It worked so equitably and profitably for the lower classes that aristocrats decided to “enclose” the commons for the exclusive use of private owners — meaning, themselves.4 A commons is the most appropriate and efficient way to share a common resource so that it is not extracted and depleted for the sake of the market.
Having cleaned up the errors Leonhardt made, Rushkoff widens his scorn to ‘free-market advocates’ — which is to say capitalists:
Free market advocates love the phrase Tragedy of the Commons, because the only alternative to a commons is a market! Put prices on things, so that the market can negotiate its scarcity. But there’s a difference between a commons and an unregulated free-for-all. A commons doesn’t mean everyone takes whatever they want until there’s nothing left. It’s precisely the opposite.
[…]
The commons is not the tragedy at all, but the solution to over-extraction of resources by those looking to grow markets. Calling the commons a tragedy is like calling cooperation a form of failure — not to mention sharing, mutual aid, or social contracts. Whenever you see the disinformational phrase “tragedy of the commons,” remember who came up with it, and what it was intended to do.
And who it serves, when accepted as true.
