XD3102 - Gender Studies

"People with disposable income actually place a premium on inefficiently produced goods & services ("the human touch")... the more goods & services get automated, the bigger that premium gets. There's a reason why Michelin Star restaurants haven't replaced the waiters with kiosks."

"Humans also have these incredible hands capable of identifying the ripest fruit from touch alone. But most of us don't use them that way any more. If you want ripe fruit, you no longer need to rely on your own sense of touch. You can go into the nearest supermarket and buy a plastic tub of pre-peeled, pre-sliced mango or melon labelled "ripe and ready" or "ripe and sweet" and eat it with a fork. One of the most striking things about eating in the modern world is that we do so much of it as if we were sense-blind. We still have the same basic physiognomy as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, yet much of the time, we switch off our senses when choosing what to eat. Our noses can distinguish fresh milk from sour milk, and yet we prefer to look at the use-by date rather than sniffing. Senses, wrote the late anthropologist Jack Goody, are "our windows on the world" - the main tools through which humans acquire information about our environments. Senses are instruments of survival as well as pleasure. But today, we have relinquished many of the functions of our own senses to the modern food industry - which suits that industry just fine. It suits us less well, judging by the current epidemic of diet-related ill health."

"One likely explanation for the spike in bad behavior is the rage, frustration, and stress coursing through society right now. When Christine Porath, a business professor at Georgetown University, collected data on why people behave in rude or uncivil ways, "the No. 1 reason by far was feeling stressed or overwhelmed," she told me."

"The US labor market is particularly dynamic for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) jobs, with new technologies proliferating throughout workplaces every year. This technological change is the engine of long-run productivity growth, but it also means that workers in technology-intensive occupations must constantly learn on the job, or risk becoming obsolete. This paper considers the consequences of technological obsolescence for workers in STEM occupations. We have three main findings. First, we look at how job skills change over time by studying the appearance of new skills and the disappearance of old skills over time. The overall rate of skill turnover is high-comparing vacancies posted by the same firm for the same occupation in 2007 and 2019 we find that about 29% contained at least one new skill requirement in 2019. Occupations vary systematically in the amount of skill turnover, however, with STEM and other technology-intensive occupations changing significantly faster than other jobs."

"You see, there is an unspoken diversity problem in the news media industry. While our industry quite rightly is trying to self-correct on issues like gender, race, religion, and sexual orientation, one aspect that has rarely been addressed is socioeconomic diversity.  In previous generations, reporters often came from blue collar backgrounds. They were working class people who had talent with a pen or mic and honed that ability to become amazing journalists, editors and media magnates. These journalists saw first-hand the effects of joblessness on families and communities. They witnessed the destruction drugs wrought on previously strong and vibrant communities. They saw the effect incarceration had on a generation of children who then had to grow up in single-parent families and got caught up in a cycle of endless poverty and crime."

"1. Change promotion criteria The Peter Principle is alive because promotions are mostly based on an employee's current performance. This doesn't make any sense as the research clearly shows: there's a negative correlation between current job performance and the added value of that person as a manager. Progressive organizations therefore change the promotion criteria. They focus on assessing other characteristics of candidates that are better predictors of managerial success. Characteristics such as collaboration experience, leadership traits, emotional intelligence and communication skills are much better predictors, and therefore much more valuable in predicting who will add the most value as a manager."

"People want this level of confidence that frankly just isn't possible in business, and it's why I start with [the advice of] making yourself uncomfortable," she said. "Because somewhere in here you're going to have to put yourself in a space that you don't quite feel ready to fill, and then leverage all the resources around you to help you be successful." 

"The real debate here is not about the principle of free speech, but the much grayer question of how we draw its boundaries. What kinds of speech should be morally out of bounds? What sorts of speakers should be excluded from major platforms? When can giving a platform to one kind of person actually make it harder for other people to speak their minds freely? And what kinds of social sanctions, like public shaming or firing, are justified responses to violations of these social norms? Once we see that these are the issues we're actually discussing, it becomes clear that "cancel culture" is not the existential threat to free expression it's made out to be. "

"If we play up an East-West dichotomy on concepts concerning social relations-where terms with an allegedly Western origin therefore become inapplicable here-then one could likewise argue that we should rethink our use of terms like 'meritocracy' and 'multiculturalism', because these too originated from the same part of the globe as 'blackface'."

" Côté found that "higher-income individuals are only less generous if they reside in a highly unequal area or when inequality is experimentally portrayed as relatively high." Rich people were as generous as anyone else when inequality was low. The rich are less generous when inequality is extreme, a finding that challenges the idea that higher-income individuals are just more selfish. If the person who needs help doesn't seem that different from us, we'll probably help them out. But if they seem too far away (culturally, economically) we're less likely to lend a hand."

"It turns out that images matter, but so does power. Bentham's panopticon works because the warden of the prison has the power to punish you if he witnesses your misbehavior. But Bentham's other hope for the panopticon-that the behavior of the warden would be transparent and evaluated by all who saw him-has never come to pass. Over 10 years, from 2005 to 2014, only 48 officers were charged with murder or manslaughter for use of lethal force, though more than 1,000 people a year are killed by police in the United States."

"Many of the workers deemed "essential" in this crisis are also among the most poorly paid and poorly treated in our economy. Food workers typically bring home no more than $12 an hour; nursing home staff often make even less. Grocery store clerks, child care and eldercare providers, trash collectors, shipping, delivery and warehouse workers - they're all out there right now, risking their safety to keep the basic organs of the U.S. social body functioning, despite compensation in normal times that treats them as implicitly valueless and disposable. But if the coronavirus is a moment of danger and exploitation for essential workers, it is also one of great opportunity. It's a harsh thing to state bluntly, but one great piece of bargaining power everyday employees have is their ability to simply stop working when their employers - when society - need them to keep doing their jobs"

"In short, and perhaps unsurprisingly, people who are quarantined are very likely to develop a wide range of symptoms of psychological stress and disorder, including low mood, insomnia, stress, anxiety, anger, irritability, emotional exhaustion, depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Low mood and irritability specifically stand out as being very common, the study notes."

"The massive suspension of economic activity in the world now will have especially serious and far-reaching consequences for those people who before the crisis had already been barely making ends meet. Among the hardest hit are low-wage workers whose livelihoods have always been insecure. Some of these jobs are in the gig economy, such as delivery and private car hire. Other jobs are insecure because they do not offer regular or full hours. When the economy stalls, these jobs are quickly threatened as customers reduce their spending and employers look to cut costs. The insecure nature of these jobs is largely the result of limited employment protection and regulation. While this lowers the barriers to entry to some jobs and allows businesses to be more nimble when responding to fluctuations in demand, the flexibility has always come at the cost of workers' income stability (in the short run) and, due to the lack of comprehensive old age income protection measures outside the CPF, retirement income security (in the long run)."