Digitizing the state: Five tasks for national governments. Public authorities cannot build great digital services on their own. They need national governments to provide the right conditions for them to succeed. For some countries, the provision of comprehensive digital public services is no longer just an aspiration. In Estonia, for instance, the only services that still require a personal interaction with a civil servant are marriage, divorce, and real-estate purchases. In other nations, too, public authorities are building digital services that are just as compelling as the products of leading Internet companies.
But it’s not enough just to change work flows and mind-sets within public authorities. Our review of ten European nations shows that when national governments do these tasks, and do them well, countries can achieve high rates of adoption for digital public services (Exhibit 2). Task 1: Set a clear digital strategy and targets Task 2: Provide common IT platforms Managing electronic identity Providing easy access to digital services. Can long-term global growth be saved? Over the past 50 years, global economic growth was exceptionally rapid. The world economy expanded sixfold. Average per capita income almost tripled. Hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. Yet unless we can dramatically improve productivity, the next half century will look very different. The rapid expansion of the past five decades will be seen as an aberration of history, and the world economy will slide back toward its relatively sluggish long-term growth rate (Exhibit 1).
Exhibit 1 Global economic growth is set to slow dramatically. Enlarge Video Global growth: Can productivity save the day in an aging world? MGI’s Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jaana Remes explain why global economic growth is destined to slow unless governments and business find ways to increase productivity. Play video The problem is that slower population growth and longer life expectancy are limiting growth in the working-age population. Exhibit 2 The employment challenge The productivity solution. Europe's e-government opportunity. Governments have long known that they can promote economic growth by investing in roads, power grids, and other physical infrastructure. But only recently have they realized that investing in e-government—the digital channels, apps, and websites that link citizens to the public sector—can produce equally important economic rewards.
A new company might be able to open more quickly and preserve its capital, for instance, thanks to an online process that eliminates red tape and minimizes transaction costs. Overall, a McKinsey analysis suggests that capturing the full potential of government digitization could free up to $1 trillion annually in economic value worldwide, through improved cost and operational performance. Although some countries have developed sophisticated online platforms, most struggle to create compelling, widely used digital channels. Building solid, long-term strategy solutions It’s clear that many digital efforts fail because of poor planning during early stages.
Declining business dynamism: What does it mean for social mobility? Business dynamism has been declining over the past two to three decades in the United States, as a number of papers I have co-authored with Ian Hathaway demonstrate. This decline is manifested in two disturbing trends: more or less steady drops in the “startup rate” (the ratio of firms one year old or less to total firms) and in a measure of employee churn among firms. Startups, associated with innovation, are unambiguously good for economic growth.
Employee churn—movement of workers between jobs—is a sign of both new business creation and growth, but also of a healthy labor market in which workers are moving from areas where demand is weak to those where it is strong. Business dynamism and economic opportunity But is a more dynamic economy—with more startups, presumably more disruption, and more movement of people between firms—good, bad or neutral for social mobility and economic opportunity? Automation and downward mobility Business dynamism as defense against automation. Publicly funded inequality. One of the factors driving the massive rise in global inequality and the concentration of wealth at the very top of the income distribution is the interplay between innovation and global markets.
In the hands of a capable entrepreneur, a technological breakthrough can be worth billions of dollars, owing to regulatory protections and the winner-take-all nature of global markets. What is often overlooked, however, is the role that public money plays in creating this modern concentration of private wealth. As the development economist Dani Rodrik recently pointed out, much of the basic investment in new technologies in the United States has been financed with public funds.
The funding can be direct, through institutions like the Defense Department or the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or indirect, via tax breaks, procurement practices, and subsidies to academic labs or research centers. When a research avenue hits a dead end – as many inevitably do – the public sector bears the cost. The Star. Specters of Marx. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International (French: Spectres de Marx: l'état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale) is a 1993 book by French philosopher Jacques Derrida first published by Éditions Galilée.
It was first presented as a series of lectures during a conference, “Whither Marxism?” , on the future of Marxism held at the University of California, Riverside in 1993. Contents[edit] For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Derrida went on, in his talks on this topic, to list 10 plagues of the capital or global system. Derrida's ten plagues are: On the New International Derrida has this to say: See also[edit]
CDD: When the People Speak: Chapter One. By James S. Fishkin [ Join us on Facebook | Watch a trailer for "Europe in One Room" | Buy the book on Amazon ] "Wonderful research; strongly recommended", CHOICE Want to leave a comment about the contents of this book? Want to start a conversation with the book’s author, James Fishkin? Just use Reframe It – the margin you see at the right-hand side of this web page – to share your thoughts in real time about When the People Speak. Sign in with your OpenID or Facebook account, or create a Reframe It account quickly and easily by clicking the orange Sign In button and clicking Sign Up. To leave a comment: Highlight parts of the book that you find interesting or especially thought provoking, click Add Comment within the Reframe It margin, and then write your thoughts down for others to see. Don’t forget to join the Reframe It group Deliberative Democracy when you sign up to keep track of comments about When the People Speak and relevant political theory.
Print this Chapter 1. 2. Self and Social Insight (SaSI) Lab. David Dunning is a Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. An experimental social psychologist, Dr. Dunning is a fellow of both the American Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association. He has published over 135 scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and commentaries, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, Yale University, the University of Cologne (Germany), and the University of Mannheim (Germany).
He has also served as an associate editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and as the Executive Officer of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Currently, he is President of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and the President-Elect of the Society for the Study of Motivation. He also serves on the Publication & Communication Board of the American Psychological Association. His work focuses primarily on the accuracy with which people view themselves and their peers. Dunning, D. Dunning, D. Scientists: Democracy Too Good For Human Race. Scientists discover what Kent Brockman knew all along: The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it.
But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments…. Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, recently implemented Dunning and Kruger’s theories by computer-simulating a democratic election. Print/crjss/v2-255-261. The Myth of the Bell Curve. We’re heading into a jobless future, no matter what the government does. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell) In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers revived a debate I’d had with futurist Ray Kurzweil in 2012 about the jobless future.
He echoed the words of Peter Diamandis, who says that we are moving from a history of scarcity to an era of abundance. Then he noted that the technologies that make such abundance possible are allowing production of far more output using far fewer people. On all this, Summers is right. Within two decades, we will have almost unlimited energy, food, and clean water; advances in medicine will allow us to live longer and healthier lives; robots will drive our cars, manufacture our goods, and do our chores. There won’t be much work for human beings. Self-driving cars will be commercially available by the end of this decade and will eventually displace human drivers—just as automobiles displaced the horse and buggy—and will eliminate the jobs of taxi, bus, and truck drivers. Read This and Take the Rest of the Day Off. Carlos Slim is a pretty successful guy: either the world's richest or second-richest, depending on which measure you use and how much he spent on lunch that day.
So it's worth taking note when he has something to say about work and productivity. At a conference recently in Paraguay, Slim, who controls America Movil, the largest mobile-phone operator in the Americas, pitched a radical overhaul of the 9-to-5 grind: People would work three days a week, though they would put in longer days (11 hours) and they would retire later in life (at around 70). The extra days off would give people more time to relax and invent things, Slim said. On the other side of the world, the Seoul city government was singing a similar tune -- a lullaby, actually: Workers will soon have permission to take afternoon naps, though the nap experiment is restricted to the summer months. This work-less, nap-more ethos is not new. Their ideas will still have a tough time catching on, to state the obvious. ProfessionalSelfRegulationandtheHumanResourcesManagementProfessioninOntarioAugust2008.pdf.
Sharing Economy – What Airbnb and Uber Have Inspired | Future CMO Movement. In the Q1 2014 issue of WARC’s Market Leader, my article on the sharing economy praised the work of Airbnb and Uber for creating a world where everyone had the chance to experience entrepreneurship as a result of sharing pre owned assets. In the following issue, Paul Kemp-Robertson attributed the success of this trend towards a trust deficit brought about by the consistently broken promises of larger brands.
The idea of sharing has of course inspired a new generation of Airbnb’s such as Boatbound (boats)Holidog (dogs)Outdoor (outdoor gear)Hipcamp (campsites)Airpnp (toilets)3D Hubs (3D printers)SupperShare (kitchens)SPOT (parking spots) and a fleet of Uber replicators such as: Bannerman (private security)LawTrades (lawyers)Canary (cannabis)Massage (massage)Minibar (alcohol)Washio (laundry)Worthee (dog walking) Further reading: Like this: Like Loading...
Canada’s new politics of discord could carry a heavy price. Call 2012 the year of The Cleavage, the year when the fractures in Canadian society gaped wide enough to threaten the legitimacy of our democracy, of our political trust in one another and much of what remains of our common national imagination. Day by day these past 12 months, when Canadians might have been collaborating with one another to build for the common good, to respectfully acknowledge and find room for each other’s thoughts and beliefs, we’ve advanced resolutely in the opposite direction toward suspicion and loathing and marginalization and the rejection of a communal public life. Willing collaboration is the definition of social cohesion. Ours is battered. American commentators write regularly of the United States unravelling.
We, too, are unravelling, being rent by demographic fault-lines of age and education yawning over the past two decades toward chasms. There are three, four and five Canadas yelling at each other, contemptuous of each other’s values and world-views. Counter-Information. 60 Signs You Studied Sociology In College.