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Richard Clarke: Why the journalists, spies, and politicians warned about Trump’s Russia ties couldn’t believe their eyes — Quartz

Looking at numerous recent disasters, we found that there was frequently an expert who had valid data and who warned about the impending calamity in advance. In each case, that expert’s warnings went unheeded.

What do these experts and their warnings have in common?

First, the warning is often about something that had never happened before. And so decision makers exhibit “First Occurrence Syndrome,” the failure to take seriously a warning about a possibility with which they had no prior experience.

The second factor we have repeatedly found is that the person giving an accurate warning is often an expert armed with data, but who is also an outlier in their field. Other experts were not giving the same warning. What we found in most of the disasters we reviewed was that the expert exhibited “Sentinel Intelligence,” meaning that they had a unique ability to spot an approaching problem well before others.

The third factor is that the disaster being foretold sounds “outlandish,” more like the plot for a Hollywood movie than something that would happen in the real world.

Fourth, the Cassandra is often assailing a highly respected person or who may have the presumption of being reputable.

Source: Richard Clarke: Why the journalists, spies, and politicians warned about Trump’s Russia ties couldn’t believe their eyes — Quartz

by Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy, authors of Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

What Progressives Miss About Arms Sales – The Atlantic

Source: What Progressives Miss About Arms Sales – The Atlantic

Celebrating their success in retaining blue-collar jobs is one way Republicans are winning the votes of working-class Americans.

While the president was in Saudi Arabia, the Trump administration announced $110 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia—with an additional $240 billion committed over a 10-year period.

Selling U.S. arms to the Gulf states further ties them to U.S. interests by deepening cooperation and interoperability between the U.S. military and its Gulf partners. … Arms sales also drive down the cost of our own weapons and thus the amount of money U.S. tax-payers have to spend on defense instead of other priorities

while progressives might have moral qualms about companies that sell weapons, the roughly 1.2 million American voters who work in the aerospace and defense sector—together with the roughly 3.2 million Americans who support the sector indirectly—see little wrong with the sales that help ensure their livelihoods and provide a future for their children.

This might be another area in which progressive elites are out of touch with the voters they need to win back control of the Congress.

The Advantage Of Being A Little Underemployed · Collaborative Fund

Eighty years later this work schedule – originally designed for the endurance constraints of railroad depot workers – has become so ingrained that we rarely question it, regardless of profession.

Which is crazy.

The traditional eight-hour work schedule is great if your job is repetitive, customer-facing, or physically constraining. But for the large and growing number of “knowledge jobs,” it might not be.

Source: The Advantage Of Being A Little Underemployed · Collaborative Fund

 

the only way to do great work, in any field, is to find time to consider the larger questions

Source: You’re Too Busy. You Need a ‘Shultz Hour.’ – The New York Times

 

“the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

— Amos Tversky

We Need More Alternatives to Facebook – MIT Technology Review

Source: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook – MIT Technology Review, by Brian Bergstein

Chastened by the negative effects of social media, Mark Zuckerberg says he will tweak his service and upgrade society in the process. Should any company be that powerful?

As the head of the Federal Communications Commission observed in a 1961 speech to broadcast executives, … The problem, the FCC chairman told the group, was the way the business was making money: … Newton Minow … called it “a vast wasteland.”
…
As for why it mattered, Minow told the TV executives:

Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership.

…
how to make a mass communication medium better for us? In 1961, Minow had a clear answer: “I believe that most of television’s problems stem from lack of competition.”

the problem is not that we need a slightly better Facebook. … What we need is to spend less time on Facebook.

Ideally, people would be able to form robust online communities and engage in the public square without letting any single company build a comprehensive dossier on them.

Economic Research | What’s Up with Wage Growth?

While most labor market indicators point to an economy near full employment, a notable exception is the sluggish rise of wages. However, this slow wage growth likely reflects recent cyclical and secular shifts in the composition rather than a weak labor market. In particular, while higher-wage baby boomers have been retiring, lower-wage workers sidelined during the recession have been taking new full-time jobs. Together these two changes have held down measures of wage growth.

Note: Four-quarter log change, four-quarter moving average.

As long as employers can keep their wage bills low by replacing or expanding staff with lower-paid workers, labor cost pressures for higher price inflation could remain muted for some time.

Source: Economic Research | What’s Up with Wage Growth?, by Mary C. Daly, Bart Hobijn, and Benjamin Pyle