What I Read

Subramanian and Kapur’s “The absent voices of development economics” tells it like it is: researchers from developing and emerging economies are mostly absent from research on developing and emerging economies. They are not editors of the Journal of Development Economics. They are rarely (7% in 30 years) authors at the Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics. And the growing use of randomized controlled trials in development economics further accentuate the divide. Is there really nothing to learn from academics of highly successful economies such as Botswana or Vietnam? 
 
Tariq Fancy’s “BlackRock hired me to make sustainable investing mainstream. Now I realize it’s a deadly distraction from the climate-change threat” was picked up by The Guardian, The Independent, triggered many online conversations and was sent to me by several people asking what I thought. I am no BlackRock supporter nor sustainable investing evangelist, but I fail to see what this testimony adds to the conversation. We already know that greenwashing is real, and that government intervention is needed for systemic change. So now what? We vote, call our parliamentary representative and wait? I believe that some of us can do more, including through business, the market, or anything else we can think of. I am typically skeptical about public bashing by former employees who do not move to the solution space they advocate for after leaving. As for former employees changing their mind and writing about it recently, I paid more attention to Claudia Kemfert’s Nature commentary about the need to cut carbon emissions to zero in absolute terms rather than to net zero.
 
Intersectionality in on all lips. This graph from the Canadian Council for Refugees was shared in a conference last week. I found it useful to turn words into ideas and hopefully into actions.

My quote is from IMF Head Kristalina Georgieva’s “Giving people a fair shot” – her curtain raiser to the 2021 World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings starting today [27’10”]: “If there is one thing that I take from this crisis as the most impressive positive lesson, it is the synchronized action by central banks and finance authorities globally. […] It has been the most powerful force to put a floor under the world economy and I am a very strong believer it will continue to be a force for good as we move on the other side of this crisis”.

Ottavia Spaggiari’s “When a migrant drowns, a whole community feels the loss” puts the spotlight on the devastating impact parents, spouses, siblings, and children suffer on top of their grief. We never hear this side of the story. News focus on the tragically growing number of young people drowning in the Mediterranean in the attempt to reach Europe for a better life. Spaggiari goes to South Senegal Pakour to meet these invisible victims. A mother who sold her cow to finance her son’s trip and lost her only remaining lifeline. A teenage widow who gets remarried to the brother of her disappeared husband as no one else can support her. A brother left to provide for additional family members and now contemplates, as the only possible future, embarking on the trip which killed his sibling. I have no word to end this paragraph.   Scott Galloway’s “The sonic (entrepreneurship) boom” argues that the coming decade will see an explosion of entrepreneurship in real estate, higher education, healthtech, and cryptocurrency. Galloway recalls that post-crisis years are the most productive. He then shows that remote work will reshape the residence-office space dynamics while online education, health services, and finance will flourish. I agree with the broad trends but am less convinced by their intensity. Indeed, after over a year of working from home and schooling, socializing and celebrating online, I mostly wish for more human and analog experiences.   Esteban Ortiz-Ospina’s “Who do we spend time with across our lifetime?” uses a decade worth of data from the American Time Use Survey to show the amount of time Americans spend with others based on their age. First, it scared me because at my age the “time spent alone” segment grows and never peaks. Then, I told myself that it was probably different for French people. Finally, I checked the evidence shared by Ortiz-Ospina showing that alone does not mean lonely. I am partly relieved.

My quote this week is the advice given to CEOs by Essilor-Luxottica Hubert Sagnieres in the first episode of my Mission to Change podcast: “To dream, to dare and to do. And when I say do, when you are able, like us, to articulate such a powerful mission…. if you do it, do it first class.“

Mental disorders are prevalent. But. Data are sketchy. Research funds small. Causes mostly misunderstood. Diagnostics limited to checklists. And treatments unchanged for the past 50 years. Yes, this is depressing. To help, Randolph Nesse’s “Good reasons for bad feelings” revisits the theoretical foundation of psychiatry and calls for an evolutionary underpinning. Nesse is one of the founders of evolutionary medicine. In this book, he expands his evolutionary framework from the study of the body to that of the mind. Traditional medicine and psychiatry look at how things work. Evolutionary medicine and psychiatry look at why they are here. The question explored in the book is why natural selection left us so vulnerable to so many mental disorders. The thesis laid out is that answering this question will improve the understanding of mental disorders and the effectiveness of their treatments. From an evolutionary perspective, we are not shaped for health, happiness and longevity. We are shaped for reproduction. Natural selection maximizes the transmission of our genes, not our health. Using illustrative cases, Nesse demonstrates how emotions serve that purpose. Anxiety helps escape life threatening situations. So panic attacks are false alarms in our fight-or-flight system. Low mood saves energy when faced with unachievable goals. So depressions keep us away from important things we can’t succeed at and can’t give up…etc… As our world complexifies faster than our natural selection needs to which our brains are wired, mental disorders grow. This book introduces evolutionary psychiatry and will lead to new advances in the field. It will stretch your thinking about what are “normal” moods and behaviors. It’s a great read.    

In NPR’s “WHO points to wildlife farms in southern China as likely source of pandemic”, WHO China expedition member Peter Daszak says that SARS-CoV-2 came from wildlife farms breeding porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs, and bamboo rats in captivity. The farming of wild animals has been promoted as a way to close the rural-urban poverty gap in China. An objectif it successfully achieved by providing employment to 14 million people and growing into a $70 billion industry in 2016.

I stole [with his blessing] “Evolution of exits for US venture capital, 1980-2019” from INSEAD Prof Henning Piezunka’s Venture Capital, Business Angels and Start-ups free online workshop which I attended this week and strongly recommend. It shows a clear change of pattern over the past 40 years in the venture capital exit strategies away from initial public offerings towards mergers and acquisitions. This illustrates, in particular, the growing concentration and power of big techs acquiring successful start-ups to kill competition.   

My podcast is out next week! I was tired of hearing about problems, theoretical solutions, and abstract companies progress. So I decided to find humans driving positive change in business to understand their journeys. The teaser is uploading right now and already on Spotify and Anchor. Check it out, subscribe and let me know what you think! 

A month ago, the G7 supported “affordable and equitable access to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics, reflecting the role of extensive immunization as a global public good”. Not walking the talk, this week, the G7 blocked the intellectual property waiver proposed by India and South Africa – and backed by a large number of developing countries – to increase the production of vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics in emerging markets. WTO Director General Okonjo-Iweala pointed to access inequalities and recalled how they had materialized for HIV-AIDS treatments and H1N1 vaccines in the past. Sadly, we are back to the old North/South divide…
 
Octopuses and naked mole rats have my attention, for different reasons. Robin Crook’s “Behavioral and neurophysiological evidence suggests affective pain experience in octopus” provides evidence that vertebrates are not the only animals experiencing pain. Before this, the common view was that invertebrates’ neurological systems were too simple for complex emotional states. Crook shows that octopuses experience pain pretty much like mammals do. This is fascinating. Like many, I started to look of octopuses differently after watching My octopus teacher which blew my mind.
 
My graph this week is from Statista’s “The countries with the most women in national parliament” because, for once, Nordic countries do not make the top of the list. I only knew Rwanda was at the top and would never have guessed which were others in the top five.

My quote this week is from Manfred Kets de Vries: “The best leaders are the ones who act and reflect. I sometimes ask them: ‘Can I see your agenda?’ And every moment is full. I ask them: ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Cross out some afternoons, walk around and think.”

Noting this week’s article in The Economist, members of the “Women of the Environment” group I belong to, concluded that the concept of ecocide – ie the mass destruction of ecosystems – had just become mainstream. Jojo Mehta and Julia Jackson, two tireless champions, wrote: “to stop climate disaster, make ecocide an international crime. It’s the only way”. They gathered a group of top lawyers to draft an amendment to the international crime law while lobbying the EU and the International Criminal Court. Legalizing — like putting a pricetag on — an issue is one way to give it teeth. And legalizing environmental degradation is a growing trend. Just think of the recent international precedent set by the UK ruling that air pollution was the cause of death of 9-year-old Ella Addo-Kissi-Debrah. 

Noah Smith’s “All futurism is Afrofuturism” is not about futurism. It basically only says that given population trends, Africa will be an important part of in any possible futures. We knew that. But the paper usefully summarizes the debate around Africa’s industrialization path and the role of manufacturing therein. It reminded me of the 2018 World Economic Outlook showing the shrinking contribution of manufacturing to job creation at the global level and debunking the long held view that development means moving from agriculture to manufacturing to services.  
 
My graph this week is from “Freedom in the world 2021” assessing people’s rights and freedom in 195 countries using 25 indicators related to political rights and civil liberties. It has documented the decline in freedom for the past 15 years with a highest low in 2020, in particular as India moves from “free” to “partly free”. It also argues that COVID-19 has amplified the democratic decline. The map below shows the change in the freedom score for each country from 2019-2020.
 

My quote this week is from Elon Musk: “Tesla and Ford are the only American carmakers not to have gone bankrupt out of 1000’s of car startups. Prototypes are easy, production is hard, and being cash flow positive is excruciating.”

I enjoyed Julia Gillard & Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s “Women and leadership”. It describes the itineraries of 10 women having reached the top of national governments and international organizations – where women make up less than 10% of leaders worldwide.  It is not an academic book and does not overuse statistics. Rather it offers eight lessons based on these stories and decades of peer observations. None of them are particularly new. What I liked was the candor with which these female politicians shared their struggles and practical tips. The chapter on how women are judged based on their hairstyles and physical appearances disturbed me. The chapter unpacking the guilt experienced by working mothers (and comments making it more vivid) spoke to me. So many times, as I travelled for work was I asked who was taking care of the kids…including by a UNICEF child rights expert and an INSEAD professor seasoned in ethics and social innovation…I thought the professional journeys of Malawian Joyce Banda and Liberian Ellen Johnson Sirleaf were mind-blowing considering all the hardships they had to overcome to become top politicians. It struck me that most women featured in the book were offered leadership “opportunities” when situations were incredibly complex, desperate or prone to failure. I also noted that none of them were initially seeking power and often asked to step in the top jobs. The book ends with a “GO FOR IT” call to action. But honestly, after reading this book, I would not run.     
 
Jeremy Bailenson’s “Nonverbal overload: A theoretical argument for the causes of zoom fatigue” argues that some of the zoom fatigue comes from nonverbal behaviors typically not associated with days in the office: close-up eye gaze, cognitive load, staring at videos of oneself, and constraints on physical mobility. Based on these, Bailenson and his colleagues developed a scale to monitor “Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue (ZEF)”. To lower our ZEF scores, they recommend moving the camera far from our faces, turning off our video, switching back to phone calls, and walking around while on zoom meetings. Good luck!
 
My graph this week is from Hannah Ritchie’s “Global deforestation peaked in the 1980s. Can we bring it to an end?”. Deforestation in temperate areas grew with populations’ food and energy needs, peaked in 1920, and gave way to afforestation in 1990. In tropical areas, the same pattern happened with a deforestation peak in 1980. These global trends look promising even if they do not account for all vegetal and animal species lost along the way.

My quote this week is from Viggo Mortensen in Armchair Expert [45’03”]: “If we are to say that memory is subjective anyways, why is the present that a person from dementia completely believes in and feels profoundly, why is that any less legitimate than my view of the present?”