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6 October

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Antonio Garcia Martinez’ “Chaos monkeys” is a deep dive into the Silicon Valley ecosystem illustrated with the up and downs of Martinez’ career from the Goldman Sachs credit derivatives desk to the Facebook ads team. His writing style is casual and witty but also show-offy and sexist. If one manages to rise above that, the second half of the book gives an illuminating unpacking of the digital advertising mechanics, and is worth reading. Rarely can one find straightforward and comprehensive information about this exploding sector which increasingly shapes economies and societies. And Martinez does that with brio. Here is a digest of a couple of chapters I’ll share with my kids (while they remind me again that “Facebook is for old people”): Facebook makes money through (people clicking on) ads; Facebook does not sell users data to ad companies, it triages and packages users data for better ad targeting; Targeting was initially done by classifying users’ “likes” and allowing ad companies to plug targeted ad in their feeds; The big revolution in targeting was about bridging online with offline users data (what you do on Facebook with what you buy online and offline with the same credit card); The bridging is done by connecting real world IDs (eg home address) with digital (mobile, tablet, desktop) IDs; “What is generating tens of billions of dollars in investments and endless scheming inside the bowels of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple is the puzzle of how to tie these different sets of [IDs] together, and who controls the links.”; This allows these companies to have full pictures of behaviors; “The match rate (ie the percentage of offline personas that can be found online) for Facebook’s Customs Audience product is as high as 90%”. Martinez says that this information (and more) is shared publicly by Facebook but agrees that it is not easily understandable. And he adds that too many people don’t care, even though they should. Oh, and I should also probably add this other quote: “Facebook has run out of humans on the internet. The company can solve this by either making more humans (hard even for Facebook), or connecting what humans there are left on the planet. This is why Internet.org exists, a vaguely public-spirited, and somewhat controversial, campaign by Facebook to wire [the developing world] with free Internet.” I’ll stop here.

The International Financial Corporation’s “Tackling childcare: The business case for employer-supported childcare” investigates the business impacts of employer-provided childcare. It complements a literature review with an in-depth analysis (~100 interviews and 40 focused group discussions) of 10 companies in different countries. It shows benefits for recruitment, retention and productivity. On-site child care helped the Village Nut Company (Kenya) attract young talent and prevent urban migration; cut staff turnover at Nalt Entreprise (Vietnam) by a third; and led to a 9% drop in sick leave absence in MAS Kreeda Al Safi-Madaba (Jordan). The evidence is here. The impact for companies is clear. This could move the needle for women who remain outside of the workforce in much larger numbers than men (27 percentage point difference). A no-brainer for action!

My graph this week is from the 2018 World Development Report “Learning to realize education’s promise” and shows big learning gaps between poor and rich children in African countries. A good graph pointing to sad realities.

 

 

My quote this week is from the late Tom Petty: “I’d have to give technology a D-plus. I think it is unhealthy for rock. I can hear digital anything. It sounds different. It’s very cold.”

23 June 2017

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Youseff Mahmoud et al’s “Entrepreneurship for sustaining peace” is the curtain raiser for one of the International Peace Institute conversation series on prevention and sustaining peace.  Mahmoud is argues that the UN refocus on prevention be accompanied by a shift away from deterring conflict towards sustaining peace. Conceptually this means moving away from a highly politicized and securitized approach to prevention. Operationally this means moving away from crisis management tools only. Adopting the sustaining peace approach, this article looks at how economic opportunities contribute to peaceful societies by offering more dignified lives and countering sentiments of marginalization for entrepreneurs, their families, and their communities. It uses two examples to illustrate how that works: Colombia and Tunisia. It highlights the unique potential of youth entrepreneurship by pointing to the correlation between positive peace and the Youth Development Index and arguing that the demographic dividend could also contribute to sustaining peace. And it provides 3 operational recommendations for UN field operations and country teams: map existing entrepreneurial initiatives that have explicit peacebuilding benefits; develop an integrated entrepreneurship development strategy; and encourage host countries to create environment supportive of youth-led social entrepreneurship as part of peace operations.

Several people shared the IOM’s “UN-biased” video with me this week. It speaks of decision biases in the work place and how they affect hiring decisions, in the United Nations. Some numbers. Where equally qualified candidates are considered, mothers are 79% less likely to be hired. Women take 5.4 years to be promoted to a P4 level whereas men take 4.6 years. In performance reviews, women receive 2.5 times more feedback about aggressive communication styles than men. Overall 62% men work in hardship duty stations, and while 30% of applicants are women, they are not selected. At senior level, 16% of males versus 40% of females are more likely to be divorced, separated or single. The video also suggests 5 very practical recommendations to counter biases in recruitment. Just take 5 minutes and watch it. Go IOM!

My graph this week is from CBInsights’ “Google is ramping up pharma activity” and shows that google has made as many pharma deals (6) in the first half of 2017 as it did during the 2010-14 period. While all eyes are on Amazon investing in the food industry, google is moving in the healthcare space with expectations of transforming the sector.  What strikes me is tech giants strengthening their monopolies with one hand while growing their philanthropic arms with the other: over the same week Amazon Bezos bought Whole Foods, he also crowdsourced ideas for how to spend his billions.

 

 

My quote is from Mark Zuckerberg’s opening speech at the Facebook’s first Communities Summit because, as flagged earlier, it marks another step in how the social media platform is being transformed into a new type of global governance entity: “The idea behind our new mission is to bring the world closer together. Ending poverty, curing diseases, stopping climate change, spreading freedom and tolerance, stopping violence: there is no single group or even country that can take these things on alone. So we have to build a world where people come together to take on these big meaningful efforts. This is not going to happen top down […] We want to help one billion people join [Facebook] meaningful communities and bring the world closer together.”

 

5 May 2017

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The Financial Times Foreign Affairs chief Gideon Rachman published “Easternization: Asia’s rise and America’s decline from Obama to Trump and beyond”. I have not read the book but this interview gives the gist of the argument. It is not new, it strengthens the message around a trend that many have documented. What was interesting to me was Jessica Mathews saying that she was not convinced because (i) global leadership takes more than global economic (and even military) power; (ii) China has to balance between global, regional and national hot issues; and (iii) there are other forces in “the East”, such as the rise of India, that are still looking West. And what was equally interesting was to read, in parallel, Danny Quah’s (Eastern?) perspective. In “Can Asia lead the world?”, Quah agrees that it takes more than a growing economic, military and population footprint to lead globally. He argues that Asia’s leadership strategy should focus on soft power and that its driving values could be different from liberal democracy. Ultimately, he says that Asia will only be able to lead if it has a story. For him, that vision does not exist, yet.

Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson’s “Writing that works” is the book I recommended when a colleague asked me for guidance on improving writing skills. I love that book. It identifies the most common writing weaknesses and gives specific tips that you can use to practice, practice, and practice until you get it right. I don’t, so I go back to it regularly and am never disappointed. They give guidance on how to write memos that get things done, plans that make things happen, proposals that sell ideas, and resumes that get interviews. It is a good way to spend 11 dollars. At one point, I also had Josh Bernoff’s “10 top writing tips and the psychology behind them” pasted on the wall next to my desk so that I could check it from time to time. I should put it back.

My graph of the week is from NYU Center on International Cooperation’s Global Peace Operational Review which, among other things, tracks the new Secretary-General (SG)’s senior appointments (USG and ASG) throughout the system by gender and nationality. 17 male vs 14 female so far in 2017. That’s for his new appointees. Overall, at this level, the situation today is 71% male vs 29% female. Not great. The SG committed to reaching parity at senior level by 2021 and across the system before 2030 and he asked his Gender Parity Task Force to come up with a plan to get there. Let’s watch and see.

 

 

My quote this week is from 80-year old Nobel Prize Daniel Kahneman: “There are studies showing that when you present evidence to people they get very polarized even if they are highly educated. They find ways to interpret the evidence in conflicting ways. Our mind is constructed so that in many situations where we have beliefs and we have facts, the beliefs come first. That’s what makes people incapable of being convinced by evidence. So education by itself is not going to change the culture. Changing critical thinking through education is very slow and I’m not very optimistic about it.”

 

28 April 2017

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Tim Urban’s “Neuralink and the brain’s magical future” is a deep dive on the evolution of the brain from the first nerve appearing in a sponge 600 million years ago all the way to the future of brain-machine interface (BMI). I like Urban’s explain-this-to-me-like-I-am-a-5-year-old blog posts. They are long but entertaining. You can tell he spends hours going down the rabbit hole and processing tons of information to extract what the reader needs to know and to select the funniest, weirdest, and most beautiful illustrations. The post came out as Elon Musk launches Neuralink, a company developing BMI to connect humans and computers. Neuralink is the latest addition to Musk’s electric car/mega-battery/rocket/hyperloop futuristic empire. Musk’s plan is to “bring something to market that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancer lesion, congenital) in about 4 years. [And he thinks that] we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability.”  Before that announcement, the timeframe for having commercial BMIs for people without disability was 2050. So let me bring this home: his plan could make BMIs part of the “how” of reaching the SDGs.
When asked why he invested in this field, Musk responds that he tried to raise the alarm bell about the possible dangers of artificial intelligence [remember? the group of concerned tech/scientists writing that warning letter] with no traction, so he decided to go ahead and develop BMI options for the social good.
Should we invite him to the UN for an early conversation about BMI governance issues? He may enjoy this trip back in time. But in addition I would suggest that someone from the UN flies to San Francisco now to convince Musk to add an ethicist to Neuralink’s 8-member core team.

UNEP Inquiry’s “The financial system we need” is the second edition of a report that takes stock of the financial system’s alignment with sustainable development. It records a steady growth of sustainable finance initiatives across the banking, investment, and insurance sectors; a rapid expansion of the green bond market ($118 billion); and a growing number of supporting policies and regulatory measures (210 in 60 countries). While these represent only a fraction of the global financial system (eg. green bonds account for less than 1% of total bond issuance), the green movement has successfully infiltrated the finance world over the past decade and offers a number of lessons and opportunities on which the social sector can build from the pricing of externalities to the design of new financial instruments to the engagement with the G20.

My visual this week is from the WEF’s gender gap report browser. It’s the visual story of a decade worth of gender data from 144 countries. It is not new but was nominated for the 2017 Webby Awards for best web campaign, eventually given to UNWomen for their “Women footprint in history“, also really cool.

 

My quote this week is from Feedback Labs Dennis Whittle’s interview with Denver Frederick “when you put people into a system that does not face competition and that is top-down, and it has too much power, you get a culture where people are trying to impress each other more than having an impact on the ground where they are working. They’re listening to the voice of their colleagues rather than listening to the voice of the people that they seek to serve. That creates strange dynamics that are really unfortunate and sad.”

21 April 2017

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I enjoyed Yuval Harari’s “Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow”. You may have heard of its prequel “Sapiens: A brief history of humankind” which critics compared to Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” and which became an instant bestseller after Gates, Obama and other influentials put it on top of their lists.  Sapiens focused on the history of mankind. Homo Deus looks forward, to the future of mankind. Harari’s thesis is that while “the great human projects of the 20th century [focused on] overcoming famine, plague and war, the new projects of the 21st century [will be about] gaining immortality, bliss and divinity”. The 20th century agenda was to save humans from external afflictions while the 21st century mission is to upgrade humans by engineering their bodies, brains and minds. The scenario he unfolds in the book is depressing. The upgrade is affordable only to a small elite becoming superhumans, while most people remain in an inferior human caste losing their value as machines take over. The new religion guiding this future is dataism – faith in the power of algorithms. At first, dataism serves humans’ aspirations and enhance their lifespans, happiness and power, but it later outsmarts them leading to their extinction. Harari draws a parallel between how humans have undervalued animals and progressively led to their extinction, and how algorithms will treat humans: “Dataism threatens to do to Homo Sapiens what Homo Sapiens has done to other animals.” Yes, it is intense and feels rather crazy as I am trying to summarize it here. But Harari is a very good storyteller. He packages knowledge and connects ideas in an exotic and punchy way. So, often I have found myself super absorbed in his arguments forgetting to question their foundations. And there are many instances where we should. His technology-optimism is a case in point. Early on in the book he sets the scene: “every technical problem has a technical solution”. And thereafter he never questions the progress of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence nor their ability to surpass human mortality and consciousness. But again it is a fun and captivating 400-page journey that will for sure kick your thinking out of the box. I’d recommend the read.

Meredith Bennett-Smith’s “The case for being grumpy at work” uses evidence to reject the correlation between positive attitude and productivity. And she highlights the gender dimension of her argument. Here are some of the research-supported facts: women do not make it to corner offices if they look too happy; faking happiness can lead to depression or heart attacks; mild grumpiness increases communication and critical thinking skills while anger can boost creativity; and overall controlling emotions in the workplace is a lose-lose for the firm and the staff, especially for women.  A bon entendeur…

My visual this week is from Hootsuite + WeAreSocial’s “Q2 2017 Global digital statshot” which shows the continuing explosion – scale and pace – of social media usage. 2.9 billion people are now active on social media. This number is increasing at a rate of one million additional users a day! Wait, what?

 

 

My quote this week is from Richard Branson via Rufina Park’s “The Future of learning and education: children, educators, and creatives as co-creators”: “Children look at the world with wonder and inquisitiveness, and see opportunities where adults often see obstacles. I believe that we should not only listen to them more, but also act more like them.”

24 February 2017

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Last week-end, back-to-back with the G20 meeting of foreign ministers, the 2017 Munich Security Conference gathered diplomats, politicians, and military/security experts to talk about the future of transatlantic relations, of NATO, and of the EU, and about the security situation of the Middle East and the Pacific under the banner “Post-Truth, Post-West, Post-Order?“. Every February, I follow this meeting to monitor the growing securitization of development. As usual, the curtain raiser for the conference does a good job at pulling together great infographics in one place.  Four points that I did not see in headline news but caught my attention. One, I heard Angela Merkel, Bono and SG Guterres say that investments in girls’ education and empowerment were key for peace and security. Two, in his closing remarks the Chairman of the Conference proposed “to complement the 2% goal [ie NATO’s recommendation to spend 2% of GDP on defense] with a larger 3% goal [focusing on] defense, foreign policy, development assistance”. This proposal is in line with the growing focus of politicians on the development/security nexus. While this not new, it is now put forward in blunt terms. See for instance EU Foreign Affairs Mogherini’s quote: “Investing in development, investing in the Sustainable Development Goals, investing in humanitarian [aid], is not charity. It is an investment, a selfish investment, in our security”. This rhetoric might help rallying taxpayers, but it can also negatively affect financial flows to those in need. Just last week, I flagged how aid was moving away from far-away conflicts towards humanitarian contexts with direct ties to EU migration. Three, last year, the Munich conference held its first ever panel on global health security…at 10 pm. This year the “small bugs, big bombs” panel was programmed mid-day and pulled out the big guns: Bill Gates, Paul Kagame, David Miliband, Stefan Oschmann, Peter Salama, and Erna Solberg. Setting the stage, Bill Gates pointed to the connections between health and international security saying that we were ignoring them at our peril. He called for an “arsenal of new weapons—vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics” and argued that we needed to “prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war”. And this year for the first time, climate change, previously systematically addressed together with energy security, got its own “climate security” panel. Fourth, an energized 13-min speech by SG Guterres is worth watching as it gives a good sense of where the house is going. If you don’t have time, watch the 2-min “deep” UN reforms part [8’45’’-11’] covering:  (i) peace and security strategy, operational set up, and architecture; (ii) the development system coordination, accountability, and evaluation; and (iii) management. He wrapped up his statement on the need to look into new issues which are changing the nature of relations in our world, and possibly defining the crises of tomorrow. He named AI, genetic engineering, and cyberspace. And he called “absolutely crucial” the development of a “capacity of analysis and discussion to be able to think about models of governance for these new areas that will be essential in our lives in 10 years.” Hear! Hear!

Even though I canceled my account 7 years ago, Facebook was in my face all week. First, Mark Zuckerberg came out with a manifesto: Building a global community. Wow: Is this where the new international order is going to come from? This week, Facebook also made it possible to wire money internationally via its platform, walking in the footsteps of Tencent whose messenger + payment combo revolutionized the banking sector in China. This is one of the peripheral trends reshaping financial transfers to developing countries, and to refugees, in a context where remittance flows are three times bigger than ODA.

My graph this week is from Data Selfie, a Chrome extension that allows you to analyze what you do on Facebook, the way Facebook does it. Data Selfie allows you to peak behind the curtain and see what natural language processing and machine learning algorithms do with the digital crumbs you leave while browsing through your old high school friends’ vacation photos. Pretty cool.

 

 

My quote this week is from Cari Romm’s “The key to productivity is a good desk neighbor”: “Replacing an average performer with one who is twice as productive results in his or her neighboring workers increasing their own productivity by about 10 percent, on average. The effect also only worked one way: Lesser performers could improve by sitting next to more competent colleagues, but those colleagues wouldn’t find themselves dragged down by their seatmates.”

 

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