government

17 March 2017

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Sebastian Strangio’s “Welcome to the post-human rights world” shows how the global rise of populism takes a toll on the human rights movement. He also points to areas of dynamism in the civic space where NGOs are rethinking their strategies and narratives. This led me to a lecture by Philip Alston who paints a bleak picture: “These are extraordinarily dangerous times, unprecedentedly so, at least in my life time.” He asks the human rights community to be innovative and offers 4 strategies to international NGOs: (i) create more synergies between international and local human rights movements, (ii) embrace economic and social rights (in addition to civil and political rights), (iii) use persuasion techniques that go beyond stating principles, and (iv) engage with new actors such as large corporations. Alston was in my “purist human rights guru” mental box so this made me pay attention. It also led me to another human rights guru, John Ruggie, who in a recent speech, asked businesses to step up their game and go beyond do-no-harm and “shared value creation”. He argued that the single largest contribution businesses could make is to drive respect for human rights throughout their global value chains as this could impact over 2 billion people. I felt that these were important readings at a time when the UN leadership reflects on the future of the normative agenda while the World Economic Forum ponders on the future of human rights.

Meyers et al’s “The nexus of microwork and impact sourcing: implications for youth employment” reviews 90 documents and interviews 40 stakeholders to give the latest picture of the microwork landscape. Microwork refers to outsourced online micro-tasks such as data entry or image tagging and is a market projected to grow to $2.5 billion and to provide work for 2.9 million people by 2020. The hype around the microwork potential for development peaked a few years ago when many warned of a possible race to the bottom with very low pay rates and no benefits — the creation of digital sweatshops. This paper looks at the combination of microwork and impact sourcing, a business model where companies work with intermediaries who deliberately employ disadvantaged or vulnerable populations. The paper also gives interesting illustrations of impact sourcing intermediaries training their workers, introducing them to the formal economy and serving as bridges towards better employment opportunities. But this remains a space with little regulation and no social safeguards. Connecting this conversation to Ruggie’s call for action, one can see how the promotion of human rights through these digital outsourcing platforms could have a big impact on young people and their employment prospects.

My graph this week is from Ben Parker’s “US funding for the UN in chart” illustrating the break-down per agency of the $10 billion annual US contribution to the UN. To be read in light of the announced (but not yet specified) cuts to the UN system.

In line with the overall theme this week, here is a quote from Kara Swisher in her Ezra Klein interview [47’35”]: “Whatever you think of Silicon Valley, at least they make stuff, stuff that changes lives. IMB was one of the first to do integration and gave their employees rights, so did Apple. I put less of my faith in policy makers than I do in businesses.”

11 March 2016

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ILO’s “Women at work: Trends 2016” looks at patterns of inequalities between men and women in global labor markets from 1995 to 2015 using data from up to 178 countries. It shows little progress. Over the past 20 years, the gender gap decreased by only 1% in workforce participation; remained constant in employment-to-population ratio; and stagnated in employment rates. The gender wage gap dropped by 2% but remains at a high 23%. If nothing changes, the ILO tells us that it will not close before 2086! Mothers suffer an extra wage penalty. In the US for instance, each extra child brings a decrease in earnings for women but a proportionally higher increase for men. And because women take the larger share of informal and unpaid work around the globe, these gender gaps at work are accompanied by gaps in access to social protection such as pensions, maternity benefits and unemployment benefits. Yes, this is rather depressing. On a constructive note the report argues that getting the “care economy” right could help turn things around. Everywhere in the world, women take on most of the care work, from early childhood, to disability, to elderly care. And everywhere in the world, this work is invisible and undervalued. Those who can afford it outsource care support in ways that often exacerbate the global care crisis, e.g., international migration of informal care workers. Overall, demand for care work is on the rise because of a confluence of trends such as ageing, urbanization, migration, and changing family structures. So the future of the global care economy is something to further investigate as we look to what matters for child wellbeing.

This is a nice segue to Slaughter’s “Unfinished business: Women men work family”, a widely acclaimed book building on a very popular 2012 article. If Sandberg’s “Lean In: Women, work and the will to lead” left you slightly uncomfortable because of the central focus on what women can/should do to fix work inequalities, Slaughter’s thesis might resonate better. Both books have had great resonance: they took gender equality in the workplace outside of the closet and have pushed many organizations take a serious look at their internal imbalances. Both books also share similar biases: they are written by high-power affluent women, using personal anecdotes that will only speak to the few, and focusing largely on the US. What is special about Slaughter’s perspective is to use a systemic analytical lens: gender inequalities at work are not a women problem, they are societal issues that have to do with how we value caregiving, how we assign gender roles, how we shape workplace rules, and how we design public policies. A must read.

All essays on work and gender inequalities call for more women in leadership roles. So my table of the week is from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU)’s “Women in national parliaments” [Can someone please second a data viz. expert to the IPU?]. The data is from February 2016 and give a world average of 22.6% of women in national parliaments. On top of the list is Rwanda. At the bottom is Yemen. Nordic countries are on average above 40% while Pacific countries are below 15%.

My quote this week is the 2-minute message from a father to his daughter in the Ariel India gone-viral video: “Why is laundry only a mother’s job?”. Just watch.

21 August 2015

Posted on August 21, 2015 Leave a Comment

Ashlee Vance’s “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the quest for a fantastic future” tells the story of the Silicon Valley superstar heading Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity. The book shows how these three businesses are re-shaping the electric car, space travel, and household solar energy industries. It gives a detailed technical account of Musk’s professional endeavors and weaves in vivid descriptions of his intense management style and chaotic private life. What drives Musk is not the money. It is to create a better future for humanity by solving sustainable energy and “becoming a multi-planetary species with a self-sustaining civilization on another planet – to cope with a worst-case scenario happening and extinguishing human consciousness”. This goes against the over-used saying that typically follows a description of all the bad things happening on earth: ‘There is no Planet B’. Musk’s agenda is to do what he can to help clean up the mess on this planet (universalize sustainable energy) while kick starting Plan B on Planet B (significantly reduce space travel costs to bring one million humans to colonize Mars over the next century). Wow. And he plans on dying on Mars. For me, the 360-page book was a fascinating journey into industries I know little about, and into the life of an extra-ordinary person. At times, I could not absorb all the technical details and had to skip a few pages. And I missed a good analysis of the danger of a “personality cult” approach to progress. The author is, no doubt, a huge Elon Musk fan and, at times, portrays him as a self-made visionary genius who revolutionizes industries almost by himself. Amanda Schaffer’s “Tech’s Enduring Great-Man Myth” nicely articulates this issue and reminds us that most breakthrough innovations attributed to the Steve Jobs and Elon Musk of this world were largely made possible by earlier substantial public investments.

In her lunch with the FT [paywall], Mariana Mazzucato argues that the contribution of the state in the success of private tech companies should be acknowledged and paid back: “So when Justin Bieber goes into space and unfortunately comes back, part of the price he’s paid to SpaceX goes to NASA’s budget. It’s all NASA technology. That way NASA can fund its next mission.” I’ll make this my quote of the week.

Dani Rodrik’s “Back to fundamentals in emerging markets” looks at the end of the emerging markets golden era and draws a few lessons. Looking back, it questions the relevance of country groupings such as BRICS given the now-heavily-exposed diversity of their growth patterns. Looking forward, it urges for a refocus on real economy and governance reforms, away from heavy reliance on foreign finance. [Tu peux trouver une version française de l’article ici.]

My graph of the week is by World Bank’s Tariq Khokhar who uses the UN’s 2015 Revision of World Population Prospects data to extract 4 powerful charts heavily picked up by the (social) media [Why couldn’t the UN authors take this extra user-friendly step? I wonder]. Looking at regional population dynamics from now to 2100, the message is clear.

5 June 2015

Posted on June 5, 2015 Leave a Comment

AfDB and Gates’ Delivering on the promise: Leveraging natural resources to accelerate human development in Africa is a good read. It basically looks at how revenues from oil, minerals and gas could contribute to education, health and social protection in Ghana, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda. With no surprise, estimates are high, e.g., they could cover half of the health and education needs of Ghana for the next decade. The paper does not just look at how to get cash from extractives but also at how to get the industry invest more in human capital, e.g., developing local skillsets. What struck me then was the absence of discussion on safeguards and rights (the words are not even used). Shouldn’t the first investment in human capital be to-do-no-harm? This was all the more striking as the paper came on my radar, today, at the same time as the UNICEF-sponsored Guardian post on Identifying the impacts of the extractives industry on children.

NYU David Steven’s Time to Deliver the Post-2015 Agenda’s Promises to Children presents a short and powerful story around 4 core promises for children. It caught my attention because I am returning from a short stint with UNICEF Indonesia to work on a short narrative on children that connects to, but trims the fat of the SDG agenda. What struck me in David’s piece was the omission of “ending child poverty” in the list of promises. We did put it in our Indonesian list. I asked him why. He replied that the multidimensional poverty measure would be partially captured in his four promises. Fair. He also felt that the income poverty measure (which is what I was hinting at) would get “mixed up in the broader challenge of ensuring all ages are above this threshold” and would prefer to leave it out. I really like his commitment to keeping things lean and on par, but I would keep poverty in.

My graph of the week is from The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015 because of the online argument it started between Yale University Thomas Pogge and FAO quants, the former accusing the latter of a flawed methodology that underestimates the magnitude of undernourishment. A solid disagreement is always a good place to learn. This one illustrates the power of data from the decision to what gets collected, to what gets estimated, to how it gets used.

My quote of the week is from Madeleine Albright at the Chicago Forum on Global Cities [10’45’’]: “People talk to their government on 21^st century technology, the government hears them on 20^th century technology and is giving 19^th century responses”.