Finland’s social-democratic prime minister, Sanna Marin, has called for a six-hour workday without loss of pay, allowing Finns more free time and a fairer distribution of employment. As the pandemic forces us to reassess how working life is organized, we should take up labor’s historic call for a shorter workday. It’s often hard to shake […]
Yuval Harari’s blistering warning to Davos
Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish. Whereas in the past human had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited. Whenever a leader says something […]
Work as forming the future, work as art
What if we left behind the mirror metaphor in trying to make sense of the world? What if we closed our eyes for a moment and began to imagine what does not yet exist? What kind of a world we would really want to create? It would mean an approach to sense making in which […]
The Agenbite of Outwit
Evidently written in 1963, a year before McLuhan was to publish The Medium is the Message, this important article brings together in one place a number of the ideas that would appear in his most important book a year later: technology as human extensions, the Narcissus myth, psychic numbness that derives from our extensions, our unawareness […]
Too Much of the Economy is Powerless
” We define market power as “the ability to skew market outcomes in one’s own interest, without creating value or serving the public good.” ECONOMIC INCLUSIONECONOMY & GROWTH By Marshall Steinbaum Today, the Roosevelt Institute released Powerless: How Lax Antitrust and Concentrated Market Power Rig the Economy Against American Workers, Consumers, and Communities, a report I wrote […]
