Portable benefits & unions

Bradley Tusk’s fun book The Fixer describes some of the political fights he took on. One was for Handy, a gig economy house cleaning and services market place. Handy wanted to pay into a portable benefits plan, but avoid pushing it’s contractors into employee status, and avoiding that triggered a fight with unions (particularly 32BJ in New York).

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Hopeful Monsters

I realised that the distinction I drew yesterday between reshaping the economy and reshaping businesses is better described by Joel Mokyr’s terms macroinvention and microinvention. 

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Bus Lines

I have recently been reading Steven Hill’s Raw Deal, a mix of useful policy recommendations and ranty polemic against the gig economy. During one section he mentions, in an aside, the situation a few folks have suggested, where a private firm cherry picks the best bus routes in a city, depriving transport authorities from much needed revenue and while exploiting the infrastructure maintained by the public. Hill points to San Francisco where this had already started happening.

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Discount Rates

Astronomer Royal Martin Rees gave a Long Now SALT talk last night around the topics in his new book, On The Future, which covers long term threats and opportunities for humanity. One of the approaches I found particularly interesting was being explicit about the discount rates applied when considering different kinds of preventative measures. 

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Lifelong Learning

As the job market changes, one way people can maintain or grow their incomes is by pivoting to more in-demands fields. For all the automation and expansion, relatively few people are unemployed (joblessness is a somewhat different boat), and most industries are unable to hire all the people they would like due to lack of appropriate candidates.

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