Good article, I love doing it, good learning, for me a leader must be committed to the 17 sustainable development goals of the 2030 Agenda to ensure that everyone has a good quality of life, it is very important that everyone has a good education for the sustainable development there encompasses everything so far, in the future we will have others because one never finishes learning. greetings and more successes

Hi Anthony

My interest [and background experience] is in the regulatory design and administration of the ‘Social Protection Ecosystem’.  This comprises four key elements: social insurance and voluntary insurance systems, and [public] social assistance & welfare support systems. In recent times there is growing recognition of the importance of social inclusion for system beneficiaries; tailoring services to meet individual needs; inter-agency coherence (alignment of effort) and ensuring overall economic efficiency within budget and resource constraints.

Moving beyond ‘admiring’ the problem/challenges EMotion will cover, how can regulators best adapt/respond on two fronts.  First, maintaining societal equity and equilibrium with respect to how technology (including the changing nature of work) impacts people and system coverage (e.g. GIG workers in relation to personal injury and employment law, automation and liability insurance, etc.). Second, how technology can better support system beneficiaries (e.g. intelligent identification of need, assistive technologies, etc.).  Finally, how the public/private sector can work in the co-design of social protection reforms/initiatives – this requires new ways of thinking about the calculus [balancing benefit:cost] with respect to specifying the economic and social impact to the community . 

Apologies for the [over]use of jargon… the intent is to help stimulate thinking about specific/practical matters can be further explored at EMotion.  

See you in May!

Andrew

Hi Anthony,

Last year' sessions regarding the future of education, IT sector developments and challenges, and women's empowerment were outstanding. The one thing I would love to see and hear more of in this year's forum is how will innovation and entrepreneurship impact education in developing regions and how can arts and culture can help overcome sociopolitical differences. It would also be very relevant to host breakout/networking sessions among civil society leaders/organizations, the private and government sector in an effort to really find simple and feasible ways in which we can all really work together in order to generate small yet meaningful changes.

Best,

Erasmo

Mas ÉXITOS #SDGs #ODS #Agenda2030 #EliteSDGs 

Hi Anthony! 

The past year was as dynamic as you can get in current political and economic climate, so I simply can't wait to once again talk to You in Paris about a variety of issues. 

For me the issues of New Societal Contract and Digitalisation and Automatisation of Work are intertwined - we as a society are in deep crisis - our old, traditional local communities have fallen apart and were replaced by anti-tribes of omnipresent politics. And, as we all know it - from Brexit to Trump, from the Wall to Green New Deal - joining the political anti-tribes brings us just a short-term comfort of hating others on Twitter rather than building valueable, full-grown relationships that will last years. And the reason for that is depressingly simple - loneliness. 

As Pew Research Centre showed us 2 years ago during The Forum, the majority of most of the OECD member states citizens are pessimistic about the future ahead. The reason why is not only rooted in economics and demographics, but also in the fact that we as a species seems to lost ability to form organizations, associations and other local institutions designed centuries ago to bring people together regardless of their political views. 

In his brilliant book "Them" Ben Sasse, US Senator from Nebraska (who will be great guest at The Forum, if I might suggest) argue that technology, especially social media, enabled us to go rootless on the world, driving us apart by hyperpolitical content and "new brave world far away from us", so we can no longer understand hopes, dreams and fears of one another. The second issue that, according to Sasse, destroyed our Societal Contract, is the revolution of work. 

The technology allows economy to grow, but a historic pace of technological transformation means that billions of people are feeling the consequenses of it. McKinsey Global Institute predicts in their report on the future of work in the age of AI that 50% of activities that people are paid to do in the global economy right now have the potential to be automated by adopting currently demonstrated technology. Furthermore, 1/3 of workers in the globe could see their jobs disrupted within the next 12 years. 

This fast pace of changes means that my young generation will have to change jobs every few years while my parents generation were able to work in 2-3 companies their entire lifes. That means that the other source of possible long time relationships - at work - is and will be also unavailable to people in their twenties. 

So, it seems to me that in order to find a solution to any economic aspects of the questions You asked, we have to start by finding a solutions to lack of basic relationships, upon which community can be establish. 

As silly as it can sound, the crucial answer to the question: "How can we prepare for Digitalisation and the Future of Work?" simply has to be: together. Or not at all.

I can't wait to see You in May and discuss all of those issues, 

Marcel

Dear Anthony I am interested to participate in the Forum 2018 scheduled in May 2018. Please guide in this regard and share the email id so that I can send the details to send the letter for Visa process. 

Anthony, Option 2 is better. Neither is great.  A title that starts with "what" is suspect. At APEC in PNG this week the buzz was about "The Digital Economy." It's not quite right but something like "The Global Digital Economy Rises."

Let me try to take up one of your challenges:

"What can institutions like the OECD do to help rebuild citizens’ trust in a post-truth era?"

The issue

This issue is rooted in the rise of populism on the right and the mistrust of the financial system on the left. Les extrèmes se touchent. The "occupy Wall Street" movement, with its offshoot in other cities, notable Frankfurt, has more in common with populism than with mainstream politics. Both movements are not about how to do things, but about how to change them. Radically. Both reject vested interests, whether they are those of the "financial products" salesman or those of the mainstream politician. Almost as an extension of those thoughts, both mistrust science, research and accepted knowledge. Both address real problems, the rise of the salesman over the administrator in the financial sector and the decreasing trust in the future and the future of the children of traditional lower middle-income families.

This state of mind creates a closed system. As long as one believes (in a religious sense) in all the basic rules, the other rules follow logically. This is not different from other closed systems. Closed systems are not necessarily useless. Mathematics is a very useful closed system. However, if one violates one of its basic rules, e.g. by dividing by zero, the whole system collapses. Thereby, the system creates its own, unassailable logic for true believers, while that same logic seems utterly ridiculous to non-believers. The system also creates its own world, where true believers interpret facts and events from their particular point of view, reaching conclusions that are logical for the true believers and nonsense to non-believers. Therefore, true believers do not accept the facts, interpretations and conclusions of non-believers and vice versa. The realities of true believers and non-believers drift apart.

Re-building trust

The classical way to build trust is to have facts stated by experts in such a way that the target group understands the facts and their consequences. This method will still work with agnostics, those who seek facts with an open mind. In the present political climate, this has become an endangered group. Another group, the committed, seeks opinions that resonate with their own opinions. They will drift outside the realm of their convictions, but are more likely to reject interpretations that do not conform with their opinions than accept them. This group is vital for rebuilding trust. A third group consists of true believers. Their opinions have hardened into convictions. They are not interested in anything that does not conform to the rules and conclusions within their own world. They will reject expertise out of hand. They cannot be reached by arguments, they expect to be ridiculed, yet isolating them will only drive them further away from reality and change their attitude.

To re-build trust, expertise has to win over the middle group. In order to do this, expertise needs to understand the motives of this group, rather than what they are saying. By changing the factors that drive the thinking of the middle group, expertise can convince the group to accept change in their reasoning and conclusions.

It seems reasonable to accept as hypothesis that the principal motivation for distrust of experts include:

• Perception of hopelessness in the face of stagnating income and unemployment while business recovers
• Expectation that children will be worse off than parents
• Banks retreating from social tasks, including cash distribution, mortgages and omnipresent branch offices
• Destructive and abusive behaviour of some financial institutions laid bare by the 2008 crisis
• Bail-out of financial institutions by tax payers

The underlying reason for these motivations can be summed up as short-termism (promoting profits over stability; sales over risk management) and an increasingly skewed distribution of income.

The role of the OECD

OECD is part of expertise and knowledge. Therefore it is suspect in the eyes of the committed. Its role as inter-governmental institution makes it a natural ally of the agnostics. In that role, it cannot help rebuild trust, though. If indeed the OECD wants to help rebuild trust, it must aim at the committed instead and work to make OECD member governments aware of the basic reasons for the lack of trust. A few action items come to mind immediately. One class promotes long-term investing. Since governments are active players on the demand side of long-term capital markets, they have direct side benefits for OCD member governments.

• Advising on measures against publication and use of quarterly business results
• Advocating bonuses calculated over a number of years
• Investigating ways to reward long-term shareholding
• Criticising supervision rules that inhibit long-term investing
• Criticising supervision calculations that inhibit investing in illiquid assets
• Adding a mandate to protect market quality to supervisory institutions’ instructions

Another class of action items would promote a better division of income. Re-distributing income is a classical role of the government. It is easy to show mathematically that such action would favour economic growth, even taking into account that this runs counter to some political dogmas. Moreover, this sort of action can be underpinned by the gist of Thomas Pikkety’s influential book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013). Advice and action could cover:

• At a minimum, not worsening tax progression
• Identifying and mitigating financial regression e.g. in pensions and bonuses
• Action on the cost of education
• (Re-)introduction of deductibility of the cost of credit on the same footing as income from investment
• Building up financial advice capacity at a moderate price
• Modernising systems that combat poverty and cover medical cost
• A web page on the Gini curves and ratios and tax progression of OECD members analogous to the OECD’s “better life index”