{Worth reading article by Mohsin Hamid on the dangers of nostalgia of the glory of the past and what writers can do to imagine a new bright future}
As I travel the world on my phone and computer and by foot and aircraft, it seems to me that nostalgia is a terribly potent force at this moment of history. Nostalgia manifests itself in so much of our political rhetoric. Islamic State and al-Qaida call for a return to the imagined glories of the early years of Islam. The Brexitcampaign was fought with a rallying cry of taking back control from Brussels, promising a return to the imagined glories of pre-EU Britain. Donald Trump emerged victorious in the US election wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the words “Make America Great Again”, words chanted by his supporters, envisioning a return to the imagined greatness of an America recently victorious in the second world war. In China and India, too, leaders seek a return to imagined past greatnesses, usurped by foreign invaders, colonisers and barbarians. All of these movements are, at heart, projects of restoration.
Nostalgia manifests itself in our entertainment and artistic culture as well. The most viewed films of our time revolve around protagonists created a generation, or multiple generations, ago: superheroes, super villains, super secret agents, super space adventurers, super ironic symbols of super sexy pasts. And on television, where we are told great storytelling happens, much of what we see in popular and acclaimed shows comes situated in a past where characters can still plausibly be almost all white. I loved Mad Men and my wife loved Downton Abbey; we and many of our friends in Pakistan loved these and countless other shows so much that it has only intermittently struck us that they are imaginative vehicles hurtling back and away from our vastly non-all-white present-day planet. Even in Game of Thrones, the laws of physics and biology and consistency allow for fire-breathing dragons and undead warriors and interminable winters, but not for non-white people living in most of Westeros. The laws of race, it seems, are immutable even there.
There was a recent survey of millennials asking them what their most important life goals were, and over 80 percent said that a major life goal for them was to get rich. And another 50 percent of those same young adults said that their other major life goal was to become famous. But according to psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, the director of a 75-year-old study on adult development by Harvard, the clearest message from the study is: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.
So the ultimate goal of all soft skills we need to learn is to build good relationships, I think.
Good relationships are built by truly caring about people who put their trust in you. This is possible only if we listen with open mind and open heart, have a clear awareness of ourselves, other people and the world and work by connecting to the highest future possibilities.
What we see is not the Reality
MIT Professor Peter Senge teaches us: World of relationships is a world of conflicts by its very nature. Different systems with different realities are interacting and sometimes interacting in very problematic ways. It is important to be aware of the fact that we do not perceive the world we see, we see the world we perceive and our perception is a reflection of our history. It is characteristic of a living system. Unlike a non-living device such as a camera, we create our own reality. Men see the world differently than women. So telling someone what reality is, is like making a demand for obedience. None of us can see actual reality because we are not a recording device. And understanding “Love is an act of allowing others to be a legitimate other” by the prominent Biologist Humberto Maturana is essential to truly caring about people.
So forcing our opinion on others will be damaging to the relationship but understanding that you cannot change thinking of people but can only provide them tools to do it themselves and that you cannot control people but can only influence them, may keep the relationships healthy.
Wisdom and the Fog
Tim Urban also provides us some good ways to improve our awareness and understand the big picture that may help to build relationships and gain happiness. He says in his blog (I am paraphrasing):
The goal of human beings should be to gain wisdom. It means being aware of the truth. The truth is a combination of what we know and what we do not know. And gaining and maintaining awareness of both sides of the reality is the key to being wise. So what is in our way: The fog.
A human is the combination of the Higher Being (brilliant, big-thinking, and rational part of our brain) and the low-level animals. These animals are the remnants of our animal past and still a prominent part of our brains, creating a zoo of small-minded emotions and motivations (such as fear, pettiness, jealousy, greed, instant gratification, etc. and the fog) in our heads.
The battle of the Higher Being against the animals—of trying to see through the fog to clarity—is the core internal human struggle.
The most glaring example is the way the fog convinces us, time after time, that certain things will make us happy that in reality absolutely don’t. The only real way to improve happiness in a lasting way is to make progress in the battle against the fog.
So if it were not because of the fog, is there any point for developing a reputation for being cheap, a liar, selfish, greedy, dishonest, or rigid or someone with a bad attitude or bad work ethics?
Being aware of our biases, shortcomings or weaknesses and continuously trying to overcome them is a major struggle for all of us. A major key to achieving this is to develop our listening skills.
Four Levels of Listening
According to MIT Professor Otto Scharmer, there are four levels of listening:
i- Listening from Habit: You listen only to what you already know. You reconfirm your opinions and judgments.
ii- Factual Listening: Listening with an open mind. Listening to what contradicts your own opinions and judgments.
iii- Empathic Listening: Listening with an open heart. Listening with feelings and seeing the situation from eyes of another. Listening with an emotional connection with another.
iv- Generative Listening: Listening with connection to emerging future possibilities. Noticing arrival of your highest future possibilities.
We cannot improve our awareness unless we really listen with an open mind and open heart. Not listening with an open mind and open heart is one of the major causes of conflict or troubles in the world.
A study conducted by Harvard University noted that 80% of achievements in career are determined by soft skills and only 20% by hard skills.
Here it’s worth it to remind ourselves of the famous quote of Aristotle: “What is essence of life? To serve others and do good.”
Whether it is for career success, happiness or a good life, it makes all the sense to let go of short term benefits or instant-gratification and keep improving ourselves to build good relationships.
Top ten soft skill attributes for business executives
Following is a list of soft skills compiled by Eastern Kentucky University.
Communication – oral, speaking capability, written, presenting, listening.
Courtesy – manners, etiquette, business etiquette, graciousness, saying please and thank you, being respectful.
Flexibility – adaptability, willingness to change, lifelong learner, accepting new things, adjusting, teachable.
Integrity – honest, ethical, having high morals and personal values, doing what’s right.
Interpersonal skills – being nice, personable, friendly, nurturing, empathetic, patient, sociable, having self-control, sense of humor, warmth, social skills.
After WWII, period between 1948 and 1973 brought great prosperity, economic boom and sharp increase in productivity.This period is considered Golden Age of North America, Western Europe, and Japan, writes Marc Levinson, an economist, historian and journalist, in one of his recent article. During this period, Marshal Plan was conceived to rebuild Western Europe and Japan. America’s infrastructure of roads, bridges, schools, universities, factories, heavy equipment for construction and farms equipment got built; and we are profiting from this even today. It brought prosperity and social programs never seen before. It was a period of dream jobs for anyone willing to work. These were kind of jobs with good pay, health insurance, pension, disability, vacation, and sick leave that every blue-collar worker still dreams of. By 1973, growth has achieved the maximum it could muster, and then unfortunately the stagnation started. To achieve further growth new technology was needed, and new technology with automation was brought in to increase the growth. Graph below explains what happened.
As the graph above shows USA manufacturing jobs ( blue line) start to decline in late 1970’s but its overall Manufacturing output ( redline) continue to increase due to new technology and automation. Even though the manufacturing jobs were cut to half by 2010, the overall growth of manufactured goods continue to climb. Graph below shows as robots increased, the manufacturing jobs declined.
Manufacturing jobs in Western Europe and Japan were not doing better either. See two graph below on manufacturing jobs and output. As a percentage of employed population, manufacturing jobs start to decrease even before 1973 but overall goods output continues to increase due to automation.
Despite losing manufacturing jobs, USA was still the largest producer of manufactured goods until recently, when China took over as the largest manufacturer of goods mainly because of population advantage. But USA is expected to take lead again, per Industry Week Magazine, by 2020 due to automation technology. Moving of manufacturing jobs to other countries had only marginal impact on total manufactured goods in USA.
Economist, Marc Levinson, further argues that Golden Age ended in 1973 and cannot be repeated. Even Elon Musk and Bill Gates are not optimistic and are suggesting some social programs to help significant portion of population that will be permanently underemployed or unemployed due to automation technology. Elon Musk supports Universal Basic Income (UBI) for every one given by government and Bill Gates recently suggested to tax Robots like humans on the income they produce.
Many blue collars workers voted for Trump with the hope that he will bring back Golden Age period. It is the same nostalgia that some Muslims have for their Golden Age period, which is not coming back either-as human’s fierce ambition to progress and move forward does not care who gets trampled in the way.
The prospect of automation taking away human jobs is both alarming and an opportunity to reorient our civilization to new objectives. The worrying part is that a sizable number of jobs, both blue and white collar, might be gone soon – a number that some estimates put as high as 47% during the next 25 years.
How will we adjust to this transformation? How will the people without jobs survive? Some ideas, floated by people like Elon Musk, see the necessity of instituting a universal basic income. Another approach was just proposed by Bill Gates, one of the original tech superstars and prognosticators, who also happens to be the world’s richest man. In an interview with Quartz, Bill Gates explained his view that as robots will be taking human jobs, a “robot tax” will be necessary on the companies that employ them.
Gates sees this as a positive development, because the tax would fund jobs that do not receive enough focus and talent currently, including elderly care and working with kids. These types of jobs that require empathy are better left to the humans. The government would run such programs. Gates thinks business cannot be left to manage this because growing “inequity” due to automation can only be addressed via the government.
Here’s how Gates says that as a working human is taxed, so should the robot replacing the human –
“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level,” explains Gates.
He thinks it an overall positive that automation will replace much of human labor, as it will free those people to do something else. What is necessary is training and education.
“So if you can take the labor that used to do the thing automation replaces, and financially and training-wise and fulfillment-wise have that person go off and do these other things, then you’re net ahead. But you can’t just give up that income tax, because that’s part of how you’ve been funding that level of human workers,” points out Gates.
Gates proposes that the time has come to start talking about these questions. Many jobs in retail, warehouse work, driving, service industry and others should be gone in the next 20 years. And, according to Gates, maybe we should also think about slowing down the pace of automation until we have a good plan going forward.
How would taxing automation work exactly? Gates sees it as a tax on profits from increased efficiency or a tax on robot companies.
“Some of it can come on the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come directly in some type of robot tax. I don’t think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. It’s OK,” says Gates.
Overall, Gates stays enthusiastic about the future. But automation is a topic that demands immediate and continual attention. Not because we should be afraid of innovation, but because it’s a challenge we worked to create and need to meet.
“People should be figuring it out. It is really bad if people overall have more fear about what innovation is going to do than they have enthusiasm. That means they won’t shape it for the positive things it can do,” continues Gates.
To him, taxation is a better approach to innovation than stifling it.
