Human capital and human dignity
Thoughts from the pandemic, lessons to recover stronger, and the beginning of a conversation
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’
This email summarizes some of my thoughts over the pandemic - a time when I have been more introspective, and have seen more reason for hope, optimism and despair than ever before.
I've added content drafted for those interested in Canadian higher education and workforce development policy and broadened the audience to basically everyone I know as a means of reconnecting with you. Grateful if you would treat this as the beginning of a conversation. I’d love to hear your thoughts and even to work with you on the ideas below.
Higher Education and Workforce Development Policy
Since the beginning of Covid19, I've continued to support students and the unemployed through my work with LinkedIn and a number of Boards, Commissions and networks. Moving workforce development and education systems online overnight has proven far more challenging than experts had hoped. Yet I've seen slow progress across hundreds of job and community centres, local, state/provincial and federal governments and social service organizations. From newcomers to the formerly incarcerated, and from people with disabilities to otherwise structurally disadvantaged groups, there is both the potential for darker and brighter futures.
After healthcare, skills and jobs will be the most important component of our recovery. With the acceleration of digitalization, the coming semester should be taught online (at least beyond secondary) and micro-credentials and skills-based-training and -hiring must be adopted at scale to address growing inequality, unemployment and skills gaps.
I recently published a paper entitled “How to Mobilize Higher Education and Workforce Development for the Rapid Re-Employment of Canadians” with Gladys Okine (Canadian Centre for Youth Prosperity and Future Skills Council) and André Côté, public policy advocate. Earlier, this past summer, an assembly of higher education and workforce practitioners and I similarly published "A Policymaker’s Recovery Agenda for Higher Education." As government makes "the largest investment in Canadian history in training for workers” we’re keen to discuss our recommendations with Canada’s policy makers, and higher education and workforce development administrators and experts.
The pandemic has opened an Overton portal to a more equitable and inclusive economy but it can only be achieved through more impactful public private collaboration. In my capacity as North America Higher Ed and Workforce Development System Lead, I am eager to discuss how LinkedIn, the largest job board and skills-based online learning platform, is partnering with governments around skills-based hiring, micro-credentials and rapid, online re-skilling. LinkedIn’s career explorer microsite illustrates its potential to support the labour market, as do these case studies on our work with Ontario's higher education system, Utah's workforce development system, and the US National Labour Exchange (note: only the views in this paragraph are expressed on behalf of LinkedIn).
Tentative Lessons from the Pandemic
“We’re experiencing 10 years of change in 10 weeks”
From explosions in safety net spending to sold-out sour dough and from dolphins in the Vatican to cocktails delivered to your door, our social, political, economic and even environmental ecosystems are changing more rapidly than ever before. Squirrels, dogs and kids are crashing zoom calls and economies worldwide have locked down resulting in historically high unemployment and recessions.
Early this past summer, Microsoft's CEO described 2 years of digital transformation in 2 months, yet the positive bluster of tech giants is facing new social and geopolitical realities. As governments pour more money into social security and economic stimuli than ever in history, the fissures and faults in our social systems are also coming into relief: we're seeing how policy and technology can exacerbate inequalities of race, gender, socio-economic status and other demographics. We face annihilation due to climate change and a more imminent revolution due to extreme inequality. Never have both been more clear than during the pandemic, and more urgent.
Liberalism has resulted in family dynamics and definitions changing similarly dramatically. Multigenerational families and the social supports of a small-town tight-nit civil society or religious community look very different than today's metropolises with every niche interest and degree of wealth and status visible to all. No longer does the church or community center, school or town hall hold our communities together and dictate or at least shape our values. Robert Putnam was prescient in Bowling Alone: the decline of real-world social capital and the reduction in in-person social intercourse has undermined civic engagement and democracy.
Facebook ads and clickbait and YouTube rabbit holes have replaced physical meeting places and institutions that used to keep society together. Democracy has succumbed to the hope that startup accelerators and VCs will fill the gaping lack of connection to meaning, itself accelerated by private equity firms and hedge funds reinforcing the efficiency of economic gain for those who already have the most.
The pandemic may have awakened some to our universal responsibility for global forces. And some say more lives were saved in China due to decreased pollution than lost to the virus: "even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?" But climate change, like populism, is on the rise: human nature tends towards the most short term solution, that can be explained in the simplest language or follows the path of least resistance and most convenience. If only we could hold onto the choice of more pedestrian and bike friendly cities beyond a pandemic forcing them briefly upon us.
Creativity, Resilience and Human Dignity in the Internet Age
Our systems like our constitution and institutions have become hard and brittle and calcified. In particular I worry about us backsliding and moving inward towards nationalism, and protectionism, at everything from the State to personal-scale. People need to be trained to break through this inertia. We as individual humans, can rewrite our futures - that's resilience. We treat our technology as if it has run away from us, talking about the increasing power of AI and algorithms as if they already have the power yet we can seize the reins.
Ben Thompson has perhaps best summarized the role of the internet in this process:
"the Internet is on par with the industrial revolution, the full impact of which stretched over centuries. And it wasn’t all good. Like today, the industrial revolution included a period of time that saw many lose their jobs and a massive surge in inequality. It also lifted millions of others out of sustenance farming. Then again, it also propagated slavery, particularly in North America. The industrial revolution led to new monetary systems, and it created robber barons. Modern democracies sprouted from the industrial revolution, and so did fascism and communism. The quality of life of millions and millions was unimaginably improved, and millions and millions died in two unimaginably terrible wars."
We're facing extremes of possibility for the future that Covid-19 has created:
Universal Basic Income or a robust safety net (through employment standards laws, mandatory benefits for health, paid sick leave, or minimum / living wage laws) OR increasing efficiencies from privatization and public private partnerships
valuing in-person interactions, even education, more OR more remote work and online learning
greater inequality for disadvantaged populations such people with disabilities or newcomers OR an opportunity to leverage technology and a new economy to leapfrog their economic, social and physical barriers.
To avoid the cataclysmic unrest predicted by leaders like Ray Dalio, the public and private sectors will need a greater focus on human dignity, inclusion and sustainability. We can use human dignity as our north star, as the German legal system does. It can guide us through competing values and extreme futures. This principle can help us apply human centered design, and inclusion, equity and diversity, to human- and technology-enabled systems change. It can even help us navigate our our own lives post-pandemic.
Three ideas for a better recovery: a portal, human dignity and epistemic humility
No three concepts have resonated more during this time than:
using human dignity to bring us together and help us navigate rebuilding as discussed above
Erik Angner’s argument that leaders, particularly in the face of scientific and economic uncertainty, be humble and hesitant in their recommendations, explaining their uncertainty in addition to making clear policy statements:
"Frequent expressions of supreme confidence might seem odd in light of our obvious and inevitable ignorance about a new threat. The thing about overconfidence, though, is that it afflicts most of us much of the time
[...]
Being a true expert involves not only knowing stuff about the world but also knowing the limits of your knowledge and expertise. It requires, as psychologists say, both cognitive and metacognitive skills...The point is that true experts express themselves with the proper degree of confidence—meaning with a degree of confidence that’s justified given the evidence."
and
Arundhati Roy’s hope that ‘the pandemic is a portal’ into a better reality that we must fight to create:
"Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.”
Content that I’ve found compelling
Over the past 9 months I've collected a wide variety of links to my favourite content here. Beyond a ton of great articles, there are links to:
papers on human capital by the World Bank and private equity firm Two Sigma Impact
this user manual for how to best work with me
my partner Elina’s piece on open innovation in the public service
Other Reasons to Connect
While they didn’t get enough mention above, I remain passionate about open data and creative commons and supporting disadvantaged groups such as newcomers and refugees, indigenous populations, the formerly incarcerated and people with disabilities.
I’d also be excited to connect in my capacities as:
Co-founder at Lighthouse Labs, Canada's foremost software development bootcamp
Director on the Boards of:
and the Canadian Club of Toronto
Member of the McKinsey & Company Consortium for Learning Innovation and NYC Workforce Business Council
Advisory Board member of the Hot Docs Cinema, Kids Code Jeunesse
Executive at the International Council on Badges and Credentials
Thank you to my parents, partner, brother, Claire Veuthey, Sarah McCullough, Graeme Owens, Jay Singh, André Coté, Steven Hoffman and many others for their support and to you for having gotten this far! I promise not to use this list frequently and look forward to hearing from you.
thank you Jake for a call to (many) arms, with many paths and opportunities for us to serve! KB
great post Jake - rich and insightful