Monday morning news drop
Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation Research using employee data reveals the top five predictors of attrition and four actions managers can take in the short term to reduce attrition. (MIT Sloan)
A new era for the American worker American workers have power. That won’t last forever. More than any other time in recent memory, the present moment offers many Americans a chance to make work better. American employees in 2022 have more leverage over their employers than they have had since the 1970s, the result of a confluence of factors. The pandemic that began in 2020 has prompted a widespread reevaluation about what place work should have in the lives of many Americans, who are known for putting in more hours than people in most other industrialized nations. There’s also been a groundswell of labor organizing that began building momentum in the last decade, due to larger trends like an aging population and growing income inequality. This movement has accelerated in the past two years as the pandemic has brought labor issues to the fore. (Vox)
Canada’s Supreme Court is off-balance as ‘large and liberal’ consensus on the Charter falls apart The nine top judges are more divided than ever on the question of how broadly or narrowly to interpret Canadians’ constitutional rights – and while the PMs who appointed them are a factor, that doesn’t tell the whole story (Globe and Mail)
Shift to net-zero emissions likely to drive higher inflation, economists say Economists around the world already are warning of greenflation, higher energy prices and consumer costs as the global economy shifts to cleaner energy sources (Financial Post)
An Evangelical Climate Scientist Wonders What Went Wrong . “For many people now, hope is a bad word,” says Hayhoe, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy as well as a professor of political science at Texas Tech. “They think that hope is false hope; it is wishful thinking. But there are things to do — and we should be doing them.” (NYT Magazine)
As Fintech Eats Into Profits, Big Banks Fight Back in Washington Traditional finance and digital upstarts alike claim the other side has an unfair advantage. (Businessweek)
Vanguard fires fresh salvo in asset management fee war Group to cut costs on investment funds by $1bn over next four years, chief executive Tim Buckley says. (Financial Times)
From living rooms to landfills, some holiday shopping returns take a ‘very sad path’. More than half a trillion dollars. That’s the estimated value of all the stuff that U.S. shoppers bought last year only to return it — more than the economy of Israel or Austria. (NPR)
Imagining the unimaginable: The U.S., China and war over Taiwan One way to avoid conflict may be to understand just how destructive it would be. (Grid)
Seven ways Republicans are already undermining the 2024 election The next attempted coup will not be a mob attack, but a carefully plotted and even technically legal one. Instead of costumed rioters, the insurrectionists are men in suits and ties. (The Guardian)
Longer-Run Economic Consequences of Pandemics What are the long-term effects of pandemics? How do they differ from other economic disasters? We study major pandemics stretching back to the 14th century. Significant macroeconomic after-effects of pandemics persist for decades, with real rates of return substantially depressed, in stark contrast to what happens after wars. Capital is destroyed in wars, but not in pandemics; pandemics instead may induce relative labor scarcity and/or a shift to greater precautionary savings. (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco)
After the Beanie Baby bubble burst What happens when the frenzy ends and the world doesn’t value your valuables? At the height of Beanie Baby mania in the 1990s, plenty of people genuinely believed the toys might be the key to their retirement or their kids’ college tuition. Some people stole litters of them, and at least one person was reportedly killed in a Beanie-related dispute. Now, when cleaning out their basements or going through bins left behind by their grandparents, some people decide to check in — just in case — to see if they’re sitting on a gold mine of ’90s relics. Most of the time, they aren’t. (Vox)
The ‘Future of Food’ Is Already Here — but How Dystopian Is It? At the Food on Demand conference in Las Vegas, the food service industry laid out its vision for a future in which customers never have to wait. Just don’t think too hard about how that’d work. (Eater)
The secret MVP of sports? The port-a-potty The concept of mobile restrooms evolved slowly over the years, with centuries of civilizations essentially just doing small tweaks on the chamber pot. The need for portable bathrooms rose in the late 1800s as more and more American jobs drifted into large-scale mining and building projects. An abandoned copper mine in northern Michigan from the turn of the 20th century was recently discovered in remarkably preserved condition, including a wooden box that had been used by miners as their underground bathroom. For miners and construction workers who desperately needed bathrooms while on the job all day, finding a tree or a wooden box often was the best they could do 100 years ago. (ESPN)