District Court Concludes More Likely Than Not that President Trump and John Eastman Committed the Defraud Conspiracy
The man who predicted the Great Resignation says quitting’s contagious
Anthony Klotz says quitting rates could stay higher than average for years, leaving the labour market unsettled as people sort out their post-pandemic lives.
Not many of us can name a single day when our life took a radically different turn.
For the US academic Anthony Klotz, it came in February last year when a reporter was interviewing him about what even he calls his “mini niche” area of expertise: how people quit their jobs.
Some people are opting out of the rat race to improve their work/life balance. David Rowe
The reporter was writing a story about the best ways to resign, but as she was chatting with Klotz, he said something else that caught her attention.
Although COVID-19 vaccine rollouts were at that time raising hopes of a return to pre-virus normality, Klotz thought the pandemic was driving several trends that would unleash an unusually large wave of US resignations.
The reporter decided to write a second story. The result was a Bloomberg article last May that quoted Klotz predicting “the great resignation is coming”. With that, one of the defining phrases of the pandemic was born.
The idea was brave at the time because it was not reflected in the latest official US workforce data, which typically has a two-month time lag. But a few weeks later, new figures showed about 4 million workers, or 2.7 per cent of the workforce, had quit in April 2021, the highest level on record.
By November, that number had climbed to 4.5 million and when fresh figures came out on Tuesday last week, they showed another 4.4 million had gone in February, or 2.9 per cent of the total.
Klotz, a 42-year-old associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, is still adjusting to the experience of being the Great Resignation inventor.
Living their dreams
“It sounds so weird to say I coined it,” he said with evident embarrassment when I spoke to him last week about what he thinks caused the phenomenon, and where it is headed next.
He cites four causes, starting with a backlog of pent-up resignations from the first uncertain year of the pandemic, when people stayed in jobs they otherwise might have left.
Secondly, workers were burnt out. The third reason is linked to what psychologists call Terror Management Theory and the idea that people confronted with death or serious illness tend to reflect on how much meaning and contentment exists in their own lives.
“What I kept hearing was, ‘Before the pandemic I arranged my whole life around work’,” says Klotz, but coming out of the pandemic, people said, “I need work to work around my life.”
Finally, there was the unexpected freedom that millions experienced when the pandemic forced them to work at home. “Autonomy is a fundamental human need,” says Klotz, and when people get a taste of it for months on end, they do not cede it easily.
It is worth saying here that other researchers are still studying the causes and impacts of the Great Resignation — and some suspect the theory is overblown.
Last month, British economists said there was evidence the UK also experienced a Great Resignation, but not because workers were quitting to live their dreams, or make drastic career changes. Rather, most seemed to be switching employers, with the exception of over-50s, who have retired in larger numbers than usual.
Klotz thinks the numbers speak for themselves, at least in the US, but agrees there is obviously room for much more inquiry.
As for what he thinks will happen next, he starts with a big disclaimer.
“I’m an organisational psychologist, not an economist, so I have no business making labour market predictions,” he says. “And if I was an economist, I’d be annoyed at me for doing so.”
RELATED
‘The Great Resignation’ wave swamping workplaces around the world
Still, he thinks resignation rates could stay above average for two or three years, partly because quitting can be contagious, and also because there is so much change in the workplace as employers experiment with new ways of working.
“I think that’s going to continue to keep the labour market somewhat unsettled for a while,” he says. Also, people are still “sorting out their lives” and what they want their futures to look like.
He has a word of caution, pointing to recent research suggesting employees’ wellbeing can fall after a job change.
Hopefully, Klotz is an outlier. He has just resigned from Texas A&M to take a new job in the UK, at University College London’s school of management.
Financial Times
Still, he thinks resignation rates could stay above average for two or three years, partly because quitting can be contagious, and also because there is so much change in the workplace as employers experiment with new ways of working.
“I think that’s going to continue to keep the labour market somewhat unsettled for a while,” he says. Also, people are still “sorting out their lives” and what they want their futures to look like.
He has a word of caution, pointing to recent research suggesting employees’ wellbeing can fall after a job change.
Hopefully, Klotz is an outlier. He has just resigned from Texas A&M to take a new job in the UK, at University College London’s school of management.
Financial Times
The dark web and day traders are an inconvenient killjoy for crypto
Digital asset evangelists want to talk about the future, but can’t totally distance themselves from the rabbit hole’s clear and present dangers.
Aleks VickovichAsked how the “crypto community” is responding to the scammers and criminals operating on their networks and, in some prominent cases, destroying consumer wealth, ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin offered a history lesson.
“It’s absolutely a big problem,” the former Goldman Sachs technology executive told The Australian Financial Review Cryptocurrency Summit on Wednesday.
“[But] we’ll build robust systems just like the monetary systems that have evolved over the last 100 years, where stage coaches and safes were beaten regularly by hackers, who extracted their consulting fees. So, we’re facing the same sort of build or break dynamic.”
As a New Yorker, Lubin may have under-estimated Australia’s historic sentimentality for bushrangers. Any local scammers may have been buoyed, rather than discouraged, by the stagecoach hold-up analogy.
But putting Ned Kelly complexes aside, the exchange highlighted the perennial thorn in the side of those who want to focus on crypto’s positives and the future, not the past or present.
The criminals operating in the crypto ecosystem, and the millions of mostly Millennial and Gen Z trading crypto tokens in their spare time, are merely misusing the blockchain and a distraction from the real power of the tech, or so the line goes.
Delegates to the Summit – a motley crew of sneakered and bushy-bearded crypto developers and start-up founders, suited lawyers and bankers and eager, note-taking investors – heard this line consistently.
“What would I say to the people who are looking for a quick tip about whether they should or shouldn’t own bitcoin, or ethereum or 1000 other sh-tcoins?” venture capital investor and summit sponsor Mark Carnegie asked in his opening remarks. “I don’t know.”
That doesn’t matter, was the implication. Instead, we should be focused on the multitrillion-dollar opportunity in web3 and asset tokenisation, he said.
NSW Senator Andrew Bragg, who led the inquiry that drove a framework for national crypto policy settings last year, sang a similar tune. “When I was first in Parliament, there was a lot of talk about drug dealers and criminals [and their links to cryptocurrencies],” he said. “I wanted to lift the bar and focus on the national opportunity for Australia.”
Non-fungible token (NFT) pioneer Yat Siu, founder of Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands, appealed to the financially literate suits in the room: you don’t judge the Aussie economy only by the dollar, he said, so don’t judge the crypto ecosystem by the financial performance of coins.
There may be real nuggets of truth in this argument. And perhaps the press and other naysayers have been too eager to pop the bubble and focus on the market’s excesses and volatility.
But more so, what these comments show is the eagerness of the emerging crypto industry (and their growing number of professional lobbyists in Canberra and Washington, DC) to distance themselves from the system’s problems, and detract critics with the shiny and new.
Some don’t even want to hear it – when the regulators took to the stage to warn of the risks inherent, there was a notable exodus of some delegates to the bar, presumably for more optimistic chatter.
Caroline Bowler of local crypto exchange BTC Markets was quick to point out that Chainalysis data suggests illicit activity accounts for just 0.15 per cent of global crypto transactions.
John Moss, deputy chief of Australia’s financial intelligence agency AUSTRAC, endorsed the data, saying it was probably the world’s best estimate.
But, he added, importantly that seemingly small that still represented $US14 billion worth of activity – and is many multiples higher than the criminal activity found in the traditional banking system.
Tellingly, while few bankers were willing to take the stage on Wednesday, many attended as delegates, sitting alongside fund managers and investment product marketers and developers.
Like our broader readership, many were simply keen to learn more about this fascinating space. But no doubt, many others have worked out they can make a buck by facilitating access to this wild, wild west.
Crypto true believers are clearly genuine about their excitement for the faster, more transparent financial system.
But they are also beneficiaries of the hyped sentiment, and structurally tied to some of the sinister activity on the fringe. So they can’t just sweep them under the carpet.
The New York Times – “Services that put a name to a face, including Clearview AI, are being used to identify Russian soldiers, living or dead, and to verify that travelers in Ukraine are who they claim…Identifying dead soldiers and notifying their families is part of a campaign, according to a Telegram post by the Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov, to break through to the Russian public the cost of the conflict and to “dispel the myth of a ‘special operation’ in which there are ‘no conscripts’ and ‘no one dies,’” he wrote.
Images from conflict zones, of slaughtered civilians and soldiers left behind on city streets turned battlefields, have become more widely and instantaneously available in the social media era. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has shown graphic images of attackson his country to world leaders in making his case for more international aid. But beyond conveying a visceral sense of war, those kinds of images can now offer something else: a chance for facial recognition technology to play a significant role.
Critics warn, however, that the tech companies could be taking advantage of a crisis to expand with little privacy oversight, and that any mistakes made by the software or those using it could have dire consequences in a war zone…”
Blockchain: Novel Provenance Applications, April 8, 2022: “Blockchain, generally, is a database technology that records and stores information in blocks of data that are linked, or “chained,” together.
Data stored on a blockchain are continually shared, replicated, and synchronized across the nodes in a network—individual computer systems or specialized hardware that communicate with each other and store and process information. This system enables tamper-resistant record keeping without a centralized authority or intermediary. There are multiple types of blockchains, and, depending on the type, recorded data may be accessible to all users or only a designated subset.
All blockchains share common characteristics, including decentralization (i.e., no centralized authority), immutability (i.e., the blockchain records are unalterable), and pseudonymity (i.e., how users’ real-world identities are handled). Certain blockchain types may offer greater levels of decentralization and pseudonymity than others. New blockchain applications, such as smart contracts, non-fungible tokens, and decentralization autonomous organizations, may automate processes or replace intermediaries in a variety of fields. Recent developments in blockchain governance protocols and consensus mechanisms have raised concerns about the environmental impact, oversight, and accountability of blockchain networks…
The United States is a hub for private-sector blockchain development, and many states and federal agencies are experimenting with novel blockchain provenance applications,including the Food and Drug Administration and Department of Treasury. Proponents claim that blockchain can increase transparency and efficiency in many fields by enabling auditable and immutable recordkeeping. However, there are equally significant concerns. Blockchain technologies are maturing and fully developed use cases outside of the financial sector are relatively limited. In some applications, blockchain technologies can add unnecessary complexity compared with using conventional databases or other alternatives.
The technology may also pose security and privacy risks if sensitive information is permanently recorded on a blockchain, encryption algorithms are broken, smart contracts malfunction, or digital wallets and other blockchain applications are hacked. Some blockchains also use energy-intensive processes to validate transactions, which can consume as much energy as small nations. Individual states have passed legislation or established initiatives to develop, incentivize, and regulate blockchain technologies. Some states have taken vastly different approaches to blockchain technologies, so the state-level regulations that do exist vary widely.
A handful of federal agencies have released guidance on blockchain technologies in specific sectors, such as finance, but there is little guidance for blockchain applications in other fields, such supply chain logistics, identity credentialing, or intellectual property and asset registration. In the meantime, China and the European Union have invested heavily in blockchain technologies and developed their own respective regulatory frameworks, so international regulations may also conflict with one another…”
