Logos. Ethos. Pathos: February 2021 Newsletter
From how to envisage cloud cities, introduction to social capital and a new way to think about wealth: I've compiled my favourite materials that I've read & heard since the year began.
Hi everyone. 2021 couldn’t start off with more doom and gloom: thanks to 3rd wave lockdowns all over the world.
But if you’ve studied anything about the history of humans, know that we’ve been around for ~200,000 years now with plenty of ups and downs. So I would very much like to think that humanity is an ongoing concern.
As of such, I’ve compiled my favourite materials so far: it’s a mixture of readings and podcasts.
Charter Cities Podcast Episode 15: A City in the Cloud with Balaji Srinivasan
Balaji is one of my favourite personalities in the Valley. In here he goes in depth into the history how cities are formed traditionally: based on geography, religious persecution, ethnic-lines to hypothesis of the creation of the city in the cloud where people will create physical cities based on alignment of similar interests. One of my favorite quotes from the podcast:
“The advantages of being physically in America has been uploaded to the cloud.”
Nevada bill would allow tech companies to create governments
The last time this level of sovereignty aligned with trade was with the 18-19th century company-states of British and Dutch East India companies. Radical experiment to organise society: rise of techno startup-states begin. Start your own company. Develop your own community. Launch your own currency (crypto for now). Pass your own laws (in a limited way). Self-govern your own city.
Introduction of Social Capital: Utah’s Economic Exceptionalism
This latest edition of American Affair introduces something that I feel is hyper important especially in the context of the pandemic world we live in today. It goes into a less well-known development: how Utah dealt amazingly with the pandemic and scoring highly on every indicator: economic growth, income equality, health & wellbeing, upward social mobility etc.
It introduces the concept of social capital. Among the most well-known scholars of social capital is Harvard University professor Robert Putnam. In his book Bowling Alone, he describes social capital as a parallel concept to physical and human capital in terms of what it does for productivity. He writes:
The core idea of social capital theory is that social networks have value. . . . Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (“human capital”) can increase productivity, so too social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups.17
Putnam and others describe social capital in various ways—as trust between individuals and entities; as established forms of reciprocity and caring for one another; as a form of empathy; as civic virtue, goodwill, and fellowship; as mutual support and cooperation; and as institutional effectiveness.
I hope we ourselves can create robust social capital structures around us.
The most data-driven way to measure social progress: The 2020 Social Progress Index dashboard
which can be found here.
Rather than emphasising traditional measurements of success like income and investment, it measures 50 social and environmental indicators to create a clearer picture of what life is really like for everyday people around the world.
An overview of their data definitions can be found here.
A new way to think about Wealth and post-pandemic recovery:
How do you define wealth in a state? I really love the approach taken by the Bennett Institute academics at Cambridge. Introducing the ‘Wealth Economy’ approach. An understanding of wealth which expands beyond physical and produced capital as seen below.
The Wealth Economy approach shows that future economic possibilities depend on the current management of all forms of mutually reinforcing wealth. Building capacity and resilience after the pandemic requires investing in vital assets necessary for a sustainable 21st century. This includes: human health and skills, physical infrastructure (e.g. transport, housing, utilities and ICT), intangible knowledge assets that allow us to use all resources more efficiently, sustainable natural resource and ecosystems management (including air quality, biodiversity, and climate systems), social trust and the strength of communities, and the quality of democratic institutions. Combined, these assets determine an economy’s Inclusive Wealth, and are the building blocks for achieving the SDGs.
Cool graphs: Visualizing the benefits of electric cars:
I stumbled upon this amazing piece of data viz (and incredibly informational one too) that I had to share. The New York Times has created a series of visualizations about the environmental and economic benefits of electric cars using data released by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Facebook and Twitter open up data to researchers:
Facebook and Twitter both announced projects to let researchers access large amounts of data about content, advertising and recommendation. The data will come with privacy controls and only approved researchers can acccess it. This has always been a contentious question: Facebook turned off a lot of data access after the Cambridge Analytica story, in which, don't forget, an academic researcher took a lot of data using FB APIs and then sold it. Hence, people in Silicon Valley are radically unimpressed by academics' tendency to assert that they should get whatever data they want. But equally, the data FB and Twitter give on a privacy-compliant basis has often left a lot to be desired. So, let's see the detail. Links: Facebook, Twitter
Google puts forward its view on how to replace cookies:
We all know ~80% of Google’s revenue comes from web advertisement. The data of you and me collected in the form of cookies. How do we get ads that are somewhat relevant without tracking individuals across the web?
Results from Google’s privacy sandbox is out: enter 'Federated Learning of Cohorts' (FLoC). FLoC's use pooling/clustering of group based on interests vs tracking individuals (that cookies do). This approach effectively hides individuals “in the crowd” and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser.