Eight cards from a vintage set of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, printed between 1920 and 1930. Frances Mulhall Achilles Library; Whitney Museum of American Art
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
| Octavia Butler
Women on the Tightrope
Alison Fragale and Adam Grant, in Kamala Harris Is Walking a Tightrope That Few Women Survive, analyze Kamala Harris' approach to presenting herself as competent for the job of US President, despite all the psychological and cultural barriers that make that difficult for her, and other women seeking positions of power.
Seeking power has always been a maddening tightrope walk for women. Show up as too dominant and they’re seen as cold; reveal too much vulnerability (or, God forbid, cry) and they seem weak. Over time Ms. Harris has figured out how to navigate these double standards, and her playbook may help other women do it, too.
Then they proceed to lay out the elements of her playbook.
1. 'One of the clearest markers of her evolution as a candidate has been her ability to convey both strength and sympathy, and to do so in ways that come across as authentic.'
2. 'Ms. Harris has continued to balance forcefulness with friendliness.'
3. 'Ms. Harris tends to begin pivotal communications with praise for others' thereby 'circumventing the gender stereotypes that punish women for anything that smacks of self-promotion.'
4. 'Ms. Harris has managed to display warmth even when anger would be a reasonable response.' 'People tend to associate male anger with power and competence — but if it’s a woman who’s expressing that emotion, she is likely to be dismissed as “hysterical.”’
5. 'Ms. Harris’s laugh has been front and center this election season. Although Mr. Trump has criticized it, it’s generally working for her — and science can explain why.' 'Women are judged more favorably when their faces convey compassion and support.' ‘Laughing makes her look affable.'
6. 'Humor turns out to be a useful tool for gaining influence — especially for women, as long as the humor isn’t at their own expense.'
Then the psychologists become political analysts:
But all these strategies have limits. Some voters are frustrated that Ms. Harris is offering them more sweet childhood stories than concrete plans. As she has leaned hard into establishing her relatability, she has sometimes sacrificed clarity about her policies. To sustain her momentum, she may need to devote as much time to her vision as her likeability.
Then they return to a conclusion based on the science:
We want to live in a world where women don’t have to balance so precariously on a tightrope to leadership. But even if these complex biases and pitfalls vanish, projecting care along with competence will still be a winning combination — for women as well as for men.
This playbook is very hard to play, and women need to carefully balance everyday at work if they want gain power while sidestepping all the potholes to get there.
This double bind reminds me of the quote about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, the great dance duo. She had to make every move he made, except backwards, and in high heels.
Hurricanes kill as much as 300X the official death tolls.
Hurricane Helene ripped up from Florida to the Carolinas last week, killing more than 100 people and leaving devastation in its wake that will take weeks or months even to assess.
A new study published in Nature suggests its impacts will be even greater. On average over the past nearly 100 years, a tropical cyclone hitting the U.S. is associated with somewhere between 7,000 to 11,000 deaths. Helene, though, was more powerful than the average; its likelihood and rainfall intensity were increased by human-caused climate change.
'When storms are active, people die, for instance, when floods rip through neighborhoods, or when trees fall on them. But the new study shows that losses continue for months, and can last as long as 15 years, after the storm passes taxing people’s health and economic well-being, contributing to thousands of premature deaths. The total impact, the study suggests, adds up to more than 3.5 million people since 1930, more than the total number of deaths from motor vehicle accidents over the same period of time and as much as 5% of the U.S.’s total deaths.
The analysis underscores that “tropical cyclones and hurricanes are a much greater public health burden than we previously thought,” says Rachel Young, an environmental economist at the University of California, Berkeley and author of the paper.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, counts the number of deaths directly attributed to hurricanes and tropical cyclones each year: out of the 501 storms that the study looked at, the official numbers say an average of 24 people die after each storm. But the new analysis suggests the toll is some 300 times higher than the official numbers.
If the official death toll for Helene rises to 150, and the true mortality is 300X that, we can expect almost 48,000 resulting deaths from this one event over the next 15 years.
…
Climate Migration
Roughly 3.2 million Americans have already migrated, many over short distances, out of flood zones, such as low-lying parts of Staten Island, Miami and Galveston, Texas. Over the next 30 years, 7.5 million more are projected to leave those perennially flooded zones, according to a First Street Foundation study.
And it's going to mostly a migration from the South and the West to the northern and inland sections of the US. I think the First Foundation estimates are way low, because they focus on flooding, leaving aside for the most part hurricanes and tropical storms, heat, drought, and wildfires.
How disruptive will that be to American business and the economy? We are short on housing now (by at least 5M housing units) but what if we need to build for 100M climate migrants?
…
Penny for your Thoughts?
Most pennies produced by the US are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them. A conservative estimate holds that there are 240 billion pennies lying around the US – about 724 ($7.24) for every man, woman and child. Minting a 1 cent coin costs more than 3 cents.
For those interested in notetaking, knowledge management, and tools for thought, I recently posted Rethinking Folio: Without Kanbans, where I describe in detail a major shift in my notetaking system for Obsidian, called Folio.
The technology is hardly new. We’ve been going around this technology block for a while. Jive was founded in 2001 and now have vanished into private equity hell. Yammer was founded in 2008. Slack was founded in 2009. Workplace from Meta the once new kid on the block was announced in 2015. Microsoft Teams was launched November 2016. Over the last 20 something years, a raft of other collaboration solutions have lit up the sky and either burnt out or scaled back to a niche. I’m sure there’s yet another Google product coming.
If you take nothing else away from this post, remember this:
In 2011, I wrote a scenario for a challenge set up by the Institute of the Future. They have taken down the materials now, but I packratted it away:
California Dreams asks you to imagine the future. Will California keep growing, start conserving, reinvent itself, or collapse? Put yourself in the future of one of these paths. Show us what a day in your life looks like and how you are living in this new world.
Why do we care? Because California is in crisis. Because pioneers with brilliant ideas live here. Because dreaming the future can change the future.
My response:
The California Territory: 2011-2020
A very dry mudflat.
The California economic crisis of 2011 led to a near cessation of public services in 2012-2015, as in nearly 20 other states of the US. Inability to maintain public services – police, highway, transportation, education, courts, welfare – led to the US intervention in California and 16 other states through the creation of the Territorial Services Agency of the US Interior department by President Biden in 2015. California was the most populous state to be put under Supreme Court ordered receivership by Chief Justice Barack Obama. (The legality of revoking the states’ statehood, and returning them to the status of “incorporated but unorganized” territories was questionable, but formed the pretext of direct federal control.)
The violent weather of the ‘10s was especially devastating to southern and mountainous areas of California, based on strengthening of El Niño and global climate changes. A drastic increase of typhoon-like storms led to widespread and enormous mudslides (like the ones that buried Glendale and Santa Barbara in 2015), and an increase in summer temperatures by 4º-5ºC led to growing severity of wildfires, culminating in the near destruction of San Diego in 2018 by the Tijuana Fire. The growing heat, erratic summer rainfall, and decreased snowpack of the Cascades led to drought conditions in California for most of the '10s, contributing to the Bee Famine of 2016.
Because of the economic collapse, federal takeover, drought, and violent weather, over 60% of the population of California emigrated between 2011 and 2020, the great majority of which were resettled in the former 'Rust Belt’ area of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania and the territory of Haiti as part of the 2017 Resettlement Act, where the government invested heavily in permatechnology and the 'Foodshed’ agriculture initiative following the Bee Famine of 2016. The Bee Famine was partly caused by the California, Russian, Asian, and South American droughts, but mostly by the total die-off of domestic bees in 2016.
By 2020, California had a population of 14 million, mostly in the northern half of the territory. South California had transformed from a coastal savannah, with the new California Desert reaching past Santa Barbara on the Pacific, and to the foothills of the Cascades. The Foodshed movement had led the country away from the industrial agriculture that typified California’s central valley in the 20th century, with only wine, olives and fruit remaining as major food exports, and all of that located in the northern parts of the territory.
There is a plan to begin the return to statehood in some of the former states of the union, but California’s situation is still too shaky to proceed today, in 2020. President Michelle Obama has publicly stated that California could be on the path back to statehood in the next few years, so long as the turnaround continues, and the territory continues to assume control of public services.
[I never elaborated on the ‘Territory of Haiti’ comment, BTW.]
Work Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Work Futures to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
