ARTCILES

Economist Jan 19th 2017 | VILNIUS AND RIGA The old countries Eastern Europe’s workers are emigrating, but its pensioners are staying The EU’s newest members face economic decline unless they woo back workers, or recruit immigrants of their own N THE Lithuanian town of Panevezys, a shiny new factory built by Devold, a Norwegian clothing manufacturer, sits alone in the local free economic zone. The factory is unable to fill 40 of its jobs, an eighth of the total. That is not because workers in Panevezys are too picky, but because there are fewer and fewer of them. There are about half as many students in the municipality’s schools as there were a decade ago, says the mayor. Such worries are increasingly common across central and eastern Europe, where birth rates are low and emigration rates high. The ex-communist countries that joined the European Union from 2004 on dreamed of quickly transforming themselves into Germany or Britain. Instead, many of their workers transported themselves to Germany or Britain.

Latvia’s working-age population has fallen by a quarter since 2000; a third of those who graduated from university between 2002 and 2009 had emigrated by 2014. Polls of Bulgarian medical students show that 80-90% plan to emigrate after graduating. Lithuania’s loss of workers is costly, says Stasys Jakeliunas, an economist. Remittances and EU money for infrastructure upgrades have helped, but labour shortages discourage foreign investment and hurt economic growth. According to the IMF, in some countries in eastern Europe emigration shaved 0.6-0.9 percentage points from annual GDP growth in 1999-2014. By 2030 GDP per person in Bulgaria, Romania and some of the Baltic countries may be 3-4% lower than it would have been without emigration.

$Economist Oct 7th 2017 Men, women and work. The gender pay gap Women still earn a lot less than men, despite decades of equal-pay laws. Why? “I ALWAYS wanted to be a mum,” says Meghan, a British woman with two children. She wanted a career, too, and worked hard for it, earning a degree in economics and accounting, and taking professional exams. At a big accounting firm in London, she managed junior employees. When her daughter was born she faced a choice between her career and being the mother she wanted to be. After her boss refused her a flexible work schedule, she quit. Six years later she is a childminder, earning a fraction of her former salary. Now divorced, she says that a professional role in accountancy would have been financially better for her family. But finding one with hours that worked for a single parent seemed impossible. Stories like this sum up the “motherhood penalty” to women’s careers. It is the main reason why the pay gap between men and women in rich countries is no longer narrowing. Employers view long hours as a sign of commitment and leadership potential. But from scarce, pricey child care to short school days, the world is organised for families with a parent at home—and that is usually the mother.$

In the rich and middle-income countries that make up the OECD, the median wage of a woman working full-time is 85% that of a man. This is not, as many assume, because employers pay a woman less than they would have paid a man in her place. Data from 25 countries collected by Korn Ferry, a consultancy, show that women earn 98% as much as men who do the same job for the same employer. The real reason is twofold. Women outnumber men in positions with lower salaries and little chance of promotion. And men and women are segregated between occupations and industries; those where women predominate pay less. Just a fifth of senior executives in G7 countries are female. Across the European Union supervisors are more likely to be male, even when most of their underlings are female. Nearly 70% of working women in the EU are in occupations where at least 60% of workers are female. The top four jobs done by American women—teacher, nurse, secretary and health aide—are all at least 80% female.

Special report / The Economist GrAIt expectations Non-tech businesses are beginning to use artificial intelligence at scale Artificial intelligence is spreading beyond the technology sector, with big consequences for companies,workers and consumers, says Alexandra Suich Bass. LIE DETECTORS ARE not widely used in business, but Ping An, a Chinese insurance company, thinks it can spot dishonesty. The company lets customers apply for loans through its app. Prospective borrowers answer questions about their income and plans for repayment by video, which monitors around 50 tiny facial expressions to determine whether they are telling the truth. The program, enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), helps pinpoint customers who require further scrutiny. AI will change more than borrowers’ bank balances. Johnson & Johnson, a consumer-goods firm, and Accenture, a consultancy, use AI to sort through job applications and pick the best candidates. AI helps Caesars, a casino and hotel group, guess customers’ likely spending and offer personalised promotions to draw them in. Bloomberg, a media and financial-information firm, uses AI to scan companies’ earnings releases and automatically generate news articles.

Vodafone, a mobile operator, can predict problems with its network and with users’ devices before they arise. Companies in every industry use AI to monitor cyber-security threats and other risks, such as disgruntled employees. Instead of relying on gut instinct and rough estimates, cleverer and speedier AI-powered predictions promise to make businesses much more efficient. At Leroy Merlin, a French home-improvement retailer, managers used to order new stock on Fridays, but defaulted to the same items as the week before so they could start their weekend sooner. The firm now uses algorithms to take in past sales data and other information that could affect sales, such as weather forecasts, in order to stock shelves more effectively. That has helped it reduce its inventory by 8% even as sales have risen by 2%, says Manuel Davy of Vekia, the AI startup that engineered the program.

Lithuania’s loss of workers is costly, says Stasys Jakeliunas, an economist. Remittances and EU money for infrastructure upgrades have helped, but labour shortages discourage foreign investment and hurt economic growth. According to the IMF, in some countries in eastern Europe emigration shaved 0.6-0.9 percentage points from annual GDP growth in 1999-2014. By 2030 GDP per person in Bulgaria, Romania and some of the Baltic countries may be 3-4% lower than it would have been without emigration. All of this imperils public finances. Pensions, which take up about half of social spending in eastern Europe, are the biggest worry. In 2013 Latvia had 3.3 working-age adults for each person older than 65, about the same as Britain and France; by 2030 that is projected to fall to just over two, a level Britain and France will not reach until 2060. Countries are raising the retirement age (apart from Poland, which is recklessly lowering it). Benefits are already meagre, leaving little room for cuts. As a share of GDP, social spending in Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic states is roughly half of that in many richer European countries.

Oscar Schwartz | Wed 25 Jul 2018 11.00 BST Last modified on Wed 25 Jul 2018 21.39 BST 'The discourse is unhinged': how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong Social media has allowed self-proclaimed ‘AI influencers’ who do nothing more than paraphrase Elon Musk to cash in on this hype with low-quality pieces. The result is dangerous In June of last year, five researchers at Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research unit published an article showing how bots can simulate negotiation-like conversations. While for the most part the bots were able to maintain coherent dialogue, the researchers found that the software agents would occasionally generate strange sentences like: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.” On seeing these results, the team realized that they had failed to include a constraint that limited the bots to generating sentences within the parameters of spoken English, meaning that they developed a type of machine-English patois to communicate between themselves. These findings were considered to be fairly interesting by other experts in the field, but not totally surprising or groundbreaking.

A month after this initial research was released, Fast Company published an article entitled AI Is Inventing Language Humans Can’t Understand. Should We Stop It?. The story focused almost entirely on how the bots occasionally diverged from standard English – which was not the main finding of the paper – and reported that after the researchers “realized their bots were chattering in a new language” they decided to pull the plug on the whole experiment, as if the bots were in some way out of control. Fast Company’s story went viral and spread across the internet, prompting a slew of content-hungry publications to further promote this new Frankenstein-esque narrative: “Facebook engineers panic, pull plug on AI after bots develop their own language,” one website reported. Not to be outdone, the Sun proposed that the incident “closely resembled the plot of The Terminator in which a robot becomes self-aware and starts waging a war on humans”.

OPINION / The World Bank September 22, 2015 | Christian Bodewig Brookings Blogs Is the Refugee Crisis an Opportunity for an Aging Europe? Europe is facing the biggest inflow of migrants in decades. The number of refugees from conflict zones in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere arriving at southern European shores is rising by the day. The resulting surge of asylum claims in the European Union (EU) have exposed divisions between EU member states over how to react. Governments in Central Europe and the Baltics have rejected the proposals by the European Commission to use mandatory quotas to distribute refugees across all 28 member states and come out against taking in significant numbers of refugees. But wait a minute. Opposition to immigration appears counterintuitive for countries that face the prospect of aging and rapid population declines. For example, the Baltic countries and Bulgaria have already seen their populations shrink by more than 15 percent since 1990, Croatia by 10 percent, and Romania and Hungary by more than 5 percent. The share of the population aged 65 and above in the countries of Central Europe and the Baltics increased by more than a third between 1990 and 2010.

Unlike in Western Europe, where people are living longer, aging in Central Europe and the Baltic countries has been driven by significant emigration, especially of young people of child-bearing ageand often to Western Europe, and by substantial drops in fertility. Fertility rates in Central Europe and the Baltic countries today are generally below 1.6. They are as low as 1.3 in Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia—far below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1. Population projections suggest that aging and demographic decline will continue and even accelerate, putting economic growth at risk and adding to fiscal pressures through a greater reliance on old age pensions and health services.

Yuval Noah Harari | Mon 8 May 2017 06.00 BST Last modified on Mon 9 Jul 2018 12.16 BST The meaning of life in a world without work As technology renders jobs obsolete, what will keep us busy? Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari examines ‘the useless class’ and a new quest for purpose Most jobs that exist today might disappear within decades. As artificial intelligence outperforms humans in more and more tasks, it will replace humans in more and more jobs. Many new professions are likely to appear: virtual-world designers, for example. But such professions will probably require more creativity and flexibility, and it is unclear whether 40-year-old unemployed taxi drivers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if the ex-insurance agent somehow makes the transition into a virtual-world designer, the pace of progress is such that within another decade he might have to reinvent himself yet again. The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.

The same technology that renders humans useless might also make it feasible to feed and support the unemployable masses through some scheme of universal basic income. The real problem will then be to keep the masses occupied and content. People must engage in purposeful activities, or they go crazy. So what will the useless class do all day? One answer might be computer games. Economically redundant people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual reality worlds, which would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the “real world” outside. This, in fact, is a very old solution. For thousands of years, billions of people have found meaning in playing virtual reality games. In the past, we have called these virtual reality games “religions”.

Interview / Guardian Andrew Anthony Rutger Bregman: ‘We could cut the working week by a third’ Could this young Dutchman, hailed as a visionary, galvanise the left with his radical plan for a borderless future in which we are all paid for working less? As liberal democracy seems to be crumbling under the weight of widespread despondency, some hardline opinions are in danger of becoming received wisdoms. In the global market, we are told, we must work harder and improve productivity. The welfare state has become too large and we need to cut back on benefits. Immigration is out of control and borders need to be strengthened. The choice seems to be either to accept this new paradigm or risk the likes of Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders gaining power. The centre ground is being dragged to the left and right, and collapsing down the middle. Meanwhile progressive politics has returned to its comfort zone, busily opposing everything and offering almost nothing. Where is the vision, the ambition, the belief?

Yet into this bleak picture drops a book and an author bristling with hope, optimism and answers. Rutger Bregman is a 28-year-old Dutchman whose book, Utopia for Realists, has taken Holland by storm and could yet revitalise progressive thought around the globe. His solutions are quite simple and staunchly set against current trends: we should institute a universal basic income for everyone that covers minimum living expenses – say around £12,000 a year; the working week should be shortened to 15 hours; borders should be opened and migrants allowed to move wherever they choose. If that all sounds like fantasy politics, then Bregman has assembled a wealth of empirical evidence to make his case. Better than that, though, it is not a dry, statistical analysis – although he doesn’t shy from solid data – but a book written with verve, wit and imagination. The effect is charmingly persuasive, even when you can’t quite believe what you’re reading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycPr5-27vSI

Amie Tsang | Sept. 10, 2018 In Britain, Calls for a 4-Day Week. Can It Be Done?  LONDON — Increasing numbers of workplaces around the world are embracing technology, and a greater array of tasks is being automated. In the eyes of one major British labor organization, that need not be a threat to workers, but may instead offer an opportunity: less time working. “I believe that in this century, we can win a four-day working week, with decent pay for everyone,” Frances O’Grady, the head of the Trades Union Congress, an umbrella group, said in a speech at the labor federation’s annual conference. That, she said, would help workers reap the benefits of technological change. The economist John Maynard Keynes had predicted that people would eventually work for just 15 hours a week. Instead, technology has led to unpredictable, more intensive and longer hours at work, the Trades Union Congress said. “This is a return to the days of piecework, creating a culture where workers are required to be constantly available to work,” the group said in a report. It is not the only organization scrutinizing how technology affects productivity and work-life balance.