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Office spaces are dangerous

I did an interview with Helen Toner for The Browser where we made bets on China’s economic development, the possibility of an AI delivered milkshake, and quantum computing.

One of the things that living in Switzerland caused me to appreciate is the impact of trust in society. Switzerland measures as an exceptionally high trust society.

When you live there, it’s something you can actually feel. The way I describe it to people is that in Switzerland, everywhere feels like high end American suburbs (holding aside for the moment that not everyone feels welcome in American suburbs). Things just work. You can leave your door unlocked.

I have a hypothesis that this trust is self reinforcing. Because people trust each other, additional things are possible. Because of these things, people trust the system. My example here is the Swiss Recycling system, although I’m sure someone could come up with something better.

Because of this experience, societal trust has become something I really want to better understand. Where does it come from? How can we make more of it? What destroys it?

With that background, I loved this interview between Phares Kariuki and Uri Bram. The whole thing is worth reading, but Phares offers two hypothesis about what creates trust and one about what destroys trust.

Trust creator #1: Violence

How you move from one equilibrium to another, from observation seems to be violence. It is cruel to think about but Europe went through countless wars in order to integrate.

Trust creator #2: Contract enforcement

The primary thing that can be done to increase trust in society is to have a level of justice for crime / breach of contract. This enforces good behaviour and dissuades bad behaviour; places with high trust have the highest rates of contract enforcement but also contracts aren't needed -- folks can shake on it.

Trust destroyer: Foreign interference

Phares Kariuki: Additionally, I've seen high trust societies get decimated by foreign interference (Korea, Somalia, Germany).

Uri Bram: I’d love to hear more about the Somalia example -- I think some people reading this might be surprised to hear it had a previous high-trust phase.

Phares Kariuki: The Somali were one people, largely Sunni. Their territory covered part of Eastern Ethiopia, North Eastern Kenya. They were split into multiple countries during the colonial era, with Kenya famously oppressing them during the Shifta wars of the 70s. They wanted to secede. The interference in their leadership due to the Cold War led to oppression and clan based mistrust; the fallout stands until today.

How St. Mortiz, a town in the Engadin Valley became a tourist destination:

Johannes Badrutt, the business-savvy owner of the Engadiner Kulm hotel in St. Moritz, is celebrated as the father of winter tourism. According to legend, he spent a rainy evening in September 1864 by the hotel’s fireplace, talking to visitors from London. Badrutt claimed that on especially sunny winter days it was possible to walk around the area without a coat because of the warmth of the sun. He encouraged the English tourists to return in winter and see for themselves, offering to pay their travel costs if his account proved untrue. Travelers could not resist this intriguing bet and returned in mid-December—arriving under a bright sky and covered in sweat. They stayed until March.

From Lapham’s Quarterly. The Swiss don’t have a reputation for branding experts, but they should. It is one of the best and most subtly branded countries in the world. See also this article on Little Switzerland’s.

Both articles were brought to me via The Browser.

I contributed to a piece for the The Morning News about what 2021 will be known for and what we thought it would be known for, but didn't pan out.

My prediction for what we'd remember the year for is the breakout of electric vehicles. From the piece:

2021 was the year that the electric car won . Electric-car makers have sky-high valuations and traditional car makers are plunging billions of dollars into electric-car manufacturing and telling markets that 40 percent or more of their sales will come from electric vehicles by the end of the decade.

I almost had commercial fusion energy in this spot, but decided the evidence for it actually happening isn't strong enough yet.

For what was supposed to happen, but didn't pan out, I had return-to-office. I go on to predict that return to office will never really happen for most workers.

Covid is going to continue to cause havoc over the course of 2022 and 2023, whether it's additional variants or concern about breakthrough cases. While this will diminish over time, by the time it does, any job that doesn't explicitly require the worker to be in person will have moved to remote-first by default and any company that tries to buck this trend will be at a disadvantage in the marketplace.

Omicron, of course, is an example of how return-to-office will continue to be delayed. Eventually it will get too hard for companies to put the genie back in the bottle.