Reinvent Podcast

John Della Volpe, Director of Polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and Founder and CEO of SocialSphere, has been studying Millennials since 2000. It all started, said Della Volpe, with two Harvard students who wanted to survey Millennials and find out why they were volunteering but not voting. Della Volpe has been polling and analyzing this generation—which he defines as people born between 1980 and 2000—ever since. Della Volpe discussed what he considers to be the defining characteristics of the Millennial generation, which include placing less importance on money and more on flexibility, and a relationship with the rest of the world that’s based on a collaborative approach to solving problems. Millennials also have famously low levels of trust in institutions ranging from Congress to the media, and increasingly identify as liberal, but decreasingly identify as Democrats. Della Volpe also talked about the role that Millennials played in the election. If Clinton had won 60 percent of this cohort instead of 55 percent, Della Volpe said, she could have won the election. Eighteen to 29-year-olds represented around 18 percent of votes cast in the 2016 election, but 100 percent participation among this demographic would have doubled that percentage—only about half of people in their 20s voted in the election.

Albert Cañigueral, the OuiShare Connector for Spain and Latin America, is a Barcelona-based sharing economy expert helping to organize the fifth edition of OuiShare Fest, which takes place this July in Paris. Cañigueral describes himself as passionate about, but also critical of, the burgeoning sharing economy. Cañigueral acknowledged that sometimes tensions arise between global, American-based corporations and smaller, local startups. Global companies like Uber face regulatory challenges abroad similar to those they face in the United States. In Spain, only professional, licensed drivers can drive with Uber, and Uber was banned from the country for over a year, returning in March 2016. According to Cañigueral, the primary source of tension around the sharing economy in Barcelona is related to rental prices and housing shortages. Barcelona’s City Hall is focusing on growing and building the “commons-oriented collaborative economy,” and is particularly interested in promoting open source software.

In early December, the Berkeley Work and Intelligent Tools and Systems (WITS) working group hosted a conference to discuss working, earning, and learning in the age of intelligent tools. A number of conference participants sat down with Reinvent to talk about how they would explain the moment we’re in, what challenges we face, what solutions might get us through these challenges, and how optimistic they are about our future. These innovators, hailing from UC Berkeley, McKinsey & Company, and Schmidt Sciences, OECD, among other organizations, shared their thoughts and insights on what many of them see as the biggest economic and technological shift since the Industrial Revolution. They expressed concerns about income inequality and the skills gap, as well as the decline of corporate spending on workforce training. Many described themselves as cautious optimists. If we want to make sure that tomorrow’s economy works for everyone, not just the most highly skilled workers, the participants emphasized, we’ve got our work cut out for us.

Neil Gershenfeld, Alan Gershenfeld, and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld used December’s What’s Now: New York as the official New York launch party for their new book Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution. The book brings the perspectives of science, technology, social science, and humanities to the third digital revolution—through three brothers who are not only observers of the revolution but also active participants in helping guide it.

Brad DeLong, UC Berkeley Economics Professor  says our political system has been hacked by time, circumstance, chaos, and disaster. He pointed to the failings of the electoral college, the fact that “small states hacked the constitution in 1787, so we now have a world in which the minority in the Senate represents 175 million people, while the majority represents 145 million people”, and the gerrymandering after the 2010 census as the primary examples of this dysfunction. DeLong’s recommended fixes for the economy include a 4 percent inflation target from the Federal Reserve, incentivizing businesses to invest in workers, and reinvigorating the idea that technology should be used to augment workers, not replace them.

Brad DeLong, UC Berkeley Economics Professor  says our political system has been hacked by time, circumstance, chaos, and disaster. He pointed to the failings of the electoral college, the fact that “small states hacked the constitution in 1787, so we now have a world in which the minority in the Senate represents 175 million people, while the majority represents 145 million people”, and the gerrymandering after the 2010 census as the primary examples of this dysfunction. DeLong’s recommended fixes for the economy include a 4 percent inflation target from the Federal Reserve, incentivizing businesses to invest in workers, and reinvigorating the idea that technology should be used to augment workers, not replace them.