Tag Archives: The Economist

Has the Automobile Peaked: The Economist Thinks So…

This morning I was thumbing through my copy of The Economist to find an intriguing headline: “Seeing the back of the car.” The “briefing” at the top of the page said, “The future of driving.”

After reading through the article, it’s seems to me that the author makes a convincing point (with data!) that the automobile has reached its peak.. It’s pretty hard to argue with some of the evidence, too. I’ve included one of the more enlightening graphs below. In it, you can see that the percentage of people getting their license (as compared across years) is definitely declining. While we can’t necessarily say that this means the end of the car. It would certainly be a contributing factor, though, if this were to occur. The Economist isn’t the only place where this argument’s being made either.

Much has been made of the generations transitioning into the work world and their lack of affinity for buying houses and cars. There are some reasonable explanations for this, too. If we think about the era that they’ve grown up, owning cars and houses weren’t the “be-all, end-all” like it was for previous generations. There’s a strong preference for spending money on other things.

One of my more popular posts here at Genuine Thriving was something I wrote near the beginning of my time writing here called, “Advancing America’s Public Transportation System: High-Speed Rail in the USA.” In my weekly glance at the posts that get the most hits, it’s often near the top. There are a number of possible explanations, but I think it has to do with a greater affinity for public transportation (than there used to be). As someone who has spent time in a number of different cities and countries with varying qualities of public transportation, it seems to me that a successful public transit is one of the cornerstones to a thriving local economy.

Note: If you’d like more evidence that public transit is vital to a city’s economy, check out Richard Florida’s work, who’s a Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Adding General Managers to the Organization Could Improve Ethical Decision-Making

I’ve mentioned that I’m working at for the summer. As I don’t currently live in , I take the to get to work. As I don’t yet have an iPhone or an iPad (with which to read something on), I’ve kept my subscription to . As I was reading , I got to an article from called, “”

At first, I was a bit skeptical, but as I read on, it may me think of the post I recently wrote about . Here’s an excerpt from the Schumpeter [emphasis added]:

But is it wise to be so obsessed with speed? High-speed trading can lead to market meltdowns, as almost happened on May 6th 2010, unless automatic breaks are installed. And is taking one’s time so bad? Regulators are always warning people not to buy things in the heat of the moment. Procrastinators have a built-in cooling-off period. Businesses are forever saying that they need more creativity. Dithering can help. Ernest Hemingway told a fan who asked him how to write a novel that the first thing to do was to clean the fridge. Steven Johnson, a writer on innovation, argues that some of the best new products are “slow hunches”. Nestlé’s idea of selling coffee in small pods went nowhere for three decades; now it is worth billions.

These thoughts have been inspired by two (slowly savoured) works of management theory: an obscure article in the Academy of Management Journal by Brian Gunia of Johns Hopkins University; and a popular new book, “Wait: The Art and Science of Delay”, by Frank Partnoy of University of San Diego. Mr Gunia and his three co-authors demonstrated, in a series of experiments, that slowing down makes us more ethical. When confronted with a clear choice between right and wrong, people are five times more likely to do the right thing if they have time to think about it than if they are forced to make a snap decision. Organisations with a “fast pulse” (such as banks) are more likely to suffer from ethical problems than those that move more slowly. (The current LIBOR scandal engulfing Barclays in Britain supports this idea.) The authors suggest that companies should make greater use of “cooling-off periods” or introduce several levels of approval for important decisions.

I fine this rather on-point with what I was saying in the . By having more layers of approval (by way of the general managers), there would, undoubtedly, be more time factored into the process. As a result, this *may* result in less of the instances of poor decision-making that what we’ve seen recently with companies like Barclay’s and JP Morgan.