thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
on System 1 thinking (recall Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink) that helps us summon whatever knowledge we think we have. Among other advantages, it saves us time in situations with similar patterns. But errors of judgment occur when we apply it to complex issues that require more careful consideration, investigation, and reasoning--System 2 thinking. It helps explain behaviors ranging from overconfidence in planning to the defense of sunk costs and the failure to cut our losses in investments.Kahneman implies, among other things, that in selecting decision-makers we should look for those who know when to switch from System 1 to System 2, that is, when to think fast and when to think slow (using his grammar). Another antidote to thinking fast at the wrong time, according to Kahneman, is to have an objective observer who can flag those situations requiring slow thinking when they arise.But the best check on too-fast decision-making may be the organization itself. As Kahneman puts it, "Organizations are better than individuals when it comes to avoiding errors, because they naturally think more slowly and have the power to impose orderly procedures." Rather than castigate the bureaucratic nature of large organizations, Kahneman suggests we try to make them more efficient at slow thinking by improving processes for deliberation and making decisions.Do you agree with what Kahneman implies here? Does bureaucracy have its advantages? Is this one of them? What do you think?To read more:Malcolm Gladwell, blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005)Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (London: Penguin Books, 2008)Jim Heskett's latest book,The Culture Cycle, was published in September.
The first world war accelerated an already established trend. An estimated 2m women took jobs making munitions and replacing bus-drivers, postmen and all the other male workers sent to the front. Many left domestic service to do soand some never returned to it. The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor, Voltaire had written over a century earlier. By the early 20th century, the rich were getting the uncomfortable sense that the foundations of the social order were shifting.Old-fashioned notions of the consecrating value of service were revived by an increasingly desperate upper class (Victorians had been fond of before-and-after illustrations of filthy ragamuffins rescued, body and soul, by being turned into neat little maids). Irish girls and orphans from institutions who half a century earlier would have had to settle for the roughlugging coals and hot water around and the likefound themselves able to pick and choose. In 1912 in America, Christine Frederick argued in The New Housekeeping for servants to get overtime and bonuses for mastering new tasksand to be granted the respect of an honorific. How many good potential servants have become poor stenographers because of the odium of the name Bridget? she asked rhetorically. But to no avail. On both sides of the Atlantic women continued to abandon other peoples sinks in droves.The life of Virginia Woolf, from 1882 to 1941, bracketed the period of the Servant Problem. Her mother, Julia, had married in 1867 and set up home with cook, kitchenmaids, housemaid, parlourmaid, ladys maid, nurse, nursemaid and gardener. Such a mistress was something akin, in the opening words of Mrs Beetons famous cookbook, to the Commander of an army, or the leader of an enterprise. But Woolf wanted to live the life of the mind, not to become manager of a medium-sized domestic business; and anyway, she would not have been able to find the staff.Like others in the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals, Woolf was groping towards a new way to live: simpler and more self-reliant; befitting the writer of A Room of Ones Own. Alison Lights book, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, uses Woolfs novels, letters and diaries to document the transition, which was anything but smooth. Woolf abandoned the custom of dressing for dinner and learned to cook, and would sometimes end a letter to the effect of must go and put the dinner on, like some 1950s suburban housewife. In another mood she would strike a snobbish tone, using the word housemaid to describe people she disliked.Woolfs relationship with her few servants could be stormy. After one of many rows with a cook, Nellie Boxall, Woolf described her in her diary as a mongrel with a timid spiteful servant mind. Screaming matches with servants were sordid and degrading, she complained, and dealing with Nellie interrupted her writing. Such dramas were caused in part by swift, yet unrecognised, changes in social status: though Woolf wrote that she wanted to be cordial towards Nellie, she also expected Nellie to be obedient. Over and over again Nellie would beg to be
kept on when Woolf threatened to sack her, only later to give notice and then withdraw it. But despite the emotional wear and tear, mistress could not imagine life without maid.Well-off Britons like the Woolfs, steeped in the culture of service, took a long time to turn to technology to solve their problems. Refrigerators caught on a generation later than in America. It was the fall in the employment of servants that drove up demand for labour-saving devices, says Ms Light, not the other way around. The Woolfs only installed flushing toilets in their country house in 1926, when the increasing difficulty of finding a villager willing to slop out their chamber-pots and deal with the earth-closet in the garden forced change upon them.Servant Problem ReduxGaping income inequalities; limited education for the masses; a long tradition of domestic service: Brazil at the turn of the 21st century bore striking similarities to 1880s Britain. But in the past decade Brazils professional classes have burgeoned and a lower-middle class25m new consumershas sprung into being. Most Brazilian children now go to secondary school and the countrys north-east, long its poorest region, has become its fastest-growing.As a result, many maids from the north-east who migrated in past decades to the richer southern cities are downing dusters and heading home. Quite a few are mixing cement and driving forklift trucks on the big infrastructure projects peppered around the region. Research by IPEA, a government-funded think-tank, found that across Brazil the proportion of domestic staff aged over 30 rose from 57% to 73% of the total over the past decade. In the past four years the workforce in Sao Paulos metropolitan area rose by 11% and average wages by 8%. But the number of domestics fell by 4%and their wages rose by 21%.The hunt for domestics, screamed one of the cover stories in Veja Sao Paulo this year. The mistresses interviewed by the weekly magazine, sold in Brazils biggest and richest city, expressed their frustration in words eerily similar to those used by Experienced Mistresss friends more than a century earlier: its rare to find an honest maid; my motto is bad with her; worse without her; maids are paid enemies.The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor, wrote VoltaireThe servant problem is raging in Brazil. Margarida, a thirty-something mother-of-two back in Sao Paulo after four years abroad, tried out seven nannies in less than a year. The failures included women who lied about their previous experience, or their travel costs (which in Brazil must be reimbursed by the employer), or sat on the sofa all day, or rarely turned up. Then Daniela, who had previously worked as her maid, called and asked if she was looking for someone. I jumped at the chance to have Daniela back, says Margarida. Id lost out on three jobs because of being let down on child-care, and I loved her, she had been a friend.But Daniela walked out after three weeks, complaining that Margarida was watching her every move. She had been working in a hotel
and she wasnt happy working back in someone elses home, says Margarida. But she didnt know that about herself. And I hadnt understood either. Margarida is now trying out her ninth nanny. Ive learned to turn a blind eye to things I dont like. I know now I was expecting too much. I hadnt realised how much Brazil had changed while we were away.Alzira hears the maids side of such stories every day. The second child of 11 and a native of Piaui in the north-east, she started work aged ten, cleaning, looking after children, and rearing chickens. In 1988, aged 21, she made the 2,000km trek to Sao Paulo in the hope of something better. A sewing-machinist until carpal-tunnel syndrome ended that job, then a door-to-door seller of cosmetics until her lack of both education and a car impeded her progress, she turned to domestic work in 2006. Since then she has been helping other natives of Piaui into similar jobs.Increasingly, she is in the line of fire in an undeclared, unacknowledged running battle. Some maids make ridiculous demands, such as large loans from their mistresses (one wanted the air fare to visit her parents); some mistresses are simply too rude for anyone to stay, no matter how much they pay (among the worst, apparently, are those who used to be poor themselves). Nowadays Alzira gets more calls from would-be mistresses than would-be maids. I feel sorry for some of them, they phone and beg.More and more, she says, Brazilian women would rather not work in other peoples homes. And maids quit more easily now than just a few years ago. She thinks many people look down on domestics, regarding them as the dregs. She knows maids who, in social situations, lie about what they do for a living. For me this is as dignified as any other jobI do it to support my family. But not everyone feels like that. Its typically black women who do this job, and prejudice still exists.Since Priscila Leite and Isabella Velletri set up Homestaff, a domestic-employment agency, three years ago, they have been contacted by 5,000 would-be mistresses and have been able to find staff for 650. Doing so is getting harder, says Ms Leite: at the moment they have one maid on their books for every 30 clients. Scarcity is, unsurprisingly, driving up wages: specialists in caring for newborns can make as much as 5,000 reais ($2,750) a month. The agency sometimes gets hate mail from enraged mistresses accusing them of talking prices upbut we dont make the market, we just follow the market.Clients often start by expecting to find a maid who, like the north-easterners who came to the city 30 or 40 years ago and worked all the time because they had left everything behind, will live in and take only every other weekend off. But todays young women are unwilling to follow in their mothers footsteps. Those that do have their own homes to sleep in, and friends and families with whom to spend evenings and weekends. Much of our
work is opening peoples minds to reality, says Ms Leite.Older clients, particularly, expect to be able to pay low wages for a maid-of-all-work. They are quickly disabused, either by the agency (we delicately point out that we abolished slavery in 1888) or by their daughters who explain that maids are no longer willing to remain standing whenever in their employers presence, and that if they are insulted they will leave. Ms Leite tells of a couple with a small apartment who made up a bed for their new maid in the laundry areanext to the dogs. They were surprised when she walked out.Britain has passed through the servant problem that Brazil is now experiencing. So what can Britain tell Brazil of life on the other side? That service does not die, but is reborn in a different form.According to Britains Office for National Statistics (ONS), household expenditure on domestic service hit a low point in 1978, since when it has quadrupled in real terms. It estimates there are as many domestic workers in London now as in Victorian times. But everything except the raw number has changed. Few live in employers houses nowadays; many are self-employed, providing specialist services such as dog-walking or oven-cleaning to multiple customers. More work in institutions such as nurseries, rather than in private homes. Some are well-qualified and earning good salaries: professional couples look for educated nannies with qualifications in first aid and the like, and pay accordingly. Not included in the ONS figures are the factory jobs that have replaced service jobs. Instead of employing housemaids and cooks, for instance, busy householders buy the output of workers chopping and bagging salads and cooking ready meals.Even the most apparently anachronistic of servants, butlers and valets, survive, though with the same shift from living-in to self-employment. Rick Fink started work as an assistant steward in the Royal Navy in 1953, then became live-in butler to a retired naval commander with a rich wife, earning 10 a week. In 1985 he went freelance, working regularly for a handful of families who wanted help on special occasions such as formal dinners and shooting weekends. In 2002 he opened his own butler-valet school to teach the traditional skills of service. His pupils are male and female, around two-thirds sent on the course by their employers, including yacht-owners, aristocrats both British and foreign and the global nouveaux riches. The other third pay their own way in the hope of making as much as 300 a day freelancing, or 70,000-80,000 a year full-time.In Brazil babysitting services and child-friendly dining venues, unnecessary when the maid lives in, will start to boom. Clothes shops will start selling the drip-dry, non-iron stuff they flog in the rich world. Dry-cleaning and ironing services should benefit too. Schools will have to shape up: even the priciest private ones offer part-time educationwith no guarantee that siblings get offered the same shiftmeaning that families often have to shell out for both school fees and a nanny who works full-time. Men might even start to take up some of the slack:
my husband changed our childrens nappies, says Ms Leite of Homestaff, and friends thought that made him the worlds best father.Ready meals will become more popular: Brazilians still cook most meals from scratch, even though the country has some of the worlds biggest food-processing companies, which export their tins and sachets to America and Europe. Fine dining at home will largely disappear. For the 4,000 reais a month a really good cook now costs, you could eat out ten times in Sao Paulos fanciest restaurants, says Ms Leite. Many Brazilian mansions have no hot water in the kitchen, and there are paulistanos who time-share helicopters but do not own a dishwasher. That will change when getting congealed fat off pans stops being someone elses job.While the demand for service survives the Servant Problem, standards of housekeeping also tend to fall. Work famously expands to fill the time available, but that is even truer of domestic work than other sorts. Bridget Anderson of Oxford Universitys Centre on Migration, Policy and Society recalls receiving the results of a questionnaire administered to domestic employers in a number of different countries, which asked what the staff spent their time doing. She was intrigued to discover that maids in Italy spent a great deal of time dusting ceilings. I had never even thought of dusting a ceiling, she says. But then I looked up at mineand they were very dusty.
are funded by their companies (in America and Europe the share is about a third). And whereas in rich countries the number of those who want to get an MBA has fallen in the past two years, applications to the OneMBA programme at FGV have doubled over the same period.For students coming from outside the country, Brazil offers lessons that stand apart from those that can be learned in other BRIC nations, such as India and China. Darden GEMBA students, for example, get the opportunity to study Rio's Carnivaland understand how such a major international event can rise out of the poverty-stricken favelas.Though the world's biggest popular gathering may look like a spontaneous street party, it is also the result of months of intense practice, meticulous choreography and people management on a massive scale. Such "Samba management", a combination of the fun and formal, may be a model for the world.
44% were valid for one to two years, the maximum duration granted for a temporary work permit, while 39% were valid for less than 90 days. Even though the state of Sao Paulo had a GDP of US$548 billion in 2008, representing 33% of the national economy, only 1,461 work permits were issued to business professionals and executives within the state, further demonstrating the extent of protectionist policies. Furthermore, 17% of Brazilian work visas were issued for technical-support visits of less than 90 days, without a Brazilian work contract, in line with government policy goals of transferring know-how while maximizing job vacancies available to locals.A review of the work authorization data also identifies areas where the foreign labor market is addressing domestic labor shortages. During the first six months of 2011, fully 25% of work visas were issued to crews of offshore oil platforms or ships in the state of Rio de Janeiro, representing by far the largest bloc of recipients and a key area for foreign direct investment. After the U.S., the second largest national origin of successful work visa applicants is the Philippines, at 2,294 (9%), with many hired under short-term contracts for fully staffed ships. The largest category of recipients in the state of Sao Paulo is "artists and athletes," followed by short-term technical support and tourism-related flight or ship crews Thus, the top three categories of Sao Paulo visa recipients do not displace local employees.Senator Cristovam Buarque sums up the predicament of the Brazilian economy by saying that "o Brasil esta bem, mas nao vai bem," meaning that Brazil is doing well now, but it is not headed in the right direction. As a leader in the fight to improve the quality of education in Brazil, Buarque faces the daily challenge of convincing stakeholders in the Brazilian economy that education is an issue deserving immediate attention. With at least US$30 billion headed to infrastructure projects in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games, Buarque's voice seems to be taking a back seat. Most politicians do not want to talk about the long-term implications of a failing education system. The more popular response to the current economic moment is to take advantage of the boom while it lasts.For nearly a year, a proposed National Education Plan (Plano Nacional de Educacao) has been held up in Congress and has already been through more than 3,000 amendments. The education plan seeks to establish quantifiable goals to measure the improvement of the country's education system over a period of 10 years. The fact that many Brazilian politicians are holding up the legislation may be simply a reflection of culture. According to Julio Sampaio, president of Associacao Alumni, a Brazilian nonprofit dedicated to English language instruction, traditionally the powerful elite have lacked interest in guaranteeing a quality education for all Brazilians.Where will Brazil be in 20 years without a government-driven effort to improve the quality of education? What will the impact of doing nothing be on GDP and foreign investment? While no one can answer these questions directly with figures,
there is a general consensus that Brazil's education problem is not going away anytime soon and that executives from the outside looking in ought to keep this major issue in mind.Despite being home to a culture that is only just beginning to value education and professional preparedness, Brazil is also host to a wide variety of opportunities that it will display proudly on the world stage for the first time in 2014 at the World Cup. While Brazilian business leaders recognize the labor challenges facing them in the short- and mid-terms, they continue to be optimistic about their growth scenarios. Whether some companies plan to establish or bolster current corporate university programs or to increase the number of foreign workers as the visa process becomes ever-more lenient, executives are hopeful that their growth projections are on track. As the demand for a qualified labor force becomes more significant, so, too, will the efforts to find and create it. As Civita says, "If I could be anywhere in the world at age 27, I would be in Brazil."This article was written by Marcus Anderson, Thomas Baldwin, Lisa Lovallo and Gabriel Pumariega, members of the Lauder Class of 2013.
The Financial TimesPublished: January 9, 2012To: Capitalists of the WorldFrom: Adam SmithMoreON THIS STORYAnalysis Promises that proved ultimately emptyGideon Rachman Why Im feeling strangely AustrianFT series Crisis of CapitalismCapitalism in crisis The code that forms a bar to harmonyLawrence Summers We need smart reinvention not destructionIN OPINIONChina and India right policy, wrong placeHS2 project should be stoppedPhilip Zelikow Obama must act on his Asian blueprintA bank run for the benefit of its owners? Dream onWhat has become of my beloved capitalism? Countries teeter, protests rage, unemployed multiply, deficits abound the virtues of capitalism are questioned. Based on a few hundred years of observation, I have some fresh thoughts on how to sustain this system for a few hundred years more, or at least do better in 2012 than it did in 2011.I am pleased to see that capitalism has triumphed over communism and socialism in virtually every part of the world and many of the most skilled capitalists are, ironically, in the countries where communism and socialism once prevailed (now endearingly called emerging markets).This triumph has occurred because capitalisms greatest strength productive economic activity has succeeded in creating more opportunities for more people than anyone including me ever imagined. And with more wealth, billions of people now in the middle class can secure education for their progeny, purchase necessities and luxuries at once-unimagined levels, pursue leisure activities for a greater part of their lives and retire with higher levels of economic security.All that is satisfying.What is not satisfying is the view that capitalism has to work perfectly to justify its presence. I never said it would. I just said it was better than the alternatives, as Winston Churchill famously said about democracy.I always felt there were two principal flaws and we saw them come to a head over the past few years. The first is that unfettered exuberance about wealth creation will produce unsustainable booms and inevitable crashes. The great recession, fuelled by cheap credit, is a textbook example of this flaw.The second is the inequality that results when the charge towards wealth creation leaves behind those less able (in most cases through no fault of their own) to adapt or to compete with the hard-chargers. The income disparity in many wealthy countries is now at its greatest level since I left the scene and it was not so wonderful then either.While there is no simple cure to capitalisms two big flaws, here is what I would do in 2012 to get the system back on its feet and to modulate income disparities.1. Save the euro and the European Union. A functioning and vibrant EU the worlds largest economic unit is essential to global prosperity. The largest countries using the euro and also those outside the eurozone or those dependent on a thriving EU must dig deeply into their pockets now to save the euro. If they do not, the pain and cost will be greater in the future. And those of more modest means will suffer the most if the euro is abandoned.2. Fix the US debt and deficit. To my