When you’re working with men and women coming out of prison to find meaningful career trajectories, it’s important to ask them about their prison experience.

Far too often, formerly incarcerated people don’t appreciate the value of their prison journey.

They will tell you, “All I did was work on a yard crew,” without recognizing that such work might prepare them for everything from construction to landscaping to property management.

They will tell you, “All I did was work in the kitchen,” without recognizing that they might have learned enough to get a job in food services, or open their own restaurant.

I work as the Southern California executive director for Defy Ventures, a national non-profit that offers both prison-based and community-based entrepreneurship, personal development, and career readiness programs. We call the people we serve—people who are on a journey out of prison—“entrepreneurs in training,” or EITs for short.

And one big advantage our clients have is the time they spent in prison. The public doesn’t understand it, but prisons offer opportunities. There are leadership positions. Men can push forward independent initiatives. I started a “Grief and Loss” group, and helped facilitate numerous other groups while I was inside.

While in prison, I actually had quite a bit of time to work on myself, in a lot of groups that I was involved in, and also through a lot of books that I had the opportunity to read. People out here have not had the same chance to work on themselves as those who have been incarcerated.

So, as I tell our EITs, all the work you’ve done on yourself can be the thing that sets you apart—even your superpower.

If you think about your prison experience this way, there are opportunities out there for you. One young man I worked with had learned how to install and fix the sprinkler system and mowers while working in the prison yard, and had realized that he was mechanically inclined. We had a CEO of an electric bus company who was supportive of hiring formerly incarcerated people, and was eager to find people with mechanical skills. The young man not only got hired—he also received equity in the company.

I know firsthand about the transition from prison to working life. While serving a life sentence for shooting a man to death when I was a gang member in Southern California in 1999, I spent time at four state prisons in California. At Solano State Prison, my last stop before I was paroled, one of my jobs was to clean the hospital. That proved to be one stroke of good fortune. The other was that I participated in a pilot program of the Defy Ventures program that I now get to help lead.

Once I got out, my brother gave me a job helping with paperwork at his real estate firm so I’d have an income. I knew that real estate wasn’t a long-term opportunity for me, because, as a convicted felon, the state wouldn’t license me. But I did notice that the janitor firm they used wasn’t cleaning the building the way it should be cleaned.

I talked to the building owner and offered my services. I used to run a hospital cleaning crew up north, I explained. I went on godaddy.com to reserve a name and web address for my company, Jade Janitors. I had to get my business license and find business insurance. Then I gave the guy a quote, and was hired the same week. I eventually had six employees, four of them formerly incarcerated.

I didn’t stop there. I helped my family start a restaurant. Within 18 months of leaving prison, I was both working there and at Jade Janitors. Then, in 2017, an opportunity to join the post-release services at Defy Ventures opened up, and I took it, while still holding onto the cleaning business.

I also wrote a book, which was published in 2020. It’s called Sparrow in the Razor Wire. The title is a reference to a moment in prison when I noticed a sparrow, badly injured because it had landed on razor wire, singing its song. From that moment, prison did not feel like punishment anymore—it became a place where I could remake myself into someone better.

We try to create that same feeling with our training. Defy Ventures’ core program inside prisons is called “The CEO of Your Life.” It’s a seven-month program with more than 2,000 pages of curriculum, four books, and twice-weekly facilitations for five hours. There’s another five hours of homework on top of that. At the halfway point of the program, we have a coaching day, where we bring in volunteers from the business world. Finally, the culmination is a business-pitch competition and graduation ceremony where everyone receives a certificate from Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker School of Management.

In this process, we are trying to shift two mindsets: the mindsets of people with criminal histories, and the mindsets of businesspeople. Each needs to recognize the opportunities in the other.

We—the formerly incarcerated—still encounter barriers in business and work. For example, during the pandemic, Jade Janitors lost 70 percent of its contracts because no one was paying to have their offices cleaned anymore. I started filling out a PPP loan for the business. But then I got to question five, which asked me if I was on parole. I answered yes, and the survey wouldn’t let me continue.

Why should my team be discriminated against for something I did over 20 years ago?

I can’t remember exactly how CBS Money Watch found out about what happened with Jade Janitors. The next thing I knew I was hearing from CNN and being contacted by the ACLU. After that Defy Ventures and the ACLU sued the Small Business Administration in a class action lawsuit on behalf of all small business owners with criminal histories. The application got changed, and I was able to qualify for the PPP loan.

Another big issue in California is licensing.

One of our graduates worked in prison as an optician, making glasses. But when he went to work at Costco and had to get a license, his crime from 30 years ago came up.

Another EIT who found an excellent job was performing well, but the company algorithm began saying he had to be fired because he was showing up late twice a month. The problem was that his parole agent would call him in the morning and insist on meeting right that day.

In that case, we were able to talk to management and explain the need for flexibility.

This is why it’s important for the formerly incarcerated to make sure they value themselves. Without knowing your own strengths, you can’t advocate for yourself and your worth.

The post Prison Time Can Be Your Superpower in Business appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’d think that a town dependent on tourist dollars could never stop advertising itself. But in Sedona, Arizona, as wealthy residents’ weariness of riffraff jamming up their roads sparked a bitter rift over what constitutes “the right kind” of visitors, that’s just what has happened.

After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sedona’s city government and chamber made a joint agreement to quit advertising the town in glossy national travel magazines and doing social media posts targeted at rich people, reasoning that such money would be wasted during an international shutdown. The pause sparked infighting, which then escalated: In April 2023, the chamber of commerce’s board voted to end its tourism contract with the city over the council’s refusal to fund “destination marketing.”

The experiment has not yielded the expected serenity.

Instead, Sedona has filled up with “wayward and lost tourists,” in the words of Christopher Fox Graham, managing editor of the Sedona Red Rock News. Without such destination marketing, he wrote, “Sedona has been beset by day travelers from Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas, and Californian overnighters who roll into town with little guidance on where to stay, eat, shop or explore other than what they saw on Instagram.”

One of the reasons for these visitors from nearby cities—and one of the headaches for the many retirees who would prefer that Sedona be more “Slo-dona”—is that more than a third of the city’s homes are used for short-term rentals. That fact led the city council to require, starting in 2022, an annual permit for lessors and mandatory sex offender checks on renters to prevent, in the words of one council member, “orgies in nice areas.”

Since then, the city of Sedona has also offered those landlords who can be persuaded to rent their homes to a local are offered a $10,000 subsidy. But few who work the low-wage tourism jobs can afford to live in Sedona. Neither can young families, which is why there is only a single elementary school, with declining enrollment, in a town of over 11,000 people. “Basically, people feel they live in a gas station,” observed resident Sean Dedalus.

The hard irony of the current controversy is that Sedona has long been defined by visitors and other outsiders. Sedona occupies a valley that had been a home for the Yavapai-Apache people for seven centuries before the U.S. Cavalry chased them away in the 1870s as a side campaign to the Apache Wars. When early settler J.J. Thompson arrived in Oak Creek Canyon, he found irrigation and fruit orchards that had been tended by people who packed up and left in a hurry. He simply took them over for himself, joined by later neighbors Manuel Chavez and the dapper storekeeper T. Carl Schnebly, who named the post office for his wife, Sedona.

The name Sedona gained cultural currency in the golden age of the pulp Western, after Zane Gray set his 1922 novel The Call of the Canyon in nearby Oak Creek Canyon, inspiring a quickie silent movie. Hollywood soon found the wine-colored spires and juniper trees just as rawbone-pretty as Monument Valley, not to mention closer to California. John Wayne came to Sedona to film Angel and the Badman, leaving behind a movie set that became a subdivision where all the streets were named after famous oat operas: Broken Arrow, Copper Canyon, The Last Wagon, Shotgun, and Johnny Guitar. Elvis Presley came here, too, to shoot what is widely regarded as the worst movie he starred in: 1968’s Stay Away, Joe, about a lascivious Native American named Joe Lightcloud who returns to the reservation in a Cadillac and rides a bull at the rodeo to redeem himself from bad behavior.

In the late 1950s, Sedona really found its tourism sweet spot. A real estate agent named Mary Lou Keller founded the Church of Light in her office and proclaimed the working-class ranching town a global center of spiritual energy. She may have been making this up to attract homebuyers who favored crystals and tarot cards, but the seekers arrived in force, turning Sedona into a cauldron of the New Thought movement that had gripped Los Angeles in the 1920s. One of Keller’s most important gurus was Manly Palmer Hall, who preached at L.A.’s occult Church of the People.

This influx of what conservative locals called “moon puppies” and “foo-foo woo woos,” led to Sedona’s first tourism crisis. Lisa Schnebly Heidinger, a great-granddaughter of Sedona Schnebly, recalled the day in the late 1960s when her grandfather came home for dinner to announce that a “bunch of hippies in their love van” had shown up at the Union 76 service station for repairs. He had gruffly sent them over to nearby Cottonwood, not knowing he was hustling away a future cornerstone of the local economy.

Today an estimated two hundred small businesses in Sedona cater to visitors intrigued with the theology of earth energy: bookstores, crystal emporiums, sweat lodge retreats, and other enterprises that come and go like sunbeams. One chamber of commerce survey found that 37% of visitors come for some kind of spiritual experience.

Often, they visit spots in the surrounding National Forests that have been proclaimed as “vortexes” of energy. Forest Service employees are constantly breaking up unauthorized rock arrangements that the metaphysical pilgrims say are “medicine wheels.” And in 2009, an Anglo businessman and “spiritual warrior” named James Arthur Ray held a sweat lodge ceremony that led to three deaths from the excessive heat. He served two years in prison for negligent homicide, and Native critics derided him as a “plastic shaman.”

Whatever their motivation, people keep catching what local realtors call “the red rock fever” and keep coming to Sedona—and adding to the traffic that kicked off the tourism debate in the first place. During the boom years of the 1970s and 1980s, spiritual flaneurs and second home seekers from Phoenix and Los Angeles flooded into the new subdivisions blossoming off the two main highways. A lack of coherent planning meant that interconnecting roads were never created and the legacy is a persistent traffic problem on Highway 89A, whose main junction, “The Y,” is often despairingly referred to as the “negative vortex.”

Recently, off-highway vehicles—most piloted by tourists—have added to the mess on 89A. Sedona mayor Scott Jablow, a former police officer for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, sought to ban these dune buggies from paved highways, but the idea couldn’t withstand the opposition of rental companies serving out-of-towners hungry for desert adventures or Republican state legislators calling for small government.

Jablow himself fought off a 2022 electoral challenge from Samaire Armstrong, an actor on The O.C. turned anti-masking Republican who had called Black Lives Matter “a one-billion-dollar domestic terrorist organization.” Sedona’s liberals breathed a sigh of relief when the ex-cop won. It helped that Jablow wanted to slow down the town’s popularity. “We have too many tourists. Period,” he said before his election.

His victory seemed less of a commentary on the national culture wars and some on something closer to home: a desire to yank back the welcome mat to the middle-class in Arizona’s capital of luxury tourism. For those who commute here by private jet, this might seem an easy decision. But for those whose monthly income depends on a steady flow of visitors to buy ice cream, tarot cards, and sunscreen, the town’s identity—and price of admission—is at stake. Nature’s artwork is not supposed to have a price tag, but commodifying the rocks is an old Sedona custom. What we’re seeing is no revolutionary moment, but merely a haggle over the amount charged.

The post Whose Sedona Is It, Anyway? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in university admissions early this summer thanks in large part to the charge that Harvard’s practice of race-conscious admissions discriminates against Asian Americans. Whether or not the decision changes the college application process for Asian Americans, it certainly obscures the more insidious and widespread forms of bias that many Asian Americans face. It also opened up pathways to dismantling race-conscious policies elsewhere—particularly in the workplace, where assumptions about what makes a good leader are couched in ideas of race.

Asian Americans are not underrepresented in university classrooms, including at Harvard. They account for 7.2% of the U.S. population, yet 29.9% of Harvard’s incoming class. Where they are underrepresented is in the boardroom and the C-suite. Among the Fortune 500, only 2.4% of CEOs are Asian, two-thirds of whom are South Asian (with roots in the Indian subcontinent, and mainly from India). Many Asian Americans—and especially East Asians (with origins in China, Korea, and Japan)—find themselves hitting a “bamboo ceiling” akin to the glass ceiling that women face. It’s here, in the workplace, where affirmative action has an important role to play in the lives and livelihoods of Asian Americans—one that the Court has put in jeopardy.

Asian Americans lag behind all racial, ethnic, and gender groups in promotion to managerial and executive ranks in spite of their education, work experience, and job performance. Even in fields in which Asians are overrepresented, such as technology, medicine, the natural sciences, engineering, and law, they are rare in leadership.

In top technology firms in Silicon Valley, white men and women are twice as likely as Asian men and women to advance into the executive ranks. Between 1997 and 2008, Asian Americans made up 20% of medical school faculty—yet there were no Asian American deans. And while Black and Latino physicians are underrepresented in the field, Asian Americans are the only racial group that accounts for a much smaller share of medical school department chairs than their percentage of the faculty in medical schools.

A similar pattern emerges in law: Asians comprise 10% of graduates of top-30 law schools, but only 6.5% of all federal judicial law clerks. And while Asians are the largest non-white group in major law firms, they have the highest attrition rates and the lowest ratio of associates to partners of all groups at four-to-one, compared to two-to-one for Blacks and Latinos, and parity for whites. Even in academia, where Asian Americans are overrepresented as students in top universities, they are nearly absent in leadership ranks, comprising only 1.5% of college presidents.

So what forms the branches of the bamboo ceiling?

Some argue that racial and gender stereotypes—technically strong but socially weak, mathematically and scientifically inclined rather than verbally gifted—hinder Asians’ advancement in the workplace. Employers may recognize Asian Americans for their hard work, dedication, and effort without seeing them as innately brilliant, visionary, or skilled to lead.

Asian American women are doubly disadvantaged in this regard: They are the least likely group to be promoted to leadership positions, and to be perceived as fit for leadership roles regardless of their education, experience, and behavior.

Where do these stereotypes come from, and what can be done to combat them? A new strand of research points to differences in culture, and, more specifically, differences in verbal assertiveness between East Asian and white Americans. Western corporate culture prizes individual assertiveness and achievement, whereas East Asian culture promotes harmony and the stability of interpersonal relationships.

To buttress this point, researchers find that South Asians are more verbally assertive than East Asians, and, despite still not being as represented as white men in top positions, South Asian men are now even more likely than white men to attain leadership positions—pointing to a unique pattern of “South Asian exceptionalism.” A similar pattern emerges in law and business schools, where South Asians outperform East Asians in leadership, strategy, and marketing—courses in which verbal assertiveness is prized and class participation accounts for a larger percentage of the final grade. The branches of the bamboo ceiling begin to grow in the classroom.

South Asian exceptionalism may also be explained by Americans’ understanding of who counts as Asian. In the U.S., “Asian” is often shorthand for East Asian, and most Americans—including most Asian Americans—exclude South Asians from the fold. If the stereotypical perception of Asian men (i.e., East Asian men) is that they are diffident, passive, and distant, South Asian men (who are not perceived as Asian) may not be hampered by a social identity that presumes these qualities. The absence of the stereotype may change both their behavior and the way others interpret that behavior.

But a larger question underlying this debate is why we assume that leaders must be bold, brash, and assertive to be effective. Some of the country’s top CEOs have been described as listeners first, and team players who are empathetic, thoughtful, steady, and measured. Columbia University’s new president, Minouche Shafik, is the first woman to lead the university in its 269-year history. When asked about her leadership style, she quoted the 6th-century B.C. Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu: “A leader is best when people barely know they exist … When the leader’s work is done, the people will say, ‘We did it ourselves.’”

Thinking more expansively about the qualities that make a good leader while recognizing that different leadership models may be just as effective (if not more so) than traditional Western ones will broaden leadership opportunities for not only East Asians, but also women, and for many of us who do not fit the prototype of what an American leader looks or acts like. It would also benefit the members of such leaders’ organizations, who may work more effectively with more diverse managers and styles. Leadership comes in many forms, and recognizing and rewarding this will better prepare us to lead and serve the diverse country that we are.

It is the recognition of race, ethnicity, and gender that enables us to identify biases in our understanding of who makes a suitable CEO, president, chair, dean, or manager. Affirmative action policies in the workplace give us the tools to address these biases and remove the barriers they create. Now, even these policies are coming under attack, led by no less than the same conservative advocate who engineered the lawsuit against Harvard.

The fight to dismantle affirmative action in university admissions was never about protecting Asian Americans, yet profiling them abetted the demise of the policy. It also veiled the more rampant forms of bias that Asian Americans face that impede their career mobility. Affirmative action in the workplace paved the way for white women to shatter and break through the glass ceiling. It can help non-white professionals—including Asian Americans—do the same.

The post Where Asian Americans Need Affirmative Action appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2016, the leaders of several street vendor organizations from the Mexico City neighborhood of Tepito met with local officials with a request: They wanted the capital city’s new constitution to codify their right to sell in public spaces. Street vendors like them, they argued, were an essential sector of the urban economy. In exchange for their legalization, they offered to submit to regulation and taxation.

The image of vendors gathered around a table with officials is not one most would associate with Tepito, best known as Mexico City’s barrio bravo, its fiercest neighborhood. Located only a few blocks north of the city’s historic center, Tepito is synonymous with lawlessness and illicit enterprise. Beneath the bright plastic tarps that line its streets, one can buy just about anything, from pirated DVDs to Swiss watches to exotic animals. It is also the home base of the drug-trafficking and extortion racket La Unión Tepito and its rival La Fuerza Anti-Unión, whose turf wars drove a recent surge in homicides.

Tepiteños, as the area’s residents are known, have long celebrated their autonomy. They have resisted efforts to tame the area through policing or gentrification by any means necessary. The mantra “Tepito exists because it resists” is graffitied on walls and repeated by residents. Yet Tepito perseveres not from its isolation and defensiveness, but from its powerful connections. For centuries, vendors who have labored in the gray areas of the law have forged relationships with government officials to sustain their trades. Informal markets like Tepito persist with the help of state actors—not in spite of them.

The association between Tepito and illicit commerce dates to the early 20th century, when a second-hand market called the Baratillo (derived from barato, or cheap) moved to the area. The Baratillo was a colonial-era institution originally located in the Plaza Mayor—now Zócalo—that offered clothing, tools, furniture, and books. New, used, and stolen items mixed indiscriminately with one another, blurring the lines between legality and criminality. Considering the market an eyesore and a threat to public order, colonial and national officials pushed it out of the city center. In 1902, the Baratillo settled for good in Tepito, then a poor, outlying neighborhood. It flourished. By mid-century, the market and its neighborhood had become synonymous, known collectively as Tepito.

As Mexico’s economy evolved, so too did the goods on offer in Tepito. At the beginning of the 20th century, signs of the country’s nascent industrialization—telegraph wire, pharmaceutical products, scientific instruments—began appearing alongside the piles of scrap metal and old furniture. In the 1930s, shoppers could find stolen radios, as well as marijuana. During the 1970s and ’80s, vendors began specializing in fayuca, the colloquial term for contraband goods that evaded the high tariffs and import restrictions of that era. Tepito put TVs, stereos, and sneakers within reach of Mexico City’s middle and working classes. Toward the end of the century, as Mexico opened its economy to the world, piratería—pirated, or knock-off goods—began to line Tepito’s alleys. Korean and Chinese merchants gained a particular foothold.

The latest evolution in this long retail trade, narcotrafficking, has become central to Tepito’s economy since the 1990s. The organization La Unión Tepito began as a protection racket, extracting payments from local merchants in exchange for promises of security. As drug consumption in and around Mexico City soared, La Unión turned to supplying that market. But even as La Unión worked to corner the city’s retail drug trade, it remained steeped in Tepito’s core business of piratería. By 2020, the organization dominated the market for pirated goods in the capital. It even replaced Tepito’s famed “Marco Polos,” who travel to China to procure merchandise, with its own members.

Just as drugs are simply the latest iteration of merchandise to be sold in Tepito, its vendors’ political strategies—such as the 2016 rendezvous with officials— from a long tradition of activism stretching back to the baratilleros of the 19th and early 20th centuries. As early as the 1840s, vendors published letters in Mexico’s leading newspapers defending the social and economic benefits of the Baratillo. They lobbied elected officials to prevent them from disbanding the market, meeting with city councilmen in their homes and showing up at meetings. The connections between vendors and the city’s municipal government, which relied on the rents vendors paid to sell in public streets and plazas, ran especially deep. After the Mexican Revolution and the ratification of the 1917 Constitution, vendors in Tepito and elsewhere organized in unions, establishing close ties with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Today, Tepito’s merchants belong to dozens of vendor organizations, each with its own political links. Vendors pay daily fees to the organizations’ leaders, who negotiate with Mexico City’s borough governments for access to street and sidewalk space. Those leaders also advocate for larger reforms, such as the clause in the 2016 city constitution codifying vendors’ right to earn a living by selling their wares in public spaces.

Criminal groups like La Unión Tepito have their own political strategies, which depend on incorporating police and government officials into their networks, or, less commonly, getting their associates appointed or elected to positions in local government. While some agents of the state end up on the payrolls of organized crime, others, especially those in elected office, benefit from less obviously corrupt alliances. The shadow economy is big business, and Tepito’s outsized importance gives its vendors and residents significant political clout.

No modern-day figure represents the thick connections between Tepito and the political arena than Sandra Cuevas, head of government of Mexico City’s central Cuauhtémoc borough. Raised in Tepito, where she worked in her parents’ appliance business, her governing style bears much in common with Tepito’s own personality. Deemed “ungovernable” by the newspaper El País, Cuevas has reveled in her defiance of just about everybody throughout her political career. She sparred continuously with former Mexico City mayor and now presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum. She has refused to back down from unpopular decisions, such as whitewashing the hand-painted rótulos on vendors’ kiosks that color Mexico City’s streetscapes and ordering some of the city’s beloved street art painted over—including murals in Tepito.

Cuevas rose to one of the highest elected offices in Mexico City with support from Tepito’s vendor organizations. She promised that she would stop the extortions from criminal groups that saddle them with payments of up to 250 pesos per day—though people claiming to act on her behalf and members of her own family have been accused of demanding such payments themselves. There are also rumors, which Cuevas denies, that she has links to La Unión.

The ascent of both Cuevas and La Unión attest to a key aspect of Tepito’s enduring power: the symbiosis between extralegal commerce, in all its forms, and the Mexican state. Though Tepito may be shorthand for lawlessness, its merchants and residents work with the government as much as against it. Contemporary vendors, like the baratilleros before them, leverage the economic value of their trades to build alliances that protect their interests. In Tepito, resistance includes the ability to straddle Mexico’s underground and official worlds, and to exploit the many linkages between them.

The post Why Mexico City’s Tepito ‘Exists Because It Resists’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the turn of the 20th century, floods, fires, and waste plagued the United States. Industries burned through resources and blew toxins into the air, with few restrictions. States and federal governments were only beginning to approach questions of the environment and did so in piecemeal ways.

In 1907, responding to the need to improve transportation, President Theodore Roosevelt tasked the Inland Waterways Commission with studying how to better manage rivers. The commissioners recognized a need for interstate coordination in this effort. Two in particular—Gifford Pinchot and William John “WJ” McGee—went further. They asked Roosevelt to invite all the country’s governors to Washington to discuss the pressing issues of water and natural resources.

Roosevelt complied, inviting the governors of all the states and territories, along with representatives from hundreds of civic, economic, and media organizations, to the White House. The resulting Conference of Governors, beginning on May 13, 1908, and lasting three days, offered a glimpse of political and economic collaboration that extended beyond normal boundaries of party, state, industry, and even time. The conference represents a not-so-distant precedent for today’s need to extend our political thinking beyond narrow parameters.

According to the New York Times, the Conference of Governors’ unprecedented composition and purpose promised “history-making possibilities.” The paper reported 44 governors attending, though the published proceedings identified 36. Alongside them, four at-large members were invited to “represent the public,” which appears to have meant ensuring the discussion integrated economic concerns: steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, railroad executive James J. Hill, labor leader John Mitchell, and Democratic mainstay William Jennings Bryan. Finally, 500-some representatives from myriad organizations—trade associations, unions, publications, and the like—joined as observers.

At the opening dinner, the attendees dined with Supreme Court Justices, members of the Cabinet and Congress, and other prominent officials in the White House’s state dining room while the United States Marine Band played.

Despite the night’s pomp, the tone of the following day’s conference was serious, even somber. According to Roosevelt’s opening address, “Conservation as a National Duty,” nothing less than the “continuance of the Nation” was at stake. During the 50-minute speech, interrupted by frequent nonpartisan applause, the president asserted the importance of cooperative planning and for elevating community rights over individuals’ pursuit of riches. “In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit,” Roosevelt said. “The time has come for a change.”

Others shared this view. The following day, railroad executive James J. Hill spoke on “The Natural Wealth of the Land and Its Conservation.” Hill spent most of his allotted time offering chilling statistics of shrinking forests, diminishing ores, and declining soil fertility. He argued that these statistics represented not only a bleak economic future but also a potentially violent political one, borne out of desperation and poverty.

Hill believed that if industry leaders understood the dire resource situation, they would manage resources more carefully. Espousing a key element of Progressive conservation doctrine—that of applying sound business principles to resource management—he compared the nation to a corporation and the leaders gathered as a board of directors. The “board” needed to consider the resource wealth available and marshal it responsibly, he suggested, looking toward long-term investments over near-term profits, or they would ruin “a national patrimony that can never be restored.”

As the conference concluded, the governors approved a slate of resolutions and presented them to President Roosevelt. The declaration reiterated the themes of resources as foundational wealth, the importance of planning, and the need to cooperate. Its final line announced the governors’ intent plainly: “Let us conserve the foundations of our prosperity.”

By the end of the three days, the governors were also eager to discuss collaborating on other matters, such as extradition laws and divorce standards. They resolved to meet regularly thereafter. That commitment eventually turned into the National Governors Association, which now meets twice a year.

Another effect of the summit was that Roosevelt appointed the National Conservation Commission, which would inventory the nation’s resources. The commission produced a three-volume report that appeared in February 1909 and featured a detailed accounting of the nation’s dwindling stocks of various resources, including estimated dates for when they would be exhausted.

These achievements were all the more striking because the Progressive Era was no harmonious nonpartisan moment. Progressives saw themselves in a battle between good and evil on behalf of “the people” versus “the interests.” Muckraking journalists took down corruption from city halls to corporate boardrooms. Roosevelt used the power of government to tame big business. One of the biggest victims was James J. Hill himself: Roosevelt ordered the investigation that led to the 1904 Northern Securities Co. v. United States case that broke up Hill’s holding company. Roosevelt also invited his political rival Bryan to the conference.

Still, the participants overcame these differences and set their eyes on the nation’s shared future. As Secretary of State Elihu Root urged in his address to the group, they performed their duties not only for their parochial interests but also for “the common good.” Pinchot later wrote that the Conference of Governors “a conception of the land they lived in that was brand new,” and suggested history might remember the conference as one of history’s turning points. More measured historians have called it one of the “climactic moments” of Roosevelt’s presidency.

Today, Roosevelt’s concerns about the risks to the “continuance of the Nation” have transformed into warnings about global catastrophes. Twenty-first-century environmental concerns extend past accounting stocks of national resources. Now, researchers aim to identify thresholds of global ecological viability. Researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, for instance, have investigated planetary boundaries to determine the requirements for sustaining life. Our worries encompass the globe and question whether the planet can maintain its resilient capabilities.

Meanwhile, the “common good” is more elusive than ever. While pulses of reform have appeared—the rise of regional planning in the interwar period, the emergence of land-use planning for conservation and urban development in the 1960s and 1970s—coming together over future shared interests feels like a faraway ambition. Imagine a similar conference today, in which Joe Biden invited Gretchen Whitmer, Ron DeSantis, and Elon Musk to share a stage. Commitments to base politics and baser instincts would produce only vitriol and communicate only enmity.

In our hyper-partisan moment, looking beyond short-term advantage has become a dwindling resource. The 1908 Conference of Governors may not have been the grand historical turning point Pinchot imagined, but it can be a touchstone. A common focus and commitment beyond party, nation, personal interest, and the present has been possible and must be again for the good of the planet and all its people. As the stakes have risen beyond a nation’s supply of resources, so must the solutions and the seriousness with which policymakers, industrial leaders, and civic organizations approach the future.

The post When American Governors and Moguls Came Together to Prevent Environmental <br>Catastrophe appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Not that you could ever peel back all the layers of Chandler’s empire. “He operated in a whirlwind of activity … setting up numerous dummy corporations and secret trusts,” Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt explained in Thinking Big, their epic account of the making of Southern California, as seen through the history of the Los Angeles Times, where Chandler served as publisher from 1917 until 1944. On his deathbed, they noted, Chandler was said to have had his papers destroyed.

Nevertheless, even just a handful of the most visible pieces of Chandler’s domain would tell you plenty about the industries that hastened the place’s heady growth 100 years ago: aerospace, autos, agriculture, oil, shipping, movies. Chandler—the wealthiest man in L.A. and one of the dozen wealthiest anywhere—had a hand in each of them.

He arranged financing for Donald W. Douglas, who began designing aircraft in the back room of a barbershop on Pico Boulevard in 1920, and within a few years, was putting together military planes from a Santa Monica factory. Chandler also invested in and became a director of Goodyear, which cranked out as many as 15,000 tires a day in downtown Los Angeles, helping to usher in the region’s signature car culture.

To the north, straddling Los Angeles and Kern counties, workers at Chandler’s Tejon Ranch farmed and tended cattle across a rugged expanse about 40 percent the size of Rhode Island. To the south, along the line dividing Los Angeles and Orange counties, he and his partners sank more than 100 wells and pumped 75,000 barrels of crude from the ground every day. Chandler assisted his father-in-law, Harrison Gray Otis, in bringing the port to San Pedro and formed the Los Angeles Steamship Company.

And he left his mark on show biz as well: The promotional sign at one of his myriad real estate developments was truncated from HOLLYWOODLAND to HOLLYWOOD in the late 1940s.

Today, no one person could possibly match Chandler’s reach into every corner of L.A. commerce. The barons of our age tend to be more narrowly focused in their endeavors. But if you looked at, say, the 10 men and women whom the Los Angeles Business Journal deemed the richest in the area in 2020, you would peer through a pretty good window into what currently propels the county economy—a $700-billion-a-year juggernaut that, were it a stand-alone nation’s, would rank as the 22nd biggest on Earth, larger than Poland’s or Sweden’s.

The map indicates the location of the business from which at least some of the richest Angelenos’ wealth is derived or where they have a presence via a corporate headquarters, factory, or other facility. Map by Ezra Rawitsch.

To be sure, no 10 people can tell the full story of a labor force of about 5 million. Zeroing in on the uber-rich can also obscure the daily hardships of L.A. County’s people, more than 20 percent of whom live in poverty. One in four workers in the county earns less than $15.60 an hour, or under $33,000 a year, if they’re full-time. As of early 2020, some 66,000 people in the county were homeless.

Yet, taken together, these 10 billionaires do reflect an awful lot. Most of them are self-made, emblematic of the county’s entrepreneurial spirit. They touch all 10 industries singled out by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation as central to the business landscape: aerospace and defense; marketing, design, and publishing; food manufacturing; trade and logistics; hospitality and tourism; information technology; entertainment and digital media; fashion, apparel, and lifestyle; bioscience; and advanced transportation.

Steven Udvar-Házy is 10th on the Business Journal’s roster of the wealthiest Angelenos, boasting a net worth (assets minus liabilities or, more plainly, what you own minus what you owe) of $6.8 billion. Dubbed by Reuters “the unofficial godfather of the civil aviation market,” Udvar-Házy made his money leasing planes to the airlines. But he is part of a broader sector that has two very different sets of customers: commercial carriers and government. In this way, the Hungarian native, whose family fled to the United States in 1958 from their Soviet-occupied homeland, showcases an industry that has a far smaller footprint in L.A. County than it did during the Cold War, but remains significant.

In fact, all in all, it’s fair to say that the requiem for aerospace in the region has been exaggerated. In 1990, after the Berlin Wall fell, Los Angeles County had more than 130,000 aerospace manufacturing jobs. These days, that number sits at around 40,000. In between, some industry titans merged or went out of business. Northrop Grumman ditched its Century City headquarters for suburban D.C., and Boeing sold off the mammoth Long Beach plant where it once assembled C-17 cargo planes for the Air Force.

But the industry’s total payroll has held pretty steady for more than 15 years now, with some segments (such as jet engines) shrinking and others (like missiles and space vehicles) booming. All of the big guns still have facilities here, from Boeing in El Segundo and Northrop Grumman in El Segundo and the Beach Cities to Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works in Palmdale and Elon Musk’s SpaceX in Hawthorne. And many other aerospace suppliers fly below the public’s radar but are essential: Paragon Precision in Valencia, Airmark Plastics in Azusa, Dytran Instruments in Chatsworth, to cite but a few. As for Udvar-Házy’s current company, Air Lease, its main offices are in Century City (as was International Lease Finance, the firm he co-founded in 1973 and later unloaded, turning him into a billionaire).

If it takes a certain kind of nerve to imagine that humans should soar through the heavens in a metal tube, it takes a wholly different kind of audacity to believe that pomegranate juice can be sold, in the words of the New Yorker, “as an antioxidant-rich miracle food that might improve cardiovascular health, battle prostate cancer, even prevent Alzheimer’s disease.” Ninth on the Business Journal list, with a net worth of $7 billion, is a couple who pulled off that marketing miracle: Stewart and Lynda Resnick. Their Wonderful Company’s 150,000-plus acres, planted with 15 million almond, pistachio, pomegranate, and citrus trees, are spread across the southern San Joaquin Valley, up and over the Tehachapis from their Beverly Hills estate.

But their genius—Lynda Resnick’s genius, really—is in cultivating brands, which also include Fiji Water and Teleflora. At times they’ve gone too far. Federal regulators at one point made the company pull some of its ads after questioning the scientific rigor behind claims that drinking its POM Wonderful pomegranate juice could “cheat death” and mitigate erectile dysfunction. Nevertheless, there is no denying their knack for swaying consumer behavior. “Creative collisions occur where industries overlap, driving new business concepts,” the county’s economic development officials tell us. In a nutshell (not to mention a seedless mandarin and the orb of a pomegranate), that is what the Resnicks have done. They “have wedded the valley’s hidebound farming culture with L.A.’s celebrity culture,” the journalist Mark Arax has written. “Their crops aren’t crops but heart-healthy snacks and life-extending elixirs.”

Beyond the marketing, the Resnicks represent another of the county’s key industries—food manufacturing. So does the eighth richest person in L.A.: Marijke Mars. Worth $7.2 billion, she inherited a stake in her family-owned company, Mars Inc., maker of Snickers and Twix candy bars, Wrigley gum, Uncle Ben’s rice, Dolmio pasta sauce, Whiskas cat food, Pedigree dog food, and much more. After graduating from college, she went to work at the company’s Kal Kan division in Vernon. Mars also owns the organic food producer Seeds of Change in Rancho Dominguez, an unincorporated county community tucked between Compton, Long Beach, and Carson.

Mars is hardly the only major industry player in the county. Dole, the fruit and vegetable giant, is headquartered in Westlake Village, Sunkist Growers in Valencia, Nestle USA in Glendale, Beyond Meat in El Segundo. In all, about 35,000 people in L.A. County work in food manufacturing, a particularly vast and varied field, befitting a megalopolis where more than 220 languages are spoken.

Here’s a tiny taste: You can find Saigon St. Foods in Los Angeles, Graciana Tortilla Factory in Sylmar, Otafuku Foods in Santa Fe Springs, Pacific Spice in Commerce, Jericho Foods in Sun Valley, Soyfoods of America in Duarte, and Huy Fong Foods’s Sriracha hot sauce factory in Irwindale.

Whether it’s hot sauce or Hot Wheels, all of it has to be stored and shipped. Edward Roski Jr., number seven on the rich list with a net worth of $7.7 billion, made a mint by meeting this demand. His Majestic Realty, started by Roski’s father in 1948, has developed warehouses and distribution centers in the City of Industry, as well as in counties neighboring L.A. Majestic’s multi-state, 82-million-square-foot portfolio includes hospitality, office, and retail properties. But it’s the warehouses that Roski seems to relish most. “What I like about industrial buildings is that they supply the things every American needs, every day, for their lives,” he once said. “We really help keep America functioning.”

The hub of L.A. County’s logistics industry are the neighboring ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, situated along San Pedro Bay. The two top handlers of cargo in the country, they were moving a combined $2 billion worth of stuff in and out every day before the coronavirus roiled the global economy, enough activity to generate about 200,000 jobs locally and 1 million across the region. All told, the ports normally traffic in more than 275 million metric tons of cargo annually—equivalent, the trade publication FreightWaves has pointed out, to 173 million cars or 25 billion watermelons—and stand as the nation’s gateway to Asia.

For his part, Roski also has ties to another crucial industry in the county: hospitality and tourism. He is a co-owner of the Lakers and Kings and the arena in which they play, Staples Center, which (again, in non-COVID times) draws more than 4 million people a year for sporting events, concerts, and more. Many of those who attend are locals, but a fair share who flock to Staples or the entertainment complex right next door, L.A. Live, are out-of-towners. The same is true for the county’s many other cultural attractions, whether highbrow or low: Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Universal Studios, the Getty Center, and so on and so forth. Pre-pandemic, more than 50 million people visited greater Los Angeles every year, pumping more than $30 billion into the county economy and supporting 240,000 jobs.

Among the most popular destinations is the Broad, the contemporary art museum Edythe and Eli Broad opened in 2015 on Grand Avenue in Los Angeles. Eli Broad, who died in April, was the sixth richest person in L.A. in 2020 with a net worth of $7.9 billion. On top of the art scene, Broad put his fingers into all sorts of issues—charter schools, the revival of downtown L.A., medical research, gun control—and came closer than anyone to being the Harry Chandler of the later part of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st.

Broad got super rich by starting two businesses that became Fortune 500 corporations: financial services provider SunAmerica (sold to American International Group in 1998 for $18 billion), and before that, homebuilder Kaufman & Broad. The company, now called KB Home, has erected thousands of dwellings across Southern California and throughout L.A. County—including in Sylmar, Paramount, Santa Clarita, Lancaster, and Woodland Hills. This catalyzing of sprawl remains controversial. In his seminal book, City of Quartz, Mike Davis excoriated Kaufman and Broad for practicing “the ecology of evil.”

The fifth wealthiest person on the Business Journal list, John Tu (net worth: $9.7 billion), offers a twist: He lives in Los Angeles County (Rolling Hills), but his company, computer memory and storage products maker Kingston Technology, is located in Orange County (Fountain Valley). That in of itself says something about how the “L.A. County economy”—the flow of goods and services, talent, and ideas—doesn’t stop at the borders on a map. Indeed, many analysts prefer to measure the economy across the entire Los Angeles Basin—L.A., Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties. Roll them all up, and annual output hits $1.3 trillion. That’s more than Mexico or Indonesia.

In terms of tech, when people use the moniker “Silicon Beach” to describe the locus of technology companies in the area, they sometimes loosely lump together L.A. and Orange counties. On the Los Angeles County side, much of the action is unfolding at 500-plus enterprises concentrated along the coast. Snap, the social media company, began in Venice and then moved to Santa Monica. Facebook has operations in Playa Vista and Northridge. Google employs thousands in Venice and Playa Vista, occupying the immense hangar where Howard Hughes built the Spruce Goose, his wooden airplane, in the 1940s. The company has been planning to take up a third campus in Los Angeles, inside a renovated Westside Pavilion shopping mall, in 2022. Meanwhile, smaller tech firms abound. Appetize, in Playa Vista, created a cloud-based platform that processes point-of-sale transactions. Nativo, in El Segundo, is an adtech firm. Headspace, in Santa Monica, makes a meditation and mindfulness app. Wevr, in Venice, is a virtual reality company.

About 40,000 people in L.A. County manufacture hardware and electronic products. Another 40,000 or so design computer systems and sell related services, state employment statistics indicate. Taking a more sweeping approach, one study tallied 260,000 information and communication technology jobs in the county. It got there by counting occupations that might not typically be thought of as “tech” per se, including the digital production and computer animation work being done in Hollywood.

If you were cheeky, you might say that Tu himself is also part of the entertainment industry because, in his free time, he plays the drums in his band, JT and California Dreamin’. Yet the fourth-richest person in L.A.—David Geffen—is a better way into Tinseltown.

A native New Yorker, Geffen has credited his mother, Batya, with teaching him the ins and outs of business. In her case, the business was undergarments, which she sold from the family’s house in Brooklyn under the name Chic Corsetry by Geffen. By default, that makes her son more connected than anyone on the Business Journal’s list of L.A.’s most affluent to fashion and apparel—another pillar of the county economy. Although an exodus of sewing machines to cheaper locales abroad has reduced industry employment to about a quarter of what it was 25 years ago, L.A. is still home to up-and-coming designers; established companies such as Lucky Brand, Nasty Gal, Revolve, and Reformation; and a designated fashion district downtown.

Geffen amassed his own fortune—$11.8 billion, as the Business Journal has it—by peddling content, not corsets. The music and movie mogul co-founded Asylum Records in 1970 (where he signed Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and Joni Mitchell) and in 1980 founded Geffen Records (whose stable included Donna Summer, Elton John, Cher, and Guns N’ Roses). He financed a string of hit movies, including Risky Business, Beetlejuice, Little Shop of Horrors, and Interview with the Vampire. In 1994, he co-founded the film studio DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Of course, no business is more identified with Los Angeles than entertainment. For locals, it can feel ubiquitous. More than 100,000 people work in motion pictures and sound recording in the county. Some 250 film stages are scattered around greater L.A., from Lakewood to Castaic, from Santa Monica to Sherman Oaks. Icons like Disney and Warner Bros. in Burbank, Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles, Sony Pictures in Culver City, and Universal Music Group in Santa Monica have a huge presence.

But over the past 20 years, new entrants have upended how we watch and listen to our favorite actors and artists, and now they’re whipping up their own content. Where the tech industry ends and entertainment begins is increasingly unclear, especially as the disruptors gobble up real estate all over L.A.: Netflix in Hollywood, Amazon Studios and Apple TV in Culver City, Hulu in Santa Monica, YouTube in Playa Vista.

These streaming media companies might never have gotten so far so fast had it not been for the gumption of the third-wealthiest person in L.A.—Sean Parker. He was 19 years old when he co-founded Napster in 1999. Accused of enabling mass piracy, the online file-sharing company was shut down two years later, but not before it pushed the music business and, ultimately, all of entertainment into the digital age.

Parker’s $14.5 billion in wealth stems from subsequent ventures; he was part of Facebook’s founding team and was an early investor in Spotify. In 2016, it was disclosed that he was planning a movie-on-demand service called the Screening Room, which theater chains worried would undermine their business model. The scheme subsequently faded away. But then Parker revived the West Hollywood company in 2020, rechristening it SR Labs.

The second-most well-to-do person in L.A., Patrick Soon-Shiong, checks a few boxes. In 2018, he purchased the Los Angeles Times, vaulting him to the fore of the publishing industry. He also owns 4.5 percent of the Los Angeles Lakers and a real estate investment company, which has been buying up properties in El Segundo. But the bulk of his $21.8 billion in wealth is from another of the county’s most prominent industries: biotech. Nine years after its founding in 2001, he sold Abraxis BioScience for $2.9 billion. His current corporate umbrella in Culver City, NantWorks, includes various entities working on cancer treatments.

NantWorks is one of about 100 bioscience companies in the county. There are also more than 400 medical device and diagnostic equipment makers, all buoyed by a large network of public and private research institutions, laboratories, and biomed incubators. Altogether, when you toss in everyone from computer systems analysts to phlebotomists, an estimated 80,000 people in L.A. County work in the industry.

That leaves but one final type of business—advanced transportation—and the No. 1 person on the Business Journal’s list, Elon Musk, to complete the county’s economic portrait. Although Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla, doesn’t manufacture anything in the area, it is in many respects the standard-setter for an industry that is flourishing locally, with about 120,000 workers across Southern California. Rival EV maker Fisker is in Manhattan Beach, and the startup Canoo is in Torrance. Proterra builds electric buses in the City of Industry, as does BYD North America in Lancaster.

Truth be told, Musk, who moved to Texas at the end of 2020, shouldn’t even be part of the discussion anymore. On his way out, he took a parting shot, suggesting that California had been “winning for too long” and had become “a little complacent, a little entitled.”

Whether such criticism is warranted or not, Musk certainly made the best of it while he was living in Bel Air. The Business Journal put his wealth at $75 billion. By the end of 2020, with Tesla’s share price having risen sharply during the final months of the year, Bloomberg said he was worth $170 billion, making him the second-richest person in the world. (He’d ascend to become the richest of all in 2021, though he and Jeff Bezos can always go back and forth depending on the stock market’s daily gyrations.)

Besides, no matter where he is, Musk will forever be tied to the business of L.A. In addition to the aforementioned SpaceX, he was the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies. And if you want to stretch, you can also link Musk to another portion of the entertainment industry. After a porn film was shot in a moving Tesla in 2019, Musk tweeted: “Turns out there’s more ways to use Autopilot than we imagined. Shoulda seen it coming.” It’s a good reminder that, despite being buffeted by a deluge of free online porn and regulations regarding condom use, the San Fernando Valley is still the heart of adult movie making.

And yet, other aspects of the L.A. economy are far more obscene. Several years ago, a group of scholars reported that white households in the county had a median net worth of $355,000. For African Americans and those of Mexican heritage, it was $4,000 and $3,500, respectively—in either case, less than the average amount that Elon Musk’s wealth increased every second of 2020.

The post What the 10 Richest Angelenos Tell Us About L.A. and Its Economy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now that 2020 is mercifully in the past, we have data (from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis) to evaluate the “grim calculus” in each state. And looking at that data—especially for large states, which have more diversified economies—the results may surprise. It’s hard to find any real trade-off between COVID lockdowns and decreased economic activity.

If anything, we find the opposite.

First, let’s step back and look at larger state data. Of those states that performed better economically than the U.S. as a whole in 2020, the state of Washington, with greater than average COVID restrictions, took first place. Then came three less COVID-stringent states—Arizona, Colorado and Georgia—followed by three more stringent states—North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia.

Then, in eighth place, came California, one of the most stringent states. After California, only three other states outperformed the country economically—Texas, Indiana, and Florida, all less stringent. Across these 11 states it is hard to find a trade-off; states with more COVID restrictions did well economically and those with fewer restrictions also did well.

And if we look beyond those 11 states to all states, we find a striking pattern: States with more stringent interventions had on average better economic outcomes and better health outcomes.

Is this just a statistical anomaly? The answer seems to be no. One reason to be confident of the result is to look at other countries. Consider, for example, Sweden, well-known for having few stringent COVID measures. In 2020, Sweden had worse health outcomes than the similar Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Finland. At the same time, its economic outcomes during the pandemic were no better than any of its healthier neighbors.

The finding also fits with history. A 2008 Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis survey of the 1918 influenza pandemic found that St. Louis, which took the flu more seriously and opened up later, had better economic and health outcomes than Philadelphia, a city that opened up sooner.

Similarly, 2020 research into the 1918 pandemic found that cities with more stringent interventions had better employment gains and better health outcomes.

What explains this seemingly strange but persistent result? The power of government signaling.

When a state indicates through policy and pronouncements that it takes the pandemic seriously enough to impose measures (sometimes extreme) to control the spread of the disease and protect public health, it is sending a message to its citizens. Part of that message is about businesses. The state is saying that there are protocols in place to make open businesses as safe as possible, and were that not possible, the businesses would be closed.

But when a state indicates through policy, as Sweden did, that individuals should make a choice as to what they do during a pandemic and that the government will not choose for them, it sends a different signal. It is saying, “Citizens, you are on your own, choose wisely.” So, while an open business will be busier than a closed one, the open businesses are likely to do better in a place with more stringent restrictions.

Does this show up in data? Yes, in some ways. Using OpenTable’s data for the pandemic, a decline in the number of diners was more dramatic for restaurants and bars in California than Texas. However, for those individual businesses were open, hours worked by employees fell by only 1.5 percent in California versus an 8.9 percent decline in Texas. But this is simply cherry picking two states. The decline in the number of diners in Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Ohio was comparable to that in Florida, Georgia, and Missouri even though the former were closer to California in restrictions and the latter closer to the Swedish approach.

The retail sector data paint a similar picture. For the same large states mentioned above, there is no significant correlation between changes in retail sales and the stringency of COVID interventions. A similar analysis of retail purchases by type of store also shows no correlation between interventions and the volume of sales. And, for the smallest 10 states, the same result holds true. People headed to online platforms to purchase goods at about the same rate regardless of the stringency of interventions.

The bottom line is that people respond to the information they have and the signals they receive from their government. Clearly, business closures increase unemployment in affected sectors. But there is no evidence to suggest that closures and other public health interventions have led to worse economic outcomes. So, the trade-off, such as it is, must be between sectors directly impacted by interventions and, in states and countries with fewer interventions, voluntary lower demand and more work absenteeism due to higher overall infection rates.

Knowing all this, you might still believe that the freedom to choose is valuable enough to pay the societal and health costs of that freedom. But empirically it is not a trade-off between health and economic outcomes. It is a trade-off between the freedom to choose and public health.

The post Why Did Tougher COVID Restrictions Help State Economies? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the current disruption in the restaurant industry, for all the pain and economic loss it’s caused, provides an opening to disrupt the established models, and reckon with both the decline of hospitality and the reality of restaurant inequality. To recover and thrive in the years ahead, this essential American business will need to bring its time-honored cultural traditions into greater alignment with the social movements that define our times.

To start with, consider the slew of new options to purchase commercially prepared food that have flooded the marketplace in the last year. These options include delivery platforms, meal subscriptions, and online storefronts with offsite “ghost kitchens.” Takeout and delivery sales have skyrocketed, as have lines at the local drive-thru. Clearly, those who can afford to eat out occasionally are still buying and consuming food that they do not make themselves.

A shadowy army of workers has sprung up to staff these operations. Many are precariously employed, armed with some combination of a vehicle, a mobile app, a mask, and hand sanitizer. By connecting people to food through wordless hand-offs or drop-offs of plastic-wrapped edibles, these people are doing the human labor that Silicon Valley would rather automate than improve.

It’s paying work, but we should be alarmed by this trend, which represents the decline of hospitality.

Hospitality is not only about restaurants. It reaches into nail salons, spas, and hotels; it is the beating heart of the tourism trade. For customers, hospitality can be an immersive consumptive experience, the ineffable pleasure of a well-earned night out or trip away. For workers, hospitality is a form of interactive labor that requires subtle interpersonal skills. Hospitality is about customer service, which means that it is about affective and aesthetic forms of labor: the careful use of one’s emotions and bodily appearance to create a desired experience for others.

Precisely because hospitality is an infinitely more textured and sensory-rich experience when it is in-person rather than in a virtual environment, settings of hospitality are uniquely vulnerable to retreats in public life, be they from contagious viruses or new technologies.

While it may be easy for some observers to dismiss hospitality as “non-essential,” this overlooks just how deeply embedded hospitality is in our culture as well as our economy. Hospitality imbues otherwise ordinary activities (think: eating, resting, relaxing, going somewhere new) with special value and collective ritual. In restaurants, it elevates food consumption to the level of romance, laughter, discovery, scenery, identity, and status. We may not like everything that gets packaged together in restaurants, but picking restaurants apart and putting their constitutive parts back together as delivery handoffs and “ghost” kitchens sucks the life out of these operations.

When restaurants are allowed to re-open in full again, however, they will have to do far more than restore hospitality. They—and the larger society—will have to reckon with an issue long left to simmer on the back burner: social inequality within restaurants.

Even in the best of times, restaurants have been engines for social division and hierarchy in our society. These inequalities go beyond the well-known distinction between server and served—that is, those who have the resources to inhabit restaurants for leisure versus those who are compelled to be there for labor.

Less visibly, restaurants produce and reproduce social hierarchies of race and class within their workforces. As I explore in my recent book, Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers, everyday forms of inequality get threaded into the very fabric of restaurants. Particularly in higher-end establishments, class-privileged, white men and women get channeled into front-of-house and managerial jobs while working-class people of color, especially foreign-born Latino men, toil behind the scenes.

This social division of labor is the result of both management decisions and the worker inter-relations that bosses help to structure. Management sets the stage for this dynamic in restaurants through discriminatory hiring and supervisory strategies. Workers then play out the scenes each and every day, coming to understand their colleagues as members of distinctly unequal “teams” tinged with race, class, and gender differences.

As a cruel irony, these inequities will get more pronounced, not less, as restaurants return to full operations (as I hope that they do again very soon). This is because serving more customers means very different things for different groups of workers. For those in the front of the house, a busy shift means more cash tips; for those in the back of the house, a busy shift means more sweat. Tips thus function as racialized and classed forms of income because they flow primarily to front-of-house workers who are often young, white, and highly educated and stop short of the Brown and Black workers in the kitchen. Under the hood of hospitality, the reproduction of social inequality feels—and looks—like business as usual.

Restaurateurs, given their numbers and all the lives they touch, could play an outsized role in bringing about organization and industry-wide innovation along these lines. The question they will need to address is, how can their establishments become more equitable spaces of employment while still managing to fill seats and pay bills? Upholding the exploitative and racially unequal norms of the past may become increasingly bad business, especially in an era when social-media savvy diners have trained their attention on these topics.

Using this moment to figuratively “turn the tables” on restaurant practices could represent a boon to business rather than an undue burden. This involves rethinking unspoken industry practices in order to widen the pool of people that find stepping foot in restaurants to be a rewarding experience. Because hospitality is about enacting finely crafted relationships with guests, the behind-the-scenes craftwork that goes into this should be made transparent to both customers and workers. The swift and silent busser, the jack-of-all-trades line cook, the bar back who is a master of anticipating needs; these workers invest daily in the production of hospitality. It is time for their employers to celebrate them in meaningful ways, such as by recognizing workers publicly while also expanding their training and advancement opportunities, or by soliciting worker input on best practices and providing these individuals with a pathway to acquiring a stake in ownership (or at least a cut of recent business successes they helped achieve).

Restaurant management should communicate these efforts proudly to members of the public as a selling point. Helping create a more inclusive workforce channels our moment in history in the most positive way possible, connect conversations in the community with conversations around dining tables—and among those walking the floor and working the grills, too. As we have seen from the rise of social and political protest in the sports world, restaurants could look to partner with foundational movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo in their efforts to empower workers of color and women and propel them into prominent roles within the industry. Restaurants are still businesses, and businesses must make money in order to survive. But they can and should do so as value-driven brands—third spaces for a new era—that tap the cultural milieu and refract it back outwards in the form of concrete practices.

Customers need to be able to support restaurants that make these concerted efforts. A worker advocacy center called Restaurant Opportunity Coalition United (ROCU) has launched an app call ROC National Diners’ Guide aimed at bringing consumer awareness to restaurants that are practicing “high road” employment standards, such as by offering livable wages, racial equity, and opportunities for advancement. The app’s interface is designed like Yelp, the widely used restaurant review app, except with a rating system for employment standards and a corresponding map of restaurants in the area (though it has limited coverage).

The Diner’s Guide is but one of a growing number of efforts to realize change in an industry that is at a crossroads. The road forward is to make going to a restaurant to be an act of supporting a new movement to infuse our dining experience with both expertly crafted hospitality and concerted efforts to advance social justice.

If we build such a movement, restaurants should thrive again in the post-pandemic era—as the engines of opportunity, not inequality.

The post Can Restaurants Become Drivers of Opportunity—Not Inequality? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To: Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk
From: Joe Mathews
Re: Acquisition and Reputation

Have you two lost your minds?

Both of you are suffering through long-running, self-inflicted public relations crises. Mark, Facebook’s self-serving and ever-shifting policies, the way its platform polarizes politics, and growing alarm about the health effects of social media, have turned you into a lightning rod.

Elon, you are over a barrel for strange behavior, including attacking financial analysts, crying during a New York Times interview (which included the revelation that you use Ambien and recreational drugs), and tweeting yourself into a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.

Neither of your predicaments is really surprising, given the way the two of you combine planet-sized ambition with questionable management. What is puzzling is your failure to escape these crises.

Why haven’t you taken advantage of the obvious, cheap, and proven way to launder your reputations and curry favor with the media?

That method is straightforward:

Buy your local newspaper!

There’s no better balm for a billionaire’s press clippings than saving a newspaper.

Exhibit A is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who was known for tax avoidance and cold-blooded ruthlessness in remaking the American retail landscape until he purchased The Washington Post for some loose change ($250 million). Despite being the world’s richest person—the sort of thing that used to make you a target of media types—Bezos is now described as a defender of democracy (“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the Post’s Bezos-era motto) against the madness of President Trump.

In California, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is taking the reputation-burnishing possibilities of media ownership to the next level. Soon-Shiong has long received bad publicity—for questions about the drug business that made him a billionaire, for self-dealing in his philanthropic and cancer test endeavors, for a troubled L.A. hospital chain he bought, and for allegations of financial improprieties lodged by people including his brother and Cher.

But then the good doctor rescued the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune from the clutches of a Chicago-based entity called Tronc. Now Soon-Shiong is being celebrated by hard-bitten reporters for restoring local ownership and investing in investigative reporting.

Sure, buying a paper isn’t free, but it’s cheap for billionaires, and can even pay for itself. Soon-Shiong had to overpay—$500 million—to wrest the Times and the Union-Tribune away from their Chicago owners. But the purchase has provided him a valuable ballast of virtue that could reduce questions about his other businesses.

In Boston, billionaire John Henry—who was educated in California, and built his investment company in Orange County—purchased The Boston Globe essentially for nothing, since he made back more than its $70 million purchase price by selling its headquarters land for more than $80 million.

Likewise, owning the Post sure hasn’t hurt Bezos’s business. The state government of Maryland, which the Post reports on, has offered an astounding $8.5 billion in tax incentives to convince Amazon to build a second headquarters there.

Of course, there are other rewards for buying newspapers, if you care: namely, that you’ll be doing a public service. Today’s newspapers are in deep trouble, struggling for revenue and constantly shedding staff. By buying papers, you two—if you’re willing to spend a little on the product—would provide stability to vital if weakened institutions that still try to get the facts and bind communities together.

Think of the opportunity—you could do a good deed, and help your public image in the process.

Now, to be fair, you’re still rich and famous and will face public scrutiny. And if you too blatantly deploy your newspapers to serve your other interests, you could run into trouble. (Soon-Shiong’s reported habit of using his philanthropy to serve his business ventures suggests that conflict with journalists at his papers is likely.) But once you own the paper you’re likely to be less of a target. Journalists have limited time and money to go after subjects; they’re not keen to devote precious resources to biting the hand that feeds.

So what should you buy? For you, Zuck, the obvious target is your hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle. You once told the paper’s editor, Audrey Cooper—according to an open letter she wrote to you—“how important The Chronicle’s work is in the Bay Area and how invested Facebook was in helping us to do it.”

Of course, in that same letter, Cooper called you out for not dealing honestly and consistently with the Chronicle and other publishers, and abdicating your responsibility to improve the public discourse. The good news is that, by buying the paper, you could work with her to show your commitment to said discourse. It would be a chance to demonstrate that the days of “move fast and break things” are behind you.

Since your press is even worse, Elon—your nasty habit of attacking reporters and suggesting you’d produce a rating system for journalists has predictably backfired—you’ll need to buy a tougher target: Digital First Media. That’s a newspaper group owned by Alden Global Capital, a New York-based hedge fund.

You don’t have to buy the whole chain. It would be enough to grab the pieces of the chain from Southern California, where you live; this means everything from the Orange County Register to the Los Angeles Daily News.

Alden, which has ruthlessly cut its staffs and newspaper offerings, is one of the few institutions with a worse reputation among journalists than yours. That’s good news for you. If you bought the papers and restored staffing and investment in the news product (maybe your Saudi buddies could help), you’d find yourself transformed overnight into a journalistic hero.

And if the papers lose money, well, they’ll fit in well with other pieces of your portfolio, like Tesla, which still isn’t profitable.

Yes, I know that newspapers are not the business you want to be in, but they still shape public narratives. So, Mark and Elon, you face a choice. You can keep complaining about all the bad press you get. Or you can buy your own newspapers, and, in the process, give a boost to media and civic life in your own state of California.

If you two are as smart as you’re supposed to be, your next moves are obvious.

The post Why Two California Billionaires Should Buy Newspapers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Human consumption is a primary driver of environmental problems. But our urge to consume is encoded in survival—it is clearly not going away.

That urge can also be harnessed to solve problems, though. Information is a powerful tool to enable and move consumers toward sustainable behavior, and it is more readily available than ever before. With information about the environmental impacts of products at their fingertips, consumers can make informed choices, driving a revolution of sustainability for whole corporate sectors.

So far, the revolution has moved slowly. Many companies have failed to translate green into gold. Firms tend to be idealistic about consumer behavior, underestimating their level of sophistication or relying too much on rational decision-making models that don’t account for biases in human decision-making. Furthermore, many have taken a piecemeal approach that decouples green messages from actual organizational practices, leading to inconsistencies and fomenting distrust.

People care increasingly about the environment but are busier and more skeptical about environmental claims. Products are usually not purchased simply because they are better for the environment, and product quality cannot be sacrificed for sustainable goals. Largely, today’s consumers are convenient environmentalists—they will buy green, but it needs to be on their own terms.

Complicating matters has been a steady stream of firms getting exposed for greenwashing and making other false representations. This has made consumers distrustful of green messages. And they are confused about what is really good for the environment in the first place. So, how do you reach these people—a majority of consumers— and convince them to buy green?

The answer lies in the green bundle.

Messaging that pairs sustainability with private benefits creates a win-win for consumers. They are not only doing right by the world but also doing the right thing for their own lives. In a sense, they get to have their cake and eat it too—they benefit psychologically from their altruism and benefit in a more tangible sense from added value.

Of course, to change consumer behavior, firms first need to get their message right. This goes beyond communications. It requires adopting a culture of transparency and framing authentic messages that resonate with consumers.

At a time when information zooms around the world in an instant from any handheld device, transparency is an unyielding force. In most cases, the cost of resisting is greatly outweighed by the benefits of embracing this force before competition.

To reach customers, green messages must pierce a busy cloud of green information. The message must be clear and credible. These may seem like simple imperatives, but many companies fail to hit all of the notes.

Practice green modesty and transparency. CEOs are pivotal to developing clarity and credibility. Rightly seen as figureheads for the companies they manage, they must exemplify a sustainable ethos in their personal and professional lives or risk damaging the credibility of the firm’s efforts. Going green cannot be delegated to a marketing department or PR firm. Indeed, one challenge that often arises (and leads to inadvertent greenwashing) is lack of coordination among different units of an organization. This can cause marketers, to overstate environmental benefits because they do not understand the complexity or impacts of a new product from R & D. To avoid this pitfall, CEOs need to set the tone by clearly stating their green modesty, instituting proper incentives, and relying on codes and standards that promote an ethical climate.

Although this may come as a surprise, even today many firms do not know the environmental and social impacts of their suppliers. Supply-chain environmental-sustainability scorecards are one way that companies can begin to take charge of this information. Once firms better understand the environmental impact of their products, they face the challenge of translating this information not only into a clear signal that can be understood by consumers but also into something that consumers care about.

The steps just described, though necessary, are insufficient to make consumers go green. Again, there is little willingness to pay for environmental benefits or the public good alone. Moreover, research shows that if there is any perceived trade-off in quality, even fewer people are willing to pay. Consumers’ willingness to pay is a less explored piece of the puzzle for green markets, but it is the key to developing effective informational strategies.

This is where the green bundle comes in.

Consumers will translate aspirational beliefs into actions when they see green products as being bundled with private benefits, such as health benefits or improved quality. Firms need to bundle environmental or public-good benefits with private benefits, including better performance, enhanced status, improved health, money savings, and even emotional returns.

Emphasize increased quality. Few are willing to pay a premium without some measure of private benefit. Conversely, with certain goods, such as cleaning products, consumers may confuse or associate eco-labeling with poor quality. It is therefore important to communicate quality alongside environmental virtue. The Clorox Company promotes the view that natural cleaners are at least as good as their conventional counterparts by boasting that products with the Green Works label “clean with the power you expect.”

In many cases, there is a natural overlap between quality and greenness. Performance, functionality, usability, durability, comfort, and convenience are all attributes that can be effectively bundled with sustainability.

Leverage peer pressure. Most of us care what others think, and we like to display the good things we are doing. The unusual appearance of the Toyota Prius became a selling point after the car was used to bring Hollywood stars to the red carpet of the Academy Awards. Suddenly, this strange-looking vehicle could make people look like stars themselves. Status is a powerful tool to compel behavior in the marketplace, and it is particularly effective when consumption is highly visible.

Promote health benefits. Research shows that the most important reason we buy green is for our health and the health of our families. Health is the main reason people choose organic products that are produced without chemicals. Thus, it was not surprising to see that, over a ten-year period, the organic-food market grew 238 percent, from $8.6 billion to $29 billion, while the overall food market grew 33 percent. Health attributes are an important private benefit that can be associated with green products.

But people do not always make the connection between environmental and health benefits. Information campaigns are one way to close that link, and there are critical times when consumers will be more receptive to campaigns about environment and health. These include national health crises, such as the water contamination in Flint, Michigan, which raise awareness and lead consumers to seek strategies to protect their health. They also include personal times in individuals’ lives, such as when they start a family or face health problems.

Unravel monetary returns. Money is the most cited reason to avoid or embrace green products and services. Premiums often scare consumers away, whereas monetary savings associated with saving energy or resources are appealing. But perceptions of premiums or savings vary widely depending on context or reference point. How financial incentives are framed makes a big difference. Small savings framed as a tax or a loss can be quite effective, and raising a product’s price can even help in some situations.

Stimulate empathy. The final piece of the green bundle is the emotional connection between the consumer and the sustainable products. Consumers will empathize with a cause when the story is told the right way. In addition, they need to believe their purchases will make a tangible difference. It is imperative to bridge the distance between green consumption and impact, making the benefits of consumption tangible by showing how they help a specific person.

The post Want to Save the Environment? Give Consumers More Benefits for Going Green appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.