The very things that made the Green Revolution so stunning - that made the last doubling in agricultural productivity possible - now cause trouble. Efforts to improve agricultural productivity in the short-term are often designed to succeed at the expense of long-term sustainability, whether this takes the form of ecological stress, loss of genetic diversity in standing crops, salinization and alkalization of irrigated lands, nitrate pollution of ground-water, or pesticide residues in food.
Unsustainable Productivity
At the beginning of the 21st century, the states of Punjab and Haryana are on the edge of a grave environmental crisis. They were at the forefront of the Green Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which farm machinery, pesticides and fertilizers, irrigation and the replacement of traditional crops with high-yielding varieties dramatically increased productivity. The two states together provide 80 percent of India's food supply. But the land is increasingly unable to support this burden of intensive agriculture. Crop yields and water resources are declining alarmingly, and some parts are close to becoming barren. Many farmers are heavily in debt from their investments in new equipment and reliance on chemicals, and rural unemployment is increasing. In the wheat belt of Ludhiana, Punjab, heavy use of fertilizer has caused excess nitrates to leach into the groundwater, posing hazards for human health. Without massive change towards more sustainable agriculture, say using less-intensively farmed sorghum and millet, there is little doubt that this food basket of India will collapse within a decade, placing the country's population at great risk of famine.
The majority of employees surveyed (87pc) said that they are productive at work and the report said Microsoft 365 productivity signals such as Teams meetings, messages and other use of Microsoft products continue to climb.
As organizations look to the postpandemic future, many are planning a hybrid virtual model that combines remote work with time in the office. This sensible decision follows solid productivity increases during the pandemic.
We show that the when one takes into account the global equilibrium ramifications of an unwinding of the US current account deficit, currently estimated at 5.4% of GDP, the potential collapse of the dollar becomes considerably larger--more than 50% larger--than our previous estimates (Obstfeld and Rogoff 2000a). That global capital markets may have deepened (as emphasized by US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan) does not affect significantly the extent of dollar decline in the wake of global current account adjustment. Rather, the dollar adjustment to global current account rebalancing depends more centrally on the level of goods-market integration. Whereas the dollar's decline may be benign as in the 1980s, we argue that the current conjuncture more closely parallels the early 1970s, when the Bretton Woods system collapsed. Finally, we use our model to dispel some common misconceptions about what kinds of shifts are needed to help close the US current account imbalance. Faster growth abroad helps only if it is relatively concentrated in nontradable goods; faster productivity growth in foreign tradable goods is more likely to exacerbate the US adjustment problem.
Hey, I love the book and enjoy remote work. BUT, dear Cal where is the evidence that current in-office work is unsustainable. Is it miserable and unproductive? Yes sure, but unsustainable? No way. What about Musk and Tesla? Why did he banned remote?
The pharmaceutical industry is under growing pressure from a range of environmental issues, including major losses of revenue owing to patent expirations, increasingly cost-constrained healthcare systems and more demanding regulatory requirements. In our view, the key to tackling the challenges such issues pose to both the future viability of the pharmaceutical industry and advances in healthcare is to substantially increase the number and quality of innovative, cost-effective new medicines, without incurring unsustainable R&D costs. However, it is widely acknowledged that trends in industry R&D productivity have been moving in the opposite direction for a number of years. Here, we present a detailed analysis based on comprehensive, recent, industry-wide data to identify the relative contributions of each of the steps in the drug discovery and development process to overall R&D productivity. We then propose specific strategies that could have the most substantial impact in improving R&D productivity.
A major perception gap between employees and leaders could make hybrid work unsustainable at companies around the world if left unaddressed, Microsoft cautioned Thursday as it released the findings of a new workplace study.
Microsoft announced Viva in March 2021 as its entry into the increasingly competitive market for technology that aims to help companies improve employee engagement and productivity, and the overall working environment.
Fiscal sustainability is one of the most pressing policy issues of our time. Yet it remains difficult to quantify. Official debt is plagued with a number of measurement difficulties since its measurement reflects the choice of words, not policies. And forming the fiscal gap-the imbalance in the government's intertemporal budget-requires strong discount rate assumptions. An alternative approach, taken here, is specifying a stochastic general equilibrium model and determining via simulation how long it takes for the economy to reach game over-the point where current policy can no longer be maintained. Our simulations, based on an OLG model calibrated to the U.S. economy, produce an average duration to game over of roughly one century, with a 35 percent chance of reaching the fiscal limit in roughly 30 years. The prospect of man-made economic collapse produces large equity premia, like those observed in the data. Our simulations show that both the fiscal gap and the equity premium rise as the economy gets closer to hitting its fiscal limit, suggesting that the fiscal gap and the equity premium may be good indicators of unsustainable policy.
There are many areas within organisations and communities where good sustainable activities are taking place. Conversely, bad practices are also prevalent. Currently there are few mechanism or systems to explicitly identify sustainable, productive, unsustainable and/or non-productive activities across organisational and community borders. We attempt to leverage the power and wisdom of the crowds to identify sustainability and productivity concepts, ideas, cases, exemplars, heuristics, rules, approaches, models and processes. Additionally, the system can be leveraged to identify areas of unsustainability and lack of productivity. This enables organisations, communities, and individuals to rectify and address areas of low productivity or unsustainable practices. The main focus of this research is to propose and implement a crowd-sourced approach for sustainability and productivity. The proposed system will support five distinct processes: (1) Capture (2) Curate (3) Discover & Share (4) Collaborate and (5) Persuade people to adopt sustainability and productivity ideas, ideals, principles, and practices.
Why did postdocs focus so much on individual productivity? Knowing that only a very small proportion of them will be able to become group leaders and stay in research, they considered themselves engaged in a fierce competition. This experience of competition is augmented by the spatial and temporal organization of the postdoc phase. Postdocs are expected to be mobile, that is, to change research groups and, better yet, countries after each postdoctoral appointment of typically two to three years. The interviewees considered two to three postdocs to be the norm for those pursuing scientific careers; after this postdoc phase, they can possibly settle into a more long-term position. 2ff7e9595c
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