More than two dozen governments, including the U.S., now have a team of behavioral scientists tasked with trying to improve bureaucratic efficiency to “nudge” their citizens toward what they deem to be higher levels of well-being.

A few recent examples include a push by the socialist French government to increase the numbers of organ donors, a conservative UK government plan to prevent (costly) missed doctor appointments, and efforts by the Obama White House to boost voter turnout on Election Day.

While the government’s use of our psychological quirks to affect behavior rubs some people the wrong way, most of us can agree that the above examples achieve positive ends. More organ donors mean more lives saved, fewer missed doctor appointments mean the government or health industry is more efficient, and increased voting means stronger citizen engagement in democracy.

But “nudges” themselves are value neutral. That is, they can be used to both achieve altruistic ends or more malicious ones. Just as behavioral science can be used to increase voter turnout, it can also be used to suppress the votes of specific individuals likely to favor the opposing side, as reportedly happened in the recent U.S. presidential election.

The nudge, in other words, has a dark side.

My research explores how behavioral science can help people follow through on their intentions where they make better or longer-term choices that increase their well-being. Because choices are influenced by the environment in which they are made, changing the environment can change decision outcomes.

This can be positive to the extent that those designing interventions have good intentions. But what happens when someone uses these insights to systematically influence others’ behavior to favor his or her own interests – even at the expense of everyone else’s?

That’s my concern with President Donald Trump, whose campaign appears to have exploited behavioral science to suppress the vote of Hillary Clinton supporters.

Small language tweaks can lead to a large uptick in organ donors. Phil Coale/AP Photo

What’s in a nudge?

Behavioral science is a relatively young field, and governments have only recently begun using its insights to inform public policy.

The UK was the first in 2010 when it created its Behavioral Insights Team. In subsequent years, dozens of governments around the world followed, including Canada with its Behavioral Insights Unit and the U.S., which in 2015 officially launched the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team.

The teams’ missions are all relatively similar: to leverage insights from behavioral science to make public services more cost-effective and easier to use, to help people make better choices for themselves, and to improve well-being.

In the UK, for example, the Behavioral Insights Team was able to persuade about 100,000 more people a year to donate their organs by tweaking a message people received when renewing their car tax. Here in the U.S., the Social and Behavioral Science Team helped the Department of Defense increase the amount of retirement savings accounts for service members by 8.3 percent.

These kinds of interventions have been criticized for unjustly interfering with an individual’s autonomy. Some even compare it with mind-control.

However, as I have pointed out elsewhere, our environment (and the government) is always exerting some influence on our behavior, so we’re always being nudged. The question is therefore not whether we will be nudged, but how and in what direction.

For example, when you sit down to dinner, the size of your plate can make a big difference in how much you eat. Studies show you’re more likely to consume less food if you use a smaller plate. So if the government is handing out the dinnerware, and if most us wanted to avoid overeating, why not set the default plate to a small one?

But now let’s consider the dark side: a restaurant might hand out a small plate if it means it can charge more for less food and thus make more money. The owner likely doesn’t care about your waist size.

Any intervention based on behavioral science is therefore neither good nor bad. What matters is the intention behind it, the aim which the nudge is ultimately supposed to help achieve.

If you want to lose weight, try a smaller plate. Plate size via www.shutterstock.com

Potential for abuse

Take the case of what Cambridge Analytica – a company founded in 2013 and reportedly funded by the family of billionaire conservative donor Robert Mercer – did during the election. This team of data scientists and behavioral researchers claims to have collected thousands of data points on 220 million Americans in order to “model target audience groups and predict the behavior of like-minded people.”

Essentially, all that data can be used to deduce individual’s personality traits and then send them messages that match their personality, which are more likely to be persuasive. For example, highly neurotic Jane will be more receptive to a political message that promises safety, as opposed to financial gains, which may be more compelling to conscientious Joe.

So what’s the problem? In and of itself, this analysis can be a neutral tool. A government might want to use this approach to provide helpful information to at-risk populations, for example by providing suicide prevention hotlines to severely depressed individuals, as Facebook is currently doing. One might even argue that Cambridge Analytica, first hired by the Cruz campaign and later by Trump, was not acting unethically when it sent such personalized messaging to convince undecided voters to support the eventual Republican nominee. After all, this is what all marketing campaigns set out to do.

But there is a fine ethical line here that behavioral science can make easier to cross. In the same way that people can be influenced to engage in a behavior, they may also be discouraged from doing so. Bloomberg reported that Cambridge Analytica identified likely Clinton voters such as African-Americans and tried to dissuade them from going to the ballot box. The company denies discouraging any Americans from casting their vote.

Beyond hiring the company, the Trump administration has a direct tie to Cambridge Analytica through chief strategist Steve Bannon, who sits on its board.

Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, talks about what his company does.

How might Trump nudge?

So far, it’s unclear whether or how the Trump administration might use behavioral science in the White House.

Trump, like most Republicans, has emphasized his desire to make government more efficient. Since behavioral science is generally a low-cost intervention strategy that provides tangible, measurable gains that should appeal to a business-minded president, Trump may very well turn to its insights to accomplish this goal. After all, the UK’s Behavioral Insights Team was kicked off under conservative leadership.

The White House Social and Behavioral Science Team’s impressive interventions have led to hundreds of millions of dollars in savings across a variety of departments and at the same time increased the well-being of millions of citizens. The future of the team is now unclear. Some members are worried that Trump will use their skills in less benevolent ways.

Trump’s apparent use of Cambridge Analytica to suppress Clinton turnout, however, is not a good sign. More broadly, the president does not seem to value ethics. Despite repeated warnings from government ethics watchdogs, he refuses to seriously deal with his innumerable conflicts of interest. Without the release of his tax returns, the true extent of his conflicts remain unknown.

And as we know from behavioral science, people frequently underestimate the influence conflicts of interests have on their own behavior.

In addition, studies show that people can easily set aside moral concerns in the pursuit of efficiency or other specific goals. People are also creative in rationalizing unethical behavior. It doesn’t seem to be a stretch to imagine that Trump, given his poor track record where ethics is concerned, could cross the fine ethical line and abuse behavioral science for self-serving ends.

Cass Sunstein is one-half of the duo that coined the term ‘nudge’ to describe using small interventions to drive government policy changes. AP Photo

A virus and a cure

Behavioral science has been heralded as part of the solution to many societal ills.

Behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, co-authors of the book “Nudge” coining the term, have been strong advocates of using the field’s tools to improve government policy – when the intentions are transparent and in the public interest.

But might the current administration use them in ways that go against our own interests? The problem is that we may not even be aware when it happens. People are often unable to tell whether they are being nudged and, even if they are, may be unable to tell how it’s influencing their behavior.

Governments around the world have found success using the burgeoning field of behavioral science to improve the efficiency of their policies and increase citizens’ well-being. While we should continue to find new ways to do this, we also need clear guidelines from Congress on when and how to use behavioral science in policy. That would help ensure the current or a future occupant of the White House doesn’t cross the line into the dark side of nudges.

Management at Pobeda Airlines, the Russian low fare subsidiary of Aeroflot, has responded to a spate of violent attacks on staff by training staff in the martial art of Sambo. The latest attack took place in February at Vnukovo International Airport in Moscow was caught on CCTV and shows a passenger who – having missed his flight and having been refused a refund – throws a series of punches at a customer service manager.

An airline spokesperson said the airline would train staff in the Russian martial art so that they are better able to deal with disgruntled passengers. Pobeda is not the first airline to adopt this policy – it appears to be a wider industry approach to dealing with rising levels of violent customer behaviour towards their staff. Hong Kong Airlines and its low fares’ subsidiary, Hong Kong Express, have trained their staff in kung fu.

The martial art of Sambo. CFS Sambo France / flickr, CC BY-SA

There are very different ways of seeing this policy. The first is that it is an investment in training for the benefit of staff. It can be seen as an expression of what is known as organisational support, where the investment symbolises the esteem in which airline management hold staff. It may even be seen as an example of a caring senior management team demonstrating their concern for staff by investing in this training to ensure the welfare of the workforce.

A very different perspective is that it’s an abdication of responsibility by airline management: passing the buck for the problems created by the strategy of the airline and the low cost business model more generally. In offering training to staff, airline management make the tacit connection between passenger disaffection and the performance of staff. Training is then a means of redressing the deficit in their skills to do their jobs properly.

The low cost model

A key component in the success of budget airlines is the extra revenue they make from various additional charges. An important one is excess baggage charges. And it is the frontline worker who is responsible for carrying out company policy – and must then face the consequences of customer discontent when this happens.

Blame for the incident at Vnukovo Airport might be assigned to the passenger whose behaviour was unreasonably violent. Blame might also be assigned to the airline whose policy it is the worker’s job to enforce. But by no means should we assign blame to the victim: the customer service representative who carried out the company policy and was physically assaulted for their efforts.

Yet, the airline’s solution to this problem – training staff in martial arts – shifts responsibility onto staff to deal with angry customers. And it totally fails to deal with the heart of the problem: the unusual rules that low fare airlines use to generate additional costs from passengers.

EasyJet, for example, introduced a policy in 2016 where it would turn away passengers who were less than 30 minutes early for their flight (informing them in small print on their boarding card) and then charging a further £80 to switch to another flight. Meanwhile, 5,000 passengers launched a £400m class action law suit against Ryanair because of what they claim to be hidden and unfair charges. Often it is these policies that cause many customers to get so frustrated in the first place.

Lower wages, worse for staff

Shifting responsibility of dealing with angry customers onto frontline staff is part of a wider problem of how airline staff are treated in general – especially those that work for budget carriers. The competition among airlines to attract customers has reduced the costs of air travel. But, in order to offer low fares, airlines must reduce costs. The cost of staffing an airline is significant and among the largest single operating costs for an airline. Airline management is also able to exert control over this cost in a way that it cannot control other sizeable costs such as the price of fuel.

So the low cost model is then invariably bad news for staff. Low fare airlines generally offer lower terms of conditions of employment and expect high levels of productivity and flexibility from staff. Indeed, repeated industrial action by British Airways staff has come about because the airline created its own low cost workforce in response to low cost competition.

So staff are getting hit by the low cost business model – not just by disgruntled passengers. Low fare airlines are creating the conditions for passenger discontent that staff must then bear the brunt of. It’s a worse work environment as well as lower wages.

The response by airlines to “arm” staff to deal with the inevitable outcome ignores the fundamental problem. It also potentially does more harm than good – what happens if and when an employee actually uses their new martial arts skills to defend themselves against a customer? Putting the onus on staff to defend themselves puts them in harms way in order to defend the policies core to the low cost model.

“This case demonstrates what should be a bedrock principal for all companies — you must get customers’ consent before you charge them,” the acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection Thomas B. Pahl said in a statement. “Consumers affected by Amazon’s practices can now be compensated for charges they didn’t expect or authorize.”

The FTC says that details about the refund program (which Amazon will operate) will be revealed shortly. We’ve reached out to Amazon for more information about when exactly that will start and will update this post should it arrive.

Andrew Puzder’s brief foray into government ended last week when he withdrew his nomination as Donald Trump’s secretary of labor. Just a day later, the administration named its new nominee for the job, Alexander Acosta, dean of the law school at Florida International University.

Put simply, Acosta is a qualified nominee for the position. Puzder was anything but. Why Puzder was ever put forward for an office dedicated to the well-being of American workers – and the agency most responsible for the interests of the white, middle-aged voters making up Trump’s electoral base – requires some explanation.

Trump’s particular approach to governance became apparent during his first weeks in office as he populated his cabinet with Wall Street financiers such as Steven Mnuchin at Treasury and big campaign donors like Betsy DeVos for education.

But Puzder, who headed the fast-food operation that owns Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., turned out to be more than a number of Republicans could swallow. Puzder has the distinction of being the only Trump cabinet nomination to date who has been rejected.

Charges against him ranged from allegations of spousal abuse publicized by Oprah Winfrey in 1990 but recently withdrawn, alleged violations of federal wage and hour laws, the employment of an undocumented worker in his household and an advertising strategy based on soft-core “food porn.”

Acosta, in contrast, served as an attorney in the Justice Department and has extensive experience in labor relations, including as a member of the National Labor Relations Board.

As a student of labor history, I know the backgrounds of the many distinguished individuals who have led the Labor Department and advocated on behalf of workers. This important position deserves a leader of competence and commitment.

Then Texas Gov. Rick Perry attends an event with Puzder, who’s been a big donor to Republican candidates including Perry. Jack Plunkett/AP Images for Carl’s Jr.

Why the job matters

The battle to establish a cabinet-level federal agency whose sole purpose was the “care and protection of labor” began shortly after the Civil War.

Early efforts found mixed success, but activists eventually managed to establish a sub-cabinet Labor Department in 1884, which quickly became the “most important statistical agency of its period” by publishing reports on many worker-related subjects such as the impact of machinery, demand for housing and women in the workforce.

A short-lived Department of Commerce and Labor followed in 1903. Today’s Department of Labor was finally established in March 1913, when William H. Taft reluctantly signed a bill into law in the final hours of his presidency that separated the two often competing interest groups.

From the outset, Labor’s mission was to:

“foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights.”

Today, the department gathers and disseminates vital information such as the monthly unemployment report, the consumer price index and workplace benefit trends. In addition, it provides important protections for workers on issues like safety, contracts and wages. Those and other agencies ensure compliance with the federal regulatory regime that immediately affects American workers.

The first secretary of labor

President Woodrow Wilson appointed William B. Wilson (no relation) as the first head of the agency in 1913.

High school students look at the monument to the victims of the Ludlow Massacre at the site near Ludlow, Colorado. David Zalubowski/AP Photo

Secretary Wilson had a long record of service in labor relations, beginning with positions at the National Progressive Union and the United Mine Workers of America. He also served three terms as a Pennsylvania Congressman and introduced the bill that split up the Department of Commerce and Labor in order to give workers a stronger voice in government affairs.

As an impartial representative, Wilson played an important role in the federal response to the infamous strike at a Colorado Fuel and Iron Company owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr., an event that would become known as the “Ludlow Massacre” and that led to an important innovation in industrial relations.

During a labor dispute in April 1914, a detachment of the Colorado National Guard overran and burned an encampment of miners leading to the deaths of a number of women and children. It prompted national outrage and was immortalized in song by Woody Guthrie. After pressure from the government, Rockefeller created internal employee representation plans that became pervasive in American labor relations. These so-called company unions gave employees a new voice but not much actual leverage in labor negotiations.

From then until Puzder

The many distinguished individuals who have headed the agency since William Wilson have continued his legacy of service. The roster includes prominent labor experts such as Frances Perkins, the first woman appointed to a cabinet position, who served during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945.

Perkins first became dedicated to improving the condition of American workers during her college years. Her aggressive agenda as labor secretary included efforts to establish a 40-hour work week and a minimum wage, abolish child labor, set up Social Security and support universal health insurance.

Many of those programs became part of the New Deal, which led to a generation of middle class prosperity in the country.

Other notable office holders include George Schultz, appointed by Richard Nixon in 1969 and who went on to serve as secretary of the treasury and state; John Dunlop, appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975, who was an eminent labor economist at Harvard and the author of a foundational study of labor relations; Ray Marshall, appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1977 and an economics professor from the University of Texas; and Robert Reich, appointed by Bill Clinton in 1993 and now a professor at the University of California (Berkeley) and a popular author.

Overall, what every secretary of labor from Wilson through the the outgoing Thomas Perez had in common was either a detailed familiarity with the labor relations environment or an understanding of political processes and the administration of complex governmental agencies or both. Their backgrounds demonstrated a capacity to undertake the administration of an institution aimed at improving the lives of American workers.

A ‘loving cup,’ which was first given to the International Seamen’s Union by William B. Wilson, was returned to the Labor Department on its 23rd anniversary in 1936. From right to left are Rose Forrester, a friend of Wilson, Andrew Furuseth, president of the union, and then-Labor Secretary Francis Perkins. AP Photo

Puzder v. Acosta

In nominating Puzder, Trump said he “created and boosted the careers of thousands of Americans” and had an “extensive record” fighting for workers. But compared with previous labor secretaries, Puzder would have been the least qualified in the history of the agency in terms of experience, temperament and training.

A corporate lawyer by training with no government experience, Puzder has been a major Republican donor, giving more than $300,000 to Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee in the most recent election cycle.

Puzder became CEO of CKE Restaurants in 2000. He described his employees as the “best of the worst,” illustrating how little sympathy he has for the tens of millions of workers he would have represented at the Department of Labor. The company’s restaurants such as Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. have been cited for numerous labor violations.

Acosta, unlike Puzder, has extensive government experience, including as attorney general for the civil rights division of the Justice Department. Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

In addition, Puzder strongly opposes increasing the minimum wage. And to me, how he deals with gender issues – such as in his racy restaurant advertisements – shows complete insensitivity to important concerns such as sexual harassment in the workplace.

With Puzder’s nomination sunk, the next man up for the job is Alexander Acosta, who has already made it through the Senate confirmation process for other jobs three times.

From 2002 to 2003, he served on the National Labor Relations Board, where he participated in over 100 decisions. He also held several jobs at the Justice Department, including assistant attorney general in the civil rights division. While some have criticized his failure to sufficiently protect voting rights while there, his confirmation will most likely succeed.

Richard Trumpka, head of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, credited “working people” with torpedoing Puzder’s nomination. “In one day, we’ve gone from a fast-food CEO who routinely violates labor law to a public servant with experience enforcing it.”

The Department of Labor has a rich history in the American political and economic landscape, and it deserves a leader who has potential to fulfill its mission.

Most people wonder how long they have left on this world, and what they’ll do with that time, but few people are as preoccupied with mortality as the professionals employed to assess risks for pension schemes and insurance companies. And it’s fair to say that these actuaries don’t quite come at it from the same point of view as the rest of the population; your early demise might just be their idea of an early Christmas present.

Evidence of this follows on from the latest report from the Continuous Mortality Investigation of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. Based on new assumptions, it suggested that future improvements in death rates will be significantly less than expected, even last year. Some reports have linked that change to a sustained spike in winter deaths. In particular, life expectancy for a 65-year-old man fell by 1.3%, which means nearly four months less of life. For a 65-year-old woman it was 2% lower – or nearly six months less. Not a huge shift, you might think, but it has got the pensions actuaries who work with defined benefit (DB) pension schemes very excited indeed.

The reasoning is as follows. If people’s lives are expected to be shorter, then they won’t be drawing pensions for as long. This means that the value of these pensions – that is, the money that needs to be set aside to pay them – falls. This is big news for DB schemes, which are committed to paying out a certain amount to retirees. The other kind of workplace pension, defined contribution or DC schemes, only pay out from the amount you have managed to accrue over the years. Your death is of less interest to them, as longevity doesn’t directly affect contribution rates.

In fact, the estimated impact on UK DB pension schemes is somewhere between 2% and 3% of their liabilities, equivalent to tens of billions of pounds, which is why pensions actuaries are so excited. But it doesn’t stop there.

Stone cold. Steve Evans/ Flickr, CC BY-NC

Death benefits

If DB pension schemes benefit from this fall in projected longevity, then so do the employers that support such schemes. This is because employers have to make up the difference if there isn’t enough money in a pension scheme to pay the benefits – and a fall in life expectancy makes this less likely. If the employer doesn’t have to pay so much into the pension scheme, then it can pay higher dividends to shareholders and is less likely to be driven into bankruptcy through pension costs, so employees can sleep more soundly.

And it’s not just pension schemes that could benefit: individuals might be better off too. Although contributions to DC schemes wouldn’t change, shorter life expectancy means that retirement funds don’t need to last as long. It also means that and it should be cheaper to buy an annuity, an insurance policy that gives you a fixed annual payment once you retire for as long as you live.

So the fact that life expectancy has fallen is nothing but positive: for individuals, pension schemes, companies, the economy, for everyone. Sort of.

The weaknesses in this argument should be clear. You’d have to be extemely optimistic to view the shortening of your life expectancy as a good thing. Being less likely to die broke is positive, I suppose, but one can take the suggestion to “always look on the bright side of life” too far.

And although the benefits are clear, it’s not really a game changer for DB pension schemes. True, the numbers are significant in the context of longevity risk. But DB pension scheme deficits – the differences between the assets pension schemes have and values of the benefits they need to pay out – can (and do) change dramatically over the course of a year. That can be due to changes in both long-term interest rates and the value of schemes’ investments.

Consider the aggregate deficit of UK pension schemes on the basis used by the Pension Protection Fund. In April 2016, this was £188.7 billion; in August 2016 it had ballooned to £413.1 billion; and in January 2017 it had shrunk back to a “mere” £196.5 billion. Suddenly, a few tens of billions doesn’t seem that material in the grand scheme of things.

Pensions can take a pounding. solarseven/Shutterstock

Satisfaction

More important, though, is what these mortality figures represent. When calculating this sort of life expectancy – known as cohort life expectancy – we need to make assumptions about how mortality rates will change in the future. These assumptions are derived using past data to help to project future changes. The data that most influences future longevity assumptions is often relatively recent.

In other words, assumptions as to what might happen to mortality in 30 years’ time might largely be driven by what has happened in the last five years or so. This means that small changes in mortality rates now can mean huge changes in what we expect longevity to be in the long run.

The approaches used to derive mortality projections are not badly structured, but there is always a huge degree of uncertainty over what future mortality will be for the population. This is an important point, because it is average life expectancy that we are talking about – and very few people are average.

To put it another way, there remains much more uncertainty over how long each individual will live, whatever the projection of an average might tell us. You may well have a life expectancy of 24.1 years, as the CMI assumes you would have as a 65-year-old woman; but you could drop dead tomorrow. Or you could live another 50 years and get a telegram. In this context, how you live your life can also have an impact on how long you live – but one look at Keith Richards shows that even this is not definitive.

Uber has suffered a spate of bad publicity in recent days after allegations of harassment and discrimination from a former software engineer.

In a blog post, Susan Fowler described being propositioned by her supervisor within weeks of starting her job. She complained to the human resources (HR) team. According to Fowler, the supervisor received a “warning and a stern talking-to” but no other discipline at the time because he was a strong performer and it was his “first offense.” Uber then offered her a choice: Transfer to another team or stay and risk a retaliatory performance review from the harasser.

Fowler also described a larger pattern of harassment, discrimination and retaliation. Others reported being harassed by the same manager, apparently contradicting what HR told her. Fowler’s performance review was downgraded, making her ineligible for a subsidized graduate program. When Fowler asked a director about “dwindling” representation of women in the division, he attributed it to their failure to step up and be better engineers. When Uber ordered leather jackets for engineers, they were ordered only for men. Apparently, there weren’t enough women to qualify for a bulk discount.

Fowler complained repeatedly. HR responded with escalating indifference, ultimately suggesting that Fowler herself was the problem.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has vowed to investigate Fowler’s allegations. Adnan Abidi/Reuters

After Fowler’s post went viral, Uber sought to distance itself from the incident and hired former Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate. CEO Travis Kalanick issued a response:

“What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in.”

Fowler’s story – which Uber neither confirmed nor denied – is not unique in the tech sector, where women remain underrepresented. Women make up only 12 percent of engineers. These women face substantial headwinds. In a survey of women in the tech sector, 84 percent reported being told they were “too aggressive” and 59 percent said they were offered fewer opportunities than male counterparts. The majority also reported receiving unwanted sexual advances. And of those that reported the harassment, 60 percent were unhappy with the company’s response.

The Uber story provides a window into how companies have developed HR infrastructure to address anti-discrimination laws. These structures occupy a marginalized status within organizations.

As I learned while working as an employment lawyer at a large law firm, legal mandates rarely disrupt business objectives. Instead, they are largely viewed as an inconvenience delegated to HR. That explains, for example, why the CEO learned about Fowler’s allegations only after they went viral.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. AP Photo

Symbolic structures

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act safeguards an employee’s right to equal opportunity in the workplace.

It initially protected an employee against discrimination in hiring, pay, promotion and termination. Courts later expanded definitions of discrimination to include harassment. Title VII also protects employees from retaliation for complaining about discrimination or harassment.

As sociologist Lauren Edelman documents in a recent book, employers responded to civil rights laws by setting up complaint processes for employees. She argues that these processes are less focused on meaningfully assuring equal opportunity and more about creating the appearance of compliance.

The ‘first bite is free’

According to Edelman, courts have become complicit in this development, crediting employers for superficial procedures without assessing whether they actually work.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Faragher v. City of Boca Raton is a case in point. The case gives employers a defense in harassment cases if they took reasonable measures to prevent and correct harassment and the victim unreasonably failed to make use of internal complaint mechanisms.

However, courts don’t require employers to do very much to satisfy the defense. Merely adopting and distributing a policy gets an employer credit, as does adopting an investigation process. Courts do not require employers to take strong disciplinary action against the harasser. Rather, they need only take action reasonably calculated to stop the harassment – even if it does not.

In theory, a plaintiff would still have a viable claim if they used the employer’s complaint procedure. But one empirical study found that even short delays in reporting the harassment can be considered “unreasonable” on the victim’s part. So if a victim waits a few months to report the harassment, and the employer goes through the motions of investigating and responding, the victim may be out of luck.

This doesn’t give employers much of an incentive to crack down on harassment. As one scholar observed, it essentially allows employers to escape liability for a harasser’s first offense. In other words, the “first bite is free.”

This helps to explain Uber’s underwhelming response to Fowler’s initial complaint. Uber wasn’t really on the hook for the “first report” and did not have a strong incentive to punish the harasser. For Fowler’s harasser, that meant a “warning and a stern talking-to.”

Ellen Pao is another woman who has accused Silicon Valley of sexism. Jeff Chiu/AP Photo

It’s just a ‘business decision’

Lauren Edelman’s research also documented a tendency among HR and lawyers to characterize civil rights obligations as “legal risks.”

This is consistent with how I talked to employers when I worked as an employment lawyer. I offered advice on “legal risks” while they were tasked with making “business decisions” on how to proceed.

However, this frame ultimately treats legal rules as one of many factors to take into account (or ignore) when employers make important decisions.

Consider Fowler’s situation. Uber evidently considered Fowler’s harasser to be an economically valuable employee that might be difficult to replace. Transferring the harasser to another team or terminating his employment likely would have been costly. By contrast, offering Fowler a transfer seemed a cheaper alternative, notwithstanding its effect on Fowler and the increased litigation risk.

When framed as a business decision, companies have a tendency to displace the victim of the harassment to preserve the profits associated with a high-flying harasser.

Swatting mosquitoes while ignoring the termites

Fowler’s allegations of sexual harassment have received a lot of press attention, but in many ways her allegations of systemic discrimination and retaliation were more troubling.

The director’s comment that women weren’t stepping up. The altered performance evaluation that cost Fowler a spot at grad school. The leather jackets.

HR was even less responsive to these complaints than to the harassment allegations and blamed the problem on Fowler herself. Why? They may not have believed her. But HR may have been limited in its capacity to fix the underlying problem. Yes, it could have paid for the leather jackets, addressed the doctored performance evaluations or scolded the director for his sexist comment.

But HR, on its own, is poorly situated to fix a business culture that is indifferent to (or in denial about) offering meaningful opportunities for advancement to women or other minorities in the workplace. As political scientist Frank Dobbin has argued, human resources professionals have long struggled to establish their legitimacy within organizations. They are rarely the locus of power within corporations, which instead resides in revenue-generating departments like engineering and sales, and in the executives that preside over the business.

HR advises. Business decides.

Rooting out discrimination

Business leaders make a Faustian bargain when they outsource civil rights compliance to HR and lawyers. They gain credible symbols of compliance. But they also lose touch with a business identity that includes doing right by their employees. As Mary Gentile argues in her book, “Giving Voice to Values,” we lose touch with our shared values when we define work roles too narrowly.

In retrospect, Uber’s decision to side with the harasser over Fowler was a bad business move. All the bad press has reinforced existing narratives of Uber as a bad actor. But the decision was also – to use a word that has fallen out of favor in the business vernacular – wrong.

Until business leaders view themselves as guardians of civil rights, those rights will continue to be framed as a tax on profits rather than important values to uphold.

Although people are becoming increasingly reliant on electronic forms of financial transaction, the introduction of a new coin still feels like an important occasion. The new £1 coin, which enters circulation on March 28, is described by the Royal Mint as “the most secure coin in the world”. It is likely to be controversial.

The coin it replaces, introduced in 1983, had become prone to counterfeiting, with about 3% of £1 coins estimated to be forgeries. To stymie the counterfeiters, the new coin incorporates a range of security measures, including micro-lettering, a bimetallic design, a hologram-like “latent image”, and a mysterious hidden feature intended to future-proof the coin against as yet unspecified threats.

It will also have 12 sides, and so harks back to one of the most fondly remembered coins of the 20th century, the dodecagonal threepenny bit. This threepenny coin was first introduced in March 1937 and was withdrawn after decimalisation in 1971.

The old threepenny coin. Slashme via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Yet for all the nostalgia associated with the reintroduction of a 12-sided coin, it should be remembered that the 1937 threepenny was not widely feted when initially introduced. It was the first non-circular coin to be struck in Britain, and was so unusual when it entered circulation that the Nottingham Evening Post wryly observed that “we shall know that the British public is past being surprised at anything” if “nobody jibs at receiving … a strange [polygonal] coin”.

The physical feeling of cash encourages us to develop emotional feelings about it. The new £1 coin is thinner, lighter and slightly broader than its predecessor, and it seems likely that the shock of the new will ensure that it generates debate. As was the case with the new five pound note introduced in September 2016, some will welcome it, others abhor it. Opinions will abound. But we shall have to see whether novelties in the British coinage are still capable of inspiring hostile verses, as they were in the 1930s when a disgruntled poet wrote to the Manchester Guardian to insist that:

I would not fritter breath
Upon that alien, new-fangled, thick
Intractable dodecagon.

Feelings run high because people do not think about cash money in purely economic terms – they judge and relate to coins and banknotes as elements of a material culture. Assessments are made based on individual taste. Personal relationships can also be formed with inanimate monetary tokens, and through them with the economic systems they embody and represent. And like all relationships, they take time to establish.

Give it time

People will, of course, get used to the new coin. It will quickly become an entirely unremarkable part of our daily routine, its specific dimensions and angular edges – at first touch so strange and unusual – will become familiar under people’s finger tips. Of course, they do not need to like a coin for it to remain useful to them, and the new pound will still be worth a pound, even if we hanker after the well-worn and comforting curves of its precursor.

The process of familiarisation takes time. But there are some coins that the public never warms to, or actively rebuffs: the 1887 double florin (worth four shillings) was withdrawn after just four years. And for a while, the 1937 threepenny was at risk of being added to the list of numismatic rejects. Being 12-sided, it was thought to look insufficiently British – polygonal coins were at the time associated with “foreign” currencies.

The 1887 double florin that was rejected after four years. Coinman62

Plus, the threepenny was an unusual colour – its nickel-brass composition lent it a distinctive yellow tinge. It also had no history and people didn’t know what to call it – newspapers ran competitions asking readers to suggest a suitable nickname, which would bring it into line with popular coins such as the tanner (sixpence) or bob (shilling). In Scotland, many harboured a preference for the smaller, lighter, rounder silver threepenny, which the Mint continued to produce until 1945. The two threepennies had to compete for the public’s affections.

Distrust lingered because of the time it took to produce enough dodecagonal threepennies for them to become commonplace. Of the first 30m struck, most quickly vanished from sight, hoarded in personal collections rather than circulating freely. The Mint eventually forced the new coins into wider circulation by asking government departments to include them in the pay packets of state employees. It was only during World War II, with bronze pennies in short supply, that the 12-sided threepenny came to enjoy any real popularity. Its unique shape also made it easy to distinguish by touch in the blackout.

The extensive promotional campaigns run by the Mint ahead of the new £1 coin’s introduction suggest that lessons have been learned from the past. A concerted effort has been made to prepare the public for the change. And as cash is less important these days, whether or not the public develops any sort of affection for the this coin that seeks to blend the old and the new might not, in the end, matter tuppence.

Immigrants have long been a scapegoat when economies are sputtering, jobs are being lost or security is a concern.

President Donald Trump’s planned wall along the Mexican border, for example, is premised on the notion that immigrants are pouring across the border (they’re not), taking Americans’ jobs (they haven’t) and committing a disproportionate share of crimes (they don’t).

The presumed threats of immigration were also front and center in Trump’s recently announced plan to deport millions of people who were in the U.S. illegally.

We saw something similar when U.K. voters opted for a “Brexit” from the European Union last year, when many British politicians cast immigrants as a threat to the physical, social and economic welfare of natives.

While it has become a popular notion in the West that immigrants jeopardize the job prospects of natives, over 30 years of economic research (including my own) give strong reason to believe otherwise.

And in fact, the opposite may be more likely: There’s evidence immigrants actually promote economic growth.

Stopping the flow of immigrants into the U.K. was the reason many voted to leave the EU. Neil Hall/Reuters

Why we blame immigrants for our troubles

Extensive reviews of research on the topic (like this one) show that most studies of how immigration affects native wages and employment found very little effect.

Although economists have yet to arrive at a complete consensus, decades of studies generally do not support the notion that immigration harms the economy, market wages or native employment. So why do so many believe it when research suggests otherwise?

A central issue is that it is easy to think that the labor market is a zero-sum game and the number of jobs available is fixed. If everyone were competing over a finite number of jobs, more immigrants would mean fewer opportunities for natives, and vice versa, right? The reality, however, is much more complex, as I will show. Further, it is simply false to think of the number of jobs as fixed in the first place. Employment has been generally rising since 2010, which means more jobs for everyone.

A new migrant interested in the same job as you may diminish your odds a little, but a single immigrant with a good idea might end up creating hundreds or thousands of jobs that wouldn’t have existed had he or she not crossed an ocean or border (the impact of son-of-a-migrant Steve Jobs or South African tech entrepreneur Elon Musk comes to mind).

The labor market is dynamic, and both individual workers and employers constantly readjust to changing conditions. In fact, many economists have found evidence that natives quickly adjust to the labor market forces of immigration and in a way that often yields positive benefits.

Immigrant Elon Musk isn’t taking anyone’s job: he’s created thousands at Tesla and SpaceX. Stephen Lam/Reuters

Adjusting to immigration

Immigration flows into the U.S. do not affect all sectors equally. Immigrants are highly overrepresented in either very low-skilled manual and labor-intensive jobs or very high-skilled science and engineering occupations.

The types of immigrants who arrive and the areas in which they work are crucial for understanding the impact, and this concentration makes it possible to adjust to it.

In a 2010 study, Dartmouth economist Ethan Lewis found that companies in regions that saw inflows of less-skilled immigrants in recent decades adopted capital machinery at a lower rate.

Another study by Lewis and researchers Michael Clemens and Hannah Postel focused on an effort by the U.S. government in the 1960s to improve labor market conditions for native workers and boost their wages by excluding about a half-million seasonal workers from Mexico (braceros). It had precisely the opposite effect: Instead of raising wages or hiring more locals, farm owners reacted by adopting technologies that required less labor. The owners even switched their crops from ones that were less labor-intensive to ones whose production could be more easily mechanized.

In other words, the ability of businesses to substitute between technology and less-skilled immigrant workers means wages won’t necessarily fall when immigration rises. And conversely, this means excluding or limiting immigration won’t necessarily lift wages or benefit natives in other ways.

Economists Giovanni Peri and Chad Sparber found that inflows of immigrants – whether low- or high-skilled – induced native workers to shift to jobs that are more complementary in nature and where they have a comparative advantage. This type of shifting also limits the impact on native wages and employment.

For example, natives working in fields receiving large inflows of low-skilled immigrants – who had a comparative advantage in manual and physical labor – moved toward occupations requiring more communication-intensive tasks. They observed a similar phenomenon when high-skilled immigrants with comparative advantages in fields like science and mathematics enter the U.S. labor force. Rather than being laid off, native skilled workers moved to occupations that required more managerial and communication skills.

Just as natives move toward occupations in which they possess a comparative advantage relative to immigrants, they can also move across skill groups by acquiring education. Several economic papers, like ones by Jennifer Hunt and Will Olney and Dan Hickman, found that natives tend to acquire more education following the arrival of less-skilled immigrants. Increases in education benefit the long-term prospects of natives, and means they are no longer competing in the less-skilled labor market.

People participate in a protest march calling for human rights and dignity for immigrants in Los Angeles on Feb. 18. Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Growing the economic pie

But beyond simply doing no or little harm to natives, there’s evidence immigrants actually benefit the overall economy – which helps everyone.

Recall that immigrants in the U.S. are highly represented in high-skill science and engineering occupations. Economists have long understood that economic growth is generated by innovation, which in turn comes from research and development. A study by Stanford economist Charles Jones found that nearly half of U.S. economic growth since the 1950s is attributable to the increase in the number of scientists and engineers engaged in research and development.

Combine this with the fact that about half of the growth in the number of scientists and engineers in the U.S. since the 1980s was due to immigrants and it is not difficult to understand the connection between skilled immigration and economic prosperity.

In a recent paper, coauthored with Giovanni Peri and Chad Sparber, I formally tested this idea. We examined whether increases in skilled foreign-born scientists and engineers in the U.S. from 1980 to 2010 improved productivity. We found modest gains in real wages for native skilled workers. And no negative impacts on native employment.

Complementing our finding is research by economists William Kerr and William Lincoln, who found that skilled immigrants increase innovation, thereby generating productivity gains for native workers most ready to take advantage of such technological advances.

As long as immigrants continue to innovate and invent, they can continue to boost economic growth.

A man expresses himself back when immigration reform was possible. Those were the days. Immigration protest via www.shutterstock.com

Who is actually most hurt by immigration

Although most studies don’t find adverse impacts on natives, that does not mean they have not found adverse impacts at all. In fact, the group that most commonly appears to be negatively affected by new immigrants are other recent immigrants.

Recent immigrants are the most easily substituted with new immigrants, tend to live and work in the same labor markets that new immigrants enter, often do not have the skills to move toward communication-intensive jobs and face restrictive policies that limit access to higher education. As such, their labor market prospects appear to deteriorate when new immigrants arrive.

Other studies that take a general focus on the labor market and find negative effects have been debated from time to time among academics, however, with little consensus.

A recent paper, however, calls into question many of these negative findings, showing researchers have been using measures of immigration that carry an inherent negative bias. Using correct measures eliminates the negative impact.

Facts are facts

All in all, most of the research suggests that the fear that immigration will drastically harm native wages and job prospects is by and large unsubstantiated. In fact, much work has shown the labor market is dynamic, and that native workers and employers take measures to evade any competitive forces from immigration.

While some pundits and presidential candidates will likely continue to claim immigration is harming our economy, that won’t alter the evidence economists have uncovered in study after study. By the same token, claims that immigrants are flooding across our southern border (so we need a giant wall to keep them out) doesn’t change the fact that illegal immigration to the U.S. has actually been falling for the past nine years.

Though it is easy to believe that foreigners will overcrowd a frail, zero-sum labor market, decades of research has shown the only thing that sums to zero are the estimated effects of immigration.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Aug. 21, 2016.

On the company’s earnings call, CEO John Chen said (via Seeking Alpha) that “We are now expanding to the next phase of our licensing program. This will focus on a broader set of endpoints. What this might mean, and I make no promise, is that you may soon see a BlackBerry tablet, and it will also extend to cobranded handset with IoT and Enterprise of Things to EoT devices. These endpoints will run our software and security features and be cobranded Secure by BlackBerry.”

The exec was careful not to promise anything, but it’s clear where the company is going. With connected devices spreading throughout homes and offices, it feels the BlackBerry name and technology still provides a level of comfort and security. Wherever those smart devices go, a BlackBerry-branded and powered device could follow. The example Chen used was with medical devices, saying that “companies providing medical monitoring devices must protect health data on the device, guarantee it connects securely to the healthcare system, and most importantly ensure that it cannot be hacked, BlackBerry Secure helps solve this triple threat.”

Add in the well-received KEYone that’s due to launch later this month, and Chen’s plan to remake the company looks like it might be moving in the right direction.