The Academic

Went along to the University of Edinburgh Business School again for another job. This time taking pictures at a memorial lecture. This is the speaker - Professor Jerry Davis  from the University of Michigan. Having taken a number of shots early on I was able to listen a while to his lecture. It was very interesting, touching on a number of things concerning his subject of new institutions for a new economic order. Several things caught my attention, including the way that new companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn and the like no longer follow the conventions of share issues, with the founders retaining voting rights ten or a hundred times greater than their shareholdings, meaning they retain control of the company even when it is publicly listed. Or the inverse correlation between the size of the corporations in a country and the level of inequality - large companies don't seem to lead to greater inequality, which seems a little counter-intuitive at first until you think about the freelance economy where workers have fewer and fewer rights in a task-orientated economy. He briefly touched on some of the political implications of it all, and the possibilities that localism might be a way to counter the more divisive aspects of the apparent economic trends. There was also an interesting comparison between Martin Luther King's March of Washington and the Arab Spring in terms of the number of people and effort required to mobilise a quarter of million people to march. The former took hundreds of activists many months, the latter was two activists with a Facebook page over a matter of weeks. Listening I wondered what I might have achieved had I followed an academic career.