Panel, Conference Presentation
2016 CA summit - California's Creative Disruption
- California is projected to serve as an exemplar for other states managing "wrenching transformation," though the panel notes a current failure to reconcile the social disruption caused by technological success.
- Predictions regarding the labor market include significant job destruction alongside the creation of new avenues, with a specific forecast that wealth redistribution will occur regardless of political leadership, potentially requiring businesses to assume government functions like retraining.
- Forward-looking plans emphasize the scaling of social enterprises to achieve both financial returns and employee welfare, alongside a proposed growth over the "next several years" in metrics for inclusive capitalism that extend beyond balance sheets.
- Investors and founders are expected to increasingly shift toward hiring women and non-White individuals in leadership roles, with the expectation that investing in "smart women" generates financial returns and that systemic diversity changes in STEM will drive transformation over "the next several decades."
- Strategic initiatives include tax policy adjustments to incentivize corporate spending on training, healthcare, and education, as well as the deployment of programs offering fitness trackers and incentives for healthy behavioral changes to address chronic health issues.
- Specific economic forecasts indicate that each undiagnosed 35-year-old with type 2 diabetes incurs an incremental cost of $150,000 annually, while building venture capital industries in other regions is estimated to take "10 to 20 years."
- Risks identified include the potential for technology to trigger massive deflationary forces and unexpected systemic blow-ups, the possibility of lower-paying job replacement lacking benefits, and the "inevitable" anger resulting from underestimating social disruption.
- Market and societal trends anticipate consumer demand driving supply chain shifts, such as the elimination of GMOs, and predict that smaller countries will move faster on policy changes than larger ones due to easier legislative processes.
- Concerns regarding systemic fragility focus on edge generation and dramatic increases in reuse, which could render many vulnerable if main networks fail, while the panel highlights meat consumption as the primary contributor to greenhouse gases requiring rapid dietary changes.
- A recurring outlook calls for proactive design of equitable futures by integrating social disruption into business plans, fostering collaboration between the public and private sectors, and utilizing tax credits to experiment with civic infrastructure.