This Video Game Could Change Business School Forever -- And It's Actually Fun

Imagine you are a new employee at a large airline. You walk into an airport one day and receive an email from your boss. He says the company needs a new strategy, and he wants you to come up with some options. You panic and scramble to find as much information as possible among passengers and employees at the airport before you board your flight.

This is the premise for a new video game called "One Day," developed for Hult International Business School to teach strategy to MBA students. The game is still in development and probably won't be ready for the classroom until next year, but early tests show promise. Not to mention, it's actually fun to play.

While it is now fairly common for video games to teach elementary concepts -- spelling, basic math, typing -- higher education has more or less resisted encroaching technology up to this point. Until recently, higher-level concepts have been harder to program because there may be more than one right answer. "One Day," which its creators say is the first game of its kind, poses some fairly new questions about learning in the digital age and the role of the professor in a modern classroom.

"I’ve been a business school professor for 30 years," said John Beck, whose educational consulting company, North Star Leadership Group, developed "One Day." He lamented that most MBA programs rely on teaching methods honed decades before the personal computing revolution. "For 30 years I’ve been thinking the system is so broken. The case studies model dates from the 1920s, and the lecture model from the 1850s."

In the new model Hult is evaluating -- teaching by video game simulation -- students actually interact with the material, rather than sitting in long lecture sessions or working through historical cases in class.

Hult recently conducted an experiment in London to see just how well the prototype game teaches. Students were given a test of their knowledge of strategy, then half were taught by a professor and the other half played the game, then they were tested again. The results showed "One Day" taught the students just as well, if not slightly better than the lecture professor did.

When North Star let me play the game for myself recently, I enjoyed it. The production quality and entertainment factor don't compare to, say, "Halo," but it's certainly more engaging than your average lecture. The graphics are fairly flat and almost look like they were drawn in MS Paint, but in a kind of pleasing way. It wouldn't be my go-to game on the weekend, but it was fun to spend a day exploring it.

The current version of "One Day," which, again, is just a prototype and only a fraction of what the full course-replacing game will look like, takes a couple of hours to complete. The player gets a task: figure out a new strategy for the fictional airline company by talking to customers and employees, who change every time the game is restarted. Players must also read through available information about the airline industry and company's performance. The player takes notes, and at the end makes a decision about the future of the company.

That said, it's hard. The game requires you to absorb new concepts while also sorting through which information is important and which is not. You don't really get any answers until you play it all the way through, so it's difficult to get right on the first try.

According to Adam Carstens, another of the game's developers, my experience was fairly typical. He told me people often don't do very well their first time playing, but do much better the second time through. 

The obvious question here is whether games are coming to automate professors' jobs. For now, it seems unlikely. 

This is an exciting new frontier in higher education, but Beck says he doesn't think this is the kind of automation that is going to put people out of work. On the contrary, it will free up professors from teaching low-level introductory classes to do more of the kind of work they enjoy, like research and teaching more specialized classed.

"It's a much more human role for teachers," noted Beck. "The rote learning, the basics, it’s pretty straightforward. Teaching to the test can be done by computers."

This Startup Offers Women An Amazing, Affordable and Thoughtful Perk

Not every company can afford to offer Netflix-level year-long maternity leaves. In fact, even Netflix doesn't offer that benefit to all of its workers. Still, there are creative ways to give perks to new moms. 

Domo, a 5-year-old startup based in Utah with a workforce of 600 employees, came up with something pretty innovative.

Every pregnant woman at the company gets $2,000 in gift cards to buy maternity clothes, according to an article by Claire Zillman in Fortune. 

If you've ever had to go to work in an office while pregnant, you will instantly understand why this is awesome.

For those of you who haven't, here's the deal: No one really wants to spend/waste money on maternity clothes -- you only need them for a very limited amount of time and they are expensive. Most of us just sort of muddle through, buying a few things, borrowing a lot of things and making do with stuff in our closet that is stretchy or big.

That's fine when you're home on the weekends, but it's a big bummer at the office, where you want to maintain a professional appearance and often wind up donning some pretty weird garments. Like, oh I don't know, a maternity shirt your cousin wore in the 1990s with a bow at the collar that seems like an OK idea in the morning but makes you feel like a sad, old Christmas present. (That may be something I know about firsthand.)

Domo's chief executive came up with the idea for the perk after his assistant became pregnant, Zillman told Fortune. 

The company, which helps other businesses manage their data, doesn't offer Cadillac-level maternity leave. You get one month at full pay and then six weeks at partial pay. Five or six people have used the clothing benefit so far, Fortune reports.

Would more paid leave probably be preferable to a new wardrobe? Yes, sure. Still, the gift cards are a nice idea and certainly signal to employees that they're valued at a time that can feel very uncertain to a lot of women. And small signals like that add up, making employees more loyal to companies, which are then less likely to have to train new workers because their current ones stick around. It's a win-win -- and nobody has to dress like a Christmas present.

 

DreamWorks CEO To Elon Musk: 'You Saved My Life'

Jeffrey Katzenberg owes Elon Musk big time -- or at least, that's what he thinks.  

The DreamWorks Animation CEO shattered his arm and wrist Oct. 19 when he was involved in a car collision in Beverly Hills, California. Katzenberg, who reportedly drives a Tesla Model S, is now recovering from surgery after a brief stay at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He says the accident could have had much more serious consequences, were it not for the electric car he was driving at the time.

"Thank you, Elon Musk -- you saved my life," Katzenberg told The Hollywood Reporter, expressing his gratitude to the Tesla Motors CEO. He also offered a few more details about the crash, noting that the vehicle was destroyed in the accident. 

Katzenberg's words didn't go unnoticed. Late on Monday, Musk took to Twitter to chime in:

Compliment from Jeffrey is much appreciated, but the people of Tesla deserve all the credit

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2015

"Safety is a top priority at Tesla, our cars are the safest on the road," a Tesla spokesperson told The Huffington Post. "The active safety systems in Model S help avoid accidents and its electric architecture protects occupants when accidents do happen."

The company has been focusing on making safety a priority in its fleet of electric vehicles. Tesla's safety standards were called into question after two of its Model S sedans caught fire in 2013. The two incidents -- one in Seattle, Washington, and the other in Smyrna, Tennessee -- made national headlines, leading to a highly publicized federal investigation. 

In a Medium post in 2014, Elon Musk addressed the controversy, noting that no "serious, permanent injuries of any kind" had ever occurred in a Tesla. He also introduced new changes to the car's titanium shielding, which would reduce the risk of car fires and "give Model S owners complete peace of mind."

After these changes, the Model S achieved a 5-star safety rating from both the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the European New Car Assessment Programme, setting a new record for the lowest likelihood of passenger injury. 

Even The Most Elite Women Are Subject To The Gender Pay Gap

A business degree, even from one from a top school in the country, won't be enough to protect women from the gender gap in compensation.

A report Bloomberg Businessweek published Tuesday found that the difference in pay for men and women swells as time goes by. Both groups leave their MBA programs earning about the same -- men's $105,000 to women's $98,000 -- but the split becomes more exacerbated years later. By the time they're six to eight years out of school, median compensation for men is $175,000, and $140,000 for women. For the latter, that rounds out to about 80 percent of men's paychecks, proving unfortunately that the roughly 78 cents women make to a man's dollar still holds up.

The study counters arguments that the pay gap between men and women results from a discrepancy in education and skills, Businessweek reporter Natalie Kitroeff told HuffPost Live on Wednesday. "We're looking at them coming out of the same schools, in the same years," Kitroeff said. "It was surprising to find that there was such a persistent gap, and we found this across every single industry."

Men gain the most ground in year-end bonuses. When those are excluded, the pay gap shrinks. Women who graduated Columbia's business school between 2007 and 2009, for example, earned a median of $170,000 in 2014, while men raked in $270,000. The difference in base salaries, though, was just $30,000.

The study's findings also reject the notion that the gap stems from women choosing to go into fields that pay less. Generally, men do enter the more lucrative industries, including consulting, real estate and finance, at higher rates -- 43 percent of men versus 32 percent of women -- but "even when women went into the highest-paying industries, they were paid less," Kitroeff said.

And let's not forget that the gender pay gap starts way before higher degrees. At the most elite colleges in the U.S., male alumni far outearn their female classmates, with Harvard men earning an average of $53,600 more than women 10 years after they start their undergraduate studies.

Even The Most Elite Women Are Subject To The Gender Pay Gap

A business degree, even from one from a top school in the country, won't be enough to protect women from the gender gap in compensation.

A report Bloomberg Businessweek published Tuesday found that the difference in pay for men and women swells as time goes by. Both groups leave their MBA programs earning about the same -- men's $105,000 to women's $98,000 -- but the split becomes more exacerbated years later. By the time they're six to eight years out of school, median compensation for men is $175,000, and $140,000 for women. For the latter, that rounds out to about 80 percent of men's paychecks, proving unfortunately that the roughly 78 cents women make to a man's dollar still holds up.

The study counters arguments that the pay gap between men and women results from a discrepancy in education and skills, Businessweek reporter Natalie Kitroeff told HuffPost Live on Wednesday. "We're looking at them coming out of the same schools, in the same years," Kitroeff said. "It was surprising to find that there was such a persistent gap, and we found this across every single industry."

Men gain the most ground in year-end bonuses. When those are excluded, the pay gap shrinks. Women who graduated Columbia's business school between 2007 and 2009, for example, earned a median of $170,000 in 2014, while men raked in $270,000. The difference in base salaries, though, was just $30,000.

The study's findings also reject the notion that the gap stems from women choosing to go into fields that pay less. Generally, men do enter the more lucrative industries, including consulting, real estate and finance, at higher rates -- 43 percent of men versus 32 percent of women -- but "even when women went into the highest-paying industries, they were paid less," Kitroeff said.

And let's not forget that the gender pay gap starts way before higher degrees. At the most elite colleges in the U.S., male alumni far outearn their female classmates, with Harvard men earning an average of $53,600 more than women 10 years after they start their undergraduate studies.

There’s A Shortage Of Cooks In America. Here’s The Simple Solution.

Despite what some viral videos would have you believe, there are too few cooks in America.

High-end restaurants are having trouble finding cooks who are skilled enough to prepare their dishes, according to a New York Times report published Wednesday. Restaurants have spent years putting off raising the pay at the back of the house, and it's finally catching up with them.

There's a lot of handwringing from established chefs about how kids these days aren't willing to submit themselves to the tough conditions to which junior members of the kitchen staff are traditionally exposed.

"Many chefs blame television for presenting unrealistic versions of life in restaurant kitchens, and they are outraged that the skills they have mastered over decades are viewed as optional by the new generation," the Times' Julia Moskin writes.

It's possible, though, that there is something much simpler going on: Would-be cooks don't think the work is worth the pay. Below is a chart showing the median annual pay of cooks and head chefs since late 2001. The orange lines show where that pay would be if it had kept up with inflation. Not only is pay for the average chef quite low, especially for the first few years -- it's actually getting worse. 

That said, the Times story itself is not exactly concerned with the average hash-slinging job. The real work shortage, according to the Times, is in the high-end kitchens:

The demand is up for chefs who can produce elegant food and know their way around a pair of tweezers, but many young cooks reject entry-level kitchen jobs -- with their harsh conditions, low pay and long hours -- where those skills are taught ... To effect change, [restaurateurs] say, they will soon be forced to raise prices.

What's happening is that foodie culture and celebrity chefs have vastly expanded both the demand for complicated food and the aspirations of chefs looking to make their mark on the industry. But every new trendy restaurant needs several line cooks who can execute an ambitious menu for a relative pittance. Outside of the truly exceptional restaurants with multiple Michelin stars, those worker bees are getting harder to find. This is particularly true in large cities with soaring rents, and in small cities where there just aren't enough experienced cooks to go around. The sweet spots, where things seem to be going OK, are biggish-but-not-too-expensive cities like Seattle, Houston and Portland, Oregon, according to the Times.

It's pretty clear the solution here is to raise wages. Making life better in the kitchen might help a little, but nothing attracts people to jobs like cash. The problem is that restaurant margins are nearly always thin -- so there's not a lot of room to raise wages without raising prices. And that risks giving loyal diners sticker shock, particularly in an economy where customers' paychecks aren't exactly getting more robust. You can see why restaurateurs might want to put off this course of action as long as possible.

But it looks like change is finally on the way. A number of minimum wage laws are coming down the pike, particularly in New York and California, that are likely to force restaurants to change. And the industry is making some moves of its own. 

Last week, restaurateur Danny Meyer made a splash by announcing in Eater that he's eliminating tipping from all of his restaurants in New York, joining a select group of restaurants in the city that have already done away with the practice. Instead, Meyer said, he will compensate his staff fairly by raising prices across the menu. The real winners in this new system will be the cooks, who don't share waiters' tips under the traditional arrangement.

Eater's Ryan Sutton explains the way things work at a fancy New York restaurant: "Some of the city’s top servers easily clear $100,000 annually. But the problem isn’t what waiters make, it’s what cooks make. A mid-level line cook, even in a high-end kitchen, doesn’t have generous patrons padding her paycheck, and as such is, on average, unlikely to make much more than $35,000 a year."

Meyer explicitly says in that story that his concern is the dwindling supply of talent in the kitchen. 

Uber Driver's Rape Sentencing Is Just The Latest Controversy For Company

A former Massachusetts Uber driver has been sentenced to 10 to 12 years in prison after raping a female passenger, adding to a growing list of Uber drivers accused of sexual assault.

Boston native Alejandro Done, 47, who pled guilty, was sentenced last Friday on charges including kidnapping, assault and battery, and aggravated rape, according to USA Today.

On Dec. 6, 2014, Done picked up a woman heading to her home in Cambridge. Done told the woman that she would have to pay him in cash. The two went to an ATM to withdraw money, then Done drove her to a secluded location, reported the Star Tribune.

Done kept the victim trapped in the car as he strangled and sexually assaulted her. 

The felon has previously been charged with five other unsolved sexual assaults that happened in the Boston area between 2006 and 2010. That case is still pending. Uber told USA Today that Done had passed a background check, and had no prior criminal record.

"The defendant preyed upon a young woman who trusted that he was who he portrayed himself to be," District Attorney Marian Ryan said in a statement. "I encourage the public to take precautions when using any ride-sharing service."

In another recent case, in South Carolina, a sixth-grade teacher, who was moonlighting as an Uber driver was arrested on charges of kidnapping and forcible rape. Patrick Aiello, 39, allegedly assaulted a 23-year-old woman in August. The woman managed to escape from the car and was struck by another one in the process.  

A former Uber driver in India, Shiv Kumar Yadav, was convicted of raping a female passenger Tuesday. 

Many states in the U.S. are demanding that Uber ensure its background checks are more thorough. Last year, prosecutors in California filed a complaint against the ride-hailing service for failing to adequately vet drivers, some of whom have been convicted sex offenders, kidnappers and murderers.

Last April, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker proposed a bill giving his state oversight in background checks. Uber has backed the legislation proposal, and hosts a petition on its website in favor of the governor's plan, which has more than 30,000 signatures.

Uber faces a litany of other problems. Last weekend, drivers called for a strike and demanded better pay and higher fares. The service has been suspended in Spain for creating unfair competition and it is banned in Italy for not adhering to licensing rules. French taxi drivers, who were upset by having to compete with Uber, took to the streets last summer, smashing cars and setting tires on fire.

Amazon Sues 1,000 People Over Fake Reviews

NEW YORK (AP) — Internet users increasingly rely on online customer reviews when making spending decisions, whether they're buying an iPhone case on Amazon or hiring an Uber ride in their hometown. But just how much can you trust those reviews?

A new lawsuit in which Amazon accuses more than 1,000 people of offering to post bogus glowing write-ups for as little as $5 apiece might give you pause.

The case, filed in Washington state court Friday by the nation's biggest online retailer, casts light on what appears to be a burgeoning practice: the commissioning of paid, fake reviews that masquerade as testimonials from ordinary people.

Fake reviews are nothing new to online retailing, and Amazon is far from the only big company affected. Yelp's restaurant reviews and TripAdvisor's hotel ratings have long been a target of critics who claim that merchants can easily post positive reviews of their own businesses.

Amazon's legal counteroffensive, however, appears to be one of the most aggressive attempts yet by a major U.S. e-commerce company to fight back.

Its lawsuit alleges that individuals would write five-star reviews about products they never even tried, and plotted with product makers to subvert Amazon safeguards that are meant to bolster confidence in the website's reviews.

"Suing the reviewers is a way to discourage them from doing it again," said Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter. "They're trying to make a statement that you can rely on the integrity of the reviews on the site."

There are powerful incentives to plant fraudulent reviews.

About 45 percent of consumers consider product reviews when weighing an online purchase, according to Forrester Research. Two-thirds of shoppers trust consumer opinions online, according to research by Nielsen.

For small businesses, it can be more economical to pay for positive reviews than to buy advertising.

For example, a half-star increase in a restaurant's online rating can increase the likelihood of securing, say, a 7 p.m. booking by 15 to 20 percent, said Jenny Sussin, a director at Gartner Research. So a restaurateur might be tempted to pay $250 for 50 positive reviews online in the hopes of raising that rating.

Online sites like Amazon, Yelp and TripAdvisor have worked hard to thwart the planting of fake reviews — a practice sometimes called "astroturfing," a reference to the synthetic grass used on sports fields.

They employ computer algorithms and teams of investigators who scour reviews and delete suspicious entries. Often, only people who have paid for a product or service and been verified can post reviews.

Yelp director of business outreach Darnell Holloway said that when suspicious reviews are found, the company puts a "consumer alert" badge on a company's Yelp site for 90 days warning consumers that reviews might be deceptive. If the problem persists, Yelp removes all reviews of the company.

Most recently, Yelp deleted all reviews of a business called Movers Alliance after if found the company was pressuring customers to write positive reviews.

TripAdvisor says it has a team of 300 people using fraud detection techniques to weed out fake reviews.

"In the first half of 2015 alone we took action against 29 different optimization companies around the world to put a stop to their activity," said spokesman Kevin Carter.

But in general, experts say, fraudulent reviews aren't going away anytime soon. Gartner estimates that 10 to 15 percent of all online reviews are fake.

Legal recourse has been scarce. In 2013, the New York attorney general's office said it had settled cases with 19 companies and secured $350,000 in penalties for fake reviews.

In April, Amazon sued several websites that offered to produce positive reviews. Now it's targeting the actual writers of the reviews — in this case, those who have accounts at Fiverr.com, a site for freelancers looking for work.

In many cases, the writers ask product sellers themselves to write the review, and then they put their name on it, the Amazon lawsuit alleges. At least one would-be reviewer offered to receive an empty envelope from a seller to make it look as if the person had actually bought the product, according to the lawsuit.

The defendants in the lawsuit are identified only by their online handles. Amazon is still working to determine their real names.

Amazon is suing for unspecified damages and an order forcing the users to stop writing fake reviews. The Seattle company said the offenders are liable for breach of contract for violating Amazon's terms of service.

Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru said that ultimately it's up to the consumer to read and evaluate reviews online carefully.

"You never know until the product actually comes to you if a review is real or not," she said. "Online shopping is a leap of faith."

 

MORE ON HUFFPOST:

Sorry Folks, But Standing Desks May Not Make You Any Healthier

You've probably heard that keeping your rear planted in your desk chair for hours on end may be as much of a health hazard today as smoking was for previous generations.

Prolonged sitting has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, cancer and even premature death. But at least we have standing desks to combat the problem, right? Maybe not.

According to a new study, published online in the International Journal of Epidemiology on Oct. 9, standing at your desk may be no better than sitting, and that's because it's the being still that has the negative impact on your health. (Maybe it's time to replace your standing desk with a treadmill desk.)

For the study, the researchers monitored the behavior and health of 3,720 men and 1,412 women over the course of 16 years. Beginning in 1985, the London-based volunteers recorded how many hours a week they spent sitting.

At the end of the 16-year period, the researchers tallied the hours and then checked the National Health Service Central Registry and determined that 450 of the participants had died. But the researchers found no correlation between time spent sitting and mortality.

The findings challenge previous research showing that sitting for long periods can shorten your lifespan even if you exercise often.

"Any stationary posture where energy expenditure is low may be detrimental to health, be it sitting or standing. The results cast doubt on the benefits of sit-stand work stations," Dr. Melvyn Hillsdon, associate professor of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter in England and a co-author of the study, said in a written statement.

The researchers concluded that sitting itself won't kill you. Rather, a sedentary lifestyle in general may be what's harmful to your health. 

"Research is not black and white, and if a single study finds X or Y that doesn’t mean that this is the truth we should all go along with," Dr. Emmanuel Stamatakis, associate professor at the University of Sydney in Australia and a co-author of the study, said in an email. "The recent study findings are in disagreement with the rest of the literature and there must be a reason for this."

Also on HuffPost:

Sorry Folks, But Standing Desks May Not Make You Any Healthier

You've probably heard that keeping your rear planted in your desk chair for hours on end may be as much of a health hazard today as smoking was for previous generations.

Prolonged sitting has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, cancer and even premature death. But at least we have standing desks to combat the problem, right? Maybe not.

According to a new study, published online in the International Journal of Epidemiology on Oct. 9, standing at your desk may be no better than sitting, and that's because it's the being still that has the negative impact on your health. (Maybe it's time to replace your standing desk with a treadmill desk.)

For the study, the researchers monitored the behavior and health of 3,720 men and 1,412 women over the course of 16 years. Beginning in 1985, the London-based volunteers recorded how many hours a week they spent sitting.

At the end of the 16-year period, the researchers tallied the hours and then checked the National Health Service Central Registry and determined that 450 of the participants had died. But the researchers found no correlation between time spent sitting and mortality.

The findings challenge previous research showing that sitting for long periods can shorten your lifespan even if you exercise often.

"Any stationary posture where energy expenditure is low may be detrimental to health, be it sitting or standing. The results cast doubt on the benefits of sit-stand work stations," Dr. Melvyn Hillsdon, associate professor of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter in England and a co-author of the study, said in a written statement.

The researchers concluded that sitting itself won't kill you. Rather, a sedentary lifestyle in general may be what's harmful to your health. 

"Research is not black and white, and if a single study finds X or Y that doesn’t mean that this is the truth we should all go along with," Dr. Emmanuel Stamatakis, associate professor at the University of Sydney in Australia and a co-author of the study, said in an email. "The recent study findings are in disagreement with the rest of the literature and there must be a reason for this."

Also on HuffPost:

Lawsuit Seeks To Stop Nestlé From Sucking Water Out Of Drought-Plagued California

Should Nestlé be allowed to take spring water from a national forest in drought-plagued Southern California, bottle it and sell it nationwide?

Under fire from locals, former forest employees and environmental groups, the Swiss-based company insists there's nothing wrong with piping tens of millions of gallons of water out of San Bernardino National Forest every year -- despite the fact that Nestlé's permit to extract water from the park technically expired in 1988.

On Tuesday, three environmental groups filed a suit in a California federal court against the United States Forest Service, demanding it stop Nestlé from taking the water, sold in its "premium" Arrowhead brand. The company has no right to pipe out water since its permit expired almost 30 years ago, plaintiffs claim. They say that Nestlé's operation is damaging the forest.

“The ecosystem in San Bernardino forest is being harmed,” said Eddie Kurtz, the executive director of the Courage Campaign Institute, one of three groups that filed the suit. “It’s not an environment that can afford to send its water to Nestlé to profit off of.”

The suit not only sheds light on the ethics and optics of bottling water during a historic drought. It also raises questions about the very idea of large corporations profiting off of what is widely considered a shared public resource. 

"This is exactly what happens when water is treated as a commodity and is sold for profit," John Stewart, deputy campaigns director at the nonprofit Corporate Accountability International, told The Huffington Post. "It is forcing us all as a society to say, 'Who is providing our water? Is it Nestlé or our own democratically governed towns and cities?'" Stewart's organization is not a party to the suit but works on other water issues.

The litigation comes at a time of enormous growth in the bottled water industry. Americans bought a record 10 billion gallons of bottled water in 2014, spending nearly $26 billion, according to data from the Beverage Marketing Corporation, a research and consulting firm.

The litigation is another knock in Nestlé's shaky reputation on water. The company, which pulled in about $15 billion in profits last year, is the leading bottled water company in the world. In a 2012 documentary called "Bottled Life," Nestlé came up for harsh criticism for extracting ground water from poor communities. Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe caught flack the following year after an interview with the Guardian in which he parsed the idea of whether or not water is a human right. The multinational lost a battle with activists in Michigan in 2009 over a plan to pump millions of gallons of water out of the state for pennies on the gallon and sell it back customers in bottles at much higher prices.

In San Bernardino, Nestlé is paying around $500 a year for the right to pipe out natural spring water. You can watch this explainer video from Story of Stuff Project, a nonprofit environmental group and one of the plaintiffs in the suit.

The suit follows a damning investigation earlier this year from reporter Ian James at the Desert Sun. The article, which revealed Nestlé's permit had lapsed, received widespread attention, triggering protests and petitions against the Swiss-based multinational and was the driving force behind Tuesday's lawsuit. 

A spokeswoman from Nestlé emphasized that the company is not named in Tuesday’s lawsuit, but said it is operating lawfully in San Bernardino. “Our permit for the pipeline remain in full force and effect,” she said. 

A press officer from the Forest Service's regional office in California confirmed that the permit was under review and that it was fine for Nestlé to continue to operate because it had requested a renewal and the agency hadn't gotten to it yet.

The company is now working with the Forest Service on getting its permit reviewed and renewed, a process that could take up to 18 months. That review only began after critics and the Desert Sun started asking about the expired permit, according to the Sun.

“Bottled water is not a contributing factor to the drought,” the chief executive of Nestlé’s water subsidiary in the U.S., Tim Brown, wrote in a recent op-ed for the San Bernardino County Sun. Nestlé uses about 705 million gallons of water in the state each year, “roughly equal to the annual average watering needs of two California golf courses,” he said. 

Brown went even further in an interview with a California public radio station: "If I stop bottling water tomorrow, people would buy a different brand of bottled water. We see this everyday," he said. "In fact, if I could increase [bottling], I would.”

Environmental groups say regardless of how much water the company is using, it’s simply not OK to extract and profit from local waters during a drought. “This doesn’t make sense,” Kurtz told HuffPost. 

Other companies have decided to avoid the negative public relations hit that bottling water during a drought brings.

Starbucks agreed to stop sourcing its bottled water brand Ethos in California earlier this year, noting the “serious drought conditions and water conservation efforts in California,” in a press release.

Environmental groups say regardless of how much water the company is using, it’s simply not OK to extract and profit from local waters during a drought.

 

Nestlé referred HuffPost to a defense of the San Bernardino operation on its website. The company says it removes 25 million gallons of water a year from the forest and that this does not harm the environment.

Yet, no one has studied the environmental impacts of the operation. Former forest service employees and activists said that such research was imperative.

"They're taking way too much water. That water's hugely important,” Steve Loe, a biologist who retired from the Forest Service in 2007, told the Desert Sun. "Without water, you don't have wildlife, you don't have vegetation."

Loe, who’s was among the first to raise the issue with Nestlé, told the Desert Sun that the removal of water was responsible, in part, for the disappearance of at least one rare species of fish from the ecosystem.

Economics Nobel Prize Winner Radically Redefined What It Means To Be Poor

Princeton professor Angus Deaton won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday for his work on consumption, income and poverty. 

Much of his work focuses on how to measure poverty around the world. The question of who is poor, he says, is very easy to determine at a community level. It's doable at a national level. But when you try to determine just who is poor worldwide, it's nearly impossible. Figuring out what poverty is globally is a big part of Deaton's work.

He has asked whether poverty should just be measured in terms of the question, "Do you have enough to eat?" or whether there are other factors that should play into the definition -- and whether those factors are different across different societies. 

Deaton wrote a very good (non-technical) essay about the difficulties of measuring poverty back in 2003. In it, he writes of all the different factors that have nothing to do with having enough food that go into determining if someone is poor around the world:

Even if you have enough goods, they are worth little if you are not healthy enough to enjoy them. Children who live in an unsanitary environment will obtain little nutritional benefit from the food that they eat if they continually suffer from diarrhea. More broadly, girls who are denied the opportunity to go to school experience yet another type of poverty, the poverty of not being able to read and to participate in activities that are only open to the literate. People are also poor in another sense if they lack the resources to participate fully in the society in which they live, who in Adam Smith’s term “are afraid to appear in public,” even if their incomes would be sufficient in some other society.

Deaton's 2013 book The Great Escape looks at the interaction between health and wealth over the last 250 years, and how the two in combination have contributed to the amount of inequality that we see today. Here's a small excerpt (taken from a longer excerpt posted by Cardiff Garcia), in which Deaton argues that income inequality has a huge effect on democratic outcomes, and is therefore a big problem: 

The very wealthy have little need for state-provided education or health care; they have every reason to support cuts in Medicare and to fight any increase in taxes. They have even less reason to support health insurance for everyone, or to worry about the low quality of public schools that plagues much of the country. They will oppose any regulation of banks that restricts profits, even if it helps those who cannot cover their mortgages or protects the public against predatory lending, deceptive advertising, or even a repetition of the financial crash.

To worry about these consequences of extreme inequality has nothing to do with being envious of the rich and everything to do with the fear that rapidly growing top incomes are a threat to the wellbeing of everyone else.

In this video, Deaton himself gives an overview of his work on the origins of inequality.

For more on Deaton and his work, see Monday's posts from Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen.

American Apparel Lawsuit Is 'Mother Of All Sexual Harassment Cases,' Judge Says

Things are not going well for American Apparel founder and former CEO Dov Charney.

American Apparel's board fired Charney for misconduct, including sexual harassment, last December. He then turned around and sued the company for defamation. That lawsuit's prospects aren't looking good after the latest hearing.

At the Sept. 30 proceeding, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Terry Green blocked the suit -- but not before a few harsh words for Charney.

"You know, I think there’s a greater likelihood that I’ll be the first American astronaut stranded on Mars before [Charney] wins this lawsuit," Green said, according to Litigation Daily.

He didn't stop there. According to the Wall Street Journal, Green went on to describe how the case would go if it went to trial. He didn't think it would end well for Charney.

"No rational company would hire this guy,” Judge Green said at the Sept. 30 hearing, describing the arguments that would be made if Mr. Charney’s case went to trial. “It would be insane. This is sexual harassment. This is the mother of all sexual harassment cases. I mean, this is so far over the top, that you can’t see the top anymore. I mean, it’s just…”

Prior to Charney's outster, multiple former employees filed lawsuits against him alleging all sorts of misconduct, from choking a store manager to forcing an employee into "sex slavery."

The judge ended the hearing almost wistfully, according to Above the Law: "This would be certainly an entertaining trial. It certainly beats your usual breach of contract case." However, he went on, "I just don’t see it.”

American Apparel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday.  

Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared Of Capitalism, Not Robots

Machines won't bring about the economic robot apocalypse -- but greedy humans will, according to physicist Stephen Hawking.

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Thursday, the scientist predicted that economic inequality will skyrocket as more jobs become automated and the rich owners of machines refuse to share their fast-proliferating wealth.

 

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

Essentially, machine owners will become the bourgeoisie of a new era, in which the corporations they own won't provide jobs to actual human workers.

As it is, the chasm between the super rich and the rest is growing. For starters, capital -- such as stocks or property -- accrues value at a much faster rate than the actual economy grows, according to the French economist Thomas Piketty. The wealth of the rich multiplies faster than wages increase, and the working class can never even catch up.

But if Hawking is right, the problem won't be about catching up. It'll be a struggle to even inch past the starting line.  

Also on HuffPost:

Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared Of Capitalism, Not Robots

Machines won't bring about the economic robot apocalypse -- but greedy humans will, according to physicist Stephen Hawking.

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Thursday, the scientist predicted that economic inequality will skyrocket as more jobs become automated and the rich owners of machines refuse to share their fast-proliferating wealth.

 

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

Essentially, machine owners will become the bourgeoisie of a new era, in which the corporations they own won't provide jobs to actual human workers.

As it is, the chasm between the super rich and the rest is growing. For starters, capital -- such as stocks or property -- accrues value at a much faster rate than the actual economy grows, according to the French economist Thomas Piketty. The wealth of the rich multiplies faster than wages increase, and the working class can never even catch up.

But if Hawking is right, the problem won't be about catching up. It'll be a struggle to even inch past the starting line.  

Also on HuffPost:

Why Another Big Bank Is Jumping On The Anti-Coal Bandwagon

Citigroup on Monday became the third banking giant this year to slash its lending to coal-mining companies.

The move, which follows similar pledges this year from Bank of America and Crédit Agricole, will make it more difficult for companies producing coal, a major source of pollution and contributor to climate change, to finance future projects.

Now, credit lines extended to any coal companies by Citi must first gain "senior approval" and pass more rigorous ethics guidelines that factor in human rights.

"Citi's credit exposure to coal mining companies has declined materially since 2011," Citi said in a 10-page memo on its environmental practices. "Going forward, we commit to continue this trend of reducing our global credit exposure to coal mining companies." 

The U.S. coal industry has been a financial disaster this year. There have been a string of high-profile bankruptcies, and borrowing costs for U.S. coal companies soared from 8 percent at the start of the year to 65 percent in July.

These are all important indicators that the financing activity Citi has pledged to cut down on is getting riskier -- which means there are very good reasons for Citi to decrease its exposure to coal companies that have nothing to do with the environment. It's just what a smart banker should do.

But that still represents a shift for Citi, which, it's worth remembering, shoveled billions of dollars at bad mortgages in the period leading up to the financial crisis.

Citi did not immediately respond to questions about whether its new commitment goes beyond the decline in lending that would already be expected as the coal industry struggles. 

To be sure, there are signs that the banking industry is waking up to the economic and existential threats that climate change poses.

In a joint statement last week, a group of six colossal U.S. banks called for a "strong global climate agreement" during the United Nations' upcoming conference in Paris. Citi was among them.

But though progress has already been significant, the industry has a long way to go to take really meaningful steps to reduce climate change.

"Reducing credit exposure is only a partial step forward," Lindsey Allen, executive director of the nonprofit Rainforest Action Network, said in a statement. "We urge Citigroup and Wall Street laggards such as Morgan Stanley to cut all financing ties to both coal mining and coal-fired power."

How Jack Dorsey Can Keep His Chill While Running Two Companies

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Jack Dorsey has his plate full -- doubly full.

Twitter on Monday named him its permanent CEO, nearly four months after he took over as the interim chief executive following Dick Costolo's sudden departure.

The company he co-founded nine years ago is in flux, struggling to attract new users and make money. Shareholders clamored for Dorsey to stay in the position in large part because few other business leaders seemed qualified to meaningfully correct Twitter's course. 

But Dorsey is also the full-time chief executive of mobile-payments firm Square, a position he will keep in addition to heading up Twitter. Square is quietly preparing for an initial public offering -- a process that, judging from Twitter's own IPO, can become quite volatile.

That's a lot for anyone to take on. As much as he's going to need the people around him, Dorsey -- who's known to meditate and jog early in the morning and take long, meandering walks during the day -- will also need to turn inward for the tools to help him succeed in both roles.

Twitter is a social media company. Square processes credit card transactions. The two firms have little in common, which helps in a certain way -- perhaps there are few conflicts of interest. But the arrangement will require Dorsey's mind to be nimble. He'll navigate very different realities at the helm of each company.

"It's unusual and really challenging," Sydney Finkelstein, management professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck Center for Leadership, told The Huffington Post.

Finkelstein said the people in Dorsey's professional inner circle will be crucial to him, perhaps more than they've ever been. 

"To make something like this work, you have to have a world-class team around you," Finkelstein explained. "Effective leaders delegate. In this case, you probably have to delegate more than normal. … You have to be able to process in your brain two different worlds."

Dorsey must also remain mindful of his own emotions to prevent himself from succumbing to stress and becoming reactionary.

“Oftentimes what we do is we withdraw and we tighten and we become reactive,” Janice Marturano, executive director of the nonprofit Institute for Mindful Leadership, told HuffPost. “That’s exactly the opposite of what we need to do during stressful times in our lives.”

Simple activities like napping, taking a walk and finding a quiet room to meditate for 10 minutes can be helpful. Some of this is undoubtedly part of Dorsey's routine already, but not everyone has time for that. Training the brain to take what Marturano calls “purposeful pauses” -- receding into the mind during a brief moment of free time -- can help keep a leader grounded, even when she or he is stretched thin.

“In times of real craziness, you have to be able to find your training that allows you to meditate with a cup of coffee, or with the two minutes you walk from this office to this meeting,” said Marturano, whose book Finding The Space To Lead was released recently in paperback. “Rather than texting along the way, you say, ‘I’m going to use that time for meditation.’”

To be sure, not everyone enjoys the perks of a chief executive whose net worth Forbes estimates at $2.2 billion. Many workers struggle as wages remain low. Nearly two million people in the United States work multiple part-time jobs, and nearly 1.6 million of those do not have a primary full-time job. That means many are likely disqualified from receiving health insurance coverage or other benefits as part of their compensation. The perks and privileges enjoyed by Dorsey and others in the executive set certainly make their struggle a bit less difficult.

Still, Marturano said the principles of mindfulness apply as much to workers stocking shelves for minimum wage as they do to someone running two large technology companies.

"We influence the people around us every day, so we're all leaders," she said. "It's about making the time to reflect." 

 

ATM Fees Have Never Been Higher

Ever been a little bit lazy or drunk and out too late and used a random ATM on a sidewalk, in a bar, at some strange bank? This is your annual reminder to stop.

The average out-of-network ATM fee is now $4.52, up 4 percent from last year and 21 percent since 2010, according to a report released Monday from Bankrate.com, a personal finance site that tracks banking costs. That includes both the fee charged by your bank and the out-of-network fee charged by the ATM operator.

“In all likelihood these fees are going to continue to go up,” Greg McBride, Bankrate’s chief financial analyst, told The Huffington Post.

Cities With Highest Average ATM Fees

Atlanta $5.15

New York $5.03

Phoenix $4.88

Miami $4.84

 Milwaukee $4.78

Cities Lowest Average ATM Fees

San Francisco $3.85

Cincinnati $3.86

Kansas City $4.01

Dallas $4.11

Seattle $4.21

Bankrate surveyed a total of 243 banks in 25 large U.S. markets in July and August, looking at ATM and overdraft fees of interest and noninterest accounts.

McBride said this is the ninth straight year ATM fees have gone up. And it’s happening for a bunch of reasons. First, people have gotten smarter about not using random ATMs, McBride said. Second, banks feel comfortable raising out-of-network fees because they don’t have to worry about alienating non-customers.

But mostly this is the result of regulations passed after the financial crisis that make it slightly more difficult for banks to levy more hidden and sneaky fees elsewhere. For example, a 2009 law requires that bank customers opt-in if they want the bank to lend them money when they overdraw their accounts.

Another law, part of the goliath Dodd-Frank Act, restricts the amount of money banks can charge retailers when you pay with a debit card, so-called swipe fees. 

So banks are making up the lost revenue at the ATM and by charging more for checking accounts. “If you own a restaurant and hamburger prices are restricted, you’d raise the price of soda and fries,” McBride explains.

Bankrate’s survey also found that just 37 percent of non-interest checking accounts are completely free, down from 76 percent in 2009.

If the fee picture seems bleak to you, the good news is: These ATM fees are much easier to avoid. You just need to stick with in-network ATMs and plan out your month of cash consumption a little more carefully. If you’re in a pinch, you can also choose to get cash back when you’re shopping at your local supermarket, McBride said.

Less hopeful: This is a strategy that won't be as easy for those typically lower-income people who live in underbanked areas.

Be careful out there, everyone.

Via: NerdWallet

 

Want To Make America Great Again? Support Working Women.

If Donald Trump, Jeb Bush and their fellow Republican presidential candidates truly want to make the United States “great again," there’s actually a reasonably simple way to do it: support working women.

The U.S. once had the world's highest percentage of women in the workforce, but over the past quarter-century, we’ve fallen behind. Policies that make it easier for women to work could vault us to the top again -- and stimulate economic growth, too.   

If American women were to enter the job market at the same rate as men, work the same hours as men and take jobs in sectors with higher productivity (think more women in tech, fewer at Walmart), gross domestic product would grow 4.2 percent over the next 10 years, according to a report released last week from researchers at McKinsey & Company. (A report from the International Monetary Fund estimates even higher growth, 5 percent, if women participated equally in the workforce.) That’s about $4.3 trillion more than what our GDP growth would be if it chugs along at an expected rate of 2.6 percent, the researchers said.

“This is one of the biggest levers they could pull, and one of the easiest ways to get a significant jump in GDP growth,” Kweilin Ellingrud, a managing partner at McKinsey who worked on the report, told The Huffington Post.

The full report considered how greater gender equality would affect GDP -- a measure of all the economic activity in the country -- globally and by region. The researchers broke out the U.S. numbers for HuffPost.

The last time the U.S. economy approached 4.2 percent GDP growth was during the Clinton administration -- when GDP grew at 3.8 percent. It’s about the same growth rate Bush is promising, and a bit less than what Trump said he’d deliver if elected president.

Bush and Trump both seem to believe they’ll increase GDP growth by cutting taxes on the rich, but economists have widely debunked the idea that such a proposal would actually be effective.

The stampede of women into the workforce that began in the late 1960s was one of the key drivers of U.S. economic growth in the second half of the 20th century, along with the invention of the Internet. 

But in recent decades, American women's ascendance in the workplace has flatlined. Since 1990, the percentage of U.S. women of working age (15-64) in the labor market has ticked up only one percentage point, to 75 percent. Meanwhile, European countries have surged ahead of us, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published in the Economic Report of the President.

Those countries were able to push the needle by enacting policies that support dual-income families: paid parental and sick leave, free universal preschool, subsidized child care and more pressure on businesses to enact policies that support parents. The U.S. doesn’t do any of that.

No Republican presidential candidate has voiced support for federally mandated paid parental leave of the sort you see in all other major industrialized countries -- and they don't even talk about that other stuff. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton does support a modest amount of paid leave and free preschool -- but she's hardly proposing the kinds of policies you'd find overseas, which are considered pretty far off the mainstream in the U.S.

Nearly one-third of the gap between the U.S. and these other countries can be traced back to the lack of work-family policies in the United States, according to a widely cited study from two researchers at Cornell University.

The McKinsey report comes to a similar conclusion. The researchers outline four things that keep women out of the workforce around the world:

1. A lack of education
2. Restrictions on women’s financial and digital freedom
3. An absence of legal protections against discrimination and abuse
4. Time spent on “free labor,” uncompensated work at home and child care.  

The good news is that the U.S. is pretty great at addressing those first three problems -- well ahead of much of the developing world. It’s on the “free labor” front that we fall down. Women are still doing the bulk of housework and child care, even though about 70 percent of women with children under the age of 18 have jobs. 

Are we, as a society, supporting these women so they can make the money that helps them care for their families? Are we making it relatively simple for a woman to have children and a career? We are not.

Many women, without access to paid parental leave, are back on the job just two weeks after giving birth. Others choose lower-paying, part-time work and juggle an intense and exhausting schedule of child care to scrape by. Some women who want to work must instead rely on government assistance because they cannot afford child care. Their lives, and the lives of their children, are measurably worse as a result.

Even at the highest levels of the workforce, women -- and, increasingly, men -- are finding it too difficult to manage home and work duties, as Anne-Marie Slaughter argues in her new book, Unfinished Business.

The McKinsey researchers are not suggesting that women simply abandon home and enter the workforce, but that there are all kinds of ways to help men and women better balance the time they spend on unpaid and paid work, Mekala Krishnan, another researcher, told HuffPost in an email. They include better on-site child care facilities at businesses, flexible work policies and a more equitable distribution of work between men and women.

Still, there’s a conservative argument that goes something like this: Well, if women work, then no one will have the babies!

In turns out the opposite is true. Indeed, in countries where it’s too hard to juggle motherhood and work, women choose work. Aiming to increase Japan's low birthrate and boost its economic growth, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently announced the country would make preschool free of charge and give more support to mothers and fathers. 

“Work-family policies are always framed as some nice thing to do,” Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, CEO of a gender balance consulting firm that works with Fortune 100 companies, told HuffPost. But it’s so much more than that. This is an economic issue that affects everyone.

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Massive Data Breach At Experian Exposes Personal Data For 15 Million T-Mobile Customers

Experian, the world's biggest consumer credit monitoring firm, on Thursday disclosed a massive data breach that exposed sensitive personal data of some 15 million people who applied for service with T-Mobile US Inc.

Connecticut's attorney general said he will launch an investigation into the breach.

Experian said it discovered the theft of the T-Mobile customer data from one of its servers on Sept. 15. The computer stored information about some 15 million people who had applied for service with telecoms carrier T-Mobile during the prior two years, Experian said.

T-Mobile Chief Executive John Legere said the data included names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers, drivers license numbers and passport numbers. Such information is coveted by criminals for use in identity theft and other types of fraud.

"Obviously I am incredibly angry about this data breach and we will institute a thorough review of our relationship with Experian," T-Mobile Chief Executive John Legere said in a note to customers posted on the company's website. "But right now my top concern and first focus is assisting any and all consumers affected."

The Experian breach is the latest in a string of massive hacks that have each claimed millions - and sometimes tens of millions - of customer records, including the theft of personnel records from the U.S. government this year, a 2014 breach on JPMorgan Chase and a 2013 attack on Target Corp's cash register systems.

It is also the second massive breach linked to Experian. An attack on an Experian subsidiary that began before Experian purchased it in 2012 exposed the Social Security numbers of 200 million Americans and prompted an investigation by at least four states, including Connecticut.

Experian on Thursday said it had launched an investigation into the new breach and consulted with law enforcement.

The company offered two years of credit monitoring to all affected individuals. People, however, said that they did not want credit protection from a company that had been breached.

Legere responded by promising to seek alternatives.

"I hear you," he said on Twitter. "I am moving as fast as possible to get an alternate option in place by tomorrow."

Experian said the breach did not affect its vast consumer credit database.

Legere said no payment card or banking information was taken.

T-Mobile had nearly 59 million customers as of June 30. A representative for the carrier said that not all 15 million of the affected applicants had opened accounts with T-Mobile.

The telecom carrier's shares were down 1.3 percent in extended trading after closing little changed at $40.13 on the New York Stock Exchange.

In the earlier data breach affecting Experian, a Vietnamese national confessed in U.S. court last year to using a false identity to opening an account with the unit, known as Court Ventures, sometime before Experian purchased it in 2012.

A spokeswoman for Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen said on Thursday that it would investigate the latest attack.

The spokeswoman, Jaclyn Falkowski, declined to elaborate on the T-Mobile incident, but said the investigations of the Court Ventures matter "is active and ongoing."

(Additional reporting by Karen Friefeld and Arathy Nair; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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Gender Equality Won't Just Change Women's Lives -- It'll Change Everyone's

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What would the world be like if we achieved true equality for women?  

The global economy might be stronger, for one thing. But such a shift would need to come with trade-offs -- adjusting traditional gender roles and modifying public policies to support a balanced family life.

A recent report from McKinsey & Company estimated that if women were to achieve economic parity with men across the world -- meaning they worked the same hours and made the same amount of money in total -- the resulting economic output would add $28 trillion in global gross domestic product per year.

What the report doesn't mention, however, is who would take over the vast amount of unpaid labor that women around the world do for their households and families on a daily basis. 

True, women aren't the only ones who raise children, care for aging parents and sick relatives or do the cooking and cleaning; but globally, women are still the default caregivers in many places. If more women choose to pursue careers and professional leadership roles, more men also need to step into the role of caregiver. On top of that, governments and employers must recognize the importance of caregiving and provide benefits that encourage it. 

This is the point of foreign policy expert Anne Marie Slaughter's new book, Unfinished Business, a follow-up to her seminal 2012 Atlantic piece, "Why Women Still Can’t Have It All." 

At a book launch event Monday night hosted by the New America Foundation, where Slaughter serves as CEO, the author spoke to former New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn about what Slaughter calls the "infrastructure of care." In the U.S., this infrastructure barely exists. It used to be maintained largely by the women who stayed home. As women have gone into the workforce, families have had to patch together a way to take care of young children and ageing parents -- with less and less time to spare.

"We need an equal infrastructure of care: a set of arrangements and institutions that allows citizens to flourish not only in the pursuit of their individual goals but also in their relationships to one another," Slaughter wrote in her book.

We build and maintain roads as a society because we recognize that most people will need to use them. Why, she asked, do we not provide "high-quality paid care" for those who need it: the young, the sick and the elderly? 

Both women and men, she argued on Monday, must manage to balance their work and their families in a world where the workday is never really over, paid family leave is not a guarantee and childcare often costs more than rent. "We should think of this not as a women's problem, but as a care problem," Slaughter said at the event.

She added that while men need to step into larger family roles if there is going to be more equality at work, reworking society is a policy problem that goes far beyond the struggles of ambition in wealthy families. People across the class spectrum need more support than they currently get for caregiving.

Slaughter mentions in her book that one of the most progressive organizations when it comes to subsidizing care is, ironically, the Pentagon. The Department of Defense provides on-site day care for children of the men and women who work there. They also pay the day care employees just as well as other employes. 

"[T]he part of the U.S. government most directly responsible for upholding national security recognizes the need to pay wages that can attract and retain college- and graduate-school-educated workers to provide care and early learning to the children of all employees from birth onward," she wrote.

Indeed, Slaughter said in both the book and at Monday's talk that she believes the care of young children is important enough to rise to the level of a national security issue.

"Children's brains are shaped most in the first five years of their lives, so it's not an exaggeration to say that the care and education of our children from birth to age five is a national security issue," she wrote in her book.