The Sammies.

Shale fracking saved the West.

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1. Michael Lewis:

Each spring, the most interesting organization that no one’s ever heard of collects nominations for the most important awards that most people will never know were handed out. The organization, called the Partnership for Public Service, created the awards, called the Sammies, in 2002 to call out extraordinary deeds inside the federal government. Founded the year before by an entrepreneur named Samuel Heyman, it set out to attract talented and unusual people to the federal workforce. One big reason talented and unusual people did not gravitate to the government was that the government was often a miserable place for talented and unusual people to work. Civil servants who screwed up were dragged before Congress and into the news. Civil servants who did something great, no one said a word about. There was thus little incentive to do something great, and a lot of incentive to hide. The awards were meant to correct that problem. “There’s no culture of recognition in government,” said Max Stier, whom Heyman hired to run the Partnership. “We wanted to create a culture of recognition.” Read the rest. (Sources: michaellewiswrites.com, ourpublicservice.org, washingtonpost.com)

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2. Workers’ share of the spoils of economic output has not recovered from a sharp drop seen after the Covid-19 pandemic, according to data that points to worsening economic inequalities as the rollout of generative AI gathers pace.   Estimates by the International Labour Organization, published on Wednesday, show that the share of global gross domestic product earned by employees and the self-employed fell from 52.9 per cent in 2019 to 52.3 per cent in 2022 and had remained flat in the following two years. The trend marks a sharp acceleration of a long-running decline. The ILO said labour’s share of global GDP had fallen 1.6 percentage points since it first began publishing data in 2004 — representing a loss of $2.4 trillion after adjusting for inflation — and that 40 per cent of the drop had taken place since 2019. (Sources: ft.com, ilo.org)