The conventional language of career success moves in only one direction; up. But there is another type of career path. Sideways moves, to jobs that don’t【C1】_____a promotion or【C2】__necessarily a pay rise, can be an advantage to employees and organisations【C3】_____.

A study carried out by Donald Sull of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021 found that the【C4】_____of lateral career opportunities has a marked impact on employee【C5】__Their research found that chances to move sideways were two and a half times more important than pay【C6】__a predictor of workers’【C7】_____to stay at a firm.

A recent paper by Virginia Minni of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a British think-tank, found that the arrival of a high-flying boss (who had got the job early in their career) was【C8】_____with a jump in intra-company【C9】__, both horizontal and vertical, among employees. Better bosses seem to be good at sorting people into roles that【C10】__them. This process【C11】_____higher pay over time for employees who move sideways.

Lateral moves can also be a wonderful【C12】_____for boredom. Surveys consistently show that great chunks of the workforce find their jobs【C13】__. Stephan Meier of Columbia Business School reckons that one big【C14】__of motivation for workers is having “just right tasks” that are【C15】__their capabilities but stretch them in new ways. Promotions offer fresh challenges but you can also easily get【C16】__waiting for a vacancy to open up above you. Looking to the side【C17】_____more options.

Embracing sideways movement requires the right【C18】_____Lots of managers like to hold talent,【C19】__workers and firms. And moving horizontally still has less prestige than moving upwards. It would help if career success had a different【C20】_____: say, across or out.

Failing train services in Britain have often been the butt of jokes, but the chaos is not funny to those who rely on them. For many in the north of England in particular, frustration has given way to despair. The pandemic’s long-term impact on working patterns may be the chief culprit for slashed traveller numbers. But it is unsurprising that former passengers are declining to come back. Many are concluding that late and cancelled trains, dirty and overcrowded carriages, and broken toilets make journeys too unpredictable or unpleasant, and are driving, flying or staying put instead. Fares have risen almost twice as fast as wages since 2010.

Labour’s plans to renationalise the rail industry, laid out by the shadow transport secretary, Louise Haigh, on Thursday, are sensible and welcome. It is something of a stretch to present them as evidence that the party is willing to make “bold” policy changes. Rather, they are a pragmatic solution to the glaring failure of the Conservatives’ ideological fixation on the private sector, regardless of its suitability for the task in hand.

The appetite is obvious; seven in 10 people back nationalisation. In fact, many parts of the system have already been taken back by the state due to private failure. Network Rail returned to the public sector in 2014, and almost one in four passenger journeys, including in Wales and Scotland, are on trains run by the Department for Transport’s own operator of last resort.

Beyond ownership, the proposals for structural reform essentially adopt Boris Johnson’s plans. But the Conservatives can take no credit when they have blown hot and cold. They said the streamlined new system would save ￡ 1. 5bn a year; Ms Haigh suggests removing the “ friction costs” of private sector involvement could save another ￡ 700m. She was wise to warn that there will be no overnight fixes. The problems are entrenched. Given just how bad industrial relations have become, a fresh start may help. From then on, however, consistency will be key. The country has had seven transport secretaries since 2010. A committed team will be essential to success.

The public still value and rely on train services. But the more they deteriorate, the greater the danger that disenchanted passengers turn away for good. That would be bad for air quality and climate policy, the British economy and society more broadly, aggravating the UK’s London-centrism and weakening the nations and regions. While some may feel embarrassed about the Great British Railways branding, a system needed to knit together different parts of the country should be a source of pride. Ms Haigh observed that the railways have become a symbol of national decline. A serious attempt to fix them also reinvigorates hope that Labour is willing and able to tackle the impoverished public sector and halt the broader slide.

In 2011, Rupert Murdoch announced the beginning of a “new digital renaissance” for news. The newspaper giant was launching an iPad-inspired publication called The Daily. Chasing tech’s distribution and cash, news firms strike deals to try to ride out the digital wave. They make concessions to platforms that attempt to take all of the audience (and trust) that great journalism attracts, without ever having to do the complicated and expensive work of the journalism itself.

Publishers like News Corp did it with Apple and the iPad, investing huge sums in flashy content that didn’t make them any money but helped Apple sell more hardware. They took payouts from Google to offer their journalism for free through search, only to find that it eroded their subscription businesses. They lined up to produce original video shows for Facebook and to reformat their articles to work well in its new app. Then the social-media company canceled the shows and the app. Many news organizations went out of business.

Now publishers are deep in negotiations with tech firms such as OpenAI to sell their journalism as training for the companies’ models. That media companies would rush to do these deals after being so burned by their tech deals of the past is extraordinarily distressing. And these AI partnerships are far worse for publishers. They are using AI to disrupt internet search—to help users find a single answer faster than browsing a few links. So why would anyone want to read a bunch of news articles when an AI could give them the answer, maybe with a tiny footnote crediting the publisher that no user will ever click on?

Tech companies act in their interest. Ask six publishers how they should be paid by these tech companies, and they will spout off six different ideas. One common idea publishers describe is getting a slice of the tech companies’ revenue based on the percentage of the total training data their publications represent. That’s impossible to track, and there’s no way tech companies would agree to it. Even if they did agree to it, there would be no way to check their calculations.

The news industry finds itself in this dangerous spot, yet again, in part because it lacks a long-term focus and strategic patience. Many large media companies are run by executives who want to live to see another quarter, not set up their companies for the next 50 years. At the same time, the industry’s lobbying power is eroding. Tech companies clearly have far more influence than media companies.

The long-term solutions are far from clear. But the answer to this moment is painfully obvious. Publishers should be patient and refrain from licensing away their content for relative pennies. They should protect the value of their work, and their archives. They should have the integrity to say no. It’s simply too early to get into bed with the companies that have no compelling case for how they will help build the news business.

Lonely children are to be prescribed activities such as fishing, gardening or visiting museums in an attempt to tackle high levels of social isolation among the young. A pilot project led by University College London will offer between 100 and 600 children aged nine to thirteen “social prescribing” measures that are already used to treat similar psychological pressures in adults.

Psychological problems among the young have been rising in nearly all developed countries since the Second World War. Explanations have included the fragmentation of the family, the competitive pressures of a consumerist society and the culture of rights creating unfulfillable demands. The common link among all of these is the erosion of attachments to other people.

In 2021, a survey by the Onward think tank found a collapse of community and belonging among young people. Millennials and Generation Z were less likely to be members of a group or participate in group activities than previous generations had been at similar ages. People under the age of 25 were three times more likely than people over 65 to distrust their neighbours, while only around half said they trusted their family “completely”. This lack of trust starts to hint at the real issue. If people aren’t solidly anchored in a family, a group, a community or a nation, they lack the connectedness to others that provides resilience and control over their life.

Having to deal with other people forces an individual to make the numerous small accommodations and compromises that are essential to getting along with them. That helps create personal resilience. The lack of such connections fosters fragility and replaces trust in others with the suspicion that they pose a potential danger. This helps explain the “ snowflake” tendency among the young in which every challenge, setback or disagreeable viewpoint is viewed as an existential attack.

The issue was the dominance of feelings that were now being confused with objective reality. Because no one today could ever deny how anyone felt, if someone felt offended then he or she would firmly believe that someone had genuinely harmed them. As a result, many young people were now “immersed in their own misery”.

The antidote to loneliness and psychological problems for both young and older people is activity that gets them to look outwards rather than inwards. Outdoor activities and pursuits that bring the individual into contact with others are all beneficial. The most beneficial of all, however, is the polar opposite to “me, myself and I”—actively and directly helping other people.

The point about altruism is that it involves other people. Young people today tend to be intensely socially conscious, believing in “social justice” and saving the planet. That’s not the same thing at all. Social causes are abstract and remote. They don’t involve a personal relationship with tangible results. Altruism involves helping others by giving up something of value, such as time, effort or reward through volunteering or selfless acts. Connecting to others through personal acts of kindness not only benefits society but can also start to heal the damaging isolation of the self-absorbed.

Pity OpenAI’s HR department. Since the start of the year the maker of ChatGPT has lost about a dozen top researchers. The biggest name was Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder responsible for many of the startup’s big breakthroughs, who announced his resignation on May 14th.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the market for AI labour has been transformed. Rapid advances in machine learning and the potential for a “ platform shift” has changed the types of skills employers are demanding and the places where those who possess them are going.

Start with the skills. Goliaths such as Microsoft and Google may be laying off non-engineers but they are seeking out star researchers who can understand, and build, cutting-edge models. Companies covet such superstars because they can produce breakthroughs that, say, dramatically increase the efficiency of an AI system or make it less prone to make things up.

More intriguing is how generative AI has changed the talent market further down the ladder. According to data from Indeed, a job-listing website, one in 40 vacancies for software developers in America mentions skills related to “generative” AI, the sort that makes ChatGPT so humanlike. Amit Bhatia, co-founder of a research firm, says that before ChatGPT a medium-sized tech firm might employ a handful of AI engineers who built small models to do things such as analyse the sentiments of customers’ emails. Today generative models can do a much better job than small, in-house efforts.

Different types of skills are also in demand. Kelsey Szot, a co-founder of an AI startup, points to individuals who quickly learn how to use AI tools and can stitch them together to build something new and impressive. Unlike the stuffy PhDs, they come up with ideas that are often not academically elegant. But, says Ms Szot, they will solve a problem on a tight deadline. In the ultra-competitive world of AI startups, that is invaluable.

As a result of all this demand, talent flows are shifting. For years engineers flocked to the big-tech. Over the nine months since ChatGPT was released, though, the net flow of AI workers to the giants reversed to an average monthly outflow.

Where is the AI talent going instead? One popular destination is Nvidia, a chipmaker whose “graphics-processing units” are powering the AI boom and whose ambitions extend beyond hardware to software and applications. Others joined more mature startups, such as Databricks and OpenAI. But one in seven of the big-tech leavers went to startups in “stealth” mode, which have not unveiled products or announced plans.

One motivation for going to a smaller startup may be financial. For an AI wizard the potential rewards from owning a stake in a successful firm could easily outweigh the salary and stock options offered by a tech juggernaut. Another motive is autonomy. There is just too much brand risk in big companies to ever launch anything fun.

People and companies want to adapt to the climate risks they face from global warming. Venture capitalists are injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into climate intelligence as they build out a rapidly growing business of climate analytics—the data, risk models, tailored analyses and insights people and institutions need to understand and respond to climate risks.

Climate information should be regarded as a public good. Otherwise it will contribute to a world in which information about the unfolding risks of droughts, floods, wildfires, extreme heat and rising seas are hidden behind paywalls.【G1】_________________________________________

It will compound disadvantage and leave the most vulnerable among us exposed.

Despite this, global consultants, climate and agricultural technology start-ups, insurance companies and major financial firms are all racing to meet the ballooning demand for information about climate dangers and how to prepare for them.【G2】_________________________________________

Private risk assessments fill that gap—but at a premium. An overreliance on the private sector to provide climate adaptation information will hollow out publicly provided climate risk science, and that means we all will pay: the well-off with money, the poor with lives.

Global warming is a collective tragedy, and so its solutions, especially around information for adapting to the risks it foreshadows, must be a public good. That is why governments must step up. People have a fundamental right to science. The climate science community needs to rapidly develop a publicly available alternative to paywalled climate information; failing to do so would be unjust and dangerous.

Climate risk information, especially information that helps communities manage impacts like floods and wildfires, should be as available as government weather forecasts. Governments should provide the resources so that this information can be obtained, assessed and acted upon by the public. Doing so is essential to our health, safety and collective well-being.【G3】______________________

Internationally, the nearly 200 countries that adopted the United Nations Paris climate agreement in 2015 committed, as the U.N. pointed out, to “strengthening the global response to climate change by increasing the ability of all to adapt and build resilience, and reduce vulnerability.“【G4】______________________________________

At the federal level, it would require establishing a national adaptation plan, revisited annually, to ensure communities around the United States have equal open-access to the tailored risk assessments they need to make long-term adaptation investments.【G5】_____________________________________Getting there will require greater federal investments in applied climate risk science, while ensuring that any publicly funded research is held to strict standards of openness.

As the private sector accelerates efforts to commodify climate information at the exact moment humanity most needs it, governments at all levels must expand efforts to make climate risk assessments and adaptation strategies widely available and understandable.

[A] At a minimum, it means that individuals could log into a website and quickly access a clear climate risk assessment for where they live based on validated, transparent and reproducible science without entering their credit card information to pay for it.

[B] While a lot of this information is public, it is often voluminous, technical and not particularly useful for people trying to evaluate their personal exposure.

[C] People and companies who can afford private risk assessments will rent, buy and establish homes and businesses in safer places than the billions of others who can’t.

[D] The privatization of climate information is already overturning the professional community, as scientists leave academia and national labs for high-paying start-up and consulting jobs; it’s a sensible move.

[E] Such a commitment implies that the information needed to adapt is a fundamental right for humanity.

[F] Local governments should establish climate adaptation clinics to engage directly with their communities, which provide both public weather forecasts and more detailed and customized forecasts to paying customers.

[G] Making this information a public good, available to all members of society for their benefit, would require a range of public efforts alongside the private ones.

Psychologists focus on scarcity as a perception that what we want is in short supply or otherwise difficult to obtain. Because we cannot easily obtain good things, that quest preoccupies us.

In their book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, behavioral scientists Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan studied feelings of scarcity in poor people from different countries. When people cannot meet their basic needs, such as food and safety, that lack becomes central to their thinking.【T1】Because they do not have the resources to acquire the good in question and to move out of poverty, they engage in practices that richer people see as “irrational.”

As the authors stress, the rest of us aren’t so different from poorer people. We, too, can be preoccupied with what we don’t have and adopt irrational strategies to obtain these things.【T2】The difference, of course, is that most of us have resource systems sufficient to meet our most basic needs.

【T3】Any of us can be obsessed with what we don’t have, even if it’s things we don’t really need. In fairness, denial, and the frustration that attends this, can motivate serious, long-term strategies to reach one’s goal. That means making decisions about time, money, and other resources. We can “ invest” in the world we want to live in. True enough. But we must admit that such investment is much easier for those who already operate from a platform of social and economic stability.

The commitment to have what others in our reference groups value is part of our social nature. More precisely, it is a manifestation of our search for identity. Who doesn’t want to belong to a group of their choosing—and, in so doing, to take on its beliefs, standards, and forms of possession?【T4】Firmly rooted in that group, most of us want to rise within it, to have a respected position and the resources that attend this. This condition is what our consumer culture exploits. Portraying life as a course or career, marketers show the path to advanced social standing, security, and well-being.

Scarcity is a very real problem for those who do not have access to the basic forms of sustenance and security. For the rest of us, many of the things we hunger for are essentially decorations for the self. Some can argue that the upcoming trip to Europe and fancy automobile are rightful fruits of their labors.【T5】But we should be honest that part of the pleasure is both the sense of privilege that the activity gives us and the satisfaction of pleasing our friends with our exploits. However, none of this lets us evade the question of what we should be doing with our lives and how we should best allocate our resources.