Highlights
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2024-11-19 10:01 But this is a chance to enshrine that idea in the international system. I’ve seen it written that this Declaration on future generations could one day be as important to us as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which came about in the late 1940s. Is that overstating it at this stage, do you think? It’s certainly a potential outcome. So we often have, I think, a lot of justified skepticism for these kinds of lofty international agreements.
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2024-11-17 12:19 And the human rights example is a great one to look at, because that declaration, coming at the end of World War II and the Holocaust and all the horrors we had seen in the middle of the 20th century, we felt pretty lofty and felt pretty disconnected from reality.
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2024-11-19 10:01 What are the steps, though, to actually make it real, to give it some kind of importance or practical reality for UN Member states. What gives me a bit of hope, and which is, I think, not really widely known around the world, is how many examples there are of governments of subnational units like states or regions or cities, or even private sector organizations, NGOs, et cetera, who are doing concrete things that actually take future generations into account and help decision making better reflect the long term. Last month, the Constitutional Court of Korea ordered the government to increase its climate targets because it said the targets weren’t fair to future generations. They weren’t doing enough to save future generations in Korea, and indeed globally, from the impacts of climate change. The EU appointed a commissioner which has intergenerational solidarity in its mandate.
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2024-11-19 10:00 Alright, well, let’s unpack some of that. You write a key reason for humankind’s preoccupation with the present is that human beings are largely self preoccupied beings. What are the personal benefits then that we derive from an obsession with the present? So you know, there is a certain amount of. It is just about self preservation and getting by, but there’s also a certain amount of prestige I think comes with the idea that we live in times that are special, times that are unique, that we’re here, that we’re part of it.
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2024-11-18 16:37 The main reason was actually that they want to increase their employer attractiveness so being more attractive for skilled applicants and also increase retention for their current staff.
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2024-11-18 16:38 And what we did differently to other studies who have also tested a four day week, we actually used fitness trackers to track the respondents or the participants stress by heart rate and heart rate variability.
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2024-11-19 10:00 It’s not simply reducing the days and then you get all the positive results. It is complex and requires a lot of measures. It’s a change management initiative, if you will, that needs to be managed and you need to bring the employees on board. But what we see, if you are able to bring them on board and involve them in this change processes, they are the drivers who identify the ideas for all the adjustments and measures.