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Video Game Competitions Should Be in the Olympics

The hottest sports ticket in Asia-Pacific right now isn’t for a soccer match, an NBA exhibition game or even a swim meet. It’s for the medal event debut of competitive video gaming, or esports. The milestone moment is taking place at the quadrennial Asian Games — sometimes referred to as an “Asian Olympics.” Leading up to this week’s games, at least 5 million people applied for the right to buy a pricey ticket to the futuristic purpose-built esports arena in Hangzhou, China, the host city. No other event, from basketball to table tennis, had near the demand, much less a ticket lottery.

But so far, the Olympics, the world’s preeminent sporting competition, has no intention of following Asia’s lead. That’s a mistake. With hundreds of millions of fans and players, esports can bring a desperately needed infusion of youth, cultural relevance and money to the lagging and scandal-plagued Olympics.

Esports, which requires a high level of critical thinking, quick decision making and coordination, is already among the world’s most popular competitive activities. Last year, the global audience totaled more than 500 million people. More than half of that amount was watching — not playing — competitive gaming online or on TV at least twice a month. The 2022 League of Legends World Championship, one of the world’s biggest tournaments, had 5.1 million viewers during peak times; by comparison, ESPN had a record-breaking 3.4 million viewers for the 2023 women’s US Open tennis final a few weeks ago.

It’s not just Asia where esports are popular, either. The US, home to developers responsible for some of the world’s most popular games, has also produced top players (though they are not eligible to appear at the Asian Games).

Early on, Asia-Pacific emerged as uniquely suited to be the center of esports. In the 1990s, personal PC ownership and home broadband were too expensive for large swaths of the region’s middle class. So the government and the private sector opened internet cafes hoping to boost the new technology. It turns out they also boosted multiplayer gaming, creating needed public spaces for young men (primarily) to socialize and relax.

It’s a fun debate, but it’s beside the point for hundreds of millions of people, especially in emerging markets where traditional sporting facilities are inaccessible and often expensive. The same goes for students across urban Asia, who often have few opportunities for outdoor play. For them, esports are among the only competitive social activities available.

Culture has bent to this reality. Esports athletes — yes, I’m using the term deliberately — are celebrities in Asia-Pacific. Gamer-friendly hotels are popping up in China to accommodate the vacation preferences of fans, and governments, especially China’s, are actively supporting the development of esports careers.

In 2017, the International Olympic Committee declared that esports “could be considered as a sporting activity” and has supported non-Olympic demonstrations. But it has stood firm in arguing that popular video games, including titles being played at this week’s Asian Games, are violent and thus incompatible with Olympic values such as peace and understanding (it prefers virtual sports games like archery simulator Tic Tac Bow). Meanwhile, Paris 2024 is preparing to host the violent sport of boxing — and rifle and pistol events.

EK: Esports may be much fairer. Threatening the status of traditional sports. Eventually may take off.

Getting a Master’s Degree May Not Pay Off With a Higher Salary

With US student-loan repayments set to resume in October after a more than three-year pause, the findings represent a distressing reality for people who took on grad school debt as a path toward higher earnings and greater career success. And costs are only rising: In addition to ever-increasing tuition, interest rates for graduate students taking loans this semester have climbed to more than 8%, the highest in a dozen years.

While college is often viewed as a ticket to a better living, it’s not clear that all master’s degrees lead to jobs with better pay. The differential between average starting salaries for bachelor’s and master’s degree graduates decreased to 22.5% in 2021 from 31.8% four years prior, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, a trade group surveyed graduating students at more than 200 universities. That’s in part a result of employers judging candidates based more on their skill sets rather than degree level, according to the group.

That idea is also showing up in other places. An analysis of online resumes found that while the share of employees with post-graduate degrees have been rising since 2008, job listings mentioning post-graduate degrees has been stagnating since 2015, said Hakki Ozdenoren, a labor economist with workforce research firm Revelio Labs.

“There’s this earnings premium, but you are paying more to get this premium,” said Jason Delisle, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute who has studied graduate school loans.

EK: Better off investing money instead of getting higher education.

Luxury Fashion Relies on Indian Artisans. The Labels Tell a Different Story

Tighter scrutiny of global supply chains and social media activism are driving change, pushing luxury brands to join fast fashion labels in disclosing the finer print of their work. In June, the European Parliament voted in favor of new due diligence rules that will open up large clothing companies to lawsuits and legal penalties if they fail to identify and address human rights abuses and environmental degradation in their supply chains.

The directive’s final wording is now being hammered out with EU member states, mirroring efforts in the US and elsewhere to improve visibility of how clothing is made — and close loopholes used to obscure the source of everything from cotton to diamonds.

Dior’s India-inspired show, spearheaded by its designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, was a milestone in a profound, if uneasy, evolution within the world of high-end apparel. For years, luxury fashion houses muted their business ties to developing nations. Executives guarded the perceived value embedded in a “Made in Europe” provenance, worried about the optics of making dresses in distant slums — and the risk that consumers could also mistake them for counterfeits. Dior is shifting that narrative by announcing its India supplier, training artisans and working to boost salaries.

To give one example, a knee-length jacket embellished entirely with tiny mirrors, which in late June retailed for almost €43,000 (about $45,000), took more than 2,000 hours to embroider in India, according to multiple exporters in Mumbai. Seamstresses estimated that the piece then underwent less than 100 hours of stitching and finishing touches in Europe. And yet, the garment carries a “Made in France” tag, reflecting European Union regulations that define the country of origin as the place where the last “substantial” transformation occurred — not where the bulk of labor was completed.

“It’s very easy to manufacture everything in India and sew the buttons in France and say it’s made in France,” Marant said, speaking generally about what she believes some high-end European fashion players do. “I think it’s despicable.”

For many in the industry, the simple garment tag illustrates a tense divide between the corporatized old guard and a wing of progressive creatives, who feel transparency around suppliers and clothing labels helps protect workers. Haute couture is one of France and Italy’s most important cultural and economic exports. To cede ground to India, the logic goes, is to diminish a point of great national pride — and jeopardize profits in a status-obsessed industry where many shoppers associate developing nations with shoddy quality, despite their often expansive histories of artistic excellence.

Though some brands like Dior have started publicly acknowledging their work in India or have even moved stitching — long a French specialty — to the developing world, many still avoid finishing garments in poorer countries, allowing them to keep those names off their labels, interviews with more than two dozen designers, executives and artisans reveal. They don’t mention these factories in sustainability reports or supplier lists, and in some cases, ask export houses to sign confidentiality agreements.

“A lot of brands play with the rules,” said Maximiliano Modesti, the owner of Les Ateliers 2M, an export house in Mumbai that counts some of the world’s biggest brands among its clients. “There is this fantasy that you cannot sell a luxury product with a ‘Made in India’ label.”

To save on rent, some artisans sleep at the factory, where they worked without air conditioning as Mumbai’s heat index peaked around 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit).

“We were slaves to the British before independence and we are still slaves,” said one of the factory’s karigars. “The only difference is foreigners don’t beat us anymore.”

To avoid scrutiny of these factories, few luxury brands disclose all of their suppliers, according to Liv Simpliciano, London-based policy and research manager at Fashion Revolution, an organization that grades apparel companies on their transparency. Kering SA’s Gucci and LVMH’s Fendi are among the luxury names that scored the highest on supply chain traceability in the group’s index.

Tactics to blur supply chains vary. Finishing India-made garments in wealthier countries is a commonly exploited loophole. Luxury apparel companies also purchase embroidery in “components” — essentially bulk packages of small patches, even if they plan to cover an entire garment with them. Exporters say this allows designers to sidestep attribution issues they may face if they order larger sheets.

And some brands that do credit developing countries, often because of export rules, still don’t play up the connection.

Since the 2000s, Prada, the Italian fashion house, has manufactured footwear in Vietnam, according to a longtime employee involved in procurement. The Prada employee, who requested anonymity to discuss the company, said the brand works with two main suppliers in Hanoi and Hai Phong.

While Prada has credited Vietnam on some shoes, the company doesn’t list any Vietnamese facilities on its official suppliers list, which mentions mostly Italian factories and an “extensive network” of external manufacturers.

EK: Cut down the price, for God’s sake, if you are making the bags in India. From Nike to Prada, luxury sweatshops in Asia.

Work Shift: How Nike, CVS and Amazon Moved the Needle on Diversity After BLM Protests

In the summer of 2020, something astonishing happened: Corporate America united around a common goal. The Black Lives Matter protests were gripping the world, and many of the biggest, most lucrative and most recognizable companies promised to hire and promote more Black people and others from underrepresented groups.

That summer, Bloomberg News reporters and editors started a project to hold companies accountable to those pledges by trying to collect data on workforce diversity that’s usually kept private. We asked the entire S&P 100 to share information on their worker demographics, which they usually only disclose to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We targeted those companies because they employ millions of people in the US and they’re influential, lucrative and sit across a broad swath of industries.

So, what did we learn? In the first year after the BLM protests, 88 S&P 100 companies added more than 300,000 workers to their ranks. Of those, 94% were people of color. You can read more of our analysis of the trends at play here.

Digging into individual companies, you get a more nuanced picture. Nike Inc. was one of the most clear-cut examples of the broader trend. The sneaker-maker added Black, Hispanic and Asian people across almost every job category. At the same time, the company lost White workers.

EK: It worked.

By way of illustration, I typed this article on a very fast new laptop. It was definitely quicker than a typewriter or old-fashioned pen and paper, so I’m not complaining and I’m not naïve. But if I tell you that the AI-assisted tools have made my task significantly slower due to all the pop-ups and “intuitive” suggestions you might smile indulgently at my technophobia. You might also nod in recognition: This isn’t generative AI but its sibling, predictive AI. For the first time my “knowledge work,” as the great management guru Peter Drucker called it, is constantly being interrupted by a noisy digital “co-worker” trying to being “useful.”

This may sound like a cute sound-bite, but it has the ring of truth. Thanks to generative AI and in particular ChatGPT, the porous line between human and machine is becoming confused. So much so that the central issue facing people in the workplace can be summed up in one word: authenticity.

Just as unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of anxiety and it’s beyond jobs. It’s about human agency and autonomy as well as authenticity. There are distinct whiffs of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein abounding: We worry we’ve created a monster. I especially worry when those with most to gain commercially show this nervousness. That’s exactly what has happened with ChatGPT. Within six months of its’ launch, more than 1,000 technology leaders including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc., signed an open letter warning that things were getting “out-of-control.”

EK: Importance of humanities in the era of generative AI.