Driving growth by nurturing entrepreneurs and startups

The Kauffman Foundation and Brink Lindsey have just released some interesting new research. Brought to you by the same people who found that US job growth is driven almost entirely by startups. Their new research focuses on how governments in developed countries can continue to drive job growth that has otherwise slowed down:

The more uncertain things get, the only way to cope with that uncertainty is ceaseless trial and error... as we've learned the primary carriers of ideas are entrepreneurs with new companies... The way to keep things going is to make things favorable to new entrepreneurs.

Their study provides a roadmap for policymakers on how they can encourage and support entrepreneurs.

Ayn Rand: Pro-Markets does not mean Pro-Business

It's a differentiation that many, out of ignorance or demagoguery seem to forget. As Donald Luskin puts it, "the author of Atlas Shrugged [Amazon] was an individualist, not a conservative, and she knew big business was as much a threat to capitalism as government bureaucrats" in an editorial out in the WSJ:

But it's a misreading of "Atlas" to claim that it is simply an antigovernment tract or an uncritical celebration of big business. In fact, the real villain of "Atlas" is a big businessman, railroad CEO James Taggart, whose crony capitalism does more to bring down the economy than all of Mouch's regulations. With Taggart, Rand was anticipating figures like Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide Financial, the subprime lender that proved to be a toxic mortgage factory. Like Taggart, Mr. Mozilo engineered government subsidies for his company in the name of noble-sounding virtues like home ownership for all.

Sandy Springs, Georgia: "The City that Outsourced Everything"

An interesting look at how a relatively new, but wealthier community (formed in 2005) has chosen to manage itself - outsourcing nearly all its services for substantial savings (from Reason.tv):

While cities across the country are cutting services, raising taxes and contemplating bankruptcy, something extraordinary is happening in a suburban community just north of Atlanta, Georgia.

Since incorporating in 2005, Sandy Springs has improved its services, invested tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure and kept taxes flat. And get this: Sandy Springs has no long-term liabilities.

It will be interesting to see how these new cities like this manage over time and the businesses and residents they attract. But it's exciting to see alternatives out there - and dare I say it, it's progressive, in the literal definition of the word.

Scott Adams: "Forget art history and calculus. Most students need to learn how to run a business"

I love business because they're often an exercise in creative problem solving, optimization wrapped in a bit (sometimes a lot) of psychology. It's too bad that academia too often sees ideas like profit and commerce as distasteful and a necessary evil. Scott Adams writes an opinion piece in the WSJ of the value of learning entrepreneurship:

I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

More at his blog and/or the discussion at Hacker News.

Why We Aren't Running Out: "Prices are Incentives Wrapped in Knowledge"

A quick and good video on resources and why we haven't yet run out:

The Root of All Evil

The UK's Independent explores why the lack of empathy is the root of all evil:

Human cruelty has fascinated and puzzled Baron-Cohen since childhood. When he was seven years old, his father told him the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades and soap. He also recounted the story of a woman he met who had her hands severed by Nazi doctors and sewn on opposite arms so the thumbs faced outwards. These images stuck in Simon's mind. He couldn't understand how one human could treat another with such cruelty. The explanation that the Nazis were simply evil didn't satisfy him. For Baron-Cohen, science provides a more satisfactory explanation for evil and that explanation is empathy – or rather, lack of empathy.

"Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling, and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion," writes Baron-Cohen. People who lack empathy see others as mere objects.

Empathy, like height, is a continuous variable, but for convenience, Baron-Cohen splits the continuum into six degrees – seven if you count zero empathy. Answering the empathy quotient (EQ) questionnaire, developed by Baron-Cohen and colleagues, will put you somewhere on the empathy bell curve. People with zero degrees of empathy will be at one end of the bell curve and those with six degrees of empathy at the other end.

Read the whole thing. I'd add though that this is probably one of the things that makes markets ingenious in co-opting the reward systems of "evil" for the benefits of society.

While malice, fraud, and other crimes exist, creating wealth legally within the system is far easier and more sustainable than the alternative. It's possible to profit if your motive is solely greed, but rewards are often greater when you aspire (or at least convincingly say you do) to more.

Protect Nature: Put a price tag on it

A reminder that it's not money but the love of money that's the root of all evil. I'm sometimes dismissed as being entirely focused on money when the reality is that prices are only a way to evaluate tradeoffs and scarcity. By reducing things to abstract values, we may end up undervaluing them - and that's the case this article makes. From the Boston Globe:

In the United States, China, Costa Rica, and elsewhere, governments have opted to fund the preservation of forests, watersheds, and other ecosystems — and not because, or not only because, of their beauty. The primary impetus, rather, is the “services” they provide, including air and water purification, carbon sequestration, flood control, and drought prevention. The World Bank has sponsored numerous relevant projects, and a Stanford-based initiative, the Natural Capital Project, draws together environmental organizations and academics to advance and implement the idea.

And yet, for all of the obvious appeal of this approach to green types, there are serious concerns about translating ecological value into dollars and cents. Commodifying nature offends the sensibilities of some environmentalists, who believe we should prize it for its intrinsic worth, and for ethical and historical reasons. If we appraise nature only for the “services” it provides to humans, could that lead to an overly anthropocentric ethos that jettisons any elements that do not obviously accrue to our benefit?

Read the whole thing. More discussion at Hacker News.

[How] Will Western Civilization Fall?

Stephan Balch at PJMedia asks "Is our civilization a bubble?" (via Instapundit). While there may be some cause for concern, there's greater cause for optimism:

For about the last two hundred years (three in a few locales), the fundamental structure of Western civilization has been anomalous in a crucial way. The anomaly consists in this: whereas in the overwhelming majority of societies the dominant route to wealth and status has been through political control, essentially the use of force or threat of force to extract value from others, in the West it has generally been through exchanges in which the parties have choices, and in which value must be returned for value received if the transaction is to consummate. We’re so conditioned to this, to the fact that our great fortunes belong to entrepreneurs, inventors, magnates, entertainers, and athletes, people who make (or do) things that others want, rather than to royalty, nobility, high priests, mandarins, court favorites and military leaders, people who take in taxes and booty things that others would prefer to keep, that we — very much including historians, journalists, and social commentators of almost every stripe — give little or no thought to it, considering it pretty much the natural order of things. But our exchange-oriented social order does not represent the natural order of things, and what it anomalously results in is of enormous –though perhaps ultimately self-destructive — consequence.

While popular academics like Jared Diamond fret over environmental catastrophes (Amazon), I think they underestimate the capacity of this system to adapt.

As Brink Lindsey points out in Against the Dead Hand (Amazon), it's a system that has come less from design than from default and accident - and it's one that can be undone.

Does this make our civilization a bubble? If this is question with respect to whether our civilization is unsustainable, I think the answer is an emphatic no. This also does not however mean that the anomaly cannot be undone through our "self destructive" tendencies - or as Lindsey calls it, the Dead Hand.

Urgh, Google Email Hacked.

If you're on my gmail address book, my apologies for the bit of spam.

When and How Prizes, Grants and Charity Work

I was hunting for something else online when I came across this talk by Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, one of the top economics blogs online. A bit wonkish, but it talks to one of my favorite ideas and the efficient pursuit of big goals:

Related, from the organizers of some of some of my favorite races/prizes:

In memory of Cody, a border collie with spunk

With all that's been happening in the world, it feels weird and a bit callous to eulogize a dog. He was born February 6th, 2009, and died April 1st, 2011, of the canine distemper virus. He was adorable. I feel I had the privileges of a grandparent - I got all the benefits when I was there of having Cody, but few of the responsibilities. To him, I may have just been the guy who would leave for months at a time and bring back treats. But I always had treats.

Our reunions were always a bit of an oddity. He'd pounce up and then jump up and down so I'd play along and jump up and down with him while he'd bark until people looked at me funny - which, rest assuredly, was not very long, but perhaps somewhat alarmingly, a little longer than one might expect. He will be missed.



(And no, he did not die because he was strangled, but this was definitely a happier moment captured in low res)

Easier to listen to than the um original...

Inbox Zero and Getting Things Done Humor

For your friends who follow GTD and Inbox Zero (via Unpluggd):

Sound of Music Flashmob at Antwerp

As some of you know, I have a soft spot in my dark cold space where there ought to be a heart, for good flash mobs:

Persistence and Success

Similar to the view that the easiest way to screw up your kids is to praise them for being smart rather than working hard (Parenting), Jonah Lehrer in Wired, notes what many of us (hopefully) already realize - success isn't easy, often isn't exciting, isn't the result of extraordinary intelligence but rather, extraordinary perseverance (Wired):

While [the growing recognition of “non-cognitive” skills like grit and self-control are] traits have little or nothing to do with intelligence (as measured by IQ scores), they often explain a larger share of individual variation when it comes to life success. It doesn’t matter if one is looking at retention rates at West Point or teacher performance within Teach for America or success in the spelling bee: Factors like grit are often the most predictive variables of real world performance. Thomas Edison was right: even genius is mostly just perspiration.

Taken together, these studies suggest that our most important talent is having a talent for working hard, for practicing even when practice isn’t fun. It’s about putting in the hours when we’d rather be watching TV, or drilling ourselves with notecards filled with obscure words instead of getting quizzed by a friend. Success is never easy. Talent requires grit.

Benjamin Franklin's Daily Schedule

From one of the most productive people in American History (via Swiss Miss):

Quote of the Day

Too true. From "Eliezer" on Hacker News:

World domination is such an ugly term. I prefer to call it world optimization.

A Sad Moment...

I heard about the assassination last week, but until it was brought to my attention by a friend, I didn't realize it had been a man I met (friend of a friend). I didn't know who Shahbaz Bhatti was at the time beyond being the Minister for Minorities in Pakistan, and the meeting itself was a bit rushed, but reading more I come to the realization that I met a great man and am reminded of what we take for granted (WashingtonPost):

American leverage in these matters is limited, but it is worth applying what we have - something the Obama administration, to this point, has not done. Its National Security Strategy avoids the topic. It did not appoint an ambassador at large for international religious freedom - a congressionally mandated position - until a year and a half after it took office. (The confirmation of that ambassador, by the way, is now held up by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint.) "This has not gotten," Clinton said at a recent hearing, "the level of attention and concern that it should. . . . I think we need to do much more to stand up for the rights of religious minorities."

This was precisely what Bhatti was doing - defending the rights of believers in every faith, not just his own. But the source of his courage in the cause of pluralism was clear: "These Taliban threaten me. But I want to share that I believe in Jesus Christ, who has given his own life for us. I know what is the meaning of [the] cross, and I am following the cross."

Which he followed all the way to the end.

Printing a Human Kidney

Another impressive TED talk (via Paul Kedrosky):

Cultural footnotes

Given that I love both Subway and McDonald's, this warms the cockles of my heart. There are no losers in this race. We're all winners for it. From the WSJ:

It's official: the Subway sandwich chain has surpassed McDonald's Corp. as the world's largest restaurant chain in terms of units.

At the end of last year, Subway had 33,749 restaurants world-wide, according to a Subway spokesman, compared to McDonald's 32,737. The burger giant disclosed its year-end store count in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing late last month.