Something that's drilled into you if you're follower of GTD, but something apparently one Harvard Economist has discovered (GTDTimes):
But time isn’t the problem, says Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan. The ultimate barrier to success is a shortage of mental “bandwidth,” or the ability to focus on a task in the moment. A lack of time isn’t the issue; a lack of focus is.
Based on studies - Buy experiences, not possessions; Focus; and Give (Lifehacker).
A big part of the problem is the lack of transparency - but that's hardly an issue that's isolated to China's debt (WSJ) - and by way of reference, Canada's net Debt to GDP ratio hovers somewhere around 35% while the US hovers around 107% and climbing:
Freedom, not regulation. Read the whole thing (Reason):
President Obama is again turning his attention to the elusive economic recovery. His “pivot” will be for naught, however, as long as he continues to ignore two important points: first, government is a major squanderer of scarce resources, and second, its regulations are impediments to saving and investment.[...]
The market test assures that bad trade-offs are avoided, or at least quickly corrected if they are made. If steel is being used to make one product when consumers are demanding something else, the competitive entrepreneurial process sees to it that steel will be redirected.
No corresponding process exists in the political realm. It contains no incentives to look out for the consumers’ welfare. Instead, we have political theater and value destruction.
Not surprisingly, "wealth" is relative to the economic freedom it buys (Bizjournal):
How much money makes you wealthy? In a recent survey, investors told UBS $5 million.
Most of them said, however, that the amount isn’t as important as the freedom of no financial constraints on what they do. A large cash reserve helps.
Thirty-one percent of millionaires surveyed said they don’t consider themselves wealthy.
That's what some research suggests (Independent, HuffingtonPost). I tend to be a night owl but I fight those impulses somewhat successfully since starting CrossFit at 515am.
TechCrunch makes the argument that what makes unions and Silicon Valley incompatible to dislike technology is not only the fear that technology will replace them but it will affect their jobs. Of course, I'd observe that job "protection" only makes them less sustainable and those being "protected" subject to greater loss when that protection finally goes away.
These attitudes help to explain why unions have lost so much ground over the past several decades.
This is pretty exciting. The money quote (Bloomberg via HN):
Shetty is not a public health official motivated by charity. He’s a heart surgeon turned businessman who has started a chain of 21 medical centers around India. By trimming costs with such measures as buying cheaper scrubs and spurning air-conditioning, he has cut the price of artery-clearing coronary bypass surgery to 95,000 rupees ($1,583), half of what it was 20 years ago, and wants to get the price down to $800 within a decade. The same procedure costs $106,385 at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
“It shows that costs can be substantially contained,” said Srinath Reddy, president of the Geneva-based World Heart Federation, of Shetty’s approach. “It’s possible to deliver very high quality cardiac care at a relatively low cost.”
Medical experts like Reddy are watching closely, eager to see if Shetty’s driven cost-cutting can point the way for hospitals to boost revenue on a wider scale by making life-saving heart operations more accessible to potentially millions of people in India and other developing countries.
“The current price of everything that you see in health care is predominantly opportunistic pricing and the outcome of inefficiency,” Shetty, 60, said in an interview in his office in Bangalore, where he started his chain of hospitals, with the opening of his flagship center, Narayana Hrudayalaya Health City, in 2001.
Highlighting and proving yet more useful future examples of how not to do economic development (WalterRussellMead). The evidence that publicly funded stadiums are a bad idea (Reason), is pretty universal (theAtlantic). And yet, they do so anyway. That they are moving ahead in already bankrupt Detroit on a half a billion dollar stadium, makes me think that Reason is right - Detroit won't get a chance at a second act.
Contrary to the views of some, the basic underlying principles of imperialism and capitalism are contradictory and unable to co-exist:
Are we in an "innovation drought"? No, argues economic historian Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University:
Part of the answer is that new types of work will emerge that we cannot foresee. A hundred years ago, people were wondering what would happen to the workers who would no longer be able to find work farming. Nobody at the time would have been able to imagine the jobs of today, such as video game programmer or transportation security employee.
But if the bulk of unpleasant, boring, unhealthy and dangerous work can be done by machines, most people will only work if they want to. In the past, that kind of leisurely life was confined largely to those born into wealth, such as aristocrats. Not all of them lived boring and vapid lives. Some of them wrote novels and music; many others read the novels and listened to the music. Some even were engaged in scientific research, such as the great Robert Boyle (one of the richest men in 17th century England), and a century later, Henry Cavendish, the English chemist and physicist who identified hydrogen gas.
Aristocratic life in the past depended on servants, and the servants of the future may be robots -- but so what? More worrisome, the aristocratic life depended on a flow of income from usually hard-working and impoverished farmers paying rich landowners. The economic organization and distribution in a future leisure society may need a radical re-thinking. As John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1931 in his "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," "With a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it today, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs."
Not that I plan on starting to drink coffee anytime soon... but does Tiramisu count? (Harvard Gazette via Instapundit)
Drinking several cups of coffee daily appears to reduce the risk of suicide in men and women by about 50 percent, according to a new study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). The study was published online July 2 in The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry.
Not sure where to begin in dissecting this opinion piece in the NYT. First, it confuses poverty and inequality:
Because of who my father is, I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in. Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left. [...] But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over.Second, he creates a straw man rejecting ideas of accountability and financial sustainability:
And with more business-minded folks getting into the act, business principles are trumpeted as an important element to add to the philanthropic sector. I now hear people ask, “what’s the R.O.I.?” when it comes to alleviating human suffering, as if return on investment were the only measure of success. Microlending and financial literacy (now I’m going to upset people who are wonderful folks and a few dear friends) — what is this really about? People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast?And finally, I'll highlight is his fuzzy approach to "poverty" and his lack of context:
Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life. [...] I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism.Are the poor on the other side of the world really the same is those across the street? Compare the "poor" in the west who are far more likely to suffer from morbid obesity to those who suffer under oppressive regimes who face starvation - how similar are they? Compare the poor in the west today - often with cellphones, microwaves, access to much greater varieties of food and products from around the world and other conveniences of modernity, to those decades earlier against the metric of "true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life." Have things really gotten worse? Are the problems facing the poor really the same? Heck, even compare the opportunities to entrepreneurs today over decades earlier - has it really gotten worse?
According to the Urban Institute, the nonprofit sector has been steadily growing. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of nonprofits increased 25 percent. Their growth rate now exceeds that of both the business and government sectors. It’s a massive business, with approximately $316 billion given away in 2012 in the United States alone and more than 9.4 million employed.
A reminder that the sometimes hysterical fears (or even perverse admiration for their central planning) some people have of China's rapid ascent are not based on reality. China has many massive hurdles to overcome on its way to becoming a superpower (ABS-CBN):
Many of the province's mainstay industries, including shipbuilding and the manufacturer of solar panels, are drowning in overcapacity. Profits are dwindling, and the government's tax growth is braking hard.
That leaves Jiangsu vulnerable as President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang slow the country's giant economy to push through reforms aimed at reducing its reliance on the massive investment that made the country the factory to the world in favour of more services- and consumption-led growth.
As part of that, Beijing has ordered a clamp down on provincial government borrowing and land sales, the mainstay income for many local administrations. But equally, Beijing expects local governments to absorb much of the cost of downsizing many industries, leaving provinces like Jiangsu caught between a rock and a hard place.
Standard Chartered, Fitch and Credit Suisse have estimated local government debt in China at the equivalent of anywhere between 15 percent and 36 percent of the country's output, or as much as $3 trillion based on World Bank GDP figures for 2012.
While the upside is that markets have become increasingly larger, Fred Wilson (AVC) notes the downside to rubbing up against the limits of growth:
Of course, you can come up with new lines of business, new hit products, or make acquisitions to keep on the growth treadmill. But recognize that is what you are on. You can and will become a slave to it.
Startups and their rich uncle pennybags (VCs) are particular slaves to this drug. We build and finance companies that are designed to grow and grow and grow. That's how we create wealth, jobs, and impact. It's a fantastic ride that I cannot get off. But these rides do slow down and even end sometimes. And that's a bitch.
Fracking, I think, is only the bridge technology to something cheaper and even cleaner... Updates on TerraPower (Weinberg Foundation via HN)
TerraPower’s interest in alternatives such as molten salt reactors (MSRs) came to light last month when the company’s director of innovation, Jeff Latkowski, surfaced in the audience at the Thorium Energy Alliance Conference in Chicago. The two-day gathering included presentations on thorium fuel and on reactors including molten salt reactors, high temperature solid fuel reactors, accelerator driven reactors, and others.
Latkowski quietly joined the five-year-old Bellevue, Wash., company a year ago to look after alternative approaches to nuclear. “My job at TerraPower is everything outside the Traveling Wave Reactor,” Latkowski told me in an email exchange after the Chicago event.
Good tip: Save the first few pages of your passport, credit card, and prescription information to the cloud before you start travelling (ApartmentTherapy). Caveat: do what you can to make sure the information is secure.
I love the idea of crowd competitions probably because in many ways they're democratizing and often enabled by the massive advances in communication technology we've had. Ahmad Ashkar, the CEO of the Hult Prize, provides a framework for how to develop competitions that succeed (HBR) - read the whole thing:
But to effectively harness the power of the crowd, you have to engage it carefully. Over the past four years, we've developed a well-defined set of principles that guide our annual "challenge," (lauded by Bill Clinton in TIME magazine as one of the top five initiatives changing the world for the better) that produces original and actionable ideas to solve social issues.
Companies like Netflix, General Electric, and Proctor & Gamble have also started "challenging the crowd" and employing many of these principles to tackle their own business roadblocks. If you're looking to spark disruptive and powerful ideas that benefit your company, follow these guidelines to launch an engaging competition
In fact, as Ann Harrison, the author of a new study from Wharton notes: "If … you were to give African entrepreneurs the same kind of environment as an American or European entrepreneur, they would outperform their counterparts." I'd go further that most if not all of the issues that the authors identify really come back to poor governance and bad policy (Forbes):
According to the researchers, insufficient infrastructure, scarce access to credit and political monopolies cripple these economies. Inefficient telecommunications, a proxy for infrastructure, consistently retains top ranking among the reasons for their perennial disadvantage. The difficulty to gain financing — due to a lack of formal lending sources — garners second place. Single-party rule also inhibits progress to a lesser degree. “If one could adjust the daunting list of geographic, infrastructure, political, economic and institutional factors to the levels [that exist] elsewhere,” the authors write, “Africa possesses an inherent advantage.” Harrison adds that this could be because African firms have had to become stronger and work smarter in order to survive such a challenging environment.
This post popped up on HackerNews which is pretty inspirational: "I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115" (JenniferDewalt). But it was the first comment by Derek Sivers that is really resonating with me:
There’s this great story from the book “Art and Fear”, that's very appropriate here:I'm in the middle of trying to pivot, exploring a lot of ideas I've had on the backburner for a while. This is just a good reminder not to get bogged down in trying to make things perfect but to focus more on creating and executing.
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.
All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an “A”, 40 pounds a “B”, and so on.
Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
