Economy Strength Quotes

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.

Vices are simply overworked virtues, anyway. Economy and frugality are to be commended but follow them on in an increasing ratio and what do we find at the other end? A miser! If we overdo the using of spare moments we may find an invalid at the end, while perhaps if we allowed ourselves more idle time we would conserve our nervous strength and health to more than the value the work we could accomplish by emulating at all times the little busy bee. I once knew a woman, not very strong, who to the wonder of her friends went through a time of extraordinary hard work without any ill effects. I asked her for her secret and she told me that she was able to keep her health, under the strain, because she took 20 minutes, of each day in which to absolutely relax both mind and body. She did not even “set and think.” She lay at full length, every muscle and nerve relaxed and her mind as quiet as her body. This always relieved the strain and renewed her strength.

Or perhaps your marriage is more of a covalent bond,” she said, sketching a new structural formula. “And if so, lucky you, because that means you both have strengths that, when combined, create something even better. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine, what do we get? Water—or H2O as it’s more commonly known. In many respects, the covalent bond is not unlike a party—one that’s made better thanks to the pie you made and the wine he brought. Unless you don’t like parties—I don’t—in which case you could also think of the covalent bond as a small European country, say Switzerland. Alps, she quickly wrote on the easel, + a Strong Economy = Everybody Wants to Live There. In a living room in La Jolla, California, three children fought over a toy dump truck, its broken axle lying directly adjacent to a skyscraper of ironing that threatened to topple a small woman, her hair in curlers, a small pad of paper in her hands. Switzerland, she wrote. Move.

Every single one of our acts is ruled by the laws of economy. When we first wake up in the morning we trade rest for profit. When we go to bed at night we give up potentially profitable hours to renew our strength. And throughout our day we engage in countless transactions. Each time we find a way to minimize our effort and increase our gain we are making a business deal, even if it is with ourselves. These negotiations are so ingrained in our routine that they are barely noticeable.

Why have so many schools reduced the time and emphasis they place on art, music, and physical education? The answer is beyond simple: those areas aren’t measured on the all-important tests. You know where those areas are measured… in life! Art, music, and a healthy lifestyle help us develop a richer, deeper, and more balanced perspective. Never before have we needed more of an emphasis on the development of creativity, but schools have gone the exact opposite direction in an effort to make the best test-taking automatons possible. Our economy no longer rewards people for blindly following rules and becoming a cog in the machine. We need risk-takers, outside-the-box thinkers, and entrepreneurs; our school systems do the next generation a great disservice by discouraging these very skills and attitudes. Instead of helping and encouraging them to find and develop their unique strengths, they're told to shut up, put the cell phones away, memorize these facts and fill in the bubbles.

When other countries run sustained trade deficits, they must finance these by selling off domestic assets or running into debt — debt which they actually are obliged to pay. It seems that only the Americans are so bold as to say “Screw the world. We’re going to do whatever we want.” Other countries simply cannot afford the chaos from which the U.S. economy is positioned to withstand as a result of the fact that foreign trade plays a smaller role in its economy than in those of nearly all other nations in today’s interdependent world. Using debtor leverage to set the terms on which it will refrain from causing monetary chaos, America has turned seeming financial weakness into strength. U.S. Government debt has reached so large a magnitude that any attempt to replace it will entail an interregnum of financial chaos and political instability. American diplomats have learned that they are well positioned to come out on top in such grab-bags.

It’s not the number of followers you have or “likes” you get, it’s the strength of your bond with your followers that indicates how much anyone cares about what you have to say. In this game, the one with the most real relationships wins.

Kuala Lumpur had a certain something… There was a sense of freedom perhaps, of anarchy even, that Singapore so sorely lacked. Perhaps it was the lack of deference to authority, the physical space, the ability to take a step back and enjoy a moment of quite that lent Kuala Lumpur its atmosphere. Singaporeans were always adding to the list of reasons each one kept to hand, in case they met a Malaysian, of why it was so much better on the island than the peninsula. They ranged from law and order to cleanliness, from clean government to good schools, and always ended on the strength of the Singaporean economy. But in the end, the Malaysian would nod as if to agree to the points made – and then shrug to indicate that they probably wouldn’t trade passports, not really. And if pressed for a reason they would fall back on that old chestnut which somehow seemed to capture everything that was wrong about Singapore – but your government bans chewing gum. The nanny state and the police state all rolled into one.

I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined. For other women of all ages, colors, and sexual identities who recognize that imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness, and for myself, I have tried to voice some of my feelings and thoughts about the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation, the function of cancer in a profit economy, my confrontation with mortality, the strength of women loving, and the power and rewards of self-conscious living.

To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.

Principles of Liberty 1. The only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law. 2. A free people cannot survive under a republican constitution unless they remain virtuous and morally strong. 3. The most promising method of securing a virtuous and morally strong people is to elect virtuous leaders. 4. Without religion the government of a free people cannot be maintained. 5. All things were created by God, therefore upon him all mankind are equally dependent, and to Him they are equally responsible. 6. All men are created equal. 7. The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not provide equal things. 8. Men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. 9. To protect man's rights, God has revealed certain principles of divine law. 10. The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people. 11. The majority of the people may alter or abolish a government which has become tyrannical. 12. The United States of America shall be a republic. 13. A constitution should be structured to permanently protect the people from the human frailties of their rulers. 14. Life and Liberty are secure only so long as the Igor of property is secure. 15. The highest level of securitiy occurs when there is a free market economy and a minimum of government regulations. 16. The government should be separated into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. 17. A system of checks and balances should be adopted to prevent the abuse of power. 18. The unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written constitution. 19. Only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to the government, all others being retained by the people. 20. Efficiency and dispatch require government to operate according to the will of the majority, but constitutional provisions must be made to protect the rights of the minority. 21. Strong human government is the keystone to preserving human freedom. 22. A free people should be governed by law and not by the whims of men. 23. A free society cannot survive a republic without a broad program of general education. 24. A free people will not survive unless they stay strong. 25. "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." 26. The core unit which determines the strength of any society is the family; therefore, the government should foster and protect its integrity. 27. The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest. 28. The United States has a manifest destiny to be an example and a blessing to the entire human race.

You may have control of your life, but you cannot control your environment. You cannot control the economy, trends, family circumstances, accidents, unexpected expenses, and the weather of life. You cannot control other people and their moods, personal situations, or issues. You cannot control biases or changes in your industry of choice. You cannot even control jealousy and envy in others. However, you can control your own STRENGTH to get back up and START AGAIN. Destiny is manifested only through action. You cannot be the captain of your own destiny, only the sailor, because we cannot control external influences that may alter the stability or direction of our ships. Once you understand this basic principle, you won't be so hard on yourself when things don't go your way. If man could write his own fate, he would have designed his journey to be without obstacles. Yet all obstacles come with valuable lessons designed just for you and only you. Suffering is imposed on us time and again so that one day we would become brave wise masters. Faith keeps our ships moving, while empathy and the memories of our experiences lead to wisdom.

The American economy is less productive today than it was in the postwar period, when unions were at peak strength.

The relationship between any two communities in the global economy is not unlike a marriage. As couples counselors advise, relationships falter when two partners are too interdependent. When any stress affecting one partner - the loss of a job, an illness, a bad-hair day - brings down the other, the couple suffers. A much healthier relationship is grounded in the relative strength of each partner, who each should have his or her own interests, hobbies, friends, and professional identity, so that when anything goes wrong, the couple can support one another from a position of strength. Our ability to love, like our ability to produce, must be grounded in our own security. And our economy, like our love, when it comes from a place of community, can grow without limit.

Trying to get through life on your own limited strength, knowledge, and resources leads to futility and a loss of hope. But in God’s economy, getting to the end of yourself is the beginning of hope.

Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent.

The strength of a balancing feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength, the feedbacks have to be strengthened too. A thermostat system may work fine on a cold winter day—but open all the windows and its corrective power is no match for the temperature change imposed on the system. Democracy works better without the brainwashing power of centralized mass communications. Traditional controls on fishing were sufficient until sonar spotting and drift nets and other technologies made it possible for a few actors to catch the last fish. The power of big industry calls for the power of big government to hold it in check; a global economy makes global regulations necessary.

You may have control of your life, but you cannot control your environment. You cannot control the economy, trends, family circumstances, accidents, unexpected expenses, and the weather of life. You cannot control other people and their moods, personal situations, or issues. You cannot control biases or changes in your industry of choice. You cannot control jealousy and envy in others. Unfortunately you cannot control everything. However, you can control your own STRENGTH to get back up and START AGAIN.

Freedom without the strength to support it and, if need be, defend it, would be a cruel delusion. And the strength to defend freedom can itself only come from widespread industrialisation and the infusion of modern science and technology into the country's economic life.

We will never take our places as “more than overcomers” with nothing to overcome. We will never be victors without opponents. As we will continue to see in our journey, God gave the Israelites the Promised Land but told them they’d have to take what was theirs in fierce battle. Why? Probably one reason was so they’d develop the strength to keep it once they conquered it. Surely another was to let them experience the thrill of victory that only a battle hard fought can bring. In God’s economy, much of what is worth having is proved worth fighting for.

In a country riven by quarrels, Hamilton produced a vision of harmonious parts. Agriculture and commerce were mutually beneficial. North and south, the western frontier and the eastern seaboard, enjoyed complementary economies. The only thing needed to capitalize on these strengths was national unity.

The bow cannot be always bent without fear of breaking. Repose is as needful to the mind as sleep to the body. . . . Rest time is not waste time. It is economy to gather fresh strength. . . . It is wisdom to take occasional furlough. In the long run, we shall do more by sometimes doing less. Charles Spurgeon

GDP doesn’t register, as Robert Kennedy put it, “the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate.” GDP measures everything, Kennedy concluded, “except that which makes life worthwhile.” Nor does GDP take into account unpaid work, the so-called compassionate economy.

Malcolm Gladwell put it best: "Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head -- even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

The strengths of social interaction and the flows of information exchange are greatest between terminal units (that is, between individuals) and systematically decrease up the hierarchy of group structures from families and other groups to increasingly larger clusters, leading to superlinear scaling, increasing returns, and an accelerating pace of life.

The human cognitive weaknesses a genie tries to mitigate are the golem’s strengths. Confirmation bias tricks like cherry-picking, motivated skepticism, and motivated reasoning benefit hugely from economies of scale, as the snappiest and most convincing articulations of the sacred ideas spread quickly through the system. Individual biases, all pointing in the same direction in an Echo Chamber, scale up to make the golem’s ultra-biased macro-mind. And while individual minds inside a golem may have doubts about the sacred ideas, the social pressure of Echo Chamber culture keeps the giant as a whole steadfast in its beliefs. If the genie is the ultimate Scientist, the golem is the ultimate Zealot—a giant that’s totally certain of itself, totally unable to learn or change its mind, and worse at thinking than the average human.

The Millennials, as a result, are less likely to be divided or even torn asunder by the culture wars of the boomer generation. They will live naturally with diversity. They will accept a more activist government. They will be more attuned to environmental needs. All this points in the direction of the mindful economy, if the healing strengths of the Millennial generation’s tolerance and optimism are mobilized for collective political action. What,

Shiny new real estate may dress up a declining city, but it doesn’t solve its underlying problems. The hallmark of declining cities is that they have too much housing and infrastructure relative to the strength of their economies. With all that supply of structure and so little demand, it makes no sense to use public money to build more supply. The folly of building-centric urban renewal reminds us that cities aren’t structures; cities are people.

On one hand the Christian missionaries sought to convert the heathen, by fire and sword if need be, to the gospel of peace, brotherhood, and heavenly beatitude; on the other, the more venturesome spirits wished to throw off the constraining traditions and customs, and begin life afresh, levelling distinctions of class, eliminating superfluities and luxuries, privileges and distinctions, and hierarchical rank. In short, to go back to the Stone Ages, before the institutions of Bronze Age civilization had crystallized. Though the Western hemisphere was indeed inhabited, and many parts of it were artfully cultivated, so much of it was so sparsely occupied that the European thought of it as a virgin continent against whose wildness he pitted his manly strength. In one mood the European invaders preached the Christian gospel to the native idolaters, subverted them with strong liquors, forced them to cover their nakedness with clothes, and worked them to an early death in mines; in another, the pioneer himself took on the ways of the North American Indian, adopted his leather costume, and reverted to the ancient paleolithic economy: hunting, fishing, gathering shellfish and berries, revelling in the wilderness and its solitude, defying orthodox law and order, and yet, under pressure, improvising brutal substitutes. The beauty of that free life still haunted Audubon in his old age.

If the people merely have the right to vote, but no right of extensive participation, in other words, if they are awakened only at election time but go into hibernation afterwards, this is token democracy. Reviewing our experience with people's democracy since the founding of the PRC, we have made it clear that in such a vast and populous socialist country, extensive deliberation under the leadership of the CPC on major issues affecting the economy and the people's quality of life embodies the unity of democracy and centralism. Chinese socialist democracy takes two important forms: in one the people exercise their right to vote in elections, and in the other, people from all sectors of society undertake extensive deliberations before major decisions are made. In China, these two forms do not cancel one another out, nor are they contradictory; they are complimentary. They constitute institutional features and strengths of Chinese socialist democracy.

Probably no single event highlights the strength of Campbell’s argument (on peak oil) better than the rapid development of the Alberta tar sands. Bitumen, the world’s ugliest and most expensive hydrocarbon, can never be a reasonable substitute for light oil due to its extreme capital, energy, and carbon intensity. Bitumen looks, smells, and behaves like asphalt; running an economy on it is akin to digging up our existing road infrastructure, melting it down, and enriching the goop with hydrogen until it becomes a sulfur-rich but marketable oil.

That law of nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits; it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power. The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in augmenting animal existence.

Victory always assumes a counterpart defeat. We will never take our places as “more than overcomers” with nothing to overcome. We will never be victors without opponents. As we will continue to see in our journey, God gave the Israelites the Promised Land but told them they’d have to take what was theirs in fierce battle. Why? Probably one reason was so they’d develop the strength to keep it once they conquered it. Surely another was to let them experience the thrill of victory that only a battle hard fought can bring. In God’s economy, much of what is worth having is proved worth fighting for.

The principles of war are the same as those of a siege. Fire must be concentrated on one point, and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.' Subsequent military theory has put the accent on the first clause instead of on the last: in particular, on the words 'one point' instead of on the word 'equilibrium'. The former is but a physical metaphor, whereas the latter expresses the actual psychological result which ensures 'that the rest is nothing'. His own emphasis can be traced in the strategic course of his campaigns. The word 'point' even, has been the source of much confusion, and more controversy. One school has argued that Napoleon meant that the concentrated blow must be aimed at the enemy's strongest point, on the ground that this, and this only, ensures decisive results. For if the enemy's main resistance be broken, its rupture will involve that of any lesser opposition. This argument ignores the factor of cost, and the fact that the victor may be too exhausted to exploit his success-so that even a weaker opponent may acquire a relatively higher resisting power than the original. The other school-better imbued with the idea of economy of force, but only in the limited sense of first costs-has contended that the offensive should be aimed at the enemy's weakest point. But where a point is obviously weak this is usually because it is remote from any vital artery or nerve centre, or because it is deliberately weak to draw the assailant into a trap. Here, again illumination comes from the actual campaign in which Bonaparte put this maxim into execution. It clearly suggests that what he really meant was not 'point', but 'joint'-and that at this stage of his career he was too firmly imbued with the idea of economy of force to waste his limited strength in battering at the enemy's strong point. A joint, however, is both vital and vulnerable. It was at this time too, that Bonaparte used another phrase that has subsequently been quoted to justify the most foolhardy concentrations of effort against the main armed forces of the enemy. 'Austria is our most determined enemy....Austria overthrown, Spain and Italy fall of themselves. We must not disperse our attacks but concentrate them.' But the full text of the memorandum containing this phrase shows that he was arguing, not in support of the direct attack upon Austria, but for using the army on the frontier of Piedmont for an indirect approach to Austria.

Employment of this concept of surfaces and gaps, then, gives us many advantages over what could be called slower moving forms of combat, where strength is thrown against strength. Attacking through gaps, avoiding surfaces, gives us an advantage of economy of force. If we are pitting strength against strength, assaulting enemy strong points, we are consuming our manpower as well as ammunition and supplies as we go along. If we go through the gaps, we are practicing economy of force. We are reaching our objective without using up our men. We are leaving the enemy behind. Because we are moving faster, we have the advantage of rapid exploitation.

To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.

It could be argued that one of democracy’s greatest weaknesses is the ability to reform itself. Reform of democracy must, however, be at the heart of a successful plan to improve economic growth and global prosperity. So far this chapter has detailed how the democratic system inherently contains incentives for policymakers to implement bad policy choices that undermine long-term economic success. Nevertheless, as we seek solutions to remedy democracy’s failings, we should acknowledge that politicians in a liberal democracy need not be malicious or even inept to fall prey to short-term thinking. They are wholly rational actors—responding to voters, succumbing to media pressure, and battling to stay in office, even if it means they do so at the expense of the economy’s longer-term success. When democracy works, it delivers economic growth and fundamental freedoms in a way that no other system can. And when it fails, it is rarely, if ever, replaced by a system that can do a better job of delivering for its population. Therefore, creating growth requires that we preserve democratic capitalism’s core strengths—freedom, efficient markets, transparency, and correctly constructed incentives—and reform its weaknesses. Something must be done to remedy the political class’s severe case of myopia, correcting the mismatch between long-term economic challenges and election cycles, safeguarding independent economic choices from political pressures, and eliminating dysfunction and gridlock.

In 2004, fifty years after Brown, “not a single African American earned a Ph.D. in astronomy or astrophysics,” according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. In fact, of the 2,100 Ph.Ds. awarded in forty-three different fields in the natural sciences, not one of these doctoral degrees went to an African American.132 The refusal to implement Brown throughout the South even in the face of Sputnik—not only as the law or as simple humanity might have dictated but also as demanded by national interest and patriotism—compromised and undermined American strength. Now, in the twenty-first century, the sector of the U.S. economy that accounts for more than 50 percent of our sustained economic expansion, science and engineering, is relying on an ever-dwindling skilled and educated workforce.

Unfortunately, the critics of economics have had a tendency to discuss the whole structure as a tissue of misconceptions. It is a critique that fails. The strength of economics is its considerable, if far from complete, understanding of the flows and comparative advantages that underlie trade, jobs, capital and incomes, and the logic of optimising behaviour, all backed by glittering accomplishment in mathematics. That makes it a powerful analytical instrument, so that just a few misconceptions – such as a failure to understand the informal economy or resource depletion – have leverage: like a baby monkey at the controls of a Ferrari, they can turn it into an instrument with extraordinarily destructive potential. If it were a tissue of errors, it would not be dangerous: it is its 90 percent brilliance which makes it so.

Our safety lies in repentance. Our strength comes of obedience to the commandments of God. My beloved brethren and sisters, I accept this opportunity in humility. I pray that I may be guided by the Spirit of the Lord in that which I say. I have just been handed a note that says that a U.S. missile attack is under way. I need not remind you that we live in perilous times. I desire to speak concerning these times and our circumstances as members of this Church. You are acutely aware of the events of September 11, less than a month ago. Out of that vicious and ugly attack we are plunged into a state of war. It is the first war of the 21st century. The last century has been described as the most war-torn in human history. Now we are off on another dangerous undertaking, the unfolding of which and the end thereof we do not know. For the first time since we became a nation, the United States has been seriously attacked on its mainland soil. But this was not an attack on the United States alone. It was an attack on men and nations of goodwill everywhere. It was well planned, boldly executed, and the results were disastrous. It is estimated that more than 5,000 innocent people died. Among these were many from other nations. It was cruel and cunning, an act of consummate evil. Recently, in company with a few national religious leaders, I was invited to the White House to meet with the president. In talking to us he was frank and straightforward. That same evening he spoke to the Congress and the nation in unmistakable language concerning the resolve of America and its friends to hunt down the terrorists who were responsible for the planning of this terrible thing and any who harbored such. Now we are at war. Great forces have been mobilized and will continue to be. Political alliances are being forged. We do not know how long this conflict will last. We do not know what it will cost in lives and treasure. We do not know the manner in which it will be carried out. It could impact the work of the Church in various ways. Our national economy has been made to suffer. It was already in trouble, and this has compounded the problem. Many are losing their employment. Among our own people, this could affect welfare needs and also the tithing of the Church. It could affect our missionary program. We are now a global organization. We have members in more than 150 nations. Administering this vast worldwide program could conceivably become more difficult. Those of us who are American citizens stand solidly with the president of our nation. The terrible forces of evil must be confronted and held accountable for their actions. This is not a matter of Christian against Muslim. I am pleased that food is being dropped to the hungry people of a targeted nation. We value our Muslim neighbors across the world and hope that those who live by the tenets of their faith will not suffer. I ask particularly that our own people do not become a party in any way to the persecution of the innocent. Rather, let us be friendly and helpful, protective and supportive. It is the terrorist organizations that must be ferreted out and brought down. We of this Church know something of such groups. The Book of Mormon speaks of the Gadianton robbers, a vicious, oath-bound, and secret organization bent on evil and destruction. In their day they did all in their power, by whatever means available, to bring down the Church, to woo the people with sophistry, and to take control of the society. We see the same thing in the present situation.

Economies can be rebuilt, armies can be repopulated, but once a nation’s pride is gone it can almost never be restored. The loss of a nation’s honor is something not even centuries can repair. The next president must love America. The next president must embody unequivocally everything that is good about this country going back to its founding. The next president must be the exact opposite of Barack Obama. He must be a man of high character and strong commitment to American values, because he will be facing problems and issues that no U.S. leader has had to face since the years leading up to World War II. In the late 1930s—only a few years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—our economy was still trying to recover from the Great Depression in the face of the policies of a big-government president, our military had been depleted, and our enemies were gathering strength and threatening war on many fronts.

Let us examine another aspect of the question: it is not only obvious that German culture is declining, but adequate reasons for this decline are not lacking. After all, nobody can spend more than he has: — this is true of individuals, it is also true of nations. If you spend your strength in acquiring power, or in politics on a large scale, or in economy, or in universal commerce, or in parliamentarism, or in military interests — if you dissipate the modicum of reason, of earnestness, of will, and of self-control that constitutes your nature in one particular fashion, you cannot dissipate it in another. Culture and the state — let no one be deceived on this point — are antagonists: A “culture-state” is merely a modern idea. The one lives upon the other, the one flourishes at the expense of the other. All great periods of culture have been periods of political decline; that which is great from the standpoint of culture, was always unpolitical — even anti-political. Goethe’s heart opened at the coming of Napoleon — it closed at the thought of the “Wars of Liberation".

Determinism is appealing because it implies that our world and our beliefs are a natural and inevitable product of history. It is natural and inevitable that we live in nation states, organise our economy along capitalist principles, and fervently believe in human rights. To acknowledge that history is not deterministic is to acknowledge that it is just a coincidence that most people today believe in nationalism, capitalism and human rights. History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. So many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of the forces and the way they interact produce huge differences in outcomes. Not only that, but history is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system. Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system. Though it is influenced by myriad factors, we can build computer models that take more and more of them into consideration, and produce better and better weather forecasts.

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it.

If you’ll allow me to stretch this metaphor, we could say that Old Survivor was too weird or too difficult to proceed easily toward the sawmill. In that way, the tree provides me with an image of “resistance-in-place.” To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual. In an environment completely geared toward capitalist appropriation of even our smallest thoughts, doing this isn’t any less uncomfortable than wearing the wrong outfit to a place with a dress code. As I’ll show in various examples of past refusals-in-place, to remain in this state takes commitment, discipline, and will. Doing nothing is hard.

To observe the kingdom of Scotland in 1513 in terms of the strength of the Crown, its relations with its magnates, the quality and administration of its justice, its economy, foreign relations, culture and religious life, is to see a community at some remove from the leaderless country inherited by James I in 1424; yet it is also to see a country still strongly tied to its ancient traditions, customs and ethnic divisions which it either could not, or would not, abandon. By 1513 the Crown was strong, popular, its position in society unassailable. It had both sought and obtained the co-operation of its nobility who were themselves closely bound together by bonds of alliance, and whose status in society was recognised by the strength and closeness its kin groups. It had introduced some useful, constructive statutes and had strengthened its legal procedures. It had sought to inform its legal officers of the body of the law. New and more efficient methods of land registration and of royal revenue collection had been the direct result of the reorganisation of the Chancery, the Exchequer, and of the Secretariat of the Privy Seal. Its economy was buoyant enough to enable a protected merchant class to trade modestly with the Baltic states through Denmark, with Southern Europe through its Staple in Flanders, with England and France. Through its many embassies abroad it pursued, as far as possible, constructive peace treaties with the major European powers.

Hoover was deeply respected by both parties. In 1928, the Republicans nominated him for president. In his acceptance speech, delivered at the height of prosperity, Hoover proclaimed that Americans were “nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” His profound belief in individualism, voluntarism, and the fundamental strength of the American economy blinded him from realizing, until too late, that government had to exert a primary role in helping people through what was fast becoming the worst Depression the country had ever known. At the slightest uptick in the stock market, Hoover believed and summarily proclaimed that the worst was over. When the economy continued to flounder, he came under blistering assault. Still, he would not admit that voluntary activities had failed. He adopted a bunker mentality, refusing to countenance the worsening situation. By contrast, Roosevelt had adapted all his life to changing circumstances. The routine of his placid childhood had been disrupted forever by his father’s heart attack and eventual death. Told he would never walk again, he had experimented with one method after another to improve his mobility. So now, as Roosevelt campaigned for the presidency, he built on his own long encounter with adversity: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

It was the economy that troubled most people prior to World War II. Europe, especially Germany, was dealing with a deep worldwide depression. Fascism was gaining a stronghold in Germany as well as in many other European countries. Although small and generally not popular, the Communist Party was the only organized group to stand in opposition to the Nazis. Small bands of these Communists occasionally attempted to disrupt the government by rioting in the streets. Occasionally gunfire would be heard, but very little could be done about it by a people that did not want to get involved. Hitler’s “Brown Shirts” were rapidly solidifying their position, and the Nazi Party was becoming stronger. Even though they frequently violated the National Constitution, they brought order to what had been chaos. The Treaty of Versailles, enacted after World War I, was hated by the German people, who felt that it suppressed them in a most demeaning way. However now Hitler was putting people to work building cars and an autobahn highway system that connected the larger cities. Modernization of airports and the development of a national railroad were all in violation of the imposed international regulations. Workers were again bringing paychecks home and could once more feed their families. Therefore, little thought was given to Hitler’s power grab. Germany was emerging from the dark era following World War I, and things were getting better. The Vaterland was regaining its strength, without regard to what France and other European countries thought.... After all, what could they, or would they, do about it?

Necessary because it could not be suppressed, this role of poverty was necessary too because it made wealth possible. Because they labor and consume little, those who are in need permit a nation to enrich itself, to set a high value on its fields, its colonies, and its mines, to manufacture products which will be sold the world over; in short, a people would be poor which had no paupers. Indigence becomes an indispensable element in the State. In it is concealed the secret but also the real life of a society. The poor constitute the basis and the glory of nations. And their poverty, which cannot be suppressed, must be exalted and revered: "My purpose is merely to attract a share of that vigilant attention [that of the government] to the suffering portion of the People...; the succor it is owed derives essentially from the honor and the prosperity of an Empire, of which the Poor are everywhere the firmest support, for a sovereign cannot preserve and extend his realm without favoring the population, the cultivation of the Land, the Arts, and commerce; and the Poor are the necessary agents of these great powers which establish the true strength of a People." Here is an entire moral rehabilitation of the Pauper, which designates, at a deeper level, a social and economic reintegration of his role and character. In the mercantilist economy, the Pauper, being neither producer nor consumer, had no place: idle, vagabond, unemployed, he belonged only to confinement, a measure by which he was exiled and as it were abstracted from society. With the nascent industry which needs manpower, he once again plays a part in the body of the nation.

Victorious in World War I, the ruling powers of France and the United Kingdom spent the 1920s rebuilding their economies and military strength, while Germany remained subordinate, its power stunted by the punitive conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty demanded severe economic reparations and imposed tight constraints on the German military, prohibiting it from having planes, tanks, and any more than 100,000 troops. Germany was forced to surrender its overseas colonies as well as 13 percent of its European territory (and 10 percent of its population), and to submit to Allied occupation of its industrial core, the Rhineland.125 Most damaging to German pride was the “war guilt” clause, which laid blame for the war squarely on Germany. While “bitterly resented by almost all Germans,”126 the so-called “slave treaty”127 nevertheless “left the Reich geographically and economically largely intact and preserved her political unity and her potential strength as a great nation.”128 Only twenty years after the Great War, Adolf Hitler would use that strength in a second attempt to overturn the European order. Hitler “focused relentlessly” on bringing about Germany’s rise.129 After his National Socialist Party won elections in 1933, Hitler moved to consolidate his power through extra-democratic means. He justified himself with a call to marshal “all German national energies” toward the singular objective of rearmament to secure his vision of Lebensraum for the German people: “He wanted the whole of central Europe and all of Russia, up to the Volga for German Lebensraum to secure Germany’s self-sufficiency and status as a great power,” as Paul Kennedy puts it.130

Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

The real improvements then must come, to a considerable extent, from the local communities themselves. We need local revision of our methods of land use and production. We need to study and work together to reduce scale, reduce overhead, reduce industrial dependencies; we need to market and process local products locally; we need to bring local economies into harmony with local ecosystems so that we can live and work with pleasure in the same places indefinitely; we need to substitute ourselves, our neighborhoods, our local resources, for expensive imported goods and services; we need to increase cooperation among all local economic entities: households, farms, factories, banks, consumers, and suppliers. If. we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people. And we must not do this by inviting destructive industries to provide "jobs" to the community; we must do it by fostering economic democracy. For example, as much as possible the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms, and then processed in small, non- polluting plants that are locally owned. We must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country. In that way, we will put local capital to work locally, not to exploit and destroy the land but to use it well. This is not work just for the privileged, the well-positioned, the wealthy, and the powerful. It is work for everybody. I acknowledge that to advocate such reforms is to advocate a kind of secession-not a secession of armed violence but a quiet secession by which people find the practical means and the strength of spirit to remove themselves from an economy that is exploiting and destroying their homeland. The great, greedy, indifferent national and international economy is killing rural America, just as it is killing America's cities--it is killing our country. Experience has shown that there is no use in appealing to this economy for mercy toward the earth or toward any human community. All true patriots must find ways of opposing it. --1991

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it. Although my novel focuses on fictional characters, Elsa Martinelli is representative of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who went west in the 1930s in search of a better life. Many of them, like the pioneers who went west one hundred years before them, brought nothing more than a will to survive and a hope for a better future. Their strength and courage were remarkable. In writing this story, I tried to present the history as truthfully as possible. The strike that takes place in the novel is fictional, but it is based on strikes that took place in California in the thirties. The town of Welty is fictional as well. Primarily where I diverged from the historical record was in the timeline of events. There are instances in which I chose to manipulate dates to better fit my fictional narrative. I apologize in advance to historians and scholars of the era. For more information about the Dust Bowl years or the migrant experience in California, please go to my website KristinHannah.com for a suggested reading list.

Ionic is the ‘opposites attract’ chemical bond,” Elizabeth explained as she emerged from behind the counter and began to sketch on an easel. “For instance, let’s say you wrote your PhD thesis on free market economics, but your husband rotates tires for a living. You love each other, but he’s probably not interested in hearing about the invisible hand. And who can blame him, because you know the invisible hand is libertarian garbage.” She looked out at the audience as various people scribbled notes, several of which read “Invisible hand: libertarian garbage.” “The point is, you and your husband are completely different and yet you still have a strong connection. That’s fine. It’s also ionic.” She paused, lifting the sheet of paper over the top of the easel to reveal a fresh page of newsprint. “Or perhaps your marriage is more of a covalent bond,” she said, sketching a new structural formula. “And if so, lucky you, because that means you both have strengths that, when combined, create something even better. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine, what do we get? Water—or H2O as it’s more commonly known. In many respects, the covalent bond is not unlike a party—one that’s made better thanks to the pie you made and the wine he brought. Unless you don’t like parties—I don’t—in which case you could also think of the covalent bond as a small European country, say Switzerland. Alps, she quickly wrote on the easel, + a Strong Economy = Everybody Wants to Live There. In a living room in La Jolla, California, three children fought over a toy dump truck, its broken axle lying directly adjacent to a skyscraper of ironing that threatened to topple a small woman, her hair in curlers, a small pad of paper in her hands. Switzerland, she wrote. Move. “That brings us to the third bond,” Elizabeth said, pointing at another set of molecules, “the hydrogen bond—the most fragile, delicate bond of all. I call this the ‘love at first sight’ bond because both parties are drawn to each other based solely on visual information: you like his smile, he likes your hair. But then you talk and discover he’s a closet Nazi and thinks women complain too much. Poof. Just like that the delicate bond is broken. That’s the hydrogen bond for you, ladies—a chemical reminder that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are.” She walked

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past — Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens — inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black. And they reason: “I cannot live unless I do evil. So I’ll set my father against my brother! I’ll drink the victim’s sufferings until I’m drunk with them!” Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate. But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble — and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology — that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago. There was a rumor going the rounds between 1918 and 1920 that the Petrograd Cheka, headed by Uritsky, and the Odessa Cheka, headed by Deich, did not shoot all those condemned to death but fed some of them alive to the animals in the city zoos. I do not know whether this is truth or calumny, or, if there were any such cases, how many there were. But I wouldn’t set out to look for proof, either. Following the practice of the bluecaps, I would propose that they prove to us that this was impossible. How else could they get food for the zoos in those famine years? Take it away from the working class? Those enemies were going to die anyway, so why couldn’t their deaths support the zoo economy of the Republic and thereby assist our march into the future? Wasn’t it expedient? That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.

The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained” German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization. Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively. Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone. Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment.” They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions. Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation” for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor. Mason’s fourth form of “containment”—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute. These various techniques of social control were successful.

Speech to the German Folk January 30, 1944 Without January 30, 1933, and without the National Socialist revolution, without the tremendous domestic cleansing and construction efforts, there would be no factor today that could oppose the Bolshevik colossus. After all, Germany was itself so ill at the time, so weakened by the spreading Jewish infection, that it could hardly think of overcoming the Bolshevik danger at home, not to mention abroad. The economic ruin brought about by the Jews as in other countries, the unemployment of millions of Germans, the destruction of peasantry, trade, and industry only prepared the way for the planned internal collapse. This was furthered by support for the continued existence of a senseless state of classes, which could only serve to transform the reason of the masses into hatred in order to make them the willing instrument of the Bolshevik revolution. By mobilizing the proletarian slaves, the Jews hoped that, following the destruction of the national intelligentsia, they could all the more reduce them for good to coolies. But even if this process of the Bolshevik revolt in the interior of Germany had not led to complete success, the state with its democratic Weimar constitution would have been reduced to something ridiculously helpless in view of the great tasks of current world politics. In order to be armed for this confrontation, not only the problems of political power but also the social and economic problems had to be resolved. When National Socialism undertook the realization of its program eleven years ago, it managed just in time to build up a state that did not only have the strength at home but also the power abroad to fulfill the same European mission which first Greece fulfilled in antiquity by opposing the Persians, then Rome [by opposing] the Carthaginians, and the Occident in later centuries by opposing the invasions from the east. Therefore, in the year 1933, we set ourselves four great tasks among many others. On their resolution depended not only the future of the Reich but also the rescue of Europe, perhaps even of the entire human civilization: 1. The Reich had to regain the internal social peace that it had lost by resolving the social questions. That meant that the elements of a division into classes bourgeoisie and proletariat-had to be eliminated in their various manifestations and be replaced by a Volksgemeinschaft. The appeal to reason had to be supplemented by the merciless eradication of the base elements of resistance in all camps. 2. The social and political unification of the nation had to be supplemented by a national, political one. This meant that the body of the Reich, which was not only politically, but also governmentally divided, had to be replaced by a unified National Socialist state, the construction and leadership of which were suited to oppose and withstand even the heaviest attacks and severest tests of the future. 3. The nationally and politically coherent centralized state had the mission of immediately creating a Wehrmacht, whose ideology, moral attitude, numerical strength, and material equipment could serve as an instrument of self-assertion. After the outside world had rejected all German offers for a limitation of armament, the Reich had to fashion its own armament accordingly. 4. In order to secure its continued existence in Europe with the prospect of actual success, it was necessary to integrate all those countries which were inhabited by Germans, or were areas which had belonged to the German Reich for over a thousand years and which, in terms of their national substance and economy, were indispensable to the preservation of the Reich, that is, for its political and military defense. Only the resolution of all these tasks could result in the creation of that state which was capable, at home and abroad, of waging the fight for its defense and for the preservation of the European family of nations.

Along with the booming economy, which after 1962 seemed capable of almost anything, the magnified mystique of the presidency stimulated ever-greater expectations among liberals and others who imagined that government possessed big answers to big problems. The revolution of popular expectations, a central dynamic of the 1960s, owed a good deal of its strength to the glorification of presidential activism that Kennedy successfully sought to foment.

Resolving these problems by a common code of behavior is the only way to make the multinational what it should and could be: a powerful instrument for economic strength and political harmony. The problems are largely political and legal. But they are problems which it is the duty—and the opportunity—of top management in the multinationals to think through. Otherwise, it is safe to predict, political solutions will be imposed on the multinationals which can only damage them and the world economy.

Community has become a buzzword in the church in recent years. Overbusy individuals hope they can cram it into their overstuffed schedules like their membership to a health and fitness club (which they never have time to use). Churches hope they can conjure it with candles, programs, or training videos. Anabaptists know that community is far more costly than that: one cannot add it to anything, rather one must begin with it in order to enter it, practice it, and preserve it. They realize that community involves proximity, and that proximity involves land, and that our ties to one another can never be separated from our ties to the land, the watershed, the local economy in which we live. They have an instinct about the deep ties between community and sexuality, community and freedom, community and economics. I suspect that Anabaptists know more than they know that they know in this regard, and I hope we all can learn from them before they forget.101

General Gerardo Machado always had an eye for the ladies and enjoyed partying at the swankiest nightclubs in Havana. For a time he even owned his own club, which was the place for his political hacks to be seen. Machado was frequently there in the company of some of the most enticing ladies in the country. Through a combination of threats and bribery, he maintained control of the Army. In April of 1928 the Cuban Congress at the behest of Machado passed a law barring any presidential nominations by any party other than the Liberal, Conservative and Popular parties. Interestingly enough Machado declared himself the only legal candidate for those parties, and thus ran for a second term unopposed. Not only had he overspent money from the national treasury, but now he also alienated the Cuban public, who denounced him as an authoritarian nationalist and tyrant. Students, labor unions and intellectuals branded him an outright dictator. It was during this time that Marxist thinking was gaining strength throughout the world. The Communist philosophy was also becoming ever more popular among intellectuals, professors and students at the Universidad de La Havana. Realizing that he was now in danger of losing control, Machado made a power grab and declared Martial Law in Cuba. Intent on holding on to power, he became even more despotic than ever, creating a secret police known to the people as La Porra, meaning a big stick! As President, Machado became openly vindictive and did not hesitate to torture or even assassinate his foes in order to maintain tight sway over the Cuban population. With the Great Depression of 1928, things only got worse. The economy, which was single-sided, was extremely dependent upon sugar. Poverty was widespread, and even necessities all but disappeared, leaving the Cuban people destitute and in misery.

It was the economy that troubled most people prior to World War II. Europe, especially Germany, was dealing with a deep worldwide depression. Fascism was gaining a stronghold in Germany as well as in many other European countries. Although small and generally not popular, the Communist Party was the only organized group to stand in opposition to the Nazis. Small bands of these Communists occasionally attempted to disrupt the government by rioting in the streets. Occasionally gunfire would be heard, but very little could be done about it by a people that did not want to get involved. Hitler’s “Brown Shirts” were rapidly solidifying their position, and the Nazi Party was becoming stronger. Even though they frequently violated the National Constitution, they brought order to what had been chaos. The Treaty of Versailles, enacted after World War I, was hated by the German people, who felt that it suppressed them in a most demeaning way. Now however, Hitler was putting people to work building cars and an autobahn highway system that connected the larger cities. Modernization of airports and the development of a national railroad were all in violation of the imposed international regulations. Now however, workers were bringing paychecks home and could once again feed their families. Therefore, little thought was given to Hitler’s power grab. Germany was emerging from the dark era following World War I, and things were getting better. The Vaterland was regaining its strength, without regard to what France and other European countries thought.... After all, what could they, or would they, do about it?

Page 7: (H)e (Darwin) supposed that man, before he even emerged from apedom, was already a social being, living in small scattered communities. Evolution in his eyes was carried out mainly as a struggle between communities - team against team, tribe against tribe. Inside each team or tribe, the 'ethical cosmos' [the dual code of Amity and Enmity] was at work, forging and strengthening the social bonds which made the members of such a team a co-operative whole. … Thus, in the early stages of human evolution we find competition and co-operation as constituent elements of the evolutionary process … Co-operation and unity give strength to a team or tribe; but why did neighboring tribes refuse so stubbornly to amalgamate? If united, they would have got rid of competition and struggle. Why do human tribes instinctively repel every thought of amalgamation, and prize above all things independence, the control of their destiny, their sovereignty? Here we have to look beneath the surface of things and formulate a theory to explain tribal behavior. How does a tribe fulfill an evolutionary purpose? A tribe is a 'corporate body,' which Nature has entrusted with an assortment of human seed or genes, the assortment differing in some degree from that entrusted to every other tribe. If the genes are to work out their evolutionary effects, then it is necessary that the tribe or corporation should maintain its integrity through an infinity of generations. If a tribe loses its integrity by a slackening of social bonds, or by disintegration of the parental instincts, or by lack of courage or of skill to defend itself from the aggression of neighboring tribes, or by free interbreeding with neighbors and thus scattering its genes, then that tribe as an evolutionary venture has come to an untimely end. For evolutionary purposes it has proved a failure. Page 25: Tribalism was Nature's method in bringing about the evolution of man. I have already explained what a tribe really is - a corporation of human beings entrusted with a certain capital of genes. The business of such a corporation is to nurse and develop its stock of genes - to bring them to an evolutionary fruition. To reach such an end a tribal corporation had to comply with two conditions: (1) it had to endure for a long age; (2) it had to remain intact and separate from all neighboring and competing tribes. Human nature was fashioned or evolved just to secure these two conditions - continuity through time and separation in space. Hence the duality of man's nature - the good, social, or virtuous traits serving intratribal economy; the evil, vicious, or antisocial qualities serving the intertribal economy and the policy of keeping its genes apart. Human nature is the basal part of the machinery used for the evolution of man. When you know the history of our basal mentality - one fitted for tribal life - do you wonder at the disorder and turmoil which now afflict the detribalized part of the world?

Think of the last 150 years as a three-act drama. In Act I, the Industrial Age, massive factories and efficient assembly lines powered the economy. The lead character in this act was the mass production worker, whose cardinal traits were physical strength and personal fortitude. In Act II, the Information Age, the United States and other nations began to evolve. Mass production faded into the background, while information and knowledge fueled the economies of the developed world. The central figure in this act was the knowledge worker, whose defining characteristic was proficiency in L-Directed Thinking. Now, as the forces of Abundance, Asia, and Automation deepen and intensify, the curtain is rising on Act III. Call this act the Conceptual Age. The main characters now are the creator and the empathizer, whose distinctive ability is mastery of R-Directed Thinking.

Page 61-2 ... Rome expanded rapidly ... and became master over the entire Mediterranean Basin. It then had unlimited resources in terms of land, money, and slaves. It collected taxes or tribute throughout its empire and was able to transfer to the central capital massive quantities of foodstuffs and manufactured items. The peasants and the artisans of Italy saw their economic base disappear as this Mediterranean economy was "globalized" by the political domination of Rome. The society was polarized between, on the one hand, a mass of economically useless plebeians and, on the other, a predatory plutocracy. A minority gorged with wealth oversaw the remaining proletarianized population. The middle-classes collapsed, a process that brought about the end of the republic and the beginning of the political form known as "empire" in conformity with the observations made by Aristotle about the importance of intermediate social classes for the stability of political systems. Since one could not eliminate the plebeians, intractable but geographically central as they were, they came to be nourished and distracted at the empire's expense with "bread and circuses." Page 64-5: The positive American trade balance, when only "advanced technology" is counted, dropped from 35 billion dollars in 1990 to 5 billion in 2001 and had disappeared entirely to become one more element in the overall trade deficit in January 2002. This fall in economic strength is not compensated for by the activities of American-based multinationals. Since 1998 the profits that they bring back into the country amount to less than what foreign companies that have set up shop in the United States are taking back to their own countries. Page 68: In conformity with classical economic theory, the general opening up of commercial exchange has brought about an increase in inequality throughout the world. This general exchange tends to introduce into each country the same disparities in revenue that exist at the level of the whole planet. ... The compression of worker revenues caused by free trade revives the traditional dilemma of capitalism that has now spread across the globe: low salaries do not allow for the absorption of increases in production. Page 17: In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 percent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation's wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage.

Spiritual pride dies when we realize that all of our comparisons with others based on relative levels of apparent goodness count for nothing in terms of gaining us standing with God. What we may want God to account to our credit has no currency with him, because the economy of good works is dead.

More bad news for aerobic activity: Whether it’s running, cycling, or a step class, the main reason it gets easier the more you do it, is not because of improved cardiovascular conditioning, but because of improved economy of motion. For the most part, it doesn’t get easier because of muscular endurance, but because your body is becoming more efficient at that particular movement. You require less strength and oxygen than you did before, because your body’s nervous system is adapting. Wasted movements are eliminated, necessary movements are refined, and muscles that don’t need to be tensed are relaxed and eventually atrophied. This is why marathon runners will huff and puff if they cycle for the first time in years.

But the Scottish patron on tour took home with him from Italy much more than his cargo of paintings, sculptures and antique marbles, the tangible souvenirs of his excursion to the south. He took home as well a sophistication of taste and an appreciation of the virtues of classicism which only contact with the Mediterranean inheritance could impart. Only sixty years before the building of the pedimented façade of Duff House in Banff, with its urns and roof-line statuary more in keeping with a southern sky, the typical laird's house in Scotland was still inspired by an economy of display and a strength of fabric deriving from less settled times. The 18th century saw the transportation to Scotland of the idea of the Italian palace, and Hopetoun or Floors or Chatelherault owe their existence to this inspiration.

I need the economy of the country as a whole,” Wesley Mouch kept repeating. “I need the production of a nation.” “Is it economics that you’re talking about? Is it production?” she said, whenever her cold, measured voice was able to seize a brief stretch of their time. “If it is, then give us leeway to save the Eastern states. That’s all that’s left of the country—and of the world. If you let us save that, we’ll have a chance to rebuild the rest. If not, it’s the end. Let the Atlantic Southern take care of such transcontinental traffic as still exists. Let the local railroads take care of the Northwest. But let Taggart Transcontinental drop everything else—yes, everything—and devote all our resources, equipment and rail to the traffic of the Eastern states. Let us shrink back to the start of this country, but let us hold that start. We’ll run no trains west of the Missouri. We’ll become a local railroad—the local of the industrial East. Let us save our industries. There’s nothing left to save in the West. You can run agriculture for centuries by manual labor and oxcarts. But destroy the last of this country’s industrial plant—and centuries of effort won’t be able to rebuild it or to gather the economic strength to make a start. How do you expect our industries—or railroads—to survive without steel? How do you expect any steel to be produced if you cut off the supply of iron ore? Save Minnesota, whatever’s left of it. The country? You have no country to save, if its industries perish. You can sacrifice a leg or an arm. You can’t save a body by sacrificing its heart and brain. Save our industries. Save Minnesota. Save the Eastern Seaboard.

But some investors and analysts fret that given the strength of the trend toward greater passive investing, the market’s efficiency will gradually atrophy, with potentially dire consequences. “A given investment in active may or may not be the best decision for an individual particular investor but for the system overall there is a benefit in the efficient allocation of capital,” Fraser-Jenkins argued.21 “Rather than looking at the real economy and seeking to understand its future development, passive allocation self-referentially looks to the financial economy to inform its asset allocation choices.

Rest time is the waste time. It is economy to gather fresh strength.

I deeply admire the president’s determination to defy the small, poll-driven politics of our day to tackle big things. However, the gap between the singular focus of the campaign and his varied and ambitious agenda afterward undoubtedly sapped some of his political strength, leaving Americans wondering if he was truly focused on their concerns. You can’t take politics entirely out of the process. I don’t speak with the president as much anymore. With the campaigns over, our once-frequent conversations have slowed to a trickle. I miss them. And when I hear the thundering hooves of the Washington pundits and pols on a stampede to run him down, I feel for him. Hell, I bleed for him. The brutal midterm election of 2014 was another painful rebuke. Yet I know this: There are people who are alive today because of the health coverage he made possible. There are soldiers home with their families instead of halfway across the world. There are hundreds of thousands of autoworkers on the assembly line who would have been idled but for him, and the overall economy is in better shape than it has been in years. There are folks who are getting improved deals from their banks and mortgage lenders thanks to new rules in place and a new cop on the beat. There are gay and lesbian Americans who are, for the first time, free to defend their country without having to lie about who they are. There are women who have greater legal recourse when they’re paid less than the man doing the exact same job alongside them. There are families who can afford to send their kids to college because there is more aid available. Oh, and yes . . . just as he predicted in my conference room back in those wonderful, heady days when we first considered an audacious run for the presidency, millions of kids in our country today can dream bigger dreams because Barack Obama has blazed the trail for them.

Five important goals are listed below. If we can achieve these goals, in a context where robots are dramatically increasing productivity and doing more and more of the mindless work that wastes human potential, we will have an economy whose strength and growth defies imagination. How do we achieve these goals? Goal #1 - For the strongest possible economy, we need to create the largest possible pool of consumers, and those consumers need to have money to spend. Goal #2 - For the strongest possible economy, we need maximum economic stability. Every economic downturn has occurred when people stop spending money, either because they don't have money to spend through unemployment, or because they are afraid to let go of their money for fear of future unemployment. Consumers need to have confidence in the economy, both on the spending and the receiving ends of the equation. Goal #3 - For the strongest possible economy, we need to create the largest possible pool of innovators - people who create innovative new businesses, new inventions, new products, new art (films, music, etc.) and new intellectual property. Capitalism is strongest when new ideas are maximized. Goal #4 - For the strongest possible economy, we need for people to invest in these new ideas, both individually and in groups. An idea is nothing unless it is put into action. Without the money provided by investment, there can be no new businesses and no new products. Goal #5 - For the strongest possible economy, we need for people to have maximum freedom. People need the freedom to choose the products they want from an open marketplace of maximum size. They need to be free to start businesses of their own. They need to be free to work on their ideas and carry them as far as possible. At the same time, people need to be free to take time off and relax as they so choose. The notion that people should have to work 60 hours a week to make ends meet is the antithesis of freedom.

Umoja ni nguvu, utengano ni udhaifu. 2 + 2 = 5. Umoja una sisi (ubinadamu), si mimi (ubinafsi). Watu wanne wakifanya kazi kwa ushirikiano watakuwa na nguvu ya watu watano! Watakuwa na nguvu ya ziada kufanikisha malengo kama vile kuwa na uwezo wa kusaidia jamii kama timu au kama mtu binafsi, kujenga jengo la ofisi, kutengeneza ziada katika masuala ya uchumi wa kampuni au nchi au wa mtu binafsi, ushindi katika kitu chochote kile, na kadhalika. Mimi ni ubinafsi. Sisi ni ubinadamu. Ubinafsi ni uvivu. Ubinadamu ni uchapakazi.

It is something that can be attained only through despair, through tragedy, through long, painful, and ceaseless struggle. It is not irrational, sentimental, emotional, or spontaneous. It comes as the result of serious thinking and learning, of rigid discipline, of complete sobriety, absolute will. It is something few can attain; but all can—and should—search for it. This is as far as I can go. If you want to go further, if you want to know about the nature of religious experience, about the way to it, about faith itself, you have to read Kierkegaard. Even so, you may say that I have tried to lead you further than I know the road myself. You may reproach me for trying to make Kierkegaard accept society as real and meaningful whereas he actually repudiated it. You may even say that I have failed in relating faith to existence in society. All these complaints would be justified, but I would not be very much disturbed by them—at least not as far as the purpose of this talk is concerned. For all I wanted to show you is the possibility that we have a philosophy that enables men to die. Do not underestimate the strength of such a philosophy. For in a time of great sorrow and catastrophe such as we have to live through, it is a great thing to be able to die. But it is not enough. Kierkegaard too enables men to die; but his faith also enables them to live. From a lecture delivered at Bennington College, where Drucker had joined the faculty in 1942.

The other great obstacle to abandoning oneself to Divine Providence is the presence of suffering, in our own lives as in the world around us. Even for those who abandon themselves to Him, God permits suffering; He leaves them wanting of certain things, in a manner sometimes painful. Think of the poverty in which the family of young Bernadette of Lourdes lived. Isn’t this a contradiction of the words of the Gospel? No, because the Lord can leave us wanting relative to certain things (sometimes judged indispensable in the eyes of the world), but He never leaves us deprived of what is essential: His presence, His peace and all that is necessary for the complete fulfillment of our lives, according to His plans for us. If He permits suffering, then it is our strength to believe, as Thérèse of Lisieux says, that “God does not permit unnecessary suffering.” In the domain of our personal lives, as in that of the history of the world, we must be convinced, if we want to go to the limits of our Christian faith, that God is sufficiently good and powerful to use whatever evil there may be, as well as any suffering however absurd and unnecessary it may appear to be, in our favor. We cannot have any mathematical or philosophical certitude of this; it can only be an act of faith. But it is precisely to this act of faith that we are invited by the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus, understood and received as the definitive victory of God over evil. Evil is a mystery, a scandal and it will always be so. It is necessary to do what one can to eliminate it, to relieve suffering, but it always remains present in our personal lives, as well as in the world. Its place in the economy of redemption reveals the wisdom of God, which is not the wisdom of man; it always retains something incomprehensible. …for My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways, says the Lord. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are My ways above your ways and My thoughts above your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9). At certain moments in life, a Christian is necessarily invited to believe in the contradiction of appearances and to hope against all hope (Romans 4:18). There are inevitably circumstances where we cannot understand the “why” of God’s activity because it is no longer the wisdom of man, a wisdom within our capacity to understand and explain by human intelligence. Rather it is divine Wisdom, mysterious and incomprehensible, that thus intervenes.

Tocqueville presciently claimed that the strength of the American government was to a large extent the result of its democratic incapacity to run the nation and the economy as coherently and effectively as a monarchical or autocratic government might run it.

To be completely honest with you, God is the only one who has the power to be your everything. His compassion has the capability to fill your heart with warmth more calming than sun rays falling upon your cheek. His peace transcends every layer of your being and eclipse the most anxious of thoughts. His grace is extended freely, covering your sin nature with a robe woven for royalty. His resources are unlimited. His strength is beyond comprehension. His economy is stable. His provision is perfect. He pursues you with creativity. He speaks softly to you...so softly that only your heart would know it was Him. He comforts you with light touches the way the wind drifts across your skin. He leads you to green pastures and quiet waters where you can have a moment to be still and to rest in Him. He initiates intimacy with you, drawing you to converse with Him, to ask of Him and to make yourself known to Him. God is the only one who can meet your every desire, exceed your every expectation, and fulfill your life completely...because you are worth it.

Another thing you need to understand is what we now call the “core competencies” of your organization. What are we really good at? What do our customers pay us for? Why do they buy from us? In a competitive, nonmonopolistic market—and that is what the world has become—there is absolutely no reason why a customer should buy from you rather from your competitor. None. He pays you because you give him something that is of value to him. What is it that we get paid for? You may think this is a simple question. It is not. I have been working with some of the world’s biggest manufacturers, producers, and distributors of packaged consumer goods. All of you use their products, even in Slovenia. They have two kinds of customers. One, of course, is the retailer. The other is the housewife. What do they pay for? I have been asking this question for a year now. I do not know how many companies in the world make soap, but there are a great many. And I can’t tell the difference between one kind of soap or the other. And why does the buyer have a preference—and a strong one, by the way? What does it do for her? Why is she willing to buy from one manufacturer when on the same shelves in the United States or in Japan or in Germany they are soaps from other companies? She usually does not even look at them. She reaches out for that one soap. Why? What does she see? What does she want? Try to work on this. Incidentally, the best way to find out is to ask customers not by questionnaire but by sitting down with them and finding out. The most successful retailer I know in the world is not one of the big retail chains. It is somebody in Ireland, a small country about the size of Slovenia. This particular company is next door to Great Britain with its very powerful supermarkets, and all of them are also in Ireland. And yet this little company has maybe 60 percent of the sandwich market. What do they do? Well, the answer is that the boss spends two days each week in one of his stores serving customers, from the meat counter to the checkout counter, and is the one who puts stuff into bags and carries it out to the shoppers’ automobiles. He knows what the customers pay for. But let me go back to the beginning: The place to start managing is not in the plant, and it is not in the office. You start with managing yourself by finding out your own strengths, by placing yourself where your strengths can produce results and making sure that you set the right example (which is basically what ethics is all about), and by placing your people where their strengths can produce results.

What is the life of one person worth? Although the Supreme leader Kim Jong-un is not suicidal, life to him is relatively cheap, after all he had his half-brother murdered. The countries population of almost 25 million people is harshly subjugated and the military consists of 5,200,000 men and women both active and in the reserves. Although his military ranks as 25th of the worlds military powers, it is the development of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems that makes Kim Jong-un so dangerous. It is estimated that they have about a dozen nuclear devices that could most likely be delivered as far as Japan. Of course their future targets, including the United States are more ambitious. In contrast to their troop strength, the United States has 1,400,000 personnel under arms, South Korea has only 624,465 and China has 2,333,000 personnel. Our advantage is primarily technical, however regardless of our superiority in battlefield technology, oil which they get from China, remains the lifeblood of their supporting economy and army. North Korea has threatened to fire missiles at the U. S. military bases in Okinawa and Guam. The reality of a war is that we would most likely win such a conflict but at a very high cost. The biggest losers of a war on the Korean Peninsula would be South Korea, North Korea and the United States in that order. If there were to be a winner it would be Russia. What are we thinking? Perhaps we should come up with a better strategy.

the temp industry launched a series of remarkably successful campaigns that helped undermine the cultural strength of the asset model and legitimize the view of workers as liabilities.

What happened to Samsung, as well as to HTC and Motorola before it, is illustrative. The evolution of the smartphone industry is a microcosm of what’s happening to the broader economic landscape. In this new world, platforms sit at the top of the economy. They have the most market power, the highest profits, and the most sustainable competitive advantage. As Samsung showed, it’s still possible to build a valuable linear business, but its competitive advantage often evaporates quickly as products get commoditized and competitors copy features—leaving the originator continually scrambling to replace those strengths. Features are easy to emulate; networks aren’t. Products get commoditized; platforms don’t.

In money matters she was scrupulousness itself. Theobald made her a quarterly allowance for her dress, pocket money and little charities and presents. In these last items she was liberal in proportion to her income; indeed she dressed with great economy and gave away whatever was over in presents or charity. Oh, what a comfort it was to Theobald to reflect that he had a wife on whom he could rely never to cost him a sixpence of unauthorised expenditure! Letting alone her absolute submission, the perfect coincidence of her opinion with his own upon every subject and her constant assurances to him that he was right in everything which he took it into his head to say or do, what a tower of strength to him was her exactness in money matters! As years went by he became as fond of his wife as it was in his nature to be of any living thing, and applauded himself for having stuck to his engagement — a

When Jayne Juvan, a partner at the law firm Roetzel & Andress in Cleveland, Ohio, started using social media, very, very few lawyers used these tools. Because her profession is so conservative, many of the attorneys she interacted with didn't see the opportunity. After only a few months of blogging, Crain's Cleveland Business interviewed Juvan on the use of social media by lawyers. In her first year of practice, she landed a client via social media. That was a game changer, because her colleagues began to see her as an owner, not just an employee. When she started to land wins, it became harder to navigate her profession because the legal industry was quite competitive. But, as she shares, "I didn't back off, because I now knew how powerful social media was." Good thing. When she was a third- and fourth-year associate, in 2007 to 2008, the economy collapsed. Her class experienced deep layoffs across the industry, which she sidestepped, in part because of her social media efforts. Most of the accolades she has received can be traced to social media. When she was considered for promotion to partner, the fact that she was being followed by prominent professionals on Twitter bolstered her case in a major way, as the CEO saw the potential of these relationships. According to Catalyst, only 20 percent of partners in law firms are women, and only 16 percent of them have $500,000 worth of business or more.6 Jayne Juvan made partner at age thirty-two, and at thirty-four, her billing reports placed her in the small percentage of women with $500,000-plus of business. Once Juvan had acquired the basic competencies involved in practicing law, social media became her distinctive strength, propelling her into the partnership ranks at her law firm.

The Chinese renminbi was fixed against the dollar from July of 2005 until June 2009. With a fixed exchange rate, a currency’s value is matched to the value of another single currency or to a basket of other currencies. So when a country pegs its currency to the dollar, the value of the currency rises and falls with the dollar. This action helped China survive the global financial crisis. But China removed the dollar peg after the global financial crisis ended last year. Meanwhile, Japan has also seen the value of the yen grow stronger. With the U.S. economy continuing to lag and growing fiscal uncertainty in European countries, the yen has continued to gain strength because it was the only currency that was stable. So countries like China expanded their purchases of the yen, resulting in the yen’s appreciation. As the yen continued to rise against the dollar, the Japanese government intervened in the currency market in September for the first time since March 2004. This is not the first global currency war the world has seen. In 1985, the finance ministers of West Germany, France, the U.S., Japan and the UK gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York to sign the Plaza Accord. Under the deal, the countries agreed to bring down the U.S. dollar exchange rate in relation to the Japanese yen and German mark. As the recent currency war continues to spread around the globe, some countries are now saying that there is a need for a new Plaza Accord to stabilize the world economy and the global financial market.

Rest time is not waste time. It is economy to gather fresh strength. Look at the mower in the summer’s day, with so much to cut down ere the sun sets. He pauses in his labor—is he a sluggard? He looks for his stone and begins to draw it up and down his scythe, with “rink-a-tink—rink-a-tink—rink-a-tink.” Is that idle music? Is he wasting precious moments? How much he might have mown while he has been ringing out those notes on his scythe! But he is sharpening his tool, and he will do far more when once again he gives his strength to those long sweeps which lay the grass prostrate in rows before him.

Having too expensive a currency can cause severe economic problems, which has been the case in many sectors of the Australian economy: the Australian dollar, its strength boosted by COMMODITY wealth, was so highly valued that it devastated the country’s retail sector – it was so easy to buy stuff from abroad using super-charged Australian dollars that local shops found it near-impossible to compete.

CFR’s Renewing America initiative—from which this book arose—has focused on those areas of economic policy that are the most important for reinforcing America’s competitive strengths. Education, corporate tax policy, and infrastructure, for example, are issues that historically have been considered largely matters of domestic policy. Yet in a highly competitive global economy, an educated workforce, a competitive tax structure, and an efficient transportation network are all crucial to attracting investment and delivering goods and services that can succeed in global markets. The line between domestic economic policy and foreign economic policy is in many cases now almost invisible. Building a more competitive economy for the future requires that our political leaders—not just in Congress and the White House but also in state and local governments—understand how their policy choices can affect the choices of companies that can now invest almost anywhere in the world.

Our planet is about ... billions of years old. So far, the earliest finds of modern human skeletons come from Africa, which date to nearly 200,000 years ago. We have made such an advanced technological progress, but here we are today, still condemning women based on their sexuality and celebrate it every year. This very 'social' movement is the enemy of women and humanity in general for it is feeding the labels, categorizations, divisions, and inequalities for somewhat 100 years now. Since its inception somewhere in the early 1900s, women were finally given(external) 'rights' allowing us to work and even vote. There used to be and quite outrageously still is a huge inequality in the functions/roles of men and women in homes, workplaces and in civil society. Women were then seen as inferior and still are today, mainly because economic achievement has become one of the most important foundation and determinant in the worthiness/value of an individual. "Womens day" pretends to celebrate women but the opposite is true. Through its systematized, preplanned and preconstructed feminist surrogate, women have been slowly but steadily stripped off a secure, nurturing sacred and honoured image as wives, mothers, but above all as procreating human beings representing life and its backbone, are turned into cheap, brainless, sexual objects and hostages of the economy. And whenever the tyranny of materialism and capitalism ends, and we the people as a whole recognize the inherent, deep rootedness and nature of human beings, will the female sex be liberated from feminism.

Barra believes she has good reason for optimism. “The U.S. economy and vehicle sales have been rebounding since 2009,” she said of the year industry sales sank to 10.4 million units, prompting plants to be closed and workers to be laid off permanently. But that dramatic cost cutting resulted in the industry being able to reach profitability at a break-even point of only 13 million in vehicle sales, which it has done the last three years and hopes to four-peat in 2015. Barra insists there's plenty of room for the auto industry to grow. “The strength of the labor market, better job security and the recovery in home prices have consumers feeling pretty good about the future, so we expect people will continue to replace their older cars and trucks,” she said, referring to pent-up demand for new vehicles to replace an older fleet on the road now that averages about 11 years of age. Analysts agree, saying employment is up and unemployment down, the economy is doing well, and consumer confidence is up.

The benefits of weight lifting on running performance were demonstrated in a 2008 study by Norwegian researchers (Støren et al. 2008). Seventeen well-trained runners were divided into two groups. Members of one group continued with their normal run training, while members of the other group added to their routine three weekly strength sessions consisting of four, four-repetition sets of half-squats using their four-repetition maximal load (i.e., the heaviest weight they could lift four times). After eight weeks, members of the strength group exhibited not only the expected gains in maximal strength and rate of force development, but also significant improvements in running economy (5 percent) and in time to exhaustion at maximal aerobic running speed (21.3 percent). The control group showed no improvement in any of the measured parameters.

Harry was not a big man. He stood a few inches short of six feet and was built lean. The newspapers, when they described him, called him wiry. Beneath the jumpsuit his muscles were like nylon cords, strength concealed by economy of size. The gray that flecked his hair was more partial to the left side. His eyes were brown-black and seldom betrayed emotion or intention. The

qualitative market research in Myanmar Address Ramakrishna Paramhans Ward, PO mangal nagar, Katni, [M.P.] 2nd Floor, Above KBZ Pay Centre, between 65 & 66 street, Manawhari Road Mandalay, Myanmar - Phone +95 9972107002 +91 7222997497 Subjective Statistical surveying in Myanmar: Revealing Bits of knowledge for Business Development In the present globalized commercial center, understanding buyer conduct and market elements is urgent for organizations to flourish. Myanmar, with its quickly developing economy, presents special open doors and difficulties for organizations hoping to lay out areas of strength for an in the district. As organizations look to acquire an upper hand, the meaning of subjective statistical surveying in Myanmar couldn't possibly be more significant. This article digs into the significance of qualitative market research in Myanmar and how it tends to be instrumental in driving business development in the powerful Myanmar market. Myanmar, previously known as Burma, has seen critical political and monetary changes as of late, prompting expanded unfamiliar speculation and development across different areas. This change has brought about shifts in buyer inclinations, buying power, and market patterns. To explore this advancing scene effectively, organizations should participate in thorough subjective statistical surveying to acquire nuanced experiences into buyer conduct, inclinations, and social impacts. qualitative market research in Myanmar centers around understanding the "whys" behind buyer conduct, digging into the basic inspirations, feelings, and insights that drive dynamic cycles. Dissimilar to quantitative exploration, which gives mathematical information and factual examination, subjective examination offers a more profound comprehension of customer perspectives and inclinations, making it priceless for organizations looking to fit their techniques to the Myanmar market. One of the critical benefits of subjective statistical surveying in Myanmar is its capacity to uncover social subtleties and context oriented factors that impact buyer conduct. Given Myanmar's different ethnic gatherings, dialects, and cultural standards, a nuanced comprehension of nearby traditions and customs is fundamental for organizations meaning to resound with the interest group. Subjective examination procedures, for example, inside and out interviews, center gatherings, and ethnographic investigations empower scientists to dive into these social complexities, giving organizations noteworthy bits of knowledge for item improvement, promoting methodologies, and brand situating. Also, subjective examination assumes a significant part in distinguishing arising patterns and market holes that may not be obvious through quantitative information alone. By connecting straightforwardly with buyers and key partners, organizations can acquire subjective experiences into advancing business sector elements, possible undiscovered portions, and moving customer inclinations. This, thus, enables organizations to adjust their contributions and methodologies proactively, remaining on the ball in Myanmar's quickly changing business sector scene. As well as illuminating vital business choices, subjective statistical surveying encourages a more profound association among organizations and the nearby local area. By effectively including Myanmar purchasers in the examination cycle, organizations show a promise to understanding and tending to their requirements, cultivating trust and brand reliability simultaneously. This human-driven approach is especially relevant in Myanmar, where individual connections and local area ties hold huge influence over customer conduct.

Regenerative changemakers everywhere are challenging old narratives that have become degenerative. They are writing a new story about a life economy and humanity’s role in this wondrous pale blue dot we call home. While still very much in the minority and outside of the mainstream, small pockets of resistance are gaining strength. With the right support, they could become the norm.

I seek to illuminate what has hitherto been obscured as well as downplayed in the scholarly literature. In my argument, in the absence of the NSS and the permanent defense preparedness around which it has formed, there would be little to distinguish U.S. innovation from that found in most other advanced democracies. Whether one should applaud or regret such an outcome is not germane to my argument. Certainly, it is conceivable that once established, a transformative innovation capacity could be unmoored from its originating NSS institutions and its geopolitical drivers. But we must also factor in particularities of the domestic institutional setting, which make that outcome most unlikely—namely, the domestic strength of antistatism.

So if women are a parasitical class living off, and at the margins of, the male economy, the reverse too is true: (male) culture is parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.

What evidence is there for the hypothesis that the average man is in need of an 'idol'? The evidence is so overwhelming that it is hard to select the data. First of all, the greater part of human history is characterized by the fact that the life of man has been permeated by religions. Most of the gods of these religions have had the function of giving man support and strength, and religious practice has consisted essentially in appeasing and satisfying the idols. (The prophetic and later Christian religions were originally anti-idolatric, in fact, God was conceived as the anti-idol. But in practice the Jewish and Christian God was experienced by most believers as an idol, as the great power whose help and support could be attained through prayer, ritual, and so forth.) Nevertheless, throughout the history of these religions a battle was fought against the idolization of God -philosophically, by the representatives of 'negative theology' (e.g., Maimonides) and, experientially, by some of the great mystics (e.g., Meister Eckhart or Jacob Boehme). But idolatry by no means disappeared or was weakened when religion lost its power. The nation, the class, the race, the state, the economy, became the new idols. Without the need for idols one could not possibly understand the emotional intensity of nationalism, racism, imperialism, or the 'cult of personality' in its various forms. One could not understand, for instance, why millions of people were ecstatically attracted to an ugly demagogue like Hitler; why they were willing to forget the demands of their consciences and to suffer extreme hardship for his sake. People’s eyes shine with religious fervor when they see, or can touch, a man who has risen to fame and who has, or might have, power. But the need for idols exists not only in the public sphere; if one scratches the surface, and often even without doing so, one finds that many people also have their 'private' idols: their families (sometimes, as in Japan, organized as ancestor cults), a teacher, a boss, a film star, a football team, a physician, or any number of such figures. Whether the idol can be seen (even if only rarely) or is a product of fantasy, the one bound to it never feels alone, never feels that help is not near.

The Depression is over.” In his December 2, 1930, message to Congress, he said that “the fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.

Africa, I believe, is embarking upon an era of sharp divergences in which China will play a huge role in specific national outcomes—for better and for worse, perhaps even dramatically, depending on the country. Places endowed with stable governments, with elites that are accountable and responsive to the needs of their fellow citizens, and with relatively healthy institutions, will put themselves in a position to thrive on the strength of robust Chinese demand for their exports and fast-growing investment from China and from a range of other emerging economic powers, including Brazil, Turkey, India, and Vietnam. Inevitably, most of these African countries will be democracies. Other nations, whether venal dictatorships, states rendered dysfunctional by war, and even some fragile democracies—places where institutions remain too weak or corrupted—will sell off their mineral resources to China and other bidders, and squander what is in effect a one-time chance to convert underground riches into aboveground wealth by investing in their own citizens and creating new kinds of economic activity beyond today’s simple extraction. The proposition at work here couldn’t be more straightforward. The timeline for resource depletion in many African countries is running in tandem with the timeline for the continent’s unprecedented demographic explosion. At current rates, in the next forty years, most African states will have twice the number of people they count now. By that same time, their presently known reserves of minerals like iron, bauxite, copper, cobalt, uranium, gold, and more, will be largely depleted. Those who have diversified their economies and invested in their citizens, particularly in education and health, will have a shot at prosperity. Those that haven’t, stand to become hellish places, barely viable, if viable at all.