Incoming Leader Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Incoming Leader. Here they are! All 92 of them:

When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.
Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
The market rewards business leaders for making things more efficient. Efficiency doesn’t love normal people.
Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
Our rulers, who rule our symbols, and so rule a symbolic class of life, impose their own infantilism on our instituitions, educational methods, and doctrines. This leads to maladjustment of the incoming generations which, being born into, are forced to develop under the un-natural (for man) semantic conditions imposed on them. In turn, they produce leaders afflicted with the old animalistic limitations. The vicious circle is completed; it results in a general state of human un-sanity, reflected again in our instituitions. And so it goes, on and on.
Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics)
It's good to be transparent in business. As much as possible, the business should be transparent about it's products and services. And it should be transparent about it's income, expenses and debts. Transparency fosters trust. And trust is very valuable in business.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on “the legacy of slavery” with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals. Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and “war on poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began. Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.” Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children [78%] being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent [66%]. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there. If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about.
Thomas Sowell
Humility and feedback are the only true measures of a greater leader
David Sikhosana (Time Value of Money: Timing Income)
Optimists Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything. If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. A study of people who exaggerate their expected life span beyond actuarial predictions showed that they work longer hours, are more optimistic about their future income, are more likely to remarry after divorce (the classic “triumph of hope over experience”), and are more prone to bet on individual stocks. Of course, the blessings of optimism are offered only to individuals who are only mildly biased and who are able to “accentuate the positive” without losing track of reality. Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders—not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge. They are probably optimistic by temperament; a survey of founders of small businesses concluded that entrepreneurs are more sanguine than midlevel managers about life in general. Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
of the 1 percent saw a bit less than a doubling of real incomes. Those in the 90th through 99th percentiles simply stayed even, with incomes growing at the same rate as per capita GDP, or gross domestic product. And the bottom 90 percent lost relative ground, with their incomes since 1980 growing more slowly than per capita GDP. The result is that the top 1 percent now owns twice as great a share of national wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent. We went from being a world leader in opportunity to being a laggard.
Nicholas D Kristof (Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope)
The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress, and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption delivers. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man's contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at-home with the middle class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, he location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from a representative of the Negro to the white man to the white man's representative to the Negro. - Dr Martin Luther King Jr
Michael Eric Dyson (April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America)
That was when the Venetians made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it. Beginning in 1281, the government paid merchants a subsidy on salt landed in Venice from other areas. As a result, shipping salt to Venice became so profitable that the same merchants could afford to ship other goods at prices that undersold their competitors. Growing fat on the salt subsidy, Venice merchants could afford to send ships to the eastern Mediterranean, where they picked up valuable cargoes of Indian spices and sold them in western Europe at low prices that their non-Venetian competitors could not afford to offer. This meant that the Venetian public was paying extremely high prices for salt, but they did not mind expensive salt if they could dominate the spice trade and be leaders in the grain trade. When grain harvests failed in Italy, the Venetian government would use its salt income to subsidize grain imports from other parts of the Mediterranean and thereby corner the Italian grain market.
Mark Kurlansky (Salt: A World History)
Look at last week’s schedule. How much of your time did you devote to regular, disciplined activities? Did you do anything to grow and improve yourself professionally? Did you engage in activities promoting good health? Did you dedicate part of your income to savings or investments? If you’ve been putting off those things, telling yourself that you’ll do them later, you may need to work on your self-discipline.
John C. Maxwell (Leadership 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know (John C. Maxwell’s 101 Series))
The typical Savings and Loan president was a leader in a tiny community. He was the sort of fellow who sponsored a float in the town parade; that said it all, didn’t it? He wore polyester suits, made a five-figure income, and worked one-figure hours. He belonged to the Lions or Rotary Club, and also to a less formal group known within the “thrift”* industry as the 3–6–3 Club: he borrowed money at 3 per cent, lent money at 6 per cent, and arrived on the golf course by 3 in the afternoon. *
Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker)
The politicians and businessmen are not interested in saving souls, but they are interested in preserving a minimum of organization, for upon that depend their posts and their incomes. These leaders adopted the liberal's solution to their problem. That was to let religion go but to replace it with education, which supposedly would exercise the same efficacy. The separation of education from religion, one of the proudest achievements of modernism, is but an extension of the separation of knowledge from metaphysics.
Richard M. Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences)
For years, black political leaders in New York City aligned themselves with labor unions to block the construction of a Walmart in a low-income community with persistently high unemployment. According to a Marist poll taken in 2011, 69 percent of blacks in New York would welcome a Walmart in their neighborhood. Yet these black leaders put the interests of Big Labor, which doesn’t like the retailer’s stance toward unions, ahead of the interests of struggling black people who could use the jobs and low-priced goods.
Jason L. Riley (Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed)
400 million Africans are born-again Christians and the various sects of Christianity are well represented in this small town, from the Church of Wonderful Miracles to the Church of the Best Future, and there is also a large Muslim community. People give around 10% of their meagre incomes to these groups – that’s far more than the government takes in taxation. And it’s made some of Africa’s church leaders multimillionaires with private jets, megachurches, video productions and publishing houses all preying on the desperate.
Gaia Vince (Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet we Made)
There is an oft-told story of a delegation going to the White House to present President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a policy proposal. After he had listened to them, he said, ‘Okay, you have convinced me. Now go out and bring pressure on me to do it.’ Fundamental social change rarely comes without sustained political pressure. And politicians are rarely intellectual or policy leaders, even though they will try to take the credit for something once it is up and running. Just occasionally, one emerges with the courage to lead. Pressure matters. One
Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
Shortly before his assassination, he envisioned bringing to Washington, D.C., thousands of the nation’s disadvantaged in an interracial alliance that embraced rural and ghetto blacks, Appalachian whites, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans to demand jobs and income—the right to live. In a speech delivered in 1968, King acknowledged there had been some progress for blacks since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but insisted that the current challenges required even greater resolve and that the entire nation must be transformed for economic justice to be more than a dream for poor people of all colors. As historian Gerald McKnight observes, “King was proposing nothing less than a radical transformation of the Civil Rights Movement into a populist crusade calling for redistribution of economic and political power. America’s only civil rights leader was now focusing on class issues and was planning to descend on Washington with an army of poor to shake the foundations of the power structure and force the government to respond to the needs of the ignored underclass.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
PHYSIOLOGY 1. Sex 2. Age 3. Height and weight 4. Color of hair, eyes, skin 5. Posture 6. Appearance: good-looking, over- or underweight, clean, neat, pleasant, untidy. Shape of head, face, limbs. 7. Defects: deformities, abnormalities, birthmarks. Diseases. 8. Heredity SOCIOLOGY 1. Class: lower, middle, upper. 2. Occupation: type of work, hours of work, income, condition of work, union or nonunion, attitude toward organization, suitability for work. 3. Education: amount, kind of schools, marks, favorite subjects, poorest subjects, aptitudes. 4. Home life: parents living, earning power, orphan, parents separated or divorced, parents’ habits, parents’ mental development, parents’ vices, neglect. Character’s marital status. 5. Religion 6. Race, nationality 7. Place in community: leader among friends, clubs, sports. 8. Political affiliations 9. Amusements, hobbies: books, newspapers, magazines he reads. PSYCHOLOGY 1. Sex life, moral standards 2. Personal premise, ambition 3. Frustrations, chief disappointments 4. Temperament: choleric, easygoing, pessimistic, optimistic. 5. Attitude toward life: resigned, militant, defeatist. 6. Complexes: obsessions, inhibitions, superstitions, phobias. 7. Extrovert, introvert, ambivert 8. Abilities: languages, talents. 9. Qualities: imagination, judgment, taste, poise. 10. I.Q.
Lajos Egri (The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives)
If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
It is interesting to note that in nearly all the economics courses it is taught that the income tax is the proper instrument for the regulation of the country’s economy; that private property is not an inalienable right (in fact, there are no inalienable rights); that the economic ills of the country are traceable to the remnants of free enterprise; that the economy of the nation can be sound only when the government manages prices, controls wages, and regulates operations. This was not taught in the colleges before 1913. Is there a relationship between the results of the income tax and the thinking of the professors? There is now a strong movement in this country to bring the publicschool system under federal domination. The movement could not have been thought of before the government had the means for carrying out the idea; that is, before income taxation. The question is, have those who plug for nationalization of the schools come to the idea by independent thought, or have they been influenced by the bureaucrats who see in nationalization a wider opportunity for themselves? We must lean to the latter conclusion, because among the leaders of the movement are many bureaucrats. However, if the movement is successful, if the schools are brought under the watching eye of the federal government, it is a certainty that the curriculum will conform to the ideals of Big Government. The child’s mind will never be exposed to the idea that the individual is the one big thing in the world, that he has rights which come from a higher source than the bureaucracy. Thus, the immunities of property, body and mind have been undermined by the Sixteenth Amendment. The freedoms won by Americans in 1776 were lost in the revolution of 1913.
Frank Chodorov (The Income Tax: Root of All Evil)
Book authors are in high demand for speaking engagements and appearances; they are the new ‘celebrity’ and celebrities gain access. Authors not only make money from royalties or book advances but from their keynotes, presentations and strategically branded product lines. This includes entrepreneurial ideas for you to extend yourself beyond just writing and prepares you to add speaking and consulting to your revenue stream. You have to begin to look outside book sales and towards the speaking market. There are radio, interviews, news, television, small channel television keynotes, lectures, seminars and workshops. These types of events have the possibility to be much more lucrative than just selling books. In essence, the book builds and brands you in the public eye. It gives you credibility and the opportunity to be more than you are. It enables you to now be a voice, a teacher, a leader, an expert - after all, you wrote the book on it!
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek (Book Power: A Platform for Writing, Branding, Positioning & Publishing)
Still, it became a big challenge to train our bank workers to overcome opposition from political and religious leaders without endangering their safety and that of the women they were serving. We tried a variety of techniques, and after a few years we learned that our staff members should quietly go about their business in one tiny corner of the village. If just a handful of desperate women make a leap of faith and join Grameen, everything changes. They get their money, start to earn additional income, and nothing terrible happens to them. Others begin to show interest. We find that borrowing groups form quickly after the initial period of resistance. When the ice finally breaks, women who originally said no to us begin to say, “Why not? I need money, too. In fact, I need the money more desperately than those who already joined. And I can make better use of it!” Gradually people come to accept us, and opposition dies off. But in every new village, it is a battle to begin. After
Muhammad Yunus (Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty)
My family is a classic American-dream story. My great-grandparents fled Russia to avoid being murdered for their religion. Just two generations later, my parents fled New York City weekends for their country house. I never felt guilty about this. I was raised to believe America rewards hard work. But I was also raised to understand that luck plays a role in even the bootstrappiest success story. The cost of living the dream, I was taught, is the responsibility to expand it for others. It’s a more than fair price. Yet the people running the country didn’t see it that way. With George W. Bush in the White House, millionaires and billionaires were showered with tax cuts. Meanwhile, schools went underfunded. Roads and bridges deteriorated. Household incomes languished. Deficits ballooned. And America went to war. President Bush invaded Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, a campaign which hit a snag when it turned out those weapons didn’t exist. But by then it was too late. We had broken a country and owned the resulting mess. Colin Powell called this “the Pottery Barn rule,” which, admittedly, was cute. Still, it’s hard to imagine a visit to Pottery Barn that costs trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. Our leaders, in other words, had made bad choices. They would therefore be replaced with better ones. That’s how AP Government told me the system worked. In the real world, however, the invasion of Iraq became an excuse for a dark and antidemocratic turn. Those who questioned the war, the torture of prisoners—or even just the tax cuts—found themselves accused of something barely short of treason. No longer was a distinction made between supporting the president’s policies and America’s troops. As an electoral strategy, this was dangerous and cynical. Also, it worked. So no, I didn’t grow up with a high opinion of politicians. But I did grow up in the kind of environment where people constantly told me I could change the world. In 2004, eager to prove them right, I volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.
David Litt (Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years)
All leaders were equal at the conference table, but those from heavyweight countries showed that they were more equal by arriving in big private jets, the British in their VC 10s and Comets, and the Canadians in Boeings. The Australians joined this select group in 1979, after Malcolm Fraser's government purchased a Boeing 707 for the Royal Australian Air Force. Those African presidents whose countries were then better off, like Kenya and Nigeria, also had special aircraft. I wondered why they did not set out to impress the world that they were poor and in dire need of assistance. Our permanent representative at the UN in New York explained that the poorer the country, the bigger the Cadillacs they hired for their leaders. So I made a virtue of arriving by ordinary commercial aircraft, and thus helped preserve Singapore's third World status for many years. However, by the mid-1990s, the World Bank refused to heed our pleas not to reclassify us as a "High Income Developing Country", giving no Brownie points for my frugal travel habits. We lost all the concessions that were given to developing countries.
Lee Kuan Yew (From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000)
But what is happiness? The definition most in vogue, fueled by the positive psychology movement, is one of happiness as a state, characterized by pleasure; a banishing of pain, suffering, and boredom; a sense of engagement and meaning through the experience of positive emotions and resilience. This is the dominant version of the new incomes sought and paid in the most widely celebrated “great places to work.” Think of flexible work hours, pool tables and dart boards, dining areas run by chefs serving fabulous and nutritious food at all hours, frequent talks by visiting thought leaders, spaces for naps, unlimited vacation time. However, the research literature on happiness suggests another definition, one that is overlapping but significantly different. The second definition sees happiness as a process of human flourishing. This definition, whose roots go back to Aristotle and the Greeks’ concept of eudaemonia, includes an experience of meaning and engagement but in relation to the satisfactions of experiencing one’s own growth and unfolding, becoming more of the person one was meant to be, bringing more of oneself into the world.
Robert Kegan (An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization)
the world needs the US administration to be a leader for women’s rights, not an opponent of them. The administration’s new policies are not trying to help women meet their needs. There isn’t any reliable research that says women benefit when they have children they don’t feel ready to raise. The evidence says the opposite. When women can decide whether and when to have children, it saves lives, promotes health, expands education, and creates prosperity—no matter what country in the world you’re talking about. The US is doing the opposite of what the Philippines and the UK did. It is using policy to shrink the conversation, suppress voices, and allow the powerful to impose their will on the poor. Most of the work I do lifts me up, some of it breaks my heart, but this just makes me angry. These policies pick on poor women. Mothers struggling in poverty need the time, money, and energy to take care of each child. They need to be able to delay their pregnancies, time and space their births, and earn an income as they raise their children. Each one of these steps is advanced by contraceptives, and each one is jeopardized by these policies. Women who are well off won’t be harmed, and women with a stable income have options. But poor women are trapped. They will suffer the most from these changes and can do the least to stop them.
Melinda French Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
Rule 1: Keep your winning coalition as small as possible. A small coalition allows a leader to rely on very few people to stay in power. Fewer essentials equals more control and contributes to more discretion over expenditures. Bravo for Kim Jong Il of North Korea. He is a contemporary master at ensuring dependence on a small coalition. Rule 2: Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible. Maintain a large selectorate of interchangeables and you can easily replace any troublemakers in your coalition, influentials and essentials alike. After all, a large selectorate permits a big supply of substitute supporters to put the essentials on notice that they should be loyal and well behaved or else face being replaced. Bravo to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin for introducing universal adult suffrage in Russia’s old rigged election system. Lenin mastered the art of creating a vast supply of interchangeables. Rule 3: Control the flow of revenue. It’s always better for a ruler to determine who eats than it is to have a larger pie from which the people can feed themselves. The most effective cash flow for leaders is one that makes lots of people poor and redistributes money to keep select people—their supporters—wealthy. Bravo to Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari, estimated to be worth up to $4 billion even as he governs a country near the world’s bottom in per capita income.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics)
for nearly a decade, the World Bank has been reiterating its finding that “crime and violence have emerged in recent years as major obstacles to the realization of development objectives.”8 The Bank has stated flatly, “In many developing countries, high levels of crime and violence not only undermine people’s safety on an everyday level, they also undermine broader development efforts to improve governance and reduce poverty.”9 Multiple studies by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have concluded that restraining violence is a precondition to poverty alleviation and economic development, plainly stating that “a foundational level of order must be established before development objectives can be realized.”10 Leaders of the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) have concluded, “Poor people want to feel safe and secure just as much as they need food to eat, clean water to drink and a job to give them an income. Without security there cannot be development.”11 When it comes to violence, researchers are increasingly concerned that development experts are missing Amartya Sen’s insight that “development [is] a process of expanding the real freedoms people enjoy,” and are failing to appreciate the idea “that freedom from crime and violence are key components of development. Freedom from fear is as important as freedom from want. It is impossible to truly enjoy one of these rights without the other.”12
Gary A. Haugen (The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence)
Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
The shift in focus served to align the goals of the Civil Rights Movement with key political goals of poor and working-class whites, who were also demanding economic reforms. As the Civil Rights Movement began to evolve into a “Poor People’s Movement,” it promised to address not only black poverty, but white poverty as well—thus raising the specter of a poor and working-class movement that cut across racial lines. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders made it clear that they viewed the eradication of economic inequality as the next front in the “human rights movement” and made great efforts to build multiracial coalitions that sought economic justice for all. Genuine equality for black people, King reasoned, demanded a radical restructuring of society, one that would address the needs of the black and white poor throughout the country. Shortly before his assassination, he envisioned bringing to Washington, D.C., thousands of the nation’s disadvantaged in an interracial alliance that embraced rural and ghetto blacks, Appalachian whites, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans to demand jobs and income—the right to live. In a speech delivered in 1968, King acknowledged there had been some progress for blacks since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but insisted that the current challenges required even greater resolve and that the entire nation must be transformed for economic justice to be more than a dream for poor people of all colors. As historian Gerald McKnight observes, “King was proposing nothing less than a radical transformation of the Civil Rights Movement into a populist crusade calling for redistribution of economic and political power. America’s only civil rights leader was now focusing on class issues and was planning to descend on Washington with an army of poor to shake the foundations of the power structure and force the government to respond to the needs of the ignored underclass.”36
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
One government policy that libertarians accept is provisions of national defense, since no private solution is likely to prove satisfactory. A private group that attempted to field an army and defend the country would find it difficult to exclude any individual person from the benefits of its protection, since any activities that deterred potential attacks or warded off actual attacks would defend everyone within the country. Thus, most people would not voluntarily pay for national defense provided by a private group, so it is hard for such an activity to be profitable enough to induce adequate private provision. That is, national defenses is what economists refer to as public good. The conclusion that government should provide some national defense applies to narrow self-defense activities, such as fielding an army that deters enemy attacks and responds to attacks that do occur. In practice, however, nations perform many inappropriate actions under the mantle self-defense, most of them harmful. On action that goes beyond strict self-defense is preemptive attacks on other countries, as in the invasion of Iraq. In rare instances preemptive strikes might be legitimate self-defense, and by moving first and preventing extended conflict, a government might save lives and property both at home and in the threatening country...In most instances of preemptive attack, however, the threat is not obvious, undeniable, or imminent. The justification for military action is therefor readily misused whenever leaders have other agendas but wish to hide behind the guise of self defense. Thus, preemptive national defense deserves extreme suspicion, and most such actions are not wise uses of government resources. Another problematic use of a country's self defense capabilities is humanitarian or national-building efforts that purport to help other countries. One objection to such actions might be that the helping country pays the costs while foreigners receive the benefits, but this is not the right criticism. The compassion argument for redistributing income holds that government should be willing to impose costs on society generally to raise the welfare of the least fortunate members. It is hard to see how logic would apply only to people who already residents of a given country.
Jeffrey A. Miron (Libertarianism, from A to Z)
Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned out badly, you might get shot. Better to avoid all responsibility. An example of what could happen
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
You are claiming that the Soviet authorities began and influenced the existence of the Democratic Party [in Iran]. That is the basis of all your statements. The simplest way to discredit your absurd claim si to tell you about Iran, of which you are apparently ignorant. The people of Iran are oppressed, poverty-stricken, and miserable with hunger and disease. Their death rate is among the highest in the world, and their infant mortality rate threatens Iran with complete extinction. They are ruled without choice by feudalistic landowners, ruthless Khans, and venal industrialists. The peasants are slaves and the workers are paid a few pennies for a twelve hour day--not enough to keep their families in food. I can quote you all the figures you like to support these statements, quote them if necessary from British sources. I can also quote you the figures of wealth which is taken out of Iran yearly by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, of which the British Governemtn is the largest shareholder. 200 million pounds sterling have been taken out of Iran by your Oil company: a hundred times the total amount of Iran's national income and ten thousand times the total national income of the working people of Iran. By such natural resources as oil, Iran is by nature one of the wealthiest countries on earth. That wealth goes to Britain, while Iran remains poverty-ridden and without economic stability at all. It has no wage policies, no real trade unions, few hospitals, no sanitation and drainage, no irrigation, no proper housing, and no adequate road system. Its people have no rights before the law; their franchise in non-existent, and their parliamentary rights are destroyed by the corrupt method of election and political choice. The Iranian people suffer the terrors of a police regime, and they are prey to the manipulations of the grain speculators and the money operators. The racial minorities suffer discrimination and intolerance, and religious minorities are persecuted for political ends. Banditry threatens the mountain districts, and British arms have been used to support one tribe against another. I could go on indefinitely, painting you a picture of misery and starvation and imprisonment and subjection which must shame any human being capable of hearing it. Yet you say that the existence of a Democratic Party in Iran has been created by the Soviet authorities. You underestimate the Iranian people, Lord Essex! The Democratic Party has arisen out of all this misery and subjection as a force against corruption and oppression. Until now the Iranian people have been unable to create a political party because the police system prevented by terror and assassination. Any attempt to organize the workers and peasants was quickly halted by the execution of party leaders and the vast imprisonment of its followers. The Iranian people, however, have a long record of struggle and persistence, and they do not have to be told by the Soviet Union where their interests lie. They are not stupid and they are not utterly destroyed. They still posses the will to organize a democratic body and follow it into paths of Government. The Soviet Union has simply made sure that the police assassins did not interfere.... To talk of our part in 'creating' the democratic movement is an insult to the people and a sign of ignorance. We do not underestimate the Iranian people, and as far as we are concerned the Democratic Party...belongs to the people. It is their creation and their right, and it cannot be broken by wild charges which accuse the Soviet Union of its birth. We did not create it, and we have not interfered in the affairs of Iran. On the contrary, it is the British Government which has interfered continuously and viciously in Iran's affairs.
James Aldridge (The Diplomat)
21. THE HABIT OF INDISCRIMINATE SPENDING. The spend-thrift cannot succeed, mainly because he stands eternally in FEAR OF POVERTY. Form the habit of systematic saving by putting aside a definite percentage of your income. Money in the bank gives one a very safe foundation of COURAGE when bargaining for the sale of personal services. Without money, one must take what one is offered, and be glad to get it. 22. LACK OF ENTHUSIASM. Without enthusiasm one cannot be convincing. Moreover, enthusiasm is contagious, and the person who has it, under control, is generally welcome in any group of people. 23. INTOLERANCE. The person with a "closed" mind on any subject seldom gets ahead. Intolerance means that one has stopped acquiring knowledge. The most damaging forms of intolerance are those connected with religious, racial, and political differences of opinion. 24. INTEMPERANCE. The most damaging forms of intemperance are connected with eating, strong drink, and sexual activities. Overindulgence in any of these is fatal to success. 25. INABILITY TO COOPERATE WITH OTHERS. More people lose their positions and their big opportunities in life, because of this fault, than for all other reasons combined. It is a fault which no well-informed business man, or leader will tolerate. 26. POSSESSION OF POWER THAT WAS NOT ACQUIRED THROUGH SELF EFFORT. (Sons and daughters of wealthy men, and others who inherit money which they did not earn). Power in the hands of one who did not acquire it gradually, is often fatal to success. QUICK RICHES are more dangerous than poverty. 27. INTENTIONAL DISHONESTY. There is no substitute for honesty. One may be temporarily dishonest by force of circumstances over which one has no control, without permanent damage. But, there is NO HOPE for the person who is dishonest by choice. Sooner or later, his deeds will catch up with him, and he will pay by loss of reputation, and perhaps even loss of liberty. 28. EGOTISM AND VANITY. These qualities serve as red lights which warn others to keep away. THEY ARE FATAL TO SUCCESS. 29. GUESSING INSTEAD OF THINKING. Most people are too indifferent or lazy to acquire FACTS with which to THINK ACCURATELY. They prefer to act on "opinions" created by guesswork or snap-judgments. 30. LACK OF CAPITAL. This is a common cause of failure among those who start out in business for the first time, without sufficient reserve of capital to absorb the shock of their mistakes, and to carry them over until they have established a REPUTATION. 31. Under this, name any particular cause of failure from which you have suffered that has not been included in the foregoing list.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich [Illustrated & Annotated])
Prime Minister Najib boasted the country would attain developed-world living standards by 2020. But the leaders of the country, as they enriched themselves, were failing to achieve this. With national income of $ 10,000 per person, a fifth of the United States’s level, Malaysia was stuck in the middle-income trap, no longer poor but not yet rich.
Bradley Hope (Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World)
With a zero risk profile, no one dares to take responsibility. Mistakes are hidden like dust is swept under the carpet and when they come to light, innocent people who had nothing to do with the mistakes are let go, while the responsible people stay in their positions. Company leaders understand the zero risk profile and rule with authority. People not wanting to risk their income, do unpaid overtime. Though this is illegal, the lack of “Western” ethics does neither shock nor surprise any of the employees. People complaining are creatively fired. Most employees keep their mouths shut and know other companies apply the exact same methods. It merely is business as usual. This demotivates the masses and – consequently - service levels become progressively worse. With the strong company hierarchies and the many levels of middle management, information from the lowest levels in the company hardly reaches general management and vice versa. Underutilized resources, like the employees, generate - relatively seen – little added value. Salaries are in line with these values and people just accept it. Regardless of their age or background, they know their friends and family members earn a similar low salary elsewhere. It is what it is, right?
Vincent R. Werner (It Is Not What It Is: THE REAL (s)PAIN OF EUROPE)
those who don’t say ‘no’ will never manage to focus on the important things, the 20% of your time that ought to generate 80% of your income
Life Hacks Books (Leadership Development: If Steve Jobs was Coaching You: Charismatic Leadership Lessons Borrowed from Steve Jobs for High Potential People and Leaders. (The Leadership Series Book 1))
income, expenses, and finances: How much debt do I want to carry, and for what purpose? Would I like to pay off one or more of my credit accounts? By when? How much money do I want to make next month? Next year? Five years from now? What expenses do I want to cut down or cut out? — My home and community: What changes do I want to make in my current living environment? Do I want to fix up my home or yard? Do I want to move? What is my ideal home like? Where is it? What is my personal corner or room like? Does it have a garden, pool, or pond? Is it near the ocean, a lake, the desert, or mountains? Is it in the city or the country? What part of the world do I live in? What is my neighborhood like? What community projects am I involved in, if any? — My spiritual life: How much time do I want to devote to spiritual practices, such as meditation, classes, church, volunteer work, and so on? What books do I want to read? What classes do I want to take? What spiritual teachers, authors, or leaders do I want to meet, listen to, and/or work with? What spiritual power places do I want to visit, with whom, and when? What spiritual projects do I want to work on? What spiritual gift do I want to give to others? — My health and fitness: What changes do I want to make in my health and fitness? How much time per day or week do I want to spend exercising? What type of exercise program would I most enjoy and benefit from? Where would I exercise? With whom? What physical healings do I want? If I were to manifest my true natural state of perfect health right now, what would my body be like? About what weight or fat percentage would my body feel comfortable and healthy being? What types of foods would be in my regular diet? What would my ideal sleeping pattern be? How would I deal with stress or tension? What unnecessary stressors do I want to get rid of? What toxins (emotional or physical) can I eliminate from my diet or life? — My family life: What type of family life do I want? What about children? How much time do I want to spend with my kids? What do I want to teach or share with them? How can I be closer to my family and/or spend more quality time with them? What type of
Doreen Virtue (I'd Change My Life If I Had More Time: A Practical Guide to Making Dreams Come True)
Liberals including James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith and conservatives like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have all advocated income guarantees in one form or another, and in 1968 more than 1,200 economists signed a letter in support of the concept addressed to the U.S. Congress.4 The president elected that year, Republican Richard Nixon, tried throughout his first term in office to enact it into law. In a 1969 speech he proposed a Family Assistance Plan that had many features of a basic income program. The plan had support across the ideological spectrum, but it also faced a large and diverse group of opponents.5 Caseworkers and other administrators of existing welfare programs feared that their jobs would be eliminated under the new regime; some labor leaders thought that it would erode support for minimum wage legislation; and many working Americans didn’t like the idea of their tax dollars going to people who could work, but chose not to. By the time of his 1972 reelection campaign, Nixon had abandoned the Family Assistance Plan, and universal income guarantee programs have not been seriously discussed by federal elected officials and policymakers since then.* Avoiding
Erik Brynjolfsson (The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies)
They say that democracy cannot be adopted; it has to be adapted to the African way of thinking. What does that mean? That the all-powerful and corrupt political leaders should stay in power? That Teodoro Obiang, the President of Equatorial Guinea, should appropriate all the country’s money for himself, a country with income per capita of more than 20,000 euros thanks to oil but where people suffer hunger and poverty? Or that women should not have any rights?
Fernando Ballano Gonzalo (Ghana: Castles in Africa: English translation: David Griffiths)
Becoming an expert not only establishes you as a leader in your field, it will make you a trusted resource that people can rely on for new and innovative ideas. In addition to raising the stakes and helping you increase your income, your expertise will serve to make a powerful first impression, which will truly help you shine and stand apart from the crowd. Having fun and meeting interesting, incredible people along the way is an added bonus!
Susan C. Young (The Art of Preparation: 8 Ways to Plan with Purpose & Intention for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #2))
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” “I have a dream that one day…” “I have a dream that one day…” “I have a dream today.” In the Dream Speech King puts on a master class in the use of anaphora. Anaphora is a storytelling device where a word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive clauses and sentences. In politics Democratic and Republican leaders share one big love—anaphora. In January 2015 Democratic president Barack Obama asked the nation: “Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?” 6 “Will we approach the world…?” “Will we allow ourselves to be…?
Carmine Gallo (The Storyteller's Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch On and Others Don't)
Seeking to unite a divided India, Nehru articulated an ideology that rested on four main pillars. First, there was democracy, the freedom to choose one’s friends and speak one’s mind (and in the language of one’s choice) – above all, the freedom to choose one’s leaders through regular elections based on universal adult franchise. Second, there was secularism, the neutrality of the state in matters of religion and its commitment to maintaining social peace. Third, there was socialism, the attempt to augment productivity while ensuring a more egalitarian distribution of income (and of social opportunity). Fourth, there was non-alignment, the placement of India beyond and above the rivalries of the Great Powers. Among the less compelling, but not necessarily less significant, elements of this worldview were the conscious cultivation of a multiparty system (notably through debate in Parliament), and a respect for the autonomy of the judiciary and the executive.
Ramachandra Guha (India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy)
But what’s happening in the Senate right now really does deserve Trumpian superlatives. The bill Republican leaders are trying to ram through this week without hearings, without time for even a basic analysis of its likely economic impact, is the biggest tax scam in history. It’s such a big scam that it’s not even clear who’s being scammed—middle-class taxpayers, people who care about budget deficits, or both. One thing is clear, however: one way or another, the bill would hurt most Americans. The only big winners would be the wealthy—especially those who mainly collect income from their assets rather than working for a living—plus tax lawyers and accountants who would have a field day exploiting the many loopholes the legislation creates.
Paul Krugman (Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future)
21. The habit of indiscriminate spending. The spendthrift cannot succeed, mainly because he stands eternally in fear of poverty. Form the habit of systematic saving by putting aside a definite percentage of your income. Money in the bank gives one a very safe foundation of courage when bargaining for the sale of personal services. Without money, one must take what one is offered, and be glad to get it. 22. Lack of enthusiasm. Without enthusiasm one cannot be convincing. Moreover, enthusiasm is contagious, and the person who has it, under control, is generally welcome in any group of people. 23. Intolerance. The person with a closed mind on any subject seldom gets ahead. Intolerance means that one has stopped acquiring knowledge. The most damaging forms of intolerance are those connected with religious, racial, and political differences of opinion. 24. Intemperance. The most damaging forms of intemperance are connected with eating, strong drink, and sexual activities. Over-indulgence in any of these is fatal to success. 25. Inability to cooperate with others. More people lose their positions and their big opportunities in life, because of this fault, than for all other reasons combined. It is a fault which no well-informed businessman or leader will tolerate. 26. Possession of power that was not acquired through self effort. (Sons and daughters of wealthy men, and others who inherit money which they did not earn). Power in the hands of one who did not acquire it gradually is often fatal to success. Quick riches are more dangerous than poverty. 27. Intentional dishonesty. There is no substitute for honesty. One may be temporarily dishonest by force of circumstances over which one has no control, without permanent damage. But, there is no hope for the person who is dishonest by choice. Sooner or later, his deeds will catch up with him, and he will pay by loss of reputation, and perhaps even loss of liberty. 28. Egotism and vanity. These qualities serve as red lights which warn others to keep away. They are fatal to success. 29. Guessing instead of thinking. Most people are too indifferent or lazy to acquire facts with which to think accurately. They prefer to act on “opinions” created by guesswork or snap-judgments. 30. Lack of capital. This is a common cause of failure among those who start out in business for the first time, without sufficient reserve of capital to absorb the shock of their mistakes, and to carry them over until they have established a reputation. 31. Under this, name any particular cause of failure from which you have suffered that has not been included in the foregoing list.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich)
they woke up to realize that many of these corporations, multinational American giants, were no longer paying taxes on their overseas income. Wonder of wonders! To cap it off, these selfsame leaders couldn’t agree on a feasible method to encourage or force these companies to bring the money home. To the contrary they passed tax laws that actually discouraged this.
Steve Martini (The Enemy Inside (Paul Madriani #13))
The main components of an OP1 narrative are: Assessment of past performance, including goals achieved, goals missed, and lessons learned Key initiatives for the following year A detailed income statement Requests (and justifications) for resources, which may include things like new hires, marketing spend, equipment, and other fixed assets Each group works in partnership with its finance and human resources counterparts to create their detailed plan, which is then presented to a panel of leaders.
Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
rising income inequality. not for nothing did Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ become a New York Times bestseller. Piketty made the strong claim that the rate of return on capital was, in the absence of wars and revolutions, always likely to be higher than the rate of economic growth. the implication was simply that the already well-off, basically those with no shortage of capital, would steadily get richer
Stephen D. King (Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History)
About half of middle- and upper-income blacks were raised in neighborhoods with at least 20 percent poverty, compared to 1 percent of whites. This finding is consistent with extensive research demonstrating that blacks and whites with similar economic status live in dramatically different residential environments, with blacks living in areas with higher crime rates, poor quality schools, higher poverty rates, lower property values, and severe racial segregation.5 Living amid such concentrated poverty does not mean simply that a child’s neighbors have little money. In the American context, neighborhood poverty is fundamentally interwoven with racial segregation, with the resources available for children and families in the community, with the quality of local institutions like schools, with the degree of political influence held by community leaders and residents, with the availability of economic opportunities, and with the prevalence of violence. Living in a high-poverty neighborhood typically means living in an economically depressed environment that is unhealthy and unsafe and that offers little opportunity for success.
Patrick Sharkey (Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality)
Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned out badly, you might get shot. Better to avoid all responsibility. An example of what could happen
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
It is easy for the leader of a business to take a quick look at Kumasi, and at the thousands of up-and-coming cities in the developing world, and conclude that his or her company is not missing out on all that much by not being there today. But at a time of rapid, surprising change, snapshots that capture a moment in economic time can be deeply misleading. In this age of Instagram, we must apply new filters to the mental and financial pictures we take. Our intuition—the nerve center that turns images into narratives—has to reset so that it processes the incoming data intelligently. The portraits we take of cities must capture the dynamism underneath the surface and highlight the brightness of opportunities, while toning down the alarming flares of risk. Most of all, they must be able to project forward motion.
Richard Dobbs (No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends)
The situation was similar in the Soviet Union, with industry playing the role of sugar in the Caribbean. Industrial growth in the Soviet Union was further facilitated because its technology was so backward relative to what was available in Europe and the United States, so large gains could be reaped by reallocating resources to the industrial sector, even if all this was done inefficiently and by force. Before 1928 most Russians lived in the countryside. The technology used by peasants was primitive, and there were few incentives to be productive. Indeed, the last vestiges of Russian feudalism were eradicated only shortly before the First World War. There was thus huge unrealized economic potential from reallocating this labor from agriculture to industry. Stalinist industrialization was one brutal way of unlocking this potential. By fiat, Stalin moved these very poorly used resources into industry, where they could be employed more productively, even if industry itself was very inefficiently organized relative to what could have been achieved. In fact, between 1928 and 1960 national income grew at 6 percent a year, probably the most rapid spurt of economic growth in history up until then. This quick economic growth was not created by technological change, but by reallocating labor and by capital accumulation through the creation of new tools and factories. Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy.
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
Popular magazine articles and Oprah-style television shows falsely represent work-life balance as an individual challenge, a lifestyle choice available to all women. The feminism on offer is woefully thin and unpleasurable. On the high end of the income scale, feminism seems to mean working even more than men. The media celebrate women such as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her brutal work ethics--magazine articles report, awestruck, they they barely sleep, that their staffs struggle to match their work hours, that they've become the rare female leaders in their spheres by laboring harder than male colleagues. Mayer reported proudly that while at Google, she would sleep under her desk. By this measure, feminism, that Utopian striving for equality that we've carried through centuries of opposition, is boiled down merely to the right to work ourselves to death. If feminism means the right to sleep under my desk, then screw it. And this is a vision that can be palatable, just barely, only at the high end of the economy where work is plausibly couched in self-actualization. . . . If any feminism is going to be worth its name, it will improve the lives of all women instead of setting them in competition with each other or applying only to this or that region or income stratum. Liberal feminism would grant women the right to compete. A radical feminism would grant women a good life in which they have real power.
Sarah Léonard (The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century)
Why are so many young men staying on in universities earning multiple degrees—and that, too, in liberal arts?’ whispered Chandini to Gangasagar. ‘So that they continue to remain as students on the campus,’ explained Gangasagar. ‘But why do you need them there?’ asked Chandini. ‘So that they can contest the elections,’ explained Gangasagar. ‘Which elections?’ ‘Students’ Union elections.’ ‘Why does the ABNS need to involve itself in Students’ Union activities across the thirty-odd universities of Uttar Pradesh?’ ‘Because if our young men control the Students’ Unions of the universities, we—the ABNS—control the youth, a key constituency in the state’s power balance.’ ‘And then what will they do?’ ‘A liberal arts education is general enough for the IAS—the Indian Administrative Service or the IRS— the Indian Revenue Service.’ ‘So they’ll enter the bureaucracy?’ asked Chandini. ‘Some of them will become trade union leaders, others income-tax commissioners, secretaries within the Reserve Bank of India—there are so many jobs that need us to have our own people!
Ashwin Sanghi (Chanakya's Chant)
Cultures grow out of the keystone habits in every organization, whether leaders are aware of them or not. For instance, when researchers studied an incoming class of cadets at West Point, they measured their grade point averages, physical aptitude, military abilities, and self-discipline. When they correlated those factors with whether students dropped out or graduated, however, they found that all of them mattered less than a factor researchers referred to as “grit,” which they defined as the tendency to work “strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.”4.26,4.27 What’s most interesting about grit is how it emerges. It grows out of a culture that cadets create for themselves, and that culture often emerges because of keystone habits they adopt at West Point. “There’s so much about this school that’s hard,” one cadet told me. “They call the first summer ‘Beast Barracks,’ because they want to grind you down. Tons of people quit before the school year starts. “But I found this group of guys in the first couple of days here, and we started this thing where, every morning, we get together to make sure everyone is feeling strong. I go to them if I’m feeling worried or down, and I know they’ll pump me back up. There’s only nine of us, and we call ourselves the musketeers. Without them, I don’t think I would have lasted a month here.” Cadets who are successful at West Point arrive at the school armed with habits of mental and physical discipline. Those assets, however, only carry you so far. To succeed, they need a keystone habit that creates a culture—such as a daily gathering of like-minded friends—to help find the strength to overcome obstacles. Keystone habits transform us by creating cultures that make clear the values that, in the heat of a difficult decision or a moment of uncertainty, we might otherwise forget.
Charles Duhigg (The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business)
Among ideas, legitimacy, and all of the other dimensions of development Ideas concerning legitimacy develop according to their own logic, but they are also shaped by economic, political, and social development. The history of the twentieth century would have looked quite different without the writings of an obscure scribbler in the British Library, Karl Marx, who systematized a critique of early capitalism. Similarly, communism collapsed in 1989 largely because few people any longer believed in the foundational ideas of Marxism-Leninism. Conversely, developments in economics and politics affect the kinds of ideas that people regard as legitimate. The Rights of Man seemed more plausible to French people because of the changes that had taken place in France’s class structure and the rising expectations of the new middle classes in the later eighteenth century. The spectacular financial crises and economic setbacks of 1929–1931 undermined the legitimacy of certain capitalist institutions and led the way to the legitimization of greater state control over the economy. The subsequent growth of large welfare states, and the economic stagnation and inflation that they appeared to encourage, laid the groundwork for the conservative Reagan-Thatcher revolutions of the 1980s. Similarly, the failure of socialism to deliver on its promises of modernization and equality led to its being discredited in the minds of many who lived under communism. Economic growth can also create legitimacy for the governments that succeed in fostering it. Many fast-developing countries in East Asia, such as Singapore and Malaysia, have maintained popular support despite their lack of liberal democracy for this reason. Conversely, the reversal of economic growth through economic crisis or mismanagement can be destabilizing, as it was for the dictatorship in Indonesia after the financial crisis of 1997–1998.33 Legitimacy also rests on the distribution of the benefits of growth. Growth that goes to a small oligarchy at the top of the society without being broadly shared often mobilizes social groups against the political system. This is what happened in Mexico under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, who ruled the country from 1876 to 1880 and again from 1884 to 1911. National income grew rapidly in this period, but property rights existed only for a wealthy elite, which set the stage for the Mexican Revolution of 1911 and a long period of civil war and instability as underprivileged groups fought for their share of national income. In more recent times, the legitimacy of democratic systems in Venezuela and Bolivia has been challenged by populist leaders whose political base is poor and otherwise marginalized groups.34
Francis Fukuyama (The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution)
By taking action now, Obama could even change the Republican calculus. Instead of burying a bill through countless delays, Republicans will have to respond to concrete decisions that could help actual human beings — perhaps as many as 6 million undocumented immigrants — and also a tech industry that wants visas for the highly skilled. The ink was barely dry on Obama’s climate change accord with China when incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pronounced himself “particularly distressed” by a deal that he said “requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years,” which rather oversimplifies matters.
Anonymous
The Wall Street Journal (The Wall Street Journal) - Clip This Article on Location 1055 | Added on Tuesday, May 5, 2015 5:10:24 PM OPINION Baltimore Is Not About Race Government-induced dependency is the problem—and it’s one with a long history. By William McGurn | 801 words For those who see the rioting in Baltimore as primarily about race, two broad reactions dominate. One group sees rampaging young men fouling their own neighborhoods and concludes nothing can be done because the social pathologies are so overwhelming. In some cities, this view manifests itself in the unspoken but cynical policing that effectively cedes whole neighborhoods to the thugs. The other group tut-tuts about root causes. Take your pick: inequality, poverty, injustice. Or, as President Obama intimated in an ugly aside on the rioting, a Republican Congress that will never agree to the “massive investments” (in other words, billions more in federal spending) required “if we are serious about solving this problem.” There is another view. In this view, the disaster of inner cities isn’t primarily about race at all. It’s about the consequences of 50 years of progressive misrule—which on race has proved an equal-opportunity failure. Baltimore is but the latest liberal-blue city where government has failed to do the one thing it ought—i.e., put the cops on the side of the vulnerable and law-abiding—while pursuing “solutions” that in practice enfeeble families and social institutions and local economies. These supposed solutions do this by substituting federal transfers for fathers and families. They do it by favoring community organizing and government projects over private investment. And they do it by propping up failing public-school systems that operate as jobs programs for the teachers unions instead of centers of learning. If our inner-city African-American communities suffer disproportionately from crippling social pathologies that make upward mobility difficult—and they do—it is in large part because they have disproportionately been on the receiving end of this five-decade-long progressive experiment in government beneficence. How do we know? Because when we look at a slice of white America that was showered with the same Great Society good intentions—Appalachia—we find the same dysfunctions: greater dependency, more single-parent families and the absence of the good, private-sector jobs that only a growing economy can create. Remember, in the mid-1960s when President Johnson put a face on America’s “war on poverty,” he didn’t do it from an urban ghetto. He did it from the front porch of a shack in eastern Kentucky’s Martin County, where a white family of 10 eked out a subsistence living on an income of $400 a year. In many ways, rural Martin County and urban Baltimore could not be more different. Martin County is 92% white while Baltimore is two-thirds black. Each has seen important sources of good-paying jobs dry up—Martin County in coal mining, Baltimore in manufacturing. In the last presidential election, Martin Country voted 6 to 1 for Mitt Romney while Baltimore went 9 to 1 for Barack Obama. Yet the Great Society’s legacy has been depressingly similar. In a remarkable dispatch two years ago, the Lexington Herald-Leader’s John Cheves noted that the war on poverty sent $2.1 billion to Martin County alone (pop. 12,537) through programs including “welfare, food stamps, jobless benefits, disability compensation, school subsidies, affordable housing, worker training, economic development incentives, Head Start for poor children and expanded Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” The result? “The problem facing Appalachia today isn’t Third World poverty,” writes Mr. Cheves. “It’s dependence on government assistance.” Just one example: When Congress imposed work requirements and lifetime caps for welfare during the Clinton administration, claims of disability jumped. Mr. Cheves quotes
Anonymous
Prayer assumes need. “Prayer and helplessness are inseparable.”116 Jesus described this in a parable of two churchgoers in Luke 18. One man, a religious leader, pronounced his self-sufficiency, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income” (Luke 18:11-12). The other, a tax collector, prayed a simpler prayer: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13). The tax collector knew more about prayer than the religious leader did. Prayer requires a humble awareness of our need for God.
Mark R. McMinn (Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality in Christian Counseling (AACC Counseling Library))
After all, if ignorance were the problem, well-meaning leaders would quickly learn what types of policies increased their citizens’ incomes and welfare, and would gravitate toward those policies.
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
Where did Jesus’ ministry resources come from? The Scriptures give eight sources of possible income for the moneybag carried by Judas. The following Scriptures will show that Jesus never asked the synagogue congregants for free-will offerings. Nor do we see the synagogue leaders asking people to make offerings to Jesus. The custom in Jesus’ time involved charity and taking care of the needs of travelers including those who preached?
Frank Chase Jr (Kleptomaniac: Who's Really Robbing God Anyway?)
We have become world leaders in income inequality, racial tension, rape and illicit financial outflows.
Jacques Pauw (The President's Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and Out of Prison)
It is a sad irony that many countries possessing natural resources with high income potential have floundered into civil strife as factions compete for their share of the bounty, often monopolized by despotic leaders. Sharing the resource wealth across the country is one suggested way to defuse the threat of political conflict, usually by transferring part of the earnings to local area governments and, in particular, to the area where the natural resource is exploited, be it oil, diamonds or other minerals. In some cases, this fiscal devolution route has limited the conflict, if the amount transferred is large enough. However, in others it has triggered conflict by giving local dissidents the means to pay for insurrection.57 It turns out that the optimum way to defuse or prevent potential conflict is to pay direct cash transfers to all individuals, which would make it much more difficult for secessionist movements or local political parties to appropriate the resources.
Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
Ironically, opponents of basic income on the grounds that it would lead to a dismantling of the welfare state tend to support some variant of social insurance. They should be reminded that social insurance was first introduced by someone vehemently opposed to the political ideology they purport to represent. Otto von Bismarck prohibited socialists and exiled their leaders from Prussian cities. So those criticizing basic income because, in their albeit incorrect view, it is advocated by enemies of socialism should logically be opposed to the fundamental base of old welfare states.
Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
President Ronald Reagan’s top foreign policy advisers. After the assassination of the FDR leaders, she quipped to journalists that their slaying was a “reminder that people who choose to live by the sword die by the sword.” When asked the views of the incoming administration on the brutal murder of the American churchwomen, she replied, “The nuns were clearly not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.
Jonathan Blitzer (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis)
God hurts when people are starving because of human greed enacted by political leaders. God hurts when people are scapegoated and “othered” by governments and then put into concentration camps, bombed into oblivion, or sanctioned into horrific poverty. God hurts when racism is at the core of lawmaking and law enforcement. God hurts when LGBTQIA people, all of whom are beautiful expressions of divine creativity, are targeted for harassment, violence, and being denied the same rights that heterosexual people are given. God hurts every time a new recruit signs up for the military, because the military is always used to kill other children of God. God hurts when God’s creation is destroyed and pillaged to generate profits with no regard to the sanctity of God’s creation and the life it contains. God hurts when his children forget to love their neighbors as themselves by putting profits over people instead of enacting laws that would protect humanity and foster human thriving, such as universal health care and universal basic income would. God hurts when people accumulate vast wealth, while billions of God’s children struggle to live without basic necessities. God hurts when people like Donald Trump blaspheme saying that only he can prevent Joe Biden from hurting God. God hurts when people of faith defend the actions of and offer support to a man like Donald Trump who brazenly admitted to being a sexual predator, has a multi-decades long history of racism, and whose utter narcissism and lack of empathy has fueled his many cruel policy decisions.
Dillon Naber Cruz (Theological Musings: Collected Essays of a Tattooed Theologian, Vol. 1)
Puget Sound Annuities leader, David Snavely leads the financial planning firm which was brought about through the company he founded 36 years ago—Sound Investment Services. He focuses on retirement income planning and assists clients as they create customized plans to meet their future goals. Mr. Snavely’s company provides an array of services as well as financial products. These include retirement and estate planning, insurance, and investments. In his spare time, he can be found enjoying the outdoors.
David Snavely
No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war,” the Chinese president declared, in a none-too-subtle dig at his incoming American counterpart. Three days later in Washington, Trump delivered a shockingly combative inaugural address, condemning “other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.” Rather than embracing trade, Trump declared that “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.” Xi’s speech was the sort of claptrap that global leaders were supposed to say when addressing business tycoons. The media fawned over his supposed defense of economic openness and globalization against populist shocks like Trump and Brexit. “Xi sounding rather more presidential than US president-elect,” tweeted talking-head Ian Bremmer. “Xi Jinping Delivers a Robust Defence of Globalisation,” reported the lead headline in the Financial Times. “World Leaders Find Hope for Globalization in Davos Amid Populist Revolt,” the Washington Post declared. “The international community is looking to China,” explained Klaus Schwab, the chair of the World Economic Forum.
Chris Miller (Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology)
It can be tough for anyone to go from being a manager or senior leader to being a student. Symbolically, becoming a student represents the loss of power, income, and status.
Zachariah Renfro
Many did, however, take money from the government via welfare, Medicaid, and food stamps, especially Celestial wives and their children. Not considered legal wives, they used their maiden names to apply for benefits. Subsidies accounted for millions of dollars—much of the community’s income.
Rebecca Musser (The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice)
Transformational leaders do not focus on chasing after an income; they pay more attention to genuine transformation in the lives of the followers.
Gift Gugu Mona (The Effective Leadership Prototype for a Modern Day Leader)
The distribution of income in a society is called the 'Gini coefficient,' named after an Italian sociologist named Corrado Gini, who published a paper on the topic in 1912. A society where one person earns all the money and everyone else earns none, effectively has a Gini coefficient of 1.0; and a society where everyone earns the same amount has a coefficient of zero. Neither is desirable. Moderate differences in income motivate people because they have a reasonable chance of bettering their circumstances, and extreme differences discourage people because their efforts look futile. A study of 21 small-scale societies around the world found that hunter-gatherers like the Hadza—who presumably represent the most efficient possible system for survival in a hostile environment—have Gini coefficients as low as .25. In other words, they are far closer to absolute income equality than to absolute monopoly. Because oppression from one's own leaders is as common a threat as oppression from one's enemies, Gini coefficients are one reliable measure of freedom. Hunter-gatherer societies are not democracies—and many hold women in subordinate family roles—but the relationship between those families and their leaders is almost impervious to exploitation. In that sense, they are freer than virtually all modern societies. According to multiple sources, including the Congressional Budget Office, the United States has one of the highest Gini coefficients of the developed world, .42, which puts it at roughly the level of Ancient Rome. (Before taxes, the American Gini coefficient is even higher—almost .6—which is on par with deeply corrupt countries like Haiti, Namibia, and Botswana.) Moreover, the wealth gap between America's richest and poorest families has doubled since 1989. Globally, the situation is even more extreme: several dozen extremely rich people control as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity—3.8 billion people.
Sebastian Junger (Freedom)
A closer look at still more refined educational elites amplifies this pattern. BAs from even modestly higher-ranked schools boost incomes by 10 to 40 percent more than BAs from lower-ranked schools and nearly double the rate of return on the tuition. Super-elite BAs generate still greater income boosts, more than doubling the gains produced by an average BA, and the top incomes from super-elite schools more than triple the incomes of the top earners with average BAs. (The highest-paid 10 percent of Harvard graduates average salaries of $250,000 just six years after graduation.) A recent broader survey reports—incredibly—that nearly 50 percent of America’s corporate leaders, 60 percent of its financial leaders, and 50 percent of its highest government officials attended only twelve universities.
Daniel Markovits (The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite)
To understand why Mohammed kidnapped the leader of Lebanon, it’s necessary to go back a half century, to 1964. That’s when a young Lebanese accountant named Rafic Hariri decided he couldn’t make enough money at home to support his young family. So he moved to Saudi Arabia, where burgeoning oil wealth was funding roads, hospitals, and hotels, and all sorts of companies were springing up to build them. Saudi Arabia in the 1960s had lots of oil and money but not much to show for it on the ground. The kingdom’s population was smaller than that of London. The royal family was intent on using the kingdom’s oil income to build new infrastructure across the country, but few domestic companies could handle big construction projects. And there were few universities to produce graduates who could run such companies.
Bradley Hope (Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power)
Fall River, an old mill town fifty miles south of Boston. Median household income in that city is $33,000, among the lowest in the state; unemployment is among the highest, 15 percent in March 2014, nearly five years after the recession ended. Twenty-three percent of Fall River’s inhabitants live in poverty. The city lost its many fabric-making concerns years ago and with them it lost its reason for being. People have been deserting the place for decades.14 Many of the empty factories in which their ancestors worked are still standing, however. Solid nineteenth-century structures of granite or brick, these huge boxes dominate the city visually—there always seems to be one or two of them in the vista, contrasting painfully with whatever colorful plastic fast-food joint has been slapped up next door. Most of these old factories are boarded up, unmistakable emblems of hopelessness right up to the roof. But the ones that have been successfully repurposed are in some ways even worse, filled as they often are with enterprises offering cheap suits or help with drug addiction. A clinic in the hulk of one abandoned mill has a sign on the window reading, simply, “Cancer & Blood.” The effect of all this is to remind you with every prospect that this is a place and a way of life from which the politicians have withdrawn their blessing. Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by Democrats. Fifty miles away, Boston is a roaring success, but the doctrine of prosperity that you see on every corner in Boston also serves to explain away the failure you see on every corner in Fall River. This is a place where affluence never returns—not because affluence for Fall River is impossible or unimaginable, but because our country’s leaders have blandly accepted a social order that constantly bids down the wages of people like these while bidding up the rewards for innovators, creatives, and professionals. Even the city’s one real hope for new employment opportunities—an Amazon warehouse that is in the planning stages—will serve to lock in this relationship. If all goes according to plan, and if Amazon sticks to the practices it has pioneered elsewhere, people from Fall River will one day get to do exhausting work with few benefits while being electronically monitored for efficiency, in order to save the affluent customers of nearby Boston a few pennies when they buy books or electronics.15
Thomas Frank (Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?)
Princeton Tries to Explain a Drop in Jewish Enrollment; or "What is Communism?" by Yggdrasil The sine-qua-non of inner party power is a multi-cultural elite alienated from its tribal and racial kinsmen. It is the native elites - the indigenous leaders who might resist the inner party's drive for power that are always the target. ... For the reform version of communism developed by the Frankfurt School that now dominates the ‘liberal democracies" and the NWO, the masses of the nations are important as consumers ... What remains relevant to the inner party are the inner party's potential competitors, the native national elites with community ties to their brethren. In the Soviet Union, the inner party elites (using Lenin and Stalin as their cover) resorted to murder and forced resettlement to remove the native national elites, a fast, direct and brutal form of decapitation. In the "liberal democracies" the inner party uses a slower and less visibly brutal method of decapitation. Thus, in the liberal democracies of today we have "affirmative action" - a set of laws that places tremendous pressure on private businesses to displace native elites at the top with minorities who will be less plausible targets of discrimination lawsuits. These laws exist everywhere in the European world, and with the exception of the U.S. were enacted long before any significant minority constituencies (other than the inner party itself) existed to lobby for their passage. The entire program of displacement and decapitation within the liberal democracies was carefully drawn up and explained in "The Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor Adorno, et. al.(1947). It is a prescription for identifying any person who displays any bond of obligation to his own kind and the will to resist those who threaten the interests of his kind. Such "authoritarian personalities" are to be denied university admission and consigned to low status occupations, which is precisely what the laws of affirmative action and social rules of political correctness accomplish. Indeed, as I read the tables from the 1939 Soviet census published in Sanning's work [The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by Walter N. Sanning] I recalled my own research showing that the inner party, representing 2.4% of the U.S. population comprises 28% of the student body at Harvard, while the descendants of European Christendom comprising 70% of the population supply only 18% of the students. The American Majority has been effectively displaced at Harvard. Relative to their share of the Population, they have 2.4 times fewer students than do the inner party's Afro-American coalition partners. ... The United States Department of Labor has maintained a tracking study of 12,000 young people who were between the ages of 14 and 22 in 1979 known as the National Longitudinal study of Youth ("NLSY"). The CD Roms with all the data can be purchased from Ohio State University. These data show that at each given level of IQ (all participants were tested) the income and educational attainment of the descendants of European Christendom is much lower than for Blacks, Hispanics and Inner party members of the same IQ. In what will surely be a surprise to most middle and upper middle-income Euro-Americans, the effects are most pronounced at the highest IQ levels. In other words, it is the majority elite that suffers the widest disparity in income and education when compared with Blacks, Hispanics and Inner Party members within the same IQ range. When the effects are broken down by sex, we find that among males the disparity is most pronounced in the highest IQ ranges and disappears entirely by the time you descend to the 50% mark. The widest disparity exists among the top 2% of the population (those with IQs above 130).
Yggdrasil
After this encounter, and despite being a US ally, the Italian government alerted Libya of the incoming attack. Whatever their motives may have been, the Italians succeeded in alerting Gaddafi at his Bab al-Aziziya residence only minutes before the F-111s arrived. The Libyan leader barely escaped with his family.
Mike Guardia (Tomcat Fury: A Combat History of the F-14)
All leaders were equal at the conference table, but those from heavyweight countries showed that they were more equal by arriving in big private jets, the British in their VC 10s and Comets, and the Canadians in Boeings. The Australians joined this select group in 1979, after Malcolm Fraser's government purchased a Boeing 707 for the Royal Australian Air Force. Those African presidents whose countries were then better off, like Kenya and Nigeria, also had special aircraft. I wondered why they did not set out to impress the world that they were poor and in dire need of assistance. Our permanent representative at the UN in New York explained that the poorer the country, the bigger the Cadillacs they hired for their leaders. So I made a virtue of arriving by ordinary commercial aircraft, and thus helped preserve Singapore's third World status for many years. However, by the mid-1990s, the World Bank refused to heed our pleas not to reclassify us as a "High Income Developing Country", giving no Brownie points for my frugal travel habits. We lost all the concessions that were given to developing countries.
Lee Kuan-Yew
Transformational leaders do not focus on chasing after an income; they pay more attention to the genuine transformation of their followers.
Gift Gugu Mona (The Effective Leadership Prototype for a Modern Day Leader)
The path that Wallace followed was an accelerated version of a three-phase journey that awaits most founders as they try to bounce back from their venture’s failure. The first phase is recovery from the emotional battering that the shutdown inflicts. The founder must cope with the grief, depression, anger, and guilt that can accompany any major personal setback—often, as with Wallace, while confronting the stark reality of having no income or personal savings. During the second phase, reflection, the founder ideally moves beyond blaming the failure on others or on uncontrollable external events. Through introspection, she gains a deeper understanding of what went wrong, what role she played in her venture’s demise, and what she might have done differently. In the process, she also gains new insights about her motivations and her strengths and weaknesses as an entrepreneur, manager, and leader. In the final phase, reentry, the founder leverages these insights to decide whether to pursue another startup or choose a different career track.
Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
3. Where Consulting Came From: A Brief History In July 1971, Chilean engineer and politician Fernando Flores was working for the Chilean Production Development Corporation, a public organization responsible for fostering economic development in the country. Following the election of the new government under President Salvador Allende the previous year, Flores faced a difficult task: how to manage the newly nationalized sectors of Chile’s economy. Party leaders had never been able to deliver their economic policy goals, which included economic growth and income redistribution, and, despite the ambition, the Chilean public sector simply did not have the capabilities to deliver the mandate on which it was elected. But it was also not afraid to draw on relevant expertise in the private sector. This was how British management consultant Stafford Beer
Mariana Mazzucato (The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies)
Crime and welfare were the major themes of Reagan’s campaign rhetoric. According to the Edsalls, one of Reagan’s favorite and most-often-repeated anecdotes was the story of a Chicago “welfare queen” with “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards,” whose “tax-free income alone is over $150,000.”68 The term welfare queen became a not-so-subtle code for “lazy, greedy, black ghetto mother.” The food stamp program, in turn, was a vehicle to let “some fellow ahead of you buy a T-bone steak,” while “you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger.”69 These highly racialized appeals, targeted to poor and working-class whites, were nearly always accompanied by vehement promises to be tougher on crime and to enhance the federal government’s role in combating it. Reagan portrayed the criminal as “a staring face—a face that belongs to a frightening reality of our time: the face of the human predator.”70 Reagan’s racially coded rhetoric and strategy proved extraordinarily effective, as 22 percent of all Democrats defected from the party to vote for Reagan. The defection rate shot up to 34 percent among those Democrats who believed civil rights leaders were pushing “too fast.”71
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
In their authoritative 1995 work, Voice and Equality, political scientists Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady demonstrated that political activity varied by class. Their study found that 86 percent of high-income people reported having voted, but only 52 percent of low-income people said they voted. And 73 percent of high-income people were involved with a political organization, compared to 29 percent of low-income people. A 2012 sequel by the same authors showed a widening of these patterns, as institutions of working-class participation such as trade unions continued to decline, while the influence of the wealthy concentrated. The affluent go to meetings, are active members of groups concerned with public issues, and develop “civic skills” far more than the poor do—and that disparity has been widening. The iconic Norman Rockwell painting of an ordinary working fellow standing up to speak his mind at a town meeting, meant to depict one of FDR’s Four Freedoms, belongs to another era. And yet, in the Trump rebellion, regular working people who had little regard for civic norms abruptly recovered their voices in a fashion characteristic of mass society—disaffected people sharing not always rational rage with an irrational leader. They even formed new, Tocqueville-style associations, the Tea Parties. Voice and Equality concluded that lower-income people participate at lower rates for three reasons: “they can’t” (because they lack the time or money); “they don’t want to” (because they don’t believe that politics will make a positive difference in their lives); and “nobody asked them” (the political system has few avenues of recruitment for lower-income people). In a survey of why so many people avoided politics, one key reason was that politics felt irrelevant. This view, of course, was also correlated by social class. Nobody in large corporations believes that politics is irrelevant. Trust in government—and in all major institutions—has been falling for half a century. When the American National Election Study first asked the question in 1958, 73 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time.” That sense of trust peaked in 1964, at 78 percent, and has been steadily dropping ever since. By 2015, it was down to just 19 percent. The
Robert Kuttner (Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?)
incoming leader of the free world
Glenn Simpson (Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump)
And harder economic times strained civic trust. As the U.S. growth rate started to slow in the 1970s—as incomes then stagnated and good jobs declined for those without a college degree, as parents started worrying about their kids doing at least as well as they had done—the scope of people’s concerns narrowed. We became more sensitive to the possibility that someone else was getting something we weren’t and more receptive to the notion that the government couldn’t be trusted to be fair. Promoting that story—a story that fed not trust but resentment—had come to define the modern Republican Party. With varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of success, GOP candidates adopted it as their central theme, whether they were running for president or trying to get elected to the local school board. It became the template for Fox News and conservative radio, the foundational text for every think tank and PAC the Koch Brothers financed: The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making. The intensity of these convictions put Democrats on the defensive, making leaders less bold about proposing new initiatives, limiting the boundaries of political debate. A deep and suffocating cynicism took hold. Indeed, it became axiomatic among political consultants of both parties that restoring trust in the government or in any of our major institutions was a lost cause, and that the battle between Democrats and Republicans each election cycle now came down to whether America’s squeezed middle class was more likely to identify the wealthy and powerful or the poor and minorities as the reason they weren’t doing better.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
Only extraordinary leaders take the initiative and seek out this training. Generally, most of today’s officers feel that they don’t need the training, or that it is too easy. Yet these are the same officers who are overwhelmed in the stress of combat while trying to process all the incoming information under chaotic conditions.
Paul R. Howe (Leadership and Training for the Fight: Using Special Operations Principles to Succeed in Law Enforcement, Business, and War)
The Five Laws of Stratospheric Success 1. The Law of Value a. Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than take in payment 2. The Law of Compensation a. Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them 3. The Law of Influence a. Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first 4. The Law of Authenticity a. The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself 5. The Law of Receptivity a. The key to effective giving is staying open to receiving •What you focus on is what you get: “Go looking for conflict, and you’ll find it. Go looking for people to take advantage of you, and they generally will. See the world as a dog-eat-dog place, and you’ll always find a bigger dog looking at you as if you’re his next meal. Go looking for the best in people, and you’ll be amazed at how much talent, ingenuity, empathy, and good will you’ll find. Ultimately, the world treats you more or less the way you expect to be treated.” (16) •“Whoever said being anxious gets more accomplished?” He had always taken for granted that getting a lot done invariably meant a high level of stress. But then, he knew plenty of people who were thoroughly stressed out, yet didn’t really accomplish that much. (58) •Survive, save, and serve. Focus on the third…the rare person does. •Network: People who know you, like you, and trust you—“personal walking ambassadors” •Enlightened self-interest: Watch out for others with the faith that when you do, you’ll get what you need •Reaching any goals takes 10% technical skills MAX—the other 90% is people skills
Bob Burg (The Go-Giver Leader: A Little Story About What Matters Most in Business (Go-Giver, Book 2))
Curious is the key word. It has nothing to do with income, nothing to do with education, and certainly nothing to do with organized religion. It has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope is interesting. Leaders are curious because they can’t wait to find out what the group is going to do next. The changes in the tribe are what are interesting, and curiosity drives them.
Seth Godin (Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us)
Popov, the head of Moscow’s City Council, took the floor. He did not believe that Russian Solidarity was a good option: 1991 would be the year of “catastrophe equal to a war or the Great Depression.” Soviet national income would fall by 10 or 20 percent, he said. Angry and unemployed masses would yearn for an authoritarian leader, he claimed: in America they had found Roosevelt, in Germany—Hitler.
Vladislav M. Zubok (Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union)
Buy Verified Wise Accounts Online: The Smart Way to Access Trusted Financial Services In today's fast-paced, globally connected world, managing finances efficiently is more important than ever. Wise (formerly known as TransferWise) has emerged as one of the most popular platforms for individuals and businesses alike to send money across borders. If You Want To More Information Just Contact Now: WhatsApp: +1 ‪(804) 452-7979 Telegram: @usapvaonline Offering competitive exchange rates, low fees, and fast transfers, it has earned its place as a leader in the online financial services space. But for many, creating a verified Wise account and fully utilizing its features can sometimes be a challenge. This is where the option to buy verified Wise accounts online comes into play. In this guide, we’ll explore why buying a verified Wise account can be a game-changer, how to go about it safely, and how to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your Wise account. Why Buy Verified Wise Accounts? Before delving into the specifics of how and where to buy a verified Wise account online, it’s crucial to understand why someone would consider this route in the first place. Here are some of the top reasons why people opt to buy verified Wise accounts: 1. Instant Access to Wise’s Features A verified Wise account comes with full access to the platform’s vast array of financial services. This includes features like multi-currency accounts, the ability to send money internationally at low fees, access to the Wise debit card, and the ability to hold and convert currencies seamlessly. Buying a verified account means you don’t have to wait through the sometimes lengthy verification process, which can be especially beneficial for those in urgent need of these services. 2. Avoiding Verification Delays One of the most time-consuming parts of creating a Wise account is the verification process. This includes submitting documents such as identification, proof of address, and sometimes even proof of income or source of funds. While these steps are necessary to comply with regulations, they can delay your access to the platform's features. Buying a verified account allows you to bypass this waiting period, granting you immediate access to all the services Wise has to offer. 3. Ensuring Security and Authenticity A verified Wise account has passed through Wise’s stringent verification process, ensuring that the account holder is legitimate and that the account is fully secure. Purchasing an already verified account can give you peace of mind, knowing that you’re dealing with a genuine account that complies with all necessary regulations. This can be particularly important for those who are wary of encountering fraud or phishing scams. 4. Convenient for Business Use For businesses that deal with international transactions, having a verified Wise account is a must. Wise allows businesses to hold multiple currencies, pay suppliers and employees across the globe, and handle various financial activities efficiently. By purchasing a verified account, businesses can immediately start making cross-border payments without the hassle of waiting for account verification, saving valuable time. 5. Access to Global Money Transfers With a verified Wise account, you can send and receive money in over 50 currencies at some of the most competitive exchange rates in the industry. This is particularly advantageous for individuals who frequently transfer money internationally, whether for personal or professional reasons. Buying a verified account ensures that you won’t face any restrictions when sending or receiving large amounts of money. How to Buy Verified Wise Accounts Online Safely While the idea of purchasing a verified Wise account may seem appealing, it’s essential to go about it with caution.
Buy Verified Wise Accounts Online: The Smart Way to
so far the record is pretty clear that tech leaders have largely abrogated their responsibilities around the deleterious impact of their products, either in pursuit of more growth and profits or to duck any incoming flack. That was especially clear in the 2024 election, as companies such as Meta and X drastically cut back on their safety and moderation teams. A stark contrast from the 2016 election, when social media companies felt pressured to evaluate how their lack of moderation may have affected the results.
Kara Swisher (Burn Book: A Tech Love Story)
Buy Verified Wise (TransferWise) Accounts – Personal & Business Ready Looking to purchase a fully verified Wise account (formerly known as TransferWise)? You’re in the right place! At pvastoreit.com, we offer secure, fully verified Wise accounts that are ready for instant use — ideal for international money transfers, cryptocurrency payments, and global business operations. ✅ Why Choose Our Wise Accounts? Wise is a global leader in cross-border payments, allowing individuals and businesses to send and receive money across 70+ countries with low fees, real exchange rates, and fast processing. Whether you’re handling payroll, freelance income, or crypto transactions — our accounts are fully equipped to support you. Our Superior Service ➤ Business & Personal Accounts ➤ Completely Verified Wise Account (We provide three account types: History, Old, and New) ➤ Bank and card verified. ➤ High-Quality Service. ➤ Wise Payments and Invoicing. ➤ Email access associated with Wise account. ➤ Money-back guarantee 100% ➤ Phone confirmed and has access ➤ Date of Birth Provided. For more information, feel free to reach out to us anytime: 24/7 Customer Support ➤Email: pvastoreit@gmail.com ➤Telegram: @pvastoreit ➤WhatsApp: +1 (682) 239-0175
Buy Verified Wise Accounts 2025