Steady Growth Quotes

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I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.
Janet Fitch (White Oleander)
Mr. Pugh turned bright red. His cheeks puffed up like the galls of shad from the nearby river. His green- monster eyes rolled around his face, and he pounded both fists down on the table, and through grinding teeth and snorting gasps hollered, “INDEED NOT, MISS KNAPP! Slaves are not allowed to read and write. We have you here with good and steady pay to instruct our children and nothing else. Going near that boy, or any other slave, with chalk or book learnin’ is strictly forbidden! Do you understand me?
Sheridan Brown (The Viola Factor)
Many people incorrectly assume time to be a steady incline, a measured arc of growth and progress, but when history is written by the victors the narrative can often misrepresent that shape.
Olivie Blake (The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1))
Humanity looked in awe upon the beauty and the everlasting duration of creation. The exquisite sky flooded with sunlight. The majesty of the dark night lit by celestial torches as the holy planetary powers trace their paths in the heavens in fixed and steady metre - ordering the growth of things with their secret infusions.
Hermes Trismegistus (Corpus Hermeticum)
Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead.
Herman E. Daly (Steady-State Economics: The Economics of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth)
your growth in the midst of a big leap forward; hold steady and allow yourself to bloom.
Yung Pueblo (Inward)
Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person (nor are they incompatible). These are beliefs, of course, that one has intuitively about friendships and family; they become less obvious when caught up in a romantic life that mirrors, magnifies, and perpetuates one's own mercurial emotional life and temperament. It has been with my pleasure, and not-inconsiderable pain, that I have learned about the possibilities of love - its steadiness and its growth - from my husband, the man with whom I had lived for almost a decade.
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
Environmental degradation is an iatrogenic disease induced by economic physicians who treat the basic malady of unlimited wants by prescribing unlimited growth.... Yet one certainly does not cure a treatment-induced disease by increasing the treatment dosage.
Herman E. Daly (Steady-State Economics)
And what is true for human beings is true for every living thing: all organisms require alternating periods of growth and equilibrium. Any person or system exposed to ceaseless novelty and change risks falling into chaos; but one that is too rigid or static ceases to grow and eventually dies. This never-ending dance between change and stability is like the anchor and the waves. Adult relationships mirror these dynamics all too well. We seek a steady, reliable anchor in our partner. Yet at the same time we expect love to offer a transcendent experience that will allow us to soar beyond our ordinary lives. The challenge for modern couples lies in reconciling the need for what’s safe and predictable with the wish to pursue what’s exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.
Esther Perel (Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence)
Stepping out of one’s world or out of one’s habitual self is a transcendental experience. [...] If we seek transcendence, we may have many visions, but we will surely end where we started. If we opt for growth, we may have our moments of transcendence, but they will be peak experiences along the steady road to a richer and more secure self. (32-33)
Alexander Lowen
Nature forms patterns. Some are orderly in space but disorderly in time, others orderly in time but disorderly in space. Some patterns are fractal, exhibiting structures self-similar in scale. Others give rise to steady states or oscillating ones. Pattern formation has become a branch of physics and of materials science, allowing scientists to model the aggregation of particles into clusters, the fractured spread of electrical discharges, and the growth of crystals in ice and metal alloys. The dynamics seem so basic—shapes changing in space and time—yet only now are the tools available to understand them.
James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: "This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree." If it were to go, all would go -- this city, this mischevious and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.
E.B. White (Here Is New York)
Here is an all-too-brief summary of Buffett’s approach: He looks for what he calls “franchise” companies with strong consumer brands, easily understandable businesses, robust financial health, and near-monopolies in their markets, like H & R Block, Gillette, and the Washington Post Co. Buffett likes to snap up a stock when a scandal, big loss, or other bad news passes over it like a storm cloud—as when he bought Coca-Cola soon after its disastrous rollout of “New Coke” and the market crash of 1987. He also wants to see managers who set and meet realistic goals; build their businesses from within rather than through acquisition; allocate capital wisely; and do not pay themselves hundred-million-dollar jackpots of stock options. Buffett insists on steady and sustainable growth in earnings, so the company will be worth more in the future than it is today.
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
Even when change is elective, it will disorient you. You may go through anxiety. You will miss aspects of your former life. It doesn’t matter. The trick is to know in advance of making any big change that you’re going to be thrown off your feet by it. So you prepare for this inevitable disorientation and steady yourself to get through it. Then you take the challenge, make the change, and achieve your dream.
Harvey MacKay
we need to move beyond the idea of growth, to something called a “steady-state economy.
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)
Silicon Valley has never been interested in slow and steady growth—an early winning appearance is key to the Palo Alto System.
Malcolm Harris (Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World)
She does not know what the future holds, but she is grateful for slow and steady growth.
Morgan Harper Nichols
Lots of earthquakes and landslides and disturbances keep happening on a daily basis simply because the mountain is growing. The same is true with human life: if one is striving to grow, earthquakes and landslides keep happening in one's life. Those who are stagnant, who don't grow, their life seems to be stable and steady, and looks better. But it's lifeless. For one who is striving to grow, an enormous amount of upheaval happens in his life. But all the upheavals are worth a little bit of growth that could happen within a human being.
Sadhguru (Himalayan Lust)
The first idea is that human progress is exponential (that is, it expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant) rather than linear (that is, expanding by repeatedly adding a constant). Linear versus exponential: Linear growth is steady; exponential growth becomes explosive.
Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology)
At Mayflower-Plymouth, we analyze global markets, analyze businesses and employ a range of strategies that emulate natural ecosystems to deliver holistic and industry-consistent investment returns. Our approach emphasizes preservation, steady compounding growth and steady returns for our capital partners and clients.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Once wealthy, however, people were less consumed by the hunt for the next score. They were more focused on staying rich than getting richer, and their strategy focused on steady, long-term growth and the minimization of the risk of big losses.
Rob Copeland (The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend)
Summary of the Science of Getting Rich There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe. A thought in this substance produces the thing that is imaged by the thought. Man can form things in his thought, and by impressing his thought upon formless substance can cause the thing he thinks about to be created. In order to do this, man must pass from the competitive to the creative mind; otherwise he cannot be in harmony with the Formless Intelligence, which is always creative and never competitive in spirit. Man may come into full harmony with the Formless Substance by entertaining a lively and sincere gratitude for the blessings it bestows upon him. Gratitude unifies the mind of man with the intelligence of Substance, so that man’s thoughts are received by the Formless. Man can remain upon the creative plane only by uniting himself with the Formless Intelligence through a deep and continuous feeling of gratitude. Man must form a clear and definite mental image of the things he wishes to have, to do, or to become; and he must hold this mental image in his thoughts, while being deeply grateful to the Supreme that all his desires are granted to him. The man who wishes to get rich must spend his leisure hours in contemplating his Vision, and in earnest thanksgiving that the reality is being given to him. Too much stress cannot be laid on the importance of frequent contemplation of the mental image, coupled with unwavering faith and devout gratitude. This is the process by which the impression is given to the Formless, and the creative forces set in motion. The creative energy works through the established channels of natural growth, and of the industrial and social order. All that is included in his mental image will surely be brought to the man who follows the instructions given above, and whose faith does not waver. What he wants will come to him through the ways of established trade and commerce. In order to receive his own when it shall come to him, man must be active; and this activity can only consist in more than filling his present place. He must keep in mind the Purpose to get rich through the realization of his mental image. And he must do, every day, all that can be done that day, taking care to do each act in a successful manner. He must give to every man a use value in excess of the cash value he receives, so that each transaction makes for more life; and he must so hold the Advancing Thought that the impression of increase will be communicated to all with whom he comes in contact. The men and women who practice the foregoing instructions will certainly get rich; and the riches they receive will be in exact proportion to the definiteness of their vision, the fixity of their purpose, the steadiness of their faith, and the depth of their gratitude.
Wallace D. Wattles (The Science of Getting Rich)
You know you’ve moved on when you find other people beautiful. when you don’t avert your eyes but keep them steady or when you stay the night, the last one at the party, and you don’t feel sorry. or empty. or guilty because whatever, where are you going anyway?
Charlotte Eriksson (He loved me some days. I'm sure he did: 99 essays on growth through loss)
Do you want to know the biggest lie in personal growth? The Tortoise and the Hare. You’ve been told that slow and steady wins the race. And you’ve been told that persistence and consistency create champions. They don’t. That’s because in real life, the rabbit always wins. Always.
Ed Rush (The 21 Day Miracle: How To Change Anything in 3 Short Weeks)
Live that way long enough, and you will literally find yourself addicted to the acceptance of people. You will constantly need verbal affirmation. You will depend on always receiving a steady stream of invitations to events you don’t even want to attend. You will feel as though you need a significant other in your life at all times. I’m not exaggerating - this need for external acceptance will literally become an addiction. And that turns every one of your relationships - personal, professional, and romantic - into a codependent one. You are not in the relationship with a full heart able to give love away. You are in the relationship because you NEED it. You don’t know how you’d survive, much less thrive, without it. You are using every person to fill a void in your heart that you simply refuse to fill yourself. This is a mess.
Stephen Lovegrove (How to Find Yourself, Love Yourself, & Be Yourself: The Secret Instruction Manual for Being Human)
I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. To be an African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one's birth, whether one acknowledges it or not...His life is circumscribed by racist laws and regulations that cripple his growth, dim his potential, and stunt his life...I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.
Nelson Mandela (Long Walk to Freedom)
I wanted no interruption in the regularity of feeding, the steadiness of growth, the even succession of days. I wanted no interruption, wanted no oil, no deviation.
E.B. White (E.B. White on Dogs)
Stage one is called the incipient or smoldering stage. Stage two is the growth stage. Stage three is the fully developed or steady burning stage. Stage four is the decay stage.
Vincent Dunn (Fire: The Battlespace Enemy (The Battlespace Series Book 2))
And gradually you'll bloom For- it takes time for a flower To bloom
Mairaj Fatima
A bad fight is anything which does not help to move the relationship and the people involved forward. If one dominates the other, it will eventually be at the expense of the relationship. Everything depends on the intention. If the intention is to hurt, belittle, ignore, reject or win then good will struggle to come from that. If the intention is to wrestle with some boundaries and deal with unresolved issues then that is positive and important. Love for the other person and respect for their rights, as well as our own rights, will set a steady course for any argument. Of most value is a sincere desire to make the relationship work which, after all, is often why we fight. We want the relationship to honestly work.
Donna Goddard (Love's Longing)
Put stress always on the aspiration within; let that get depth and steadiness in the heart; the outer obstacles of mind and the vital will recede of themselves with the growth of the heart's love and aspiration. Breath of Grace, editor: M.P. Pandit, p.205
Sri Aurobindo
One light is steady and sure, the other uncertain and flickering. . . . On balance, it's where I prefer to be: somewhere in the middle. Certainty is a dead space, in which there's no more room to grow. Wavering is painful. I'm glad to be travelling between the two.
Katherine May (Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times)
A focus on steady, long-term growth may be unheard of now in most public companies, but it was standard operating procedure for corporations in the 1950s and ’60s, until we wilted in the face of foreign competition and the global economy and became obsessed with shareholder value.
Peter Georgescu (Capitalists, Arise!: End Economic Inequality, Grow the Middle Class, Heal the Nation)
... somewhere in my heart, however, I continued to believe that intense and lasting love was possible only in a climate of somewhat tumultuous passions. This, I felt, consigned me to being with a man whose temperament was largely similar to my own. I was late to understand that chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life. Normal people are not aways boring. On the contrary. It has been with pleasure, and not inconsiderable pain, that I have learned about the possibilities of love - its steadiness and its growth...
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
In these times there is a powerful demarcation between the surface and the deep currents of human development. Events and upheavals, which seem more profound than they really are, are happening on the surface. But there is another and deeper change in progress. It is of long, steady persistent growth, very little affected and not at all disturbed by surface conditions. The artist of today should be alive to this deeper evolution on which all growth depends, has depended and will depend. On the surface there is the battle of institutions, the illustration of events, the strife between peoples. On the surface there is propaganda and there is the effort to force opinions. The deeper current carries no propaganda. The shock of the surface upheaval does not deflect it from its course. It is in search of fundamental principle; that basic principle of all, which in degree as it is apprehended points the way to beauty and order, and to the law of nature.
Robert Henri (The Art Spirit)
Perhaps the most widely read piece of research that McKinsey has published in the past decade showed that companies that rapidly re-allocate capital to new growth businesses outperform those that take a steady-state approach.21 Yet, the social side of strategy is such that companies still tend to take what is known as a “peanut butter” approach—spreading a thin layer of resources smoothly across the whole enterprise, even though it’s clear that opportunities are far greater in some areas than in others.
Chris Bradley (Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds)
Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does white America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains? The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity. Overwhelmingly America is still struggling with irresolution and contradictions. It has been sincere and even ardent in welcoming some change. But too quickly apathy and disinterest rise to the surface when the next logical steps are to be taken. Laws are passed in a crisis mood after a Birmingham or a Selma, but no substantial fervor survives the formal signing of legislation. The recording of the law in itself is treated as the reality of the reform. This limited degree of concern is a reflection of an inner conflict which measures cautiously the impact of any change on the status quo. As the nation passes from opposing extremist behavior to the deeper and more pervasive elements of equality, white America reaffirms its bonds to the status quo. It had contemplated comfortably hugging the shoreline but now fears that the winds of change are blowing it out to sea.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?)
Almost a year after the start of the corona crisis, how is the mental health of the population? MD: For the time being, there are few figures that show the evolution of possible indicators such as the intake of antidepressants and anxiolytics or the number of suicides. But it is especially important to place mental well-being in the corona crisis in its historical continuity. Mental health had been declining for decades. There has long been a steady increase in the number of depression and anxiety problems and the number of suicides. And in recent years there has been an enormous growth in absenteeism due to psychological suffering and burnouts. The year before the corona outbreak, you could feel this malaise growing exponentially. This gave the impression that society was heading for a tipping point where a psychological 'reorganization' of the social system was imperative. This is happening with corona. Initially, we noticed people with little knowledge of the virus conjure up terrible fears, and a real social panic reaction became manifested. This happens especially if there is already a strong latent fear in a person or population. The psychological dimensions of the current corona crisis are seriously underestimated. A crisis acts as a trauma that takes away an individual's historical sense. The trauma is seen as an isolated event in itself, when in fact it is part of a continuous process. For example, we easily overlook the fact that a significant portion of the population was strangely relieved during the initial lockdown, feeling liberated from stress and anxiety. I regularly heard people say: "Yes these measures are heavy-handed, but at least I can relax a bit." Because the grind of daily life stopped, a calm settled over society. The lockdown often freed people from a psychological rut. This created unconscious support for the lockdown. If the population had not already been exhausted by their life, and especially their jobs, there would never have been support for the lockdown. At least not as a response to a pandemic that is not too bad compared to the major pandemics of the past. You noticed something similar when the first lockdown came to an end. You then regularly heard statements such as "We are not going to start living again like we used to, get stuck in traffic again" and so on. People did not want to go back to the pre-corona normal. If we do not take into account the population's dissatisfaction with its existence, we will not understand this crisis and we will not be able to resolve it. By the way, I now have the impression that the new normal has become a rut again, and I would not be surprised if mental health really starts to deteriorate in the near future. Perhaps especially if it turns out that the vaccine does not provide the magical solution that is expected from it.
Mattias Desmet
Mercantilists promote the view that private market activity often drives the economy into difficulties which require government to intervene and set matters back on course. They typically characterize the economy as cyclical, driven to excesses by human emotions of greed and fear, which cause “bubbles” and “crashes” and interrupt steady progress of society. Government, they say, must prevent these cycles, smooth these bubbles and crashes, so as to achieve less volatility and greater stability in economic growth. Then they persuade government to adopt policies which produce cycles, bubbles, crashes, volatility, high taxes and unemployment, and economic instability —and monstrously large, illicit gains for themselves.
Wayne Jett (The Fruits of Graft: Great Depressions Then and Now)
You know you’ve moved on when you find other people beautiful. when you don’t avert your eyes but keep them steady or when you stay the night, the last one at the party, and you don’t feel sorry. or empty. or guilty because whatever, where are you going anyway? ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ i used to sit here, in this same pub in this same city 7 years ago, writing another book, like i am now again and i wrote myself out of heartbreak with that book like i am now i guess. in some ways maybe i’ve written myself into heartbreak this time but i’m coming out of it. at least i find other people beautiful again. they make me smile. maybe more than i have before and i have a good feeling about things. You know you’ve moved on when you find other people beautiful.
Charlotte Eriksson (He loved me some days. I'm sure he did: 99 essays on growth through loss)
Now, there is nothing inherently unusual or interesting from an economic point of view about a change in the types of things businesses invest in. Indeed, nothing could be more normal: the capital stock of the economy is always changing. Railways replaced canals, the automobile replaced the horse and cart, computers replaced typewriters, and, at a more granular level, businesses retool and change their mix of investments all the time. Our central argument in this book is that there is something fundamentally different about intangible investment, and that understanding the steady move to intangible investment helps us understand some of the key issues facing us today: innovation and growth, inequality, the role of management, and financial and policy reform.
Jonathan Haskel (Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy)
Life is a crapshoot. It is also brief. No generation is invulnerable to the formidable and grave powers of creation and obliteration that time renders. All people are subject to the vagrancies of time’s steady pulse and subordinated to brute chance engendered when pulling the levers of fate found in our risk-filled environment. We can tilt the odds in our favor of living happily to a ripe old age by displaying a high degree of awareness and exercising self-control. We must rightfully display pride in our lives by claiming responsibility for ourselves and by taking on every challenge without mental equivocation. I seek to conquer personal fears and employ honest effort, energy, endurance, and enthusiasm supplemented with booster shots of intellectual integrity to become my personal master. Self-mastery, self-discipline, conscientious study, uncompromising integrity, and ethical awareness form the foundation stones of all religions and these qualities anchor every person of high character. While no personal medicine wheel is without faults and frailties, a person who exhibits an annealed temperament constantly searches inward to improve him or herself while maintaining a vigilant eye upon fulfilling their caregiver responsibilities.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
To put it slightly differently, the rate at which we need to process energy to sustain our standard of living remained at just a few hundred watts for hundreds of thousands of years, until about ten thousand years ago when we began to form collective urban communities. This marked the beginning of the Anthropocene, in which our effective metabolic rate began its steady rise to its present level of more than 3,000 watts today. But this is just its average value taken across the entire planet. The rate at which energy is used in developed countries is far higher. In the United States it is almost a factor of four larger, at a whopping 11,000 watts, which is more than one hundred times larger than its “natural” biological value. This amount of power is not a lot smaller than the metabolic rate of a blue whale, which is more than one thousand times larger in mass than we are. Thinking of us as an animal using thirty times more energy than we “should” given our physical size, the effective human population of the planet accordingly operates as if it were much larger than the 7.3 billion people who actually inhabit it. In a very real sense, we are operating as if our population were at least thirty times larger, equivalent to a global population in excess of 200 billion people.
Geoffrey West (Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies)
Many models are constructed to account for regularly observed phenomena. By design, their direct implications are consistent with reality. But others are built up from first principles, using the profession’s preferred building blocks. They may be mathematically elegant and match up well with the prevailing modeling conventions of the day. However, this does not make them necessarily more useful, especially when their conclusions have a tenuous relationship with reality. Macroeconomists have been particularly prone to this problem. In recent decades they have put considerable effort into developing macro models that require sophisticated mathematical tools, populated by fully rational, infinitely lived individuals solving complicated dynamic optimization problems under uncertainty. These are models that are “microfounded,” in the profession’s parlance: The macro-level implications are derived from the behavior of individuals, rather than simply postulated. This is a good thing, in principle. For example, aggregate saving behavior derives from the optimization problem in which a representative consumer maximizes his consumption while adhering to a lifetime (intertemporal) budget constraint.† Keynesian models, by contrast, take a shortcut, assuming a fixed relationship between saving and national income. However, these models shed limited light on the classical questions of macroeconomics: Why are there economic booms and recessions? What generates unemployment? What roles can fiscal and monetary policy play in stabilizing the economy? In trying to render their models tractable, economists neglected many important aspects of the real world. In particular, they assumed away imperfections and frictions in markets for labor, capital, and goods. The ups and downs of the economy were ascribed to exogenous and vague “shocks” to technology and consumer preferences. The unemployed weren’t looking for jobs they couldn’t find; they represented a worker’s optimal trade-off between leisure and labor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these models were poor forecasters of major macroeconomic variables such as inflation and growth.8 As long as the economy hummed along at a steady clip and unemployment was low, these shortcomings were not particularly evident. But their failures become more apparent and costly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008–9. These newfangled models simply could not explain the magnitude and duration of the recession that followed. They needed, at the very least, to incorporate more realism about financial-market imperfections. Traditional Keynesian models, despite their lack of microfoundations, could explain how economies can get stuck with high unemployment and seemed more relevant than ever. Yet the advocates of the new models were reluctant to give up on them—not because these models did a better job of tracking reality, but because they were what models were supposed to look like. Their modeling strategy trumped the realism of conclusions. Economists’ attachment to particular modeling conventions—rational, forward-looking individuals, well-functioning markets, and so on—often leads them to overlook obvious conflicts with the world around them.
Dani Rodrik (Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science)
The threat to capitalism is no longer communism or fascism but a steady undermining of the trust modern societies need for growth and stability.
Robert B. Reich (Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few)
From some sort of emotional bankruptcy, To some kind of steady growth. I am learning how to analyse, In order to understand them both.
Jovannah Bär (Seasoned Eyes Are Beaming)
The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
Does the flat tax work?...The flat tax works in a country that is a former Communist state, with no investment capital, and low wage rates, which needs to build a capitalist economy from a base of approximately zero. The flat tax works if people are willing to pay a 20% sales tax on everything they buy to make up for lower revenue. The flat tax works if employers are willing to pay 34%, or more, in Social Security taxes for every employee they hire. The flat tax works in a country where almost everyone has the same amount of wealth so there's no need for the distributive effect of graduated rates. And if all these conditions are met, the flat-rate tax will probably work as long as the economy is on a path of steady growth.
T.R. Reid (A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System)
1. SEPARATE THE PHASES Separate your artists and soldiers People responsible for developing high-risk, early-stage ideas (call them “artists”) need to be sheltered from the “soldiers” responsible for the already-successful, steady-growth part of an organization. Early-stage projects are fragile.
Safi Bahcall (Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries)
Pages 85-87: Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a laborer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labor was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty laborer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…
J.S. Furnivall (Colonial Policy And Practice)
The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. Winston Churchill in a letter to Prime Minister Asquith, advocating the forced sterilisation of disabled people
Winston S. Churchill
Steven Donziger, drawing from the work of Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, argues: [C]ompanies that service the criminal justice system need sufficient quantities of raw materials to guarantee long-term growth . . . In the criminal justice field, the raw material is prisoners, and industry will do what is necessary to guarantee a steady supply. For the supply of prisoners to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of incarcerated Americans regardless of whether crime is rising or the incarceration is necessary.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series))
The human capacity to respond with great variety is testament to the core principles that have guided our exploration thus far: the entropic two-step and evolution by natural selection. The entropic two-step explains how orderly clumps can form in a world that is becoming ever more disordered, and how certain of these clumps, stars, can remain stable over billions of years as they produce a steady output of heat and light. Evolution explains how, in a favorable environment such as a planet bathed by a star’s steady warmth, collections of particles can coalesce in patterns that facilitate complex behaviors, from replication and repair, to energy extraction and metabolic processing, to locomotion and growth. Collections that acquire the further capacities to think and learn, to communicate and cooperate, to imagine and predict, are better equipped to survive and hence to produce similar collections with similar capacities. Evolution thus selects for these abilities and, generation upon generation, refines them. In time, some collections conclude that their cognitive powers are so remarkable that they transcend physical law. Some of the most thoughtful of these collections are then bewildered by the conflict between the freedom of will they experience and the unyielding control of physical law they recognize. But the fact is there is no conflict because there is no transcending of physical law. There can’t be. Instead, the collections of particles need to reassess their powers, focusing not on the laws that govern particles themselves but on the high-level, thoroughly complex, and extraordinarily rich behaviors each collection of particles—each individual—can exhibit and experience. And with that reorientation, the particle collections can tell an illuminating story of wondrous behaviors and experiences, suffused with wills that feel free and speak as though they have autonomous control, and yet are fully governed by the laws of physics.
Brian Greene (Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe)
IAM I AM clear about who I am. I have no problem losing you or anyone. Do not speak to me out of obligation. Leave my life; I will be all right. Please give me your undivided attention. Respect who I AM I expect nothing more or less. Fakeness is disrespect. I will close any door when my presence is ignored; I will not hesitate for sure. I will never fight for anyone’s attention. I AM CHOOSING ME OVER ANYONE. Bursting words, painfully shy, Craving solitude, fierce and steady, Overcoming adversity... Do you want to try me? I AM READY! If you are going through tough times, It is time to embrace the genuine, authentic YOU. Unshakable Unstoppable Unbreakable Subtly powerful and vulnerable, Continuous growth is inevitable. My uniqueness is my greatness. Dare to be more challenging. When life throws you rocks, Dare to help them heal, even though they hurt you. Dare to fight back when the world attacks. Dare to cut people off because choosing you is the most important task.
Raquel McKenzie (My Healing Journal: From Once Broken to I AM)
In the quest for success, the most potent formula is transforming the steady rhythm of consistency into measurable units of achievement!
Erick "The Black Sheep" G
Milo's Way- A Haiku Strength sought in small steps, Like Milo's calf on shoulders, Grow with steady will.
Amogh Swamy (On My Way To Infinity: A Seeker's Poetic Pilgrimage)
there is an alternative. ...[Dr Jason Hickel] explained that we need to move beyond the idea of growth to something called a 'steady-state economy.' We would abandon economic growth as the driving principle of the economy and instead choose a different set of goals. At the moment we think we're prosperous if we are working ourselves ragged t buy things - most of which don't even make us happy. He said we could redefine prosperity to mean having time to spend with our children, or to be in nature, or to sleep, or to dream, or to have secure work. Most people don't want a fast life - they want a good life. Nobody lies on their deathbed and thinks about all that they contributed to economic growth. A steady-state economy can allow us to choose goals that don't raid our attention, and don't raid the planet's resources.
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again)
The company created a new team of top executives called the business development board, whose sole job was to look for other companies to buy. This group was essentially a reincarnation of the central development group that Brad Hall had overseen in the late 1990s, but it was restructured in a way that made it larger, more influential, and capable of closing deals that were larger by an order of magnitude than anything Koch had done before. The new development group rivaled any deal-making entity on Wall Street. The team had a steady river of cash to work with thanks to the steady flow of money generated at Pine Bend and other assets. The team also made use of Koch Industries’ nearly pristine credit rating,I which made it cheap and easy to get big loans. Even this new strategy—to push for growth and limit risk with a corporate veil—rested on a deeper, more important idea. This idea was the centerpiece of Koch’s new game plan, which relied on one competitive advantage more than any other: Koch’s superior information. Koch was seen by outsiders as an energy company, but, within the firm, it was seen quite differently. Charles Koch and his lieutenants considered Koch to be an information-gathering machine that built up stores of knowledge that were deeper and sharper than its competitors’. This strategy traced back to Koch Industries’ earliest days, but with the new business development board in place, it reached the level of a fine art. Koch’s newly designed companies, like Koch Minerals, each had their own mini development teams that became like searchlights, trained on the various industries in which they operated. Whatever they saw and learned was transmitted to the central development board, which synthesized the information with knowledge that was flowing in from Koch’s other companies. The development board also undertook studies of its own, looking for new opportunities beyond the existing Koch universe.
Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
Koch’s oil gathering division delivered a steady flow of cash and profits into the company. This money gave Charles Koch a chance to put his management theories to the test. He encouraged his employees to look for new growth opportunities and to act like entrepreneurs. He wanted to lead by example. In his first years as head of Koch Industries, Charles Koch put together one of the most brilliant and profitable deals in the history of Koch Industries. The deal involved an oil refinery. Since the late 1950s, Fred Koch had owned a minority share in the Great Northern oil refinery outside of Minneapolis, near the Pine Bend Bluffs natural reserve. The other shareholders in the refinery were an oil tycoon named J. Howard Marshall II and the Great Northern Oil Company. In 1969, the refinery didn’t look like a gold mine. Competition in the sector was fierce, with new refineries being put into production monthly. But the Pine Bend refinery, as everyone called it, had a secret source of profits. And this source of profits could be traced to exactly the kind of government intervention that Hayek hated most. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower capped the amount of oil that could be imported into the United States, in one of the federal government’s many ploys to protect domestic oil drillers. (Imported oil was often cheaper than domestic oil, so US drillers wanted it kept out.) But there was a loophole in that law that allowed unlimited imports from Canada. As it happened, Canada was the primary source of oil processed at the Pine Bend refinery. Pine Bend was one of only four refineries in the nation that was able to buy cheaper imported oil in unlimited quantities, giving it a huge advantage over firms that were forced to buy mostly domestic oil.
Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
We tend to understand our world through labels and through stories. Well, I love a good story. You know that. But... sometimes... I see folks getting themselves all twisted up over stories. I mean the stories we apply to ourselves. The story of our identities. Younger folks, older folks too, get anxious because they feel like their story hasn’t actually begun. That they are in a play and they’ve missed their cues and forgotten their lines. Or, they turn into literary critics of life and criticize their own character, looking for steady growth and rising action. A satisfying plot tying events together. Here’s the thing. Lives aren’t stories. They aren’t written to be tidy or to hang tight to a central theme or conflict. We consume a lot of carefully constructed stories and it can be easy to forget that life is not one of them. You aren’t headed toward a thoughtful climax and, so, you can’t be off track within your own narrative. Life doesn’t work that way. We live and then we don’t. That’s the simple truth of it. Our stories are happening now and if we get preoccupied looking for satisfying character arcs or a steady build toward some conclusion, well we miss what’s here in the moment and we will always fall short of our expectations. We can’t judge ourselves like we judge the protagonist in a book or movie. Life isn’t failing you because it isn’t delivering a cohesive story. You aren’t failing because you haven’t stuck to a clear and explainable hero’s path. Stories are a great way to understand the world, but they are paper thin compared to actual life. You, in contrast, are complicated. Make room for that truth and love yourself in all your messy complexity. (The Cryptonaturalist episode 39: Bittersweet)
Jarod K. Anderson
Part of learning the slight edge is finding your own “intrinsically optimal rate of growth,” and it is always served best by a step-by-step approach of constant, never-ending improvement, which lays solid foundations and builds upon them over and over. The slight edge is your optimal rate of growth. Simple disciplines compounded over time. That’s how the tortoise won; that’s how you get to be a winner, too. Having said that, now let me ask this: what is the real point of the story of the tortoise and the hare? All together now: Slow and steady wins the race, right? But notice something here: the point is not that there’s any special virtue to moving slowly. There’s nothing inherently good about slowness, and it’s just as possible to move too slowly as to move too quickly. The key word in the Aesop moral is not “slow.” The key word here is steady. Steady wins the race. That’s the truth of it. Because steady is what taps into the power of the slight edge. The fable of the tortoise and the hare is really about the remarkable power of momentum. Newton’s second law of thermodynamics: a body at rest tends to stay at rest—and a body in motion tends to remain in motion. That’s why your activity is so important. Once you’re in motion, it’s easy to keep on keeping on. Once you stop, it’s hard to change from stop to go.
Jeff Olson (The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness)
A continuous growth, a steady growth is a demand of life.
Sunday Adelaja
one of the top selections for its steady growth and defensive nature of its business. Economies may ebb and flow, but the number of incarcerated Americans is steadily growing according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Matt Taibbi (The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap)
Tough times brought on by the Gulf War were testing such assumptions, forcing us to consider our response. We needed to come up with new ideas, do more with less, make short-term gains through greater efficiency, and prepare for long-term gains. That meant cutting every dollar possible in overhead and procedures while maintaining or boosting spending in three vital competitive areas. Number one was product quality. World leadership demanded that we maintain world-class quality, and recession is generally a period when material and labor prices are lowest and room occupancies are down. So we renovated and refurbished at such normally busy properties as the Inn on the Park in London and The Pierre in New York at a time when revenue would be little affected and customers least inconvenienced. That meant we were spending when others were retrenching. We had followed that strategy in 1981-82, and the rebound from that recession had given us nine years of steady growth. I thought the odds were in our favor to score the same way again. The second area was marketing. It’s tempting during recession to cut back on consumer advertising. At the start of each of the last three recessions, the growth of spending on such advertising had slowed by an average of 27 percent. But consumer studies of those recessions had showed that companies that didn’t cut their ads had, in the recovery, captured the most market share. So we didn’t cut our ad budget. In fact, we raised it modestly to gain brand recognition, which continued advertising sustains. As studies show, it’s much easier to sustain momentum than restart it. Third, we eased the workload and reduced costs by simplifying reporting methods. We set up a new system that allowed each hotel to recalculate its forecast, with minimal input, to year’s end, then send it in electronically along with a brief monthly commentary.
Isadore Sharp (Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy)
The bigger story, which includes both the JVP insurrection and the civil war with the LTTE, also involves a close but unstable link between populist democracy and authoritarian rule. Sri Lanka has had regular, and relatively peaceful, elections throughout the decades of internal turmoil. Sometimes elections have initiated a change of government, but more often incumbent governments have used patronage and political manoeuvring to block off potential opposition. The more adept a government is at blocking expressions of opposition and discontent, the more toxic the long-term consequences for the polity as a whole. The bigger story also involves the steady, and for now apparently irreversible, growth of the military-security establishment as a factor in the country’s internal political arrangements.
Dhana Hughes (Violence, Torture and Memory in Sri Lanka: Life after Terror (Routledge/Edinburgh South Asian Studies Series))
Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.
Frederick Jackson Turner (The Frontier in American History)
Here are several rules that worked for me as I grew from a wild amateur into an erratic semiprofessional and finally into a calm professional trader. You may change this list to suit your personality. Decide that you are in the market for the long haul—that is, you want to be a trader even 20 years from now. Learn as much as you can. Read and listen to experts, but keep a degree of healthy skepticism about everything. Ask questions, and do not accept experts at their word. Do not get greedy and rush to trade—take your time to learn. The markets will be there, offering more good opportunities in the months and years ahead. Develop a method for analyzing the market—that is, “If A happens, then B is likely to happen.” Markets have many dimensions—use several analytic methods to confirm trades. Test everything on historical data and then in the markets, using real money. Markets keep changing—you need different tools for trading bull and bear markets and transitional periods as well as a method for telling the difference (see the sections on technical analysis). Develop a money management plan. Your first goal must be long-term survival; your second goal, a steady growth of capital; and your third goal, making high profits. Most traders put the third goal first and are unaware that goals 1 and 2 exist (see Section 9, “Risk Management”). Be aware that a trader is the weakest link in any trading system. Go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous to learn how to avoid losses or develop your own method for cutting out impulsive trades. Winners think, feel, and act differently than losers. You must look within yourself, strip away your illusions, and change your old ways of being, thinking, and acting. Change is hard, but if you want to be a professional trader, you have to work on changing and developing your personality.
Anonymous
There is one problem, however, at least for alternative experiments of the American variety (and possibly some European as well), namely that we have no clear litmus test to determine which models are truly steady-state (non-expansionist) and which are business as usual hiding under “green wigs.” This latter trend is known as “greenwashing,” in which the language is hip and the bottom line remains profit. Thomas Friedman and Al Gore are major (and wealthy) players in this category, perpetuating the notion of “green corporations.” Other examples include a 2012 conference on “Sustainable Investing,” sponsored by Deepak Chopra, among others, which had as its slogans “Make Money and Make a Difference” and “Capitalism for a Democratic Society.” All of this is the attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too (or simply eat someone else’s cake); there is no real interest in disconnecting from growth, and it is growth that is the core of the problem. As Professor Magnuson tells us, while traveling around the U.S. to interview varous alternative businesses and experiments, he discovered that many of them were shams—capitalist wolves in green clothing.
Morris Berman (Neurotic Beauty: An Outsider Looks At Japan)
Market doesn't like volatility. It always rewards steady, predictable growth. Aditya Puri controls himself in good times and doesn't lose control in bad times. Since
Tamal Bandopadhyaya (A Bank for the Buck)
We knew that the prospect of our little studio being absorbed into a much larger entity would worry many people. While we’d worked hard to put safeguards in place that would ensure our independence, we still expected our employees to be fearful that the merger would negatively impact our culture. I’ll say more about the specific steps we took to protect Pixar in a later chapter, but here I want to discuss what happened when, in my eagerness to ease my colleagues’ fears, I stood up and assured them that Pixar would not change. It was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever said. For the next year or so, whenever we wanted to try something new or rethink an established way of working, a steady stream of alarmed and upset people would show up at my office. “You promised the merger wouldn’t affect the way we work,” they’d say. “You said that Pixar would never change.” This happened enough that I called another company-wide meeting to explain myself. “What I meant,” I said, “was that we aren’t going to change because we were acquired by a larger company. We will still go through the kinds of changes that we would have gone through anyway. Furthermore, we are always changing, because change is a good thing.” I was glad I’d cleared that up. Except that I hadn’t. In the end, I had to give the “Of course we will continue to change” speech three times before it finally sunk in. What was interesting to me was that the changes that sparked so much concern had nothing to do with the merger. These were the normal adjustments that have to be made when a business expands and evolves. It’s folly to think you can avoid change, no matter how much you might want to. But also, to my mind, you shouldn’t want to. There is no growth or success without change.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar)
Oil and Gas Investing in Permian Basin-Smart Move As the true scope of Permian Basin is being understood, one thing is very clear; it is going to attract a lot of investment. As in case of all oil and gas investments, the sooner you invest, the better your returns are going to be. Right now is the perfect time for oil and gas investing in Permian Basin. There are a lot of benefits of choosing to invest in things other than the property, shares and stocks circuit. It not just helps you spread out your earnings, it lets you test potential markets such as these. As these markets are not overcrowded, there is more scope for growth. But why should you choose oil and gas investing in Permian Basin when you have dependable assets elsewhere? The answer is that those assets multiply at such a slow pace that you forget they are there while when there is an oil and gas boom, it turns your fortunes. An oil well investment brings with it years of steady income with the benefit of tax deduction on the investment. It is not as much a gamble as it is made out to be and oil strikes are more frequent than people would like you to believe. About 15% annual income from oil and gas wells is exempt from tax and 65-85% of your first year's investment can be waived off. Gone are the days when all you could do with oil well was bore increasingly downwards, vertically. Now there is technology available that lets you draw oil supply for a long, long time after the initial vertical bore runs dry. With new advancements in drilling and extracting techniques, a lot of oil that was earlier as good as not being there has suddenly become readily available. Being with a company that is well equipped with the latest technology gives your investment more stability. That is one of the reasons for a revival of the boom in Permian Basin and it has been predicted to last for a long time to come. Choose with great care a reliable and experienced company that is a seasoned hand at oil and gas drilling and production. Oil and gas investing in Permian Basin is bound to attract many investors looking to be a part of the upward trend. Invest today and reap benefits for years to come.
Nate Lewis
The solution to the economic crisis is widely thought to be growth. But that will only accelerate global warming. The rich countries need to switch to steady-state or ‘degrowth’ economies to save the planet, but capitalism needs growth to survive; it’s in its DNA. Soviet state socialism proved no better environmentally. We need a different model.
Andrew Sayer (Why We Can't Afford the Rich)
Growth economics gave technology free rein. Steady-state economics channels technical progress in the socially benign directions of small scale, decentralization, increased durability of products, and increased long-run efficiency in the use of scarce resources.
Herman E. Daly (Steady-State Economics)
In 1965, Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, noticed the number of integrated circuits on a transistor had been doubling every twelve to twenty-four months. The trend had been going on for about a decade and, Moore predicted, would probably last for another.9 About this last part, he was off by a bit. All told, Moore’s law has held steady for nearly sixty years. This relentless progress in price and performance is the reason the smartphone in your pocket is a thousand times faster and million times cheaper than a supercomputer from the 1970s. It is exponential growth in action.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
How much would you say? Take a pencil and use this empty page to scribble, sketch, and do some calculations. The answer is on the next page, but I strongly encourage you to have fun and try it out for yourself first. Scribble, sketch, and have fun! I hope you did try to solve it yourself, because learning is so much more fulfilling when it is interactive. If you did not, too bad for you. ☹ In truth, the bacteria have only filled 3.125% of the glass. But how can this be? Well it is simple. If they double every minute, and they fill the entire glass in 60 minutes, then they will have filled half the glass the minute before 60 (or 50% after 59 minutes), half of that the minute before 59 (or 25% after 58 minutes), and so on. Table 3.1 summary of the last 10 minutes, starting from the end.  Time Elapsed    Amount Filled  60 minutes   100 .000%   59 minutes   50 .000%   58 minutes   25 .000%   57 minutes   12. 500%   56 minutes   6. 250%   55 minutes   3. 125%   54 minutes   1. 563%   53 minutes   0. 781%   52 minutes   0. 391%   51 minutes   0. 195%     Table 3.1: Exponential growth of bacteria in a bottle over the last 10 minutes. It all makes sense now, right? Suddenly it becomes clear, even obvious. Who could not get this? It is so simple, right? Apparently, it is not. The most common replies I get are between 50% and 90%. Even college graduates typically get it wrong. And let?s not talk about politicians. We will come back to this in the Appendix, with some real-world examples. For now, I think it is safe to say that we all understand what steady growth means. Let’s now see how this applies to our main focus in the next chapter: information technology.
Federico Pistono (Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy)
Weak or strong, everyone falls at least a thousand times throughout their life. It is in what they learn from their fall and how steady they become that you recognize the strongest of all." -Grandma (Magdalen)
Lydhia Marie (Remember (Amani, #1))
Progress in living the Christian life may have been steady and incremental throughout a believer's life to this point, but with entry into a triad there is a gear shift to warp speed. Why is this? What are the climatic conditions in a discipleship group of three or four that create the hothouse effect? Three ingredients converge to release the Holy Spirit to bring about a rapid growth toward Christlikeness. These can be summarized in the following biblical principle: When we (1) open our hearts in transparent trust to each other (2) around the truth of God's Word (3) in the spirit of mutual accountability, we are in the Holy Spirit's hothouse of transformation.
Greg Ogden (Transforming Discipleship: Making Disciples a Few at a Time)
I O N S c. Suppose that public policy raises the saving production function, but they have different parameter values. Atlantis has a saving rate of 28 percent and a population growth rate of 1 percent per year. Xanadu has a saving rate of 10 percent and a population growth rate of 4 percent per year. In both countries, g = 0.02 and  = 0.04. Find the steady-state value of y for each country.2. In the United States, the capital share of GDP is about 30 percent, the average growth in output is about
Anonymous
Most organisations, when they would dream of the exaltations of the present, roll their eyes backward. The International Business Machines Corporation has beheld no past so golden as the present. The face of Providence is shining upon it, and clouds are parted to make way for it. Marching onward as to war, it has skirted the slough of depression and averted the quicksands of false booms. Save for a few lulls that may be described as breathing spells, its growth has been strong and steady. From a report in Fortune magazine, 1940
James Essinger (Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age)
The reality is, it takes daily cultivation of a spiritual path, preferably with spiritual kin in proximity, to sustain not the feeling of elation, but the focused, mindful path of steady growth.
S. Kelley Harrell (Gift of the Dreamtime - Reader's Companion)
Getting U.S. public debt on a sustainable path will require more sacrifice from the American public. Just to slow debt growth to the rate of GDP growth (or a steady debt-to-GDP ratio) from today through 2040, changes to current policy would have to be dramatic: cut entitlements by 10 percent or cut discretionary spending by 24 percent or increase tax revenue by 6 percent, or some combination of the three.27 Adjustments to actually lower the debt-to-GDP ratio would be even more painful. Ideally, the debt-reduction burden would be shared by all Americans. But one thing is certain—less generous entitlement programs and tax increases will need to be part of any balanced solution. PUBLIC OPINION: FOR A BALANCED BUDGET, BUT AGAINST SACRIFICES TO BALANCE THE BUDGET Changes in entitlement programs and tax increases, however, collide with an American public that largely wants neither. Almost as a rule, Americans support a balanced federal budget. But public opinion moves decisively in the other direction when Americans are asked about the specific actions necessary to balance the budget.28 Entitlement programs are broadly popular. Although most Americans understand that entitlements have a financing problem, they oppose making them less generous. When given the choice between preserving entitlements and reducing the deficit, Americans prefer the status quo. A solid majority, or 69 percent, would rather keep entitlements as they are and incur the debt consequences, whereas only 23 percent say the country should take steps to reduce the budget deficit that would include entitlement cuts.29 It is understandable that older Americans are more inclined than their younger counterparts to want to preserve entitlements. But even so, most Americans age eighteen to twenty-nine, who will foot the future debt interest bill, still favor entitlement preservation over debt reduction. Perspectives differ depending on party affiliation: Republicans are more likely than Democrats to favor making deficit reduction a priority. There may be a “tax more” option. Americans do appear to favor increasing taxes on the rich, though Democrats more so than Republicans.30 It is unclear, however, whether Americans would favor raising their own taxes to cover their entitlement expenses. This suggests a fundamental disconnect between the services Americans want and what they are willing to pay in taxes to fund them.
Edward Alden (How America Stacks Up: Economic Competitiveness and U.S. Policy)
Less speculative is the productivity-enhancing learning by doing that occurred during the high-pressure economy of World War II. Economists have long studied the steady improvement over time in the speed and efficiency with which Liberty freighter ships were built. The most remarkable aspect of the surge in labor productivity during World War II is that it appears to have been permanent; despite the swift reduction in wartime defense spending during 1945–47, labor productivity did not decline at all during the immediate postwar years. The necessity of war became the mother of invention of improved production techniques, and these innovations, large and small, were not forgotten after the war.
Robert J. Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World))
The lack of affordable housing regulation allows rents to rise with little restriction, and Oregon law prohibits local governments from enacting almost all rent-control policies outside of special subsidized units. But regulation, like Portland’s famous urban growth boundary, has also enhanced the number of multi-unit buildings being constructed inside a limited zone to avoid suburban-like sprawl. Although Portland’s rental rates are not skyrocketing at the speed of San Francisco or even Seattle, the U.S. Census ranks Portland as having one of the tightest markets in the nation. Despite tax-abatement programs for luxury neighbors like the Pearl District and the South Waterfront supposedly tied to affordable-housing units, the city Housing Bureau says they won’t even meet 2003 goals, much less expand and continue programs. Meanwhile, the average condo price rose 41 percent last year and the average apartment rental has climbed at a steady pace of six percent in 2012 and again in 2013.
Anonymous
Although this conventional theory describes the outcome of GDP growth it does not really explain the growth process. As the steady state growth rate, “g”, is external to the model, Solow models in effect describe growth after it happens.
Edward A. Hudson (Economic Growth: How it works and how it transformed the world)
When the conquests stopped, the empire moved into a steady state or, more bluntly, it stagnated.
Edward A. Hudson (Economic Growth: How it works and how it transformed the world)
Metabolic networks remain the only class of biological network reconstructed reasonably comprehensively at the genome-scale in humans. Given that metabolic networks are ultimately based on directed chemical reactions that obey the laws of mass and energy balance, they can further serve the basis for calculations to predict reaction rates (metabolic flux). These fluxes can subsequently be used to compute productions and growth rates of metabolites. In flux balance analysis, the set of reactions is formulated as a stochiometric matrix, which enumerates the ratios of metabolite participation in each reaction. A set of physically possible reaction flux rates result by enforcing a steady-state mass balance (homeostasis) and additional constraints on reaction reversabilities and maximal conversion rates. From within the space of chemically feasible reaction flux combinations, the subset of biologically relevant reaction flux profiles can be solved by optimizing an objective function. The most commonly used objective function in microbes has been to maximize the production of biomass, which serves as a proxy for maximizing growth rate. Notably, while maximal growth may be an appropriate assumption for diseases such as cancer under certain conditions, the best cellular objective function to simulate many human tissues and cell types is unknown (and is likely condition-specific). Adjusting this objective function, which was developed based on microbial physiology, to better reflect human tissues is an area of active research.
Joseph Loscalzo (Network Medicine: Complex Systems in Human Disease and Therapeutics)
May you awaken each day with a heart attuned to the sacred rhythms of your becoming, a heart that knows how to listen for the quiet, steady whisper of growth that lies hidden beneath the surface of your daily life. As the butterfly emerges from its cocoon, transformed and radiant, so too may you honor the tender and intricate process by which your soul unfolds, ever towards the light of its true essence.
Alma Camino
There are seven timeless traits essential for the heart’s health in its physical, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions: steadiness, wisdom, openness, wholeness, courage, lightness, and warmth.
Jonathan Fisher (Just One Heart: A Cardiologist’s Guide to Healing, Health, and Happiness)
Every day at sunset I would visit a grove of birch trees…and lie down and listen to the steady rhythmic heartbeat of the earth. This grove had all the power of an ancient shrine. As the light intensified and the sky awash in crimson flames, I learned a way of being in the world and transition. Something within me changed as the earth underwent its own transfiguration and as the day’s activity gave way to the long, slow respiration of the night. I understood the rhythm of existence through the interplay of light and shadow and the subtle changes of the air and climate. In winter…I came to know that darkness is a time for the migration of the soul; I saw then then what we hold in common with the roots and seeds- a stage of mute and invisible growth. I would feel the breakthrough of the spring as the windswept sky and a sudden movement of the clouds.
Valerie Andrews
A meteoric rise- a passing flash but consistent growth - the bright north star
Mala Naidoo
Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall Quoting page 85-87: Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a labourer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labour was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty labourer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…
J. S. Furnivall
The beat of things, their steady direction, had dissolved into nothing–this room wasn't happening then, it isn't happening now; maybe it's a dream of what's going to happen or what will happen never. The sound of her own voice injures her like a shock of electricity through her ears, but screaming herself to hoarse exhaustion is the only reprieve from breathing. She looked up out of her voice and saw the angel. He will have ears like a cartoon of organic growth. He is yellow with light but covered with mobile shadows, animated tattoos. His face kept changing. His voice will come from far off, like a train's. His body is steady and beautiful and hairless, the wings white, incinerating, and pure, but the head changes rapidly–the head of an eagle, a goat, an insect, a mouse, a sheep with spiraling horns that turn and lengthen almost imperceptibly–and the entire message had no words. The entire message will be only the beat and direction of time. Yes is Now. The angel who says "It's time." "Is it time?" she asked. "Does it hurt?" He will have the most beautiful face she has ever seen. "Oh babe." The angel starts to cry. "You can't imagine," he said.
Denis Johnson (Angels)
And while I describe each of these network effects independently, in practice they all work together in concert. A more engaged and retained audience will have more opportunities to share the product with their friends, driving up viral growth. A stronger Acquisition Effect means there will be a steady stream of new people to engage the existing community, keeping them more engaged. Stronger monetization might mean that users make more money, which then stimulates more engagement. Amplifying one will often drive the others up as well.
Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
The fast pace of evolution will not give us time to freeze; instead, we need to be in a perpetual fluid state to keep adaptation in the direction of evolution, rather than in a steady or frozen state that is not malleable.
Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
I entered my old home like a thief in the night. I was there to steal the life of its heir. I set my feet on the richly polished wood floor on which generations of Frankensteins had trod. My soaked skirts dripped a steady puddle of water that would damage the wood if left unmopped. As a child, I would have cleaned it immediately, wishing to leave no trace of myself and no opening for censure. I leaned over and wrung my hair all over the floor.
Kiersten White (The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein)
October 3 After the earthquake came a fire. . . . And after the fire came a gentle whisper. (1 Kings 19:12) A woman who had made rapid progress in her understanding of the Lord was once asked the secret of her seemingly easy growth. Her brief response was, “Mind the checks.” The reason many of us do not know and understand God better is that we do not heed His gentle “checks”—His delicate restraints and constraints. His voice is “a gentle whisper.” A whisper can hardly be heard, so it must be felt as a faint and steady pressure upon the heart and mind, like the touch of a morning breeze calmly moving across the soul. And when it is heeded, it quietly grows clearer in the inner ear of the heart. God’s voice is directed to the ear of love, and true love is intent upon hearing even the faintest whisper. Yet there comes a time when His love ceases to speak, when we do not respond to or believe His message. “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and if you want to know Him and His voice, you must continually listen to His gentle touches. So when you are about to say something in conversation with others, and you sense a gentle restraint from His quiet whisper, heed the restraint and refrain from speaking. And when you are about to pursue some course of action that seems perfectly clear and right, yet you sense in your spirit another path being suggested with the force of quiet conviction, heed that conviction. Follow the alternate course, even if the change of plans appears to be absolute folly from the perspective of human wisdom. Also learn to wait on God until He unfolds His will before you. Allow Him to develop all the plans of your heart and mind, and then let Him accomplish them. Do not possess any wisdom of your own, for often His performance will appear to contradict the plan He gave you. God will seem to work against Himself, so simply listen, obey, and trust Him, even when it appears to be the greatest absurdity to do so. Ultimately, “we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Rom. 8:28), but many times, in the initial stages of the performance of His plans: In His own world He is content To play a losing game. Therefore if you desire to know God’s voice, never consider the final outcome or the possible results. Obey Him even when He asks you to move while you still see only darkness, for He Himself will be a glorious light within you. Then there will quickly spring up within your heart a knowledge of God and a fellowship with Him, which will be overpowering enough in themselves to hold you and Him together, even in the most severe tests and under the strongest pressures of life. from Way of Faith
Mrs. Charles E. Cowman (Streams in the Desert: 366 Daily Devotional Readings)
Evidence for this theory comes from the finding that every species seems to have a genetically determined maximum lifespan. While the average life expectancy for humans has increased, the maximum lifespan has remained stable (approximately 120 years). There is also research to suggest that at an early age, our genes trigger hormonal changes in the brain and regulate the cellular reproduction and repair process. At some point in the process, the genes that promote growth are 'switched off,' and those that promote aging are turned on. This leads to a steady decline in the functioning of the body until death occurs. One may see changes not only in physical functioning, but in the cognitive, emotional, and psychological domains as well.
Aisha Utz (Psychology from the Islamic Perspective)
Steep growth" is generally characterized by rapid change- learning new skills or deepening existing ones quickly. It's not about becoming a manager- plenty of individual contributors remain on a steep growth trajectory their entire careers, and plenty of managers are on a gradual growth trajectory. Nor should steep growth be thought of as narrowly as "promotion". It's about having an increased impact over time. Gradual growth is characterized by stability. People on a gradual growth trajectory, who perform well, have generally mastered their work and are making incremental rather than sudden, dramatic improvements. Some roles may be better suited to a rock star because they require steadiness, accumulated knowledge, and an attention to detail that someone in a super-star phase might not have the focus or patience for. p50
Kim Malone Scott
The essential activity of science consists of thought, which arises in creative perception and is expressed through play. This gives rise to a process in which thought unfolds into provisional knowledge which then moves outward into action and returns as fresh perception and knowledge. This process leads to a continuous adaptation of knowledge which undergoes constant growth, transformation, and extension. Knowledge is therefore not something rigid and fixed that accumulates indefinitely in a steady way but is a continual process of change. Its growth is closer to that of an organism than a data bank.
David Bohm (Science, Order and Creativity (Routledge Classics))
We have just been seeing political power concerned to break a "clandom" which preceded it in time. Let us now see how it behaves in regard to a clandom which is its contemporary. It may be said in effect, paraphrasing Shakespeare: "Monarchy and feudal aristocracy are two lions born on the same day." There was something of an act of piracy about the foundation of the European states. The Franks who conquered Gaul, the Normans who conquered England and Sicily, and even the Crusaders who went to Palestine, all behaved like bands of adventurers, dividing the spoil. What was there to divide? First of all, the ready cash. Afterwards, there were the lands; no deserts, these, but furnished with men whose labor was to maintain the victor. To every man, then, his share in the prize. And there we have the man-at-arms turned baron. This is shown to the evolution of the world of the word baro, which in Germany meant "freeman" and in Gaul denoted the name of the class. There the remains for seizure the apparatus of state, which there was one: naturally it is the share of the chief. But when a barbarian like Clovis found himself confronted with the administrative machine of the Late Empire, he did not understand it. All he saw in it was a system of suction pumps, bringing him a steady flow of riches on which he made merry with no thought for the public services for which these resources were intended. In the result, then, he divided up along among his foremost companions the treasure of the state, whether in the form of lands or fiscal revenues. In this way, civilized government was gradually brought to ruin, and Gaul of the ninth and 10th centuries, was reduced to the same condition as that in which William of Normandy was to find England of the 11th. There was imposed the system of barbarian government known as government by retainers. Let the Charlemagne use as points d'appui of Power, the influential men who are already on the spot, or let William create his own influential men by a share-out of big fiefs in England - it was all one. The important thing to note is that the central authority appoints as its representatives in a given district either the chief proprietors of the soil who were there already, or those whom it sets up in their place. By a slant common to the barbarian mind, or rather by an inclination which is natural to all men, but in barbarians encounters no opposing principle, these influential men soon confound their function with their property and exercise the former as though it were the latter. Each little local tyrant then becomes legislature, judge and administrator of a more or less extensive principality; and on the tribute paid by it he lives, along with his servants and his men-at-arms. Power thus expelled soon returns, however, under the spur of its requirements. The resources at his disposal are absurdly out of proportion to the area, which depends on it and to the population, which calls it the sovereign. The reason is that the manpower has been taken over by the barons. What was in other days a tax is now a feudal due. The only way is to rob the baronial cell of its withheld resources. That is why monarchy establishes townships on the confines of the baronial lands; they act as cupping-glasses, drawing away the best elements in the population. In that way, the barons will get fewer villeins, and the king more bourgeoisie who will be grateful for the franchises conferred on them and will help the king in his necessities from their purses.
Bertrand de Jouvenel (ON POWER: The Natural History of Its Growth)