Work Allocation Quotes

The accumulation of capital is a good thing. When we look at nature, we see the accumulation of capital everywhere. But accumulated capital usually works in harmony with the productivity of capital. Plots of soil work in harmony with the forest; and each exists in service to the other.

Every man has been called to produce a certain number of products within the time allocated to him to live on earth and failure to hit the target would mean a wasted life.

70/20/10 became our rule for resource allocation: 70 percent of resources dedicated to the core business, 20 percent on emerging, and 10 percent on new.

In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. But how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life — the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the world of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city's economy, or the way the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools — even universities — are structured, let alone how much structures are changing under the impact of the Third Wave.

Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you. 1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master’s whims. He is often cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on. 2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time. 3. The master has a group of slave, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on. 4. The master allows the slave four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own. 5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking. 6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what use to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on. 7. Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into discussion of the 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of their powers. 8. In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselve3s to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000 for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had occasion to open your ballot. (A single master may also might commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.) 9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome. The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of the slave?

Marketing is the art of allocating resources—sending more power to the wheels that are getting traction, sending it away from the ones that are spinning. And investing in each strategy until the results stop working. Then find the next one!

Mischel refers to this skill as the “strategic allocation of attention,” and he argues that it’s the skill underlying self-control. Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber. But that’s wrong. Willpower is really about properly directing the spotlight of attention, learning how to control that short list of thoughts in working memory. It’s about realizing that if we’re thinking about the marshmallow, we’re going to eat it, which is why we need to look away.

Be patient. Changes that alter the structure of power and widen opportunity require years of hard work, as those who toiled for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, or have been working for the rights of the disabled and gays, would tell you. It took thirty years of continuous fulmination for women to get the right to vote; fifty years of agitation before employers were required to bargain with unionized workers. Those who benefit from the prevailing allocation of power and wealth don’t give up their privileged positions without a fight, and they usually have more resources at their disposal than the insurgents. Take satisfaction from small victories, but don’t be discouraged or fall into cynicism. And don’t allow yourself to burn out. I

The state must answer these questions, too, but whatever it does, it does it without being subject to the profit-and-loss criterion. Hence, its action is arbitrary and necessarily involves countless wasteful misallocations from the consumer’s viewpoint. Independent to a large degree of consumer wants, the state-employed security producers instead do what they like. They hang around instead of doing anything, and if they do work they prefer doing what is easiest or work where they can wield power rather than serving consumers. Police officers drive around a lot, hassle petty traffic violators, spend huge amounts of money investigating victimless crimes that many people (i.e., nonparticipants) do not like but that few would be willing to spend their money on to fight, as they are not immediately affected by them. Yet with respect to what consumers want most urgently—the prevention of hardcore crime (i.e., crimes with victims), the apprehension and effective punishment of hard-core criminals, the recovery of loot, and the securement of compensation of victims of crimes from the aggressors—the police are notoriously inefficient, in spite of ever higher budget allocations.

Habit formation is incredibly useful because the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain. It can only pay attention to one problem at a time. As a result, your brain is always working to preserve your conscious attention for whatever task is most essential. Whenever possible, the conscious mind likes to pawn off tasks to the non conscious mind to do automatically. This is precisely what happens when a habit is formed. Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention other tasks.

When professional work is decomposed, constituent tasks tend to be allocated to the least costly sources consistent with the quality and nature of the work involved.

The actual “Root Bug” is the fact that earning opportunities (work) aren’t allocated to people (in the mid-term) according to their willingness to spend and invest.

Decide what you want. Determine the Five Major Moves that will help you leap toward that goal. Do deep work on each of the major five moves—at least 60 percent of your workweek going to these efforts—until they are complete. Designate all else as distraction, tasks to delegate, or things to do in blocks of time you’ve allocated in the remaining 40 percent of your time.

The first is the notion that machines and systems will work alongside tomorrow’s professionals as partners. The challenge here is to allocate tasks, as between human beings and machines, according to their relative strengths.

How the public felt about government aid to the poor seemed to depend on how the question was put. Both parties, and the media, talked incessantly about the “welfare” system, that it was not working, and the word “welfare” became a signal for opposition. When people were asked (a New York Times/CBS News poll of 1992) if more money should be allocated to welfare, 23 percent said no. But when the same people were asked, should the government help the poor, 64 percent said yes.

The problem with fiat is that simply maintaining the wealth you already own requires significant active management and expert decision-making. You need to develop expertise in portfolio allocation, risk management, stock and bond valuation, real estate markets, credit markets, global macro trends, national and international monetary policy, commodity markets, geopolitics, and many other arcane and highly specialized fields in order to make informed investment decisions that allow you to maintain the wealth you already earned. You effectively need to earn your money twice with fiat, once when you work for it, and once when you invest it to beat inflation. The simple gold coin saved you from all of this before fiat.

As a rule of thumb, a manager whose work is largely supervisory should have six to eight subordinates; three or four are too few and ten are too many. This range comes from a guideline that a manager should allocate about a half day per week to each of his subordinates.

Most of the institutions that come in to offer help after disaster don't have the resources to provide concrete help. . . . Donor communities invest billions funding peace talks and disarmament. Then they stop. The most important part of postwar help is missing: providing basic social services to people. Not having those resources might have been a reason men went to war in the first place; they crossed a border and joined an armed group because they didn't have jobs. In Liberia right now, there are hundreds of thousands of unemployed young people, and they're ready-made mercenaries for wars in West Africa. You'd think the international community would be sensible enough to know they should work to change this. But they aren't.

Probably, in the unfamiliar situation, responsibility was never formally allocated to anyone by anybody, and, human nature being incurably optimistic and fundamentally hostile to assuming any work not established as its own by long tradition, each person who might have shouldered the task of organization hopefully supposed it to have been performed by one of the other.

The economic approach is both broader and simpler than that. It relies on data, rather than hunch or ideology, to understand how the world works, to learn how incentives succeed (or fail), how resources get allocated, and what sort of obstacles prevent people from getting those resources, whether they are concrete (like food and transportation) or more aspirational (like education and love).

With this warning, Mussolini demanded and was given authority to do just about whatever he wanted; but his initial priority, surprisingly, was good government. He knew that citizens were fed up with a bureaucracy that seemed to grow bigger and less efficient each year, so he insisted on daily roll calls in ministry offices and berated employees for arriving late to work or taking long lunches. He initiated a campaign to drenare la palude (“drain the swamp”) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants. He repurposed Fascist gangs to safeguard rail cargo from thieves. He allocated money to build bridges, roads, telephone exchanges, and giant aqueducts that brought water to arid regions. He gave Italy an eight-hour workday, codified insurance benefits for the elderly and disabled, funded prenatal health care clinics, established seventeen hundred summer camps for children, and dealt the Mafia a blow by suspending the jury system and short-circuiting due process. With no jury members to threaten and judges answerable directly to the state, the courts were as incorruptible as they were docile. Contrary to legend, the dictator didn’t quite succeed in making the trains run on time, but he earned bravos for trying.

As far back as 1922, Ludwig von Mises wrote a 500-page treatise predicting that socialism would not work. Socialist theorists, he wrote, had failed to recognize basic economic realities that would eventually bankrupt the future they were creating. These included the indispensability of markets for allocating resources, and of private property for providing the incentives that drive the engines of social wealth.

The Realistic Vision acknowledges that people vary widely both physically and intellectually—in large part because of natural inherited differences—and therefore will rise (or fall) to their natural levels. Therefore governmental redistribution programs are not only unfair to those from whom the wealth is confiscated and redistributed, but the allocation of the wealth to those who did not earn it cannot and will not work to equalize these natural inequalities.

contrary to conventional leadership in which the leader’s focus is on himself and what he can accomplish and achieve. Rather, the focus is on those being served. Servant leaders do many of the same things other leaders do—cast vision, build teams, allocate resources, and so on. The big difference is their orientation and their motivation; these make all the difference in the world. They possess an others-first mindset. The servant leader constantly works to help others win.

The politics of deference focuses on the consequences that are likeliest to show up in the rooms where elites do most of their interacting: classrooms, boardrooms, political parties. As a result, we seem to end up with far more, and more specific, practical advice about how to, say, allocate tasks at a committee meeting than how to keep people alive. Deference as a default political orientation can work counter to marginalized groups' interests. We are surrounded by a discourse that locates attentional injustice in the selection of spokespeople and book lists taken to represent the marginalized, rather than focusing on the actions of the corporations and algorithms that much more powerfully distribute attention. This discourse ultimately participates in the weaponization of attention in the service of marginalization. It directs what little attentional power we can control at symbolic sites of power rather than at the root political issues that explain why everything is so fucked up.

Allocate millions more to brain research, and every airport could be equipped with ultra-sophisticated FMRI scanners that could immediately recognise angry and hateful thoughts in people’s brains. Will it really work? Who knows. Is it wise to develop bionic flies and thought-reading scanners? Not necessarily. Be that as it may, as you read these lines, the US Department of Defense is transferring millions of dollars to nanotechnology and brain laboratories for work on these and other such ideas.

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. I didn’t want to believe that this was all our politics had to offer. I hadn’t run simply to fan anger and allocate blame. I had run to rebuild the American people’s trust—not just in the government but in one another. If we trusted one another, democracy worked.

big forces to worry about: growth and inflation. Each could either be rising or falling, so I saw that by finding four different investment strategies—each one of which would do well in a particular environment (rising growth with rising inflation, rising growth with falling inflation, and so on)—I could construct an asset-allocation mix that was balanced to do well over time while being protected against unacceptable losses. Since that strategy would never change, practically anyone could implement it.

We have commoditized wellness & creativity, and so gay men are up against these much larger contexts that aren't particularly conducive to the strongest, healthiest, most holistic approaches. Access to basic healthcare, and a healthcare system that is not homophobic and that is responsive to the needs of gay men, would radically change the pressures and therefore the opoprtunities for those of us who work primarily within the HIV/AIDS sector of healthcare, whether in research, programming and cultural production, or advocacy. Similarly with the arts: if we had sufficient and adequate funding for community-based arts programming--of all kinds, not just related to gay men and HIV--then it wouldn't seem so shocking and misappropriated to allocate some of those funds for gay men to tell their stories. So it's in this larger, structural context that we gt forced into very painful conversations about prioritizing of funding, or what's most important, and it's always a reductive conversation because of limited resources. --Patrick "Pato" Hebert

That’s why I’ve come to see you today, in the hope that there might be some other function in which I’d have less responsibility, without having to relate to the overall workflow to the same extent. I’d like to be assigned to that kind of position. I realize the abilities I’ve been allocated won’t be fully exploited in that case, but does the pain I feel not mean anything? I venture to suggest that such pain impacts the quality of my work and moreover may negatively influence the work of my colleagues. OK. I see. So I wouldn’t have the power of speech? No, I understand. I hereby consent. When

Imagine having to put a code into your phone when you go to the toilet, and then have a weekly meeting with your supervisor where you have to justify why you were 1.2 minutes above the average toilet break allocated to you last week,” wrote another. Lindsay, who worked as a rep on Walmart and Sam’s Club accounts a few years back, told me the stress of her job caused her to develop digestive problems. “Even though I went to the doctor and brought a note explaining what was wrong, my supervisor still insisted on following me into the bathroom to ‘make sure’ I really did have diarrhea every single time,” Lindsay said. “She would stand outside the stall door and listen to me shit.

Abundance and scarcity In a society where value is created by the manufacture of goods or the allocation of limited resources, it’s not a surprise that organizations seek scarcity. We hesitate to share, because if I give you this, then I don’t have it any more. We erect barriers and create rules to make it difficult for some people to have access to these limited resources. While we don’t set out to become miserly, it’s an economic instinct, because what’s yours is no long mine. Even though we give lip service to sharing when kids show up for kindergarten classes, most of school is organized around the same ideas. We rank students, we cut players from the roster, we grade on a curve. Success, we teach, is scarce. Our new economy, though, is based on abundance, the abundance that comes from ideas and access. If I benefit when everyone knows my idea, then the more people I give the idea to, the better we all do. If I benefit when I earn a reputation leading, connecting and creating positive change, then I’ll benefit if I can offer these insights to anyone who can benefit from them. With an abundance mindset, we intentionally create goods that can be shared. It’s not based on our traditional factory-based economy, but it works now (in fact, it’s just about all that works)… engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales. With an abundance mindset, we create ideas and services that do better when people share.

Keeping a population growing was best served by creating conditions in which as many women as possible were having as many babies as they could, raising those children to be useful to the state as future breeders, workers, and warriors. Ancient Mesopotamian cities became concerned with taking censuses – including gender as a category alongside age and location – so they could measure their human resources and collect taxes more efficiently. Categories were needed for hierarchies to function, for leaders to know how many people they had, and how to allocate work and rations between them. People had to be given social codes to follow so the state would keep ticking over efficiently without falling apart. In many ways it was like a machine: every part designed for a particular function.

The principal reason that districts within states often differ markedly in per-pupil expenditures is that school funding is almost always tied to property taxes, which are in turn a direct function of local wealth. Having school funding depend on local wealth creates a situation in which poor districts must tax themselves far more heavily than wealthy ones, yet still may not be able to generate adequate income. For example, Baltimore City is one of the poorest jurisdictions in Maryland, and the Baltimore City Public Schools have the lowest per-pupil instructional expenses of any of Maryland's 24 districts. Yet Baltimore's property tax rate is twice that of the next highest jurisdiction.(FN2) Before the funding equity decision in New Jersey, the impoverished East Orange district had one of the highest tax rates in the state, but spent only $3,000 per pupil, one of the lowest per-pupil expenditures in the state.(FN3) A similar story could be told in almost any state in the U.S.(FN4) Funding formulas work systematically against children who happen to be located in high-poverty districts, but also reflect idiosyncratic local circumstances. For example, a factory closing can bankrupt a small school district. What sense does it make for children's education to suffer based on local accidents of geography or economics? To my knowledge, the U.S. is the only nation to fund elementary and secondary education based on local wealth. Other developed countries either equalize funding or provide extra funding for individuals or groups felt to need it. In the Netherlands, for example, national funding is provided to all schools based on the number of pupils enrolled, but for every guilder allocated to a middle-class Dutch child, 1.25 guilders are allocated for a lower-class child and 1.9 guilders for a minority child, exactly the opposite of the situation in the U.S. where lower-class and minority children typically receive less than middle-class white children.(FN5) Regional differences in per-pupil costs may exist in other countries, but the situation in which underfunded urban or rural districts exist in close proximity to wealthy suburban districts is probably uniquely American. Of course, even equality in per-pupil costs in no way ensures equality in educational services. Not only do poor districts typically have fewer funds, they also have greater needs.

And in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs failure, not only our psychological state, but living conditions generally in the prison became much more severe. Even food was much scarcer. At that time, they would bring in vats full of greasy water with some vegetables floating in it — potatoes, pumpkins, yams — frequently dirty and rotten, at that. We found out from men working in the kitchen, who belonged to Circular 4, that one hundred pounds of foodstuffs per day were allocated for the six thousand prisoners on Isla de Pinos — that worked out to less than a pound for every fifty prisoners. And that was the extent of our food. The bread had not a drop of fat or lard in it, just salt, and not always that. Its texture was so rubbery that you could stretch it out to more than a third longer without breaking it.

But despite the Secret Service–like behavior, and the regal nomenclature, there’s nothing hierarchical about the way an ant colony does its thinking. “Although queen is a term that reminds us of human political systems,” Gordon explains, “the queen is not an authority figure. She lays eggs and is fed and cared for by the workers. She does not decide which worker does what. In a harvester ant colony, many feet of intricate tunnels and chambers and thousands of ants separate the queen, surrounded by interior workers, from the ants working outside the nest and using only the chambers near the surface. It would be physically impossible for the queen to direct every worker’s decision about which task to perform and when.” The harvester ants that carry the queen off to her escape hatch do so not because they’ve been ordered to by their leader; they do it because the queen ant is responsible for giving birth to all the members of the colony, and so it’s in the colony’s best interest—and the colony’s gene pool—to keep the queen safe. Their genes instruct them to protect their mother, the same way their genes instruct them to forage for food. In other words, the matriarch doesn’t train her servants to protect her, evolution does. Popular culture trades in Stalinist ant stereotypes—witness the authoritarian colony regime in the animated film Antz—but in fact, colonies are the exact opposite of command economies. While they are capable of remarkably coordinated feats of task allocation, there are no Five-Year Plans in the ant kingdom. The colonies that Gordon studies display some of nature’s most mesmerizing decentralized behavior: intelligence and personality and learning that emerges from the bottom up.

what. Content strategy asks these questions of stakeholders and clients: Why are we doing this? What are we hoping to accomplish, change, or encourage? How will we measure the success of this initiative and the content in it? What measurements of success or metrics do we need to monitor to know if we are successful? How will we ensure the web remains a priority? What do we need to change in resources, staffing, and budgets to maintain the value of communication within and from the organization? What are we trying to communicate? What's the hierarchy of that messaging? This isn't Sophie's Choice, but when you start prioritizing features on a homepage and allocating budget to your list of features and content needs, get ready to make some tough calls. What content types best meet the needs of our target audience and their changing, multiple contexts? What content types best fit the skills of our

you’re a leader with no power over business strategy and no ability to allocate people to important tasks, you’re at best at the mercy of your influence with other executives and managers, and at worst a figurehead. You can’t give up the responsibility of management without giving up the power that comes with it. The CTO who doesn’t also have the authority of management must be able to get things done purely by influencing the organization. If the managers won’t actually give people and time to work on the areas that the CTO believes are important, he is rendered effectively powerless. If you give up management, you’re giving up the most important power you ever had over the business strategy, and you effectively have nothing but your organizational goodwill and your own two hands. My advice for aspiring CTOs is to remember that it’s a business strategy job first and foremost. It’s also a management job.

I’ll say it: I am lucky enough to not have to work, in the sense that Jesse and I could change how we organize our life to live on one income. I work because I like to. I love my kids! They are amazing. But I wouldn’t be happy staying home with them. I’ve figured out that my happiness-maximizing allocation is something like eight hours of work and three hours of kids a day. It isn’t that I like my job more than my kids overall—if I had to pick, the kids would win every time. But the “marginal value” of time with my kids declines fast. In part, this is because kids are exhausting. The first hour with them is amazing, the second less good, and by hour four I’m ready for a glass of wine or, even better, some time with my research. My job doesn’t have this feature. Yes, the eighth hour is less fun than the seventh, but the highs are not as high and the lows are not as low. The physical and emotional challenges of work pale in comparison to the physical and emotional challenges of being an on-scene parent. The eighth hour at my job is better than the fifth hour with the kids on a typical day. And that is why I have a job. Because I like it. It should be okay to say this. Just like it should be okay to say that you stay home with your kids because that is what you want to do. I’m well aware that many people don’t want to be an economist for eight hours a day. We shouldn’t have to say we’re staying home for children’s optimal development, or at least, that shouldn’t be the only factor in the decision. “This is the lifestyle I prefer” or “This is what works for my family” are both okay reasons to make choices! So before you even get into reading what the evidence says is “best” for your child or thinking about the family budget, you—and your partner, or any other caregiving adults in the house—should think about what you would really like to do.

More specifically, this book will try to establish the following points. First, there are not two great liberal social and political systems but three. One is democracy—political liberalism—by which we decide who is entitled to use force; another is capitalism—economic liberalism—by which we decide how to allocate resources. The third is liberal science, by which we decide who is right. Second, the third system has been astoundingly successful, not merely as a producer of technology but also, far more important, as a peacemaker and builder of social bridges. Its great advantages as a social system for raising and settling differences of opinion are inherent, not incidental. However, its disadvantages—it causes pain and suffering, it creates legions of losers and outsiders, it is disorienting and unsettling, it allows and even thrives on prejudice and bias—are also inherent. And today it is once again under attack. Third, the attackers seek to undermine the two social rules which make liberal science possible. (I’ll outline them in the next chapter and elaborate them in the rest of the book.) For the system to function, people must try to follow those rules even if they would prefer not to. Unfortunately, many people are forgetting them, ignoring them, or carving out exemptions. That trend must be fought, because, fourth, the alternatives to liberal science lead straight to authoritarianism. And intellectual authoritarianism, although once the province of the religious and the political right in America, is now flourishing among the secular and the political left. Fifth, behind the new authoritarian push are three idealistic impulses: Fundamentalists want to protect the truth. Egalitarians want to help the oppressed and let in the excluded. Humanitarians want to stop verbal violence and the pain it causes. The three impulses are now working in concert. Sixth, fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought. Seventh, there is no way to advance knowledge peacefully and productively by adhering to the principles advocated by egalitarians and humanitarians. Their principles are poisonous to liberal science and ultimately to peace and freedom. Eighth, no social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., “harassment”) and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.

First, as I showed in Chapter 5, the term “cultural Marxism” refers to a particular Marxist theory and strategy inaugurated by Antonio Gramsci – working to establish “cultural hegemony” in order to effect socialist revolution. Second, the substitution of special identity groups advocated for by social justice activists for the working class championed by Marxists does not lead to an identical or nearly identical politics. With the working class as a lever, Marxism proposes to overcome its nemesis – the capitalist class, which maintains the class system, including a class-based system of production and resource allocation. Social justice, on the other hand, aims at little more than debunking particular identity groups from atop a putative social hierarchy, knocking them from their supposed positions of totemic privilege, and replacing them with members of supposedly subordinated groups. Third, in Chapter 5, I told why Marxism and postmodernism can’t be equated. I’ll restate it here. While postmodern theory is anti-capitalist, it not only rejects capitalism but also other “totalizing” systems, or “meta-narratives,” including even the major system proposed to counter capitalism – Marxism itself.

Viewed in this light, life itself appears as a dynamics of integration that is equipped with auto-therapeutic or 'endo-clinical' competencies and refers to a species-specific space of surprise. It has an equally innate and - in higher organisms - adaptively acquired responsibility for the injuries and invasions it regularly encounters in its permanently allocated environment or conquered surroundings. Such immune systems could equally be described as organismic early forms of a feeling for transcendence: thanks to the efficiency of these devices, which are constantly at the ready, the organism actively confronts the potential bringers of its death, opposing them with its endogenous capacity to overcome the lethal. Such functions have earned immune systems of this type comparisons to a 'body police' or border patrol. But as the concern, already at this level, is to work out a modus vivendi with foreign and invisible powers - and, in so far as these can bring death, 'higher' and 'supernatural' ones - this is a preliminary stage to the behaviour one is accustomed to terming religious or spiritual in human contexts. For every organism, its environment is its transcendence, and the more abstract and unknown the danger from that environment, the more transcendent it appears.

My Future Self My future self and I become closer and closer as time goes by. I must admit that I neglected and ignored her until she punched me in the gut, grabbed me by the hair and turned my butt around to introduce herself. Well, at least that’s what it felt like every time I left the convalescent hospital after doing skills training for a certification I needed to help me start my residential care business. I was going to be providing specialized, 24/7 residential care and supervising direct care staff for non-verbal, non-ambulatory adult men in diapers! I ran to the Red Cross and took the certified nurse assistant class so I would at least know something about the job I would soon be hiring people to do and to make sure my clients received the best care. The training facility was a Medicaid hospital. I would drive home in tears after seeing what happens when people are not able to afford long-term medical care and the government has to provide that care. But it was seeing all the “young” patients that brought me to tears. And I had thought that only the elderly lived like this in convalescent hospitals…. I am fortunate to have good health but this experience showed me that there is the unexpected. So I drove home each day in tears, promising God out loud, over and over again, that I would take care of my health and take care of my finances. That is how I met my future self. She was like, don’t let this be us girlfriend and stop crying! But, according to studies, we humans have a hard time empathizing with our future selves. Could you even imagine your 30 or 40 year old self when you were in elementary or even high school? It’s like picturing a stranger. This difficulty explains why some people tend to favor short-term or immediate gratification over long-term planning and savings. Take time to picture the life you want to live in 5 years, 10 years, and 40 years, and create an emotional connection to your future self. Visualize the things you enjoy doing now, and think of retirement saving and planning as a way to continue doing those things and even more. However, research shows that people who interacted with their future selves were more willing to improve savings. Just hit me over the head, why don’t you! I do understand that some people can’t even pay attention or aren’t even interested in putting money away for their financial future because they have so much going on and so little to work with that they feel like they can’t even listen to or have a conversation about money. But there are things you’re doing that are not helping your financial position and could be trouble. You could be moving in the wrong direction. The goal is to get out of debt, increase your collateral capacity, use your own money in the most efficient manner and make financial decisions that will move you forward instead of backwards. Also make sure you are getting answers specific to your financial situation instead of blindly guessing! Contact us. We will be happy to help!

One argument of Uniqueness is that it is not any particular renaissance, revolution, or liberal institution that marks out the West, but its far higher levels of achievement in all the intellectual and artistic spheres of life. I relied on Charles Murray’s book, Human Accomplishment: Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, to make this argument.[1] This book is the first effort to quantify ‘as facts’ the accomplishments of individuals and countries across the world in the arts and sciences, by calculating the amount of space allocated to these individuals in reference works, encyclopaedias, and dictionaries. Murray concludes that ‘whether measured in people or events, 97% of accomplishment in the scientific inventories occurred in Europe and North America’ from 800 BC to 1950.[2] Murray also notes the far higher accomplishments of Europeans in the arts, particularly after 1400. Although Murray does not compare their achievements but compiles separate lists for each civilisation, he notes that the sheer number of ‘significant figures’ in the arts is higher in the West in comparison to the combined number of the other civilisations.[3] In literature, the number in the West is 835; whereas in India, the Arab World, China, and Japan combined, the number is 293. In the visual arts, it is 479 for the West as compared to 192 for China and Japan combined (with no significant figures listed for India and the Arab World). In music, ‘the lack of a tradition of named composers in non-Western civilization means that the Western total of 522 significant figures has no real competition at all’.

This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern. If the development of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance of production relations, the rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eighteenth century as techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive management of its forces were at the time indispensable.

Smart Sexy Money is About Your Money As an accomplished entrepreneur with a history that spans more than fourteen years, Annette Wise is constantly looking for ways to give back to her community. Using enterprising efforts, she qualified for $125,000 in startup funding to develop a specialized residential facility that allows developmentally disabled adults to live in the community after almost a lifetime of living in a state institution. In doing so, she has provided steady employment in her community for the last thirteen years. After dedicating years to her residential facility, Annette began to see clearly the difficulty business owners face in planning for retirement successfully. Searching high and low to find answers, she took control of financial uncertainty and in less than 2 years, she became a Full Life Agent, licensed Registered Representative, Investment Advisor Representative and Limited Principal. Her focus is on building an extensive list of clients that depend on her for smart retirement guidance, thorough college planning, detailed business continuation, and business exit strategies. Clients have come to rely on Annette for insight on tax advantaged savings and retirement options. Annette’s primary goal is to help her clients understand more than just concepts, but to easily understand how money works, the consequences of their decisions and how they work in conjunction with their desires and goal. Ever the curious soul who is always up for a challenge, Annette is routinely resourceful at finding sensible means to a sometimes-challenging end. She believes in infinite possibilities as well as in sharing her knowledge with others. She is the go-to source for “Smart Wealth Solutions.” Among Annette’s proudest accomplishments are her two wonderful sons, Michael III and Matthew. As a single mom, they have been her inspiration and joy. She is forever grateful to the greatest brothers in the world- Andrew and Anthony Wise, for assistance in grooming them into amazing young men.

Collateral Capacity or Net Worth? If young Bill Gates had knocked on your door asking you to invest $10,000 in his new company, Microsoft, could you get your hands on the money? Collateral capacity is access to capital. Your net worth is irrelevant if you can’t access any of the money. Collateral capacity is my favorite wealth concept. It’s almost like having a Golden Goose! Collateral can help a borrower secure loans. It gives the lender the assurance that if the borrower defaults on the loan, the lender can repossess the collateral. For example, car loans are secured by cars, and mortgages are secured by homes. Your collateral capacity helps you to avoid or minimize unnecessary wealth transfers where possible, and accumulate an increasing pool of capital providing accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding. It is the amount of money that you can access through collateralizing a loan against your money, allowing your money to continue earning interest and working for you. It’s very important to understand that accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding are the key components of collateral capacity. It’s one thing to look good on paper, but when times get tough, assets that you can’t touch or can’t convert easily to cash, will do you little good. Three things affect your collateral capacity: ① The first is contributions into savings and investment accounts that you can access. It would be wise to keep feeding your Golden Goose. Often the lure of higher return potential also brings with it lack of liquidity. Make sure you maintain a good balance between long-term accounts and accounts that provide immediate liquidity and access. ② Second is the growth on the money from interest earned on the money you have in your account. Some assets earn compound interest and grow every year. Others either appreciate or depreciate. Some accounts could be worth a great deal but you have to sell or close them to access the money. That would be like killing your Golden Goose. Having access to money to make it through downtimes is an important factor in sustaining long-term growth. ③ Third is the reduction of any liens you may have against these accounts. As you pay off liens against your collateral positions, your collateral capacity will increase allowing you to access more capital in the future. The goose never quit laying golden eggs – uninterrupted compounding. Years ago, shortly after starting my first business, I laughed at a banker that told me I needed at least $25,000 in my business account in order to borrow $10,000. My business owner friends thought that was ridiculously funny too. We didn’t understand collateral capacity and quite a few other things about money.

The most vexing managerial aspect of this problem of asymmetry, where the easiest path to growth and profit is up, and the most deadly attacks come from below, is that “good” management—working harder and smarter and being more visionary—doesn’t solve the problem. The resource allocation process involves thousands of decisions, some subtle and some explicit, made every day by hundreds of people, about how their time and the company’s money ought to be spent. Even when a senior manager decides to pursue a disruptive technology, the people in the organization are likely to ignore it or, at best, cooperate reluctantly if it doesn’t fit their model of what it takes to succeed as an organization and as individuals within an organization. Well-run companies are not populated by yes-people who have been taught to carry out mindlessly the directives of management. Rather, their employees have been trained to understand what is good for the company and what it takes to build a successful career within the company. Employees of great companies exercise initiative to serve customers and meet budgeted sales and profits. It is very difficult for a manager to motivate competent people to energetically and persistently pursue a course of action that they think makes no sense.

Strategic Planning Today: A Six-Step Process  The strategic planning process offers incredible benefits if we pursue it correctly. The following six steps constitute one version of the process: mission, objective, situation analysis, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and control.  The first step in the process is to define your mission; as we saw at the beginning of this lecture, this is the core that guides you. Your mission is what you look to in setting your objectives.  The objectives established in the second step are chosen based on some notion of wanting to fulfill your mission. They should be clear, concise, achievable, and in some sense, measurable.  The third step, the environmental scan, is pivotal for most firms, and it is the most involved. Look at both the external and internal environments in which your firm functions. On a personal level, evaluate the external factors that impinge on you with respect to your objectives.  The fourth step is the actual formulation of strategy. Decide what you will actually do to get from where you are to where you want to be. Allocate resources and connect your management decisions with the people who will implement the plan.  The fifth step is implementation of strategy, and here is where many companies fail because they do not follow the military dictum to “supervise and refine.” This means not to simply issue orders and assume that they’ll be carried out.  The sixth step, control, involves developing a control mechanism to evaluate whether or not the plan is working. When the control or monitoring system tells you that something is amiss in your strategy, you can then circle back to your environmental scan to discover whether the relevant environmental factors have changed.

Commencing and concluding any writing project entails making certain compromises. A person must put off attending to other projects in order to devote him or herself to taking on an extensive writing project. The allocation of a writer’s limited resources of time requires choosing how much time to devote to any manuscript. One must stop working on a manuscript before it meets all the writer’s hopeful expectations.

Stop Saying “Yes” To Everyone In his book The Distinguishing Mark of Leadership, author Don Meyer quotes Warren Buffet as saying the following: “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.” Buffet’s remark mirrors a comment made by Steve Jobs while giving a presentation at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 1997. He noted: “Focusing is about saying no.” Most people say yes. They acquiesce when a stranger asks for their time. They give in when a coworker asks for help. They surrender when a family member demands immediate attention. On the surface, such a response seems reasonable. After all, a willingness to help others is an admirable quality. The problem is, saying “yes” forces us to put our own tasks and responsibilities on the back burner. Every moment we devote to helping someone is a moment we cannot allocate toward getting our own work done. Constantly saying “yes” has another adverse effect: you gain a reputation for being helpful. Again, that seems admirable. But consider: making yourself available to anyone who asks only encourages people to seek your help in the future. It’s like placing a bowl of milk on your doorstep for stray cats. As long as you continue to provide the milk, the stray cats will come. Guaranteed. Let’s take a closer look at how the habit of saying “yes” diminishes your ability to get things done.

Action Steps 1. Evaluate your progress regarding the tasks on your to-do list before offering to help other people. Note how much time you’ve allocated to each task and determine whether you have enough time left in the day to address them as planned. If you’re ahead of schedule, offer your help to the person asking for it. Otherwise, tactfully say “no” and explain your reason. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with helping people. You should do so whenever you can. But you need to make sure you’re not jeopardizing the quality or timeliness of your own work in the process. 2. Remind yourself that few requests are truly emergencies. People seeking help usually want to receive it immediately. Their urgency rarely stems from a crisis. Rather, most people simply want whatever they seek sooner rather than later. It’s human nature. Before offering your help, determine whether a true crisis exists that warrants your swift attention. Again, most “emergencies” aren’t emergencies at all. 3. Ask whether you can help the person later. That allows you to say “no” and simultaneously appear willing to accommodate the individual. This approach also helps you to retain control of your time, a crucial part of working productively. People who hear this response will find it to be more palatable than a simple “no.” 4. Find out what you’re being asked to commit yourself to. When people ask for help, they often downplay the amount of time it will take. For example, consider the times you’ve heard someone ask you, “Got a second for a quick question?” Ask the person seeking your help to clearly describe what he or she wants you to do for them. If the tasks involved require more time than you have to offer, you’ll have a suitable reason to decline. 5. Decide in advance the activities you won’t help others with. Placing limits on the types of work you’re willing to address will make it easier to rebuff requests for help. For example, you might decide to shun making phone calls before 10:00 a.m. because you know such calls expose you to potential time sinks. A planned 3-minute call can easily turn into 20 minutes if the person you’ve called is chatty. If a coworker asks you to call a vendor or client for him or her, tactfully decline and explain your reason.

While writing this book, I discovered that there is a field of study called “disaster theory.” A lot of the work in this area explores self-interested motivations. In the United States, for instance, presidents are more likely to declare national disasters during election years, and battleground states get more donations than others; money allocated to address disasters is used as an inducement and a reward.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance

It’s worth noting, incidentally, that most private corporations are fantastically inefficient, although their inefficiency is disguised by collusion with the government: Contrary to their claims of efficiency, most large corporations…spend an inordinate portion of society’s resources on advertising, executive perks and salaries, transportation and communications to far-flung corporate empires, and lobbying expenses. Most depend for their profits and survival on a complex regime of public subsidies, exemptions, and externalized costs, including the indirect subsidies they gain when allowed to pay less than a living wage, maintain substandard working conditions, market hazardous products, dump untreated wastes into the environment, and extract natural resources from public lands at below-market prices. Ralph Estes…estimates that in 1994 corporations extracted more than $2.6 trillion a year in such subsidies in the United States alone—roughly five times their reported profits… It is one of the basic principles of efficient market function that the full costs of a product or service be borne by the seller and passed on to the buyer. Yet many corporations would be forced to close their doors or restructure if they had to bear the true full costs of their operations.123 Americans sometimes think of large size almost as an end in itself, or at least as necessary for economic efficiency. But this is not always the case. In some industries, economies of scale do exist. But large size tends to entail bureaucratic inefficiencies, environmental destruction, allocative inequalities, political corruption, in general significant negative externalities.124

Retirement Lifestyle Planning There are four (4) major financial questions that you must be able to answer in order to know if your current or future plan will work for you. What rate of return do you have to earn on your savings and investment dollars to be able to retire at your current standard of living and have your money last through your life expectancy? How much do you need to save on a monthly or annual basis to be able to retire at your current standard of living and your money last your life expectancy? Doing what you are currently doing, how long will you have to work to be able to retire and live your current lifestyle till life expectancy? If you don’t do anything different than you are doing today, how much will you have to reduce your standard of livingat retirement for your money to last your life expectancy? Motto for Retirement Lifestyle Planning A solid financial plan is a powerful possession that offers a sense of peace and freedom. Our process allows us to determine appropriate strategies and help you understand how to achieve your goals and live your dreams. Our process stresses informed financial decision making. We encourage you to review all decisions with your team of tax and legal professionals. For the record, we are not tax or legal professionals and this information is not intended as tax or legal advice. Now we’d like to remind you that a well-executed financial plan requires diverse knowledge and utilizes some or all of the following strategies and services: -Retirement Lifestyle Planning Making the most of your employer-sponsored retirement plans and IRAs. Determining how much you need to retire comfortably. Managing assets before and during retirement including Social Security analysis. -Estate Planning Referring you to qualified Estate Attorneys to review your wills and trusts to help preserve your estate for your intended heirs by helping with beneficiary designations. Reducing exposure to estate taxes and probate costs. Coordinating with your tax and legal advisors. -Tax Management Helping to reduce your current and future tax burden by considering multiple strategies for review by your tax professional.Also, referring you to qualified tax specialists if needed. -Legacy Planning/Charitable Planning Creating a solid future for generations to come by ensuring that your legacy will live on through those you love or causes you care deeply about. -Risk Management Reviewing existing insurance policies. Recommending policy changes when appropriate. Finding the best policy for your individual wants and needs. -Investment Planning Determining your asset allocation needs. Helping you understand your risk tolerance. Recommending the appropriate investment vehicles to help you reach and exceed your goals.

Your Personal Economic Model One tool we use when discussing the best course of action to secure your financial future is the Personal Economic Model®. Just as a medical doctor would use an anatomical model to convey medical concepts, we use the following model to convey financial concepts. This model offers a visual representation of the way money flows through your hands. On the left, you will notice the Lifetime Capital Potential tank, which illustrates that the amount of money you will control during your lifetime is both large, as well as finite. Most people are shocked to see how much money can flow through their hands in their lifetime. Once earned, your money flows directly to the Tax Filter where the state and federal governments take tax dollars owed from your paycheck. The after tax dollars are then directed to either your Current Lifestyle or your Future Lifestyle. Your management of the Lifestyle Regulator determines where these dollars go. Regulating the cash flow between your current lifestyle desires and your future lifestyle requirements may be the most important financial decision you will ever make. Here’s why. Each and every dollar that is allowed to flow through to your Current Lifestyle is consumed and gone forever. The goal is to accumulate enough money in the Savings and Investment tanks so that when you retire, the dollars in those tanks can be used to pay for your future lifestyle requirements. Retirement planning seems hard for most people to do but it is not rocket science. The best position, position A, would be to have enough in the tanks so that you can live in the future like you live today adjusted for inflation and have your money last at least to your life expectancy. That’s a win, but the icing on the cake would be to accomplish that with little to no impact on your present standard of living, and that is exactly what we strive to help our clients to do. Working with us can help you with the following: Optimize the balance between your Current and Future Lifestyles Identify inefficiencies in your current personal economic model (where are you losing money) Design, implement, and execute a plan to secure your financial future Limit the impact on your Current Lifestyle dollars (maintain your current standard of living)

Zero Line Spender, Saver, Wealth Creator Your financial personality type determines your financial position in life. Let’s say there is a zero financial line that represents a position where you owe nothing and have nothing. Perhaps you can remember those days getting started on your own. So, let us assume you just graduated from college and you’re one of the lucky few who graduated at the zero line, you owe nothing. Pretty amazing considering that in 2013, the debt on student loans exceeded all credit card debt owed in America. But fortunately, you made it out free and clear to the zero line. You’re a “Spender” so you go to the showroom and pick one out. With your job and the car as collateral, you get a car loan and you drop below the zero line. You lifestyle gets more and more expensive and since you are a ‘Spender” you probably take on credit card debt to help finance your lifestyle desires. You are constantly working your way back to becoming a zero, financially speaking. Then, you get married and now there are two in debt working their way back to zero. Eventually, children come along, and the odds of being able to put away enough money to pay your debt and interest and live on the top side of the zero line are becoming virtually impossible. Unfortunately, many Americans live in this position with little or no chance of ever living debt free. When something comes along that requires their savings, they must deplete their funds in order to avoid paying interest and then they must start saving again for their next expense. They are constantly returning to the zero line. The money they have accumulated is compounding interest, giving them uninterrupted growth. Having access to capital allows them to negotiate more favorable loans by collateralizing against their accounts rather than depleting them. They make payments to the lending institution with dollars from their current cash flow, protecting the growth of the money they have saved and invested for their future. Saving and investing with uninterrupted compounding is an important wealth concept for moving further and further away from the zero line.

Tax-Deferred does not mean Tax-Free It never ceases to amaze me when I meet with people who do not know that tax-deferred does not mean tax-free. You mean I have to pay taxes when I take this money!? This is not all mine!? These are common remarks I hear as we are looking at their most recent retirement account statement. Somehow this consideration was missed when they enrolled in the savings plan and each year when they postponed the tax when filing their tax return. I am not a tax professional but I can understand how an accountant or tax preparer wouldn’t think to make sure the client understands that they are postponing taxes and the tax calculation during their working years. I met an accountant that expressed how difficult it is when he gets the client that believed they were ready to leave work only to find out that because of taxes they are coming up a little or a lot short. This happened to one of my relatives that worked at least 30 years as an x-ray technician and then supervisor at a very large hospital. While working, they always had the nice houses, the nice cars, and a nice upper-middle class lifestyle, nothing fancy. After he retired and even though his wife still worked as a school principal, he had to take a sales clerk job at a nearby liquor store so that his family could maintain their lifestyle. I will never forget other relatives joking and laughing about him miscalculating his retirement. I’m certain that his unsuccessful retirement and that of other relatives influenced my interest in retirement planning if for no one else but me. With a limited amount of retirement income, most retirees would prefer to keep their dollars rather than give them to Uncle Sam. Even those with an unlimited source of funds don’t want to pay more taxes than necessary. Fortunately, there are some ways to decrease your tax burden once you’ve done the obvious work of ensuring you’ve taken all the deductions and credits to which you’re entitled when you file your taxes.

If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, “Hand me the wrench,” his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, “And what do I get for it?”—even if they are working for Exxon-Mobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that “communism just doesn’t work”): if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.11 One might even say that it’s one of the scandals of capitalism that most capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically. True, they don’t tend to operate very democratically. Most often they are organized around military-style top-down chains of command. But there is often an interesting tension here, because top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. The greater the need to improvise, the more

Berkshire’s operating CEOs are masters of their crafts and run their businesses as if they were their own. My job is to stay out of their way and allocate whatever excess capital their businesses generate. It’s easy work.

Employees who work for a company whose stock price increase ranked among the top 20 percent of all firms in the past five years allocated 31 percent of their contributions to the company stock. This compares to an allocation of only 13 percent to company stock in firms whose performance was in the worst 20 percent. The actual 401(k) asset allocation behavior of employees suggests that they use the past price trend (the representativeness bias) as a determinant for investing in the company stock (the familiarity bias).

Now there is an attempt to reverse the history, to go back to the happy days when the principles of economic rationalism briefly reigned, gravely demonstrating that people have no rights beyond what they can gain in the labor market. And since now the injunction to "go somewhere else" won't work, the choices are narrowed to the workhouse prison or starvation, as a matter of natural law, which reveals that any attempt to help the poor only harms them—the poor, that is; the rich are miraculously helped thereby, as when state power intervenes to bail our investors after the collapse of the highly-toured Mexican "economic miracle," or to save failing banks and industries, or to bar Japan from American markets to allow domestic corporations to reconstruct the steel, automotive, and electronics industry in the 1980s (amidst impressive rhetoric about free markets by the most protectionist administration in the postwar era and its acolytes). And far more; this is the merest icing on the cake. But the rest are subject to the iron principles of economic rationalism, now sometimes called "tough love" by those who allocate the benefits.

None of these systems, whether “natural” or man-made, can operate without a continuous supply of energy and resources that have to be transformed into something “useful.” Appropriating the concept from biology, I shall refer to all such processes of energy transformation as metabolism. Depending on the sophistication of the system, these outputs of useful energy are allocated between doing physical work and fueling maintenance, growth, and reproduction. As social human beings and in marked contrast to all other creatures, the major portion of our metabolic energy has been devoted to forming communities and institutions such as cities, villages, companies, and collectives, to the manufacture of an extraordinary array of artifacts, and to the creation of an astonishing litany of ideas ranging from airplanes, cell phones, and cathedrals to symphonies, mathematics, and literature, and much, much more. However, it’s not often appreciated that without a continuous supply of energy and resources, not only can there be no manufacturing of any of these things but, perhaps more important, there can be no ideas, no innovation, no growth, and no evolution. Energy is primary. It underlies everything that we do and everything that happens around us. As such, its role in all of the questions addressed will be another continuous thread that runs throughout the book. This may seem self-evident, but it is surprising how small a role, if any, the generalized concept of energy plays in the conceptual thinking of economists and social scientists.

Capitalism allocates resources, generates innovation, rewards effort, and builds affluence with high efficiency, and these are extraordinarily important things to do well in a society. As a system capitalism is not perfect, but it’s far better than the alternatives. Winston Churchill said that, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.”2 We believe the same about capitalism. The

It is not coincidence that, as Raymond Money puts it, “from the pyramids of Egypt, the rebuilding of Rome after Nero’s fire, to the creation of the great medieval cathedrals…all great public works have been somehow associated with autocratic power.” It was no accident that most of the world’s great roads —ancient and modern alike—had been associated with totalitarian regimes, that it took a great Khan to build the great roads of Asia, a Darius to build the Royal Road across Asia Minor, a Hitler and a Mussolini to build the Autobahnen and autostrade of Europe, that during the four hundred years in which Rome was a republic it built relatively few major roads, its broad highways beginning to march across the known earth only after the decrees calling for their construction began to be sent forth from the Capitol by a Caesar rather than a Senate. Whether or not it is true, as Money claims, that “pure democracy has neither the imagination, nor the energy, nor the disciplined mentality to create major improvement,” it is indisputably true that it is far easier for a totalitarian regime to take the probably unpopular decision to allocate a disproportionate share of its resources to such improvements, far easier for it to mobilize the men necessary to plan and build them; the great highways of antiquity awaited the formation of regimes capable of assigning to their construction great masses of men ( Rome’s were built in large part by the legions who were to tramp along them); at times, the great highways of the modern age seemed to be awaiting some force capable of assigning to their planning the hundreds of engineers, architects and technicians necessary to plan them. And most important, it is far easier for a totalitarian regime to ignore the wishes of its people, for its power does not derive from the people. Under such a regime it is not necessary for masses of people to be persuaded of an improvement’s worth; the persuasion of a single mind is sufficient.

We’re each living through our own private reality, a reality shaped by our hardworking automatic system’s attempts to allocate our attention to the right things.

There are two very different ways to view time with your family. One way is to see it as a compartment of your life to which you allocate time. If you spend time with your family in this way, you will never avoid the constant frustration that your family time is taking away from other important activities or that other important activities are taking away from family time. For working moms and dads, this involves long seasons where the family loses their best time and attention and those times can never be recaptured. We need to seriously consider another way. What if you decide to live in, with and through your family? What if you reject family as one of the compartments of your life and see family instead as the environment in which you experience as much of your life as possible? The more I began to identify myself with my family, the more this felt like the natural way to live. But be aware, virtually all elements of western culture are set up to separate individuals from their families. Rejecting this requires building a very different kind of culture. However, when I consider God’s design for the family and who he has called me to be as a father, I no longer believe treating family like a compartment is an option. Family is not a part of my life. My family is in me and I am in them and so we need to be deeply interconnected. To live like separate individuals is to deny this reality. How is this possible in today’s society? What does this look like? It begins by taking the elements of life that are compartments—work, worship, friendships, hobbies, learning etc.—and doing as many as possible with, in, through and as a family. Perhaps every day should be “take your child to work day.” Maybe it means you don’t separate and go into different groups to worship. You worship together, and even more importantly, you worship as a family in your home. Maybe it means your friends are friends of your family and that when you give your love and loyalty to a friend, you are giving that love and loyalty to their family. Maybe it means you either find ways to enjoy your hobbies with your family or you find new hobbies that your family can enjoy with you. Maybe it means that whenever someone in your family acquires a new skill, you complete the learning experience by sharing it with your family. But whenever possible you learn together.

étendre /etɑ̃dʀ/ I. vtr 1. (allonger) to stretch [bras, jambe] • il a étendu les bras/jambes | he stretched his arms/legs 2. (déployer) to spread (out) [bâche, nappe] • ~ du linge (dehors) to hang out washing; (dedans) to hang up washing 3. (coucher) to lay [sb] down [malade, blessé] • ~ qn (sur le carreau) (informal) (blesser) to lay sb out cold (familier), to floor GB sb; (tuer) to kill sb • ~ qn d'un coup de poing (informal) | to knock sb out • se faire ~ à un examen (informal) | to flunk (familier) an exam • ils se sont fait ~ par l'équipe adverse (informal) | they got thrashed (familier) by the opposing team 4. (diluer) to dilute, to water down [vin, solution] 5. (étaler) to spread [enduit, peinture, beurre]; (Culin) to roll out [pâte] 6. (accroître) to extend [emprise, pouvoir] (sur "over"); to extend [mesure, allocation, aide, embargo] (à "to") • il faut ~ le champ de nos connaissances | we must extend our range of knowledge • la société a étendu ses activités à de nouveaux secteurs | the company branched out into new fields II. vpr 1. (occuper un espace) to stretch (sur "over") • s'~ à perte de vue | to extend ou stretch as far as the eye can see • la forêt s'étend sur 10 000 km2 | the forest stretches over 10,000 square kilometres GB 2. (augmenter) [grève, épidémie, sécheresse, récession] to spread (à "to"); [ville] to expand, to grow 3. (s'appliquer) s'étendre à • [loi, mesure] to apply to 4. (durer) to stretch (sur "over"), last • la Renaissance s'étend de la fin du XVe siècle au milieu du XVIe siècle | the Renaissance stretched from the end of the 15th century to the middle of the 16th century • les travaux s'étendront sur trois ans | the work will last three years 5. (s'allonger) to lie down 6. (s'appesantir) s'étendre sur • to dwell on [sujet, point]

Learning Should Never Stop And It Should Be Like A Habit, As A Professional Everyone Works On Average For 40 Years. As Per My Views, Allocate The First 15 Years Of Your Career For Exposure, Training, Feedback, Development, And Learning, So That In The Next 25 Years, You Can Have Exceptional Earnings.

Conway’s law says: Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure. A system that must be developed by an organization with many teams and many concerns must have an architecture that facilitates independent actions by those teams, so that the teams do not interfere with each other during development. This is accomplished by properly partitioning the system into well-isolated, independently developable components. Those components can then be allocated to teams that can work independently of each other.

The most important behavior on your part involves dedicating a disproportionate share of your own time, attention, and discretionary resources to creating new business models. Existing businesses, and the leaders in charge of them, face little difficulty in articulating their needs, building a case for their support, and attracting people. Entrepreneurial initiatives, on the other hand, are usually seen as marginal or unimportant in their early stages. Unless you personally allocate to them disproportionate attention, disproportionate resources, and disproportionate talent, they will get squeezed by the existing business to the extent that they never have a chance to take off. Your challenge is to provide counterpressure to the inertial forces that lead your people to constantly attend to the demands of today’s business. [...] By disproportionate resources, we mean budget, access to operating capacity or operating assets, and, most vitally, the very best people. Ironically, these are the very resources that are highly desired by managers of the existing business, who are apt to hotly contest any other claim on them. Like the payment of disproportionate attention, the disproportionate allocation of resources to new business models has its costs. Every dollar and every hour of operations capacity allocated disproportionately to entrepreneurial initiatives is money and time denied the existing business. Disproportionate allocation must be a deliberate process, with commitment of resources being visibly recognized as a matter of strategic choice, not a struggle between long- and short-term goals. [...] Finally, you must be prepared for your organization’s top talent to work on entrepreneurial initiatives. This can create a painful dilemma. When top talent works on an entrepreneurial initiative, the current business is weakened accordingly. However, if only mediocre talent is assigned to the difficult task of new business development, the ventures are doomed. Furthermore, allowing ventures to be run by mediocre people sends an even stronger signal to the rest of the business about your real priorities. The smart people in the firm will recognize that business development is not truly a priority for you, and they will organize their own priorities accordingly. The message: If you don’t walk the talk, only the dumb people will listen.

In other words, my (Bill’s) team working on Amazon Music might have had 23 goals and initiatives in our 2012 operating plan. After reviewing our plan with us, the S-Team might have chosen six of the 23 to become S-Team goals. The music team would still have worked to achieve all 23 goals, but it would be sure to make resource allocation decisions throughout the year to prioritize the six S-Team goals ahead of the remaining 17.

Our resources are limited, after all. Ask a congressman to allocate an additional million dollars to the National Science Foundation for basic research, and he’ll justifiably ask whether that money wouldn’t be better used to fund teacher training or to give a needed tax break to a troubled factory in his district. To channel limited resources we must answer questions such as ‘What is more important?’ and ‘What is good?’ And these are not scientific questions. Science can explain what exists in the world, how things work, and what might be in the future. By definition, it has no pretensions to knowing what should be in the future. Only religions and ideologies seek to answer such questions

To hack back, schedule time in your day to catch up on group chats, just as you would for any other task in your timeboxed calendar. It’s important to set colleagues’ expectations by letting them know when you plan to be unavailable. You can put them at ease by assuring them that you will contribute to the conversation during an allocated time later in the day, but until then you shouldn’t feel guilty for turning on the Do Not Disturb feature while doing focused work.

Beside him was a small employee sweeping the floor, just by Andrei. The cleaner clenched the broom with effort and quick movements. She moved forcefully, with so much vigor that one saw a girl scout. But wrinkles had already formed on her neck, that sweated, moistening her black wig. Andrei stared, noticing she was damn good at her job, but too good. She would bend her legs to sweep the difficult corners of the shop. The woman would adjust the picture frames on the wall and wipe down the chairs, tasks which were not part of her required duties. Whenever her co-workers talked casually, the woman steered the conversation to the topic of the conditions of the store, which she knew, or to certain customers, who she knew, or to how business was, which she knew. She drove back home with a smile, knowing she’d done a great job that day. “They need me! Otherwise, who else would have caught the slip hazard by the trash? No one, not even my manager!” she would say before bed. She was naturally helpful. It was tragic to see that kind employee, happy like a little child, be so great at some stupid shop, when in her pumped a heart large enough to fuel the future, a forest, or a country. There was no structure of life, or invention yet created, whose mechanism could righteously allocate the innocence and love embedded in the warm blood of a human being. There deserved to be. She was sacred. But the world, decidedly corporate, had seized her, eaten her up, devouring what was left of the lively.

Controlled economy was the economic base of totalitarianism and fertile soil for bureaucratic privilege. Under a highly centralized political and economic system, survival depended on bureaucrats who could arbitrarily allocate state assets and ration the necessities of daily life. A strict household-registration system ensured that the vast majority of China’s peasants never ventured far from where they were born. Employees of government organs and state-run enterprises had their housing and all their daily necessities allocated by their work units. Secret dossiers decided the fate of every cadre and worker.

Seneca believed that one should spend their time fulfilling their duties and responsibilities, enjoying any wealth and fortune that might come of them, but not work for the purpose of social status or material success beyond one’s minimal needs, because beyond almost everything else, he argued for allocating as much time as possible to leisure—more specifically, a particular type of well-focused leisure in which one finds tranquility, introspection, and stillness.

Do what you can, but know that content creation is only one facet. Any time you allocate for content, know that most of it should be to amplify what you’ve already produced.

As its name suggests, Tri-Party Repo is an agreement between three parties. There’s the seller of the securities (the securities dealer), the buyer of the securities (cash investor), and the clearing bank (the bank that holds both the securities and the cash). The cash investor liked the transaction because they have better security. They knew the securities were priced and margined correctly by the clearing bank. For the securities dealer, Tri-Party minimized settlements and ticket processing. It gave them more time to allocate collateral throughout the day, and it made it easier to finance smaller pieces. The clearing bank did most of the work. They handled the risk management, pricing the collateral, and accommodated collateral substitutions. They managed the settlement risk, cleared the trades, provided valuation, and the position reporting. And, on top of that, they get paid a fee. Sounds like everyone wins! When there was a problem with HIC Repo, the market figured out a way to reduce investor risk. It brought cash investors back to the Repo market.

In software development, engineers are often pressured to deliver features instead of fixing defects, addressing reliability issues, or working on internal improvement projects. As a result, so called “technical debt”§§ adds up, leading to more complex problems that are increasingly difficult to solve. Consequently, Marty Cagan, a product expert who has trained generations of product leaders on building software products that customers love, stresses the importance for product and engineering leaders to allocate at least 20% of engineering’s time to proactively fix issues before they snowball into catastrophic ones, such as having to “rewrite the entire codebase from scratch.

The trick was to have a portfolio rich with cash generators and with high opportunity cash users while maintaining a positive cash balance (Exhibit 1–6). Surprisingly, this is not much of a trick in the long run. Most companies develop balanced portfolios over time by default as severely disadvantaged businesses are closed or sold off under the continual pressure for profits and cash. The real challenge is to consciously manage the movement of businesses within the portfolio. Management must allocate the corporation’s resources to move question-marked businesses into the star position before the growth slows, to keep the stars advantaged so that when growth slows the stars become cash cows, and to manage the cash cows for cash. The dogs need to be worked out of the portfolio.

the Jewish Agency and they had agreed to allocate from the next immigrant ship twenty-four Moroccans to Kibbutz Makor for work at the dig. “They’ll be pretty rough diamonds,” Eliav warned. “No English. No education.” “If they speak Arabic I can handle them,” Tabari assured the leaders, and two nights later the team went to greet the large ship that plied monotonously back and forth across the Mediterranean hauling Jewish immigrants to Israel. “Before we go aboard,” Eliav summarized, “I’ve got to warn you again that these aren’t the handsome young immigrants that you accept in America, Cullinane. These are the dregs of the world, but in two years we’ll make first-class citizens of them.” Cullinane said he knew, but if he had realized how intellectually unprepared he was for the cargo of this ship, he would have stayed at the tell and allowed Tabari to choose the new hands. For the ship that came to Israel that night brought with it not the kind of people that a nation would consciously select, not the clean nor the healthy nor the educated. From Tunisia came a pitiful family of four, stricken with glaucoma and the effects of malnutrition. From Bulgaria came three old women so broken they were no longer of use to anyone; the communists had allowed them to escape, for they had no money to buy bread nor skills to earn it nor teeth to eat it with. From France came not high school graduates with productive years ahead of them, but two tragic couples, old and abandoned by their children, with only the empty days to look forward to, not hope. And from the shores of Morocco, outcast by towns in which they had lived for countless generations, came frightened, dirty, pathetic Jews, illiterate, often crippled with disease and vacant-eyed. “Jesus Christ!” Cullinane whispered. “Are these the newcomers?” He was decent enough not to worry about himself first—although he was appalled at the prospect of trying to dig with such assistance—but he did worry about Israel. How can a nation build itself strong with such material? he asked himself. It was a shocking experience, one that cut to the heart of his sensibilities: My great-grandfather must have looked like this when he came half-starved from Ireland. He thought of the scrawny Italians that had come to New York and the Chinese to San Francisco, and he began to develop that sense of companionship with Israel that comes very slowly to a Gentile: it was building itself of the same human material that America was developed upon; and suddenly he felt a little weak. Why were these people seeking a new home coming to Israel and not to America? Where had the American dream faltered? And he saw that Israel was right; it was taking people—any people—as America had once done; so that in fifty years the bright new ideas of the world would come probably from Israel and no longer from a tired America.

First, Modern Portfolio Theory only works if a portfolio has some fixed income as well as some equity. This system breaks down if you’re too tilted one way or the other. For example, during a stock market crash like the one we had, if I had been holding 100 percent equity, rebalancing wouldn’t work. As the stock market plummeted, there would have been no complementary asset that would rise, so my allocations wouldn’t have changed and I’d have had nothing to rebalance. That’s why I advise not going above 80 percent equity, even if you’re an aggressive investor.

Union Street Railway was a New Bedford, Massachusetts-based bus company. With the equity trading below the net cash on the company’s balance sheet, Union Street was a classic net-net when Buffett bought the stock. This was a small, thinly traded company with a market capitalization below $1 million. The small float meant acquiring stock required a bit of work and persistence by the young, enterprising investor. Like the other stocks discussed so far, it was cheap. But in contrast to the previous investments discussed in this book, this one was actually losing money at the time of Buffett’s purchase. Yet this stock would be a huge winner for Buffett, yielding him a dollar profit worth more than 4.5x the average household yearly income at the time. After accumulating a meaningful stake in the company, Buffett took a trip to Massachusetts to meet with the company’s president. While he did not run a proxy contest or take aggressive action to prompt a capital return, the company paid a substantial dividend shortly after his visit.109 Union Street Railway was an early lesson in how positive changes in capital allocation can lead to windfall profits.

Habit formation is incredibly useful because the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain. It can only pay attention to one problem at a time. As a result, your brain is always working to preserve your conscious attention for whatever task is most essential. Whenever possible, the conscious mind likes to pawn off tasks to the nonconscious mind to do automatically. This is precisely what happens when a habit is formed. Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.

The antiquated rhetoric of ‘having it all’ disregards the basis of every economic relationship: the idea of trade-offs. All of us are dealing with the constrained optimization that is life, attempting to maximize our utility based on parameters like career, kids, relationships, etc., doing our best to allocate the resource of time. Due to the scarcity of this resource, therefore, none of us can ‘have it all,’ and those who claim to are most likely lying.”1

Your new challenge is to redesign your time allocations. Your strategic focus determines where your time resources will be mainly invested. Prioritise acting out your own script, make your own movie instead of spending too much time watching others at work through the TV. It is surprising the number of unsuccessful people who spend all their time resources on the social media platforms following the lives of the successful. Make the news, be the leader and let others follow you. Align you priorities and balance your activities.

Berkshire’s operating CEOs are masters of their crafts and run their businesses as if they were their own. My job is to stay out of their way and allocate whatever excess capital their businesses generate. It’s easy work.” -2002 letter

What Susanne Jaeggi has found with the N-back, what Torkel has shown with working memory training, what others have found with meditation, and what we have shown with video games—they are all different ways of getting at the same underlying mechanisms,” she said. “We’re all training the flexible allocation of executive and attentional resources.

Typically a command and control organization uses a top-down approach in allocating work: it defines a title for an individual, like Sales Manager, and then based on that tries to figure out what kind of tasks the person

Economic growth Stalin style was simple: develop industry by government command and obtain the necessary resources for this by taxing agriculture at very high rates. The communist state did not have an effective tax system, so instead Stalin “collectivized” agriculture. This process entailed the abolition of private property rights to land and the herding of all people in the countryside into giant collective farms run by the Communist Party. This made it much easier for Stalin to grab agricultural output and use it to feed all the people who were building and manning the new factories. The consequences of this for the rural folk were calamitous. The collective farms completely lacked incentives for people to work hard, so production fell sharply. So much of what was produced was extracted that there was not enough to eat. People began to starve to death. In the end, probably six million people died of famine, while hundreds of thousands of others were murdered or banished to Siberia during the forcible collectivization. Neither the newly created industry nor the collectivized farms were economically efficient in the sense that they made the best use of what resources the Soviet Union possessed. It sounds like a recipe for economic disaster and stagnation, if not outright collapse. But the Soviet Union grew rapidly. The reason for this is not difficult to understand. Allowing people to make their own decisions via markets is the best way for a society to efficiently use its resources. When the state or a narrow elite controls all these resources instead, neither the right incentives will be created nor will there be an efficient allocation of the skills and talents of people. But in some instances the productivity of labor and capital may be so much higher in one sector or activity, such as heavy industry in the Soviet Union, that even a top-down process under extractive institutions that allocates resources toward that sector can generate growth. As we saw in chapter 3, extractive institutions in Caribbean islands such as Barbados, Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica could generate relatively high levels of incomes because they allocated resources to the production of sugar, a commodity coveted worldwide. The production of sugar based on gangs of slaves was certainly not “efficient,” and there was no technological change or creative destruction in these societies, but this did not prevent them from achieving some amount of growth under extractive institutions.

In my experience, high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home. Investing our time and energy in raising wonderful children or deepening our love with our spouse often doesn’t return clear evidence of success for many years. What this leads us to is over-investing in our careers, and under-investing in our families—starving one of the most important parts of our life of the resources it needs to flourish. It should be becoming clear that the answers to all three of our questions are deeply connected. Try as you might, it’s very hard to wall off different parts of your life. Your career priorities—the motivators that will make you happy at work—are simply one part of a broader set of priorities in your life, priorities that include your family, your friends, your faith, your health, and so on. Similarly, the way you balance your plans with unanticipated opportunities, and allocate your resources—your time and energy—does not stop when you walk out the door of your office. You’re making decisions about these every moment of your life. You will be constantly pressured, both at home and at work, to give people and projects your attention. How do you decide who gets what? Whoever makes the most noise? Whoever grabs you first? You have to make sure that you allocate your resources in a way that is consistent with your priorities. You have to make sure that your own measures of success are aligned with your most important concern. And you have to make sure that you’re thinking about all these in the right time frame—overcome the natural tendency to focus on the short term at the expense of the long term. It

Writing in 1954, the British author C. Northcote Parkinson introduced the notion that work expands to fill the time allocated for it, now known as Parkinson’s Law. If you didn’t know that few managers receive any management training at all, you might think there was a school they all went to for an intensive course on Parkinson’s Law and its ramifications. Even managers that know they know nothing about management nonetheless cling to that one axiomatic truth governing people and their attitude toward work: Parkinson’s Law. It gives them the strongest possible conviction that the only way to get work done at all is to set an impossibly optimistic delivery date. Parkinson

One broad way of thinking about the use of blockchain concepts is applying them beyond the original context to see ways in which everything is like an economy, a market, and a currency — and equally important, how everything is not like an economy. This is a mindset that requires recognizing the fundamental properties of economics and markets in real-life situations. Blockchain technology helps elucidate that everything we see and experience, every system in life, is economics to some degree: a system for allocating resources. Furthermore, systems and interactions are economics in that they are a matter of awareness and discovery, value attribution, and potential interaction and exchange, and may include a mechanism for this exchange like a currency or token, or even a simple exchange of force, energy, or concentration (as in biological systems). This same basic economic structure could be said to exist universally, whether in a collaborative work team or at a farmers’ market. The quantized structure of blockchain technology in the form of ledger transaction-level tracking could mean higher-resolution activity tracking, several orders of magnitude more detailed and extensive than we are accustomed to at present, a time at which we are still grateful for SKU-level tracking on a bill of materials.

It's better to be treated as a paper airplane than a fighter jet. When you are disrupting, the best possible start-up scenario is to be dismissed, even ignored, just as Blockbuster ignored Netflix—right up until Blockbuster was "netflixed."17 Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) is a good example of an organization that took on fly-under-the-radar market risk.18 A decade ago, SNHU was a two-thousand-student college with declining enrollment. Instead of trying to increase enrollment by competing for Ivy League-caliber professors at the high end or with government-funded community colleges at the low end, the university chose to play where no one else was playing—online. There was no guarantee that students would be interested in online degree programs. But because SNHU took on market risk, playing where no one else was playing, and there were many students looking for the flexibility provided by online courses, it is now considered the Amazon of education, with thirty-four thousand students enrolled. SNHU is in the process of jumping to yet another growth curve to decrease the cost of a college degree by measuring competencies rather than credits. One student demonstrated all 120 competencies in one hundred days. His associate's degree cost a grand total of $1,250. A good example of taking on market risk in personal, career terms is Amy Jo Martin, founder of Digital Royalty. In 2008, of the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on advertising and publicity by the NBA, very little was allocated to social media. Martin saw an unmet need, and leveraged her expertise to persuade the Phoenix Suns to hire her as director of digital media, a first-of-its-kind position within the NBA. Martin's clients have included Shaquille O'Neal, and she has more than a million Twitter followers. Her gig sounds fantastically fun, but at the outset people wondered if it was even a job.

learning—we have learned how to increase productivity, the outputs that can be produced with any inputs. There are two aspects of learning that we can distinguish: an improvement in best practices, reflected in increases in productivity of firms that marshal all available knowledge and technology, and improvements in the productivity of firms as they catch up to best practices. In fact, the distinction may be somewhat artificial; there may be no firm that has employed best practices in every aspect of its activities. One firm may be catching up with another in some dimension, but the second firm may be catching up with the first in others. In developing countries, almost all firms may be catching up with global best practices; but the real difference between developing and developed countries is the larger fraction of firms that are significantly below global best practices and the larger gap between their productivity and that of the best-performing firms. While we are concerned in this book with both aspects of learning, it is especially the learning associated with catching up that we believe has been given short shrift in the economics literature, and which is central to improvements in standards of living, especially in developing countries. But as we noted in chapter 1, the two are closely related; because of the improvements in best practices by the most innovative firms, most other firms are always engaged in a process of catching up. While the evidence of Solow and the work that followed demonstrated (what to many seems obvious) the importance of learning for increases in standards of living, to further explicate the role of learning, the first three sections of this chapter marshal other macro- and microeconomic evidence. In particular, we stress the pervasive gap between best practices and the productivity of most firms. We argue that this gap is far more important than the traditional allocative inefficiencies upon which most of economics has focused and is related to learning—or more accurately, the lack of learning. The final section provides a theoretical context within which to think about the sources of sustained increases in standards of living, employing the familiar distinction of movements of the production possibilities curve and movements toward the production possibilities curve. Using this framework, we explain why it is that we ascribe such importance to learning. Macroeconomic Perspectives There are several empirical arguments that can be brought to bear to support our conclusion concerning the importance of learning. The first is a simple argument: In theory, leading-edge technology is globally available. Thus, with sufficient capital and trained labor (or sufficient mobility for capital and trained labor), all countries should enjoy comparable standards of living. The only difference would be the rents associated with ownership of intellectual property rights and factor supplies. Yet there is an enormous divergence in economic performance and standards of living across national economies, far greater than can be explained by differences in factor supplies.1 And this includes many low-performing economies with high levels of capital intensity (especially among formerly socialist economies) and highly trained labor forces. Table 2.1 presents a comparison of formerly socialist countries with similar nonsocialist economies in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the state-controlled model of economic activity. TABLE 2.1 Quality of Life Comparisons, 1992–1994 (U.S. $) Source: Greenwald and Khan (2009), p. 30. In most of these cases, at the time communism was imposed after World War II, the subsequently socialist economies enjoyed higher levels of economic development than

Civic imagination and innovation and creativity are emerging from local ecosystems now and radiating outward, and this great innovation, this great wave of localism that's now arriving, and you see it in how people eat and work and share and buy and move and live their everyday lives, this isn't some precious parochialism, this isn't some retreat into insularity, no. This is emergent. The localism of our time is networked powerfully. And so, for instance, consider the ways that strategies for making cities more bike-friendly have spread so rapidly from Copenhagen to New York to Austin to Boston to Seattle. Think about how experiments in participatory budgeting, where everyday citizens get a chance to allocate and decide upon the allocation of city funds. Those experiments have spread from Porto Alegre, Brazil to here in New York City, to the wards of Chicago. Migrant workers from Rome to Los Angeles and many cities between are now organizing to stage strikes to remind the people who live in their cities what a day without immigrants would look like. In China, all across that country, members of the New Citizens' Movement are beginning to activate and organize to fight official corruption and graft, and they're drawing the ire of officials there, but they're also drawing the attention of anti-corruption activists all around the world. In Seattle, where I'm from, we've become part of a great global array of cities that are now working together bypassing government altogether, national government altogether, in order to try to meet the carbon reduction goals of the Kyoto Protocol. All of these citizens, united, are forming a web, a great archipelago of power that allows us to bypass brokenness and monopolies of control.

One important lesson to take away from this is that you should always take care of any administrative things the code must do during initialization. This may include allocating memory, or reading configuration from a file, or even precomputing some values that will be needed throughout the lifetime of the program. This is important for two reasons. First, you are reducing the total number of times these tasks must be done by doing them once up front, and you know that you will be able to use those resources without too much penalty in the future. Secondly, you are not disrupting the flow of the program; this allows it to pipeline more efficiently and keep the caches filled with more pertinent data. We also learned more about the importance of data locality and how important simply getting data to the CPU is. CPU caches can be quite complicated, and often it is best to allow the various mechanisms designed to optimize them take care of the issue. However, understanding what is happening and doing all that is possible to optimize how memory is handled can make all the difference. For example, by understanding how caches work we are able to understand that the decrease in performance that leads to a saturated speedup no matter the grid size in Figure 6-4 can probably be attributed to the L3 cache being filled up by our grid. When this happens, we stop benefiting from the tiered memory approach to solving the Von Neumann bottleneck.

Checklist: Fitting Product Managers into the Organization ✓ To be most effective as a product manager, focus on being a generalist who can accomplish work through other people and functional departments. ✓ Position yourself with the sales force so that you’re viewed as neither strictly sales support nor corporate dictator. ✓ Understand how your activities fit into the sales process. ✓ Be prepared to represent the voice of the customer in meetings with operations and R & D and to demonstrate at least a minimum understanding of operational techniques and standards. ✓ Don’t be afraid to question and critique the work of your internal or external advertising agency. ✓ Allocate a significant portion of the time you spend with customers gathering information on future product needs and applications.