I’m reading Francis Fukuyama’s book Trust. He argues that a culture’s ablity to support spontainous sociablity and hence form numerous overlapping organizations with is key to lowering transaction costs and creating economic vitality.
He spends a lot of time on various national and religious cultural frameworks; contrasting them with that model. Here, for example, [...]
Med Rants — A doctor’s blog who appears to be writing usefully about the SARS situation.
Useful – Spin Sanity’s Myths and misconceptions about Iraq.
Some good news.: “He was a mere 1.5 metres from the brink of the falls.”
“He could have reached out and touched the brink of the falls with his hand,” said John Jacoby, battalion chief of the Niagara Falls Fire Department.
Maybe he was decided the time had come to move to Canada?
Some people this happens to [...]
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
There is an amazing moral dilemma hidden in the text of Richard Layard’s lectures on economics and happiness.
If you are evil, he outlines a reasonably simple reciepe you can use to make a large groups of people unhappy. The
trick is to engineer a change in their model of their rank. This is easier [...]
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
In the early 1970s as we pulled out of Vietnam, Richard Nixon went insane in the whitehouse, and Albert O. Hirshman wrote an facinating short book called Exit, Voice and Loyality: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States.
Hirshman, an economist, noticed that members of an organization have three broad choices about how to respond [...]
Happiness is not like ice cream. When I eat a spoonful of ice cream from the quart in the fridge I’m taking that spoonful away from the rest of my family. Happiness isn’t like that, if I’m a bit more happy it doesn’t follow that the rest of my family is denied some [...]
“What few things need to be the same so that everything else can be different?”
– Michael Tiemann, CTO of Redhat
Boy does that go to the heart of the standardization/hub/network-effect problem in short order. While it is a good question from [...]
My nation is going back to Iraq. I am deeply ashamed of my nation today. I am afraid of my nation today.
Iraqi solder, last Gulf War
Something that makes me happy is to observe the process by which science proves the patently obvious, and then beats it up with a large club until it gives up just a bit more information so you will leave it alone and go home.
I gather that scientists have discovered that stuff make makes us happy. [...]
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