Monthly Archives: March 2011

Bottle deposits

Posted on March 31, 2011 by

On a recent business trip, a conversation arose with the locals  about the state’s beverage container deposit and refund policy, which is meant to encourage folks to recycle. It’s also caused a cottage industry for people to collect containers in … Continue reading →

Posted in Critical Thinking, Economics, Private Solutions, Systems thinking | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Failure

Posted on March 28, 2011 by

Here’s a nice article on failure on the Harvard Business Review website, called The Missing Market for Failure by Joshua Gans (thanks to Tim Harford‘s tweet). I’m not sure a market for failure is nearly as important as simply gaining … Continue reading →

Posted in Capitalism, Experimentation, Feedback, Trial and Error | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Washing machines are a great innovation

Posted on March 28, 2011 by

Thanks to Aaron McKenzie of The Idiots’ Collective for directing me to this 10 minute TED talk from Hans Rosling. In it, Rosling uses his mix of entertaining presentation skills, easy-to-understand graphics and simplifying data analytics to tell us how … Continue reading →

Posted in Business or Product Idea, Critical Thinking, Economics, Innovation, Specialization, Standard of Living, Systems thinking, Value Proposition | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

“The future of education”

Posted on March 28, 2011 by

As said by Bill Gates.  He might be right. Thanks to Arnold Kling on EconLog for posting a link to this excellent TED video: Here are some of my thoughts. I’m glad to hear school teachers are trying to figure … Continue reading →

Posted in Black Swan, Education | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

What is fallacy?

Posted on March 27, 2011 by

In a conversation this evening, I mentioned that one motivation for this blog was to combat fallacy.  My counterpart said that I was the first person, besides himself, in years he has heard use that word. That caused other conversations … Continue reading →

Posted in Critical Thinking, Debate, Fallacy | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

G.E.’s business strategy

Posted on March 25, 2011 by

Profit from rent-seeking. If you don’t get it, please read this post. If you don’t believe me, please read this article.

Posted in Capitalism, Economics, Profit & Loss, Strategy | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Manage the right outputs

Posted on March 25, 2011 by

I believe one secret of good leadership is rewarding and punishing the right outputs, or results.  Bad leaders tend to fixate on inputs and/or the wrong results.  For example, a business owner complained to me about one of his associates.  … Continue reading →

Posted in Art of Management, People Management, Power of Incentives, Profit & Loss | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Progressive tax rates II

Posted on March 24, 2011 by

I appreciate the comments to my previous post.  They all provide good reasons why progressive tax rates may not be as fair of a way to tax as it first appears. As dave points out, it’s inefficient to pay for … Continue reading →

Posted in Critical Thinking, Economics, Government, Power of Incentives, Taxes, True Measures | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Progressive tax rates

Posted on March 20, 2011 by

A few weeks ago a family member explained the simple and appealing logic of progressive tax rates — or tax rates that get progressively higher on higher incomes. Someone who makes $10,000, pays 10% to the government only has $9,000 … Continue reading →

Posted in Government, Politics, Power of Incentives | Tagged , , | 6 Comments