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Confidence is rarely related to competence, and may be a factor why there are so few women leaders. Similarly, I suggest sometimes coding requires more confidence than competence, making men more suited to this discipline. (Ugly code out there, eventually made to work by brute force).

We could spend less than 1% of our GDP on defense and still have a larger military than most countries out there.

Thanks for making my point.

Second, what infrastructure? Be specific.

Is "public" a specific enough modifier for you?

I was a truck driver for years, and if you're going to mention highways and bridges - don't bother. You're wrong.

I don't find your personal anecdotal experience very compelling. I find multiple reports from credible sources far more convincing.

We are responsible for quite a few things, military-wise...[blah blah blah]

I asked for accomplishments, not responsibilities. Care to try again?

Did you even read that link?

No. Why would I? All I did was accurately observe that you didn't add anything to the discussion.

I defined "threat" by the only measure it should be defined: based on the actual reality of the situation [...] Is that the reality? Yes.

Uh huh. Another prick on the internet who claims to know the true reality of the situation.

We face a much larger threat from people who can't use their brain properly.

I assume that would that include people who claim that North Korea "shot a missle over Japan", right?

I think Mr. Gillette would disagree. http://www.maxtonmen.com/blogs... https://hbr.org/2010/09/gillet...

You cannot teach creativity

Plenty of people disagree with you.

WP's are largely a means by which 'health consultants' make money off corporations.
And now FitBit is simply trying to get in on that action.

Now there's a difference between actually caring about your employee's health, and just trying to save money.
But let's be realistic: most companies are trying to save money by doing this.

Multiple independent research studies (have shown that Wellness Programs don't work, and don't save companies any money, nor make them any additional revenue, and actually harm health instead of improving it. Which rather contradicts the (rather self-serving) studies coming out of the wellness industry itself. (And some companies are simply using them to penalize their poorer and/or unhealthier (two conditions that tend to go hand in hand in a vicious cycle) workers.)

Overall what their finding is that there is very little return on investment, basically about breaking even.
The broader wellness programs, with the most preventive measures/incentives (ie the most overbearing) do the least, and actually decrease worker health.

At the same time more narrow, targeted programs, such as specific disease treatment programs (such as asthma, diabetes, etc) do the most, mostly likely because these are conditions people already have, and having a program at work that supports them and helps them manage their conditions does alleviate some burden, compared to the more traditional approach where the company doesn't care and leaves you to worry about it on your own, and/or raises your insurance costs or even dismisses you over it.

http://theincidentaleconomist....
http://www.nationaljournal.com...
https://hbr.org/2010/12/whats-...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09...

Ellen is a person who brazenly attempted to abuse the gender inequality debate in a high profile court case to make millions of dollars when she was fired for being abrasive, lazy and generally incompetent.

Actually, it's not at all brazen. The facts of the case painted the firm as pretty sexist. What they could not prove to a reasonable standard was that this background sexism was directly responsible for her not getting promotions and bonuses. Her husband's legal problems also complicate the narrative, and cast doubt on her intentions

This is why the civil rights movement in the 60s waited for Rosa Parks, even though there had been several incidents of black women being mistreated on buses prior to Ms Parks' case. People are simple-minded, and confounding factors (like illegitimate children, alcohol/drug addictions, unsympathetic looks when it came to these many black women who went through what Rosa Parks went through) make your cause less likely to be successful, as unfair as that is.

superior compensation. period.

I don't think so:
The manager usually does not have control of compensation.
Compensate is not a strong motivator. https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-m... Personally, I do feel more of a commitment when I realize I have a high salary but it is small relative to other motivations
The main reason people quit is because of bad managers http://fortune.com/2015/04/02/...
A good manager is competent and has good people skills https://hbr.org/2014/03/why-go...

superior compensation. period.

I don't think so:
The manager usually does not have control of compensation.
Compensate is not a strong motivator. https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-m... Personally, I do feel more of a commitment when I realize I have a high salary but it is small relative to other motivations
The main reason people quit is because of bad managers http://fortune.com/2015/04/02/...
A good manager is competent and has good people skills https://hbr.org/2014/03/why-go...

I'm not entirely sure why this post is modded -1 other than it is from AC. In fact, I think that, although they are incompatible in some way, both AC and GP have said something incredibly valid.

I like the way that the GP described how the process by which people who have a single brilliant idea that nets them capital can work hard with that capital to leverage that into a larger enterprise. Although I'm sure he participates in VC activity, Musk did not simply take his money and "steal" from other's ideas by snookering inventors and founders into giving up huge equity stakes for a paltry amount of cash (albeit with very high risk). He took what he made and kept learning and then applied that to a venture that he did not think could succeed without someone willing to put some of their own hide into the game. Although there is a new article in HBR saying that Tesla is not really as "disruptive as you might think" link, I think that his work proved that you can have electric cars that people treat like cars and not buggies.

On the other hand, I definitely agree with the AC too. There is a significant amount of luck that contributes to whether or not someone's hard work simply keeps them alive (food on the table, shelter, medicine, etc) and whether their hard work nets them a huge payday. The sad part is that there are plenty of people whose hard work simply keeps them alive that, if freed from the Sisyphusian Task of looking out for their safety and survival, would improve the world in ways that we could not even imagine. We are awash in missed opportunities as a society because we waste so many people's intellect and talent by forcing them to deploy them in self defense against a system that wants them to fail.

I wish that we could have it both ways.

Perhaps because women aren't represented well in engineering, and a recent study has indicated that teams work better and smarter when they include women. https://hbr.org/2011/06/defend...

Now, as an engineer, I want my team to be as god as I can get it. Why wouldn't I want women engineers? I know good ones and bad ones, but engineering ought to be an option for interested women, and it shouldn't be anymore of an uphill slog than it is for guys, right? So a little bit of effort to attract or encourage women to consider engineering as a career isn't such a bad idea, is it? After all, our major tech companies are all whining that there aren't enough qualified engineers in the US, so they need to increase the H1B threshold. (yes, I realise that's not why they want to increase the number of cheap, exploitable foreign workers)

Thankd for the Drucker mention, AC, and the GM history. Any good specific Drucker references you suggest related to his comments on automation and employment and wages?

This is at the HBR:
https://hbr.org/2014/10/what-p...
"âoeEvery few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred,â Peter Drucker observed in a 1992 essay for Harvard Business Review. âoeIn a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself â" its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. Our age is such a period of transformation.â For Drucker, the newest new world was marked, above all, by one dominant factor: âoethe shift to a knowledge society.â ...
Be more mindful of those left behind. Drucker worried a lot about a group that he characterized as "knowledge-worker cousins": service workers. "Knowledge workers and service workers are not 'classes' in the traditional sense," Drucker wrote. "But there is a danger that ... society will become a class society unless service workers attain both income and dignity." He added: "Anyone can acquire the 'means of production', i.e., the knowledge required for the job, but not everyone can win." Again, Drucker's words prove prescient as the gains in the knowledge economy are hardly being shared equitably. "Our basic grievance with today's billionaires is that relatively little of the value they've created trickles down to the rest of us," the University of Toronto's Roger Martin asserts. He warns that this situation is unsustainable, and that top executives need to rein in their compensation. Surely, Drucker would have agreed. "A healthy business," he wrote, "cannot exist in a sick society.""

Good sentiments. What specific solutions did he propose for "being mindful of those left behind"? Also, ironically, it is often the knowledge workers who are in some ways more at risk of automation of various sorts than people who work in trades using both their hands and mind. Examples include the "Cloud" replacing sysadmins, or software replacing radiologists, or various internet sites reducing the need for lawyers for many basic tasks for small businesses including forming a corporation. Robots are not still not up to the skill level of, say, a human carpenter and we have not yet rebuilt our general infrastructure to work within their limitations. Contrast our fairly random infrastructure of non-standard and undocumented home layouts with factory floors that have been documented and standardized like for Kiva robots, or systematically organized corporate information management systems that can have software replace human though at various key points. However, I expect that we may see even the home become more standardized to deal with robotic limitations, possibly causing another housing price collapse, because for many people, especially the elderly or parents with young children, it might be worth it to move to a new home if it means robots coudl systematically clean it and prepare food and be available for medical emergencies or helping recover from falls and so on.

I see this about a 2014 conference talking about the risk of "a devastating effect on jobs and employment":
http://www.druckersociety.at/i...
"There is a broad consensus among economists that we enter 2014 into a period of limited economic recovery - even though it will by uneven by country and region and fraught with uncertainties.
A cyclical improvement of the global economy will provide an opportunity to address the huge structural issues that are still looming. They include: unsustainable debt levels, underfunded social

Because he's infallible and not trying to sell you something? More importantly does he have some peer reviewed research to support that premise or is he just pushing a book? Reading this does not instill confidence that he is making any great insights or than spouting more nonsense buzz words. https://hbr.org/2014/11/how-sm...

Progress = tyranny. Tens of millions of people cannot be wrong.

Besides the effect on lawmaking (or failure to pass laws under gridlock), gerrymandering gives people on both sides of issues a sense of majority. "I won in a landslide, I must be right", combined with polarized news programming, has been demonstrated to make people dumber. Harvard Business Review has an interesting article this week on opinion reinforcement and groupthink this week [ https://hbr.org/2014/11/making... ], which compares focus groups from liberal Boulder CO USA and conservative Colorado Springs USA. The researchers documented the negative effects of grouping like-minded people in political discussions. I think gerrymandering has the same effect on political intelligence. Their own conservatism or liberalism appears validated by landslide elections in their districts.

Hadn't seen, read big chunks thru carefully and scanned the rest. Looks like it has potential to stand alongside the old bell labs star performers study/doc. Thank you 1e6.

I tend think it's a combination of issues. Some can be offset or fixed by teaching women differently (negotiation for more money), some possibly can be offset through a combination of law and working with their employers (maternity leave), but prejudice is the bug bear that's so hard to fix since it raises hackles (putting some on the defensive), is hard to teach & is misattributed as the cause when it's actually a different cause.

Women not asking for more money
http://www.womendontask.com/qu...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://hbr.org/2003/10/nice-gi...
-
Women deciding to have children
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
-
Prejudice
http://www.forbes.com/sites/wo...

What keeps someone at a job that might pay less than he could get for hopping?

1. Individual job satisfaction? (Yeah, laugh! That's a big part of the industry's problem! Proof: http://thedailywtf.com/ :-)
2. Co-workers, the company, the location
3. Benefits and incentives to remain

I guess as a Boomer, these might be old fart attitudes. But at least for many of the people I've worked with, they're significant considerations. Salary alone has rarely been the primary reason engineers change jobs. That's well-documented, here's one reference that tries to summarize the research: http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/04/d...

Did they consider this:
http://hbr.org/2012/03/hard-to...

The key word in the summary is "legacy". This indicates that there is a large code base that the current developers are not too familiar with (deep knowledge, staff turnover causes this). This causes an organization to fear change due to the related complexity of changes and potential regression bugs. I'm going to guess that there aren't large, mature suites of unit and regression tests.

So I believe you have:
1. Complex code base without a lot of deep developer knowledge of the innards.
2. Fear to change things too much due to complexity and the possibility of introducing bugs.
3. Do not have effective, wide coverage testing implemented.

But, you also have good knowledge of Perl and the architectural elements that compose the system (server software, external libraries, etc.). That knowledge is very valuable and shouldn't be dismissed just for the sake of changing the base language of a system. And you have a working system. How many person years of development have been put into it? Are you willing to spend that much time on the replacement (do you think a replacement could be built in less time, and if so, why?)?

As well, rewriting large admin systems is very risky. I've personally seen two such efforts fail, a 100% failure rate from my personal experience (both had budgets over $5 million, one was over $40 million). Here's an article on this topic:
http://hbr.org/2011/09/why-you...

Consider keeping the existing system, but embarking on a long term (years) modernization/re-design/improvement effort to make the system more modern (ie. easier to work with). Focus on small, non-breaking changes that can go out with regular enhancement promotions (the modernization effort should be able to stop at any point, with any improvements to the system staying in place - this allows for tight budget control and financial risk mitigation). Hire a good application DBA to perform analysis and recommend changes to the data model. Hire a good software architect or bring in architectural consultants that can bring a different perspective to the understanding of the application, its goals, and how it could be improved.

Here's an article on approaching IT projects in a "Small and Simple" manner:
http://w.objectwatch.com/white...

Early indications are that it will be an Animal Farm sort of net neutrality, with some nets more neutral than others. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler promised recently that his agency “will not allow some companies to force Internet users into a slow lane so that others with special privileges can have superior service.” But the rule seems likely to allow ISPs to cut deals with content companies to ensure that their packets get delivered smoothly — as Netflix reluctantly agreed to with Comcast in February and Verizon last week. Which by definition means they’re in a faster lane than others, doesn’t it?

Keep the pressure up, we can still win this thing.

Honestly, creativity is overrated in our age because with scientific research over the last century a lot of good ideas have been already been flushed out. They simply are not practiced. The problem is not that people avoid creativity, it's they want their own creativity to manifest, not yours. This is true even in the face of peer reviewed, expertly written material.

Geniuses do not create new things, they copy things that already exist (I got this from Edward Tufte). Basically, they observe and then they apply intelligent design to what already exists to improve the status quo, in a way then does not rock the boat, but improves things gradually. Gradual improvement is all we are really capable of anyways, because you cannot observe and improve things without seeing the problems first.

However, this is what is seen as "creativity" by those who do not understand it, because understanding usually requires in depth abstract thought and an extremely good memory to put together the pieces of the puzzle together.

What is really easy is these people who are trying to be "creative" in their own right and ignoring the status quo making things horrible for those around them and creating very detrimental products of their creativity.

i.e. "Let's take advantage of people's superstitious nature." (forced spread and manipulation of religion, just glance at the inquisition...), "Let's issue to much currency and not protect the people, we'll make a huge profit in the end either way." (Several banks throughout history, perhaps bit coin will be the same, we'll see.), "Let's guess how much we are going to make based on business plans that have not come to fruition, and budget that way." (Enron) "Let's time our employees and pay them less, so they need more government assistance and assistance from family members. It's the job that is worthwhile to them." (Good Will) "Let's pay our employees so little and squeeze as much money out of them as possible instead of paying them what we can afford and investing into their futures. This way they go on welfare." (Walmart) "Let's do massive scale Agriculture" (Humanity)

I suppose I could throw in experts being told what to do by their bosses despite plenty of push back. If you have not experienced this, you should try getting a degree or specializing in something. Everyone is an expert except the practitioner and student of their discipline.

As far as I know, ALL of these things go against conventional wisdom, or did at some point in time. These things were never observed to be good, they were just done, they were created by creative people. Created against the tried and true wisdom established before hand.

• -Religion as a Form of Control (who needs real leadership and organic social structure, we have no control then.)
• -Banks (Specie Circular crisis)
• -Speculative Budgeting (Enron did this, and I remember in the documentary, they even coined a term for it, maybe I even got it right. Bull markets come to mind too, i.e. Taking out loans for investing, because how can you lose, right?)
• -Not Investing into People (If you have not watched the Good Will clip that demonstrates this, you should. However, this is how employers are treating people across the board in my experience so far. Walmart is another "great" company.)
• -Mass Scale Agri

You could have just quoted Lisa Simpson (S07E23): http://blogs.hbr.org/2008/08/innovation-lessons-from-lisas/

... don't build a database of ruin.

So yes, those parents are right to be worried.

Yeah, no shit.

In fact I remembered that some time ago there was a story on /. about Marx.

I had a journal entry dedicated to that topic, going over every point that was discussed ITFA, showing how all of them were wrong.

To techies the idea seems absurd, but it's not. Sure, your server, your rules. But what you pull into them is another matter entirely, and the American view that if it's not behind closed curtains, it must be public, doesn't scale.

Compare, of all places, Japan, where it is in fact customary to "not see" things that are pretty much out in the open out of sheer necessity because too many people are living too close together. In a sense, the internet is worse than Tokyo.

There's irony here, where the techies are deriding politicians for doing boneheaded things with far too much data. Well, this is part of that, but in reverse, and if they're doing it wrong it's up to us to find ways to do it right and nudge them in the right direction.

DRM became a bad word because big media deployed it to control their customer whom had thought they'd bought something only the seller afterward pulled a legalised fast one. David losing to Goliath until dvdjon came along.

Data protection in this case wouldn't include money passing hands in the reverse direction. It's more like, well, you put DRM on your SSN when you sign up (and pay) for something that requires it, and you can more or less reliably wipe your SSN out of their databases once they no longer need it.

No longer having to trust some faceless large entity on their wooly word salad assurances and their pretty face is a nice boon for the individual. Bit of a different power balance there.

Yet the only real fix is to not store all that data in the first place. This means that a lot of data that's being gathered now must not be gathered at all or perhaps some other data needs to be gathered. Zero-knowledge proofs will likely have a big place in that, say to prove you're old enough without showing your ID card with all that extra data you're forced to give out currently. This'll need new techology, but will prove necessary to really scale out our data use without building databases of ruin.

However grammar is an indication of performance (not the only one) - see I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here's Why. for a view on this. (Unfortunate URL truncation there).

Actually, short breaks _don't_ improve productivity. Latest study (Harvard Business Review - http://hbr.org/2012/05/coffee-breaks-dont-boost-productivity-after-all/ar/1 - _do_ sign up and read the whole article, don't just read the headline) shows that productivity is, at best, indifferent to micro breaks and at worst, reduced significantly.

How about both sides in this debate stop assuming all workers are the same. Some need short breaks and others are able to sit and stare at a problem to make progress. PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT. Stop grouping.

Actually, short breaks _don't_ improve productivity. Latest study (Harvard Business Review - http://hbr.org/2012/05/coffee-breaks-dont-boost-productivity-after-all/ar/1 - _do_ sign up and read the whole article, don't just read the headline) shows that productivity is, at best, indifferent to micro breaks and at worst, reduced significantly. Those breaks _do_ have some effect on the stress level of the employee, but that's not of the employer _immediate_ concern (though long-term employers should factor this into their calculations). Numbers and cases, or it isn't science. (oh, and 5 minutes of an 8 hours day is ~1%, not 0.2%).

To the government that the US can no longer sustain a competitive domestic solar panel industry. This was predicted in shockingly accurate detail by HBS researchers 3 years ago. Protectionism is only going to make it worse -- amazing that these ideas still fly.

Well I guess we could bring back slavery if the object is to be competitive. For all the boasting China is still largely a third world economy where a small percentage control all the money. We have a similar system but our baseline is much higher. Republicans have boasted that we could go head to head with the Chinese if we just get rid of that nasty minimum wage. You know the one that keeps factory workers from living in cardboard boxes the way God and corporations intended. I know the party line is cheaper is always better but it's not that simple. What happens is we kill off our industry by letting China dump products? Then once the Chinese economy grows those cheap products become more expensive since their workers now want $6 or $8 an hour instead of $1 so they can too aford the things they make the way Henry Ford intended. Suddenly products double in price and we have no industry left to compete. We have to get out of this "I want it now and I want it cheap" mindset and realize a balanced approach means you can still aford the products 10 years from now instead of simply complaining in 10 years that Chinese goods are too expensive.

To the government that the US can no longer sustain a competitive domestic solar panel industry. This was predicted in shockingly accurate detail by HBS researchers 3 years ago. Protectionism is only going to make it worse -- amazing that these ideas still fly.

Making things people want to buy isn't earth shattering. Finding out what people want before they know *is*.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

To counter balance that though, It looks like Ford never said that and he was eventually forced to give into trends brought by GM. Apple doesn't have the color problem (at least they didn't on the original iMac and on iPods). They certainly have other problems. There are probably things that customers want, and Apple won't give them or can't because it would upset their business model. The next prize goes to whoever can figure out what those things are. Whether they use their imagination or a focus group, it doesn't really matter. If you have a great imagination that trumps focus groups, use that. If you have a room full of analysts who know how to interpret the results from focus groups, and consistantly produce the correct answer, use that.

Welcome to a world dominated by idiots and fame based on monkey sociology.

Reminds me of the Edison / Tesla thing. Though to my knowledge Ritchie didn't fall in love with a pigeon.

If you want to see how desperate some commentators are to excuse Jobs for not being more philanthropic, read this. Now that's an apologist in need of an apologist.

In the Soviet Union, perhaps. This has never been the case in the United States.

Yes it has.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#United_States

http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2010/04/what-the-founding-fathers-real.html

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/history_corporations_us.html

If this is anything like Digital Divide Data, then I wish you the best of luck. We studied the HBR case study (sorry, paywall) in one of my MBA classes, the prof was friends with one of the founders, they are doing good things.

So the fabulous amazing U.S. wage multiplier for product costs in now 275%? Where did you pull that number from? The labor portion of a product - and the "penalty" for using U.S. labor - is usually fantastically overstated in these discussions. Look at this estimate for an Apple hi-tech product, the iPod family: http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2009/07/a_fair_labor_ipod_what_would_i.html According to this the price increase would be more like 23%, 1/12 your fake made up claim.

I think you are missing the point.
True laborers have been fired and their jobs have been outsourced oversees. See http://hbr.org/hbr-main/resources/pdfs/comm/fmglobal/restoring-american-competitiveness.pdf

Evidence? I looked this up with neutral search terms. While one of the items on the list could possibly have something to do with unions, they are not even explicitly mentioned here:

http://blogs.hbr.org/financial-intelligence/2009/06/why-gm-failed.html

If you search around, you will see basically a similar list. Your evidence is, what? What on earth do you know about it -- because you've written multiple posts now and not a bit of actual fact has come out.

Funny, I use leftist to refer to liberals, socialists, progressives, etc., and right-wingers to refer to moral conservatives, neocons, fiscal conservatives, etc... because it groups them together. Don't think the original AC meant it as an insult. Bit defensive?

Anyway, here. If you read the article, you will see that those in the 250,000 ~ 500,000 range (which the article refers to as a HENRY, or High Earner Not Rich Yet) pay a higher tax rate than those who make millions, because millionaries tend to make so much money on low-taxed dividends and investments. So it seems that between the leftists looking to tax the rich guys and the right-wingers and their 'trickle down economics' theory, the upper-middle class (lower-upper class?) gets the shaft, which is what the original AC said. If you really want to get at the 'evil rich guy', you need to increase the tax on earnings through dividends.

I am also of the opinion that the upper-middle class is where it's at - that's the point at which investing in a business of your own looks reasonable option. Any less than that and you're probably stuck paying off school loans and a mortage.

http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2010/06/maybe-shareholders-were-to-bla.html

Nokia ignored America

You're describing a world view that simply is not supported by reality, and dripping with a level of cynicism and possibly paranoia that is incredibly unfortunate.

Did you not read that I said that Austrian economics can work?

However, the external costs are simply too high for modern societies to bear. We have evidence from history of this happening.

If we completely deregulated the markets, even with competition, this doesn't guarantee food would be safe, it wouldn't guarantee that products wouldn't blow up if we tried to use them, it wouldn't guarantee that medicines would have any real efficacy at all(Hint: Most of our western quack nostrums eg: homeopathy, chiropractic, etc come from largely deregulated periods of our culture), while yes in life, there are no guarantees, it's hard to vote with your wallet when your car decided to blow up and remove both of your legs because the manufacturer decided that the market could bear a %5 to 10 rate of catastrophic failure because there would be no tort law to have them see any consequences for their profit motivated decision, and it would be incredibly difficult for them to get bad press if they also happened to own a few media outlets. It would also be VERY difficult for them to really get any sort of market based reprocussions if they also happened to own a few online outlets too; and since we're completely deregulated there goes Net Neutrality, which means they can buy up the sufficient infrastructure to make sure that instead of going to Jalopnik or Top Gear (assuming of course, they didn't play ball and also go along with covering up this story for lucrative advertising revenue), you got redirected to their online outlets instead.

As far as that Orion piece goes, you're so full of paranoid Alex Jones bullshit that it hurts me to think that people think this way. So what? GE invested in Orion. GE also invests everywhere else too. Big whoop.

Money is an abstract concept. It always has been. The value of 1 unit of gold to how many ever units of bread, water, coca cola or shaving cream or whatever you want to buy is completely arbitrary. Yes, gold has value on many levels; useful conductor in microelectronics, it's shiny and makes pretty jewelry, it makes Goldschlager easy to look at. But is, "Eh, whatever." the real basis for an economic system? You've got several factors that make Gold completely useless as a unit of trade, but most importantly, and undeniably, is that Gold is at a limited supply, and populations aren't. Eventually as populations rise and grow, the same amount of gold isn't going to trade for the same units of marble cake or whatever. Given in the 70's, this, along with other constraints of the gold standard were tying our hands economically, it made a certain amount of sense for Tricky Dick to take us off that immature, obsolete and useless standard. Our economies aren't run by gold anymore. We're not measuring our given wealth based on how much gold we have. It's more likely we're going to measure it by how many goods such as TVs, cars, and dildos we're producing, buying, selling, exporting and importing and in what ratios. So, why not make the whole system fiat anyway? It's more flexible and realistic than Gold, not to mention more representative of what is actually going on inside of the borders of a given nation. The difference between Greece and America is that unlike Greece, we're exporting Apple iPods, Ford Focuses and Starbucks Coffee franchises.

Yes, we're no longer manufacturing those things, but this is an argument FOR Government involvement in the market. If you take a look at the iPod Classic, $250 bucks right? Well, an interesting piece Here suggests that "Fair Trade" or locally sourced iPod would cost only $307. While that's over a %20 jump in cost, the externality is that if we brought back manufacturing here as a matter of corporate regulation, wages would also rise like hell, making that price

but that doesn't mean that Google will dominate, too.

This is what the creators of our government thought about corporations.

I know:
http://blogs.hbr.org/martin/2010/02/why-modern-business-is-bad-for.html

Why is it assumed that the path with the highest short-term payoff is the rational one? What if you actually care about what the company that you oversee does?

And before anyone responds with this, not everyone believes the current interpretation of Dodge v. Ford is good law.

31 of 34 directors surveyed (each of whom served on an average of six Fortune 200 boards) said they’d cut down a mature forest or release a dangerous, unregulated toxin into the environment in order to increase profits. Whatever they could legally do to maximize shareholder wealth, they believed it was their duty to do.

If there are problems with the workforce, it is mostly among the youth who are far too easily distracted and don't commit themselves too much to their work. (once again, YMMV)

There might be a reason for their distractions. See this article from the Harvard Business Review which talks about the differences between the current and former generations when it comes to work.

Then there is this article from Bloomberg Businessweek which talks about the same issue. Both came about because of the Washington Post article which essentially said that the current generation has a lazy work ethic.

While it can be said the current generation (gees, does that make me sound old) doesn't seem to want to get their hands dirty (so to speak), they are willing to work on a problem until they find a resolution. Whether that is good or bad is up to the manager.

We've seen considerable cultural shift through the dissemination of the "greed is good" ideal : Ayn Rand's fiction and "philosophical" writing represents one important faction. There has been the blowback against socialism known as Thatcherism. The most insidious however has been the economists deciding that a business' sole duty was to maximize shareholder wealth.

HBR has these articles about it, in fact: http://blogs.hbr.org/martin/2010/01/why-good-spreadsheets-make-bad.html http://blogs.hbr.org/martin/2010/01/management-by-imagination.html

HBR has these articles about it, in fact: http://blogs.hbr.org/martin/2010/01/why-good-spreadsheets-make-bad.html http://blogs.hbr.org/martin/2010/01/management-by-imagination.html

What is even worse about it is that quarterly EPS game is fundamentally flawed: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/restoring-american-competitiveness/2009/10/can-we-break-the-tyranny-of-qu.html