Daniel Pink has some surprising results about what motivates people. Mostly, if there’s any creativity, then more money doesn’t provide more motivation — and may even unmotivate.
Doug Green has a detailed review of this book — I
saved a copy.
You can also check out an animated version of a talk by Daniel Green:
Tag: philosophy
Being a Consumer vs Investor
There’s some lesson to be learned here about investing vs consuming but I can’t quite figure it out! Hmm, I wonder if I’m a consumer or an investor.
If instead of spending $5700 on an Apple Powerbook in 1997 you’d bought Apple stock, it’d be worth $330K! If I hadn’t bought a MacBook Pro in 2008 for ~$2,499 but bought Apple Stock it’d now be worth $5,680. I’d have nearly $8,000 more.
Rich pessimist?
I like this saying:
I’ve never met a rich pessimist
Creationism – yuck!
Not sure why I’m obsessing about it but here’s a photo takedown of the Creationist Musuem
Paul Krugman’s Nobel Prize
I was trying to explain “The New Trade Theory” and doing a poor job of it. Fortunately, Krugman does a good job simplifying it here.
The new trade theory starts with the observation that while this explains a lot of world trade, it also misses a lot. France and Germany sell lots of stuff to each other, even though they have similar climates and resources; so do the United States and Canada. What’s that about?
The answer is that there are many goods that aren’t like wheat or bananas, but are instead like wide-bodied jet aircraft. There are only a few places in which wide-bodied jets are produced, because of the enormous economies of scale – you only want a couple of factories worldwide. Those factories have to be somewhere, and those countries that get the factories export jets, while everyone else imports them.
There’s more details in the article.
The Art of Happiness
I’m reading a book “The Art of Happiness” by Howard Cutler. He’s a psychiatrist who spent time talking with the Dalai Lama. Here’s an interesting quote about what a psycologically happy person is:
Well, I would regard a compassionate, warm, kindhearted person as healthy. If you maintain a feeling of compassion, loving kindness, then something automatically opens your inner door. Through that, you can communicate much more easily with other people. And that feeling of warmth creates a kind of openness. You’ll find that all human beings are just like you, so you’ll be able to relate to them more easily.
Pete Ware 