The AIG bonuses have marked a turn, for the worse — not economically but socially, or morally. The disgrace of the bonus-giving itself has been dwarfed by the populist reaction against them. Matthew Yglesias has pointed to some of the best bits from around the web — especially via this post quoting Brad DeLong on compensation reform (also [...]
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I feel obligated to write about this because it squats squarely in my basket of interests, touching on politics, belief, science, ethics, media… If I didn’t post something about this I’d be signaling gross indifference to the enterprise of blogging. Concern in the science community shouldn’t be surprising. By comparison, while we don’t expect the agriculture [...]
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Directly following up on my last post about the problems of goals gone wild, here’s a look at China’s attempts to keep up their 8% rate of annual GDP growth. (Thanks to Francois in the previous post’s comments for bringing up the abuse of information during China’s Cultural Revolution.) Earlier today, FP Passport reported the World Bank’s quarterly [...]
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I love this: Rather than reflexively relying on goals, argues Max Bazerman, a Harvard Business School professor and the fourth coauthor of “Goals Gone Wild,” we might also be better off creating workplaces and schools that foster our own inherent interest in the work. “There are lots of organizations where people want to do well, [...]
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In his interview on 60 Minutes, Ben Bernanke gingerly offered the analogy that if your neighbour lit his house of fire by smoking in bed you might be disinclined to help put it out because he had it coming. But if your own house is made of wood you can’t afford to be passive. [...]
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We tend to reduce faraway conflicts by figuring out who’s the good guy and who’s the villain, then working out the rest of the narrative around those simple distinctions. And more often than not we decide who the good and bad guys are based on how we associate them with particular good and bad guys [...]
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Two good pieces in the last couple of days: one by Clay Shirky and the other by Steven Johnson. They both make the same basic point: much of the supposed innovation in recent decades meant to perpetuate the old business models rather than actually come to terms with emerging realities. Here’s Shirky: Revolutions create a curious [...]
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