The Great Reset Pins Fault on the Finance Sector

It's great when a book highlights the importance of engineers. Even the president gets into the act when Richard Florida quotes him as saying:

"We don't want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader. We want some of them to go into engineering....

I like this graphic by Carl Richards. It is simple, but the essence of the book.

Kurt Andersen talks about a reset in our values and the rise of new frugality Have to follow up on the Colbert Nation video of him.

There's more bashing of the finance sector in the Chapter when he cites NYU economist Nouriel Roubini, "When you have more financial engineers than computer engineers, you know that the brightest minds have gone into something where the margin was excessive."

On the same page, he cites the blog of Michael Mandel, chief economist for Business Week. Mandel charges the decline of high tech trade and notes that "such weak performance in tech innovation paved the way for the financial bubble and ultimately the economic collapse"

"Beacause the financial sector cares almost exclusively about high accounting yields and 'profits', it misallocates capital away from firms and entrepreneurs that could best improve the real economy (e.g. by producing innovative goods through research).

Searching for images of The Great Reset, I also came across this Q&A from the South Florida Business Journal. I think he sugar coats his responses for them somewhat, but that's probably good to sell books.

He puts a pitch in for rail, which I find funny in sprawl ladened South Florida, I guess it depends on where and how, but transit in Florida has its challenges.

The Great Reset by Richard Florida

I joined the WTS book club and they chose this book to discuss. I have needed some inspiration since I don't have the flight time I used to have on the cross country flights to Bmore.

A good book so far although it seems like a bunch of small newspaper column articles that have been stitched together by a successful author trying to write another book to satisfy a contract obligation.

That being said there are some good stuff in the book. One takeaway that comes early on in the book is a quote by Paul Romer who said "a crisis being a terrible thing to waste". The author makes the case that we are wasting it by throwing public money at the old economy. He suggests that government spending can't be the solution in the long run because it's simply lacks the resources to generate the enormous level of demand you need to power sustained growth.

Consistent with his other book The Rise of the Creative Class, Mr. Florida writes about transportation and housing, making the land use connection. I found it interesting when he talked about new models of consumption that spur the economy, enabling industry to expand and productivity to improve, thus creating better jobs for workers. This sounds a bit utopian and highly dependent on China for production, which he describes as an issue as well.

He references Jane Jacobs several times in the first few chapters and some of this seems like an update of her work. Peculiar that he has moved to Toronto (just like Jacobs did) after living in Newark, Boston, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, and Detroit.

He has three key attributes that he cites as what makes people happy in their communities and causes them to develop a solid emotional attachment to the place they live.
First, the physical beauty and level of maintenance (great open spaces and parks - Portland, check);
Second, the ease with which people can meet others, make friends, etc (PDX - compact urban form - check)
Third, diversity and open mindedness, acceptance (PDX seems to have all but the great diversity here).

The meeting is next week and I have the book nearly half read after a solid day working on it.

Bicycle Commute Challenge - Day 17 - Bicycle Diaries Book Review

I am currently reading Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne. It is a bit of a rambling book about biking through various cities and miscellaneous events that are similar to this blog. Certainly, with my blog there isn't a consistent theme and the same could be said of this book. It is a bit random at times and I can't say that I would recommend it. Oh well, it was in the list of blog posts, so I might as well go ahead and post about it just in case someone else decides to pick it up.

Book Review - Better: Notes from a Surgeon on Performance

This book was recommended to me by Paul Zebell who had read it. I found several takeaways that can apply to transportation or any industry.  

 Here are some of my favorite excerpts:

You go into this work (medicine) thinking it is all a matter of canny diagnosis, technical prowess, and some ability to empathize with people. But it is not, you soon find out. In medicine, as in any profession, we must grapple with systems, resources, circumstances, people-and our own shortcomings as well. We face obstacles of seemingly unending variety. Yet somehow we must advance, we must refine, we must improve.

Three core requirements for success:

1. diligence, the necessity of giving sufficient attention to detail to avoid error and prevail against obstacles. You just pay attention, right? No.
2. do right, reduce failings like avarice, arrogance, insecurity, misunderstanding.
3. ingenuity, thinking anew. Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change.

Betterment is a perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns.

Trying to find a way to reduce malnutrition, doctors went to the homes of villagers to learn what the families of the best-nourished children were doing.

There was a “positive deviance” idea- the idea of building on capabilities of people already had rather than telling them how to change. 

Chapter 3 entitled “Casualties of War” – describes how the armed forces have determined how to save more lives during battle by using forward medical teams that reduce transport time.

One way to improve is “to make a science of performance, to investigate and improve how well “they” use the knowledge and technologies they already have at hand”. You can make simple, almost banal changes that produce enormous improvements.

Brew to Bikes Book Review

My initial post on this was over at my personal blog at : http://peterkoonce.blogspot.com/2011/01/reading-list.html.

Charles Heying and his cadre of coauthors wrote a nice book and I thought a few of the recommendations are worth commenting on. This raises a question about the future of old school media and the popularity of books as we increase the amount of electronic content in the world. The nice thing about reading a book is you get a significant amount of content from one source. A downside is that it doesn't force you to articulate your thoughts on a particular subject like commenting on a blog would. Media like Bikeportland.org  is such a site where the comments can offer significant insight. The newest radio shows on Oregon Public Broadcasting offer an online format for collecting thoughts and the host brings those into the show to offer perspectives that the generalist host would otherwise have.

Back to one of the recommendations worth noting in the book...

Recommendation #2: Don't let economists design your economic development strategy. Here's the excerpt:

For one, they are trained to use data that comes from sources that were design in an industrial economy, like gross domestic product. They focus things like growth and jobs and old school terminology. "things like environmental impacts are described as externalities, as if the economy operates in some abstract world and its connection to the physical world is tangential, even accidental. Pollution and resource depletion seem to come as a surprise to economists, something akin to collateral damage.

There are some socialist leanings in this book, but having read the book "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" among other titles, I appreciate some of these critiques.

Reading the first review on Amazon, it was funny to see that the commenter was from Austin, TX a City where the "Keep (insert City name here) Weird" slogan started. Essentially, I see that sort of a movement as a keep it local concept, an effort to preserve the uniqueness of a community. I don't believe Weird is the right moniker, but it's something that one can hang your hat on (whether it be of a cowboy or bicycle messenger variety).

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

I am reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why we Need a Green Revolution and How it Can Renew America. The book promises an outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy. The recent chapter that I read speaks to Petropolitics which makes the link between the price of fuel and the freedom associated with the country involved. His argument speaks to those who are concerned about the state of America in the global future.

Is The World Flat?

I read Thomas Friedman's book "The World is Flat" and he summarizes flatteners that include:
#1: Collapse of Berlin Wall--11/'89: The event not only symbolized the end of the Cold war, it allowed people from other side of the wall to join the economic mainstream. (11/09/1989)
#2: Netscape: Netscape and the Web broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots as a communications medium used primarily by 'early adopters and geeks' to something that made the Internet accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to eighty-five-year olds. (8/9/1995)
#3: Workflow software: The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved. Friedman believes these first three forces have become a “crude foundation of a whole new global platform for collaboration.”
#4: Open sourcing: Communities uploading and collaborating on online projects. Examples include open source software, blogs, and Wikipedia. Friedman considers the phenomenon "the most disruptive force of all."
#5: Outsourcing: Friedman argues that outsourcing has allowed companies to split service and manufacturing activities into components, with each component performed in most efficient, cost-effective way.
#6: Offshoring: Manufacturing's version of outsourcing.
#7: Supply chaining: Friedman compares the modern retail supply chain to a river, and points to Wal-Mart as the best example of a company using technology to streamline item sales, distribution, and shipping.
#8: Insourcing: Friedman uses UPS as a prime example for insourcing, in which the company's employees perform services--beyond shipping--for another company. For example, UPS itself repairs Toshiba computers on behalf of Toshiba. The work is done at the UPS hub, by UPS employees.
#9: In-forming: Google and other search engines are the prime example. "Never before in the history of the planet have so many people-on their own-had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people", writes Friedman.
#10: "The Steroids": Personal digital devices like mobile phones, iPods, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, and voice over IP (VoIP).

As someone that has been skeptical of globalization, because of its seemingly pro-business stance and you hear many stories in the media of American's losing their jobs, which is of concern, you think that the story will be a fairly straightforward one regarding the reality of global change.

He strikes a cord with me in that I found the book interesting in that he took a turn to discuss what Bush should be doing to leave a legacy for making America stronger. The author describes a "Green New Deal". He suggests that we should execute a national science initiative that would be our generation's moon shot: a crash program for alternative energy and conservation that would make America energy-independent in ten years. He suggests that would dry up revenue for terrorism, strengthen the dollar, and improve our standing. It would also create a magnet to inspire young people to contribute to America's future by becoming scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.

A few other tidbits worth contemplating:
The most important competition today is between you and your own imagination. We are in a world that whatever can be done will be done. And the small shall act big.
The best companies are the best collaborators.

In the last chapter, he took a turn for the dramatic and discussed 9/11 in a way that I wasn't really agreeable with. He did end on a positive suggesting that what we need to do is to teach people above all things. He highlights a Bangalore community that he visited where all the kids hope for a better day. He made contrasts to a West Bank community in Israel that describes kids that are studying engineering but are angry men because of the Israeli occupation and are "martyrs in waiting", becuase the engineers are likely to find a better life because the US and other companies are treating them like terrorists already.