Monday, March 31, 2014

Wrap Up for March '14

Recently I indicated that I wanted to start a monthly wrap up, but wasn't quite sure what shape it would take. While this monthly wrap will include random thoughts and musings, it also serves as a place to highlight some of my recent posts, and provide additional details.

At some points early in the month, I spent more time at the desk than was evident from what actually got posted then. Late in March, I finally started catching up on what are normal posting levels for me. There have been some recent changes in my scheduling and organizational processes, along with a few "tweaks" to the blog set up as well. However, this is one of those years when the home I live in will demand it's own "tweaks". That will likely slow down blogging, at times.

Hard to believe I'm coming up on the first year of blogging. One of the things I want to do is (finally) start reviewing early posts to see whether they need updates, rewrites and the like. Often I see where an early post has been recently read - yet I know it to be inadequate, in terms of what I wanted the title to explore! Perhaps at least a couple of times a month I'll be able to do some of those rewrites. Subject details in particular need to be worked out more clearly and linked together, where it is possible to do so.

Here is a quote which made me laugh when I came across it, because I wrote something about "idea theft" a while back: "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats" - Howard Aitken. That also reminded me of some discussion a year or so back, when Roger Farmer seemed to be concerned that Paul Krugman may have stolen one of his ideas! In this same vein, Scott Sumner reminded everyone this morning that what counts is when good ideas get adopted, rather than appropriate attributions. I agree. Still, that's what we tell ourselves and believe on our "better" days!

Who doesn't particularly want capitalism to succeed...and yet, why not? I thought about that when I came across this quote by Ezra Klein, "A vegetarian is someone who doesn't eat meat. It's not someone who loves vegetables."

One early month posting I want to highlight is Let A Thousand Placebos Bloom. While it touched on healthcare, I also wanted it to serve as an illustration that the missing marketplace for knowledge use isn't just what we think is missing, i.e. more of the same care. Rather, we want "growth space" to include what we could imagine services to be. Or..just give our attempts to be "present" for one another, some credit too!

A series of posts also explained how lower income levels could compensate for service deficiencies, and add value to the marketplace in the process. While they weren't planned as such, these thoughts more or less started with An Economic World in an Hour, where I focused on the hour as a portal of entry for coordination in knowledge use.

Our time use is a fixed designation, and one post which considered this is Why Do Fixed and Random Designations Matter? Here, I considered time use from an entrepreneurial perspective and also looked at societal desire to fix elements in favor of certain interests. While this provides income flows and stability at the outset, ultimately it leads to economic gridlock. Before so much of the economy was given over to technology, sometimes it was easier to "get away" with fixing various definitions of the game and get real results, than it is in the present. When anyone hears me speak of deregulation, I mean in terms of allowing more participants back to the table.

I also want to mention yesterday's post, At the Intersection of Fixed and Random Resources, if only to indicate that the definition of "fixed" in this post is my most frequent usage of the term. The finite nature of our time is where deficits actually matter the most. Why so? Nations have many means and resources at their disposal to tend to deficits. But when society creates aggregate time use negatives by assigning prime value to a fraction of high IQ levels, they end up with - for instance - aggregate debt realities at family levels, which are often larger than family income. Those time deficits are one of the main monetary issues which skills arbitrage and knowledge use coordination, would seek to remedy.

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