innovation culture

Free market logic describes how the laws of supply and demand incentivize providing the best goods at the lowest prices. But custom means economic decisions are made unthinkingly, outsourced to tradition, which might be political, ideological, or even aesthetic in origin. By law and in practice, the entire U.S. banking system has been fully... See more

Here is how Plutarch, classical biographer par excellence, described his attraction to the stories of great men:

We may say, then, that achievements of this kind, which do not arouse the spirit of emulation or create any passionate desire to imitate them, are of no great benefit to the spectator. On the other hand virtue in action immediately takes

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Two parables:

First, Ezra Pound’s parable of Agassiz, from his “ABC of Reading” (incidentally one of the most underrated books about literature). I’ve preserved his quirky formatting:

No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:

A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to

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Taste is not some idea of good design and brand. That definition isn’t rooted in a single damn thing.

Taste is that personalizing moment, that got transferred spiritually. It’s Naoto Fukasawa’s idea of embodiment in design. It didn’t come from a vague notion of “being good”. NOOOOOOOOO it came from dropping in on that moment in life, being ready... See more

FDEs tend to write code that gets the job done fast, which usually means – politely – technical debt and hacky workarounds. PD engineers write software that scales cleanly, works for multiple use cases, and doesn’t break. One of the key ‘secrets’ of the company is that generating deep, sustaining enterprise value requires both. BD engineers tend to... See more

Their methods are a bit unorthodox, but Dyevre (2024) uses more standard methods and obtains broadly similar results:

Using a novel firm-level dataset...covering 70 years (1950-2020), I estimate the impact of the decline in public R&D in the US on long-run productivity growth. I use two instrumental variable strategies...to estimate the impact of

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Together, Hobart and Huber argue that bubbles are coordination mechanisms for progress: by linking collective risk to potential financial rewards, bubbles enable megaprojects beyond the capability of any single person or industry—megaprojects which, although risky, mark inflection points in technology, economics, and culture when they are... See more