by Spencer Johnson
- one of the worst one minute books i've read
- boring because very similar to one minute manager
- stopped reading at top of page p65 (hardcover) - someone was anxious to speak
- had to return because due
- think i can learn more from reading jae's TEFL stuff
NO NOTES SCANNED AS ALREADY DOWNLOADED A FEW PDF SUMMARIES OFF THE WEB + TOO MANY NOTES TO SCAN...NOT A PRIORITY RIGHT NOW.
Showing posts with label incomplete. Show all posts
Showing posts with label incomplete. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
The Price of Everything
by Eduardo Porter
- ok book but didn't finish it...no time to read it and didn't feel it told much more than freakonomics
- again, its a book that tries to teach a lot but freakonomics is still better...
Right-wingers are happier than left-wingers.
A survey by the Pew Research Center found that even as the Republican candidate John McCain headed for disaster in the presidential election of November 2008,37 percent of Republicans rate(themselves as "very happy," compared with 25 percent of Democrats. A similar trend has held since 1972, when the General Social Survey started asking the question. This is true around the world. Apparently, it has to do with the left's guilt. A study by psychologists at New York University found that the right-left happiness gap increases with deepening income inequality. This suggests people on the right are better at rationalizing inequality as a normal feature of life and feel less guilty about it.
The rich may be happier than the poor. But getting richer wouldn't make them happier, at least not for long, because they would soon adapt to their new life one rung up the income ladder and start comparing themselves with richer people.
Adaptation could be a useful trait. Economists Gary Becker and Luis Rayo argue that the ephemeral, context-dependent nature of happiness makes sense in evolutionary terms. If progress boosts our happiness only briefly, we will be motivated to constantly improve. The desire to keep up with the neighbors would work in much
the same way.The relentless drive to improve would increase our chances of survival. As Adam Smith put it 250 years ago, the idea that we can achieve happiness amounts to a "deception, which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind."
Money makes us feel better about our lives, but so does having free time. Americans have sacrificed enormous amounts of time to achieve their unparalleled economic prosperity. Easterlin's paradoxical finding that Americans' growing wealth hasn't made us any happier is, in reality, proof that the time we spend earning money is erasing the happiness we get out of counting and spending it.
The French chose time and the Americans money because they preferred it. Their choices
should make them both happy. But there is another possible reading: Americans chose an unhappier path.
Some of the same studies that showAmericans stuck in a happiness rut since the end ofWorldWar II suggest that the French have become happier with their lot. The French work 440 hours a year fewer than Americans partly because they take sevenweeks' vacation, compared with fewer than four in the United States.They sleep the longest of all citizens of the industrial world. They spend two and a quarter hours a day on meals, an hour more than in the United States.And they devote almost an hour a daymore to leisure than Americans do.
French women spend more than twiceasmuch time as Americans on meals and almost 50 percent more on active leisure-like doing sports or going to shows.American women spend about 10 percent more time working and a third more on passiveleisure activities like watching TV.As it turns out, Americans like the French life better than their own. Researchers found that ifAmerican women were to reorganize their days to spend time as the French do, theywouldn't
be quite as happy as the French, but they would be happier than they are with the lives they lead.
The conclusion to be drawn from the American happiness paradox is not that money cannot increase happiness. It can. It simply underscores that money is not the only relevant variable. Happiness can be purchased in other currencies too. It can be bought with love. It can be bought with time. And pursuing growth at all costs can lead us to sacrifice other components of our happiness.
MANY DYNAMICS CONTRIBUTED to the decline of labor coercion. Employers who could increase production by adding more inexpensive slaves had little incentive to invest in laborsaving technologies. Coerced workers had no incentive to become more productive-because they would just be handing a higher surplus to the boss. Both these effects hindered economic progress.
In the Americas, slavery led to slower subsequent economic growth. NewWorld colonies in which slave labor was common in the 1830s,such as Jamaica and Guyana, are today much poorer than colonies in which slaverywas rare, such as Barbados or Trinidad. In the United States, states where slave labor was 'widespread in the mid-nineteenth century, such as Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, are much poorer today than free states such as Connecticut, Massachusetts, and NewJersey.
Prices provide the most important signals in an economy, guiding people's decisions on where to invest their resources to get the best return they can. People who shop around to get the best possible price for their plasma TV are doing us all a favor. They get a better machine, have more money left over to buy other things, and improve the odds of success of the company that makes good products for less, boosting the economy's efficiency. Successful technology companies that profit from the work of highly qualified workers will offer higher wages-a higher price-to attract better-qualified applicants. Workers will keep raising their qualifications as long as the return-measured in better wages-is worth the investment in time, money, and effort.
A study of the impact of economic shocks on politics between 1970and 2002 concluded that a one-percentage-point decline in economic growth leads to a one-percentage-point increase in the share of the vote going to right-wing and nationalist parties.
Still, it's hard to know what to do about bubbles, even when we know they are going to pop up time and again. The cycle of investment surge and bust can bankrupt many investors but can also do good along the way. Investment booms built upon technological breakthroughs like electricity, railways, or the Internet ultimately revolutionized the world economy-fueling surges of productivity that could-at least temporarily-justify the exuberance.
The long-standing American approach, shared by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, as well as his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, has been that bubbles should be dealt with only after the fact. The Fed should be ready to pick up the pieces after they burst-flooding the economy with cheap money to encourage lending and help debtors avoid bankruptcy as the value of their assets deflates. But the government should do nothing to the bubbles themselves. Their point is that we can't tell when a bubble is a bubble.
Opinion surveys in the United States over the past few decades suggest that Americans
who experienced a deep recession between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five were more likely to grow up to believe that success is achieved through luck rather than effort and were more likely to support redistributing income from the lucky rich to the unlucky poor. Paradoxically, the shock also diminished their trust in public institutions, like the presidency and Congress, so even as they demanded more of government, they doubted government's ability to deliver necessary services
- ok book but didn't finish it...no time to read it and didn't feel it told much more than freakonomics
- again, its a book that tries to teach a lot but freakonomics is still better...
Right-wingers are happier than left-wingers.
A survey by the Pew Research Center found that even as the Republican candidate John McCain headed for disaster in the presidential election of November 2008,37 percent of Republicans rate(themselves as "very happy," compared with 25 percent of Democrats. A similar trend has held since 1972, when the General Social Survey started asking the question. This is true around the world. Apparently, it has to do with the left's guilt. A study by psychologists at New York University found that the right-left happiness gap increases with deepening income inequality. This suggests people on the right are better at rationalizing inequality as a normal feature of life and feel less guilty about it.
The rich may be happier than the poor. But getting richer wouldn't make them happier, at least not for long, because they would soon adapt to their new life one rung up the income ladder and start comparing themselves with richer people.
Adaptation could be a useful trait. Economists Gary Becker and Luis Rayo argue that the ephemeral, context-dependent nature of happiness makes sense in evolutionary terms. If progress boosts our happiness only briefly, we will be motivated to constantly improve. The desire to keep up with the neighbors would work in much
the same way.The relentless drive to improve would increase our chances of survival. As Adam Smith put it 250 years ago, the idea that we can achieve happiness amounts to a "deception, which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind."
Money makes us feel better about our lives, but so does having free time. Americans have sacrificed enormous amounts of time to achieve their unparalleled economic prosperity. Easterlin's paradoxical finding that Americans' growing wealth hasn't made us any happier is, in reality, proof that the time we spend earning money is erasing the happiness we get out of counting and spending it.
The French chose time and the Americans money because they preferred it. Their choices
should make them both happy. But there is another possible reading: Americans chose an unhappier path.
Some of the same studies that showAmericans stuck in a happiness rut since the end ofWorldWar II suggest that the French have become happier with their lot. The French work 440 hours a year fewer than Americans partly because they take sevenweeks' vacation, compared with fewer than four in the United States.They sleep the longest of all citizens of the industrial world. They spend two and a quarter hours a day on meals, an hour more than in the United States.And they devote almost an hour a daymore to leisure than Americans do.
French women spend more than twiceasmuch time as Americans on meals and almost 50 percent more on active leisure-like doing sports or going to shows.American women spend about 10 percent more time working and a third more on passiveleisure activities like watching TV.As it turns out, Americans like the French life better than their own. Researchers found that ifAmerican women were to reorganize their days to spend time as the French do, theywouldn't
be quite as happy as the French, but they would be happier than they are with the lives they lead.
The conclusion to be drawn from the American happiness paradox is not that money cannot increase happiness. It can. It simply underscores that money is not the only relevant variable. Happiness can be purchased in other currencies too. It can be bought with love. It can be bought with time. And pursuing growth at all costs can lead us to sacrifice other components of our happiness.
MANY DYNAMICS CONTRIBUTED to the decline of labor coercion. Employers who could increase production by adding more inexpensive slaves had little incentive to invest in laborsaving technologies. Coerced workers had no incentive to become more productive-because they would just be handing a higher surplus to the boss. Both these effects hindered economic progress.
In the Americas, slavery led to slower subsequent economic growth. NewWorld colonies in which slave labor was common in the 1830s,such as Jamaica and Guyana, are today much poorer than colonies in which slaverywas rare, such as Barbados or Trinidad. In the United States, states where slave labor was 'widespread in the mid-nineteenth century, such as Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, are much poorer today than free states such as Connecticut, Massachusetts, and NewJersey.
Prices provide the most important signals in an economy, guiding people's decisions on where to invest their resources to get the best return they can. People who shop around to get the best possible price for their plasma TV are doing us all a favor. They get a better machine, have more money left over to buy other things, and improve the odds of success of the company that makes good products for less, boosting the economy's efficiency. Successful technology companies that profit from the work of highly qualified workers will offer higher wages-a higher price-to attract better-qualified applicants. Workers will keep raising their qualifications as long as the return-measured in better wages-is worth the investment in time, money, and effort.
A study of the impact of economic shocks on politics between 1970and 2002 concluded that a one-percentage-point decline in economic growth leads to a one-percentage-point increase in the share of the vote going to right-wing and nationalist parties.
Still, it's hard to know what to do about bubbles, even when we know they are going to pop up time and again. The cycle of investment surge and bust can bankrupt many investors but can also do good along the way. Investment booms built upon technological breakthroughs like electricity, railways, or the Internet ultimately revolutionized the world economy-fueling surges of productivity that could-at least temporarily-justify the exuberance.
The long-standing American approach, shared by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, as well as his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, has been that bubbles should be dealt with only after the fact. The Fed should be ready to pick up the pieces after they burst-flooding the economy with cheap money to encourage lending and help debtors avoid bankruptcy as the value of their assets deflates. But the government should do nothing to the bubbles themselves. Their point is that we can't tell when a bubble is a bubble.
Opinion surveys in the United States over the past few decades suggest that Americans
who experienced a deep recession between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five were more likely to grow up to believe that success is achieved through luck rather than effort and were more likely to support redistributing income from the lucky rich to the unlucky poor. Paradoxically, the shock also diminished their trust in public institutions, like the presidency and Congress, so even as they demanded more of government, they doubted government's ability to deliver necessary services
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
incomplete...read up to p91 middle...
good book but felt like i wasting my life as its not too relevant to my cooking or career...
- good bit of asian american history i didn't know about
- writer is good, not great
- would not mind finishing it on vacation or sometime when i don't want to be so focused
p75 1/2
First of all: Chinese restaurants in America tend to shy away from anything that is recognizably animal. Mainstream Americans don't like to be reminded that the food on their plate once lived, breathes, swam, or walked. That means nothing with eyeballs. No appendages or extremities (no tongues, no feet, no claws, no ears). Secondly, opacity. That means nothing transparent or even semitransparent (this eliminates certain kinds of fungus and all jellyfish). There is also a limit to the textures Americans will allow in their mouths: nothing rubbery or oddly gelatinous (no tripe and, again, no jellyfish or sea cucumber). There is also an acceptable color palate. Nothing organic should be too black (black seaweed or black mushrooms). Nothing made with flour should be too white (steamed white buns have the undone look of the pillsbury doughboy; toasty brown is better).
But perhaps most important in American eating is the idea that what goes into the mouth should never come out. That is, there should be nothing where you have to chew on something and then spit out an inedible part. this means no chicken feet, no fish with bones, no shrimp with shells. Peanuts come shelled, and even watermelon is preferred seedless.
In China, however, the aftermath of most restaurant meals is a pile of bones, shells, and other detritus on the table at every place setting: the casualties of a personal battle between the diner and the items on the plate. In particular much of the debris is due to the Chinese love of seafood, and the love of that seafood in its God-created entirety. Chinese buy their fish whole.
The meat nearest the bone is the most tender and most flavorful. So Chinese like chicken feet and legs (lots of bones) and are confounded by the American's preference for chicken breast (boneless and bland).
good book but felt like i wasting my life as its not too relevant to my cooking or career...
- good bit of asian american history i didn't know about
- writer is good, not great
- would not mind finishing it on vacation or sometime when i don't want to be so focused
p75 1/2
First of all: Chinese restaurants in America tend to shy away from anything that is recognizably animal. Mainstream Americans don't like to be reminded that the food on their plate once lived, breathes, swam, or walked. That means nothing with eyeballs. No appendages or extremities (no tongues, no feet, no claws, no ears). Secondly, opacity. That means nothing transparent or even semitransparent (this eliminates certain kinds of fungus and all jellyfish). There is also a limit to the textures Americans will allow in their mouths: nothing rubbery or oddly gelatinous (no tripe and, again, no jellyfish or sea cucumber). There is also an acceptable color palate. Nothing organic should be too black (black seaweed or black mushrooms). Nothing made with flour should be too white (steamed white buns have the undone look of the pillsbury doughboy; toasty brown is better).
But perhaps most important in American eating is the idea that what goes into the mouth should never come out. That is, there should be nothing where you have to chew on something and then spit out an inedible part. this means no chicken feet, no fish with bones, no shrimp with shells. Peanuts come shelled, and even watermelon is preferred seedless.
In China, however, the aftermath of most restaurant meals is a pile of bones, shells, and other detritus on the table at every place setting: the casualties of a personal battle between the diner and the items on the plate. In particular much of the debris is due to the Chinese love of seafood, and the love of that seafood in its God-created entirety. Chinese buy their fish whole.
The meat nearest the bone is the most tender and most flavorful. So Chinese like chicken feet and legs (lots of bones) and are confounded by the American's preference for chicken breast (boneless and bland).
Friday, April 16, 2010
Rock, Paper, Scissors
author: len fisher
topic : game theory
read up to page 107, chapter 5: lets get together
comment:
topic : game theory
read up to page 107, chapter 5: lets get together
comment:
- book was boring...started off good but never got anywhere
- didn't learn much about game theory except in the beginning which was very elementary
- think i can learn more about game theory from the internet or a text book
- i might want to finish it someday as it did get high reviews and maybe i didn't get to the good part of the book but for now, i rather read other things
- i don't remember much from it as i didn't take notes when i was reading, but from what i remember, what is most important is to remember that everyone acts based on incentives and the difficulty of life problems is that these incentives and choices are interconnected to other people. and with game theory, you can objectively access the most optimal choice based off of what others parties will probably do relative to their incentives
- but there are also certain things that have to be around to make it fair, as within every scenario there is always an incentive to cheat all others parties to benefit himself
- an ideal game theory solution would make it so there is no incentive to cheat (maybe even negative incentive to cheat) and also one in which it can be self-regulated...without an authority above to make sure the rules are followed...
- game theory can get very complicated when considering all the parties and all the scenarios possible...
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