The economic concept of “value added” refers to the cycle of production in which the organized efforts of personnel, working with capital equipment and other factors of production, make something more useful out of whatever they started with. Value-added is a simple concept and a measurable indicator of success in industries or individual enterprises. In… Continue reading »
Dec
20
Philosophical contexts for strategy-based progress
Human progress is complicated by the following three conditions of context: The tools we have developed, in not only technology but also in institutions and other systems. Shifts in competitive advantage, among technologies, locations (at times a direct function of technology shifts), and cultures, where cultures can adopt policies that either harmonize or destabilize human… Continue reading »
Dec
20
Tracking converging trends
Much social change is based on highly interrelated phenomena. For example, during the Industrial Revolution, and in a relatively short time, agriculturally dominant societies became urban societies. This didn’t happen only because people suddenly believed city life was better, although some no doubt did believe that, or merely because city jobs were plentiful and farming… Continue reading »
Dec
20
Cooperation rules the future, Part 1
There are a number of reasons to expect, intuitively and setting aside for the moment considerations that are more strictly academic, that cooperative models of human behavior are now likely to play a more dominant role in human evolution than in the past. The necessity of more intensive management as densities increase. Ten people in… Continue reading »
Dec
20
Cooperation rules the future, Part 2
Addressing fundamental challenges in the application of cooperative models Lack of experience. One has only to observe, directly as a participant or indirectly, the machinations of a typical American homeowner’s association to see that inexperience in working with communal goals is endemic. At the national level, Americans have not designed our own country’s experiments in… Continue reading »
Dec
20
Index of optimism
To restore confidence to a system spiraling downward as we have recently witnessed, action must occur outside the system as it is presently configured. FDR’s New Deal, whether or not it was a “good” thing for the country in the long run, did at least coincide with economic recovery. Now, with the economy stressed by… Continue reading »
Dec
17
Consumer Confidence
Consumer confidence, meaning here its formal measure through a systematic survey process conducted by The Conference Board, is a well-established indicator of current economic health and the prospects for future economic growth in at least the near-term future. At the root of assumptions about the usefulness of such measures is the notion that people’s economic… Continue reading »