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One of the most important lessons I’d learned was cautionary in nature. The most committed activists on the left and the right are convinced that the majority of voters agree with them but that institutional flaws in our democracy prevent popular sentiment from prevailing. They are usually wrong. Today conservatives are more profoundly damaged by this state of mind than liberals, but in the late 1960s and early ’70s it was primarily a problem for liberal Democratic officeholders. Their allies were certain that the great mass of voters were ready for a sharp shift to the left, and they excoriated those in power for failing—or maybe refusing—to take advantage of this opportunity. In recent years, this tension between committed activists and political reality has worsened significantly, exacerbated by changes in how people—especially the most ideologically driven—get their information. Thirty years ago, people watched, read, and listened to the same relatively few outlets, albeit with varying degrees of skepticism. Over the past decade, America’s political community has come to live in two parallel media universes. Each wing ingests information and opinion that reinforces its own policy preferences and its own conviction that those preferences reflect majority opinion.
It’s good to keep in mind that those who extoll the virtues of disruption tend to be—coincidentally enough—the ones in the winners’ circle. But disruption that spreads its benefits and new opportunities broadly is better for society. Fortunately, most disruption falls into this category. In a 2004 working paper, “Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement,” Yale economist William Nordhaus examined the US economy from 1948 to 2001. Based on the data he collected, he concluded that only 2.2 percent of “profits that arise when firms are able to appropriate the returns from innovative activity” went to the disrupters. “Most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers,” he concluded. Like it or not, change is inevitable—but it doesn’t have to be wholly unexpected.
Blitzscaling
Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh
Our job as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Protect the future, not the past.
Creativity, Inc.
Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
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