Economics

Helping Women Fight Poverty With Entrepreneurship

January 7, 2011

I don’t know much about this, but it certainly impressed me, so I decided to share it here. I assume the video here speaks for itself, but, just in case you’d like a summary, it’s about an organization called FITE, for Financial Independence Through Entrepreneurship, that is powered by Kiva.org and focuses on microloans for [...]

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2011 As Good Times for Entrepreneurs?

December 31, 2010

So, on last day of the year, eve of a new year and (I think … correct me if I’m wrong) a new decade, Steve Blank posted his optimistic 2011 may mark the beginning of a golden era for entrepreneurs on VentureBeat. He cites several reason, all of which make sense to me: Compressing the [...]

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Does the Kindle Tell You Something About Your Pricing?

December 14, 2010

While I tend to think pricing too low is one of the most common mistakes in small business, there’s still something to be said for finding the pricing sweet spot. Sometimes elasticity works. For example, in Amazon says it has sold millions of Kindles This Quarter, Business Insider notes: Amazon [says it] has “already sold [...]

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Do We Give a Damn About Public Schools?

November 8, 2010

Last Thursday I attended an evening meeting at a local public school that’s on the close-down list as our school district (4J in Eugene, OR) reels in shock over massive budget cuts. I have a 7-year-old grandson in first grade at that school, so I joined his mom at the meeting. It was a sad [...]

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Graphic Evidence of What We Value Most

July 30, 2010

Like it or not, your real priority, my real priority, our society’s real priority shows up not in what we say but in how we spend our resources, including, of course, how we spend our time. Time is the scarcest resource. Author David McCandless at Information is Beautiful called it Cognitive Surplus Visualized in honor [...]

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Free is Fashionable, But Still, Beware of Free Lunches

January 22, 2010

I’ve been thinking about this Free business a lot. There’s Chris Anderson’s book Free, and the debate around it. There’s free content everywhere. I find great free photos on Flickr. And I read free blogs every day. It’s not like free is all that new. I grew up with free radio and television, funded by advertising. [...]

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A New Dimension of Haves and Have-Nots

January 19, 2010

Wow. Talk about misreading data. They found clusters of autism and looked for pollution or some such problem as a cause, but found something entirely different, and probably just as significant. You have to read this, on NPR: Autism ‘Clusters’ Linked To Parents’ Education. It turns out that… Clusters of children diagnosed with autism tend [...]

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On Cities, Food, History, and Future

October 15, 2009

In honor of Blog Action Day, the video here is a 15-minute TED talk by Carolyn Steel, author and architect. Among the startling things she says here: We lose about 47 million acres of rainforest every year. And at the same time, we lose about 50 million acres of farm land to salinization and erosion. [...]

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Top 10 Unconventional Recession Indicators

August 11, 2009

I found this on the Huffington Post over the weekend: Top Ten Unconventional Indicators Of The Recession. It’s a slide show, more fun there than here, but in case you’re interested: Home movie rentals: up during recession. Netflix, Redbox and others are way up over last year. From The Atlantic. Urban farming: More people grow [...]

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