No big developed country has come out of the global recession looking stronger than Germany has. The economy minister, Rainer Brüderle, boasts of an “XL upswing”. Exports are booming and unemployment is expected to fall to levels last seen in the early 1990s. The government is a stable, though sometimes fractious, coalition of three mainstream parties. The shrillest protest is aimed at a huge new railway project in Stuttgart. Amid the truculence and turmoil around it, Germany appears an oasis of tranquillity.

Heh, Europe in shambles with the exception of Germany. Too funny.

Phenomenal analysis. The survey itself is a mint of valuable information on tons of different topics. Must. Read. More.

I need to make a list of arguments against capitalism.

Here are just a few things Stanley found in his research on the wealthy:

— Eighty-six percent of all prestige or luxury makes of motor vehicles are driven by people who are not millionaires.

— Typically, millionaires pay about $16 (including tip) for a haircut.

— Nearly four in 10 millionaires buy wine that costs about $10.

— In the United States, there are nearly three times as many millionaires living in homes with a market value of less than $300,000 than there are living in homes valued at $1 million or more.

— Forget the Manolo Blahnik high-priced shoes. The No. 1 shoe brand worn by millionaire women is Nine West. Their favorite clothing store is Ann Taylor.

I ran across a Web site maintained by the Department of the Treasury, listing the U.S. National Debt year by year since 1791. The numbers by themselves are too big to be meaningful, so I put them into a spreadsheet to see if I could extract any interesting trends. Here’s what I did:

1. Tabulated the national debt by year, back to 1911. (I originally went only back to my birth, in 1964, but then expanded the chart to 1911, stopping there because I ran out of CPI data.)
2. Subtracted each year’s debt from the next year’s, as a measure of one-year federal deficit (including interest paid).
3. In 1986, the reporting date shifted by 3 months, and in 1953 by 6 months, so these “years” were actually 9 and 6 months long respectively; I multiplied the deficits in these years by 4/3 and 2 respectively to give annualized figures. In fact, my spreadsheet has two rows labelled 1953.
4. Adjusted this annualized deficit by the annual Consumer Price Index to give one-year federal deficits in constant (1984) dollars.

After that, there were still several different reasonable ways to look at the data:

Grove’s solution

You can find a lot of people who agree with Grove’s assessment of the state of the American technology industry. However, where the real controversy is over his prescribed remedy. Grove concludes:

“Long term, we need a job-centric economic theory — and job-centric political leadership — to guide our plans and actions… The first task is to rebuild our industrial commons. We should develop a system of financial incentives: Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars — fight to win.) Keep that money separate. Deposit it in the coffers of what we might call the Scaling Bank of the U.S. and make these sums available to companies that will scale their American operations. Such a system would be a daily reminder that while pursuing our company goals, all of us in business have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability — and stability — we may have taken for granted… If what I’m suggesting sounds protectionist, so be it.”

Man, I love seeing real data and trying to figure out all the factors that go into the outcomes.

(Today my graduate research class begins; here is advice for new researchers.)

“Son, don’t marry for money; hang around rich girls and marry for love.” A joke I heard years ago from Chip Morningstar.

Research topics work similarly.  Don’t research a topic because it is popular; expose yourself to many popular topics and you will fall in love with a few.  Fall in love with a dozen topics; too few and you’ll linger too long after they fail.

Really gushing on Hanson today. My apologies, but I think we’re all better for it.

The lessons to draw here depends on whether you want credit or influence.  If you want credit as an innovator then you should actually be pretty conservative.  Become prestigious in a conservative way, until late in your career.  Reject non-standard views but not explicitly; just ignore them so your quotes won’t bite you later.  When the time is right, look around for ripe once-contrarian ideas and take one.  Change the name and vary the methods and topics, grab the first few high profile resources, and trash the original contrarians as weirdos.

Just. Phenomenally. Good. Read the whole piece, really.