Why America's corporate innovation beats Japan's
THE most important factor that led to America’s stunning success in information technology was not the free market but government regulation. Federal trustbusters made AT&T lease its lines to others and eventually broke up the giant telephone company. Later they forced IBM to separate its hardware and software businesses. These actions opened the door to competition and lower prices. More important, they changed the industry’s structure, replacing monoliths with smaller, specialised companies which have to work with others with complementary skills. The result has been tremendous innovation.
That good regulation is more important than simply freeing markets in technological industries is one of the main ideas in a new book* by Peter Cowhey of the University of California, San Diego (who recently joined the Obama administration) and Jonathan Aronson of the University of Southern California. Counterintuitively, fragmenting these industries helped common standards to emerge, they say. Such standards allowed businesses to become “modularised” so that, for instance, Microsoft’s operating system and Novell’s applications run on IBM’s hardware while an AT&T internet connection can be used to access Google’s search engine. ...
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donderdag 11 juni 2009
Height and Happiness
This one is for me (Brieuc):
According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index daily poll of the US, taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more highly, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. They are also less likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness, and physical pain, though they are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they are women, to worry. These findings cannot be attributed to different demographic or ethnic characteristics of taller people, but are almost entirely explained by the positive association between height and both income and education, both of which are positively linked to better lives.
Read more here.
According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index daily poll of the US, taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more highly, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. They are also less likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness, and physical pain, though they are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they are women, to worry. These findings cannot be attributed to different demographic or ethnic characteristics of taller people, but are almost entirely explained by the positive association between height and both income and education, both of which are positively linked to better lives.
Read more here.
Eastern Germany Less Hard Hit than the West
More evidence on the importance of small firms in times of crisis here.
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