Quality of Life (Video 7 minutes) Our problems with business, government, and the environment should provoke rarely asked questions. For example, should the purpose of a business be to make money, to please customers, or much, much more? Should most business legal structures now be obsolete? Should unpaid work have value? What is work anyway? […]
By Mike Hall. Compression advocates a social challenge for humans to seek and learn a lifestyle of “Doing Better With Less”. The concept seems easy to acknowledge given our current observed decline of nature and limited resources. But intelligence (mental and emotional acceptance) of what is necessary for action must first overcome our learned dependency […]
Ours to Hack and to Hold: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet, Edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider. This book is unusual. First, it’s not to be released officially until August, but poke around and you can download a pdf. Second, the new […]
Healthcare and the Quality of All Life Human health depends on all human systems, plus nature’s systems. But we seldom think of health care that way. We define it as intervention when things go wrong – as curative care to restore health. And its costs seem to be rising out of sight. That’s what concerns […]
An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal, MD Why does curative care cost so much? Rosenthal explains many of the reasons by muckraking American healthcare in gory detail. Not only an experienced MD, she has written on medical topics extensively for the New York […]
Doc Hall: Wicked Problems (Video 6 minutes) We will be doing more about wicked problems on this blog. A comment about the video: at the end, Jose the owner of the restaurant said that his wicked problem at the time was disposing of grease from his restaurant. The problem becomes much more extensive because it […]
Coffee With Doc: EDUCE. Educe: Education that Learns By Jack Ring Whether children or adults, most of us love to learn; we don’t like to be taught – told by an authority. Great “teachers” know this. They guide each learner’s self-discovery. Anything you discover may be old knowledge, but when you see it […]
The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran, and Zach Ward-Perkins This book attracted interest because it is associated with Rethinking Economics, a gestating global movement of renegade graduate students in economics bent on reforming economic thinking. They are revolting against the models and doctrines they are being […]
Coffee With Doc: Stalking Dinner (Video 4 minutes) Whether called “free market,” globalization,” neo-liberalism, or something else, the West’s prevailing business and economic system is sputtering. A totally new social contract will have to displace it because the present system appears incapable of meeting our needs in the 21st century. The old system featured conflict […]
Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason Mason is an experienced British writer and TV news editor covering economics and public policy. His future vision fuses artificial intelligence, automation, environmental problems, and wonky strategies to cure our global economic mess. Having seen policy made in central government sausage grinders, he pulls few punches. […]
Coffee With Doc: Re-Balancing Ourselves Previous posts referred to a broad swath of environmental degradation undermining our consumptive way of life. Issues are global, but vary by location. Some of us don’t want to accept that this is happening; others are engaged in so many little initiatives that no one can know of them all. […]
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Harari Yuval Noah Harari is a professor of history in The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a secular Jew. That’s important because he spends part of the book on the rift between science and religions, and he’s a neutral observer. Along the way he dribbles in […]
Even economists are beginning to see that the current economic system is flawed. Most want to fix it, like Jared Bernstein who advocates re-priming growth, but distributing it more equally, which he calls “reconnection.” Arguments about fairness captivate us more than ecological crises that seem more abstract, so they dominate attention. They want to overhaul […]
Three short reviews of fairly dense books. Surviving the Future by David Fleming and Shaun Chamberlin David Fleming worked on the basis for this book for 30 years. Hardly known in the U.S., in the UK Fleming obtained a PhD in economics, was an environmental activist; at one time secretary for the Green Party, the founder of […]
Coffee With Doc: Adopting Compression Thinking (video and blog) Last Saturday, we went to Maria Morgan’s coffee shop. Maria asked about Compression and Compression Thinking. She had not heard of it before. I asked about her coffee shop business. I knew nothing about it except that her coffee was exceptionally good. So we took Compression […]
NOW – The Physics of Time by Richard A. Muller Muller is professor of physics at Berkeley, best known recently as a skeptic investigating global warming, reluctantly concluding that the evidence points to it – with reservations, of course. However, his book, Now, is a review of physics leading to Muller’s hypothesis that since time […]
One indicator that we need a very different concept of what we call business is Eroom’s Law, a buzzword from the world of pharmaceutical drug development. Erooms’s Law is that the increasing complexity of a system inexorably keeps driving costs up. It’s Moore’s Law backwards, and Moore’s Law is that computing speed of an integrated […]
In this newly released book, Michael Kinch begins with the history of drug development from ancient times up to 2016. He’s qualified. Kinch is a knowledgeable insider in drug development, biotech, and in university research, with experience in both the scientific and the business sides of all these institutions. Major themes are fast mutation and […]
In the sense of psychology and communications, George Lakoff coined the term, “framing.” A framework is a belief, or a set of them, by which people interpret their world. We all have multiple frameworks; they need not be logically consistent. Framing is communicating an idea so that it fits into a framework already fixed in […]
Frase is a writer for Jacobin, a left-wing political magazine that sponsored his book. Left wing polemics being predictable, this book seemed of little interest until spotting a couple of reviews by other authors saying that it was mind opening. Critics complained that the book left too many unanswered questions. However, raising questions was the […]
Lean thinking needs transformation, major expansion, and a basic shift in objectives – from improving operational efficiency to something much bigger: Continuous Regeneration of ourselves, our human economy, and of the natural world. All three depend on each other. To do that we must learn to think more than technique deep. “Lean” refers to lean […]
What We’re Reading: Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First, by Frank Trentmann. Trentmann is professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a prolific book writer. As an academic work, this book is an easy read, but it’s a description of the […]
What We’re Reading: Infinite Reality:The Hidden Blueprint of Our Virtual Lives, by Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson. While five years old, this book is a dated descriptor of where Virtual Reality is today as a technology, but it is as good as has been found as a descriptor of the linkage between VR and its […]
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