There are plenty of really good resources out there about how to meditate. Really good. Want to meditate and practice your Spanish at the same time? Try this. Here, however, is my way. It works every time, without fail:
Coming Soon: Why meditate. (This entry could be substantially longer.)
Being in the lobbyist business is a reminder – sometimes painful, always amusing – that we never really left high school. Every psychological issue from high school friends, frenemies, and not-so-friends comes forward: who knows whom, who is rising, who is falling, hooking up, breaking up, parents are divorcing, stuck in study hall – what else? Feel free to add to the list.
Economics is pretty much the same thing, or so argue the authors of Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. In the early pages where I find myself, the book already comes across as a foil to Sowell’s tome Basic Economics that I read over several weeks recently.
Continue reading “Sunday Books: Economics = high school drama”
You can’t go to San Francisco and not leave with some unique cultural marker that helps define what you think of the City and what the City thinks of you. And no, I don’t mean Fisherman’s Wharf.
I could do a whole blog just about San Francisco but there are plenty of other blogs out there doing it better. Still, a Sunday Op-Ed article in the Los Angeles Times by Richard Rodriguez brought me back to San Francisco, where I lived and loved until nine years ago.
Continue reading “Sunday Books: San Francisco calling… again”
Tom Teicholz blogged this week that blogging is no fun. More to the point, he says:
I still find that it is neither as pleasurable as composing a column or article essay, and not necessarily as emotionally or intellectually rewarding. I don’t really write in as great depth or push myself to think as deeply.
True, when something is not fun anymore then either don’t do it or find a way to do it differently, right? Not so fast. Perhaps the real trouble is this: Continue reading “Writing for fun or profit (but not both?)”
How do you run a large institution that is critical to the functioning of our economy but steeped in intertia, prcoess and politics? That sounds like pretty much every workplace on the planet, but in Ben Bernanke’s place it also happens to be the Federal Reserve. Bernanke and the Fed are not only tasked with, among other things, balancing the U.S. money supply and ensuring appropriate liquidity in our economy so people can consume goods and services, but now must also navigate the current economic crisis and kick-start cash flows through the economy again.
The Los Angeles Times on 4/10/09 reprinted a Washington Post article about Ben Bernanke and his management style. The report finds that “Bernanke has transformed the stodgy organization, invoking rarely used emergency powers. His decision to do so has drawn criticism — he has transcended traditional limits on the role of a central bank, stretched the Fed’s legal authority and to some, usurped the responsibility of political authorities in committing vast sums of taxpayer dollars.”
Change isn’t easy. How is Bernanke pulling it off (so far)?
What strikes many who have worked with Bernanke, though, is that he has pulled it all off without grand speeches, arm-twisting or Machiavellian games. Rather, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former Fed officials and others familiar with the workings of the central bank, he has enacted bold policy moves through measured, intellectual debates and by making even those who are resistant to some of the new actions feel that their concerns are understood.
To many Fed veterans, Bernanke’s leadership style is a stark contrast with that of his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, whose tenure was characterized by tightly controlled decision-making with only rare open disagreement.
Business, as in life, is very zen. Sometimes the people who talk the loudest are the ones who talk the least.
DavidKDaily 