Nathan Chitty weblog

Saving our global economy with growth, a Strategic Initution story about Paul Romer's theories

On Feb 4th I wrote a post about the book Strategic Initution (Wall Street Journal review) and referred to a web log about the book at http://columbiapress.typepad.com/strategic_intuition/. I was reviewing that web log again this morning and saw a link to the work of Paul Romer, economist on how to create growth in the world economic growth through "exploratory systhesis." 

Here is a link to a paper Dr. Romer wrote on the subject.

Paul Romer describes successful economic growth through "exploratory synthesis," which is a key element of strategic intuition

The key point of his paper is that the compounding effect of "Meta-Ideas" on improving the lives of people is possible if we seek to approach the issue understanding his theory. Great work.

TED Conference Bill Gates speaking about Malaria and Making Great Teachers

Bill Gates gives a great talk at the TED conference about Malaria and Making Great Teachers. Malaria is important but I would listen to the Making Great Teachers first (it starts at 8 minutes 10 seconds into the 20 minute video.. Malcolm Gladwell has a section in his new book Outliers: The Story of Success about great education too with a lot of similar themes. 

The talk itself is at this link http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/451

The Fierce Urgency of Pork OpEd by Charles Krauthammer

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe." -- President Obama, Feb. 4. Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

Click the read more link at the bottom to read the actual article.

This is a disturbing turn of events, way too much pork in this Nancy Pelosi engineered bill. Our President really needs to be careful. I know he means well I just hope his intellect 

triumphs over his inexperience for the sake of the country.

read more | digg story

Chris Hedges Article "It's Not Going to Be OK"

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090202_its_not_going_to_be_ok/

http://tinyurl.com/cx8nyo 

This is a very interesting article sent to me by my sister Em. It articulates some drastic future scenarios like: "At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over." The article content is a great frame for discussion of our future. I think there are many answers to our challenges if we look deeply at many sources of wisdom and history. 

For instance, I think our democracy was in greater peril at the onset of FDR's administration. Jonathan Alter wrote a really interesting book about FDR's first hundred days.