Paths......................

 

There's no such thing as a sweet deal without a clear path to significant growth.

-Brad Jacobs, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars

In praise of construction................

 

That’s shadowed by less irksome regulations, something that unsurprisingly meant more construction. Drive around any of the big Texas metros, particularly the suburbs, you’ll see new buildings everywhere. Permissive zoning laws mean that what, until recently, were rural pathways are now packed with cars and fast-food joints. 

-Joel Kotkin, from here

goals..................

 

Seemingly impossible goals are more practical than possible goals because impossible goals force you outside your current level of knowledge and assumptions.

-Dan Sullivan with Dr. Benjamin Hardy, 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More By Doing Less

magical reinventors.....................

 

Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow.  Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant?  Flora or fauna, we are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors.  Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

-Diane Ackerman

Who is not in favor....................

..........................of Type 2 growth? 

In English there is a curious and unhelpful conflation of the two meanings of the word “growth.”  The most immediate meaning is to increase in size, or increase in girth, to gain in weight, to add numbers, to get bigger. In short, growth means “more.” More dollars, more people, more land, more stuff. More is fundamentally what biological, economic, and technological systems want to do: dandelions and parking lots tend to fill all available empty places. If that is all they did, we’d be well to worry. But there is another equally valid and common use of the word “growth” to mean develop, as in to mature, to ripen, to evolve.  We talk about growing up, or our own personal growth. This kind of growth is not about added pounds, but about betterment. It is what we might call evolutionary or developmental, or type 2 growth. It’s about using the same ingredients in better ways. Over time evolution arranges the same number of atoms in more complex patterns to yield more complex organisms, for instance producing an agile lemur the same size and weight as a jelly fish. We seek the same shift in the technium. Standard economic growth aims to get consumers to drink more wine. Type 2 growth aims to get them to not drink more wine, but better wine. 

-Kevin Kelly

On progress.................

      Making progress isn't always about moving forward.  Sometimes it's about bouncing back.  Progress is not only reflected in the peaks you reach—it's also visible in the valleys you cross.  Resilience is a form of growth.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

One things us Ohioans do.............

 ..........pretty well is build, build, build.

In fact, blue states’ failure to allow development is a pervasive feature of their political cultures. Housing scarcity doesn’t just cause population loss — it’s also the primary cause of the wave of homelessness that has swamped California and New York. Progressives’ professed concern for the unhoused is entirely undone by their refusal to allow the creation of new homes near where they live. Nor is housing the only thing that blue states fail to build — anti-development politics is preventing blue states from adopting solar and wind, while red states power ahead. And red states’ willingness to build new factories means that progressive industrial policy is actually benefitting them more.

If blue states are going to thrive in the 21st century, they need to relearn how to build, build, build.

-Noah Smith, as excerpted from here

Beating up on Malthus.....................

     Malthus had quite accurately foretold the one phenomenon [population explosion], but had missed the other altogether [productivity increases].  Why? Because of the systematic pessimistic bias to which prophecy is prone. . . . They all thought they were making sober predictions based on the best knowledge that was available to them.  In reality they were all allowing themselves to be misled by the ineluctable fact of the human condition that we do not yet know what we have not yet discovered.

-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

YIMBYism versus NIMBYism.........................

 .....................................interesting stuff.  Always good to remember to be careful around the "isms".

On comparing....................

 Contrary to the cultural norms of heroic individualism, do not compare yourself to others.  Compare yourself to prior versions of yourself and judge yourself based on the effort you are exerting in the present moment.

-Brad Stulberg,  The Practice of Groundedness

AI will be baking a bigger pie.............?

 The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs doomers keep making is called the Lump Of Labor Fallacy. This fallacy is the incorrect notion that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done in the economy at any given time, and either machines do it or people do it – and if machines do it, there will be no work for people to do.

The Lump Of Labor Fallacy flows naturally from naive intuition, but naive intuition here is wrong. When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy, which drives the creation of new production – including new products and new industries – which then creates new jobs for the people who were replaced by machines in prior jobs. The result is a larger economy with higher material prosperity, more industries, more products, and more jobs.

-Marc Andreessen, from this Substack, why-ai-will-save-the-world

Wow, I think he is talking about Newark, Ohio...

 Urbanism is not dead, but it is morphing into a new form. The most promising cities are currently taking shape on the periphery of the most densely settled areas, which lets them accommodate companies and families in a safer, healthier environment. These new cities are found around economically and demographically dynamic regions, largely in the sunbelt, but also in parts of the Midwest such as around Columbus and Indianapolis.

-Joel Kotkin, from here

Go Bucks...................!

 Whether it’s the two biggest capital investment announcements in Ohio history in 2022 or the very real statewide manufacturing resurgence, Ohio is on a trajectory for growth and opportunity which most Ohioans haven’t seen in our lifetimes.  Governor Mike DeWine is right to say, “It’s Ohio’s time.” 

-Rick Platt, as excerpted from here

dependence and addiction...............

 Industrialization plus globalization has not only generated the fastest economic growth in history; collectively they have dramatically increased the standard of living of billions of people the world over.  Unlike the shockingly unequal preindustrial world, the industrialization/globalization combo has achieved the seemingly impossible duology of enabling the utterly unskilled to live at something above an abused subsistence level while pushing the frontiers of human knowledge and education further and faster and more broadly than ever before. . . .

     Botton line: the world we know is eminently fragile.  And that's when it is working to design.  Today's economic landscape isn't so much dependent upon as it is eminently addicted to American strategic and tactical overwatch.  Remove the Americans, and long-haul shipping degrades from being the norm to being the exception.  Remove the mass consumption due to demographic collapses and the entire economic argument for mass integration collapses.  One way or another, our "normal" is going to end, and end soon.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

At least until it got politized too...........

I wanted to be a scientist.  That is where a lot of my moral hierarchy comes from.  I view scientists as being at the tip of the production chain for humanity.  The group of scientists who have made real breakthroughs and contributions probably added more to human society, I think, than any single other class of human beings.  Not to take away from art or politics or engineering or business, but without science, we'd still be scrambling in the dirt fighting with sticks and trying to start fires.

-Naval Ravikant,  The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Good question.................

 .........................Given decline or growth, who doesn’t choose growth for their kids and grandkids?

From the always interesting................

 .....................................Kevin Kelly:

Our humanity is something we invented over the course of a million years. It’s our first and most important “tool”. In fact, we ourselves — humans — are the first wild creations we domesticated, before wheat, corn, dogs, cows and chickens. We’ve been modifying ourselves, and our genes, since day 1. It’s true that most of our behavior is primitive, unchanged, ancient, and no different than our animal cousins. But not all. And it is these different bits that make us human.

In praise of economic growth..........

 The key to ending racial antagonism, then, doesn’t lie in equity programmes, but in economic growth and opportunity. Unity can’t just be conjured out of thin air — people need to feel it in their bank accounts first. This won’t be achieved through a national campaign of penance, or through boxing the country into a racial zero-sum game. If Biden really cares about America’s minorities, the goal should be simple: to help them to find a road to prosperity and financial independence, along with the rest of the country.

-Joel Kotkin, from this essay

Hey, that's Ohio he is talking about................

 Heartland Manufacturing Renaissance | City Journal (city-journal.org)

Joel Kotkin points to good things (from an economic development point of view) happening in Ohio.  The Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority gets a nod:

The Buckeye State, notes Rick Platt, president and CEO of the Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority, “never skipped a beat on funding development.” More than 60 such authorities in Ohio work to attract industry with capital financing, infrastructure investment, land preparation, and speculative building development. Such efforts often tend to be largely expensive money-wasters, but in Ohio they have proved more successful. For the past quarter-century, Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority has transformed the former Newark Air Force Base into a hotbed of more than 20 companies with a total of 1,650 jobs. The companies operate in fields as diverse as aerospace, medical products, automotive and energy-related products, and even the world’s first organic baby food company, located in the industrial city of Heath (population 10,000), one of four plant-based food firms in the area. Licking County’s manufacturing workforce has expanded by 10,000 this decade.

customers.................

      The reach and power of Giannini's branch banking empire in California was extraordinary, beyond the comprehension of people living outside the state.  "I still can't realize that in forty years a man has built something out here that compels the awe—that's the right word, awe—of all New York," said an East Coast financial writer on his first trip to San Francisco in the late 1940s.  With 504 branches and four million individual customers, Bank of America held the savings deposits of one out of every three Californians, or 40 percent of the state's total bank deposits. . . .

      Giannini always remained the bank's most energetic booster.  He would go to extremes to attract new depositors and to keep them as customers.  He did this partly to reaffirm Bank of America's relentlessly promoted images as a "people's bank" and  partly out of his own fierce competitive urge; there was no such thing as an unimportant customer.  "When you sell people," he was fond of saying, "keep them sold."

      As successful as Giannini was, nothing generated more public comment than his disregard for his own wealth.  He saw no point in accumulating money or in surrounding himself with the signs of material success.  The home in which he lived until the end of his life was the one he had purchased when he was selling fruits and vegetables on the San Francisco waterfront. The wardrobe of the man whom Fortune would include in its Hall of Fame of America's ten greatest businessmen consisted of four off-the-racks suits, three pairs of shoes, and a handful of shirts and ties.  "My hardest job," he said on one occasion, "was to keep from becoming a millionaire."

Felice A. Bonadio, A. P. Giannini: Banker of America