Growthology

The search for good policy must truly be our own

CHRISTIAN BJØRNSKOV & NICOLAI J. FOSS wrote this fine sentence in a September 2006 paper:

However, one seeks in vain in the classical statements for more precise discussions of the institutional and economic policy antecedents to entrepreneurial activity, perhaps because the notion - now entirely commonplace - that institutions imply systems of incentives was not widespread at the time when Schumpeter and Knight wrote.

The article -- Economic Freedom and Entrepreneurial Activity: SOME CROSS-COUNTRY EVIDENCE -- is available at SSRN.  The study is interesting, and I am not sure what to make of the findings given the small sample size (29 countries), in addition to the fact the government size and economic freedom tend to be positively correlated (in larger samples) - a fact that causes some teeth-gnashing among those of us who prefer smaller government and economic freedom.

It is compelling, at least, to think that our search for policies and institutions that promote entrepreneurship and growth is truly our search and not something resolved or even well defined by our intellectual ancestors. Good hunting!

Easterly skewers World Bank report

Bill Easterly is a funny man, quite subtle, but what a perfect foil for development panaceas.  Here he skewers a $4m World Bank study:

The report of the World Bank Growth Commission, led by Nobel laureate Michael Spence, was published last week. After two years of work by the commission of 21 world leaders and experts, an 11- member working group, 300 academic experts, 12 workshops, 13 consultations, and a budget of $4m, the experts’ answer to the question of how to attain high growth was roughly: we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out.

I have not digested the full report myself, and I will almost surely find more to like in it than Easterly.  But I wouldn't recommend anyone read the study without getting their skeptical thinking caps on first, and what better way than starting with Easterly's preface?  (FYI, if you can  read only one book on international development, it should be Easterly's "Elusive Quest")

Startups as Charities

Are the best startups like charities?  An interesting essay from Paul Graham on the values ingrained in an organization's culture are key to its success (hat tip Arnold Kling):

Here's where benevolence comes in. If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed. Most of us have some amount of natural benevolence. The mere fact that someone needs you makes you want to help them. So if you start the kind of startup where users come back each day, you've basically built yourself a giant tamagotchi. ... Once you have users to take care of, you're forced to figure out what will make them happy, and that's actually very valuable information.

Another insight from Graham, who by the way designed one of the earliest web apps and a Bayesian spam filter, is that a mission-driven startup has an advantage in attracting superstar talent, because superstars can always make money but not always with a purpose:

If you can attract the best hackers to work for you, as Google has, you have a big advantage. And the very best hackers tend to be idealistic. They're not desperate for a job. They can work wherever they want. So most want to work on things that will make the world better.

Plaxo and Community

I was pleasantly surprised to find this post by Dr.Tax, which is motivated by Plaxo v LinkedIn:

A few years ago Robert Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone which argued that civic institutions were falling by the wayside - things like bowling leagues and Elks clubs. Putnam's argument reminded me a lot of Malthus - who for save a few changes like the invention of the steel plow might have been a bit more on target. In Putnam's case he was struck on the notion of geographic proximity. In this world that is increasingly unimportant. As the communities of the last century begin to falter - the new ones are taking their place. Plaxo and LinkedIn are but two examples.

I am in love with Plaxo - a personal contact management technology that is at once efficient and life-saving (for those of us who define "death" as a computer crash with totally MS Outlook). In the arms race of social networking technologies, I've been on and off and on LinkedIn, with mixed results. I quite enjoy Facebook, and only wish more folks from my generation would participate. I suppose these things will cross-pollinate features until they get it perfect. Or is there such thing as a perfect technology?  (long answer: No, progress is infinite.  See Viriginia Postrel.  Short answer: Yes.  See Pac-Man, Summer, 1980).

Farewell, Peter Carlson

After 12 years, Peter Carlson is leaving his job as a journalist covering magazine culture, and taking the buyout offer from the Washington Post.  This is my update on the print media's metamorphosis.  Peter's farewell article, with some self-referential irony, describes creative destruction in the industry:

In the magazine business, as in nature, life is a Darwinian struggle that is frequently nasty, brutish and short. Every year, more than 500 magazines are born and nearly as many die. During the past 12 years, Life died. So did Civilization, My Generation, Spy, George, Talk, Brill's Content, Punk Planet, Doubletake and Mademoiselle, plus Lingua Franca, a smart, funny magazine about academia, Gadfly, a lively pop culture magazine and recently, the music magazines Harp and No Depression.

Replacing the dead on newsstands was a crop of newborns -- Maxim, Portfolio, Real Simple, the Week, Blender, the American Conservative, Hallmark, Found, Mental Floss and a fine literary mag called the Believer. Meanwhile, the Oxford American, a magazine of Southern culture, died and was reborn. And Radar, a snarky pop culture mag, died, was reborn, died again and was reborn yet again.

Joel Achenbach's blog covers the story, and tipped me off to Howard Kurz solid article covering the early-retirement plan's impact: 100 journalists out the door.  Still, I dislike the snarky "we get the media we deserve" whine that "the next generation blew us off in favor of Xbox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods."  It's anecdotal.  Sure, you can point to some youngster who watches YouTube and scoffs at newspapers, but that person is an idiot.  What about the other million youngsters who are compulsively RSSing the news, and are deep into the long tail on foreign affairs, climatology, or gee, the U.S. presidential election? Kurz precedes his anecdote with this:

In one sense, the Web is a blessing. Daily circulation for the newsprint Post, now 673,000, may be down from 813,000 in 2000, but we are drawing an eye-opening 9.4 million unique visitors online each month, 85 percent of them from outside the D.C. circulation area.

My guess is that the online readers simply ain't linking to the Health or Business or Style sections. The Post is a powerhouse in political (Capitol Hill) and military (Pentagon) coverage, and that is probably where the paper will have to focus its reporting.  Bigger question (and keep in mind that I am ignorant of the WaPo's particulars, so this comment is general in nature, not aimed at the Post):

Is a company downsizing via early-retirement the best way to handle financial distress?  Would you rather lose your least productive 100 employees or your 100 employees who have the best outside options?  Yes, RIFs are better for morale than layoffs.  Or are they?  When the Air Force had a RIF, my morale was hurt by the departure of the top mentors and role models. I submit that it hurts any organization deeply when it reduces staff by effectively carroting out its most entrepreneurial people.  Maybe Jack Welch should become an editor?

The silver lining, perhaps, is that lost entrepreneurs may be lost to the organization, but not to society!  The fact that they leave and start new businesses is a net plus, right?  Indeed, Kurz points to Politico.com, founded by ex-WaPo staffers. 

Is eBay a mythical employer?

Daniel Gross takes some air out of the eBay balloon:

Of course, there's a big difference be­tween making a buck and making a living, between a sometime-thing and a steady gig. The notion that 630,000 Ameri­cans—a number roughly equal to the population of North Dakota—are making something approaching a living wage selling on eBay is a little rich. I've been paid a few times to play the piano—it doesn't make me a professional musician.

The whole piece at Slate is well done (ht: realclearmarkets). 

Keep in mind that I am skeptical of the traditional job count, and have faith in the new economy.  But I agree with Daniel ... always thought the eBay line in response to job worries is ineffective.  But let's not be too hasty.  The company just posted profits of $459.7 million on sales on $2.2 billion in the first quarter of 08, which represents fraction of the value of transactions by eBay's sellers.  My sense is that the most powerful economic contribution of eBay is the creation of economic surplus in matching obscure wants with rare goods, markets that were too thin to even exist 10+ years ago.

National Inventors Hall of Fame

Have you heard of the National Inventors Hall of Fame?  I'm embarassed to say I had not before (hat tip) my colleague Thom Ruhe told me about it last week. He was at the 2008 awards ceremony, which he describes as "first class." The museum is located in Akron, Ohio -- but it is closed while a new section is under construction.  Anyway, the online material is must-see.

This section caught my eye - an ad campaign to inspire invention among young children.  Very cool:

Wiki Word Count ...

... as a metric for how serious our culture takes different topics, from the reliably funny and insightful Achenblog:

Selfless Wikipedians are staying up into the wee hours reading each individual article for the characters of the old G.I. Joe cartoon, ensuring the entry about Cobra Commander is neutral and unbiased.

It stands to reason that if an obscure cartoon villain can get a fair shake, then our first president will, too. The test is simple, if a little imprecise.... Do a word count, and you have a rough sense of your subject's importance in human affairs.

Winston Churchill: 10,808
Abraham Lincoln: 10,595
Napoleon Bonaparte: 10,414
Moses: 9,443
Jesus: 9,310
Muhammad: 9,194
Batman: 8,953
Julius Caesar: 8,766
Superman: 7,945
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer": 7,371
Christopher Columbus: 7,181
Albert Einstein: 7,135

Michael Malone on Entrepreneurial America

In this adapted speech published in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Malone lays out a vision of entrepreneurial America in the 21st century better than we ever could:

The entire world seems to be heading toward points of inflection. The developing world is embarking on the digital age. The developed world is entering the Internet era. And the United States, once again at the vanguard, is on the verge of becoming the world's first Entrepreneurial Nation.

...

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today's high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

...

But liberty exacts its own demands. Entrepreneurial America is likely to become even more innovative than it is today. And that innovation is likely to spread across society, not just as products and inventions, but new ways of living and new types of organizations.

The economy will be much more volatile and much more competitive. In the continuous fervor to create new institutions, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain old ones. New political parties, new social groupings, thousands of new manias and movements and millions of new companies will pop up over the next few decades. Large corporations that don't figure out how to combine permanence with perpetual change will be swept away.

Read the whole thing here.

Food Crisis and Shameless Protectionism

Innovation and Entrepreneurship are commonly associated with high technology.  We think of the Silicon Valley garage as the Platonic ideal of an innovative place.  Despite this stereotype, innovation happens everyplace.  And thank goddness, because if there were no such thing as innovative hunting and gathering, we would all still be, well, hunting and gathering.

The revolution in farming, not computerization, is arguably the most important innovation of the 20th century.  History may well remember Deng Xiaopeng's liberalization of small-farm profit incentives as a greater innovation than GUI computing or WSYWIG printing.  But farming innovation has stagnated in many respects, and part of the problem is that people just don't get angry enough about protectionism.

The moral imperative is for the world to encourage innovation everywhere.  To be more specific, what I mean by the world is "rich urban economies" and by everywhere is "poor rural economies."  Sadly, the rich world tends to protect older and dying sectors from competition coming out of the LDCs. In a Washington Post op-ed today,  Sebastian Mallaby describes the current food crisis very effectively in terms of what some friends and I might call a dynamic market failure (i.e. an equilibrium that fails by limiting potential growth):

Part of the solution to the food crisis, as the Oxford economist Paul Collier has written, is to promote large-scale commercial agriculture in the poor world. But for that to happen, investors have to know that there will be a market for their exports. They won't risk their money if Congress is going to subsidize their American competitors. They won't risk their money if European prejudice is going to prevent them from using the best seeds that scientists offer. And they won't risk their money if the governments of developing countries short-circuit their profits with crazy export bans.

In short, the governments of the world are conspiring to undermine farming in developing countries. Do they mean to inflict hunger on tens of millions of people?

The logic is pretty simple if you want to encourage entrepreneurship in poor, rural areas.  Get the incentives right!  Local farmers need demand for their potential product before they can obtain capital to grow. If rich countries restrict the external market through import restrictions, destroy competitive pricing through home subsidies, and restrict the internal market through aid (i.e. free imports of their countries' farming exports), the poor would-be farmer cannot win.

Economists are often viewed as cool and remote.  But what motiviates economists are passions just as intense as those inspring rock concerts to fight poverty and mass media hypercoverage of hurricances, plane crashes, and earthquakes.  The current food crisis is improverishing hundreds of millions, but doing it so softly and abstractly that often only a handful of cool and remote economists in rich countries get angry whereas typical politicians - reflecting constituents - remain oblivious.

For those keeping score, Congress passed the latest $290 billion farm bill with a veto-proof majority, 318-106 in the House and 81-15 in the Senate.

The Puzzling Supply-Side of Skills

I’m totally new to blogging, so readers, please cut me some slack.

I plan to write about things that bother or puzzle me, and here’s the first one.

It is well known that the so-called “college premium” – the additional income college graduates earn over their lifetimes relative to the incomes earned by those with a high school diploma or less – has widened substantially over the past several decades. The puzzle is why that this clear payoff from going to and completing college has not induced more young people to go to college. Or, put differently, why has the high school dropout rate – which reaches 50 percent or more in some urban areas – not fallen?

Answering this question is important for many reasons, but among the most important to me is that if we had a better handle on how to dramatically cut the drop out rate, we could make a significant dent in reducing the poverty rate – and most likely the crime rate as well. Moreover, since President Clinton was clearly right when he famously repeated “You earn what you learn,” a lower dropout rate would narrow income inequality, while making our labor force more adaptable to continued (and seemingly accelerating) change.

A recent paper at voxeu.org by Joseph Antoni, Prashant Bharadwaj and Rabian Lange documents the college premium puzzle and offers a few answers : other things than money (such as what peers think) drive kids’ decision about whether to stay in school; parents may not be aware of the economic benefits of having their kids stay in school (this is hard to believe); kids are “liquidity constrained” and thus don’t have enough money to pay for college (but kids drop out well before they graduate and there are plenty of ways to finance even community college, while it also still pays to finish high school).

The authors admit that more study is required to fully explain the persistently high drop out rates. While I agree that certainly more research is always a good thing, more effort in the meantime should be devoted to experiments with ways to cut the drop out rate.

One good place to start is with incentives for teachers. We know that good teachers are essential not only for improving student achievement, but can also play a huge role in students’ lives – positively or negatively. A teacher, even in the earliest grades, who convinces her students that they can go to college and realize their dreams can give them the confidence and hope they need to do precisely that. Conversely, teachers who send subtle (or not so subtle) signals to their students that have no chance of finishing high school, let alone going to college, can also help about that unwelcome result.

If all this is true – and I believe it is – is not time to begin thinking creatively about ways to reward teachers based on the high school graduation rates of their students?

Thoughts – on reasons for the high drop-out rates and ways to reduce it?

If Schumpeter could talk to Larry Page ...

FORTUNE has a great interview with google co-founder Larry Page in the recent "best advice" issue. Lots of good stuff in there, but I appreciate his distinction between invention and entrepreneurship:

You don't want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors, but it's a sad, sad story. He couldn't commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research. You'd want to be more like Edison. If you invent something, that doesn't necessarily help anybody. You've got to actually get it into the world; you've got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.

It's exciting to see smart guys like Larry make it big because I tend to believe they will use their fortune to great effect, i.e. huge positive externalities. Larry's fascination with automated cars is a case in point if you are, like he is, bothered by the 40,000+ car crash deaths annually in the U.S.

If Schumpeter had lived to see the development of the IT revolution, the Internet, and google, what would he have thought? He probably would be incredibly encouraged to see the acceleration of innovation and the constant re-spawning of innovative small firms. This is the start-up culture, and my sense is that it is the one big idea Schumpeter missed. It goes without saying that Karl Marx missed it. But the painful thing about creative destruction is that even a great company like google cannot help but face talent defection.

Again, FORTUNE has the story on the brain drain at Larry & Sergey's huge, young corporation. This has long been happening to Microsoft. And for all the blather about strategic plans and mis-steps made by these new gaints, the real story might simply be that there is only so much equity to go around. Best line:

Google was like that too, about eight years and 18,000 employees ago.

The story is somewhat anecdotal, but it raises an interesting challenge. What can a company do to keep innovative employees from leaving? The dominant model decades ago was for a major industrial firm to establish a corporate R&D lab - At&T and Xerox come to mind. This is the model Schumpeter expected to dominate the future on the theory that future innovations require integration of more and more knowledge, requiring larger and larger teams of researchers to push the envelope. History proved him wrong. (And history was named Noyce). The updated model has big firms shedding internal R&D in favor of M&A. They buy innovation and revenue growth through acquisistions - Cisco comes to mind. But the new model that google is wrestling with is to allow almost all their employees to be entrepreneurial.

I don't think any one of these models is always right or always wrong, because they are all contextual. Too often, commodity organizations buy into faddish management theories and try to empower all their workers. Nice in theory, but sometimes you just need the architect to draw and the sales team to sell. Regardeless, we can be confident the corporation is not done evolving. Companies face brain drains, and the question is how to stop them - or more properly - take advantage of them.

The smart companies will do what universities aren't doing very well yet - offer maximum flexibility to their innovative employees while retaining a minority stake in the offshoots. If google really wants to keep talent in-house, it might need more than google stock options and free food. It might need to create a new turn-key subsidiary framework - a kind of reverse M&A where employees can apply to start internal divsions using company capital in exchange for partial ownership of the future revenue stream.

What does this mean? Labor is more than labor. Modern labor is human capital, and it wants more than a paycheck, a pension, profit sharing, and, even more poignantly, aggregated risk capital returns. I think human capital wants a balance of individualized risk returns and security. Sorting out that balance is the true search function of modern capitalism.

Thoughts?

Inflation Pie

Thanks to a tip from the Joint Economics Committee’s insightful Dan Miller, I was happy to find this quick and brilliant interactive graphic about the components of U.S. inflation:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/05/03/business/20080403_SPENDING_GRAPHIC.html

Makes you wonder what would happen if housing got a lot cheaper … wouldn’t that make Americans’ purchasing power stronger?

The Blogging Manifesto

So here I am launching a blog, and pondering its implications. There is blood on my hands. Ink, rather … Venerable newspapers face extinction (from the May 1, 2008 issue of the Economist):

THE New York Times once epitomised all that was great about American newspapers; now it symbolises its industry’s deep malaise. The Grey Lady’s circulation is tumbling, down another 3.9% in the latest data from America’s Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). Its advertising revenues are down, too (12.5% lower in March than a year earlier), as is the share price of its owner, the New York Times Company, up from its January low but still over 20% below what it was last July. On Tuesday April 29th Standard & Poor’s cut the firm’s debt rating to one notch above junk.

A specter is haunting 620 8^th Avenue in Manhattan – it is the ghost of the great economist, Joseph Schumpeter. It is also haunting newspapers large and small all across America. For those who don’t know him, Schumpeter’s ghost is a balding, German-accented fellow that few would recognize, but he is haunting them all the same. While alive, Schumpeter championed capitalism, while predicting its ultimate demise. Presumably the specter of Schumpeter is pleased that the corpus of Schumpeter erred in his prediction.

All the powers of old media have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise Schumpeter’s theory: media mogul and rock star, publisher and studio head, opinion-editing elitist and radio-spittling populist.

In 2001, the humbling of the “arrogance and hubris” of the Stanford MBAs and their new economy faith was welcomed with smug chuckles of the old guard. They still call it the Internet “bubble” – implying with certain confidence that inside the stock valuations of oh-so-many companies was nothing but air. Schumpeter’s ghost is now chuckling, as the incessant information technologies are continuing to unfold with much more force than bubbles, like some accelerating fire scorching existing businesses and business models

Some are smugly suggesting that the newspapers are in duress because they failed to plan ahead. The newspapers will fall regardless whether their owners plan or not. But those who see ahead see that the newspaper business has nothing to do with paper and everything to do with news.

The future is all about information. It is a future ripe for editors and writers whose life’s work is the manifestation of information. The packaging is what the old business model represents, and that packaging – a few hundred pages of cheap pulp smeared with a quarter-cup of ink – will not see the end of the next decade

It’s no secret that, as the Economist notes, “this decline is being blamed on the rise of the internet.” But what about the Internet, exactly? One cause is surely the loss of classified advertising to craigslist.com and eBay.com. Another cause is simply speed – why wait 24 hours to learn “breaking” news? A third cause is money, namely the high costs of physical production of a newspaper. And yet, the more important phenomenon that I see is disaggregation. A better way to think of this is personalized aggregation, something that can be done digitally with ease.

Why bother reading the six or seven political experts assembled by the Times, when I only enjoy Kristoff, Krugman and Kristol (okay, I’ll admit it … and Dowd)? Alternatively, I can use an RSS feed to get seven (or twenty) of my favorite writers piped directly to me at bloglines?

What is under siege is the business of mass-market aggregated news. I do not know if it can survive, but I do know that – as a blogger – I have its ink on my hands.

Jacobs' Three Product Stages

I borrowed a book from Dane Stangler without his permission, and couldn't resist because I have wanted to read this book for such a long time: The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs.  Written in 1968, the year of riots that radically altered the shape of Detroit and other great cities, the book is amazingly insightful.  Consider this, which I call the Lesson of Three Product Stages:

Garment making, I think, affords an interesting clue to future manufacturing because it exemplifies manufacturing of three distinctly different kinds.  The oldest is craftwork.... The second is mass production.... The third method of garment manufacturing has arisen chiefly during this [20th] century, has grown much more rapidly than the other two, and has become the dominant form.  For lack of any present generic name, let us call it differentiated production.  This method produces relatively modest amounts of each item as compared with mass production, yet it is not craft manufacturing either.... Thanks to this third kind of garment making, one can look at a crowd of thousands of persons in a large city park on a fine day or gathered to watch a parade, and be hard put to find two women or two children dressed in identical outfits. (Chapter 8)

From what I can tell by googling "differentiated production," this concept is underappreciated and sometimes mischaracterized.  Craft products are made by artisans, mass products are made by one-size-fits-all factories, and “differentiated” products are made by modernized assembly processes.  I think the problem is that the word differentiated describes the output, not the process.  Both stage 1 and 3 yield differentiated output, but stages 2 and 3 use mass production.  I am tempted to call stage 3 something new.  Customized? Personalized?  Micro-mass?

Maybe Jacobs Three-Stage Theory is canonical among city scholars, which is entirely likely.  But here's why it matters to me: I have seen the Three Product Stages occur in products that were not invented when I was born.  Key Example:

Personal Computers
Stage 1. 1973-76           Apple I (in a wooden box!)
Stage 2. 1977-81           Apple II, IBM PC
Stage 3. 1985-present    Dell custom-ordered components

So what products are in Stages 1 and 2 today?  And how soon do we think they will get to Stage 3? I can think of a few things in stage 2 (or 2.5) ... houses, game consoles, iPods, digital book readers.  But the most things that are stuck in stage 1 (or 1.5) are major capital infrastructure things like highways and skyscrapers and jumbo jets.  Does anyone doubt they will get to stage 2-3 this century?

Isn't the most interesting irony of Jacobs describing this 3-stage pattern in a book about cities is that it is not too hard to imagine whole cities moving from stage 1 to stage 3?  I keep thinking of all these City 2.0 retirement communities popping up in Florida, Arizona ...

Launch & Ground Rules

Welcome! As the name growthology.org implies, we will be sharing our thoughts in this blog on the topic of entrepreneurship and all that it implies for faster economic growth, greater individual opportunity, smart government policy, and of course, changing the world.

As officers of the nation’s largest foundation devoted to advancing understanding of the importance of entrepreneurship, we have a special interest and strong opinions about these subjects. But as it turns out, the more research the Kauffman Foundation has funded and engaged in ourselves, the more convinced we have become that, at least until recently, the linkage between entrepreneurship and growth has been unjustifiably overlooked in mainstream economics, and by policy makers as well. We hope to play our own small part in rectifying this in future entries.

Here are the ground rules we plan to follow:

1. What we write will often be the first drafts of our thoughts, and we anticipate offering as many questions as opinions. Do not be surprised if we change our minds from time to time – especially as we learn things from you (and as we discuss our views with each other and with our colleagues inside and outside the Foundation). Accordingly, do not expect us to agree on everything. The whole point of blog is to engage one another and especially you in a conversation

2. This blog is a work of the individuals who write and edit for it. What is published here are personal expressions, which do not necessarily state or reflect those of the Kauffman Foundation. The posts will usually be individual expressions, not based on the collective expression of the main editors. Our particular focus is on the research area of entrepreneurial economics and its relationship with growth. There are other areas of interest within Kauffman, which this blog will not cover.

3. We will be non-partisan, but not non-political. Celebrating entrepreneurship in America is bi-partisan, thankfully. So are ignorance, corruption, narrow-mindedness, as well as nobility, insight, and wisdom. We’ll try to point out such examples when we see them.

4. Comments and interaction are welcome. We can’t respond to everything, but we will read all of the comments. This is probably understood by the folks who actually read guidelines, but we’ll enforce civility in the comments, and remove those that that don’t measure up.

- Bob Litan and Tim Kane