In an interview with Wired, Vivek Kundra, Obama’s Chief Information Officer, says Obama plans to post online every scrap of government information they can and make them easily to search. Why?
The key is to have debates and analysis and discussions that are fact-based. And for everyone to have access to that raw data, [...]
Entries from June 2009
Change: Make It Visible
June 29th, 2009 · Comments Off
Tags: Make It Visible · Work and Family
Getting Dirty on the Farm
June 22nd, 2009 · Comments Off
On Wednesday, The Kojo Nnamdi Show had a great example of how understanding actors & their ecosystem can be crucial for pushing the economy towards our values.
Today, middle-class professional folks like myself can get great tasting local organic produce from farmers markets, CSAs, etc. for a good chunk of the year. But for many folks, [...]
Tags: Model
Why Understanding the Actors & Their Ecosystem Matters
June 17th, 2009 · Comments Off
Recently NPR ran a piece about the impact behavioral economists — the folks who argue that people aren’t calculators — are having on the Obama administration. NPR gave a sample of the dizzying amount of hard empirical research backing up behavioral economics, then asked, “So why would economists assume that human beings are so hyper-rational?” [...]
Tags: Model · Organizations Aren't Calculators · People Aren't Calculators
Why Choosing Worklife Balance by Ourselves Hurts Kids
June 15th, 2009 · Comments Off
There’s another reason that we have to choose together if we value work life balance: if we don’t, we’ll hurt kids.
Not the kids of computer programmers. The market’s done a truly terrible job so far at creating computer programming jobs with worklife balance. But as our population ages, the number of people who absolutely have [...]
Tags: Choosing Together · Model · Work and Family
Choosing Together: Worklife Balance
June 10th, 2009 · Comments Off
Suppose you want to be able to work hard at a job you like but also have time for your family or for a life outside work. Womenomics, new book just excerpted by BusinessWeek, says no problem, the market’s going to take care of it. Why? Because most of us really want it:
• [...]
Tags: Choosing Together · Work and Family
Da Model v0.1
June 8th, 2009 · Comments Off
Now that I’ve laid out some basic principles & assumptions, it’s time for my first extremely rough draft of a model for thinking about the economy to create a better world. With the principles & assumptions, I’ve been thinking about them for quite a while. This model? This is my first time — the “Stumbling [...]
User-Centered Policy Design
June 1st, 2009 · Comments Off
As we saw in the last post, one reason computerizing healthcare records can be a disaster is that the people designing the software don’t pay attention to how people will actually use it.
Some software designers argue that the way to avoid this mistake is to use “user-centered design.” Don’t assume that nurses in a hectic [...]
Tags: Assumptions · Health care · Model · Smart Growth
