Rethinking the Economy

Does pushing for cleaner energy kill jobs & growth? No, says Google (via Grist’s Stephen Lacey). In fact, waiting will cost us dearly:
Google, a leader of innovation in the digital economy, says that without a private and public focus on innovation in renewables, storage, and electric vehicles, the cost of delaying the clean energy [...]

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After spending the week playing with the pieces of Stack the Odds, I’ve figured something out. Each of the pieces of Stack the Odds feels true. What’s missing is why you should care — what do they give you that other models don’t?
This is particularly critical for the first principle. If the first principle [...]

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Now that I’ve simplified my framework down to 3 main principles — Stack the Odds, We Aren’t As Smart As We Think We Are, and Use Checks and Balances — it’s time to flesh out each of the principles. To get that started, here’s a quick brain dump of the pieces rattling around in Stack [...]

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One of the things I figured out while consolidating my core principles down to just three is that a number of the free-floating principles and strategies I wasn’t sure how to categorize will fit into Stack the Odds in Favor of the Good Guys:

Make It Easy
Make It Visible
Level the Playing Field
[...]

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Fast Company has an interesting article about Starbucks’ efforts to figure out a way of making their cups sustainable. Most of the article focuses on Starbucks’ trials and tribulations – it turns out it’s a lot more complicated than it might at first seen. But near the end of the article, Fast Company gets [...]

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One of the many benefits of playing big on the Corporate Accountability Board is that it gives an assist to other players. Take Newsweek’s interview with 5 of the 800 CEOs who’ve signed the Copenhagen Communiqué on Climate Change. Newsweek asked:
Isn’t there an inherent contradiction between the interests of business and the environment?
Reinoldo [...]

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Can we create rules to stop Wall Street from ripping us off? No, says Wall Street. You aren’t smart enough to understand what we do. Your rules and regulators will just get stomped by traders. All your pathetic attempt to keep up with us will do is stifle innovation. So shut up and let [...]

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Speaking of thieves, it’s not everyday that a former CEO lays out how stacked the deck has become against working families. Atlantic blogger Mike Konczal on a recent Frontline special on the credit card industry:
[It] traces a narrative of the changing nature of credit and debit cards, where services and goods became [...]

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From inside US Trade, courtesy of David Sirota:
Business groups are worried by the potential effects of provisions banning the import of all goods made with convict labor, forced labor, or forced or indentured child labor that were included in a customs bill sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Charles [...]

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While playing around with the new rules metaphor, I realized it’s also time to replace one of my favorites: Stack the Deck in Favor of the Good Guys. I really like juxtaposing stacking the deck with good guys. But there’s a problem with that metaphor — control.
According to Wikipedia:
The term originated from the magician’s [...]

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