This TED talk by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi about creativity and flow made me think about what actually determines greatness in life, both from an individual perspective and from a agency perspective. 

It all comes down to one thing: experience. Intelligence and talent is one thing, but becoming super-skilled is all about doing things many times over. After ten years of doing something, you will fully master it. So, it's all about statistics. Nassim Nicolas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness, has an even more extreme position: he argues that success is totally random – people who have reached exceptional wealth have been the right people at the right time in the right environment. 

I'd say the outlook for somebody who believes only in statistics is rather gloomy, and I believe there's one way to beat the system: productivity (not really surprising, most exceptional people I know also happen to work a lot). So, if you're twice as productive as the average person, you will do twice as much and instead of ten years, you'll master a subject after five years. If you're lazy, things will take longer – unless you're a lucky bastard, that is. 

The new SAAB seems to better than anything that has come out of the previously GM-owned car manufacturer for a long time. Maybe it’s PR work that has effectively positioned the new 9-5 as a great car. Or maybe it’s a live example of Jospeh Schumpeter’s idea of Creative Destruction – that past production resources must be destroyed in order to give way for innovation. For a corporation like GM that’s evidently unable to renew itself, the best solution forward might a total dismantlement.

These days I’m hooked on Glasvegas, a hyped UK band and a good example of what Michael Dahlén writes about in Nextopia, the society where everything is about what will happen in the future. In the UK, new rock bands have always been the hyped as the next big thing since the Beatles. Kind of like the kind of hope that arises before football championships.

In 1978, when Krugman was an assistant professor at Princeton, he wrote a paper called The Theory of Interstellar Trade. If two planets, for example Earth and Trantor, are engaging in trade of goods that require transportation near lightspeed, how will interest rates be determined, given the theory of general relativity (time goes slower near the speed of light)?

Abstract: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved… This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.

This entertaining paper has now been scanned and is free for everybody to enjoy.

NY Times via http://theplanninglab.com/?p=414 Swedish people certainly know their brands. Sweden has blessed the world with brands such as IKEA, Volvo, Ericsson, H&M and so forth. We have also embraced foreign brands and made them our own. Swedes drink both Gevalia and Illy coffee, drive Volvo and BMW, fly Scandinavian and Ryanair, drink Pripps and Staropramen, so in that respect, it could be argued that Swedish consumers are, compared to many other nationalities, more rationalist than nationalist, and definitely not traditionalist. Most bang for the krona seems to be the rule: if foreign brand is better, we choose that brand. If the domestic brand is better, we choose that brand. If foreign and domestic are equal, we choose both.