Archive for the “Learning” category
Ross • 7th Dec 2009 • Learning, Living, Thinking • bargaining, negotiation, taxi, travel
Via Tim Harford’s Twitter feed, I came across this interesting piece from Chris Blattman on national variation in bargaining strategies, a.k.a. how to negotiate your taxi fees. A good example of a thread where the comments add as much value as the post.
My top overseas taxi tip: When you arrive at an airport, go by foot from the Arrivals concourse to the Departures concourse. Collect a taxi there to save yourself roughly 50% of the price of a waiting taxi. (Plus you know they are a real taxi, you just saw their last Westerner fare arrive unmolested.)
Ross • 9th Nov 2009 • Learning, Living • finance, investing, money
I sold out of Tesco in October at 407, having bought them at 321 exactly a year previously and enjoyed two dividends in addition to the 26% rise in share value. It was my first investment. Of course, commissions took their toll from my profit: although I try to keep these as low as possible, I’m playing with hundreds rather than thousands, so it’s hard not to lose a few points to the brokers. However, perhaps that’s a good thing as it discourages frequent trading, a sure fire way of making brokers rich at your expense. The asymmetric brokerage costs that I now have arranged (£1.50 flat to buy, £10 flat to sell) are a good incentive to stay in the game too. Despite this, not staying in the game is my first investment mistake. Tesco passed 420 today, making 321 seem even more of a steal.
Ross • 8th Nov 2009 • Learning, Thinking • africa, aid, Dambisa Moyo, development, economics, international development, William Easterly
I have just finished this book, by Dambisa Moyo. It’s a very simple argument. So simple that the preface by Niall Ferguson means you can skip the majority of the book. After an hour, you’ll have the idea. As Niall points out, it’s slightly annoying that these arguments are taken more seriously when they come from Dambisa, an intelligent, attractive Ghanaian, rather than from older, whiter (but equally intelligent) critics of aid, such as Bill Easterly. But that’s not to the discredit of Ms Moyo or the arguments. Somebody needs to get the fact that aid is not the answer on the radar. Moyo does a good job as the ‘anti-Bono’.
Ross • 7th Nov 2009 • Learning • books, business, business school, education, harvard, MBA, reading
I have just finished reading Philip Delves Broughton’s book on the topic (called Ahead of the Curve in the US). I loved the book: it’s one of the best reads of my year. It has also made me want to go to HBS. I think that the school comes across as a place that teaches well and broadly, that strives for a balance of the academic and the social, and which, fundamentally, tries hard. It’s a shame that in his subsequent work, Broughton appears to blame MBAs for the failures of the world economic system. Taking such a position turns him from an interesting outsider with a fresh perspective to a caricature of a bitter critic peddling exposé. It’s not clever.
Ross • 6th Nov 2009 • Learning, Thinking • academic, governance, policy, policy transfer, television
You know that you have been studying too hard when one of your policy case studies comes from The Wire.
In this season, a maverick Baltimore cop, Major Colvin, in despair, stops enforcing drug laws in certain areas of the city. The local drug dealers love the policy, and refer to it as ‘Hamsterdam’ – citing a direct transfer of Amsterdam’s liberal cannabis policies. In reality, Colvin’s plan wasn’t very much like the law in Amsterdam at all. But the dealers obviously had their state-centric hats on that day – had they spent more time reading, they’d be thinking ‘maybe this is an example of the slow process of international, cross-jurisdictional policy learning’!
I think that films are a powerful way to develop case studies. The Mist is a paradigm of testing moral absolutism and Kant’s categorical imperative for a start.
Ross • 30th Oct 2009 • Learning, Thinking
When I first reached this article on ‘Why-Because Analysis’ I thought it was an over-intellectualisation of the three-year old’s game (“But why mummy?”). But the attached diagram does contain rigour and insight. I had never heard of this type of basic analysis before.
Ross • 27th Oct 2009 • Learning • advice, business, presentations, strategy
In a chapter of Winning that appeals to the consultant in me, Jack Welch thinks that you can sum up strategy in five slides.
- What the Playing Field Looks Like Now
- Who are the competitors in the business, large and small, new and old?
- Who has what share, globally and in each market?
- What are the characteristics of this business? Is it commodity or high value or somewhere in beteen? Is it long cycle or short? Where is it on the growth curve? What are the drivers of profitability?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor? How good are their products? How much does each one spend on R&D? How big is each sales force? How performance-driven is each culture?
- Who are this business’s main customers, and how do they buy?
- What the Competition Has Been Up To
- What has each competitor done in the past year to change the playing field?
- Has anyone introduced game-changing new products, new technologies, or a new distribution channel?
- Are there any new entrants, and what have they been up to in the past year?
- What You’ve Been Up To
- What have you done in the past year to change the competitive playing field?
- Have you bought a company, introduced a new product, stolen a competitor’s key salesperson, or licensed a new technology from a start-up?
- Have you lost any competitive advantages that you once had – a great salesperson, a special product, a proprietary technology?
- What’s Around the Corner
- What scares you most in the year ahead – what one or two things could a competitor do to nail you?
- What new products or technologies could your competitors launch that might change the game?
- What M&A deals would knock you off your feet?
- What’s Your Winning Move?
- What can you do to change the playing field – is it an acquisition, a new product, globalisation?
- What can you do to make customers stick to you more than before and more than to anyone else?
If you run all or part of a large business, buy this book, of which Warren Buffett says: “No other management book will ever be needed.” Now to try and apply this thinking to public policy…
Ross • 26th Oct 2009 • Learning
Being a fan of both the Eels and the Many World Interpretation of quantum physics, I was interested to read that:
Hugh Everett III (November 11, 1930 – July 19, 1982) was an American physicist who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, which he called his “relative state” formulation.
Discouraged by the “scorn” other physicists heaped on MWI, Everett left physics after completing his Ph.D. Afterwards, he developed the use of generalized Lagrange multipliers in operations research and applied this commercially as a defense analyst and a consultant. He enjoyed commercial success for a while, although at the time of his death he was facing financial ruin. He was married to Nancy Everett née Gore, with two children: Elizabeth Everett and Mark Oliver Everett, frontman of the band Eels.
I don’t think that this is one of those ‘Wikipedia facts’ either.
Ross • 25th Oct 2009 • Learning, Thinking • academic, economics, Goodin, governance, government, MPA, Niskanen, politics, public administration, public choice, public policy
I volunteered to do a summary of a piece of non-core reading for my MPA class this week. The piece I chose was:
Goodin, R. (1982) ‘Rational Politicians and Rational Bureaucrats in Washington and Whitehall’, Public Administration, Vol. 60, pp. 23-41.
This paper is a discussion and reformulation of Niskanen’s model of decision-making. This model has apparently been very influential, especially with Keith Joseph.
First, the paper outlines what it was that Niskanen thought:
The bare bones of Niskanen’d model are very simple indeed. Basically, there are two types of actors: bureaucrats and politicians. The relationship between them is one of bilateral monopoly. The bureaucrats are the sole suppliers of public goods and services, and politicians are the only buyers of bureaucratic outputs. The goals of each actor are equally simple. Bureaucrats are aiming to maximise theor agency’s budget…. Politicians, in turn are aiming to maximise the votes cast for them at the next election….
Niskanen’s thesis is that, owing to special features on both sides of this bargaining game [namely the way that Congressional committees that authorise budgets are stuffed with those who benefit disproportionately from those budgets] public goods and services are oversupplied at a rate of anything up to twice what would be optimal in terms of citizen preferences.
As the paper discusses, this model leads Niskanen to recommend many NPM style government reforms, to enable bureaucrats to compete for resources.
Goodin applauds this model for its simplicity, but doesn’t think that it offers a good description of decision-making, for a large number of reasons, such as:
- He doesn’t think that bureaucrats would ‘bare faced lie’ about their budgetary needs, as this is both not lucrative (they need to be credible) and very high risk
- The Congressional budget approval procedure altered with the creation of the Congressional Budget Office and other reforms in the 1970s – these mean that budgets are considered in places other than just on committees of vested interests
- Niskanen doesn’t follow up the flip side of his argument and identify when budgets may be lower than desired, and bureaucratic outputs undersupplied. Goodin thinks that this would happen when issues fell between defined policy areas (e.g. Climate Change)
- Goodin doesn’t think that Niskanen’s answer – trying to get bureaucrats to compete – is sensible, because they would be more likely to collude with each other
- Goodin says that Niskanen’s simplistic view of bureaucrat and politican motivation is dated and does not reflect more modern thinking that people care about the policies they work on
As a result of these criticisms, Goodin offers an alternative model in which bureaucrats and politicians collude to overload oversight bodies with information, and use the ensuing confusion to bid for higher budgets. This results in the skewed spending around core programme areas, leaving too little for cross-cutting or broadly defined issues.
In general, this is a refreshingly clear article. However, I found it odd that it did not pick up on the one obvious criticism of Niskanen’s model that occurred to me straight away: Niskanen posits that as a monopoly provider of bureaucratic goods and services, bureaucrats would oversupply and overcharge. Indeed, it appears (from Goodin’s discussion) that he confused the two, or saw them as synonymous. But this is odd, given that it is a standard tenet of economic theory that monopolists undersupply and overcharge. If one grafts this assumption to Goodin’s rebuilt model, you get the worst of both worlds – a collusive bureaucratic-political machine that under-delivers and overcharges in core areas, and doesn’t deliver at all in non-core ones. Impartiality prevents me from commenting on whether this is an accurate picture of Washington or Whitehall.
Ross • 24th Oct 2009 • Learning • drugs, gringo, latin america, sex, south america, travel, violence
American-born Colin is a seasoned gringo who blogs of his new life in Latin America at Expat Chronicles. He’d just written a PDF guide for gringos. The guide is no Lonely Planet: focusing on drugs, sex, love and violence, it’s by turns lurid and sordid, with many detailed descriptions of sex and violence. For this reason, it comes across as honest, and, frankly, captivating; mixing the ethics of stabbing prisonmates with theories of Latina love-psychology. I would not, however, consider it workplace or family reading.
Incidentally, Google Reader ‘found’ this for me – suggesting that I might like it. If its recommendations for what I might enjoy reading continue to be so accurate, I may no longer need to use Tyler Cowen as my human information filter.
