Posted on 07/23/2011 7:17:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
I'm going to tell you something that Barack Obama doesn't understand.
And because he doesn't understand it, our country is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when we cannot afford to waste hundreds of millions of dollars.
Time and again President Obama has told us how he intends to solve our health care problems: spend money on pilot programs and other experiments; find out what works and then go copy it. He's also repeatedly said the same thing about education. The only difference: in education we've already been following this approach with no success for 25 years.
Still, if the president were right about health and education, why wouldn't the same idea apply to every other field? Why couldn't we study the best way to make a computer, or invest in the stock market and do any number of other things — and then copy it?
I want to propose a principle that covers all of this: entrepreneurship cannot be replicated. Put differently, there is no such thing as a cookbook entrepreneur.
Let's suppose for a moment that I am wrong. Suppose we could study the behavior of successful entrepreneurs and write down the keys to their success in a book that everyone could read and copy.
Consider Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Sam Walton. If we could discover what they did right, and everyone copied their behavior, then we could all become billionaires. Right? Well, not quite.
Here's the problem: In order for each of us to be a billionaire, we have to each be doing something that produces a billion dollars' worth of goods and services. But if all we're doing is copying action items out of a book, then we are not doing anything special. And if we’re not doing anything special, we are definitely not producing a billions dollars of value added.
In mathematics, Gödel's Theorem says that no complex, axiomatic system can be both consistent and complete. What I am proposing is something similar for social science. Although there are some habits of highly successful people that can be identified and copied, there are not enough of them for each of us to become highly successful ourselves through copycat behavior alone.
I think I will call this Goodman's Nonreplicability Theorem.
In health care, it's already been borne out.
Scholars associated with the Brookings Institution identified 10 of the best hospital regions in the country and then tried to identify common characteristics that could be replicated. There were almost none. Some regions had doctors on staff. Others paid fee-for-service. Some had electronic medical records. Others did not.
A separate study of physicians' practices found much the same thing. There were simply not enough objective characteristics that the practices had in common to allow an independent party to set up a successful practice by copycat alone.
By the way, this is not bad news. It is good news. How much fun would life be if we all went around copying what we read in a book?
We’re all going to be billionaires. Course a loaf of bread will cost a million.
Time to open my new business
Jim Bobway’s Currency Exchange
godel’s theorem is a long way from the so-called social “sciences” because
these social sciences are not science
but ideologies.
BO and the Democrats are doing their best to do the same for us.
Surprisingly, the moral philosopher Adam Smith's "An Enquiry into the Causes of the Wealth of Nations" was published at about the same time as the Declaration of Independence in America.
Free, though imperfect, individuals, unencumbered by the heavy hand of a political elite of likewise imperfect persons, could create goods and services, freely exchange the work of their own hands, and enrich the lives of people all over the world.
Millions flocked to America over the next 200 years to participate in the freedom provided by what Madison called a "benign" government (meaning, it was not a malignancy which consumed "the People's" wealth). By that mechanism, America became a literal breadbasket for the world and the source of compassion and benevolence unmatched by any other nation.
Fast forward to the Mao/Marx/Lenin/Keynes philosophy which possesses the current Administration and its supporters. That world view relies on what Madison and the other Founders surely would call a "malignant" government--one which coercively imposes its imperfect will on the individuals who create and work, in order to select and "redistribute" their earnings to political allies and friends. In other words, the mechanism is legalized theft from some for the benefit of a captive group of dependencies who will continue to vote the "redistributors" into positions of power.
The definition of one is LIBERTY. The definition of the other is TYRANNY.
Can you decide which best would answer Adam Smith's 1775 query:
"An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations"?
And the one and only “program” the government spent money on that actually improved our lives and caused numerous amazing inventions, he defunded - NASA.
Yesterday Obama said we should all be millionaires
Once again he proved just hot STUPID he really is.
Not everyone can be a millionaire. If everyone were a millionaire then nobody would be a millionaire.
The only way to make everyone a millionaire is to magically wave his wand over a dollar bill and call it a million
Obama OBVIOUSLY has never started a business - ran a business - made payroll - or has any concept of money and economics.
THUS we are doomed to fail at the hands of a madman - named Owhiney.
hot=how :)
Mmmmm. Million dollar bread...
I stopped reading after this sentence. Why consider anything this person says if they do not even understand what gross revenues are?
How To Survive And Prosper From The O'conomy:
Investment Tip: Go long on wheelbarrows.
A hundred million isn’t going to cut anything. To close a budget deficit of $2 trillion, would take $100 million a day, 20,000 days to cover. But there are only 365 days in a year.
Actually with most all of our transactions done with electrons these days, most of the work will involve programming changes to allow more digits left of the decimal point.
Wouldn’t you also have to factor in the differences in human nature? How many are willing/able to do what it takes to become a billionaire?
“The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” comes to mind... lol
With reference to Adams Smith and America's founding philosophy, one of the problems of the last several decades is that Democrats have spent years making so-called "studies" of "poverty" and its causes.
As a moral philosopher, not an economist, Smith, on the other hand, chose to study wealth creation. That was in the late 1700's and coincidental with the live laboratory for wealth creation which was going on at the same time in America.
When the great statement of political philosophy, the Declaration of Independence, was asserted in 1776, the colonists had been experimenting with liberty for about 150 years, in a wilderness, using centuries-old tools.
By the time Edmund Burke made his famed "Speech on Conciliation . . . " before the British Parliament, much of his reasoning about the American colonists had to do with the great productivity and wealth creation on that faraway sliver of land.
He alluded to the great spirit of liberty which existed in America, its roots, and how it contributed to the amazing productivity and wealth being created there.
One can only conclude that today's Washington politicians are either ignorant of America's foundations in liberty, or their agenda seeks its destruction. The answer to poverty is liberty and opportunity--not political tyranny by inept, arrogant, and power-hungry Machiavellian leaders.
Yes We Can!
Not exactly correct. I think you should include the Department of Defense. For example DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been responsible for such things as the Internet and Global Positioning System.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was established in 1958 to prevent strategic surprise from negatively impacting U.S. national security and create strategic surprise for U.S. adversaries by maintaining the technological superiority of the U.S. military.
To fulfill its mission, the Agency relies on diverse performers to apply multi-disciplinary approaches to both advance knowledge through basic research and create innovative technologies that address current practical problems through applied research. DARPA’s scientific investigations span the gamut from laboratory efforts to the creation of full-scale technology demonstrations in the fields of biology, medicine, computer science, chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics, material sciences, social sciences, neurosciences and more. As the DoD’s primary innovation engine, DARPA undertakes projects that are finite in duration but that create lasting revolutionary change.
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