The Machiavelli Effect works against a freewheeling, experimental, playful culture that celebrates and rewards tinkerers for trying out wacky ideas rather than punishing them for attempting to institute a paradigm shift.
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Economy, finance, and budgets
Are all the significant inventions already achieved? Economist Robert Gordon identified five Great Inventions, whose discovery in the late nineteenth century powered what he deems an unrepeatable burst of economic growth between 1920 and 1970. These inventions electrification, the internal combustion engine, chemistry, telecommunications, and indoor plumbing were indeed far more significant than what often passes for innovation today. While some recent IT breakthroughs are important, no number of Snapchat filters can hold a candle to well, not needing to use candles to see at night.
The phenomenon that Gordon a careful, data-driven economist attempts to explain is real. Economists use the concept of total factor productivity (TFP) to track the degree to which output is not attributable to observable inputs like labor-hours, capital, or education. When TFP increases, it is due to intangible factors such as innovation or better institutions. From 1920 to
Shifting the impossible to the inevitable A Private ARPA user manual
Stay in the Loop How can we enable more science fiction to become reality? Looking to successful outliers from history is a good place to start. After digging into why DARPA works, I asked the follow-up question: how could you follow DARPA s narrow path in a world very different from the one that created it? This piece is my answer. It both describes and provides a roadmap to actualize a hybrid for/nonprofit organization that leverages empowered program managers and externalized research to shepherd technology that is too researchy for a startup and too engineering-heavy for academia; taking on work that other organizations can t or won t by precisely mapping out blockers to potentially game-changing technology, creating precise hypotheses about how to mitigate them, and then coordinating programs to execute on those plans.