Money and Finance
- Bill Gates: We Cannot Stand Still On Polio, But We Can Push Ahead And End It
At Microsoft I learned that innovation is the most powerful force for change in the world. Today, I see that same excitement and promise in my work in philanthropy. Thanks to the accelerating pace of innovation, we are making new discoveries to drive...
- Forget Edison: This Is How History's Greatest Inventions Really Happened
Found via @farnamstreet. The world's most famous inventors are household names. As we all know, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone, and Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. Except they didn't. The...
- Invention Is The Mother Of Economic Growth - By Nathan Myhrvold
Found via The Big Picture. One reason “dismal science” aptly describes economics is that it so often winds up in a zero-sum trade-off of diminishing returns. That gets depressing when the global economy is in a sorry state, as it is now. Most economists...
- Newsweek Interview With Bill Gates And Randi Weingarten On Education
Our schools are lagging behind the rest of the world. Why is that? How did we fall so far behind? Gates: Well, it’s the big issue. A lot of other countries have put effort into their school systems. So part of it is the competition is better. The...
- Gates Foundation: 2010 Annual Letter From Bill Gates
This is my second annual letter. The focus of this year’s letter is innovation and how it can make the difference between a bleak future and a bright one. 2009 was the first year my full-time work was as co-chair of the foundation, along with Melinda...
Money and Finance
Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems
We can learn a lot about improving the 21st-century world from an icon of the industrial era: the steam engine.
Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World." Among the most important were a new way to measure the energy output of engines and a micrometer dubbed the "Lord Chancellor" that could gauge tiny distances.
Such measuring tools, Mr. Rosen writes, allowed inventors to see if their incremental design changes led to the improvements—such as higher power and less coal consumption—needed to build better engines. There's a larger lesson here: Without feedback from precise measurement, Mr. Rosen writes, invention is "doomed to be rare and erratic." With it, invention becomes "commonplace."
In the past year, I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal—in a feedback loop similar to the one Mr. Rosen describes.
This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right. Historically, foreign aid has been measured in terms of the total amount of money invested—and during the Cold War, by whether a country stayed on our side—but not by how well it performed in actually helping people. Closer to home, despite innovation in measuring teacher performance world-wide, more than 90% of educators in the U.S. still get zero feedback on how to improve.
- Bill Gates: We Cannot Stand Still On Polio, But We Can Push Ahead And End It
At Microsoft I learned that innovation is the most powerful force for change in the world. Today, I see that same excitement and promise in my work in philanthropy. Thanks to the accelerating pace of innovation, we are making new discoveries to drive...
- Forget Edison: This Is How History's Greatest Inventions Really Happened
Found via @farnamstreet. The world's most famous inventors are household names. As we all know, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone, and Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. Except they didn't. The...
- Invention Is The Mother Of Economic Growth - By Nathan Myhrvold
Found via The Big Picture. One reason “dismal science” aptly describes economics is that it so often winds up in a zero-sum trade-off of diminishing returns. That gets depressing when the global economy is in a sorry state, as it is now. Most economists...
- Newsweek Interview With Bill Gates And Randi Weingarten On Education
Our schools are lagging behind the rest of the world. Why is that? How did we fall so far behind? Gates: Well, it’s the big issue. A lot of other countries have put effort into their school systems. So part of it is the competition is better. The...
- Gates Foundation: 2010 Annual Letter From Bill Gates
This is my second annual letter. The focus of this year’s letter is innovation and how it can make the difference between a bleak future and a bright one. 2009 was the first year my full-time work was as co-chair of the foundation, along with Melinda...