Eight years ago, Paul Romer was quoted:

The Soviet Union had very strong science in some fields, but it wasn't coupled with strong institutions in the market. The upshot was that the benefits of discovery were very limited for people living there. The wonder of the United States is that we've created institutions of science and institutions of the market [emphasis mine]. They're very different, but together they've generated fantastic benefits.

The Centre for Innovation Studies is an economic think tank in Western Canada that appears to operate in the gap between operational business issues and Romer's theories.

As a teenager and an economics undergraduate, I always had an uneasy feeling about the right-wing nature of economics and business. We would study how the growth of a cookie company could create jobs and make the GDP larger, but it seemed so pointless to me; can't people just bake cookies, or buy dates? If, instead of a cookie company, we were analyzing a company that threw computers off a cliff because there was a paying audience for such an activity, would this be an example of economic growth?

I think it's simplistic to equate all profitable business activity with economic growth; or to equate non-business activity with the opposite (economic cost). Health care is a good example; in Canada, depending on your ideology, you could view health care as a cost to society, and cookies as an example of society's productive output. But this framing is illusory; healthcare is a major fraction of Canada's GDP (10% -- retrieved today).

But much more valuable than either the cost frame or the GDP frame is to analyze the innovation within the healthcare system. How much science takes place? How much learning-by-doing? How much of this is distributed across the system, making the entire system more efficient? This is quite apart from both the utility of healthcare -- that of maintaining an able workforce -- and even further removed from the moral essence of a healthcare system.

But consider a GDP-specific examination of the computer sector that ignores any change in transistor speeds: factories are built to make computers; engineers are employed to design computers; logistics and marketing/merchandising professionals are engaged to bring the computers to market, etc. Clearly, all of this misses the point that a single, $200 computer today is more productive by a factor of millions than its 1980s counterpart; that virtually all other economic activity on Earth can exploit this improvement to become itself more productive.

Look at the centre for innovation studies; they link Moore's Law, so-named by the technology sector, with "creep capacity", so named by the chemical sector. Are the underlying mechanics of these phenomena the same or similar? Consider their "Sailing Ship" anecdote; after the invention of steam-powered ships, sailing innovation radically accelerated.

Studying innovation is kind of meta-meta. But I remember that Arthur Lydiard didn't actually earn much of a living from turning kids from his block in New Zealand into Olympic champions; he earned a living by teaching coaches.

The Globe and Mail headline describes a "surge in popularity" for Harper's Conservatives. It's true; the chess master of politics has managed once again to turn adversity -- recession and an initially dismal record thereof; standing to the right of everyone -- to achievement.

Or has he? In fact, two factors have brought our nation within reach of a "Reform" majority, and both were engineered by the loyal opposition itself.

Back in 2004, the Martin Liberals painted Harper as a scary neo-con -- which he may in fact be. Martin won that election, and lost the next playing the same card. And Ignatieff Dion lost the next playing the same card, all the while Harper governed almost like a Liberal. I believe the 1993 Tory ads poking fun at Jean Chretien's facial disfigurement -- and Chretien's historic speech following -- defined Chretien through three mandates. It reinforced his "little guy" image and endeared at least enough Canadians to the "untested" future Prime Minister. In a similar vein, while not many people feel endeared to Harper, the smart people that make up this country know when they've been told a story; and they hate being fooled twice, three times or even a fourth time?

This feeds directly into what happened this late summer and early fall, when Ignatieff decided Canadians would go the polls (and then decided not). In simple terms, Ignatieff had nothing to sell. Again, the smart people that make up this country know that we've had an easier recession than countries we care about, like the U.S. and those in Western Europe. So what was the election to be fought over -- a technical matter concerning employment insurance reform.

In fact, the Conservatives had succeeded brilliantly in striking at Ignatieff's weakness -- his presumed ugly ambition; his desire to be Prime Minister as a personal feather in the cap, not as a continuation of a lifelong pursuit of ... some policy goal.

Ignatieff was not sincere. Sure, he's new on the national stage, but he's also an experienced TV broadcaster, and, like Reagan or our most recent two Governors General, his charisma should be dancing on the television screens. It does not.

For Ignatieff to have a hope, he must follow this approach:

1. though you came late to the party, recognize that last-fall's near two-for-one election campaign taught Canadians to seek a resolution to the string of minority governments. the reasons for not choosing Harper have diminished since 2004, and amendments to EI reform are not going to overturn everything since. be a real policy alternative.
2. stop thinking you're smart. you are in close quarters and on typewriters, but -- perhaps unlike the U.S. -- Canadians en masse tend to act more intelligently than their average IQ. We can smell a lie, so tell it to us straight.
3. attack Harper on his systemic failures. Most critically, you should take credit for Canada's relatively light recession, given Harper's abysmal blindness and inaction on the issue just 12 months ago. He had to be led to the policy he now takes credit for. Exploit that.
4. take a charisma pill; we'll excuse you for being smooth. We won't excuse you for handing the charisma crown to Stephen Harper.

I prefer Gmail because it's quicker and less bloated. But Outlook will definitely be with us for some time, and while it is, Taglocity offers a product that closes the gap a little.

I'm running Taglocity 3.0 professional edition (free trial; soon to revert to standard edition), after using the 2.0 for about eight months.

In a nutshell, Taglocity radically enhances an existing Outlook feature called "Categories." (Categories = tags). For some time, Outlook has allowed you to categorize emails, but it was clunky.

Here's how I set up and use Taglocity, after installing it:

1. Assuming you currently store your Outlook email in folders, open a folder and select all emails. Now, use the Taglocity Pane (atop your main Outlook page) to assign a tag to all items in this folder. You can just use the name of the folder, but I believe in following these conventions:
   
   
   a) don't pluralize ("report" not "reports") or capitalize, except
   
   b) capitalize acronyms ("PR", not "pr"), and
   
   c) add a hypen after tags that would otherwise form words or parts of words; e.g., "PR-" and "Toronto-". This will pay off later if you run a search for "professional". [Granted, it will fail if your email includes something like, "Toronto-based accountant"].
   
   
   
2. Go through all your folders and repeat this
3. Open your Tag Bar window (click "Tag Bar") clean up your tags. Through right-clicking you can consolidate similar tags.
4. Now, within your Tag Bar window, move the tags around into groups and then assign a colour to each group (e.g., industries are blue; administration is green; personal is yellow)
5. Still within the Tag Bar window, add a half dozen of your most popular tags to the actual Tag Bar. This bar sits atop Outlook's main page, and makes it easier to assign tags to emails.
6. Now, go back and see where you can assign more than one existing tag to an email. E.g., you have an email about a flight on Air Canada and another about consulting services to Air Canada. Tag both "air-canada" but tag one "flight" and another "consulting" or something.
7. When you've done all this, put all of your email in an "archive" folder and delete your other folders. One caveat, for repetitive projects, I prefer to use folders to tags. E.g., I write a monthly newsletter and I store material for it throughout each month; I will tag this material with the name of the newsletter, but I also store it in a folder called "May 2009" or whatever.

Yes, all of this takes some time. You may not follow all these steps for the email you received in the past. But the process demonstrates how to use Taglocity for email as you receive it. When an email arrives, once it's dealt with as a work task, you can click twice and deal with it as clutter.

Finding anything is simply about narrowing down the options -- triangulating. If, in six months, you need details about that Air Canada flight, you can use Outlook's search box to run a keyword search "category:air-canada, category:flight". Even if this produces 100 emails, you can easily scroll to the rough period of the flight. And you can combine the search with "from:dave"-type commands.

If the size of your company permits it, you can benefit from a network effect by making all of your tags public; i.e., the tags you assign to an email will travel with the email when an email is forwarded or replied to. If you invest the time to create a taxonomy for your firm, email conversations will only have to be tagged once, rather than by each recipient.

Sounds complicated, but in fact the top benefits I've experienced from using this are:

1. if you equate a tag to a folder, you can put one email in two or more "folders" at the same time, so it's easier to find regardless of how your brain is working when you need the email. E.g., you might spend a year storing email first by industry (or client) and then by service performed, and then decide you want to store by service performed first and then by industry/client within those folders. With tags, you just do both.
2. it's ridiculously quick to tag and drag emails to a single folder than to drag up and down Outlook and through nested folders.
3. though command-line searches are not popular, in fact we have all become used to them through Google; they're quite quick when you get used to them. have you ever watched someone painfully spend two or three minutes trying to find a simple email? if you can narrow the problem down by two or three tags (and perhaps a rough date), it shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen seconds to find a needle in a 10,000 email haystack.

In time, people will no doubt have personal taxonomies. You'll add 100 tags to Gmail and you'll use them for all work documents, personal documents, calendar items, emails, photos and videos, and basically any discrete piece of content you store.

I find wine absurd. That's not to say I don't like drinking it. I'd drink it at work if I could! But how do you choose one? Seriously ... by what criteria does one purchase wine?

This was well summed up by a friend of mine who, at 19, entered a liquor store in our hometown of North York and suggested, "we're looking for a good bottle of wine." Following this, we went to a hardware store and asked for "a good thing."

Fifteen years later, I have added a bit to my knowledge of wine, but I'm not sure if any of the knowledge is useful; I know that Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot are grapes, that Napa Vally and Bordeaux are regions (and that you could probably spend weeks in Bordeaux and come away describing it as an indecipherable taxonomy of applied geography). But still, is it useful? Useful means that I can predict pretty well what tastes good.

Well, a few nights ago I drank a bottle of Jip Jip Rocks Shiraz 2007. And it tasted very good. I think it was the best wine I can remember drinking, and I remember at least the first two thirds of it.

I think it was $15 at the LCBO; not a big price. I took a different approach to finding it; I think, a logical approach. I had come across the name Robert Parker Jr.; an American wine reviewer who is both an anti-elite in his bucolic homestead and unrefined upbringing, and, relative to folks like Billy Munnelly, confidently snobbish about really good wine. Unlike many anti-snobs, Parker doesn't balk at drinking a $60 wine or calling it as better than a lot of $12 wine.

There's some backlash against Parker: who is this nobody from nowhere-USA? Even if he is somebody, he's destroying wine by favouring certain rich, heavy types and forcing small and large vintners to comply.

Perhaps, but I don't care. Like I said, I want to drink wine that tastes good. And Jip Jip Rocks Shiraz 2007, bought on Parker's recommendation, tasted great.

So, my approach was simple. I discovered that some of Parker's ratings can be accessed at Wine.com -- specifically, with a click from the homepage, they lay out the wines that are highly rated and that cost under $20. The rating system is a bit odd, but it's enough to know that a rating of 80 is good, 90 is excellent and 95+ is very excellent. So, I just cross-referenced what RP (as Robert Parker's ratings are symbolized with) rated highly with what the LCBO sells (it turns out, correlation is poor).

Now, I learned very little about earth or limestone or breezes or rivers or Chateaus or grafting or anything to find a nice wine. I just learned Robert Parker's name and did what he said. He seems to correlate with my taste.

My point is not that people should be sheeple. Rather, it's that I cannot access wine with the approach commonly presented by the greater wine industry. Even Billy Munnelly's 3-type breakdown failed me; they all tasted not that great.

In my view, drinking wine should be a journey (I cannot but hear Adam Clayton's "A musical journey!"). I mean, if you go to Ireland, you don't go first to the geography and then to the people and then to the food. You do it all at once; you mash it all up, and how you make sense of it is through experience (sensuous). A hamburger in Doolin while chatting with young hitchhikers and listening to traditional Irish music is sensuous; it's a discrete moment and memory. As a moment, it can be used to understand other things; is this music like that music? Is a hamburger considered Irish food or foreign food? What's common and what's different between the generations?

I'd love to find a book, perhaps an annual book, written as a wine journey for the uninitiated. Why not! You start with something bold, then learn one thing about it and why it's bold. Then you go to an Ontario Merlot, and try to understand what's different about them. And so on.

I think I could understand one or two bottles a week; but I cannot understand 75 of anything, at least not all at once. I need to work my way through them, experientially, creating context using useful, common criteria.

So, wine! Get your act together. Write something useful, you stained, fruity lallygag.

PS -- next up:
MAIPE MALBEC 2008 Argentina | Proviva
VINTAGES 93823 | 750 mL | $ 12.95

Paul Romer is an economist who is at the vanguard of the most exciting school in the science today: New Growth Theory. Some history: until the 1960s, economists believed that economic growth resulted from two things:

1. investing today's surplus (mostly profits) in more equipment, like factories and/or more civil infrastructure, like highways and canals
2. adding more workers through social policy -- immigration, the baby bonus, etc. -- to accomplish more economic activity at lower cost

In the 1950s, Robert Solow amended that formula by adding technology to the mix. In Solow's view, most economic growth results from technological change -- discovery -- while some still results from the things mentioned above. As an economist, Solow didn't seek to understand why technological change occurred, but he could measure it and this came to be called the Solow Residual. The Solow Residual measures the pace of discovery: things like more viscous motor oils, more durable highway pavement, more efficient light bulbs. Imagine for a moment that in World War II you were asked by your government to build a computer with eight billion vacuum tubes; in fact, winning the war would be easier than building such a device, though today you can buy 8.56 billion transistors at Wal Mart for $10 in a 2 gig flash key.

In Solow's view, this technological change occurs exogenously -- outside of the economic system. Perhaps discoveries happen in universities, or in government labs.

Romer's contribution in the 1980s, as a young economist moving between Chicago, MIT and, for a year, Queen's University in Kingston, was to place technological change within the economy. For Romer, transistors don't become smaller because the government makes this a priority, but because every man woman and child in North America may have bought 1000 transistors in 1985 annually, via their TV remote controls, Walkmans and home computers. Today, we perhaps buy 25 billion transistors annually -- all the while directing investment to transistor development and research, while innocently playing X-box or using a remote control or answering a cell phone.

In fact, the Soviets developed the system of centralized discovery; that regime was an impressive force in science and technology, but this was never linked to the market system and so advances never went beyond the moon -- which in fact is not a good thing. The Soviet model could not benefit from compounding returns from discovery, from the X-box market funding the development of faster computers that design better transistors to make faster computers. Romer boldly projects increasing returns for humanity in perpetuity.

Richard Florida and Jane Jacobs comprise the Yin and Yang of urban theory. Jacobs prized diversity and density as necessities for a thriving city; Florida looks for thriving cities to find pools spawning the ideas that are changing the world. Famously, Florida uses a "gay index" to rate cities; though predominance of overt homosexuality in a city is unlikely to cause genius, it tends to be correlated with tolerance and openness to new ideas; while Pride Week doesn't spawn transistor development in any direct way, Florida believes that a city that can handle Pride Week is more likely to discover new things. To Florida, this diversity is exogenous; Jacobs situates it in an urban planning policy that, thankfully, Toronto has to a large degree adopted. So has New York and many other leading cities.

So, to this point in my post you have Jane Jacobs telling us how to arrange cities, Richard Florida telling us how good cities produce discovery, and Paul Romer telling us that discovery matters more than anything else when describing economic growth.

But take this interesting article by a U.S. academic, Vivek Wadhwa. Titled, America's Perilous Anti-Immigrant Protectionism, Wadhwa delves into recession-fueled Xenophobia in America -- blaming foreigners for taking "American jobs"; Wadhwa claims he himself is not excepted, receiving hate mail and threats for pointing out roughly what I have just written -- that America's immigrants are not taking "commodity jobs"; rather, they are growing the U.S. economy through discovery linked with the uniquely pervasive American market system. In simple terms, non-white people are inventing things and then employing lots of white people, all the while keeping America at the leading edge of economic growth and technology.

Wadhwa astutely notes that these immigrants, facing hate and anti-immigrant policies, may be taking their ideas elsewhere; just as many smart Jewish Germans did in the mid to late 1930s, in large part enabling the U.S. and not German to invent the atom bomb.

Much has been written about global neoliberalism and the "race to the bottom" of corporate tax rates -- certainly, states like Ireland have benefited by agreeing to charge multinationals much less tax. Horrible poverty has been wiped out in a generation by this.

But what about the race to attract the next Sergey Brin, the next Vivek Wadhwa, the next Albert Einstein? A cleavage is occurring in employment between the highly skilled and those who can only sell their labour as a commodity; the market is global for both, creating horrible pain for the unskilled and incredible opportunity for the skilled.

Growth in the global economy is from knowledge. People who are smart enough to contribute to that are smart enough, open enough to migrate globally. India and China must produce smart kids at the same rate as the U.S., or Britain -- just look at the competition in our universities at a point when the majority of people in these countries do not have access to proper education or opportunities to showcase their inheritance. In time, the cities with the right planning -- structural change -- and the states with the right policies to attract these people will quickly become better than the other ones.

[Note: this post was called Xenophobia, discovery, and economic growth; Richard Florida linked to it under the current title, which I thought was a good one, so I changed it.]

Until last week, I was taking a night course in political science -- pre-graduate type of thing. I handed in my final essay at the last class last Thursday. It was a cool essay, looking into issues of law and democracy; whether it is democratic for the judiciary to overrule the majority (parliament) in Canada.

Metaphorically for me, the content was pretty interesting but the process sucked -- I crammed it out in little more than a week of late nights, staying up till 4:00 am the night before I submitted it. But after I handed it in, I didn't actually feel exhausted. I felt refreshed; in the wake of a week of little sleep and long hours reading dense legal theory, (on top of a day job and parenthood), I felt as relaxed as I might after a week of vacation. Creative new ideas are popping into my head that have nothing to do with legal theory. I slept 6 hours last night so I could watch a move and don't feel the least tired.

This got me thinking. I saw Reservation Road last night -- ho hum. But a plot premise is that a bored, under-employed suburban father about my age believes to some degree that he could find his true calling in life by spending six months or more unemployed and promenading or journaling in Paris (family in tow). I used to do this very thing (sans famille) for this very reason.

So which is it? If you really wanted a sense of "otherness" -- a separation from monotony -- a new, vital clarity, creativity and sureness about yourself, should you do a lot of nothing or a lot of something? Should you bake, or break, your brain?

Let me be clear, forgetting my exhaustion Thursday night (and subsequent debilitating neck spasm ;-), I felt about as good from Friday till now as I would after resting totally on a dock by a lake for five days. Normal life feels easy after hard thinking.

Of course, I worked really hard on this essay, and learned a lot of new things; I was passionate about the subject and about getting the argument right. Work is rarely like that. So then the issue becomes: is it more "living" to -- take an easy job that permits you to travel or write or play sports or do whatever feels like real life to you; or, to find a passionate vocation and work exceptionally hard with brief breaks.

I remember the economic theory I read years ago describing the trade-off between work and leisure; economics made a moral assumption that all people prefer unpaid leisure to paid work, and that they trade some leisure for some income; economics assumes "work to live." Common Sense today talks about not working too hard and smelling the roses. But maybe it's more tangled than that.

I called this post The Snowball because I think that's a nice label for the effect of working hard; you don't get tired, you get bigger. You know a little more, have a little more experience, and have a little less to do -- everything else should be a bit easier, and so on. A snowball rolling along gets bigger.

What motivates a personal trainer? Some people love the culture of gyms. But I think personal trainers are often motivated by helping people. For 30 or 60 minutes at a time, they're physically close to a person who, in many cases, wants to feel better about themselves; trainers have the ability to help them get there. You could say that there's no irony between them -- the trainer isn't using a bait-and-switch technique, or attending sessions on how to "sucker in" more clients.

Usually, they're not just acting like, but are being a real person. Pretty simple, really.

Notwithstanding all that, training is normally capitalistic. My friend trains in her clients' homes and drums up work herself. She's an independent business person -- she uses her own capital to buy equipment and promote her company.

The free market is competitive. Though Adam Smith anticipates many features of capitalism -- the minute division of labour chief among them -- the pitting of opponents against one another to produce the best offer (product, price or marketing/placement) for consumers is central to how we view the positive side of the system today.

But within this system is a central irony -- that companies want to profit from their relationship with customers -- certainly from the consumer relationship (the B2B relationship is a bit harder to fudge). Most of the ads I take in make me feel like I'm being lied to; in fact, I think most people of my generation automatically handicap anything they receive via mass distribution, or that doesn't carry a label of authenticity with it.

What is the larger effect of this? I try not to consume media much anymore; just radio and Internet mainly, but few movies or magazines and no TV. But if I, like many people, took in hours of media daily, and if it was all funded by explicit and implicit (embedded) advertising messages, would that not affect how I see the world? The level of trust I generally have.

And would that carry over to my trust of political leaders, or in fact of policies that were genuinely developed in an objective and fair way -- the governance of our nation. Or of personal relationships, or of how I might relate socially in public places, like malls or sidewalks, or while driving in traffic.

I think there's something big about closeness -- I think physical trainers are more likely to develop friendships with clients than to lie to them and use them. What about mid-sized private companies? Are they more authentic than multinationals? And, if so, what is it about multi-nationals that makes then inauthentic? Can a multinational consumer chain be built that cultivates genuine and honest relationships in all points of business (relationships with suppliers and other vendors, creditors, employees/owners, and customers)? What if a group of local, authentic businesses formed a federation -- would it change things? What if that federation adopted a form of central authority -- what then?

I've written before that authenticity is big -- in PR and in business as well as of course in life. But for people who don't perform personal training or public school teaching etc. as a career, it can be difficult to not creep over that line. But that line really, in the long run, is vital personally and in society.