100+ Self-Education Resources For Lifelong Learners

Self-education and the embrace of lifelong learning is becoming a critical mindset to navigate our rapidly changing world. Lifelong learning can be a catalyst for earning more money in your career and it can be a gateway to self-employment. Fortunately, the Internet has made it easier than ever to find the right resources to spark your curiosity and learn what you need to know.

In this post, I have compiled some of the most useful self-education resources that I’ve found online. You will find online courses and tools to master new skills, learn languages, find classic books, broaden your mind and interact with other lifelong learners.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs):

Take free online courses from the world’s best Universities. MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) provide video lectures, structured deadlines and interactive learning communities.

1. Coursera -The largest course platform for free MOOCs . Founded by two former Stanford University professors.
2. Udacity – Founded by Sebastian Thrun, the creator of the artificial intelligence system behind Google’s self-driving cars. Udacity’s focus is on free MOOCs for improving your knowledge of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines.
3. EdX – A free MOOC platform developed through a partnership between Harvard, MIT and Berkeley. Expanding rapidly.
4. MIT Open Courseware – This ambitious project launched over a decade ago by MIT makes the course materials used in virtually all of MIT’s courses available on the web for free.
5. Khan Academy – Salman Khan’s pioneering online academy where you can learn just about any academic subject online for free.
6. Saylor – Started by serial entrepreneurial and education futurist Michael Saylor. The Saylor Foundation is a non-profit that provides a free University education that includes written exams and University credits for most of your work.
7. University of the People – A tuition-free online University that aims to democratize higher education by offering it anyone in the world.
8. iTunes U – Apple’s iTunes University initiative makes it easy to take courses on your iPhone or iPad wherever you go.
9. World Education University (WEU) – A massively open online University (they call it MOOC 2.0) that offers degrees and full program for free. It’s a for-profit enterprise that funds itself through advertising, publishing and organization partnerships rather than tuition fees.
10. Canvas Network – An open learning network with a growing collection of free online courses. Sign up early for courses, they fill up fast.

Lectures and Video Learning Websites:

Get inspired by watching short lectures by the world’s leading thinkers, entrepreneurs and creators.

1. TED – With its slogan “Ideas Worth Spreading” the TED Conference (stands for Technology, Education, Design)  features world’s leading academics, teachers and innovators in easily digestible 18-minute lectures.
2. YouTube EDU – Google’s YouTube Education channel. Lots of great educational content, lectures and conference talks conveniently organized.
3. Do Lectures – Inspiring talks from people who have set out to change the world.
4. Solve For X – A forum established by Google to amplify technology-based solutions to radically challenge the world’s problems.
5. Big Think – Short videos with important contemporary thinkers, entrepreneurs and scientists talking about their expertise.
6. Fora.TV – Constantly expanding collection of videos from the world’s biggest conferences and events.
7. @Google Talks – Innovator thinkers and doers visit Googleplex to give inspiring talks that are posted freely online by Google.
8. RSA Animate – Engaging, hand-drawn videos that illustrate important issues in the world today.
9. Creative Live – Live workshops taught by world class experts. Free if you mark the talks on your schedule and watch the live streams.
10. Mixergy – Excellent courses and interviews by Andrew Warner with today’s top Internet entrepreneurs.
11. Academic Earth – 1000s of free video lectures from many of the world’s top Universities.
12. The Faculty Project – Udemy has created an excellent free platform for the best professors from the world’s leading Universities to teach online.
13. The Floating University – Inspiring video lectures from today’s most interesting thinkers, practitioners and leading scholars.
14. Reddit Lectures – A busy Reddit community for the latest and greatest video lectures.
15. Video Lectures – A growing collection of 14,500+ video lectures.

Watch Streaming Documentaries:

Watching documentaries is a great way to relax and learn new things.

1. Mind Expanding Documentaries – Free, streaming educational documentaries collected from across the web.
2. Snag Films – One of the largest collections of ad-supported movies and documentaries online.
3. Can I Stream I? – Search Netflix, Hulu, Google Play and iTunes to find movies and documentaries that you can instantly rent or buy.
4. PBS Video – Watch full-length shows and documentaries from PBS. I especially recommend their Frontlinedocumentaries.

Digital Skills Training:

An  emerging group of education startups that are offering skills training for the digital workplace.

1. Udemy – The iTunes of learning new digital skills and training for your career.
2. Skillshare – A global community centered around creativity, collaboration and learning by doing. Online and offline classes.
3. University of Reddit – If you love Reddit, you can take part in their evolving online education initiative.
4. ALISON – Free workplace skills training with over 300+ online courses accessible to you.

Digital Skills Portfolios:

With so much informal learning now happening online, your credentials are less important than what you can do with your knowledge. These platforms are developing alternative forms of accreditation that are based on your practical skills and accomplishments.

1. Degreed – Trying to jailbreak the college degree by helping your build a digital, lifelong diploma.
2. Pathbrite – Collect, organize and share a lifetime of learning and achievement.
3. Smarterer – Benchmark your skills and track what you’ve learned through online skill tests.
4. Mozilla’s Open Badges – Get recognition for your skills and achievement by earning digital badges.
5. LinkedIn – The professional social networking website has become the new social resume.

Open Educational Resources:

Access high-quality education textbooks, get your burning questions answered and explore a world of free digital self-education resources.

1. Boundless – Disrupting the big textbook publishers by offering textbooks online, for free.
2. Textbook Revolution – Free, open source textbooks if that’s how you want to learn.
3. Open Textbooks – Browse college textbooks by subject, which are made freely available online.
4. Scribd – Amazing library of digital documents on every imaginable subject.
5. Slideshare – Learn new things and find information broken down to the essential bits in this incredible library of digital presentations.
6. Creative Commons Education – An open source movement to make educational content freely available online.
7. Connexions - A global knowledge sharing community that breaks information down into small, easily-digestible chunks.
8. Open Study – Ask. Answer. Understand. Get real-time study help in the world’s largest study group.
9. Quora - My favorite question and answer community. Find expert and amateur advice on every imaginable topic.
10. iTunes Podcasts – I highly recommend browsing the Podcasts on iTunes. So many incredible free audio shows at your fingertips.

DIY Education Communities:

Online communities where you can meet other lifelong learners and build a mastermind community for your own self-education endeavors.

1. Uncollege – The Uncollege movement challenges the notion that you need to go to University to get an education. They provide inspiration and resources for alternative educational paths.
2. Zero Tuition College – A community of self-directed learners that provide mentoring to each other.
3. The Public School – A school with no curriculum. A framework for self-education and auto-didactic activities, operating under the assumption that everything is in everything.
4. Meetup – Find interesting meetups and meet new people in your local area. Or start your own meetup, join a mastermind group or create a new learning community.
5. P2PU – An open education community for lifelong learning leveraging open source education materials, collaborative learning and an evolving system that gives learners recognition for their achievements.

Liberal Arts: Study The Classics

A great way to get inside the minds of civilization greatest thinkers is to read their books.

1. The Liberal Arts 4-Year Reading List – Study the essential classical books and educate yourself in the liberal arts by reading a book every 2 weeks for 4 years (or pick the ones that interest you the most). The first year covers Greek authors; the second year is from Roman, medieval, Renaissance periods; the third year is the books of the 17th and 18th centuries and the fourth year covers books from the 19th and 20th centuries.
2. A Lifetime’s Reading: The World’s 500 Greatest Books – Compiled by the prolific Philip Ward,  a librarian, scholar, editor and author of more than 50 books.
3. Great Books of the Western World – 161 books essential books of the West on Wikipedia.
4. The Western World’s 500 Greatest Books – An excellent collection of over 500 books from Western civilization with links to where you can read them on Project Gutenberg.
5. Great Literature of the Eastern World – I couldn’t find an equivalent book of Eastern books online but this book apparently covers the major works of prose, poetry and drama from China, India, Japan, Korea and the Middle East.
6. Classic Reader - Search and access an online library of 3800+ mostly classic books.
7. Planet Ebook – Read 80+ free classic books for free on your computer or mobile device.
8. Project Gutenberg – Read over 42,000 free books in the massive Project Gutenberg archive. Download many of them directly to Kindle or other mobile reading formats. Amazing resource for self-education.

Find and Share Amazing Books:

Discover new books that you can read online or find at your local library and connect with other people reading similar books.

1. Good Reads - A massive social network (recently acquired by Amazon) for discovering new books and sharing the books you love.
2. Book Yards – 1000s of more free ebooks easily browsable by author or category.
3. Read Print Library – A social network “where books and people meet”.
4. Library Thing – A community of 1.6 million book lovers. Meet and share stories with people who have similar taste or are reading the same books you are.

Self-Knowledge and Wisdom:

Educating the mind without awakening the heart is no education at all. Explore religious texts to develop your self-knowledge and awaken to the spiritual dimension that gives life meaning and richness.

1. Internet Sacred Text Archive – Read the sacred texts from the world’s major religions and other less institutionalized religions like Sufism, Gnosticism, Tantrism, Taoism, Shamanism and more.
2. Sacred Books of the East – Browse and read public domain copies of 50 of the most important books of Eastern philosophy and civilization.
3. Virtual Religious Index – Extensive link collection maintained by Rutgers University of websites with informative religious content. Categorized by religion as well as ancient religions, archaeology and philosophy.
4. Meta Religion – Internet project for educating people in a multidisciplinary view of the religion, spiritual and the world of esoteric phenomena.
5. Sacred Destinations – Places of great spiritual power around the world that you can explore and plan to visit one day.
6. Religion Facts – Get your religious questions answered on this site.
7. Spiritual Reality Power of Meditation – Freedom from compulsory thoughts is the gateway to wisdom and a true understanding of who you are. This YouTube video is one of the best introductions to meditation.

Education Depositories and Tools:

Some great digital tools for furthering your self-education and lifelong learning.

1. Learnist – Browse and create your own online learning collections. Lots of great content to enjoy.
2. MentorMob – Discover and create your own learning playlists. Similar to Learnist.
3. Kibin – A proof-reading and editing community that can help you improve your writing. You can either pay or proof-read other people’s work and get credit for it.
4. Library of Congress – The de facto national library of the United States of America and the largest library in the world. Most of it is accessible online.
5. BBC Learning – Huge collection of learning resources from the BBC. Find online courses, video clips and educational games.

Learn New Languages:

The best way to learn is to travel. To travel well, you’re probably going to want to learn the local languages. Here are the best ways to do it fast.

1. Duolingo – My favorite free language learning website. Totally gamified learning process where you can learn for free by translating content while you learn. Their iPhone app is great too.
2. Memrise – Innovative memorizing system for learning new languages.
3. Live Mocha – The largest language learning community online that I know of.
4. BBC Languages – Great language learning resources freely provided by the BBC.

Self-Education Toolbox:

Here are my favorite tools for managing my own self-education and creative projects. I prefer digital tools with seamless cloud-based syncing across computers and mobile devices.

1. Evernote – Outsource part of your brain to Evernote. Much more than just notes synced across all your devices. You can also take photos of pages or items and search them later with full text recognition, record voice memos, organized your research and collaborate seamlessly with colleagues on projects.
2. Feedly –  The best Google Reader alternative for grabbing RSS feeds from your favorite blogs. Syncs with iPhone, iPad and Android too.
3. Flipboard - Find interactive content from the web’s best sources and curate your own digital magazine of the websites, articles, videos and photos that inspire you.
4. Pocket – Save articles and information on websites you like to read later online or offline on your laptop, smartphone or tablet.
5. Diigo – My favorite tool for organizing bookmarks by keyword, highlighting text online and posting sticky notes to read important things later. Accessible from any computer or mobile device.
6. Trello - An essential tool for keeping yourself organized and accountable with to-do lists, workflow and flexible deadlines. Also excellent for collaborative learning projects. In one glance, know what’s being worked on, who’s working on it and keep up-to-date with your colleagues progress with private Twitter-like social project stream. Great mobile support on iPhone, iPad and Android.
7. Google Apps For Education – Free web-based email with Gmail, calendar to set reminders and schedule your life, and documents for collaborative study anytime, anywhere.
8. Toggl – Easy time and task tracking for your creative projects. Get an instant breakdown of which projects are consuming your time. For freelance business projects, Harvest has better invoicing and tax features.
9. MindMeister – Create mind maps for brainstorming and organizing where you creative ideas lead you.
10. Astrid – Create and share to-do lists and easily set reminders from your iPhone, iPad or Android device. Wunderlist is great too.

Self-Discipline Tools:

Self-discipline rarely comes naturally so these digital tools are great for setting goals, accountability and tracking progress.

1. Cojourneo – A new app in beta-testing for setting goals and achieving them.
2. 43Things – A goal setting community with 3 million members.
3. Day Zero Project – Make lists of your goals and turn them into a challenge.
4. Everest App – An iPhone app that helps you achieve personal goals.
5. RescueTime - An excellent time management and productivity tool. See where you’re wasting your time and break the habit.
6. Pomodoro App – My favorite productivity tool. The scientifically-proven Pomodoro method breaks down your work or study projects into easily managed 25 minute chunks with 5 minute breaks in-between.

Recommended Reading:

All education is self-education, a good teacher can only point the way, we have to do the work. Interesting perspectives on how education is being revolutionized by the Internet and information abundance.

1. Weapons of Mass Instruction (John Taylor Gatto)
2. Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will (Dale J. Stephens)
3. The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late (Michael Ellsberg)
4. The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined (Salman Khan)
5. Better Than College: How to Build a Successful Life Without a Four-Year Degree (Blake Boles)
6. DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (Anya Kamenetz)
7. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (John Taylor Gatto)
8. Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better (John Holt)
9. The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World (Chris Guillebeau)
10. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Peter Gray)
11. The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (Neil Postman)

Free Self-Education Ebooks:

Some great free ebooks about self-education and how to become more creative in your life and work.

1. Stop Stealing Dreams: What Is School For? (Seth Godin)
2. The EduPunk’s Guide To A DIY Credential (Anya Kamenetz)
3. Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich)
4. Teaching As A Subversive Activity (Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner)
5. Education and the Significance of Life (Jiddhu Krishnamurti)

Critical Thinking Resources:

If you’re going to follow the path of self-education these resources can help you sharpen your critical thinking skills.

1. Think Again: How to Reason and Argue – Improve your ability to assess arguments other people make and learn how to construct good arguments of your own.
2. Critical Thinking in Global Challenges – Interesting course that teaches you how to assess information and develop reasoned arguments in the context of global challenges facing our world.
3. Trivium Education – An excellent website dedicated to the Trivium, an ancient system of grammar, logic and rhetoric that provides the intellectual tools to establish clarity and consistency of personal thought. It used to be the cornerstone of a classical liberal education through the study of essential 7 liberal arts and sciences but it is now largely absent from schools.
4. Trivium Resources – An excellent collection of Trivium resources from online free thinking community Tragedy and Hope. I recommend starting with the 5-page summary of the Trivium method for critical thinking and creative problem solving.
5. The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric – The classic book by Sister Miriam Joseph that teaches the Trivium and how it can be used to improve your faculties of intelligence and reasoning.

More Lifelong Learning Resources:

1. Meta-Learning – 70 pages of the Meta-Learning section of Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Chef book.
2. Google World Wonders Project – Google brings to life the wonders of the modern and ancient world.
3. Google Art Project – Explore collections from art museums around the world with thousands of artworks photographed in extremely high resolution.
4. National Geographic Education – Cultivate your knowledge of the world’s geography and countries.

A big thank you goes to Opensource.com for the image at the top.

Do you know of a really valuable self-education and lifelong learning resources that can help me improve this list? I’d love to hear from you.

Fonte: http://www.diygenius.com/

Google Projects That Are Absolutely Amazing

Google revolutionized the Internet by making the global brain easily searchable by anyone. In addition to search, Google has created all kinds of different tools like Google Maps, Gmail, Analytics, Android and Apps that many of us use everyday.

One of the reasons why Google has consistently released new innovative project is because of their 20% time policy, which gives many of their employees one day a week to experiment with new concepts and ideas. This has resulted in many lesser-known creative projects that have emerged from within Googleplex.

In this post, I want to show you some of most fascinating websites that Google employees have created and how you can use them as educational tools.

1. Google Trends Visualizer

Tap into the visual intelligence of the global brain by visualizing search trends as they are happening right now in every country in the world. I recommend downloading the free Google Trends Visualizer screensaver so you can observe real-time trends anytime.

2. World Wonders Project

Explore the ancient and modern wonders of the world like Angor Wat, the Pyramids of Giza, Stonehenge and the Great Barrier Reef in high-res photos and 3D Street View style imagery. It will surely inspire you to learn more about these mysterious and beautiful places.

3. Solve For X

Solve For A is a platform for discussing radical technology ideas for solving global problems. Inspired by Google X, this website will challenge you to think bigger and to speculate about technological “moonshots” that could change the world for the better.

4. Google Public Data Explorer

Search through databases from around the world, including the World Bank, OECD, Eurostat and the U.S. Census Bureau. After you find what you want, filter through categories to make graphs with the axes you want.

5. The Evolution of the Web

Explore the evolution of the technologies that power the World Wide Web. You can even look at how webpages and technologies like web browsers used to look like, if you want to be reminded of how far we have come in such a short time.

6. Ingress

Google’s intriguing augmented reality mobile game for iPhone and Android. Discover interesting places where you live in this urban exploration game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4hY0UBAmlo

7. Google Sky

I’m sure you’ve explored Google Earth, but did you know that you can fly through space with Google Sky? In addition to exploring our solar system and distant constellations, you can also check out the awe-inspiring topography of Google Moon and Google Mars.

8. Build LEGO With Chrome

Now you can build with LEGO bricks using Google Maps as your baseplate in Chrome. Google and LEGO have built an excellent creative academy that shows you how to build your own LEGO cities and LEGO-fied versions of popular landmarks.

9. Google Art Project

Browse super his-res photos of artwork from over 400 of the world’s greatest art museums. You can take virtual gallery tours with audio and video guidance, zoom in on individual artwork masterpieces and even create your own virtual collections.

10. Creative Sandbox Guide

Google’s Creative Sandbox is a guide to ideas that blend creativity with technology. It shows you how to use new technology to solve problems for businesses and organizations and ties together with their excellent educational resources Think With Google and Our Mobile Planet.

11. Google Earth Flight Simulator

I’m sure you’ve probably already heard of Google Earth but if you haven’t used it in the last year, you’ll be amazed at the 3D detail in the latest version. Zoom in on the 3D ridgelines of mountaintops and between skyscrapers in major cities. To activate the awesome flight simulator download Google Earth and and press CTRL + Option + A.

12. SmartyPins

Google has recently released a new Maps game called SmartyPins for geographic trivia. It’s a fun way to explore and learn about your community.

If I missed any of your favorite creative projects from Google then feel free to share them with everyone in the comments.

Fonte: http://www.diygenius.com/

Economia - Comentários Melhores livros 2014 segundo Strategy+Business

Thomas Piketty, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Capital in the 21st Century
(Belknap Press, 2014)

Evan Osnos
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)

Timothy F. Geithner
Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises
(Crown, 2014)

---

The politics, economics, and rhetoric of inequality have been inescapable over the past year. Not since the Gilded Age have we had such vigorous debates over the concentration of wealth and the gap between the rich and the poor. And not just in the United States. In China, where new fortunes are minted daily; in Europe, where social nets are fraying amid economic crises; and in India, where a gleaming technology industry coexists with Dickensian poverty, income inequality is a prominent and often divisive debate.

Among the dozens of books on economics that have crossed my desk in recent months, three in particular have helped illuminate the nature and impact—and resilience—of inequality in our world. One, far and away the best and most important book on economics of the year, is an academic tome on the progression, regression, and rebirth of inequality in Western Europe and the United States. One is a journalistic narrative that takes us deep into modern China, where rampant growth is simultaneously lifting millions from poverty and spawning unprecedented inequality. And one is a memoir of the feverish crisis years in the United States’ financial system, which inadvertently explains how the financial industry was able to reconstitute its fortunes so rapidly after the epic debacle of 2008.

Daniel Gross says the three best books on economics this year illuminate the global nature of income inequality.

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Rentiers Redux

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, the best business book on economics of the year, is also perhaps the most discussed and least read book of 2014. Data collected by Amazon via its Kindle suggested that most readers who bought the bestseller didn’t get much past page 26 of the 577-page (before notes) volume.

On a nine-hour flight, during which I had little else to occupy me than this 42-ounce brick of a book, I managed to get through the whole thing. And it turns out the book everybody was blogging and tweeting about was quite different from the one I read. Capital in the 21st Century is not about the 21st-century U.S. or the hoodie-wearing boy titans of Silicon Valley. It is, in large measure, a book about the vast, powerful forces that have made and broken fortunes in Europe—and then made them again. Because of its focus, which is at once sweeping and limited, I found it to be more interesting and useful as an introductory textbook on the basics of macroeconomics, a primer on 20th-century European and U.S. history, and a brief diversion into the literature of giants like Jane Austen (from which Piketty draws descriptions of how people lived and thought about wages, capital, and investments) than as a prophecy.

Piketty, a French economics professor, illustrates the dynamics of wealth, capital, and growth with a simple equation: R > G. “When the rate of return of capital [R] exceeds the rate of growth of output and income [G], as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based,” he declares.

For much of human history, the global economy barely grew. Between the year 0 and 1700, world output rose at a trifling 0.1 percent compound annual rate. The Industrial Revolution kicked up the growth rate to 1.6 percent, which, says Piketty, is more rapid than many people realize. This growth rate, combined with low inflation and stable prices, was very good news for people who already had money. Inherited wealth snowballed. It was this dynamic that helped construct the grand boulevards and opulent mansions in European cities that we now regard as paragons of equality. Sweden in the 19th century, writes Piketty, “was not the structurally egalitarian country that we sometimes imagine.” In France in 1910, the top 1 percent had 60 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the top 10 percent had 90 percent. Fraternité et liberté, oui. Egalité, non.

Everything changed in the 20th century. As labor organized, wages began to rise. The disintegration of the colonial empires sapped the wealth of Britain and France. World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression and the accompanying hyperinflation, the rise of Nazism, and the unfathomable destruction of World War II literally destroyed much of the world’s capital. And taxes went up.

“All rich countries, without exception, went into the twentieth century from an equilibrium in which less than a tenth of their national income was consumed by taxes to a new equilibrium in which the figure rose to between a third and a half,” Piketty writes. Although the U.S. suffered less from the destruction of capital, he notes, its progressive taxes were most aggressive. Confiscatory taxation of excessive incomes was a domestic invention: The U.S. was the first country to try tax rates above 70 percent on income—from 1919 to 1922—and various surcharges brought the top rate to as high as 94 percent in 1944.

The biggest force for equality, however, turned out to be inflation. In a series of very sharp insights, Piketty describes how public debt (government deficits) builds private wealth. Government bonds, paid for by the taxes of the broad public, tend to become assets for the rich people who own most of them. The flip side, of course, is that rentiers can be utterly wiped out when inflation rises sharply, which is what happened in Europe in the period from the 1930s to the 1950s. In France, says Piketty, “the enormous deficits of the Liberation were almost immediately canceled out by inflation above 50 percent per year in the four years 1945–1948.” (Germany, where prices rose 300-fold between 1930 and 1950, “was the country that, more than any other, drowned its public debt in inflation in the twentieth century.”) Thanks in part to inflation, between 1914 and 1945, capital in Europe fell from six or seven times national income to a mere two or three times. The high growth of the period between the 1950s and 1980s further helped labor attract a decent and growing share of income in developed countries.

But Piketty finds that those were mere interludes before the inevitable regression to the mean. After 1980, the reconstruction of Europe having been completed, the high-growth era subsided, the world’s central banks killed off inflation, taxes on the rich were cut, and markets soared. Fortunes reconstituted themselves. In France, for example, inheritance flows had dropped from 24 percent of the economy in 1900 to a low of 4 percent in 1950. But by 2000, they stood at 12 percent of the total economy. Rather than dissipating over time—shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, as the saying goes—inherited fortunes grew rapidly in the late 20th century. Piketty writes with disdain of Liliane Bettencourt, the heiress to the L’Oréal fortune, “who never worked a day in her life, [but] saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of Bill Gates.”

A new wrinkle emerged that helped further tilt the scales toward those at the top. In the 19th century, Piketty explains, people who tried to work their way to riches were chumps. They could never match the gains of capital that already existed. But toward the end of the 20th century, “a stunning new phenomenon emerged… the very top salaries, and especially the pay packages awarded to the top executives of the largest companies and financial firms, reached astonishing heights.” That was in France.

The dynamic of what Piketty calls the “hypermeritocratic society”—a few people getting extremely high salaries—was most pronounced in the United States. Between 1977 and 2007, the richest 1 percent alone vacuumed up 60 percent of the total increase of the country’s national income, pushing inequality levels back to the pre-trust-busting days of 1910. In the U.S., the 1 percent have been running away from the 10 percent, primarily because all-stars—top corporate executives, hedge fund managers, athletes, and top performers in a range of other fields—are raking it in like nobody’s business, in part because they determine their own compensation. Some of those receiving outsized salaries, Piketty notes with irony, are academic economists, who now think the system of “the United States is working fairly well, and, in particular, that it rewards talent and merit accurately and precisely.”

Happiest are those who get paid vast sums from their labor each year, then convert it into capital by investing it. Think of a private equity partner who takes his US$30 million annual payday and plows it into seeding other hedge funds, buying art, and purchasing real estate. Piketty notes, for example, that Bill Gates’s wealth, which is managed by sharp professional investors, has grown just as fast since he stopped working as it did before. “Entrepreneurs thus tend to turn into rentiers, not only with the passing of generations, but even within a single lifetime,” he says.

What can stop these forces from corroding social and political relations? Piketty concludes that a very modest form of confiscation—a global, progressive tax on all forms of wealth—is the only way to rein in inequality while preserving entrepreneurial efforts. But he concedes that “a global tax on capital is a utopian idea.” And so he ends with a certain fatalism about the ever-encroaching power of capital in what is sure to be an age of slow growth. “There is no historical example of a country at the world technological frontier whose growth in per capita output exceeded 1.5 percent over a lengthy period of time,” he writes.

It’s difficult to argue with Piketty’s long-run trends. But I find his reading of history to be too fatalistic, especially as it relates to the short term. If the last 200 years have taught us anything, it is that we should never discount the ability of discontinuities to pop up. Shocks, disruptions, wars, and new technologies have made those who draw straight lines infinitely into the future look like fools with great frequency. For example, there has been no larger economic discontinuity in the past 30 years than China’s emergence as an economic power.

Another quibble with the year’s best business book in this category is that Piketty generally underplays the role of globalization in the rise of capital. Simply put, rich people and the companies they own now have a much broader world to work in. When domestic markets are growing slowly—at 2 or 3 percent—wealthy rentiers have a far greater ability than, say, a small businessperson or a clerk to invest in, participate in, and benefit from the rapid growth in places such as India, Brazil, or, above all, China.

Some Get Rich

The greatest story of our era is China’s so-far successful effort to become less unequal in comparison with other economies in the world. In 1978, the average Chinese income was $200, about one-tenth the world median income. By 2014, it was $6,000, about half the world’s median income. By bringing hundreds of millions of its citizens up from subsistence poverty to a higher standard of living, China is acting as a powerful force against inequality between nations. But the country’s soaring goals, captured lyrically in Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, are also spurring inequality within China.

Whereas Piketty relies on a combination of large data sets and fictional characters to offer an overview of global developments, Osnos, a New Yorker staff writer, takes us inside the lives of ordinary—and extraordinary—Chinese people. Much of the media coverage of China leads casual readers to see the country’s 1.3 billion inhabitants as an undifferentiated mass of commercially minded automatons: pragmatic and disciplined, forgoing leisure for the sake of national development. But Osnos introduces us to idealistic, stubborn individuals who are intent on making their mark in modern China. When Hu Shuli, the tiny, fearless founding editor of muckraking business magazineCaijing, is pushed out of the magazine by the owner, who has tired of her confrontational approach, she starts a new one. Lin Zhengyi defected from Taiwan in 1979, eager to participate in the rebirth of China, and became a well-known economist. In 2008, he was named chief economist of the World Bank—the first professional from any non-developed market to hold that high post. And then there’s Tang Jie, a graduate student in Western philosophy, who made the highly nationalistic viral Internet movie2008 China Stand Up!

“China reminds me most of America at its own moment of transformation—the period that Mark Twain and Charles Warner named the Gilded Age, when ‘every man has his dream, his pet scheme,’” Osnos writes. And he vividly conveys China’s shady hustling, earnest bustling, and poignant efforts to make up for its lost century—all being led by an authoritarian regime whose mixture of aggression, fear, self-confidence, and inferiority led it to tamp down all types of aspiration not related to making money.

In today’s China, being on the ground floor of any enterprise that gains scale can make you very rich indeed. Jack Ma, a former English teacher who founded e-commerce giant Alibaba, is now one of the wealthiest people in the world, after his firm recently went public. And yet, despite the rampant growth, Osnos finds that opportunity in China is somehow constrained—by corruption, by a shortage of resources, by an overweening state, and by a new Western import: inequality.

“The longer I lived in China, the more it seemed that people had come to see the economic boom as a train with a limited number of seats,” Osnos writes. By 2007, the top 10 percent of urban Chinese were earning 9.2 times as much as the bottom 10 percent. And in 2010, a post charting out how many years it would take a blue-collar worker to earn income sufficient to buy a small apartment in Beijing (about 150) went viral. But public discussion of income inequality is verboten. Among the unintentionally hilarious text messages Osnos receives from the Department of State Council Information Office is this gem: “All websites are requested to remove immediately the article entitled, ‘In China, 94% Unhappy with Wealth Disproportionately Concentrated at the Top.’”

Indeed, Age of Ambition seems to offer a testament to the universality of Piketty’s thesis. Growth in China has been remarkably rapid. But the returns on capital invested in China have risen even faster, creating the same sorts of gaping differentials in economic circumstances that are evident in Europe and the United States. And to a degree, this is by design. “Let some people get rich first,” Deng Xiaoping, the architect of modern China, said.

New Testament Justice

Not even the financial crisis of 2008, which took a healthy bite out of global capital, seemed to affect China significantly. In fact, it didn’t even put much of a crimp in the fortunes of the wealthy in the United States.

Historically, Piketty tells us, financial crises have been great levelers. Certainly, the 2008 crisis should have laid U.S. capital low for a generation, much as the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression did. But thanks in part to a more robust set of institutions (the FDIC, the Federal Reserve) and the aggressive solicitude of politicians of both parties, the system swung into action to save capital from its self-inflicted wounds—a process that is on full display in Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, an engaging, breezy, and perversely fun memoir from former Treasury secretary Tim Geithner.

Geithner is a creature of capital, even though he never actually worked in finance. Well-meaning, personable, profane, and highly competent, he cut his teeth at the Treasury Department during the global financial scandals of the 1990s. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he had both a responsibility to ward off trouble and a front-row seat. Throughout, he paints himself as a constant worrier about stability and out-of-control capital.

As the Great Recession started, Geithner was reading Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Penguin Press, 2009), the magisterial history of the European and U.S. central bankers who botched things horrifically in the 1920s and ’30s. “But I had put it down after a few chapters. It was too scary.” Ever the pragmatist, he rejected the “moral argument about justice, what I called the ‘Old Testament view.’ The venal should be punished. The irresponsible shouldn’t be bailed out.” With regard to capital, Geithner proved to be a distinctly New Testament kind of guy. When a crisis is raging, he says, “the goal should be to protect the innocent, even if some of the arsonists escape their full measure of justice.” This trope appears time and again in Stress Test, as if the two—justice and a functioning system—are mutually exclusive.

In this insider account, full of showdowns with fellow administration members such as Rahm Emanuel and Elizabeth Warren, Geithner argues, correctly, that the bailouts and guarantees largely worked as intended. The TARP money was returned, and a depression was averted. But the innocent weren’t really protected, and the arsonists were rewarded richly. Geithner never adequately explains the dichotomy. The Fed easily invented new powers and instrumentalities to shore up the stock market and financial system, where the rich have their assets. But when it came to bailing out the housing market, which, um, houses the bulk of total wealth for most middle-class people, there was a distinct lack of urgency and effort. Old Testament justice for the homeowners; New Testament justice for their bankers.

Among the dozens of crisis books, Geithner’s stands out partly because it is well written (he was assisted by Time veteran Michael Grunwald). But compared with many of the other protagonists we’ve heard from—especially former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan—he also proves himself to be more pragmatic, self-aware, and self-deprecating. Far from projecting the Olympian calm of Greenspan or former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, Geithner is forever worrying, nervous, and full of self-doubt. When he was about to assume his role as president of the New York Fed in 2004, he tells us, he got carded at a Manhattan convenience store. Of his first speech as Treasury secretary, he writes, “It was a bad speech, badly delivered, rattling confidence at a bad time.” He provides equally frank descriptions of the bunker behavior of his boss, President Barack Obama, colleagues such as Emanuel and Larry Summers, and frenemies such as former FDIC chair Sheila Bair.

Geithner also tells us that the bailouts succeeded in part because they temporarily transformed huge private obligations into public ones. This financial prestidigitation not only stopped the panic, but paved the way for a recovery favorable to capital. Banks returned to profitability, and the S&P 500 more than doubled, as interest rates and inflation remained low. So the wealthy recovered everything they had lost in the crisis and then some. Meanwhile, median wages and housing prices remain far below their pre-crisis peaks.

According to Geithner, he and his colleagues did their part to reform capital. When lobbyists for financial trade groups came to his office to complain about the Dodd–Frank legislation, he resisted them. “‘My team is beating back your proposals because they’re bad for the country,’ I told them. ‘And we’re going to keep doing it.’”

Geithner also reluctantly supported the Volcker Rule, and small tax increases on higher incomes, which took a bit of wind out of the finance industry’s sails. But only a bit. In our world, the very rich get richer, and they get richer faster than the merely rich. And
it’s not just because of the simple equation of R > G. As Piketty notes, “Wealthy people are constantly coming up with new and ever more sophisticated legal structures to house their fortunes.” What’s more, they’re coming up with new and ever more sophisticated political structures to protect them—friendly government officials of both parties, low tax regimes, and bailouts.

Geithner’s memoir proves instructive here as well. Obama never had the fire in his belly to go after the rich the way that Franklin Delano Roosevelt did. As Geithner describes it, the administration only halfheartedly pursued the so-called Buffett Rule, which would ensure that the very wealthy would pay an effective tax rate of at least 30 percent. At several different points, Obama had opportunities to undo the Bush-era tax cuts, which favored the wealthy. But he never pressed too hard. After eight years of the Obama administration, tax rates on carried interest, estates, high incomes, and capital gains and dividends will all be lower than they were during the Clinton administration.

Capital is doing quite well indeed in the 21st century—thanks to the natural advantages it enjoys, to be sure. But it’s also doing well in part because of the substantial lift it has received from Communists in China and from the United States’ most progressive president in a half century. Très ironique. 

Reprint No. 00293

AUTHOR PROFILE:

• Daniel Gross is a columnist for Slate and the Daily Beast. His most recent book is Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline and the Rise of a New Economy (Free Press, 2012).

Inovação - Comentários Melhores livros 2014 segundo Strategy+Business

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
(W.W. Norton, 2014)

Alex Pentland
Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science
(Penguin Press, 2014)

Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, with Alan Eagle
How Google Works
(Business Plus, 2014)

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These days, it seems as though every business challenge has the same solution: innovation. Innovation is the watchword for generating fast growth in the very slow recovery from the Great Recession, and, thanks largely to Clayton Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation, it’s the narrative center of gravity in Silicon Valley and the rest of the global tech community. But if innovation is the answer, the obvious next question is how to innovate.

This year’s three best business books on innovation offer answers to this crucial query in intriguing and insightful, if sometimes indirect, ways. In The Second Machine Age, economist Erik Brynjolfsson and information technologist Andrew McAfee suggest that smart machines are not only the products of innovation, but also essential enablers of innovation prowess. In Social Physics, MIT data scientist Alex Pentland offers a data-driven and eye-opening inquiry into the flow of ideas among people. And in How Google Works, high-level company insiders Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, with Alan Eagle, take us down to where the rubber meets the road.

Innovation Cyborgs

In The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business contend that we have entered an era during which machines will extend our mental powers in the same way that they’ve already extended our physical might. The authors point to Google’s driverless cars and Apple’s Siri as the early examples of what will soon be a flood of smart machines. The authors don’t map the exact channels that this flood will follow, but by showing how digital capabilities have become ever more sophisticated (and will continue to gain in sophistication in the future), they make a compelling case that smart machines will shift and blur the line between the human and digital domains. Routine tasks both manual and cognitive that were heretofore reserved for humans will increasingly become digitized.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee are convinced that the overall effect of smart digital technologies will be profoundly beneficial. They predict that the growth of these technologies will yield an exponential increase in the trajectory of human social development for the foreseeable future. As digital technologies are combined and recombined, abundance will replace scarcity as the norm in economics, bringing greater choice and freedom. For instance, digital technology should help us live more lightly on the planet than the machine technologies that preceded it.

Although it’s not a connection the authors make directly, the diminished physical scale of digital technologies, in comparison with their mechanical and human counterparts, is a major contributor to the authors’ principal concern for the future: the uneven distribution of the economic bounty that will accompany the second machine age. Machine technologies like the railroad and the automobile changed the physical landscape, which in turn created a vast ecology of new blue-collar and white-collar jobs. But the migration of work to computers will probably result in significant job losses. And if digital change occurs faster than displaced workers can acquire new skills, they may never catch up.

Further, because of the winner-take-all nature of digital innovation (recall that when Facebook acquired WhatsApp for US$19 billion, WhatsApp had only 55 employees), society could become highly polarized, with a small group of well-paid digital knowledge workers on one side, and on the other, a vast pool of low-paid service workers performing the non-routine tasks that computers can’t yet do. Median wages could be very low, indicating huge income disparities between the haves and the have-nots (see “Economics: All Things Being Unequal,” by Daniel Gross). These problems, together with the multiple significant changes in policy and practice required to address them, could place an enormous burden on governments.

The authors offer some recommendations for sidestepping these problems and prospering in the second machine age. They say that the focus of educational institutions and students should shift from rote learning to “the skills of ideation, broad-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication”—which machines can’t deliver, as yet. Governments should support basic research and offer prizes for innovation (like the kind awarded by DARPA that played such an important role in the development of driverless cars), adopt tax incentives to encourage employment, and radically reform economic metrics such as GDP that fail to capture much that is relevant to human well-being. They make a strong case, but I’d be remiss if I neglected to note that changing education curricula, financial incentives, and economic metrics are often accompanied by unintended consequences that are neither obvious nor benign.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s ultimate goal is the development of a “freestyle” civilization where people and machines work together to become powerful hybrids. As an example of such a hybrid, they cite chess, where computers can now routinely beat grandmasters, but grandmasters working with machines can muster a combination of strategic acuity and tactical knowledge that is more powerful still. If we translate this idea to the corporate arena, it suggests that in the future, a company’s competitive advantage will lie in the ability of its employees to sense and integrate while its computers are busy scanning and calculating.

Toward a Torrent of Ideas

Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science, by Alex “Sandy” Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics laboratory, offers a glimpse into the kinds of insights that the smart machines described in The Second Machine Age can help us surface. Pentland is a pioneer in social physics, a new science that uses big data and digital technologies to identify patterns and predict outcomes in social interactions. For instance, Pentland has developed an astonishing ability to predict the performance of teams in different situations based entirely on their nonverbal behavior and without knowing anything about the content of their conversations.

Although much of his work has been done with small groups, in Social Physics, Pentland scales up his findings to describe the dynamics of social learning and idea flow among people in large companies, cities, and society as a whole. He explains that social learning within a group—which includes the group’s ability to innovate—takes place when people adopt new strategies or acquire new beliefs through experience or observation. The critical determinant of social learning is idea flow—that is, the way in which ideas spread through the group. Pentland likens this to water: The idea flow within a group can be swift and clear or can take the form of a terrifying whirlpool or a stagnant pond.

The dynamic that drives idea flow is a continuous cycle of exploration and engagement. Exploration is the process of gathering ideas through exposure to a wide variety of experiences and ideas; engagement, which requires interaction and cooperation, is the sifting of those ideas and the conversion of those selected into action.

Pentland and his collaborators figured out how to detect ideas that are converted to action using electronic sociometric instruments. Briefly, the instruments measure energy, engagement, and exploration levels in groups, along with individual energy, extroversion, and empathy through body language. The researchers then couple that data with more conventional sources—such as surveys, purchasing records, and social network data. The result is a comprehensive view of social interaction patterns.

As social physics reveals more patterns, Pentland is most interested in applying them to cities. He’d like to see the creation of mobile sensing networks whose “eyes and ears” would be digital networks of wireless devices, such as mobile phones. These would be the basis, explains the author, of a “control framework: one that first senses the system; then combines these observations with models of demand and dynamic reaction; and finally uses the resulting predictions to tune the systems to match the demands being made on them.” Such a framework would help us understand and improve the rhythms of urban life, and quicken the pulse of exploration and engagement that is the signature of a vibrant, innovative community. In this regard, Pentland’s views on city design are supportive of those of urban activist Jane Jacobs, who fought the expressways and massive urban renewal projects of the mid-20th century, arguing that they destroyed communities and social capital.

Pentland envisions a future in which the science of social physics is used to design more human-centric cities. With the help of digital technology, he believes that urban design can be based on analysis at the individual level rather than averages and stereotypes. This will enable us to move beyond social classes to peer groups and beyond markets to exchange networks, where enhanced trust creates greater fairness and stability.

Of course, a mobile sensing nervous system depends on having a steady and wide-reaching flow of data. Pentland is cognizant of the privacy issues that this might entail and proposes a “new deal” on data in which individuals own their personal data, have full control over its use, and have the right to dispose of or distribute it as they see fit. As we’re seeing, however, this scenario is far easier described than done.

The patterns of interaction described in Social Physics also raise implications for executives who want to enhance the level of creativity and innovation in their companies. For example, instead of the current focus on employee cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction as drivers of idea flow, the book suggests that companies should provide employees with a wide diversity of exploratory experiences, coupled with periods of egalitarian engagement. Instead of the current emphasis on individuals and the content of communication, it suggests that companies should elevate their focus to groups and the modes of communication. And instead of using conventional organization charts, it suggests that companies should map idea flows.

Sandy Pentland’s Social Physics, with its emphasis on hard data, its view of organizations as dynamic processes, and the questions it raises about the entities on which organizations should focus—teams rather than individuals—is my choice for best business book of the year on innovation.

As Google Does

In How Google Works, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, with the help of Google’s director of executive communications, Alan Eagle, take the reader on a guided tour through the inner workings of the tech giant. Schmidt and Rosenberg joined the company, as CEO and product senior vice president, respectively, in the early 2000s, after the venture capitalists who funded its initial growth realized that some “adult supervision” was in order.

The veteran IT executives quickly discovered the aversion of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to traditional management approaches, including the stage-gate process for managing new projects. In the Google Boys’ view, it slowed innovation down too much, constricting people in the process.

“Just talk to the engineers,” suggested Brin and Page. When Schmidt and Rosenberg did, they discovered that Google was staffed with “smart creatives”—digital knowledge workers who had deep technical know-how, broad management expertise, and business savvy. Realizing that imposing conventional control systems on such employees could be counterproductive, the newly hired execs decided to rethink their approach to management.

For one thing, they decided to manage the context for innovation rather than the content of innovation. “If you can’t tell someone how to think,” explain the authors, “then you have to learn to manage the environment where they think. And make it a place where they want to come every day.”

This meant that the design and management of Google’s culture became a top priority for Schmidt and Rosenberg, as did the design of the facilities (“boisterous, crowded offices, brimming with hectic energy”). They purposely maintained wide spans of control and organized the company around the people who had the highest impact on the organization (as measured by “performance and passion”), with the corporation retaining a simple, functional structure.

The idea is not to create a so-called star system, but a management system built around an ensemble. Reorganizations are undertaken often—with the participation of the employees being reorganized—and executed quickly in order to minimize disruption and uncertainty. And teams are purposely kept small; the authors say that they hew to Jeff Bezos’s “two-pizza rule” (a team should never be so large that it cannot be fed by two pizzas). Realizing that plans were bound to change often in an industry driven by fast-paced innovation, Google also adopted the VCs’ maxim to “invest in the team, not in the plan.” Using Pentland’s terms, one might say that the company seeks to promote social learning and idea flow by maintaining a constant pulse of exploration and engagement.

Unsurprisingly, in a company where talent drives innovation, Schmidt and Rosenberg tell us that hiring is an essential process at Google. They describe hiring as an egalitarian, peer-based activity that is tasked with an unabashedly elitist goal: Find the very best people and never let urgency compromise quality. Brilliant generalists—Rhodes scholars come in for special mention—are Google’s prime target. And the company subscribes to the view that hiring good people attracts good people, setting off a virtuous circle.

The big question for readers of this book is how transferable the Google experience is to their own company. It’s one thing to sustain a generative culture as a company grows, but, as the authors acknowledge, it’s much more difficult to revitalize a stagnant culture. Here their advice is brief and somewhat familiar: Find the smart people, understand how the existing culture is creating problems, encourage openness and difficult questions, and try to find something in the organization’s original culture that can take you where you want to go.

A closely related question is how sustainable Google’s culture of innovation is within Google itself. The authors clearly think that it is sustainable. But the histories of many innovation-driven companies that came before Google suggest that there is no sure inoculation against organizational sclerosis. Nonetheless, How Google Works should be read as an excellent case study in practical applications of some of the principles of social interaction described in Social Physics (note: the authors do not mention Pentland’s work).

All three of this year’s best business books on innovation point to digitization as the key enabler of progress at every level of society, and their authors evince an infectious optimism in this regard. But they also rightly acknowledge that digitization brings with it serious concerns: job losses and widening disparities in income, to say nothing of central issues involving trust and power that loom larger still. That is the other side of the coin—the possibility that digitization could produce a stultifying Taylorism ruled by George Orwell’s Big Brother.

This year’s three best business books on innovation pinpoint digitization as the key enabler of progress throughout society.

Surely the end result of digital innovation will fall somewhere between a digital utopia and a dystopia. The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant probably had it right when he wrote: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” 

Reprint No. 00291

AUTHOR PROFILE:

• David K. Hurst is a contributing editor of s+b and the author of several books, most recently The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2012).