What’s the value of a head start?

Horse crossing finish line
A head start along with 1 – 2% productivity growth becomes a sizable advantage

Early this morning, I was running on the treadmill and listening to an economics lecture by professor Timothy Taylor.

He said the year 1870 kicked off our modern era of economic growth. If you take the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of productivity, of the richest countries in the world in 1870 and compare them to the poorest countries, the ratio is 9:1.

By 1990 and the ratio widens to 45:1.

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How I think: Thursday, June 2, 2016

Rubix cubes floating across outer space
synapsis” by Leo Grübler is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Questions are a window into the mind. Here are my questions today:

  1. What is perceived as more valuable: a 28 page PDF with tutorials or a 100 page PDF with tutorials?

    • Bob Bly says that electronically delivered books need to have 10x more information than physical books to get the same price point.
    • The trend is for copy to be short.
  2. When will email be dead and what will replace it?

  3. What can finance teach marketing?

    • Where do financial concepts overlap with marketing concepts?
    • Could finance and marketing be two sides of the same coin?
  4. Is rel=me transitive on Google, Yahoo and Bing?

    • What will the future use of rel=me be?
    • When will there be a rel=me for companies so that our B2B marketing databases can do things like connect PG.com to all of its related domains?
  5. How does my environment influence me?

    • What triggers are influencing me?
    • How do I encourage others to give me feedback? I tried this survey.

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