The experiment worked like this: “The children were led into a room, empty of distractions, where a treat of their choice was placed by a chair.  The children could eat the marshmallow, the researchers said, but if they waited for fifteen minutes without giving in to the temptation, they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow.”  A third of the children held out for the second treat.

Follow-up studies have shown that there is an unexpected correlation between the results of the marshmallow test, and the success of the children many years later.  The children who could defer gratification for fifteen minutes ended up with more successful lives by almost any measure.

So self-restraint and deferred gratification are important to the success of individuals.  How about for countries?  I would say yes and so are the lenders to European countries.

The lesson also applies to saving, home ownership and education. These three, used to be symbols of middle class success.  They were what people with self-restraint who were willing to defer gratification used to earn as a reward.  Now the government is trying to give the reward to everyone.  And as a result we get the housing crisis and the coming student debt crisis. See my earlier story Degrees and Sneakers

The Marshmallow Test and it followups show the link between the cultural expectations of the people and the way government operates.  Arguing about how to lower the deficit is a fools game until we all start exercising a little self-restraint and accepting a little more deferred gratification.

Thanks to Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute for an article in the WSJ were I first heard about the Marshmallow Test.

In a remarkable coincidence my old iPhone was dying and going out of contract at the same time.  So I took the easiest path and stopped by the AT&T store nearby and bought the new iPhone 4S.  I was able to transfer my information and upgrade my apps with no difficulty and for a few weeks I really didn’t use the new phone any differently.

“Oh what a tangled web”

But I had SERI in my pocket and I saw the little microphone at the bottom of the memo and email pages so last week I gave it a try.  Conclusion: The new transcription program built into the 4S is incredibly good.

I have been trying to be able to dictate into a machine and have it type a transcript for more than a decade and all of the programs I ever tried were crap.  Now here on my phone is one that works. It means less typing and faster communications.  It also means more messages sent in haste without reflection.  Isn’t technology grand.

Walter Mossberg wrote about it today in his Wall Street Journal article.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303772904577335792574509780.html?KEYWORDS=mossberg

The WSJ is difficult to read if your not a subscriber.  So try both links or do a Google search  if you’re interested.

More importantly see if your phone has speech transcription technology and give it a try.  This btw is another argument for Starbucks to get together with Apple and/or Android and bring the Genius Bar to the Coffee Bar.  To make this kind of change people are going to need a little hands on instruction.

• like they are in the right place.
• like they want to know more.
• good
• entertained
• angry

Feel Something

But you only have four seconds to make a person feel something that will cause then to stay.  A web site is more than a billboard but less than a TV commercial.

This important data came from Tom Reynolds the principal of Reynolds Group who spoke to my Federation Networking Breakfast Group last month.  Tom specializes in “Internet Business Strategy” which is an evolving and very interesting field.

So moving on what will be next to go?  All of it.  The age of print is over.  The presses, libraries, bookstores and publishers as we know them are all doomed within a generation.  Just like Kodak film was doomed when digital photography was invented.  They can’t be saved.  Digital books will keep the format alive for a few generations but even that is doomed.  I know you don’t like to hear this but the printed book is as over as the livery stable in 1912.  There is nothing you can do about it.

If young people want entertainment they will watch a show on their iPads.  If they want information they will Google.  And if they want to understand a subject they will use new interactive formats that combine documentary film with feedback loops, illustrations, charts and source material.

The technology of movable type created the printed book which shaped the way we learn about the world.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  The Medieval world was shaped by the scribe.  Access to information was limited and a society developed that favored those who could read and write.  Now because of printing almost everyone can read and write.  So what.  The future will create amazing new ways of doing what books have done for the last 500 or so years.

My advise if you are in the printing business:  Sell your presses! Now!  Let someone else go down with the ship.  However all is not lost. And here again the analogy to the beginning of the automobile era is instructive.  The end of the livery stable was also the beginning of the age of the mechanic,the auto dealer, the macadam road builder and lot more.  And so it will be in this era.  The book, like the horse, will be gone but as costs goes down the need for the new forms of entertainment and information will increase.  What a wonderful time to be in the new media.

Encyclopedia Britannica RIP you served us well.

The changes have been remarkable. Both physically and in the nature of the experience. The first time we came there were just a few hotels on the beautiful beach. Now all ten miles of beach are lined with hotels, condos and private homes and it is still beautiful.

But the biggest and most encouraging change has been in the nature of the service. The workers here have changed from acting like wage slaves resentful of the rich outsiders to really helpful, caring, friendly people. All of them seem to be focused on quaking sure that the tourist economy keeps working. For example they have hundreds of busses that allow you to go anywhere from town to the end of the tourist zone for about a dollar. The drivers happily take any kind of money and make change. In LA or London if the driver had cash like that around he would be robbed hourly. In the flea market the hustlers tell lies and hawk crap just like before but they no longer physically confront you. And in the “all inclusive” hotel where we are staying everybody from the pool waiter to the room cleaner is trying really hard to speak English and make you happy.

It appear that an entire people have had a change of attitude. They are working communally to keep the tourism business going and it happened in a little more than a generation. This is really good news for the world. Angry, distrustful people don’t have to stay angry and distrustful.

The Phone Stack

Basically when you sit down you put your phone in the stack.  The first person to pick up their phone from the stack during dinner picks up the check.

Read the article

Good Idea!

• Cut the pay and benefits of all federal employees about 10%.
• This would save the federal govt. about 200 billion a year. (see the math below the fold)
• It would also signal that we are serious about cutting the size of government.
• The cut could be progressive.  About 25% for the best paid and 5% for the lowest paid federal workers.

Government workers are by all accounts better paid than those in the the private sector and have higher benefits and much higher job security.  This change would have the effect of getting their pay back in line with the private sector and would solve a substantial part of the deficit issue.

How popular would this idea be with the voters? the media?  Could it be a strategy for winning the presidency?

How I did my admittedly very rough math:

• The Federal budget is about 3 trillion dollars.
• Most of it is transfer payments (grants to states, Social Security, Medicare etc.) or salaries of employees.
• I’m assuming that 2/3′s is salaries of employees and contractors.
• Ten percent of 2 trillion is 200 billion.
• Yes I’m including the military.
• Yes I’m including direct and indirect contractors.
• Yes I know this would take a lot of money out of the economy.

The book is easy to read and is chock full of quotes and ideas that will cause latter day Malthusians to cringe.

Examples:

• It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet.
• The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500.
• Never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.
• There was nothing special about the brains of the moderns; it was their trade networks that made the difference – their collective brains.
• The argument is not that exchange teaches people to be kind; it is that exchange teaches people to recognise their enlightened self-interest lies in seeking cooperation.
• The intelligentsia has disdained commerce throughout Western history. Homer and Isaiah despised traders. St Paul, St Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther all considered usury a sin. Shakespeare could not bring himself to make the persecuted Shylock a hero.
• The lesson of the last two centuries is that liberty and welfare march hand in hand with prosperity and trade.
• Or as the Kenyan scientist Florence Wambugu puts it, ‘You people in the developed world are certainly free to debate the merits of genetically modified foods, but can we eat first?’
• Indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things the longer they last.
• The secret of the modern world is its gigantic interconnectedness. Ideas are having sex with other ideas from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity.
• I Highly recommend this book!

Lillian and Mary Ann

It was amazingly good.  I only took a few pictures because I was to busy eating, drinking and grousing about how badly USC was beating UCLA (final 50 – 0).

Food

The food was super and the small bite part of it made it possible to taste everything without getting stuffed.

Album Here

Rebecca and Nurit

There is an opportunity here for rethinking Holiday food away from quantity and towards superb taste.  And I think the small bites idea makes it possible.  For instance Lillian made a wonderful Pumpkin Bean Soup but instead of serving bowls of it, she served it in stemmed wine glasses.  It was just a taste that was easy to hold and it was amazingly delicious.  I them still had an appetite for the rest of the meal

It turns out that from about 1909 to about 1930 New York State did charge brokers a stock transfer tax.  There was also one in the 1960′s and for some of that period the Federal Government also had a transfer tax.

I’m not sure what the rates were in the past but there is no question that if you make something more expensive by taxing it you will have less of it.  Financial transactions would move to where they were treated better, maybe Singapore or Belgrade.  Is this the result we want? Here is a link to an article that strongly opposes the transaction tax.  And another one on the pro side.  I’ll have to think about this one some more.