Economics and pie
It is my dearest wish that every person in America (and every other part of the world, for that matter) could understand the simple fact that global economics is not a zero-sum game. Is that so much to ask?
As a kid, I was indoctrinated with the idea that if someone is successful, it is necessarily because they profited from the loss of another, and that others have suffered to make that prosperity possible. This is as poisonous and wrong-headed as ideas get, and I hear a variation on it from otherwise seemingly intelligent people on a near daily basis.
As Nancy Rommelmann is fond of saying: Instead of trying to rationalize why you are entitled to all or some of someone else’s pie, why not focus your energy on making more pie? Imagine what the people of this world would achieve if we were focused on wealth creation instead of wealth revocation.
Speaking of Nancy and pie, there is this.
Filed under: Life
I recall the time a woman called me for “advice” as to how to launch her comic strip. I told her, I wasn’t so hooked into that part of the editorial world but of course she should contact Roman Genn, super successful and someone she knew and who would have been happy to give her pointers.
“But I can’t do that!” she said. “He’s the competition!”
Oh, Lord. Someone I know in Cincinnati was embarking on a (now dead, it seems) project to launch a new local news site. When I commented in conversation that the RSS feed for Cinplify, a wonderful local news aggregator, had stopped working for me, this person replied: “I know, but don’t tell them. They’re my competition!” He had also stopped linking to them from his blog as part of his “strategy”.
This reminded me of the Hugh MacLeod cartoon in which a frustrated man says: “If you weren’t so stupid, I could explain to you how stupid you are!”