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" Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o

But we risk losing sight of what truly drives business value. Yes, gross margins are important. But over-rotating on gross margins is myopic because business quality is driven by more than margins. Business quality is about defensibility. Defensibility comes from moats. And while high gross margins are often a reflection of moats, they are not a moat in and of themselves. And when faced with a low gross margin business, you need to focus even more on moats: without those extra points of revenue to invest in sales & marketing strategies or research & development, you need other ways to generate cash flow over time.

"Prosociality is endemic. In a common experiment called the social dilemma, anonymous subjects choose between a "defection" strategy that maximizes their own personal payoffs, and a "cooperation" strategy that gains them slightly less, but gives other members of the group substantially more. Up to 97% of subjects choose cooperation in some social dilemmas. Not surprisingly, researchers have found that the incidence of such prosocial behaviors declines as the personal cost of acting prosocially rises. We are more likely to be nice when it only takes a little, not a lot, of skin off our noses. But the scientific evidence demonstrates the vast majority of people will make at least small sacrifices to follow their conscience and help others."