Category Archives: Politics

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Part IX

(IV) The Zero Sum Game within the Economy Is A Lie.

New wealth can be created by reinventing a business model. Godin believes that the pie (economy) is not limited, and does not delinate how large the pie could be. The example is Kim Berry of the Programmers Guild, a non-profit lobby in Congress to ban Visas for talent programmers from outside the US. For him, it’s a win/lose, not a win/win to have diversity and foreign competition within the US programming community. This is completely absurd since programmers can be anywhere, and still program via telecommuting. Also, great talent can create innovation and more productivity, this then leads to more demand, the programmers guild could grow tenfold by enlarging the pie.  The scarcity of resources might make it clear that wealth is derived from 1st resource acquisition, 2nd the specialists within finance, et cetere, 3rd the service technology and industries but Godin believes the pie can be enlarged, while Berry believes that there is a limited size to the macro-economic pie.

Moscow McDonald’s 1990

A video of the now infamous McDonald’s queue in Moscow circa 1990. It was a common practice to queue for products in a command economy at that time, and McDonald’s was a highly anticipated new restaurant chain. There was a McDonald’s in every small town in the US, Canada and Western Europe before it reached Russia.