Here in the midst of the Coronavirus Pandemic and attached economic crisis, it seemed a good time to read Ben Bernanke’s memoir of the Panic of 2007-2008. Like most of the economics history books I’ve read and posted about, the stories are interesting but the writing quite dry. Too many words devoted to unnecessary details. But ideas that are well worth remembering and learning from...
“How in the world [is Africa] going to deal with this? We didn’t plan for disease. They are putting dead bodies in the streets” – Melinda Gates When Melinda Gates, co-creator of the world’s largest foundation, largest non-government philanthropist for healthcare and hunger doesn’t know of a solution, there is no solution coming. I’ve been writing about...
Two months after predicting a hunger crisis in Africa, and there is a hunger crisis in Africa. The news on this has been sparse, but its starting to trickle out. Today the story was posted on Foreign Affairs. The novel coronavirus has overwhelmed public health systems and jolted economies around the world. Now it is poised to spark a global hunger crisis as well. After decades of progress in the...
Both McKinsey and the International Monetary Fund published papers in the last week talking about the current and coming food security issues in Africa. McKinsey McKinsey’s paper is Safeguarding Africa’s food systems through and beyond the crisis. TL;DR: Africa is a net importer of food and requires $6 billion worth of imported inputs to grow the food it grows. So far, the breakdowns in the...
Three months ago I started posting about the coronavirus pandemic. If this hadn’t turned into such a huge national and global tragedy, it would be quaint to look back at the very first graph and try and remember just how naive everyone was when a bad day was not even 70 new cases. A day under three months later and 21,000 new cases in the U.S. would be a good day. Here we are in June...
The 2nd of June, 2020. The United States of America. More divided than united at the moment, still fighting the worst pandemic in the last 100 years, and for the past week nightly aflame with civil unrest. How does this story end? How do protests end? How do pandemics end? How does life ever go back to a pattern that feels normal? I’m an entrepreneur. I have been for almost 30 years. Part...
An oft-repeated advice to startups is to fret over your name and logo. It’s the first impression you make with customers, potential hires, investors, and everyone else. Over on Fledge’s blog is a video (below) showing off examples of how we’ve done this at Fledge. Some of the “after” logos were my designs, some by professional designers. For the Fledge logo, the logo...
Economic history books tend to be dry. Not so with Americana: A 400 Year History of American Capitalism. The author does a very good job of weaving threads of stories together to keep the narrative fast paced and interesting. The story spans from the Mayflower in the 1600s through the iPhone in 2007. I previously posted the Mayflower story, as I hadn’t before seen details on how the oft...
When the world gives you a pandemic, make lemonade??? Maybe, if what your city needs most of all is lemonade. Most likely it is something else. But what? Well… unless you live in China, the good news is that some country is ahead of yours in terms of dealing with the pandemic, and thus you can look to see how they dealt with their epidemic to better guess how your customers will deal with...
I’ve been writing about how the pandemic is a causing hunger crisis in the poorer countries. The Los Angeles Times published an article predicting that the pandemic-induced economic crisis in these countries could cause more loss of life than the virus. My fear is that the big institutions that have the means to mitigate these issues won’t do so until the death toll gets large. My...
