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Showing posts from September 19, 2012

"What makes life worth living?"

The Burning Man question: " What makes life worth living ?" ~ Larry Harvey , founder, The Burning Man Festival This is not a question economists know how to ask let alone answer.  Yet it is the driving question you must answer when making any life decision such as whether or not to start a business.  Why?  How do you quantify or measure quality of life with numbers?  Figure that out and you'll win a Nobel in Economics. Rather, economists spend their careers quantifying what they can and of necessity ignoring any aspect of quality of life that cannot be set to numbers.  So in the dismal world inhabited by economists, the ONLY reason to start a business is growth as defined by increasing (or decreasing) some numbers of "things", usually money or jobs or efficiency or productivity.  Economists have no language for discussing the core reasons for starting and running a business.  Take Mr. Harvey's guiding principle for his Burning Man orga