Makers by Chris Anderson

A fascinating book about the movement of people making things in their own backyards and then transferring the idea into mass production through 3rd party subcontract manufacturing houses.

When you go open source, you’re giving away something in hopes of getting back more in return. Is it guaranteed? No. You also need to build a community, ensure that the initial product is needed, documented, and distinct enough for people to want to join in its development. And even then, managing an open-source community can be a full-time job in itself. But when it works, it can be magical: an R&D model that’s faster, better, and cheaper than those of some of the biggest companies in the world.Read more at location 1654

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Bill Joy, one of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems, revealed a flaw in Coase’s model. “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” he observed, stating what has now come to be known as “Joy’s Law.” His implication: for the sake of minimizing transaction costs, we don’t work with the best people. Instead, we work with whomever our company was able to hire. Even for the best companies, that’s a woefully inefficient process.Read more at location 2141

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As I write this, the hot product at the moment at Quirky is the “Pivot Power” flexible power strip. It’s like a regular power strip, but each outlet can pivot so that bulky power adapters don’t block neighboring outlets. Designed by Jake Zein, a software programmer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it’s classic Quirky: clever, clearly solving a problem, stylishly designed, and slightly inessential. It’s the kind of thing you’d see in the store and think, “Yeah, I hate it when I can’t fit power adapters in all the power strip outlets,” admire its design, and maybe buy one. You don’t need it, but once you’ve seen it you might want it.Read more at location 2698

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As at Kickstarter, there are countdown clocks and competitions everywhere—the whole thing feels like a game. You don’t need to have any ideas of your own to participate and feel as though you’re helping create things, or at least improve them. And it suits everyone from words people (names and taglines) to visual thinkers (design). Top influencers participate in dozens of projects and can earn thousands of dollars. It can be addictive, they report.Read more at location 2716

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Unlike Kickstarter and Quirky, Etsy doesn’t try to help Makers fund or create their products. Instead, it’s simply a way to sell them, with a strong social component that comes from its focus on handmade goods and the crafting and arts communities that make them. Like eBay, Etsy offers simple ways for sellers to create their own listings and handles the payment processing. It charges twenty cents for each listing for four months, and 3.5 percent of the sale.Read more at location 2744

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MFG.com would now remain independent, with Bezos as its main investor. Today it is the world’s largest custom manufacturing marketplace. It has more than 200,000 members in fifty countries and has brokered more than $115 billion in deals so far, with an average of $3–4 billion a month today. The deals that scroll by on any given day are typically pretty prosaic stuff—injection-molded plastic enclosures, machined metal rods, fasteners, specialty cables—but they give Free an unmatched window on the world of manufacturing today.Read more at location 3114

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For a lens into the new world of open-access factories in China, just search Alibaba (in English), find some companies producing more or less what you’re looking to make, and then use instant messaging to ask them if they can manufacture what you want. Alibaba’s IM can translate between Chinese and English in real time, so each person can communicate using their native language. Typically, responses come in minutes: we can’t make that; we can make that and here’s how to order it; we already make something quite like that and here’s what it costs.Read more at location 3176

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Perhaps the best known of these are Ponoko and Shapeways. Ponoko (on whose advisory board I sit as an unpaid volunteer) started in New Zealand as a laser-cutting service, but is now global and offers laser cutting, 3-D printing, and CNC cutting.Read more at location 3223

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Similar services exist for electronics (printed circuit boards), fabrics, and even ceramics. Meanwhile, the grandfather of them all is the Lego company, whose Lego Digital Designer CAD program for kids lets them do exactly the same thing with Lego bricks, creating a design onscreen, then uploading it to the service to be turned into a custom kit that is shipped back to them, looking just like an official Lego kit. Then, if others buy it, the designer will get a cut of the revenues.Read more at location 3238

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And that’s just chemistry. What happens when the tools get powerful enough to extend to biology and genetics? Today we can amplify and identify DNA at the kitchen table. Tomorrow we will be able to sequence it, too. But after that comes synthesizing it, modifying it, and the rest of genetic engineering. The day when only a small number of professional labs can do this, checking and screening every request that comes in, will soon end. At that point, people will start hacking life. We’ve been doing that for thousands of years with cross-breeding and agricultural genetics, but that was always within the bounds of nature. But in the lab, there are fewer such bounds. And the DIYbio Movement aims to create countless new labs. Why should trained scientists have all the fun?Read more at location 3349

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

I have always been a fan of Matt Ridley's books and this one is no exception.
It covers damming evidence that both government R&D and international aid produce no overall benefit, in fact they actually cause harm by discouraging individuals from supporting themselves.
How arbitrage (trade) is the engine that drives civilisations to innovate and grow, how their governments eventually stifle them (and how the same thing happens to companies are they grow ever larger).

it is a book about the benefits of change. I find that my disagreement is mostly with reactionaries of all political colours: blue ones who dislike cultural change, red ones who dislike economic change and green ones who dislike technological change.Read more at location 159

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years. Today, a car emits less pollution travelling at fullRead more at location 255

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The spread of IQ scores has been shrinking steadily – because the low scores have been catching up with the high ones. This explains the steady, progressive and ubiquitous improvement in the average IQ scores people achieve at a given age – at a rate of 3 per cent per decade. In two Spanish studies, IQ proved to be 9.7 points higher after thirty years, most of it among the least intelligent half of the group.Read more at location 286

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Put it another way, an hour of work today earns you 300 days’ worth of reading light; an hour of work in 1800 earned you ten minutes of reading light.Read more at location 308

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Time: that is the key. Forget dollars, cowrie shells or gold. The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it. If you have to acquire it for yourself, it usually takes longer than if you get it ready-made by other people. And if you can get it made efficiently by others, then you can afford more of it. As light became cheaper so people used more of it. The average Briton today consumes roughly 40,000 times as much artificial light as he did in 1750. He consumes fifty times as much power and 250 times as much transport (measured in passenger-miles travelled), too. This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.Read more at location 331

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Besides, a million years of natural selection shaped human nature to be ambitious to rear successful children, not to settle for contentment: people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.Read more at location 412

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That is what, it is now clear, far too many people and businesses did in the 2000s – they borrowed more from posterity than their innovation rate would support. They misallocated the resources to unproductive ends. Most past bursts of human prosperity have come to naught because they allocated too little money to innovation and too much to asset price inflation or to war, corruption, luxury and theft.Read more at location 459

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after studying the issue, that the entire concept of food miles is ‘a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator’. Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 per cent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops. A New Zealand lamb, shipped to England, requires one-quarter as much carbon to get on to a London plate as a Welsh lamb; aRead more at location 621

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There is no such thing as unproductive employment, so long as people are prepared to buy the service you are offering. Today, 1 per cent works in agriculture and 24 per cent in industry, leaving 75 per cent to offer movies, restaurant meals, insurance broking and aromatherapy.Read more at location 640

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allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity. Innovation changes the world but only because it aids the elaboration of the division of labour and encourages the division of time.Read more at location 690

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once cooked, starch gelatinises and protein denatures, releasing far more calories for less input of energy. As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size.Read more at location 765

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A single, routine, minuscule Wal-Mart decision in the 1990s – not to sell deodorant in cardboard boxes – saved America $50 million a year, half of which was passed on to customers.Read more at location 1673

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In effect, Borlaug and his allies had unleashed the power of fertiliser, made with fossil fuels. Since 1900 the world has increased its population by 400 per cent; its cropland area by 30 per cent; its average yields by 400 per cent and its total crop harvest by 600 per cent. So per capita food production has risen by 50 per cent. Great news – thanks to fossil fuels.Read more at location 2093

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(chickens and fish convert grain into meat three times as efficiently as cattle; pigs are in between)Read more at location 2169

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The dirigiste mentality that dominated the second half of the twentieth century was always asking who is in charge, looking for who decided on a policy of trade. That is not how the world works. Trade emerged from the interactions of individuals. It evolved. Nobody was in charge.Read more at location 2412

Note: echoes of the intrnet, social networking, wikipedia Edit

It is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo’s magic trick.Read more at location 2477

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governments gradually employ more and more ambitious elites who capture a greater and greater share of the society’s income by interfering more and more in people’s lives as they give themselves more and more rules to enforce, until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is a lesson for today. Economists are quick to speak of ‘market failure’, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure’. Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members.Read more at location 2670

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Rural self-sufficiency is a romantic mirage. Urban opportunity is what people want. In 2008 for the first time more than half the people in the world lived in cities. That is not a bad thing. It is a measure of economic progress that more than half the population can leave subsistence and seek the possibilities of a life based on the collective brain instead. Two-thirds of economic growth happens in cities.Read more at location 2783

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The economist Pietra Rivoli writes, ‘As generations of mill girls and seamstresses from Europe, America and Asia are bound together by this common sweatshop experience – controlled, exploited, overworked, and underpaid – they are bound together too by one absolute certainty, shared across both oceans and centuries: this beats the hell out of life on the farm.’Read more at location 3219

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Two billion people alive today have never turned on a light switch.Read more at location 3420

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Though they may start out full of entrepreneurial zeal, once firms or bureaucracies grow large, they become risk-averse to the point of Luddism.Read more at location 3818

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A large study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development concluded that government spending on R&D has no observable effect on economic growth, despite what governments fondly believe. Indeed it ‘crowds out resources that could be alternatively used by the private sector, including private R&D’. This rather astonishing conclusion has been almost completely ignored by governments.Read more at location 3940

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As Bruce Ames famously demonstrated in the late 1990s, cabbage has forty-nine natural pesticides in it, more than half of which are carcinogens. In drinking a single cup of coffee you encounter far more carcinogenic chemicals than in a year’s exposure to pesticide residues in food.Read more at location 4357

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The history of the world is replete with examples of the extinction or near-exhaustion of resources: mammoths, whales, herrings, passenger pigeons, white pine forests, Lebanon cedars, guano. They are all, note, ‘renewable’. By striking contrast, there is not a single non-renewable resource that has run out yet: not coal, oil, gas, copper, iron, uranium, silicon, or stone.Read more at location 4410

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The aid that Zambia has received since 1960, if invested instead in assets giving a reasonable rate of return, would by now have given Zambians the income per head of the Portuguese – $20,000 instead of $500.Read more at location 4611

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They could find no evidence that aid resulted in growth in any countries. Ever.Read more at location 4615

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Botswana turns out to have secure, enforceable property rights that are fairly widely distributed and fairly well respected. When Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues compared property rights with economic growth throughout the world, they found that the first explained an astonishing three quarters of the variation in the second and that Botswana was no outlier: the reason it had flourished was because its people owned property without fear of confiscation by chiefs or thieves to a much greater extent than in the rest of Africa. This is much the same explanation for why England had a good eighteenth century while China did not.Read more at location 4667

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Whether considering fish off Iceland, kudu in Namibia, jaguars in Mexico, trees in Niger, bees in Bolivia or water in Colorado, the same lesson applies. Give local people the power to own, exploit and profit from natural resources in a sustainable way and they will usually preserve and cherish those resources. Give them no share in a wildlife resource that is controlled – nay ‘protected’ – by a distant government and they will generally neglect, ruin and waste it. That is the real lesson of the tragedy of the commons.)Read more at location 4719

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The twenty-first century will be a magnificent time to be alive. Dare to be an optimist.Read more at location 5226

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