Categories
General/All

Free: The New Currency

About 10 years ago while I was still an undergraduate, I remember taking a course called Knowledge Economy. The lecturer who also co authored the textbook we were using, described how knowledge will be the new capital vs what emerged from [the remnants of] the Industrial Revolution where the factors of production are (a) labour (b) land and (c) capital (raw materials and money).

Categories
Mental

The Jevons Effect

The latest craze in Malaysia is arguably the Big Bad Wolf sale from 7 – 23 December 2012. It is the biggest book sale in the world with more than 3 million books offered at steep discounts. I was told that the mastermind behind this is the same couple who run BookXcess. I would be very much delighted to meet this cool enterprising pair. Why? Because if you think about it, Malaysia is a super diverse multilingual nation who can easily speak English, Chinese (China), Indian (India) and Malay (distant cousin of Indonesia). It’s a record and rightly so, because the 3 million books sold are in English only.

Categories
Mental

The Elder’s Manifesto

Besides exuding a vampire-like feeling (Elder just strikes me as a Vampire Elder, one of the three original Vampires: Marcus, Viktor, and Amelia), the man of the hour is Alexander Elder, a professional stock trader. Elder was born in Leningrad and grew up in Estonia, where he entered medical school at the age of 16. At 23, while working as a ship’s doctor, he jumped a Soviet Union ship in Africa and received political asylum in the United States. Or so his public profile often goes.

Categories
Mental

The Economic Truth

Many people, I presume, occasionally vow to learn something new, only to find themselves beaten down a couple of months later. This enthusiasm sometimes coincides with yearly resolution setting.