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).
Month: December 2012
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.
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.