The power of sweating the small stuff

Recommended: Rory Sutherland’s talk “Sweat the small stuff”.  He posits that small things and encouragements are often more conducive to changing people’s behaviors than large projects and threats. As an example, Sutherland cites traffic signs that display your current car speed together with a smiley or a “frownie” (depending on whether your are within the speed limit). These are actually more efficient at preventing traffic accidents than speed cameras (which come with the threat of real punishment).



Unfortunately, powerful people often have large budgets and favor grand strategies. Instead, he would prefer powerful people with little money which would have to sweat the small stuff. He describes the four quadrants of a coordinate system with the axes “cost” and “effect”:

• costs much, has a big effect: strategy


• costs much, has a small effect: consultancy (partially tongue-in-cheek). He also mentions mergers which often change little for both employees and customers of companies.


• costs little, has a small effect: trivia


• costs little, has a big effect: these are things that usually escape politics and companies. He suggests inventing a word for this category and hiring “chief detail officers” (with small budgets) that are responsible for it.

Is Bill Gates really altruistic?

Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have recently made headlines when they announced that they were going to donate half of their fortune. Bill Gates tried to convince German billionaires to do the same. But they are hesitant and I find the justification interesting. Peter Krämer says that U.S. fiscal law allows billionaires to basically decide between donating and paying taxes and argues that no single human should have the power to control that much public money. He has also been quietly donating a lot of money, in addition to paying taxes and is in favor of the rich having to pay more taxes. Quite impressive. The Bill Gates Foundation has in the past been questioned for investing its money into “unethical” companies. It might come with the territory, but it shows the pitfalls of this approach.

Arguments against the “war on drugs”

While I don't have any perfect answer, the global “war on drugs” smacks of the American prohibition of alcohol, something that ended up causing a lot of crime. If all drugs were legal, there would be no extraordinary profit in selling them and thus the crime that surrounds drugs would go away. Except, obviously, the crimes committed for making money to afford drugs (which is not an issue with rich people and would be less of an issue with poor people if drugs become legal and thus cheaper). What I'm not sure about is if free drugs would increase drug usage and, if that is true, there could be something done about that. The article “The Wire's War on the Drug War” has some more things to say about this topic, mainly that it leads to arresting the wrong people and that all of them are part of the lower class.

[source: doggdot.us]