Elon Musk’s 7 Rules To Increase Productivity (via Gabriel Gruber). Among them: “Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get [rid] of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience in which case keep them very short.” And: “Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.”
Katy Milkman on How to Change (Econlib): “The willpower problem is a really big one. I think too often we know from evidence people think Nike is right and I can just do it. And that’s just garbage. We aren’t good at pushing through…But, we ourselves have some ability to set systems up that also support success, individually. And, we can take a hint from what works when someone else is trying to help and use those same tools.”
Reason on the era of big government in the US: “Even if nothing truly terrible happens—no interest rate hikes, no runaway inflation, no major catastrophes or recessions demanding that we tap into a nonexistent rainy-day fund—the current projections show that, within a few decades, half of all tax revenue will be used just to pay the interest on the debt. By the time a child born today is old enough to be nostalgic for the 2020s, half of his annual tax burden will go toward paying off the debt—a debt that includes myriad benefits his parents received without paying for. Maybe his generation will come to care about fiscal responsibility. Maybe things will change even sooner than that: Perhaps Biden, once the fog of the pandemic has lifted and the cost of its response becomes clear, will rediscover the importance of balancing budgets. Until then, it’s clear that the era of small government is over.”
