What Do Managers Do? An Economist’s Perspective: Economic activity requires motivating and coordinating individuals to work toward a common goal. These aims are the purview of managers. What, however, do managers actually do? We outline three defining principles of economic research on managers—technological determinism, skill distinction, and managerial self-interest—and relate them to the set of skills reported by managers on LinkedIn. We highlight “managers of people” and “managers of projects” as a useful distinction for categorizing theoretical, empirical, and descriptive accounts of managers. In light of our three principles, we review research on how managers can create value—namely, by hiring, retaining, training, monitoring, evaluating, allocating, and supervising. We propose that managers apply these skills in different proportions depending on the production technology in which they are embedded and that research on managers should seek to produce generalizable insights by exploring managers’ contributions in different contexts.” [via Arnold Kling]
WSJ: “What’s the secret to the best-tasting chocolate? It is using the right microbes, and for the first time scientists have isolated a collection of those bugs and made a superior-tasting chocolate in a laboratory. Chocolate, like sourdough or yogurt, begins with fermentation. Farmers stash cocoa beans scooped out of ripe cocoa pods in wooden boxes outdoors, cover them with leaves and leave them alone for a week. Fermentation is kicked off by bacteria and yeasts that live in the boxes or the soil. If things go well, the beans and slimy white pulp that surrounds them will transform into brown beans that can be dried, roasted and cracked open. The flavorful nibs within are turned into chocolate liquor, the foundation for confections and baking chocolate.”
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn: “The purpose is for us to teach you the language fully. What does fully mean? There are lots of caveats here. Our goal is to get you to the level where you can speak the language well enough to have a knowledge job. Now, you may not be a poet. You may have trouble with wordplay. You may have an accent. There’s another caveat, which is that it takes a long time. On average, it takes about 550 hours on Duolingo to get to that level. Sometimes people will tell me: “I have a 1,000-day streak. Why am I not fluent?” If they only do one lesson a day, that’s three minutes. A 1,000-day streak is 50 hours.”
FT: “Winning elections is the only curb against strongmen…Liberals focus too much on constitutions and too little on politics…No check or balance is effective against would-be autocrats aside from beating them in elections…If winning is the one reliable break against power-abusers, it is a patriotic duty to have a round-the-clock fixation with the median voter.”
