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Here are some books and articles that I have found to be especially intriguing.

The Capitol Steps are on-line.  If you've been to a major convention in Washington, DC, you've probably heard their hilarious songs about current events.  Now you can listen on-line.

What's the Fed going to do next?  By looking at options on Fed Funds futures contracts, you can figure out what the market expects the Fed to do.  There are cool charts, updated daily, at the Cleveland Fed's web site.

WorldMapper is a cool site.  Here's how the world looks in terms of population:


"Addicted to Crude" the President said.  For sharp insights into our energy consumption, read Peter Huber's column in the Wall Street Journal.  It's a 5-minute primer on what kind of energy we use, and how we can achieve independence from Persian Gulf oil.  Read it here.

Michael Crichton (author of Jurassic Park, State of Fear, etc.) has another great speech on his web site, this one about complexity and the environment.  Read it here.

The Fred Factor is the New York Times Bestseller that my friends are talking about.  Mark Sanborn, the author, tells an intriguing story about his mailman, with lessons for both business leaders and everyday people.  Buy it at any store or on Mark's website.

CEOs/CFOs: Getting ready for annual reports and analyst presentations? Get a copy of Bill's one-page "Guidelines for Investor Presentations." Call or email (bill@conerlyconsulting.com) for your complimentary copy.

Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer, gave a great graduation speech at Stanford, with tremendous life lessons in packed into three short stories. Read them here.

Labor markets are tightening, we learned from our recent survey of newsletter subscribers. (Thanks to those of you who participated.) One way to deal with tight labor markets is to reduce employee turnover. The tough part: it's best to start an action plan before labor markets get too tight. We at Conerly Consulting LLC are not turnover experts, but we have compiled a list of resources for the business leader who would like to reduce turnover. See the compiled list here.

The Economist Magazine has an excellent "Survey: America" in its July 20, 2005 issue. The series of articles discuss migration of Americans within our country, as well as foreign immigration. It's an excellent, well-written background piece. Read it here.

Does international finance confuse you? Is the foreign trade deficit a concern? Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke has a great speech that lays out clearly some points that I have been making (not so clearly) in my own speeches. Read the speech here. It's a little dry in the beginning, but then it gets rolling. (Thanks to John Mitchell for mentioning this speech.)

Life 2.0 by Rich Karlgaard, (publisher of Forbes Magazine and author of that magazine's column, Digital Rules) has written a book for burned out baby boomers. Life 2.0 takes its name from the experience of the people interviewed, who started a second version of their lives over somewhere else. These "return to one's roots" stories, though, have a difference: returning to smaller cities, but with high speed Internet connections, air travel to the big city customer bases, and general connectedness to the big cities. In moving, however, many people have found less hectic lives, shorter commutes, lower priced houses, as well as more time for family and church, fishing and golf, and generally enjoying life. Whether you're hankering to run away from home or not, it's valuable to be up on this trend. With our high price housing, Pacific Northwest cities such as Portland and Seattle may be on the losing end of this movement.

"Personnel Turnover and Leadership Thinking" by Dale Collie offers five tips for reducing employee turnover, plus links to more information. Dale doesn't mention this specifically, but I'm inclined to believe that better training of first-level supervisors on how to manage employees often has great payback.

Is your organization using its financial system to really understand the business? My bet is you are not. Take the self-test (pdf file) developed by Heads Up Systems, a firm that really understands how to use hard data to improve profitablilty.

New Search Engine: I'm not giving up on Google, but I'm now using "Clusty" a lot. The cool idea here is an additional feature: a list of clusters for the search term. For example, search for Bill Conerly under Google and you get a mix of references to me, plus a few items related to the famous quarterback (and distant cousin) Charlie Conerly. Do the same under Clusty and the general search page returns similar results; but the left margin is more interesting. It has categories ("clusters") that make it easier to find exactly what part of my life interests you: my consulting work, my research on unemployment, my experience racing a Thistle class sailboat, etc. In addition, the sites that don't refer to me are grouped into two clusters, one for the quarterback, and one for all of the Mississippi references to the Conerlys.

Why was Ronald Reagan so successful as president? Read a liberal columnist's assessment, and learn something about how we can all be more successful in our own lives.

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras. I'm not big fan of the management self-help genre, but this is a good one. It's structured somewhat like In Search of Excellence, but the focus is on excellent companies that have lasted for at least half a century, and includes contrasts with similar companies that have not achieved as much. The writing is compelling, and liberal use of anecdotes drives home the points. Applicability extends beyond for-profit companies to the non-profit sector as well. I recommend it.

If you subscribe to Reason Magazine, one of my favorites, your house will be on the cover of the June issue. Whoever you are, wherever you live, that's your house on the cover. Each cover will be printed with a satellite photo of the subscriber's neighborhood, with the subscriber's house circled. Read the New York Times article about the cover project.

"Using an Expert Witness Effectively: The Do's and Don'ts of Using Expert Witnesses" by Scott Miller.

If the European economy is important to your business, check out Olivier Blanchard's recent notes on the subject. Blanchard is an economics professor at MIT, and writes in short-bullet format for a quick read. Bottom line: there are downside risks in Euroland from strong Euro/dollar exchange rate, combined with low productivity growth.

Traveling to Skagit or Kootenai counties? Wondering how they are pronounced? Sure that you'll look ignorant if you muff it? Easy answer: Go to A Northwest Pronunciation Guide. By the way, say "SKAJ-it" and "KOOT'n-ee."

Peter Drucker always has interesting ideas. His latest interview in Fortune Magazineis well worth reading. His comments on productivity growth and the role of the United States in the world economy are very cogent. And if you're looking for some fireplace reading on a snowy day, try his Adventures of a Bystander, out of print but available at Powells.com.

Has job growth been so weak in this recovery because of rapid productivity growth? Princeton's Alan Krueger offers an interesting counterpoint to the usual slant here.

Is environmentalism a religion? Sci-Fi writer Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain) gave a fascinating speech to San Francisco's Commonwealth Club on how the environmental movement can be more effective in protecting the health of the planet. Read the speech.

"What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop?" Everett Ehrlich's Washington Post commentary offers some interesting lessons from the Howard Dean campaign, lessons relevant to all political persuasions. Read the article.

Who wins and who loses from technological revolutions? Berkeley professor Brad DeLong has a good, short, readable explanation in his article, "A Framework for the Economic Analysis of Technological Revolutions, with an Application to Nanotechnology." Read it on his blog.

Is the trade deficit a problem? Warren Buffett wrote an article in Fortune expressing his very strong opinion that America is in trouble because of its excess of imports over imports. One doesn't disagree with the world's greatest investor without feeling some nervousness, but I believe that Buffett is wrong. The best explanation why is in David Malpass's Forbes article. In a nutshell, America consumes less than it earns, so we do have net savings (contrary to Buffett's example). But our physical investment is more than we save, so we bring capital in. That is the flip side of the trade deficit: we export IOUs, stock certificates, property deeds to bring our international accounts into balance. But it's not a problem to export these claims on our assets if we are growing our assets. And we surely are. Our strong (even if imperfect) respect for property rights, rule of law, low corruption and general honesty make this country a great place for foreigners to purchase assets. Thus, the trade deficit is financing domestic expansion, not profligate consumption. OK, it's a simplification, but it's in the ballpark.

Robert Wright's The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life is my favorite book of the year (so far). Wright explains our emotions and sense of morality as developed through evolution. The reason we have our feelings is that they helped our ancestors pass the genes on. (Example: men who were attracted to post-menopausal women didn't pass on their genes as well as men attracted to young women.) The book feels natural to an economist who regularly sees the world as a competitive environment. Others may find it weird, but possibly eye-opening.

Since reading Cryptonomicon (recommended below), I've been catching up on Neal Stephenson's earlier novels. The Diamond Age combines nanotechnology with the advantages and disadvantages of Victorian morals. It's hard to believe that this novel predates the recent spate of articles about nanotech. Snow Crash, about the web gone wild, isn't quite as good as Diamond Age, but still far more interesting than most novels. The Big U is an amusing satire on higher education for the first half of the book, and a waste of paper for the second half.

Scott McNealy's interview in Red Herring magazine (May 6) is worth reading by anyone in business, even those not involved in computers. There's a good discussion on the distinction between making things and distributing them.

This article from the McKinsey Quarterly explains how successful companies make strategic planning more than an exercise, translating strategic thinking into action.

"Learning to Love Recessions" is another article from McKinsey Quarterly, explaining how successful firms can come out of recessions in stronger competitive position than when the recession began.

Is Supply-side Economics dead, or ready for a rebound in this recession?

There's a great summary of what makes sense about supply-side, and what doesn't, in The Heritage Foundation's newsletter. It's written by Raymond J. Keating, chief economist of the Small Business Survival Committee, and includes comments relevant to policy during the current recession. Key point: it helps a lot to cut marginal tax rates that influence behavior. It doesn't help much to cut taxes retroactively or on a lump-sum basis.

"Creative destruction" was only one great insight from the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. The Austrians tend to be hard reading, though tremendously insightful. This 20-minute article excerpts key thoughts from Schumpeter's work. Call it Schumpeter for Dummies. In Economic Insights.

Tom Bethell, The Noblest Triumph

Bill's comments: Why have some societies made tremendous economic advances in the last two centuries, while others languish in poverty? Why are some areas of the Middle East desert, though historical records clearly show them cultivated two thousand years ago? Why is China making progress today, but not Russia? Tom Bethell has the answer, and its property. Specifically, Bethell argues that the right to own, use and sell property is the key to investment and economic improvement. This book is broad in its vision, yet offers fairly detailed defense of the author's thesis. It's a rewarding work.

Economists have been criticized--and have criticized themselves--for developing economic models that don't accurately reflect the real world. Many of the models have been getting more realistic, but there's a really interesting trend also at work: the real world is looking more like our theoretical models. I have commented on this in terms of business practices; now a broader perspective is offered by Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton professor and former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. "How the Economy Came to Resemble the Model" was published in Business Economics in January 2000.

Population, Food, and Knowledge (pdf file)

"Population, Food, and Knowledge," is a great little article summarizing centuries of progress in feeding humanity. It assesses the Malthusian hypothesis that progress will mean population grows faster than food supply. D. Gale Johnson presented this paper as his Presidential Address before the American Economic Association in January 2000, and it was published in American Economic Review March 2000.

The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress
by Virginia Postrel

Review from Amazon.com: Virginia Postrel smashes conventional political boundaries in this libertarian manifesto. World-views should be defined not by how they view the present, she says, but the future. Do they aim to control it, as many conservative reactionaries and liberal planners want to do? Or do they embrace it, even though they can't know what lies ahead? Postrel (editor of Reason magazine) firmly places herself in this latter category--the dynamists, she calls her happy tribe--and urges the rest of us to sign up. The future of economic prosperity, technological progress, and cultural innovation depends upon embracing principles of choice and competition. The downside of this philosophy, Postrel readily notes, is that it doesn't allow us to manage tomorrow by acting today. And that's exactly the point: we shouldn't want to. A future constructed by an infinite number of individual decisions, made privately, is one she believes we should encourage. The Future and Its Enemies is at once intellectually sweeping and reader-friendly; it has the potential to join a pantheon of books about freedom that includes works by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. --John J. Miller

Bill's comment: This was my favorite book of 1998; I highly recommend it.

The Nail File
The Economic Meaning of Manicures
by Virginia Postrel

Bill's comments: to understand the process of economic growth and development, there are two choices. Read Josef Schumpeter's Theory of Economic Development or read Virginia Postrel's article about acrylic fingernail salons. The serious student should head for Schempeter - but only after joining everyone else with Postrel.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
by Jared Diamond

Bill's comments: How did Pizarro and 200 soldiers conquer the Incas, with 40,000 armed warriors? Why didn't the Incas travel to Spain instead and seize the Spanish king? Diamond's answer is the title to his book. He explains how biological and geographical factors worked through a competitive, evolutionary process to put Europeans at the top of the range of human development. His sympathy and concern for other people is strong, but Diamond is a scientist looking for the facts. What Virginia Postrel has done for the future, Diamond has done for the past. (Thanks to Arthur Levinson for turning me on to this book.)

Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson

Excerpt from the Amazon.com review: Cryptonomicon is vintage Stephenson from start to finish: short on plot, but long on detail so precise it's exhausting. Every page has a math problem, a quotable in-joke, an amazing idea, or a bit of sharp prose. Cryptonomicon is also packed with truly weird characters, funky tech, and crypto--all the crypto you'll ever need, in fact, not to mention all the computer jargon of the moment. A word to the wise: if you read this book in one sitting, you may die of information overload (and starvation). --Therese Littleton

Bill's comments: Quirky, long, and occasionally tedious, but nonetheless a worthwhile read. It raises the question: can encryption free the world?