Month: January 2017

it might have been only a temporary confluence of interests, but everything was temporary now— with so many traditions broken or vanished, it left what John used to call the necessity of creation;

They were apolitical, supposedly, like civil servants— empiricists, who only wanted things managed in a rational scientific style, the greatest good for the greatest number, which ought to be fairly simple to arrange, if people were not so trapped in emotions, religions, governments, and other mass delusional systems of that sort.

For the adepts, the walk from Sabishii up onto the massif must have been an aesthetic journey, filled with allusions and subtle variants of tradition that were invisible to him. Hiroko would have called it areoformation, or the areophany.

To see the landscape in its history, to read it like a text, written by its own long past;

Less obviously visionary, perhaps, less spectacular, less active; an acceptance of what was there; love of rock, for rock’s sake. For Mars’s sake.

That must be why they’re killing each other— they know what they’re thinking themselves, and so they suspect all the others. How ugly. How sad.

“The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the privileges of capital.”

You don’t know about this partly because you are ignorant, and partly because metanationalism itself steadfastly ignored and denied all alternatives to it.

And justice and freedom do not contradict each other as much as has been claimed, because freedom in an injust system is no freedom at all.

In your mental traveling you can journey back into the past, retrace your steps, see where you turned and why, then proceed onward in a direction that is different because it includes these loops of understanding.

It was power politics and hierarchy to these people now, they had forgotten the real issues involved.

What mattered to them was not the result of any single disagreement, but the successful use of the process.

Of course her reading of Bogdanovism was relatively simple: things should be just, Arkady had insisted, and everyone free and equal; the past didn’t matter; they needed to invent new forms whenever the old ones looked unfair or impractical, which was often; Mars was the only reality that counted, at least to them.

She was a power; and people knew it; and power was corrosive. Power was powerful, in more ways than one.

If millions and millions of Terrans began to pour up onto Mars, they all argued, what then of Mars— not just of the landscape itself, but of the Martian culture that had been forming over the m-years? Wouldn’t that be drowned in the old ways brought up by the new influx, which might quickly outnumber the native population?

We have a lot of time to fill. And the only work really interesting enough to pursue over the long haul would be raising a kid, don’t you think?

It was hard to give up being a revolutionary. Nothing seemed to follow from it, either logically or emotionally.

in an expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible. This difference was what humans perceived as order.

“And the land is in the shared stewardship of everyone. We still own personal items as property, but land as property has never happened here. That’s a new social reality, we struggle with it every day.”

What now was lacking? Peace of mind? Nanao would have laughed. The presence of other old friends? Well, there would be other days for that. Now, in this moment, they were two old brothers in arms, sitting on a sea cliff. After all the years of struggle they could sit out there all afternoon if they liked, flying a kite and talking. Discussing their old friends and the weather. There had been trouble before, there would be trouble again; but here they were.

And as the process continued, and a hundred and then a thousand asteroids and moonlets were given a local habitation and a name, the process took fire, becoming what some called the explosive diaspora, others simply the accelerando.

People now ordinarily understood capitalism to have been the clash of feudalism and democracy, and the present to be the democratic age, the clash of capitalism and harmony.

In this pressured situation, history was little comfort; so far they had dealt with it well, but never before had humanity responded to a crisis of need with any longterm consistent sensible sanity; mass madness had erupted before; and they were the exact same animals that in previous centuries, faced with matters of subsistence and survival, had slaughtered each other indiscriminately.

They did not fully understand that patriarchy no longer mattered, and perhaps never had— that it had always been caught in the Kegel grip of uterine law, which operated outside patriarchy with a biological power that could not be controlled by any mere politics.

“It’s like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind. Without mind there is no intrinsic worth.”

The Chinese are still jammed into their country like sardines, and they don’t give a damn about the intrinsic worth of China itself, much less a barren moonlet on the edge of the solar system.

You can try sabotage like the Reds did on Mars, but they can blow you off the moons here just as easy as you can them, and they’ve got a million replacements for every colonist they lose.

Their attitude was deeply hypocritical, as most of those applauding made their living from Terran tourists, and all of them were immigrants or the children of immigrants; but they cheered anyway.

And so the newcomers can’t cope. They cluster in immigrant ghettos, or new towns entire, and keep their traditions and their ties to home, and hate everything here, and all the xenophobia and misogyny in those old cultures breaks out again, against both their own women and the native girls.”

We’ve tried to integrate newcomers every way we know, but they clump, naturally, and you can’t just break them up.

But so many problems are rising— cases of sharia, family abuse, ethnic gangs getting in fights, immigrants attacking natives— usually men attacking women, but not always. And young native gangs are retaliating, harassing the new settlements and so on.

Mars right now is the battleground of past and future, and the past has its power, but the future is where we’re all going. There’s a kind of inexorable power in it, like a vacuum pull forward.

Science was a social construct, but it was also and most importantly its own space, conforming to reality only; that was its beauty

If nothing was real but this moment, Planck instant after Planck instant, an unimaginably thin membrane of becoming between past and future.

People in the streets, that’s the only thing governments are afraid of. Well, or term limits. Or free elections! Or assassination. Or being laughed at, ah, ha-ha-ha!

The right decision, even when all seems lost, can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The wrong decision, even when a victorious outcome seems all but certain, can result in deadly, catastrophic failure.

They must literally risk life and limb to accomplish the mission. For this reason, they must believe in the cause for which they are fighting. They must believe in the plan they are asked to execute, and most important, they must believe in and trust the leader they are asked to follow.

Such concepts are simple, but not easy

These principles empower those teams to dominate their battlefields by enabling leaders to fulfill their purpose: lead and win.

No doubt, as an outstanding leader himself, he felt somewhat responsible.

I was the leader. I was in charge and I was responsible. Thus, I had to take ownership of everything that went wrong.

They must first look in the mirror at themselves. The leader bears full responsibility for explaining the strategic mission, developing the tactics, and securing the training and resources to enable the team to properly and successfully execute.

Every mistake, every failure or shortfall—those leaders would own it.

The best leaders checked their egos, accepted blame, sought out constructive criticism, and took detailed notes for improvement.

there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.

Consequences for failing need not be immediately severe, but leaders must ensure that tasks are repeated until the higher expected standard is achieved.

Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mind-set into the team.

His attitude reflected victimization: life dealt him and his boat crew members a disadvantage, which justified poor performance.

“We may not be winning,”said the CTO resolutely, “but we’re making the right decisions.”“If you aren’t winning,”I responded, “then you aren’t making the right decisions.”

When it comes to performance standards, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.

As a critical part of our culture, we constantly challenged each other to tests of physical strength.

I didn’t believe that this mission made sense. I didn’t believe it was smart. I didn’t believe it would be successful.

But once I understood and believed, I then passed that understanding and belief on, clearly and succinctly, to my troops so that they believed in it themselves. When they understood why, they would commit to the mission, persevere through the inevitable challenges in store, and accomplish the task set before us.

Even when others doubt and question the amount of risk, asking, “Is it worth it?”the leader must believe in the greater cause. If a leader does not believe, he or she will not take the risks required to overcome the inevitable challenges necessary to win.

Every leader must be able to detach from the immediate tactical mission and understand how it fits into strategic goals.

But in the minds of her sales managers, she was still The Boss: experienced, smart, and most important, powerful. That position demanded a high level of reverence—so high, in fact, that for an employee to question her ideas seemed disrespectful.

Leadership isn’t one person leading a team. It is a group of leaders working together, up and down the chain of command, to lead. If you are on your own, I don’t care how good you are, you won’t be able to handle it.

It was immaterial which units did what or who conducted the most operations. It was about the mission and how we could best accomplish it and win.

Often, the most difficult ego to deal with is your own.

This isn’t his fault, it’s yours. You are in charge, so the fact that he didn’t follow procedure is your fault. And you have to believe that, because it’s true.

If you approached it as he did something wrong, and he needs to fix something, and he is at fault, it becomes a clash of egos and you two will be at odds. That’s human nature. But, if you put your own ego in check, meaning you take the blame, that will allow him to actually see the problem without his vision clouded by ego.

When plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them. And when things go wrong, and they inevitably do go wrong, complexity compounds issues that can spiral out of control into total disaster.

He fearlessly stood in the window braving incoming enemy rounds as he unleashed three to five round bursts of his own into insurgent positions.

Even the greatest of battlefield leaders could not handle an array of challenges simultaneously without being overwhelmed. That risked failing at them all. I had to remain calm, step back from my immediate emotional reaction, and determine the greatest priority for the team. Then, rapidly direct the team to attack that priority.

It is crucial, particularly for leaders at the top of the organization, to “pull themselves off the firing line,”step back, and maintain the strategic picture.

I trusted them to lead. My ego took no offense to my subordinate leaders on the frontlines calling the shots. In fact, I was proud to follow their lead and support them.

Every time we called for help, the company commander fearlessly placed himself and his men at great risk. He personally saddled up and drove out in his tank to bring the thunder on our behalf and beat back enemy attacks on SEAL positions.

Teams must be broken down into manageable elements of four to five operators, with a clearly designated leader. Those leaders must understand the overall mission, and the ultimate goal of that mission—the Commander’s Intent. Junior leaders must be empowered to make decisions on key tasks necessary to accomplish that mission in the most effective and efficient manner possible.

Leaders must be free to move to where they are most needed, which changes throughout the course of an operation.

Situations will sometimes require that the boss walk away from a problem and let junior leaders solve it, even if the boss knows he might solve it more efficiently.

If frontline troops are unclear about the plan and yet are too intimidated to ask questions, the team’s ability to effectively execute the plan radically decreases.

No matter how exhausted from an operation or how busy planning for the next mission, time is made for this debrief because lives and future mission success depend on it.

It was a realization for him that even when a leader thinks his troops understand the bigger picture, they very often have difficulty connecting the dots between the tactical mission they are immersed in with the greater overarching goal.

Leaders must routinely communicate with their team members to help them understand their role in the overall mission.

I needed to check my negative attitude, which was corrosive and ultimately only hampered our ability to operate.

Leading up the chain takes much more savvy and skill than leading down the chain. Leading up, the leader cannot fall back on his or her positional authority. Instead, the subordinate leader must use influence, experience, knowledge, communication, and maintain the highest professionalism.

Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do.

Take responsibility for leading everyone in your world, subordinates and superiors alike.

If someone isn’t doing what you want or need them to do, look in the mirror first and determine what you can do to better enable this.

Regardless, leaders cannot be paralyzed by fear. That results in inaction. It is critical for leaders to act decisively amid uncertainty; to make the best decisions they can based on only the immediate information available.

Instead of letting the situation dictate our decisions, we must dictate the situation. But for many leaders, this mind-set was not intuitive. Many operated with a “wait and see”approach.

Discipline equals freedom.

The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win—you pass the test. If you are mentally weak for that moment and you let that weakness keep you in bed, you fail.

Instead of making us more rigid and unable to improvise, this discipline actually made us more flexible, more adaptable, and more efficient. It allowed us to be creative.

If frontline leaders and troops executing the mission lack the ability to adapt, this becomes detrimental to the team’s performance.

A true leader is not intimidated when others step up and take charge. Leaders that lack confidence in themselves fear being outshined by someone else.

It is a leader’s job to always mitigate as much as possible those risks that can be controlled to accomplish the mission without sacrificing the team or excessively expending critical resources.

Leaders must never get so close that the team forgets who is in charge.

“The insistent permissiveness of the late Twentieth Century had produced fully as much sex-guilt and sex-fear in its heirs as had the insistent repressiveness of the late Nineteenth Century.”

There was an acceptant, passive quality about him that seemed feminine, or even childish.

No doubt Haber had a lot of ambition and found it hard to believe that a man could be without it.

He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence.

That one worked but didn’t get approved, it came under the brainwashing laws, we decided.

That reality’s being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the tune—only we don’t know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream. If that’s true, I guess we’re lucky not knowing it.

But the big man was like an onion, slip off layer after layer of personality, belief, response, infinite layers, no end to them, no center to him.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

Refugees from southwest Portland had to walk through it; women carried their children and walked weeping with pain, in thin shoes full of broken glass.

To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one.

But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all.

Every step forward that I force you to take, you cancel, you cripple with the deviousness or stupidity of the means your dream takes to realize it. You try, each time, to take a step backward.

There were still gray people now, it was said, particularly in the Middle West and Germany, but most of the rest had gone back to white, brown, black, red, yellow, and mixtures

We went over to the client’s office and spent an entire eight-hour day going over each and every pixel and word in that deck. When it was over, the client clapped (really). They loved it. We were relieved. And we never looked at that deck again. Six months after that meeting, nothing had changed on the client’s site. I don’t think they ever looked at that deck again, either.

It’s also for developers who understand that a collaborative team environment leads to better code and more meaningful work.

each principle detailed here will help you build a product design organization that is more collaborative, more cross-functional, and a more useful fit for today’s reality.

Insight on each idea is brought in from all relevant disciplines earlier in the process.

Translated to Lean UX, this concept means creating only the design that is necessary to move the team forward and avoiding a big “inventory”of untested and unimplemented design ideas.

It’s worth noting that there’s been a lot of backlash in the design world against measurement-driven design.

The most effective way I’ve found to rally a team around a design direction is through collaboration.

These conversations may seem awkward at first; after all, you’re breaking down time-tested walls between disciplines.

That’s why you should include a researcher on your team if you can. Just don’t outsource the work to that person. Instead, use the researcher as a coach to help your team plan and execute your activities.

Here’s why: it becomes very easy to create a situation in which the entire team is never working on the same thing at the same time.

The people on the team generally performed in their area of expertise/strength but were supportive of other specialties and interested in learning new skills.

I looked for opportunities to work in real time with other people on the team (such as developers and the product manager) and rough things out as quickly as possible at the lowest responsible level of fidelity.

At most, these teams plan an iteration or two ahead. This perceived “short-sightedness”tends not to satisfy most high-level managers.

Keep the conversations focused on outcomes (how you’re trending towards your goal), not feature sets.

The more discrete a person’s job is, the easier it becomes to retreat to the safe confines of that discipline.

Too often, people in organizations discourage others from working outside the confines of their job descriptions.

Every team member possesses a core competency—design, software development, research, etc.—and must deliver on that skill set. However, he or she may also possess secondary competencies that make the team work more efficiently.

Designers must open up the design process.

The entire concept of design as hypothesis immediately dethrones notions of heroism; as a designer you must expect that many of the your ideas will fail in testing.

Don’t waste time debating which type of artifact to create, and don’t waste time polishing them to perfection. Instead, use the one that will take the least amount of time to create and communicate to your team.

Designers can demonstrate their problem solving skills by illustrating the path they took to get from idea to validated learning to experience. In doing so, they’ll demonstrate their deep worth as designers.

To use the concept of UX debt, write stories to capture a gap analysis between where the experience is today and where you’d like it to be.

Instead, their engagements are based on simple time-and materials agreements, or, more radically, on outcome-based contracts.

Some managers may be threatened by proposals to work in a new way, which could result negative consequences for you.

If your manager still doesn’t see the value in working this way and you believe your organization is progressing down a path of continued “blind design,”perhaps it’s time to consider alternative employment.

Kuhn had written about Priestley— that a scientist who continued to resist after his whole profession had been converted to a new paradigm might be perfectly logical and reasonable, but had ipso facto ceased to be a scientist.

He won every argument but never got anywhere.

So in the current political situation, information technology was creating not totalization but balkanization.

It was fairly humorous to see how responsive mood was to chemical manipulation, despite what it implied about the precarious balance of one’s emotional equanimity, even sanity itself.

Certainly the common wisdom was correct; the emergence of the transnationals in the 2040s had set the stage, and was the ultimate cause of the war.

For the record showed that the industrial nations had prospered under the transnats, while the developing nations had had no recourse but to fight each other for flag-of-convenience status.

Well, you know, this particular division of Subarashii is run by Georgians, and they’re in the grip of a big Stalin revival there. It’s a patriotic gesture to run their country as stupidly as possible.

What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one’s options, and reduce one’s freedom. One became a servant of one’s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one’s time protecting it.

“The resistance begins fighting itself, because that’s the only thing it can beat. Happens every time. You can’t get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”

Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you— anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

At Praxis we believe nations were never truly sovereign, but were always semiautonomous in relation to the rest of the world.

If only the rich would behave decently, then the system would be okay. That’s crap. The system overdetermines everything, and it’s the system that has to change.

In these arrangements the client government becomes the enforcement agency of the metanational’s economic policies. In general they enforce what are called austerity measures, but all government employees are paid much more than they were before, including the army and police and intelligence operations.

But either way, the scientist’s job is to explore everything. No matter the difficulties! To stay open, to accept ambiguity. To attempt to fuse with the object of knowledge. To admit that there are values shot through the whole enterprise. To love it. To work toward discovering the values by which we should live. To work to enact those values in the world. To explore— and more than that— to create!

“That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory— not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.”

What use was utopia without joy, after all? What was the point of all their striving if it did not include the laughter of the young?

“In fact, bad behavior is more often than not good politics.”

“It is hard to imagine that anyone, including ourselves, cares much about what we think ought to be. Neither do we exhort others to be better than they are.”

“Why do leaders do what they do? To come to power, to stay in power and, to the extent that they can, to keep control over money.”

“If we are going to play the game of politics, and we all must from time to time, then we ought to learn how to win the game.”

“No one rules alone; no one has absolute authority. All that varies is how many backs have to be scratched and how big the supply of backs available for scratching.”

“Managing the interchangeables, influentials, and essentials to that end is the act, art, and science of governing.”

“This support is only forthcoming if a leader provides his essentials with more benefits than they might expect to receive under alternative leadership or government.”

“It’s always better for a ruler to determine who eats than it is to have a larger pie from which the people can feed themselves.”

“The most effective cash flow for leaders is one that makes lots of people poor and redistributes money to keep select people—their supporters—wealthy.”

“Why do some political parties favor immigration? Rule 2: Expand the set of interchangeables.”

“The problem for democrats is that they face different constraints and have to be a little more creative than their autocratic counterparts.”

“Anyone who thinks leaders do what they ought to do—that is, do what is best for their nation of subjects—ought to become an academic rather than enter political life.”

“When democratic politicians lament “mortgaging our children’s future,”they’re really regretting that it was not them who came up with the popular policy that voters actually want.”

“To achieve power means recognizing the moment of opportunity, moving fast, and moving decisively to seize the day.”

“Unless such a purge can be accomplished in the dark, presented as a fait accompli to the old group of influentials, the risk of failure is real.”

“This is the essential lesson of politics: in the end ruling is the objective, not ruling well.”

“Both leaders knew that it is better to have loyal incompetents than competent rivals.”

“Any action he took—say, sending so-and-so to Siberia—was the will of the people, and any of the people in the replacement pool had a chance, albeit a slight one, of being called up to serve as an influential or maybe even an essential somewhere down the line.”

“The real decisions are made by the group leaders who deliver blocs of votes. They are the true influentials. It is therefore unsurprising that it is common for the rewards to flow through them, so that they can take their cut, rather than go directly to the people.”

“Leaders, however, are rather fond of taxes—as long as they don’t have to pay them.”

“Ruling is about staying in power, not about good governance.”

“In autocracies, it is unwise to be rich unless it is the government that made you rich. And if this is the case, it is important to be loyal beyond all else.”

“It is ironic that while oil revenues provide the resources to fix societal problems, it creates political incentives to make them far worse.”

“Of course, borrowing more today means higher indebtedness and a smaller ability to borrow tomorrow. But such arguments are rarely persuasive to a leader.”

“This makes the current leader vulnerable. Incurring debt today is attractive because, after all, the debt will be inherited by the next administration. That way, it also ties the hands of any future challenger.”

“They resist the cry of people like us who demand improved governance before any bailout money is offered up to rescue a troubled autocratic economy.”

“That this uneven distribution of top-notch universities favors large-coalition locales is no accident.”

“To know what the people need, governments need to make it easy for the public to make clear what basket of public goodies they desire. That is best done by allowing the least costly and most precious public good of all: freedom.”

“The causal ties run both ways: power leads to corruption and corruption leads to power.”

“Anyone unwilling to undertake the dirty work that so many leaders are called on to do should not pursue becoming a leader.”

“Most of us would like to believe that foreign aid is about helping impoverished people.”

“Yes, it is true that a lot of aid is given to corrupt governments but that is by design, not by accident or out of ignorance. Rather, aid is given to thieving governments exactly because they will sell out their people for their own political security.”

“This is all just the dance of the donors and the takers, the recipients looking for as much money as possible and the donors looking for a highly salient, costly political concession.”

“A UNSC seat gives leaders valuable favors to sell in the form of their vote on the Security Council, and the aid they receive results in worse performance for their economy.”

“It is perhaps ironic that while aid affords the resources to alleviate poverty and promote economic growth, it creates the political incentives to do just the opposite.”

“A common argument is that the locals know much better how to address their problems than do far-away donors. That’s probably true, but knowing how to fix local problems and having the will or interest to do so is quite another matter.”

“Dictators are cheap to buy. They deliver policies that democratic leaders and their constituents want, and being beholden to relatively few essential backers, autocrats can be bought cheaply.”

“Buying democrats is much more expensive.”

“However, as long as we the people want cheap gasoline and an abundance of markets in which to dump agricultural products, and we want that more than we want to see genuine development in poor countries, then our leaders are going to carry out our wishes.”

“A prudent dictator nips rebellion in the bud. That is why we have reiterated the claim that only people willing to engage in really nasty behavior should contemplate becoming dictators. The softhearted will find themselves ousted in the blink of an eye.”

“Effectively the government told these survivors to go away and die quietly: inhumane in the extreme, but good small-coalition politics. Dead people cannot protest.”

“Allowing people to die reveals serious policy failure.”

“The willingness of democracies to try harder goes a long way to explaining why seemingly weaker democracies often overcome seemingly stronger autocracies.”

“Democrats more often than autocrats fight when all other means of gaining policy concessions from foreign foes fail. In contrast, autocrats are more likely to fight casually, in the pursuit of land, slaves, and treasure.”

“Democracies don’t fight with each other, true. Rather, big democracies pick on little opponents whether they are democratic or not, with the expectation that they won’t fight back or won’t put up much of a fight.”

“Democracy overseas is a nice thing to believe in, in the abstract. In practice it’s probably not what we, the people want.”

“It is precisely this predictability and normality of war that makes it, like all the pathologies of politics we have discussed, susceptible to being understood and fixed.”

“Pursuing the perfect world for everyone is a waste of time and an excuse for not doing the hard work of making the world better for many.”

“Think about what is good for interchangeables, influentials, and essentials, the three dimensions of political life:”

“The essential facts of political life are that people do what is best for them.”

“At the beginning and the end of an incumbent’s reign the danger of being purged is greatest and so, at these times, coalition members should be most receptive to reform.”

“Effective reform means expanding the coalition and that means that everyone, including the current essentials, has a good chance of being needed by tomorrow’s new leader.”

“Outsiders would be wise to take cues from the same lessons: the time for outside intervention to facilitate democratic change or improved corporate responsibility is when a leader has just come to power or when a leader is near the end of his life.”

“As the rules to rule by lead us to expect, states in which leaders required support from a larger proportion of the population developed faster.”

“The rules of the electoral college make it possible in a two-candidate race for one candidate to win a majority of the popular vote and the other candidate to be elected president of the United States.”

“Expanding immigrant access and rights, then, can boost the required size of the winning coalition and, in the process, improve the quality of public policy.”

“Give us your poor and let’s see if they can make a better life. Give us your tired and let’s see if they can be energized by participating in making a more public-goods oriented government work better. Give us your huddled masses longing to be free and let’s see if their children don’t grow up to be the foundation of a stronger, more peaceful, and more prosperous society than they first came to.”

“Using foreign aid to set up nationwide wireless access to the Internet and to provide the poor with mobile phones could be a win-win-win-win among the four constituencies affected by aid.”

“Offering such deals might prove self-fulfilling. Once essential supporters believe their leader might take such a deal, they themselves start looking for his replacement, so even if the leader had wanted to stay and fight he might no longer have the support to do so. “

“Leaders want to survive in office and maximize their control over money. But what if their choice is to trade the power of office in exchange for the right to the money?”

“Our individual concerns about protecting ourselves from unfriendly democracies elsewhere typically trump our longer term belief in the benefits of democracy.”

“Democracy overseas is a great thing for us if, and only if, the people of a democratizing nation happen to want policies that we like. When a foreign people are aligned against our best interest, our best chance of getting what we want is to keep them under the yoke of an oppressor who is willing to do what we, the people, want.”

“Every government and every organization that relies on a small coalition eventually erodes its own productivity and entrepreneurial spirit so much that it faces the risk of collapsing under the weight of its own corruption and inefficiency.”