Seemingly impossible

Hans Rosling is a Swedish statistician.  We don't expect to be hugely entertained by a Swedish statistician!  But you will believe after watching this.

You saw his work earlier if you accessed www.gapminder.org.  You saw a beautiful chart of the nations developing over the years in longevity and wealth.

In this video, he does a talk called "The Seemingly Impossible is Possible" in which he includes such original concepts as "Grandma-verified statistics."

He makes a good point about the progress of Africa over just fifty years.

Cat lover market

Here's a story I bet you haven't heard (unless you've already read Money, Greed, and God by Jay Richards).

Ed Lowe had a $45/week job delivering sand and sawdust for his dad in 1947.  The company added a new absorbent clay called fuller's earth, so Ed offered it to chicken farmers as nesting material, calling it chicken litter.  They didn't like it.

Looked like a failed idea, but then a friend asked him for something to allow her cat to relieve itself inside the house. He gave her a bag of what he called that chicken litter and she came back for more. He offered it to the owner of the Davenport Pet Shop, who thought it was just dirt in a bag but agreed to give free samples away.  He changed his mind - and Kitty Litter was eventually sold all over the U.S. in pet stores.

Cat litter became a billion-dollar industry.  Nobody saw that coming, not even Ed.  What did he actually do?  He used his imagination.  When his first attempts didn't produce anything, he made more attempts.

Author Jay Richards says, "At the base of the capitalist system is not greed or consumption, but intuition, imagination, and creation."

Correction

If you were not able to access Jacqueline's story in the post below, "Good Wealth", you will be able to do so this time because I've corrected it  (sorry for the inconvenience)

Gapminder

Since we human beings are actually able to create wealth that didn't exist before, has the aggregate wealth of the nations of the world really grown over the last couple centuries?    Yes it has.

For an absolutely stunning visual of how wealth has grown since about 1800, go to "Gapminder, for a fact-based worldview".  Click on the button "Load Gapminder World" and you'll see a chart of colored circles, each representing a nation with its color indicating which part of the world it's in.  Click on the play button.

The circles move to the right indicating a rise in wealth, while also rising toward the top to indicate the rise in life expectancy.  Makes sense that one benefit of rising wealth would be an ability to increase health and longevity.

Pick a country, keep your eye on it as you play the chart again, and watch how its well-being changed over the years.  For example:   China stayed at the low end of income per person until around 1990.  It begs the question, what happened around 1990 in China?

What do you find in this chart?

Good wealth

Millions of dollars of inherited wealth spent recklessly ("Millionaire Image"):  maybe you would say this is bad wealth.  Millions of dollars earned, but through unethical behavior like lying to or cheating other people:   almost everyone would call this bad wealth (the perpetrator would just call it survival of the fittest).

But that is not the common kind of wealth.  It's much more common that good wealth is earned by well-meaning people who are trying to build something ("Creating . . Wealth") for their family and their employees.

It's good wealth when it's earned by providing a service or a product that others need/want at a price that they figure is a good deal for them (it's also good when you make your wealth by working for such a business).

"What we now know is that market economies work because they allow wealth to be created", says Jay Richards in his book Money, Greed, and God.

People all over the world use their abilities and resources to support their families by creating wealth with the help of "micro loans" that help them start or grow their businesses.  They are well-meaning people who are trying to provide material wealth for their families.

One of their stories:

"Jacqueline became the sole provider for her family after her husband, a soldier, was killed. " (See the rest of her story, and several others, here)

Numbers beyond grasping

In the last post, I said there are millions of cells in the brain.  To be really sure that was accurate, I checked out some websites.  I was a bit inaccurate.  There are actually about 100 billion neurons (a billion equals a thousand millions) in the brain, and each has thousands of connections to other neurons, so there's trillions of connections!

Lots of comparisons to a computer are out there too.  There are plans (hopes) to map those neural connections like the human genome project did for DNA, but the sheer number of connections (synapses) is staggering.

You can actually choose to strengthen the connections where thought takes place between your brain cells, primarily through clean living - avoid drugs/alcohol, stay healthy, get physical exercise (same old advice - still important).  

Oh, and continue to exercise your brain - which you're kind of doing when you read this blog and try to think things through.

Mind over brain

When you think about what a brain looks like, it's so different from bone or skin or even muscle.  How can it contain all the memories of your life, and all the things you thought today and every day, and all your preferences and passions?

It's made up of millions of electrical connections between brain cells and it's a material thing.  And "Materialists" claim that that is all you are, just a highly evolved animal brain with a body.

But the Christian position on humans goes further.  Agreed, you have a wondrous material brain.  But you are more than that.  "Image of God" claims that you have a mind and/or a soul and a spirit that are not produced by your body at all.  You have all the intellectual functions of rationality and appreciation for beauty.  You also have a desire to live for something higher than yourself, to create a meaningful life.

Atheists/Materialists have a hard time explaining this non-material side of people.

Here is an article from Eric Metaxas (read about him in the post before this one) on the mystery of the mind.

He changed Western Civilization

Eric Metaxas spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C. last spring and made quite an impression.  Barack and Michelle Obama, at his table, are laughing at his dry wit (which shows up whenever he speaks) in this photo.

Having written for Veggie Tales, Chuck Colson, The New York Times, and more, his background is eclectic. He became a Christian believer after graduating from Yale as a confirmed unbeliever (conversion video here).

That's all great, but what interests me are his biographies of a couple of Christians who lived in difficult times and tried to make the world better.  One of them was more clearly successful than the other.  That man was William Wilberforce.  He actually changed Western Civilization after something like 30 years of effort by getting the slave trade stopped in England.

Here's a video of Eric telling the story to a live audience.  His book is entitled, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery.

Correcting the millionaire image

The Millionaire Next Door authors Stanley and Danko say that their research (1995-6) "is the most comprehensive ever conducted on who the wealthy are in America - and how they got that way."

If the millionaires of your imagination started out with a huge inheritance, your imagination describes just a very small percentage of them.   Of the millionaires they researched:

• More than half never received as much as $1 in inheritance
• Ninety-one percent never received . . as much as $1 of the ownership of a family business
• Nearly half never received any college tuition from their parents or other relatives

Chapter 2's title describes these people as:  "FRUGAL FRUGAL FRUGAL."  They have detailed annual budgets and the authors' advice is, "Whatever your income, always live below your means."

Stanley & Danko describe this concept with this story:

"Big Hat No Cattle" - we first heard this expression from a thirty-five-year-old Texan.  He owned a very successful business that rebuilt large diesel engines.  But he drove a ten-year-old car and wore jeans and a buckskin shirt.  He lived in a modest house in a lower-middle-class area.  His neighbors were postal clerks, firemen, and mechanics.  After he substantiated his financial success with actual numbers, this Texan told us:

"'My business does not look pretty.  I don't play the part .  . don't act it . . . When my British partners

first met me, they thought I was one of our truck drivers . . . They looked all over my office, looked at everyone but me.  Then the senior guy of the group said, "Oh, we forgot we were in Texas."

"'I don't own big hats, but I have a lot of cattle."

  

Business & ethics

So what does it look like when an ethical person does business?  Here's one example.

Michael Hyatt gives advice on how to conduct a meeting in such a way that all parties will benefit (win).

"at the end of the day, everyone is a volunteer. People will only go so far in the performance of a duty. If you want their very best, you have to have their hearts. You can’t demand this or even buy it with a paycheck. You have to earn it  [by treating them as you would like to be treated].

"In my experience, there are five ways to do this:

1. Assume others are smart and working hard.
2. Listen intently and ask thoughtful questions.
3. Acknowledge the sacrifices others have made on your behalf.
4. Express gratitude for their effort and their results.
5. Remind them why their work is so important and the difference they are making."

If you had to do business with someone, you'd want it to be someone like Michael . . . because he uses the Golden Rule. (This is from his blog.)

Business Image

Just listening to some voices in media and politics, you might think that business people are all manipulators, cheaters, or at least impure in that they're "just trying to make money."  Some say that business is unworthy of the effort of good, decent people who should be working for a non-profit where the motives are pure.

But making money is a good motive.  It must just be conducted ethically.  I remember hearing speaker John Maxwell say, "There's no such thing as 'business ethics' - there's only ethics."  Ethics applies to all of life, including business.  He says that means to treat people by the Golden Rule - treat people as you would like to be treated.

Ethics rightly applied to business should result in a win/win situation:  a win for both parties, the seller and the customer.

In a free economy, both parties have the freedom to decide for themselves what constitutes a win for them.  A seller can decide what price would both cover her costs and give her the profit she wants as a condition for staying in that business.  A customer can go elsewhere if that price is not worth it to her.

So there's nothing inherently impure about making money.  Every worker should hope her for-profit employer is making money (or her job will go away).  And, by the way, every non-profit should be hoping their contributors make money!

Millionaire image

Public opinion probably considers Paris Hilton a bad example of wealth, notorious for gluttonous consumption and reckless waste of resources.  She leveraged her multi-million dollar inheritance into notoriety, then used her name to sell stuff.  Thousands may lay down good money to buy her celebrity fragrance, still it rankles people that her pampered position in life was unearned in the first place: unearned, undeserved, and managed badly.

But does this description apply to most wealthy Americans?  Not at all, as reported in The Millionaire Next Door: Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy, by Thomas Stanley and William Danko.  The surprise is that, movie and tv fiction to the contrary, those secrets are so humdrum -  apparently, most of them live below their means and invest the rest!

They live in average homes valued at around $320k and don't drive the newest cars.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

"Why do I continue to write about rich people?  It is not for the benefit of rich people!  What I write is designed to enlighten those who are confused and misinformed about what it means to be rich.  Most Americans have no idea about the true inner workings of a wealthy household.  The advertising industry and Hollywood have done a wonderful job conditioning us to believe that wealth and hyper consumption go hand in hand.  

"Yet . . . the large majority of the rich live well below their means.  As one millionaire woman trained as an engineer told me, "After college my husband and I both got good jobs.  We lived on one income and saved the other."

Looks like most millionaires earned their financial security.