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Executive pay

This house believes that on the whole, senior executives are worth what they are paid


About this debate

Over the past few decades executive pay has risen dramatically. Bosses who were once paid ten times as much as shopfloor workers are now sometimes paid as much as 300 times as much. This trend was never popular, even during good times. But today it is becoming radioactive, as governments step in to rescue failing companies and ordinary people are forced to tighten their belts.

Is the anger justified? Some argue that executive pay is a long-standing disgrace(耻辱）. Pay is often not tethered to（用绳子栓住） performance. Huge rewards for the few demotivate the rest of the workforce. Others are more sanguine. Successful executives, such as Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, can add hugely to a firm's profitability, benefiting workers, managers and shareholders alike. The growing pay of executives has to be balanced against the growing difficulty of their jobs, particularly as turnover in the boardroom increases.

Opening statements

Defending the motion

Steven N. Kaplan Neubauer Family Prof. of Entrepreneurship & Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinely criticised for being overpaid.

Against the motion

Nell  Minow Editor and Co-founder, The Corporate Library

Excessive executive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a cause of the current economic mess.

The moderator's opening remarks

Oct 20th 2009 |   Adrian  Wooldridge

Oneof the few things that anti-globalisation campaigners and stockmarketinvestors agree upon is that executive pay is out of control.
Itis not hard to understand this shared outrage: executive pay hasexploded since the 1980s. For most of the postwar era executives earneda few multiples of the median pay. But thereafter, starting in Americaand slowly spreading to the rest of the world, the multiples increased exponentially. Today many American workers earn in a year what theirboss takes home in an evening.
Isn't this a disgrace? Critics ofexecutive pay worry that even mediocre bosses are given outsizedrewards. Robert Nardelli received a $20m pay-off when he left HomeDepot even though the share price had fallen during his six-yeartenure. Carly Fiorina was $180m better off when she leftHewlett-Packard despite a lacklustre tenure. Defenders of executive payargue that great bosses such as Louis Gerstner, the former boss of IBM,and Jack Welch, the former boss of General Electric, are worth everypenny because they create huge amounts of wealth for both shareholdersand employees.
The debate about executive pay, though never cool,is particularly hot at the moment. Workers have been squeezed by therecession. Unemployment is approaching 10% in the United States andmuch higher numbers in many other countries. Numerous governments areplanning to deal with their rising deficits by freezing public-sectorpay. And yet many bosses and bankers continue to make out likebandits—or so lots of people think.
We are lucky to have two ofthe best people in the business to debate this subject. Steven Kaplan,who proposes the motion, teaches at the University of Chicago's BoothSchool of Business. Nell Minow, who opposes it, is a long-timeshareholder activist and chairwoman of the Corporate Library, aresearch company. (For people who want to know more about her she isalso the subject of a profile in a recent issue of the New Yorker.)
MrKaplan starts off by making two fundamental points. CEO pay has notgone up in recent years; indeed, it has been dropping since 2000,particularly in relation to other well-paid groups, such as hedge fundmanagers, lawyers, consultants and professional athletes. Nor is CEOpay unrelated to performance. Boards are increasingly willing to fireCEOs for poor performance.
Ms Minow focuses heavily on therelationship between pay and the recent credit crunch. She points outthat executive pay helped to create the mess in the first place:Countrywide's CEO, Angelo Mozillo, made more than $550m during his timein office. She also points out that the fact that many companies thatwere bailed out by the government continue to pay their CEOs hugesalaries and bonuses is damaging the credibility of the system.
Suchbold opening statements raise questions galore. Is Mr Kaplan justifiedin starting his account in 2000 rather than 1980, when executive payexploded. And is Ms Minow right to concentrate so heavily on thefinancial sector? These are only a couple of the questions that we needto thrash out in the coming days.


The proposer's opening remarks
Oct 20th 2009 |   Steven N. Kaplan

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinelycriticised for being overpaid. Critics argue that boards do not respondto market forces, but, instead, are dominated by or are over-generousto their CEOs. Boards are criticised for not tying CEOs' pay toperformance. These criticisms have been exacerbated by the financialcrisis and the desire to find scapegoats（替罪羊）.
I argue below that thecritics are wrong and that there are many misperceptions of CEO pay.While CEO pay practices are not perfect, they are driven by marketforces and performance. Contrary to public perception, CEO pay has notgone up in recent years. In fact, the average CEO pay (adjusted forinflation) has dropped since 2000, while the pay of other groups hasincreased substantially. Similarly, the view that CEOs are not paid forperformance is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true and boardsincreasingly fire them for poor performance. And, most recently,consistent with market forces driving pay, the US and UK governmentseach hired a new CEO (of AIG and the Royal Bank of Scotland) for payexceeding that of the median large company CEO.
It is useful tounderstand how CEO pay is measured. It includes three components:salary, bonus and stock-based pay. It is usually measured in two ways.The first is the sum of salary, bonus, restricted stock and theexpected value of stock options. I call this expected pay. Expected paymeasures what boards believe they awarded the CEO. This is the bestmeasure of what a CEO is paid each year. Note that the CEO does notactually walk away with this money. The second measure replacesexpected stock option values with values actually realized and realisedpay measures what CEOs walk away with.
The first graph shows average and median expected CEO pay forS&P 500 CEOs since 1994 (adjusted for inflation). It shows thatmedian CEO pay has been stable since 2001; it has not increased. Andaverage pay has declined substantially. In fact, average CEO pay in2008 is below the average in 1998.


Whileaverage CEO pay has declined, the pay of other highly paid groups hasincreased. The second graph shows S&P 500 CEO pay relative to theincome of the top 1% of US taxpayers. Relative to those other groups,CEOs are no better off in 2008 than in 1994. Strikingly, relative CEOpay is a half of what it was in 2001, a huge decline.


Whichare those groups that have earned increasingly high compensation? Hedgefund, private equity and venture capital investors have increased theirassets and fees substantially, translating into high pay. By oneestimate, the top three hedge fund managers earned more in 2007 thanall 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined. Professional athletes, investmentbankers, consultants and lawyers also have benefited greatly. Forexample, from 2004 to 2008, the inflation-adjusted pay of partners atthe top 20 law firms increased by 12% while that of S&P 500 CEOsdropped 12%. Those law firms had over 3,000 partners making an averageof $2.4m each.
One can look at the Obama administration for otherexamples. Larry Summers made $8m (more than the median S&P 500 CEO)giving speeches and working part-time for a hedge fund. Eric Holdermade $3.5m as a law partner.
So, while CEOs earn a lot, they arenot unique. The pay of people in the other groups has undoubtedly beendriven by market forces; all are compensated in arm's-length markets,not by cronies. Technology, globalisation and scale appear to haveincreased the market value of these groups. CEOs have not done betterand, by some measures, have done worse. Those who argue CEOs areoverpaid have to explain how CEOs can be overpaid and not subject tomarket forces, when the other groups are paid at least as well and aresubject to market forces.
Why is the pay of these other groupsrelevant for CEOs? Top executives regularly leave to work for privateequity firms and hedge funds. Law partners and consultants leave towork for public companies as general counsels and executives. Relativepay matters and all these groups are paid according to market demand.Markets are the driving force for senior executives in all theseindustries and talented people jump across industries, based on marketperceptions of their worth.
Critics also argue that CEO pay isnot tied to stock performance. Again, that is not true. Looking at whatCEOs actually receive—realised pay—Josh Rauh and I found that firmswith CEOs in the top decile of realised pay earned stock returns 90%above those of other firms in their industries over the previous fiveyears. Firms with CEOs in the bottom decile of realised payunderperformed by almost 40%. The typical CEO is paid for performance.
Thiswas reinforced in 2008, when average realised CEO pay declined by 25%(according to S&P's Execucomp). And Equilar, another provider ofCEO pay data, estimated that the typical CEO experienced a net worthdecline of over 40%.
The final myth to bust is that CEOs controltheir boards and earn high pay through this control and notperformance. In fact, CEO tenure has declined, from ten years in the1970s to six years today, and boards have got tougher on theirexecutives when they do not perform.
In sum, market forces governCEO compensation. CEOs are paid what they are worth. Talentedindividuals, who are perceived to be valuable, can move betweenindustries to be compensated well. The clearest example of this is thateven governments have to pay highly for talented executives. Recently,the Royal Bank of Scotland (under UK government control) hired a CEOwith a package worth up to $16m; AIG (under US government control)hired a CEO with a package worth up to $10.5m. For these critical jobs,both of these executives received compensation exceeding the pay of themedian S&P 500 CEO.


The opposition's opening remarks
Oct 20th 2009 | Nell  Minow

Excessiveexecutive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a causeof the current economic mess. And the post-meltdown awards are all butguaranteed to continue to create perverse incentives that will rewardmanagement and further damage the interests of shareholders and everyother participant in the economy.
Incentive compensation rewarded executives for the quantity of transactions rather than the quality of transactions. It inevitably led to failures like the subprime disaster(次代危机） and the dominoes（多米诺骨牌） it toppled as it took the economy down with it. Worstof all, the avalanche of post-bailout bonuses and departure packageslike the $53m Ken Lewis got from Bank of America have severely damagedthe credibility of Wall Street and the American financial markets as awhole. The billions of dollars of losses do not come close to thereputational hit to American capitalism, which will increase the costof capital for all US companies.
Panglossian observers willalways be able to find some metric to justify any level of pay. But theresults speak for themselves. The decisions that led to the meltdownwere made by executives who knew that they would be paid tens, evenhundreds of millions of dollars no matter how successful theconsequences of those decisions.
Let us look at ground zero ofthe subprime mess, Countrywide, where Angelo Mozilo made more than$550m during his time as CEO. When the compensation committee tried toobject to his pay levels, he hired another compensation consultant,paid for by the shareholders, to push them into giving him more. Healso pushed for, and was given, shareholder subsidies, not just for hiswife's travel on the corporate jet but for the taxes on the imputedincome from that travel. Instead of telling Mr Mozilo that he had nobusiness asking the shareholders to subsidise his taxes, the boardmeekly signed off on it, making it clear to everyone in the executivesuite that the pay-performance link was not a priority.
By theend of 2007, when Countrywide finally revealed the losses it hadpreviously obscured, shareholders lost more than 78% of theirinvestment value. Meanwhile, in early 2007 Mr Mozilo sold over $127m inexercised stock options before July 24th 2007, when he announced a$388m write-down on profits. Before the bailout, Countrywide narrowlyavoided bankruptcy by taking out an emergency loan of $11 billion froma group of banks. Mr Mozilo continued to sell off shares, and by theend of 2007 he had sold an additional $30m in exercised stock options.There is the definition of outrageously excessive compensation.
Countrywideresponded to a shareholder proposal that year asking for a non-bindingadvisory vote on its pay plan by urging shareholders to oppose itbecause "Countrywide has been an outstanding performer" and because"The Board's Compensation Committee has access to the best informationon compensation practices and has a thorough process in place todetermine appropriate executive pay." They could hardly have doneworse. And it is likely that some market feedback on the structure ofthe pay plan could have given compensation committee members Harley W.Snyder (chair), Robert J. Donato, Michael E. Dougherty and Oscar P.Robertson worthwhile guidance.
Michelle Leder of theindispensable Footnoted.org website discovered that Frank A. Keating,Charles T. Maxwell and Frederick B. Whittemore, the compensationcommittee at Chesapeake Energy, not only paid the CEO, AubreyMcClendon, $100m, a 500% increase as the stock dropped 60% and theprofits went down 50%, they spent $4.6m of the shareholders' money tosponsor a basketball team of which Mr McClendon owns a 19% stake, theypurchased catering services from a restaurant which he owns just undera half of, and they took his collection of antique maps off his handsfor $12.1m of the shareholders' money, based on a valuation from theconsultant who advised Mr McClendon on assembling the collection. Theboard justified this by referring to Mr McClendon's having to sell morethan $1 billion worth of stock due to margin calls, his havingconcluded four important deals and the benefit to employee morale fromhaving the maps on display in the office. A market-based response wouldbe: (1) that was his risk and it is inappropriate to the point ofmisappropriation to force the other shareholders, already substantiallyout of pocket with their own losses due to his poor leadership of theorganisation, make up for his losses (2) if the deals are good ones, hewill be adequately rewarded when the benefit of those deals isreflected in the stock price; and (3) you have got to be kidding. Ifthis is pay for performance, what exactly is the performance we arepaying for?
These may be anecdotes, but they are illuminatingones. The numbers and details may be at the extreme, but the underlyingapproaches are representative. Even as outliers, they still demonstratethe failure of the system to ensure a vigorous, arm's-length system fordetermining pay and the inability of the system to require an effectiveincentive programme with a genuine downside as well as an upside.
Inmy comments, I will discuss the seven deadliest sins of executivecompensation, the two key elements that are essential for any plan thatmerits support from investors and the only metric that matters inlooking at pay.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

I am against the opinion of this house and  I will argue in the following passenge that  senior executives are not worth what they are paid in the recent years.

Over the past few years executive pay has been risen dramatically, which is a shock to everyone compared to the dropping economy because of the economic crisis.  Some argue that their pay is actually dropping if we take the expasion into account and it is lower compaired with the other high-paid jobs such as lawyers and conculsants, whose pay is rising much faster and still in a highest level. Now I will explain why this statement is totally wrong.

First, Bosses who were once paid ten times as much as shopfloor workers are now sometimes paid as much as 300 times as much. This trend was never popular, even during good times. But today it is becoming radioactive. 300 times or more compaired with ten times! Who can say this is not a dramatic rise in pay?

Second, it is unfair to argue that the pay of CEOs should be high because other well-paid groups get much higher pay.  Lawyers get high salary because they help the court make decisions and thus make the world peacful. Consultants get high salary because they help each company work well. Professional athletes  get high salary because they win honors for their country. But why should the CEOs get high salary when the economy is dropping so fast? Now the economy is in crisis because of their bad performance.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Art.view
Back to the future
Dec 19th 2009
From Economist.com
The taste for clutter and realism is curiously buoyant
WHILE the contemporary art market constantly seeks the new—new names, new imagery, new media or simply new novelty—another curious corner of the art market has remained steadfastly old-fashioned, cluttered and sentimental. With bad weather coming, much of London may have been preparing to shut down early for Christmas last week. But Christie’s sale of Victorian and British Impressionist pictures on December 16th and Sotheby’s sale of Victorian and Edwardian paintings the next day were surprisingly busy.

Sotheby's

Of the two auctions, Sotheby’s was by far more successful, fetching £4.4m ($7.1m) for works by some of the best-known names of the period, including Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Alfred Munnings, Dame Laura Knight and Charles Spencelayh. The cover lot, Spencelayh’s “The Old Dealer”, sold for a record price for the artist at auction. The buyer was David Mason, a London dealer who joined his father’s firm, MacConnal-Mason, when he was just 17. Mr Mason, who has seen recessions come and go in the 53 year he has been in the business, said afterwards: “Prices today reflect what is happening out there. People are discounting the coming inflation and buying quality. They know that inflation has always been the art dealer’s friend.”

Buyers in every sector of the art market, from Chinese porcelain to Old Masters, now seem to follow a pattern. They are happy to pay over the odds for top-ranking pictures, but leave the rest untouched. Nearly 40% of the lots in Sotheby’s sale were bought in. Its success lay in the high prices achieved for those that sold, half of which were bid up beyond their high estimate. Some pieces went for as much as four times what the auction house had predicted.

John Atkinson Grimshaw is a painter who celebrated industry, commerce and conspicuous wealth during Queen Victoria’s reign, dying in 1893. His works are often dark social commentaries featuring streets and portsides, full of ships’ rigging and lamplight that seems visually interchangeable with moonlight. Eight years ago Mr Mason sold an 1881 Grimshaw entitled “Prince’s Dock, Hull” to an American collector for £130,000. Consigning the picture to Sotheby’s, that same American saw his Grimshaw sell to an anonymous bidder for £397,250 (including commission and taxes), the third highest price achieved for the artist at auction.

Spencelayh, the son of an iron and brass founder, rose to be a prolific member of the Royal Academy of Arts and a favourite of Queen Mary. His work is, if anything, even more unfashionable-looking than Grimshaw’s. Spencelayh, who died in 1928, liked to paint fussy interiors. The most sought after are realistic pictures of men, often gathered around a table in a room full of clutter, with glazed jugs, books, umbrellas and pieces of velvet jumbled together. There is usually a pipe or two on the table, and there is nearly always a clock hanging on the wall.

A Manchester cotton merchant named Levy supported Spencelayh from the early 1920s. He offered the artist and his wife a house to live in and bought a number of his paintings. When Levy's widow, Rosie, auctioned his collection in 1946, the picture that fetched the highest sum was “The Old Dealer”, which Spencelayh had painted in 1925. It was sold again in 1973, where it was bought by Richard Green, a London dealer, on behalf of an American collector for about £30,000.

Consigned last week to Sotheby’s by this same collector, it sold for more than ten times that (£337,250 including commission and taxes) to Mr Mason. Mr Green, an earlier owner, was the underbidder. “It has everything you could want: the old man, the clock, the knickknacks,” Mr Mason said afterwards. “It is quite simply the best example of a Spencelayh I have ever seen.” Mr Mason said he bought the picture for stock, with no particular collector in mind.



“On the Cliffs” (pictured above) is one of a series of pictures that Laura Knight painted of women sitting high above the water on the Cornish coast. In one of the earliest examples, “Daughter of the Sun”, the women were naked. That picture did not sell when Knight exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1912, and Knight later cut it up and sold the pieces after it had become damaged. She continued to be inspired by the Cornish theme in the years before the end of the first world war, after she and her husband moved to London. In “On the Cliffs” one woman is sewing while the other may be threading a needle. Both are strong, calm figures. Behind them the sea, silvery, shimmering and full of light, has the same idyllic quality of water painted at the time by the Scottish Colourists. But there are no men in any of Knight’s pictures of this period, reminding viewers that war was close at hand.

“On the Cliffs” sold to an anonymous bidder for £646,050, nearly twice the top estimate. Even at that price, many regard the painting as a bargain. In July, Galen Weston, a Canadian billionaire whose family owns Fortnum & Mason, bought the companion picture, “Wind and Sun”. It cost him £914,850.

Comments

It seems that this article is not quite suitable for making up new ideas and giving comments here~

Well, let me talk something about art. By researching for the art section on economist, I found another aspect of art. That is, the commercial side. Paintings are auctioned and sold in the art market like Sotheby's. People are talking about the famous artists and collecters are searching for fashion.

I am not quite famaliar with the commercial side of art. What I am always focusing on is the beauty and meanings inside the art, the strong feeling it can arise from people, and the life of the artists. Issues about art can be devided into several themes: art and the government, artists and their works. Should government support art? I always try to say yes. Arts have spiritual value. Artists express their thoughts of the world through their works. Some works are perfect reflection of the realism and can make people think deeply. Art is also a good way of culture exchange, which can make people know more about the culture of other countries and know each other better. But how much should the government support art? Since the governments should focus more on other issues such as health-care, poverty, education and so on, art seems to be the last government should care about. I think government can try to support art in other ways, wich will not only flourish the development of art,but also need little financial support from the government. Art market might be a goog option. But there are other problems coming from the commercilization of art. Artists might try their best to cater to the taste of their customers. They might no longer create their works for their inner feeling and deep thought, but for the surface value of their work. This trend might damage the development of true art.

I just have some pieces of ideas and collect them together. Anyway, more details and supports about each idea are needed.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

John Atkinson Grimshaw is a painter who celebrated industry, commerce and conspicuous wealth during Queen Victoria’s reign, dying in 1893. His works are often dark social commentaries featuring streets and portsides, full of ships’ rigging and lamplight that seems visually interchangeable with moonlight.

The explaination of "celebrate" in M-W is as follows:
transitive verb
1 : to perform (a sacrament or solemn ceremony) publicly and with appropriate rites <celebrate the mass>
2 a : to honor (as a holiday) especially by solemn ceremonies or by refraining from ordinary business b : to mark (as an anniversary) by festivities or other deviation from routine
3 : to hold up or play up for public notice <her poetry celebrates the glory of nature>

I think this "celebrate" here is quite fit for the third explaination: to hold up or play up for public notice. John's works show the industry, commerce and conspicuous wealth during Queen Victoria's reign, which make the public think deeply about the dark society that time.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

A special report on entrepreneurship

Global heroes

Mar 12th 2009 From The Economist print edition

Despite the downturn, entrepreneurs are enjoying a renaissance the world over, says Adrian Wooldridge
IN DECEMBER last year, three weeks after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and in the midst of the worst global recession since the 1930s, 1,700 bright-eyed Indians gathered in a hotel in Bangalore for a conference on entrepreneurship. They mobbed business heroes such as Azim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil company into a software giant, and Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, another software giant. They also engaged in a frenzy of networking. The conference was so popular that the organisers had to erect a huge tent to take the overflow. The aspiring entrepreneurs did not just want to strike it rich; they wanted to play their part in forging a new India. Speaker after speaker praised entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well.
Back in 1942 Joseph Schumpeter gave warning that the bureaucratisation of capitalism was killing the spirit of entrepreneurship. Instead of risking the turmoil of “creative destruction”, Keynesian economists, working hand in glove with big business and big government, claimed to be able to provide orderly prosperity. But perspectives have changed in the intervening decades, and Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs are once again roaming(to range or wander over) the globe.
(The economic concept of creative destruction was first introduced by the Austrian School economist Joseph Schumpeter.
In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter popularized and used the term to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation.[1] In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power.)

Since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, governments of almost every ideological stripe have embraced entrepreneurship. The European Union, the United Nations and the World Bank have also become evangelistsan(enthusiastic advocate). Indeed, the trend is now so well established that it has become the object of satire. Listen to me, says the leading character in one of the best novels of 2008, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, and “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man.”
This special report will argue that the entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right, championed by powerful pressure groups, reinforced by a growing infrastructure of universities and venture capitalists and embodied by wildly popular business heroes such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and India’s software kings. The report will also contend that entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation.
The world’s greatest producer of entrepreneurs continues to be America. The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. High-flyers from around the world still flock to America’s universities and clamour to work for Google and Microsoft. And many of them then return home and spread the gospel.
The company that arranged the oversubscribed conference in Bangalore, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), is an example of America’s pervasive influence abroad. TiE was founded in Silicon Valley in 1992 by a group of Indian transplants who wanted to promote entrepreneurship through mentoring, networking and education. Today the network has 12,000 members and operates in 53 cities in 12 countries, but it continues to be anchored in the Valley. Two of the leading lights at the meeting, Gururaj Deshpande and Suren Dutia, live, respectively, in Massachusetts and California. The star speaker, Wipro’s Mr Premji, was educated at Stanford; one of the most popular gurus, Raj Jaswa, is the president of TiE’s Silicon Valley chapter.
The globalisation of entrepreneurship is raising the competitive stakes for everyone, particularly in the rich world. Entrepreneurs can now come from almost anywhere, including once-closed economies such as India and China. And many of them can reach global markets from the day they open their doors, thanks to the falling cost of communications.
For most people the term “entrepreneur” simply means anybody who starts a business, be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up. This special report will use the word in a narrower sense to mean somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem. The defining characteristic of entrepreneurship, then, is not the size of the company but the act of innovation.
A disproportionate number of entrepreneurial companies are, indeed, small start-ups. The best way to break into a business is to offer new products or processes. But by no means all start-ups are innovative: most new corner shops do much the same as old corner shops. And not all entrepreneurial companies are either new or small. Google is constantly innovating despite being, in Silicon Valley terms, something of a long-beard.
This narrower definition of entrepreneurship has an impressive intellectual pedigree going right back to Schumpeter. Peter Drucker, a distinguished management guru, defined the entrepreneur as somebody who “upsets and disorganises”. “Entrepreneurs innovate,” he said. “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.” William Baumol, one of the leading economists in this field, describes the entrepreneur as “the bold and imaginative deviator from established business patterns and practices”. Howard Stevenson, the man who did more than anybody else to champion the study of entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School, defined entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, arguably the world’s leading think-tank on entrepreneurship, makes a fundamental distinction between “replicative” and “innovative” entrepreneurship.
(The definition of entrepreneurship.)
Five myths
Innovative entrepreneurs are not only more interesting than the replicative sort, they also carry more economic weight because they generate many more jobs. A small number of innovative start-ups account for a disproportionately large number of new jobs. But entrepreneurs can be found anywhere, not just in small businesses. There are plenty of misconceptions about entrepreneurship, five of which are particularly persistent. The first is that entrepreneurs are “orphans and outcasts”, to borrow the phrase of George Gilder, an American intellectual: lonely Atlases battling a hostile world or anti-social geeks inventing world-changing gizmos in their garrets. In fact, entrepreneurship, like all business, is a social activity. Entrepreneurs may be more independent than the usual suits who merely follow the rules, but they almost always need business partners and social networks to succeed.
The history of high-tech start-ups reads like a roll-call of business partnerships: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (Facebook). Ben and Jerry’s was formed when two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, got together to start an ice-cream business (they wanted to go into the bagel business but could not raise the cash). Richard Branson (Virgin) relied heavily on his cousin, Simon Draper, as well as other partners. Ramana Nanda, of Harvard Business School (HBS), and Jesper Sorensen, of Stanford Business School, have demonstrated that rates of entrepreneurship are significantly higher in organisations where a large number of employees are former entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship also flourishes in clusters. A third of American venture capital flows into two places, Silicon Valley and Boston, and two-thirds into just six places, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin as well as the Valley and Boston. This is partly because entrepreneurship in such places is a way of life—coffee houses in Silicon Valley are full of young people loudly talking about their business plans—and partly because the infrastructure is already in place, which radically reduces the cost of starting a business.
The second myth is that most entrepreneurs are just out of short trousers. Some of today’s most celebrated figures were indeed astonishingly young when they got going: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell all dropped out of college to start their businesses, and the founders of Google and Facebook were still students when they launched theirs. Ben Casnocha started his first company when he was 12, was named entrepreneur of the year by Inc magazine at 17 and published a guide to running start-ups at 19.
But not all successful entrepreneurs are kids. Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to help start Garmin, a GPS giant. Herb Kelleher was 40 when he founded Southwest Airlines, a business that pioneered no-frills discount flying in America. The Kauffman Foundation examined 652 American-born bosses of technology companies set up in 1995-2005 and found that the average boss was 39 when he or she started. The number of founders over 50 was twice as large as that under 25.
The third myth is that entrepreneurship is driven mainly by venture capital. This certainly matters in capital-intensive industries such as high-tech and biotechnology; it can also help start-ups to grow very rapidly. And venture capitalists provide entrepreneurs with advice, contacts and management skills as well as money.
But most venture capital goes into just a narrow sliver of business: computer hardware and software, semiconductors, telecommunications and biotechnology. Venture capitalists fund only a small fraction of start-ups. The money for the vast majority comes from personal debt or from the “three fs”—friends, fools and families. Google is often quoted as a triumph of the venture-capital industry, but Messrs Brin and Page founded the company without any money at all and launched it with about $1m raised from friends and connections.
Monitor, a management consultancy that has recently conducted an extensive survey of entrepreneurs, emphasises the importance of “angel” investors, who operate somewhere in the middle ground between venture capitalists and family and friends. They usually have some personal connection with their chosen entrepreneur and are more likely than venture capitalists to invest in a business when it is little more than a budding idea.
The fourth myth is that to succeed, entrepreneurs must produce some world-changing new product. Sir Ronald Cohen, the founder of Apax Partners, one of Europe’s most successful venture-capital companies, points out that some of the most successful entrepreneurs concentrate on processes rather than products. Richard Branson made flying less tedious by providing his customers with entertainment. Fred Smith built a billion-dollar business by improving the delivery of packages. Oprah Winfrey has become America’s richest self-made woman through successful brand management.
The fifth myth is that entrepreneurship cannot flourish in big companies. Many entrepreneurs are sworn enemies of large corporations, and many policymakers measure entrepreneurship by the number of small-business start-ups. This makes some sense. Start-ups are often more innovative than established companies because their incentives are sharper: they need to break into the market, and owner-entrepreneurs can do much better than even the most innovative company man.
Big can be beautiful too
But many big companies work hard to keep their people on their entrepreneurial toes. Johnson & Johnson operates like a holding company that provides financial muscle and marketing skills to internal entrepreneurs. Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entrepreneurial Davids. Jorma Ollila transformed Nokia, a long-established Finnish firm, from a maker of rubber boots and cables into a mobile-phone giant; his successor as boss of the company, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, is now talking about turning it into an internet company. Such men belong firmly in the pantheon of entrepreneurs.
Just as importantly, big firms often provide start-ups with their bread and butter. In many industries, especially pharmaceuticals and telecoms, the giants contract out innovation to smaller companies. Procter & Gamble tries to get half of its innovations from outside its own labs. Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world. Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow.
But how is the new enthusiasm for entrepreneurship standing up to the worldwide economic downturn? Entrepreneurs are being presented with huge practical problems. Customers are harder to find. Suppliers are becoming less accommodating. Capital is harder to raise. In America venture-capital investment in the fourth quarter of 2008 was down to $5.4 billion, 33% lower than a year earlier. Risk, the lifeblood of the entrepreneurial economy, is becoming something to be avoided.
Misfortune and fortune
The downturn is also confronting supporters of entrepreneurial capitalism with some awkward questions. Why have so many once-celebrated entrepreneurs turned out to be crooks? And why has the free-wheeling culture of Wall Street produced such disastrous results?
For many the change in public mood is equally worrying. Back in 2002, in the wake of the scandal over Enron, a dubious energy-trading company, Congress made life more difficult for start-ups with the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation on corporate governance. Now it is busy propping up failed companies such as General Motors and throwing huge sums of money at the public sector. Newt Gingrich, a Republican former speaker of America’s House of Representatives, worries that potential entrepreneurs may now be asking themselves: “Why not get a nice, safe government job instead?”
(The Enron scandal, revealed in October 2001, involved the energy company Enron and the accounting, auditing, and consultancy partnership of Arthur Andersen. The corporate scandal eventually led to Enron's downfall, resulting in the largest bankruptcy in American history at the time. Arthur Andersen, which was one of the five largest accounting firms in the world, was dissolved.
Enron was formed in 1985 by Kenneth Lay after merging Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth. Several years later, when Jeffrey Skilling was hired, he developed a staff of executives that, through the use of accounting loopholes, special purpose entities, and poor financial reporting, were able to hide billions in debt from failed deals and projects. Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow and other executives were able to mislead Enron's board of directors and audit committee of high-risk accounting issues as well as pressure Andersen to ignore the issues.
Enron's stock price, which hit a high of US$90 per share in mid-2000, caused shareholders to lose nearly $11 billion when it plummeted to less than a $1 by the end of November 2001. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began an investigation, and Dynegy offered to purchase the company at a fire sale price. When the deal fell through, Enron filed for bankruptcy on December 2, 2001 under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code, and with assets of $63.4 billion, it was the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history until WorldCom's 2002 bankruptcy.[1]
Many executives at Enron were indicted for a variety of charges and were later sentenced to prison. Enron's auditor, Arthur Andersen, was found guilty in a state court, but by the time the ruling was overturned at the U.S. Supreme Court, the firm had lost the majority of its customers and had shut down. Employees and shareholders received limited returns in lawsuits, despite losing billions in pensions and stock prices. As a consequence of the scandal, new regulations and legislation were enacted to expand the reliability of financial reporting for public companies.[2] One piece of legislation, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, expanded repercussions for destroying, altering, or fabricating records in federal investigations or for attempting to defraud shareholders.[3] The act also increased the accountability of auditing firms to remain objective and independent of their clients.[2])

Yet the threat to entrepreneurship, both practical and ideological, can be exaggerated. The downturn has advantages as well as drawbacks. Talented staff are easier to find and office space is cheaper to rent. Harder times will eliminate the also-rans and, in the long run, could make it easier for the survivors to grow. As Schumpeter pointed out, downturns can act as a “good cold shower for the economic system”, releasing capital and labour from dying sectors and allowing newcomers to recombine in imaginative new ways.
Schumpeter also said that all established businesses are “standing on ground that is crumbling beneath their feet”. Today the ground is far less solid than it was in his day, so the opportunities for entrepreneurs are correspondingly more numerous. The information age is making it ever easier for ordinary people to start businesses and harder for incumbents to defend their territory. Back in 1960 the composition of the Fortune 500 was so stable that it took 20 years for a third of the constitutent companies to change. Now it takes only four years. (good example!)
There are many reasons for this. First, the information revolution has helped to unbundle existing companies. In 1937 Ronald Coase argued, in his path-breaking article on “The Nature of the Firm”, that companies make economic sense when the bureaucratic cost of performing transactions under one roof is less than the cost of doing the same thing through the market. Second, economic growth is being driven by industries such as computing and telecommunications where innovation is particularly important. Third, advanced economies are characterised by a shift from manufacturing to services. Service firms are usually smaller than manufacturing firms and there are fewer barriers to entry.
Microsoft, Genentech, Gap and The Limited were all founded during recessions. (good example!)Hewlett-Packard, Geophysical Service (now Texas Instruments), United Technologies, Polaroid and Revlon started in the Depression. Opinion polls suggest that entrepreneurs see a good as well as a bad side to the recession. In a survey carried out in eight emerging markets last November for Endeavor, a pressure group, 85% of the entrepreneurs questioned said they had already felt the impact of the crisis and 88% thought that worse was yet to come. But they also predicted, on average, that their businesses would grow by 31% and their workforces by 12% this year. Half of them thought they would be able to hire better people and 39% said there would be less competition.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

good expressions:
a frenzy of
intervening decades
roam the globe
evangelistsan:enthusiastic advocate
Silicon Valley
break into a business
a budding idea
out of short trousers

more information

1.
economic concept of creative destruction was first introduced by the Austrian School economist Joseph Schumpeter.
In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter popularized and used the term to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation.[1] In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power.)

2.
The Enron scandal, revealed in October 2001, involved the energy company Enron and the accounting, auditing, and consultancy partnership of Arthur Andersen. The corporate scandal eventually led to Enron's downfall, resulting in the largest bankruptcy in American history at the time. Arthur Andersen, which was one of the five largest accounting firms in the world, was dissolved.
Enron was formed in 1985 by Kenneth Lay after merging Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth. Several years later, when Jeffrey Skilling was hired, he developed a staff of executives that, through the use of accounting loopholes, special purpose entities, and poor financial reporting, were able to hide billions in debt from failed deals and projects. Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow and other executives were able to mislead Enron's board of directors and audit committee of high-risk accounting issues as well as pressure Andersen to ignore the issues.
Enron's stock price, which hit a high of US$90 per share in mid-2000, caused shareholders to lose nearly $11 billion when it plummeted to less than a $1 by the end of November 2001. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began an investigation, and Dynegy offered to purchase the company at a fire sale price. When the deal fell through, Enron filed for bankruptcy on December 2, 2001 under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code, and with assets of $63.4 billion, it was the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history until WorldCom's 2002 bankruptcy.[1]
Many executives at Enron were indicted for a variety of charges and were later sentenced to prison. Enron's auditor, Arthur Andersen, was found guilty in a state court, but by the time the ruling was overturned at the U.S. Supreme Court, the firm had lost the majority of its customers and had shut down. Employees and shareholders received limited returns in lawsuits, despite losing billions in pensions and stock prices. As a consequence of the scandal, new regulations and legislation were enacted to expand the reliability of financial reporting for public companies.[2] One piece of legislation, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, expanded repercussions for destroying, altering, or fabricating records in federal investigations or for attempting to defraud shareholders.[3] The act also increased the accountability of auditing firms to remain objective and independent of their clients.[2])

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strike it rich  露富

doing good as well as doing well  应该是来自一句谚语: doing well by doing good

creative destruction : this term is used to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation.[1] In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power.

Keynesian economics: a macroeconomic theory based on the ideas of 20th-century British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynesian economics argues that private sector decisions sometimes lead to inefficient macroeconomic outcomes and therefore advocates active policy responses by the public sector, including monetary policy actions by the central bank and fiscal policy actions by the government to stabilize output over the business cycle. 主张宏观调控~   

work hand in glove 密切合作

roam 漫步，漫游

evangelist n.传道者

pressure group an organization that seeks to influence political decisions

spread the gospel

corner shop 小店

pedigree = lineage 血统

Atlas  被罚承受天地之重的巨人

geek n. 怪人

gizmo=gadget

suit n.a business executive

roll-call 点名

bagel 甜甜圈~~

radically  adv.激进地

short trousers  小孩儿穿的裤？

franchise v.授予特许经销权

no-frills discount   no frills is a term used to describe any service or product for which the non-essential features have been removed to keep the price low. The use of the term "frills" refers to a style of fabric decoration.
keep sb. on their toes

Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entreperneurial Davids
用了一个大卫与歌利亚的典故

Such men belong firmly in the pantheon of entrepreneurs.
pantheon 万神殿 很喜欢这句


Procter & Gamble tries to get half of its innovations from outside its own labs.
Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world.
Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow.
这三句说的差不多一个意思，但是说法不同

public sector ：sometimes referred to as the state sector is a part of the state that deals with either the production, delivery and allocation of goods and services by and for the government or its citizens, whether national, regional or local/municipal.

also-rans （竞赛、竞选等的）失败者

path-breaking  开创性的

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The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. High-flyers (有野心的人）from around the world still flock to America’s universities and clamour(吵闹，喧哗) to work for Google and Microsoft.这个比喻相当生动~~

think tank 智囊团

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This report reminds me of the competition I have taken part in this semester about entrepreneurship. Innovation is the source of entrepreneurship, just as the author puts here. The global recession is not necessarily a strike on the entrepreneurs. In contrast, for the true heroes, it is a wonderful opportunity. With an original idea and the strong desire to put it into practice, true heroes in commercial field might create creation and change the economic world.

There is a famous saying: the safest place is where is the most dangerous. It is also true in this way: the worst situation in economy hides the largest opportunity there. Bill Gates created the Microsoft during recession.Genentech, Gap and The Limited were all founded during recessions. Only by jumping into the house of the tiger can one catch the baby tiger. Only by creative thinking and innovative behavior in bravety can one go to the peak of the entrepreneur mountain, regardless of the global recession and the seemingly difficulty we are meeting.

The most important thing entrepreneurs shoud do today is to try to find the great opportunity in the recession economy with innovation and be confident to overcome the trouble. A bright future is on the way!~

Sigh~ I am hungry now~

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Beauty(节选）

By Scott Russell Sanders

Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those whom I've read about, you can't pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping into(to encounter especially by chance) beauty. "I don't know if it's the same beauty you see in the sunset," a friend tells me, "but it feels the same." This friend is a physicist, who has spent a long career deciphering what must be happening in the interior of stars. He recalls for me his thrill on grasping for the first time Dirac's equations describing quantum mechanics, or those of Einstein describing relativity. "They're so beautiful," he says, "you can see immediately they have to be true. Or at least on the way toward truth." I ask him what makes a theory beautiful, and he replies, "Simplicity, symmetry, elegance, and power."

Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it's comprehensible. How unlikely, that a short-lived biped on a two-bit planet should be able to gauge the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an atom, or calculate the gravitational tug of a black hole. We're a long way from understanding everything, but we do understand a great deal about how nature behaves. Generation after generation, we puzzle out(苦苦思索而弄清楚或解决） formulas, test them, and find, to an astonishing degree, that nature agrees. An architect draws designs on flimsy paper, and her buildings stand up through earthquakes. We launch a satellite into orbit and use it to bounce messages from continent to continent. The machine on which I write these words embodies hundreds of insights into the workings of the material world, insights that are confirmed by every burst of letters on the screen, and I stare at that screen through lenses that obey the laws of optics first worked out in detail by Isaac Newton.

By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God. Scientists in our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as an unnecessary hypothesis, or at least an untestable one. While they share Newton's faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by a coherent set of rules, they cannot say, as scientists, how these particular rules came to govern things. You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.

I spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, however, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense. Nowadays I add, subtract, multiply, and do long division when no calculator is handy, and I can do algebra and geometry and even trigonometry in a pinch, but that is about all that I've kept from the language of numbers. Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seemed as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars.

I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova. Eva's wedding album holds only a faint glimmer of the wedding itself. All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.

"All nature is meant to make us think of paradise," Thomas Merton observed. Because the Creation puts on a nonstop show, beauty is free and inexhaustible, but we need training in order to perceive more than the most obvious kinds. Even fifteen billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of background radiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero. Just so, I believe, the experience of beauty is an echo of the order and power that permeate the universe. To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert intelligence and our five keen senses.

Anyone with eyes can take delight in a face or a flower. You need training, however, to perceive the beauty in mathematics or physics or chess, in the architecture of a tree, the design of a bird's wing, or the shiver of breath through a flute. For most of human history, the training has come from elders who taught the young how to pay attention. By paying attention, we learn to savor all sorts of patterns, from quantum mechanics to patchwork quilts.

This predilection（prejudise) brings with it a clear evolutionary advantage, for the ability to recognize patterns helped our ancestors to select mates, find food, avoid predators. But the same advantage would apply to all species, and yet we alone compose symphonies and crossword puzzles, carve stone into statues, map time and space. Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd perceptions to an absurd extreme? Or have we stumbled onto(偶然碰到，恰巧碰到） a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?

I am persuaded the latter is true. I am convinced there's more to beauty than biology, more than cultural convention. It flows around and through us in such abundance, and in such myriad forms, as to exceed by a wide margin any mere evolutionary need. Which is not to say that beauty has nothing to do with survival: I think it has everything to do with survival. Beauty feeds us from the same source that created us. It reminds us of the shaping power that reaches through the flower stem and through our own hands. It restores our faith in the generosity of nature. By giving us a taste of the kinship between our own small minds and the great Mind of the Cosmos, beauty reassures us that we are exactly and wonderfully made for life on this glorious planet, in this magnificent universe. I find in that affinity a profound source of meaning and hope. A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and brimming hearts and teeming minds, in order to close the circuit of Creation

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Since I am interested in the auther Scott Qussell, I search the name by google and find an interview with him, which makes me excited to know that he has just finished a book about environment protection and he is a professor of  Indiana University.

I’ve had some great teachers over the years, but none quite like Scott Russell Sanders, the gentle guru of Bloomington, Indiana, and a leading light of Midwestern environmentalism. To call him articulate doesn’t begin to do justice. He exudes a sort of intellectual clarity, in both his works of non-fiction and fiction and in his teaching at Indiana University. (As a former student, I’m a thoroughly biased source.)
Sanders’ book Staying Put offers a countercultural vision of what it means to live rooted in a place—not far from Wendell Berry country, geographically or philosophically. A Private History of Awe charts his development-of-conscience growing up on a military base during the civil rights and Vietnam eras. It’s one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.
His new book, A Conservationist Manifesto (released this week), presents a host of arguments for why we’re better off thinking of ourselves as citizens and stewards than consumers in the face of ecological disaster. Here’s our recent phone conversation about the book.
Q. What led you to write A Conservationist Manifesto?
A. For the first time in human history, we are causing damage to the entire living system of the planet, and we know that we are doing so. We don’t have models for how to respond, because none of our ancestors ever had to contend with damage on this scale. I’m trying to identify some of the sources we possess within our spiritual and intellectual traditions, and within science and art, for responding in creative ways to our present environmental predicament.
Q. You do a lot of describing a civic “good life”—through describing what you love best about Bloomington, through describing the work of unsung conservationists, and in your essay that responds to [James Howard] Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere with a “Geography of Somewhere.” Why do you take this on?
A. We live in a society that places so much emphasis on private wealth that we forget how important the common wealth—the realm of shared natural and cultural goods—is for our happiness, our wholeness, and our well-being. Advertising addresses the isolated individual, but we don’t exist in isolation. We exist as members of relationships, within families, communities, neighborhoods, and workplaces. I write about that communal dimension of our existence because the private dimension is more than adequately dealt with by the popular media.
Q. Sure. It seems like an artistic challenge as well to make successful towns and societies as compelling as dysfunctional ones.
A. None of us wants to live in the midst of trouble, but we do want to read about it and watch it on screen. It’s easier to make trouble and failure artistically captivating. So there is this paradox. I faced a similar challenge in my book A Private History of Awe, where I wrote about an enduring and loving marriage. It’s a lot harder to engage people in reading about something that works well over a long period of time than to engage them with something that breaks down in catastrophic and sensational ways.
Most environmental news describes breakdown of one sort or another. Of course, it’s crucial for us to be aware of such news. At the same time, we need to know about the creative and promising responses that people are making, the various “arks” people are building to carry what we love and what we need through this time of troubles.
Q. You write about settling in southern Indiana in 1971 and trying to be a conscientious citizen since then. How have you seen the environmental movement, or attitudes toward conservation, change in the Midwest over that time?
A. During my nearly 40 years here in southern Indiana I have seen a rising concern about the preservation of forests, the restoration of wetlands, the cleansing of rivers, and the healing of communities.  As I travel around the Midwest, I meet people everywhere who are involved with farmers’ markets, with land trusts, with community-supported agriculture, with schoolyard gardens, and with other efforts to protect and restore portions of the natural world. Every community I visit has organizations devoted to looking after the land and waters, fostering organic gardening, reducing carbon emissions, or other environmental causes. I find that very encouraging.
The central section of A Conservationist Manifesto focuses on Indiana, because this is the place I know most deeply. For the benefit of readers who live elsewhere and who may think of the Midwest as short on wild beauty and environmental consciousness, I wish to call attention to the natural history of my home region and to the conservation efforts underway here.
Q. Your vision about how we ought to live in relation to the natural world stands very much in the tradition of Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and such. And you make it pretty clear in your writing that you’re working from within that tradition. I’m curious about how you make your message your own.
A. Well, certainly I have drawn on the great tradition of American nature writing, and I honor those predecessors. But I also feel that I’m doing something different. That tradition was created primarily by men who explored nature in solitude. They made excursions into the natural world, lived beside ponds or climbed trees in the midst of storms or canoed wild rivers, and then returned to write about the experience. I treasure their work.  But I am not solitary.  I write about living in the midst of family, community, and human structures.  I see the natural world not as a wild place out there, but as the matrix from which we arise and in which we dwell.  We breathe it, drink it, eat it, and wear it; we are sustained by nature with every heartbeat.
Among our contemporaries, Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, in particular, have written powerfully about human relationships embedded within nature.  They exemplify the sort of writer I’ve tried to be, more fully than such earlier figures as Thoreau or Muir.
Q. I want to ask about reverence and irreverence. You make a case for sort of rediscovering reverence—in dealing with the natural world, in dealing with other humans—Grist tries to make a case for irreverence in approaching deadly serious topics. What gives?
A. Reverence is a profoundly important attitude. Not toward ourselves or our work, but toward the power that we see manifest in the natural world and that we feel moving within us.  Reverence toward that shaping power seems to me the deepest and truest emotion the universe calls for. That awareness runs through A Private History of Awe, as well as A Conservationist Manifesto.  We need to recover a sense of the ultimate value and beauty of wildness, including the wildness that courses through us as human beings.
While we honor the universe, we need to maintain a healthy irreverence toward ourselves.  We need to challenge, to question, in some cases to mock, to look harder at our works, postures, and sayings. Grist has attracted readers who might be put off by the sense of frenzy and righteousness that can creep into environmental writing (including my own). So that’s where irreverence comes in.
Q. What do you make of the so-called “moderate” Congressional Democrats, ones like Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, your representative, Baron Hill, and others who have suggested they may force Obama to slow down or water down renewable energy measures and capping carbon emissions? What do you think of the whole “moderate” or “centrist” terminology?
A. They’re not moderate, nor centrist, nor conservative. Insofar as they are endorsing the status quo, which is ruining the planet, they are extremists.  They refuse to recognize how radically our society needs to change. They seem to feel that we can cope with global-scale damage by making little changes around the edges of our lives. They’re not moderate; they’re timid. We need more courage and vision from all of our leaders, at the local, state, and national levels, and we need those qualities from Republicans as well as Democrats.
The word “conservative” ought to have some connection to the word “conserve.”  If you’re going to call yourself conservative, you ought to be clear about what it is you want to conserve.  Many conservatives, if they’re honest, will say, “I want to conserve as much money as possible in private hands, and I want to protect every opportunity to increase that private wealth, regardless of the cost to society or planet.” If we keep treating the accumulation of money by individuals and corporations as the highest good, we will continue to degrade Earth’s living systems, and we will leave a sadly diminished world for future generations. That’s as immoral a path as I can imagine.
Q. Thanks. What have I missed?
A. Some people come across A Conservationist Manifesto and say, “That title seems confrontational.” Maybe it is, I reply, but so is every billboard, every TV advertisement, every speech calling for endless growth, every Hummer on the highway, every assault on the Endangered Species Act, every call for drilling in wildlife refuges. If we plead, “Don’t forget that we share the planet with millions of other species, that we are degrading the living conditions for all beings including ourselves, that we are betraying future generations”—if we say all of that mildly and meekly, we have no chance of being heard in our cultural cacophony. We need to be forceful in challenging the ruinous path we’re on and the media and ideology that keep pushing us along that path. I hope that A Conservationist Manifesto is written in a measured, thoughtful, lucid way. But I also hope the book conveys a sense of ethical and practical urgency. Right now, anything less than urgency is inadequate to our situation.

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Comment:

I feel lucky to come across this beautiful essay with fluently flowing language and a brimming heart of the beauty of science and nature, especially when I seach the author Scott Russel with Google and bump into a seemingly connection between the author and myself. He is a professor of the Indiana University and he has just finished a book named A Conservationist Manifesto focusing on environmental protection.Indiana university ranks first in the research on public policy of environmental management in America. There are beautiful forests and shining sunlight, which share the beauty of the nature to the most. If I have the chance to go to Indiana(although my dream unviversity is not there), I hope to meet Professor Russel and share with him my understanding of the beauty of science and nature. I'm looking forward the coming of that lovely special day.

Reading about the beauty of law and the power of nature in Russel's eyes, a strong feeling of emotion flushed into my minds. I love this expression of "close the circuit of creation." God created the beauty of nature. The beautiful nature nurtures human. And human beings embrace nature with their born sense of appreciation. The universe is incomprehensible because of the unlimitation of beauty. Beauty is a mysterious thing, which arouses our emotion and creation, which incentives us to search deeper into the heart of the earth, which makes us recoganize how weak we are when facing the power of nature and how strong we are when trying to disvocer the law. That is a way of paradox the beauty of nature want to cast upon us.

I am always eagering to appreciate the beauty in this somewhat impetuous world nowadays, when money and status is placed first in most people's lives, when the beauty of environment is damaged by economic growth, when the beauty of love is replaced by jelousy, when the beauty of trust is substituted by misconception.

Beautiful sunlight penetrates into my room while I am typing this illogical, maybe a little bit emotional comment. A new year is coming and I hope everyone in the earth can try to sense the beauty of nature and love. In most cases you do not need to be trained to sense the beauty. All you should do is to close your eyes, listen to your heart and breath the clean air mixed with the  fragrance of sunlight. You will soon feel that the beauty of the planet is walking toward you.~

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Beyond Righteousness and Gain

by Zhou Guoping

"A virtuous man is concerned with righteousness while a mean man, with gain,” Confucius says. The "righteousness" and "gain" have long been a central theme in the Chinese philosophy of life. But, what if I am neither virtuous nor mean?

There was once a time when almost everyone claimed to be a gentleman and every word uttered was about righteousness. At that time, there might have been some truly virtuous men who were so righteous as to give up whatever was profitable. But, more likely, one might meet hypocrites who used righteousness as a fig leaf for their cupidity, or pedants believed in whatever passed for righteousness. Gone are the old days. The social trend has taken on a dramatic change unawares: the reputation of righteousness nosedived, truly virtuous men became extinct, hypocrites dropped the fig leaf and the scales fell from the eyes of the pedants. With- out exception, they all joined in the scramble for gains. It is believed that the philosophy of life has changed and a new interpretation of righteousness and gain looms large: seeking material gains is not the exclusive patent of the mean, but a golden rule for all.

"Time is money" is a vogue word nowadays. Nothing is wrong when entrepreneurs apply it to boost productivity. But, when it is worshipped as a motto of life and commercialism takes the place of other wisdom of life, life is then turned into a corporation and, consequently, interpersonal relations into a market.

I used to mock at the cheap "human touch". But, nowadays even the cheap “touch” has become rare and costly. Can you, if I may ask, get a smile, a greeting, or a tiny bit of compassion for free?

Don’t be nostalgic, though. It is in fact of little help if you try to redeem the world or salvage the corrupt minds through preaching various brands of righteousness. Nevertheless, beyond righteousness and gain, I believe, there are other attitudes towards life; beyond virtue and meanness, there are other individualities. Allow me to coin a sentence in the Confucian style: "A perfect man is concerned with disposition."

Indeed, righteousness and gain, seemingly poles apart, have much essence in common. Righteousness calls for a devotion to the whole society while gain drives one to pursue material interests. In both cases, one’s disposition is over- looked and his true “self” concealed. "Righteousness" teaches one to give while "gain" induces one to take. The former turns one’s life into a process of fulfilling endless obligations while the latter breeds a life-long scramble for wealth and power. We must remember, however, the true value of life is beyond obligations and power. Both righteousness and gain are yoked by calculating minds. That’s why we often find ourselves in a tense interpersonal relationship whether Mr. Righteousness is commanding or Mr. Gain, controlling.

If "righteousness" stands for an ethical philosophy of life, and "gain," a utilitarian one, what I mean by "disposition" is an aesthetical philosophy of fife, which advocates taking your disposition as the operational guidance for your fife, whereby everyone is allowed to keep his true "self". You do not five for the doctrines you believe in or the materials you possess. Instead, your true "self" makes you who you are. The true meaning of life lies not in giving or possessing, but in creating, which actively unfolds your true disposition, or, in other words, the emotional gratification you obtain through the exertion of your essential power. Different from giving, which is the performance of an external responsibility, creating is the realization of one’s true self. The difference between creating and possessing is more than crystal clear. Let’s take creative writing as an example: "Possessing" focuses on the fame or social status a piece of writing may bring, while "creating" highlights the plea- sure in the process of writing. A man of disposition seeks nothing but the communication of feelings while in company, and the cultivation of taste while possessing something. More valuably, in a time when most people are busy hunting for wealth and being hunted by it, a man of disposition is al- ways at ease in social intercourses. Here I' m not talking about the leisure of traditional Chinese scholar-officials, nor the complacency of conservative peasants, but about a peaceful mind coming from a non-materialistic attitude towards life. Using the writing example again, I’ve been wondering why a writer needs to be prolific. If he dreams of being enshrined, an immortal short poem is enough. Otherwise, he could be pretty much satisfied with a carefree life. In this sense, writing is merely a way for such a life.

Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it." With it I couldn’t agree more. I did admire him for his easy and humorous way in describing the quandary of life. However, a deep ponder over it has brought home to me that Shaw’s standpoint is no other than "possessing", which keeps us stranded in a double dosage tragedy of life: it' s a pain not to possess your heart' s desire, and a tedium, to have possessed it. However, if we shift the standpoint from "possessing" to "creating", and look at life with an esthetic eye, we can interpret Shaw’s words the other way round: there are two comedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire, so you still have the opportunity to seek or create it. The other is to get your heart’s desire, and then you are able to enjoy tasting or experiencing it--Of course, life can never be free from pains, and a wealth hunter can not dream of the sadness of a man who places a premium on his true disposition. However, to be free from the mania for pos- session may at least save you many petty worries and pains, and let you enjoy a graceful life. 1 have no intention to prescribe the esthetic viewpoint as the cure for a corrupt world. I just want to express a belief: there is a life more worth living than the one haunted by righteousness and gain. And, this belief will help me sail through the unpredictable waters of my future life.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

I was so excited while reading this essay that I nearly do not know from which point  to express my feelings. I like the essays of Zhouguoping in Chinese. They are always simple but deep in thought, which can penetrate into your heart, help you calm down when you are drawn crazy and  lead you to the  world of serenity when you are meeting with terrible storm. That's what the essays of Zhouguoping gives me, and this one is not an exception.

We are always told to become a righteousness person, who place the society's interest to the highest and always remember to give rather than take. But in this world where money can decide status and lead to luxury life, many people give up the priciple of righteousnesss and seek for self-interest to the most. Shall we choose to be righteous or self-interest? The philosophy of ancient China will give you the answer:NEITHER! The philosophy of Confucians focuses on the heart of humanity.Confucianism believes that human nature is virtuous and all we should do is to try to walk toward our inner heart and behave naturally in our true way. I am now still learning about the soul of the philosophy of ancient China, which help me keep peaceful in mind and try to be generous.

The day before yesterday a good friend of mine sent me a postcard of Barcelona, which he bought when he was travelling around Europe last year. On the back of the postcard he wrote a sentence for me:Let it go and you'll feel relief. I admit that I always feel strained as the competition is so fierce around me and everybody is walking here and there in a hurry. In some cases I hesitate to listen to my heart in fear of the unknown future. However, this friend of mine is a perfect example for me to become more relaxed and seek for what my heart truly wants bravely. He always listen to his heart and he is never halted by the outsiders. His inner heart contains a strong belief, which can help him sail through the unpredictable, but obviously, splendid waters of his future life.

"A perfect man is concerned with disposition." Always remember to listen to the eachoes of your innter heart, that's where your boat of life ought to sail toward. Never hesitate about this!

Here is a poem I like very much. Enjoy it~

God, grant me:
The serenity to accept the things that I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference!~

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Comments：
I cannot catch the true meaning of this article until the end when the author puts  
the conclusion:You must avoid wickedness and pursue the good. Lift up your  
mind in virtue and hope and, in humility, offer your prayers to the Lord. This is  
the consolation of philosophy.What the article wants to explain is that the divine  
knowledge is eternal and continuous and God knows everything from the past  
to the present to the future. Even when you change your ideas, divine  
prescience runs ahead of everything and recollects it to the eternal present of  
its own knowledge. What's more, things are universal and considered in  
themselves they are free from the compulsion of necessity. In this case, God's  
rewards and punishments are meted out fairly and our hopes and prayers are  
not at all in vain.

I once had a talk with an American girl who believes in Christianism. She is  
pious and never forget to spread the spirit of God. She has a Bible in both  
Chinese and English translations which is sorted out all by herself. She carefully  
explained the spirit of God to me with this book. She believes that human  
beings have original sins and it's Jesus who saved all the human beings. God  
is the highest and the only bridge to connect with the God is to do good and  
pray. God never compels you to do anything. But as you have original sin, you  
should do good to atone for your sin. God can see your behavior from the  
highest and your pray will not be in vain. God can hear your hope.

I always respect the Christians. Whenever I meet with a Christian who is  
spreading the spirit of God, I carefully listen to him or her. From their pious eyes I  
can see their strong belief. This strong belief pushes them to do good to get  
connection with the God. This strong belief makes them full of hopes toward  
life. This strong belief encourages them to face the difficulties in life. In this  
case, I always feel that Christianism is more than a religion. It gives its disciples  
the strongest belief, the strongest encouragement to overcome the difficulty and  
the strongest devotion to help the poor. In that way, God is creating a better and  
better world!~


错字：
continuous
compel
atone for your sin
disciple
encouragement