One of his core points is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. We tend to think that whoever competes best comes out ahead. In the race to be more competitive, we sometimes confuse what is hard with what is valuable. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value.

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Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.

He goes on to point out that this is exactly how we treat our education system now, as if it is for building competition, not creativity:

First, students have to jump through ever-more demanding, preassigned academic hoops. Instead of developing a passion for one subject, they’re rewarded for becoming professional students, getting great grades across all subjects, regardless of their intrinsic interests. Instead of wandering across strange domains, they have to prudentially apportion their time, making productive use of each hour.

Then they move into a ranking system in which the most competitive college, program and employment opportunity is deemed to be the best. There is a status funnel pointing to the most competitive colleges and banks and companies, regardless of their appropriateness.

This is why No Child Left Behind is a joke. This is why the goal of beating out Pacific Rim countries like China, Japan, Korea and Singapore on the PISA and TIMSS exams makes no sense at all.

In the business world, in the Lean Startup movement, there is a term called vanity metrics. Vanity metrics are numbers that make us feel like we are doing well but in the grand scheme of things doesn’t mean much. They don’t mean much because they are not actionable numbers and to be actionable they must have a clear cause and effect. In the iOS software world, downloads are one of those measurements. I have no idea why downloads happen because I am completely removed from the App Store process.

I would argue that PISA and TIMMS scores are also vanity metrics. Who cares if we are 19th in the world in this or 5th in the world in that. For the most part we aren’t even comparing apples to apples, as this incredibly good article by Zalman Usiskan, professor emeritus at the Univerity of Chicago, points out. What really matters is that our students can graduate and be productive members of society.

What we need in this country is more creativity, not more competition. And our success and failure in birthing creative students will not be reflected in any test score.

Bipartisanship, the supposed scarcity of which so distresses the high-minded, actually is disastrously prevalent.

Since 2001, it has produced No Child Left Behind, a counterproductive federal intrusion in primary and secondary education; the McCain-Feingold speech rationing law (the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act); an unfunded prescription drug entitlement; troublemaking by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; government-directed capitalism from theExport-Import Bank; crony capitalism from energy subsidies; unseemly agriculture and transportation bills; continuous bailouts of an unreformed Postal Service; housing subsidies; subsidies for state and local governments; and many other bipartisan deeds, including most appropriations bills.

Speaking of bipartisan snow jobs, I watched Inside Job last night. It’s a documentary about the financial crisis, wonderfully explained and presented. Well worth your time. Go watch it (Netflix, Amazon) right now.

p.s. Anyone who is interested in powerOne on Android needs to email us. If you already have, please don’t email again. We’ve got you on our list already.

For the most part I have been happy with it. The purchase process is seamless, reviews of books are nice, and its feature set is straight forward. It is a little slow to react to menu presses and the like, but page turns are fast enough and the e-ink display is fine for reading in light. My biggest headache is with touch itself but only because it reacts differently than my iPad. On the Kindle, anything that touches it counts as a touch — a blanket corner, pillow, arm, finger, anything. On an iPad, only body parts touching makes it register touches. This is awkward as I constantly forget, go to wipe some piece of dirt off the screen and find myself a chapter ahead.

Another issue is the screen’s color. It is darker than a piece of paper so even in times when I would normally be able to read a book without a problem, I still need a light for my Kindle. Backlighting might be nice, but that is a fine line. Too bright, like my iPad, and it keeps me up in the evenings and early mornings when I do my recreational reading. Today I use a small light attached to the Kindle where I can focus the source on the screen. Of course this means I had to buy a light, attach it to my Kindle, and carry an accessory with me, making my small Kindle that much bigger.

Enter the rumor mill. Reuters is reporting that Amazon is rushing the next Kindle to market in July and that the big new feature is a lit screen. It’s believed Amazon is rushing it to market because Barnes and Noble released a version of their eReader with a backlit screen. I doubt it. Amazon, like Apple, always seems to do things on their own schedule. [1]

Given that, if it is done tastefully, I think the backlighting will be an excellent feature and would even get me to buy a new one. But the light has to be simple (not glaring), be able to turn off, and the device can’t suddenly work for one week when the old model worked for one month.

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[1] Really, MG? There is no way Amazon “has to react” any more than Apple does to Android. No one is going to switch to Barnes & Noble’s eReader for the backlighting. And a new user will pick a platform based on content and reach more than a small feature of the reader. I care way more if my book is available and the format will be available for the long run then on a backlit screen.

So we all swam at the pool and the girls talked to each other and all the kids played. At one point I saw the diving board and, realizing that I hadn’t done a swan dive in 25 years, decided to try one. It was sloppy — a 4.5 on the judges scale not including difficulty which probably would have dragged my score lower — but I did it.

Afterward it dawned on me how, as we get older, there are just certain things we don’t do any more. I haven’t dove in 25 years. Now I’m content to walk in the water or slide in off the side. There was a time I wouldn’t get in the water without diving. I don’t jump anymore, either. I watch my daughters, aged 6 and 4, skip. Don’t do that, although I’m not certain I ever did.

I don’t know when that happened but at some point those things just went out off fashion for me. And, for the most part, I don’t miss most of them. (Although having a little more hair on my head would suit me fine.)