…quality?

over the years i have had a lot of discussions with people in organisations, often clients, who were involved in quality assessment processes, where the organisation tried to assure a certain level of quality of production to (mainly) their customers and it’s market. almost in all of these discussions, i was definitely the odd man out, when it came to the necessity of these processes. let me try to explain why.

what is quality anyway?

for a lot of people, particularly people who are involved in said processes, this is a difficult question to answer. most people associate quality with supplying the highest quality to the market. now try to explain that to chinese manufacturers of say, children’s toys or clothing. they don’t provide the highest quality (quite the contrary, sometimes), yet they are often very successful.

when i was about 2 years old, my mother got the idea to start cutting my and my brothers hair. and i have to say, over the years, she became Continue Reading…

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…freakonomics

somewhere in this book, i read why i am so fascinated by economics and subconsciously probably also why i decided to become an economist. cause indeed, i recognise myself when steven levitt describes the difference between normal people and economists . to normal people the price of something is, first of all, just the amount of money you have to pay for that something to get it and, secondly, that something is usually very concrete (though not always tangible).

when i read about rescue plans for certain animals threatened with extinction, i always ask myself what the costs are and how much that is per animal, for example (don’t get me wrong: not that the conclusion then always needs to be to not invest that money then!).

but i do tend to question political measures or societal movements in economical context. and by this i mean, that everything we need is scarce and therefore can be valued in money. when i see an advertising campaign of the dutch government for example, about having a BOB when you go out (in english that would be a CUD: consciously unintoxicated driver), i wonder about Continue Reading…

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…fuck da recession!

my friend Debbie @ De Verwondering is issuing a brandnew magazine! i love initiatives and i am looking forward to it as she is an amazing (marketing) communication specialist. so i loved it, when she asked me if i would write a column for it, dealing with how i feel about recession and economics (myself being an economist and all…).

so here it is:

“economics is like porn.
for reality is just a little different than what is predicted; beautiful models with incredible figures for amazing statistics, do exactly what you want, or don’t do what you don’t want. And reality? The models don’t do what you want and when what you expected to happen doesn’t,  there is serious headache involved.

economics is like porn.
actually, reality is always more exciting. a dumb and dumber secretary of state in the netherlands once said, to my utter astonishment, that he thought economics had nothing to do with psychology. Undoubtedly, the man thinks the main characters in a pornmovie get married at the end. Because exactly that is what economics and porn have in common: their right to existence is human psychology.

economics is like porn.
they both deal with psychology and for both optimism is essential. you keep trusting, that reality will eventually become what you hope. and where porn is completely ridiculous (which it is usually), without a huge dosage of reality, economics in theory is the exact same airplanecrash on fantasy island. every blind faith in models, which eventually, that is the problem with practical science, are only based on results from the past, doesn’t offer any guarantees for the future. the only thing that counts is faith and optimism. within reason obviously? actually no. not within reason, not within unreason, mostly outside of reason and Continue Reading…

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