We’re discussing and referencing Keynesian economics quite a bit in the recession. Robert Reich recently wrote a short bio of Keynes and Wikipedia’s entry is informative. Looking at the cast of characters throwing in the free–markets towel these days, I can’t help but trot out the saw: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

What responsibility do we have to live beyond instinct and unconscious behavior? Surely this wasn’t simply a crowd of murderers in a store managed by the criminally negligent. Yet, at the end of the day, a human being lost their life because of a holiday sale. There are many things we can do to prevent this, as others note in comments, e.g., distributing numbers, using crowd flow techniques. But, should we, as thinking people, have to do so prevent us from killing us over a television?

Here’s a clear, short talk by T. Boone Pickens about concepts from his plan to shift natural gas to transportation and back fill power production with wind generation; a hat tip to Presentation Zen.

I’ve come right to the brink of erasing my numbers and asking which the audience wishes to see in more meetings than I care to remember. (Hat tip to Dan Roam.)

Reading this, I tried to think of any of my many mistakes with a root cause I wouldn’t label with Sondheim’s wonderful, a “bad case of importantitis.” Not one. And, I can think of many victories where I, almost forcefully, pushed my ego aside to let another’s perspective in. And, that’s good advice to surround oneself with jokesters, it’s too easy to let people around you, without a sense of humor or hypersensitivity to it, drive away that great tool of humility, laughter. See also:  King Remembered on 40th Anniversary of Death.