This is an incorrect title; the wrong conclusion may have been drawn.
Although he has given them majority shares they are nonvoting only. The terms of.the gift forbid them from selling the shares or participating in any management or governance of the company.
Bose is remaining a private / independent company still run by said founder. This is essentially a gift that should pay nice stock dividends for MIT.
Those were the conditions under which the gift was offered. They are controlling their financial income by choosing to accept the gift, which gives them revenue from dividends. It's very similar to how a trust fund operates.
Yes, but they themselves wouldn't then receive dividends. They could route cash to themselves by issuing other capital instruments, but the corporate by-laws and / or charter should protect minority equity against this. This sort of thing is why you want good lawyers up front.
The likelier problem is management controlling the board and creeping up exec comp.
There will always be a trade-off between dividend payments and re-investment, but presumably here the voting equity's interests are basically aligned with the non-voting minority.
That's a good point, and I wasn't aware of this discussion, which gives your comment more useful context. I think there are a lot more examples than pg hints at, they just happen to be less common in tech...which someone else theorized could be because money is so easy to come by in technology and less so in other fields. People don't have to bootstrap as often in tech, so fewer big success stories started out by bootstrapping.
I think maybe it's a hard thing to figure out because there are so few Googles, Amazons, and Apples in the world. If you only have a few extreme outliers to look at as your data, your conclusions might be completely wrong, even though they fit the data perfectly.
It seems to me that "lifestyle company" is often a denigrating term used by VCs to insult companies that didn't need VCs to succeed, and that didn't choose an exit that would fit a VC-invested business model. Bose is a very large, very successful, international company. Most VCs would have been very pleased to have been involved in funding Bose. Bose could also go public at any time, and have a very large exit.
Regardless of the lack of an exit, the Bose founders are extremely rich today, and they don't have to remain involved in Bose for it to continue to operate and grow. I believe the original use of the term "lifestyle" implied an ongoing requirement for the founders to be involved to keep the company going, but it's come to mean "a company that did not raise huge sums of money and did not choose to exit via acquisition or IPO within a few years of founding".
In short, I don't like the term, as it provides little useful information about a company, and is colored by the most common users of the term (VCs).
It says Bose donated a majority of the shares. How much is Bose (private company) worth? And how much in dividends can MIT expect from Bose on an annual basis?
Assuming a decent P/E ratio, total stock value is probably in the 10s of $billions minimum (I know, as a private company things are different, I'm just thinking off the top of my head).
But the E in P/E is earnings not sales, so this estimate is way too high. Better guess: start with 1x sales and adjust up or down based on how fast it's growing and how profitable you think they are. As far as public/private, if you haircut public company multiples by 10-15% you wouldn't be too far off.
Oops, yup you're correct. Every outside analysis seems to indicate that they're incredibly profitable (there retail products have pretty dramatic markups) so the earnings gotta be in the $100s of millions at minimum.
Folks like to rag on Bose products (and from a pure sound quality standpoint they are overpriced IMO) but Amar Bose was the best professor I had and his enthusiasm for engineering and acoustics showed in all of his lectures.
He's been good to MIT over the years (MIT students, faculty and affiliates get substantial discount) and this is another example of him giving back. I hope this encourages MIT to resurrect some of their acoustics programs (aside from a couple of projects coming out of the Media Lab and a telephony class or two, acoustics has been dead at MIT since the late 1990's) but I suspect they'll just use it as a cash cow.
Amar Bose was a good professor, and in making this donation to his alma mater, he continues to carry on the tradition of MIT graduates doing good things long after they've made a name for themselves.
His work today in no way lessens the impact of an audiophile's criticism of his company's products. Not only are they overpriced in consideration of value delivered, they are in many respects poor implements for faithfully reproducing sound.
But those criticisms are criticisms of product and market, not criticisms of people and principles.
Grado is not bad, but I don't think their goal is faithful reproduction of the sound either.
I own a pair of Grado phones, and a pair of Sennheiser, high end. There's a pretty big difference between the two.
The Sennheiser is, for lack of a better word, "transparent". It's like the sound is coming not from a pair of cans, but from "out there". It's very easy to forget you're wearing phones. It's like they don't have any personality of their own.
The Grado, OTOH, is very different. The sound is very much "in your face". Can you hear all sorts of tiny details and nuances? Sure, but that's because they were magnified a lot, to force them to become obvious. A look at the response curve tells you why: Grado likes to crank up the high-frequency response on their cans. They are great, though, if you're mixing audio tracks and are keeping an eye out for tiny mistakes.
The Sennheiser is like a wide-screen TV. The Grado is like a microscope. Both are useful, but for different purposes.
I recently compared my Shure $150 SRHDJ head phones to my roomates $500 or so sennheiser hd 650s plugged into a $275 preamp and can honestly say the difference was hardly noticeable. I'm not an audio pro but I'm a musician with a good ear who has had a lot of kinds of headphones. For the money I can't justify sennheisers. Anything by Shure has been top quality, I've had a bunch of their stuff.
The other responses are talking about headphones, but with regard to loudspeakers (and given that this is Hacker News) you can always pick out your own components and build your own loudspeakers. That will allow you to tailor the speakers to your specific sound quality and aesthetic requirements.
It helps to have access to decently-equipped wood shop, but if you don't you can try asking a local custom-cabinet maker if they will cut and assemble the box for you. IME they are receptive to these types of projects since they can often use scrap from their other projects which allows them to make some money from material that would typically be wasted.
I like Bose stuff, except for the noise canceling headphones. It is not accurate. Most people don't know how to set up their speakers in the first place so a pair of excellent speakers in the wrong configuration will sound awful. Bose products sound pretty good under almost all circumstances, while requiring little or no expertise to set up. They're not for the sort of people who like Emacs.
Speakers (as in, small-mid-size near-field monitors, from very expensive to why-not cheap): Genelec ($3000), Adam ($2000), KRK ($750), Logitech ($100). Tastes in speakers vary a lot, and it makes a difference where you will be using them. These numbers are for the upper-middle end of the range. I like KRKs for their clear but slightly forward sound. I don't need a pair of Genelecs, but they are amazingly good. Some people swear by the Adams, they don't evoke any strong response from me. At the cheapie end the Logitech stuff strikes me as having a surprising level of bang for the buck, but it's been a while since I listened carefully to anything like that.
Buy powered speakers. Don't waste money on passive + amp combinations unless you have strong opinions on the electronics of different amplifier classes, in which case you probably want to build your own at some point.
Definitely. I've recommended them on HN before. They're the best 'pro' headphones at a very fair price that the companies making overpriced 'amateur professional' products don't want you to know about, including Sony themselves.
Offhand, only anecdotal. For much of the last decade, I have done production sound for film and video. I generally use Schoeps microphones, which cost a couple of thousand apiece (just so you know cost isn't a factor here). The reason I prefer MDR7506s is that when I'd set up every day, they're the only headphones that sound the same when I put them on as when I take them off.
"Faithful reproduction" is not a goal of Bose kit. A psychoacoustically pleasing reproduction with fine detail, by simulating the effects of a better acoustic environment in a room of a house is.
I have a pair of Bose speakers. They cost me $100. I wouldn't use them for pro work, but I don't feel ripped off by them because when I put my TV out or music through them, they deliver on the ads' promise of "room-filling sound".
Any mass market product will have to compromise in some way in order to be affordable for the masses. Good engineers and designers find ways to compromise that don't make the products suck.
I have to admit, though, "faithful reproduction" sounds like a great platform for Republicans in 2012.
I have a friend who works for Bose. Their product line is mostly acoustics, but they also do a lot of really interesting and varied research/innovation in a number of electrical and mechanical engineering fields.
Yep, Project Sound (the active car suspension system) being among the most well known. Every few years Bose offers up tours for the various Boston-area professional acoustics organizations.
It's an interesting blind spot; when I first got interested in computer music and acoustics, I somehow just assumed that MIT would have something roughly analogous to Stanford's CCRMA or Berkeley's CNMAT (or France's IRCAM), but that wasn't the case. But I suppose no one university can do everything.
I wouldn't say acoustics is dead at MIT. I participated in some very interesting ocean acoustics research in the last few years which has been published in Science a couple of times.
For anyone interested in reading about underwater ocean acoustics:
A bit of a sensational title. With all the discussion on Hacker News lately about ownership of the company, this is interesting. Gave a majority of non-voting stock to MIT to get company dividends. That is all.
Interesting way of donating your fortune to a school.
I was fortunate to be a student of Dr. Bose many years ago. No other professor gave unlimited time on exams, plus free Toscanini's ice cream to boot!
Beyond those small perks, his stories working with Norbert Wiener and his inspirations have completely transformed and shaped my personality and how I solve problems. Above all, the highest integrity one would have with his/her work, has been my #1 beacon thanks to Dr. Bose. I will always cherish that end-of-term field trip at his corporate headquarters where I witnessed amazing demos (including the active automobile suspensions), and heard even more stories that made me believe that anything is possible when you put your mind and heart into it.
Bose spent over a decade working with Wiener. It started when Lee recruited Bose (as a grad student) to work under Wiener.
Bose often told the story of the initial encounter, in which he spent 6 months fearing for his life because his level of math versus that of Wiener was equivalent to a child who knows basic arithmetic versus someone well versed with Calculus.
They worked together on a wide variety of projects, including bio-engineering projects where they measured brain signals of hospital patients who lost, say, their arms but was asked to pretend to move their fingers as if their arms were still attached.
According to Bose, Wiener was a total genius who had an amazing memory. He fully memorized AND understood the human anatomy down to every detail, and often corrected experienced Harvard doctors from mistakes, large or small.
Wiener told Bose that he resented his upbringing because his parents wanted to see if they could raise a genius. By age 7, Wiener's eyesight was nearly shot from so much reading, but his parents pushed on and made Wiener do everything in his head instead.
I have Weiners book "Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" (unfortunately not in the hardback version) and although I don't understand the math in the book I still read it to the best of my ability.
Another book that I did understand and which made me understand Weiners book a little better conceptually was Valentino Braitenbergs "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" a fantastick book for math morons like myself.
> I was fortunate to be a student of Dr. Bose many years ago. No other professor gave unlimited time on exams, plus free Toscanini's ice cream to boot!
Unlimited time and free food is a good thing? I went to Harvey Mudd and the only thing more terrifying than an unlimited time exam was an unlimited time exam with free food. It was a surefire indicator that you were about to lose a significant chunk of your time working on a nigh-impossible exam. I guess it's just weird to find out that this isn't universal.
Those were great perks since no other classes I knew had them. Bose didn't offer these things so he could have impossible exams. He offered them because he was cool like that. :)
If you knew your materials, it would have taken about 1 to 1.5 hrs to finish the exam. The vast majority finished within 2 hrs (typical duration of MIT night exams). But indeed there were a few who stuck around for 4-5 hrs. At least one TA had to stick around too.
Ah, that's a much different case. There's a (true) horror story about an upper division physics course at Harvey Mudd. It was an unlimited time proctored exam. The prof apparently expected the students to spend 4-5 hours, but when nobody had left by then he had to order some pizzas to feed them. If I remember the story correctly, most of the students exceeded 20 hours and, I might be making this up, but I believe a couple got into the 40-some range.
This isn't really the usual case (most of the unlimited time exams are take home exams rather than proctored), but it's still terrifying.
>But indeed there were a few who stuck around for 4-5 hrs. At least one TA had to stick around too.
In one of our exams, there was supposedly a student who remained in the hall until 3 or 4am. It was unlimited time and s/he decided to take advantage of it. I took the class pass/fail (I was an Mech E so I didn't have a great background in the advanced EE stuff underpinning some of the concepts) so I always left sooner than I really should have since I didn't sweat the small stuff.
Dr. Bose strongly believes that the company would have gone down a terrible path had they taken on any VC money. He had always wanted Bose Corp to focus on research, and thus all profits are poured into funding more R&D. No doubt this decision makes it possible for him to donate the majority of shares to MIT today. I still remember his words: "Those MBAs would have had me fired in no time."
So how did he fund the company initially? According to Dr. Bose, Lee handed over his entire life savings because he firmly believed that Bose would succeed!
It would be fascinating to know more about how Bose funded his company without venture captital. Has that story been told somewhere? And, who's "Lee"? Thanks!
I don't understand anything about the stock market, but giving someone a large portion of stock with the agreement that it can never be sold seems like the wrong thing to do when people need to spend more to bring us out of a recession.
MIT will receive dividends from the stock. It will never cost them anything to hold it even if it falls in value. Also, if it does fall horribly (unlikely) and is sold off, MIT would receive part of the sale proceeds (I believe). Either way, it's a win win for MIT.
> people need to spend more to bring us out of a recession.
every time i hear that i'm surprised what a fairy tale! Of course politicians forced to say comfortable "we need more spending" than the suicidal "we need more working", yet it is obvious for any sane normal person what only increased productivity and efficiency can get us out of this small hole-in-the-road current recession and the really big crises looming tomorrow - healthcare, energy, education - and the day after tomorrow - social security. Look at who's leading the recovery - the companies reporting large profits without much increased sales, if any. I.e. increased productivity and efficiency, less waste. The waste in the business is still extremely large, yet much smaller than compare to heydays of 2005-7. Instead of being wasted, at least some part of these profits would get invested and thus would spread around in the economy and help overall recovery.
"increased productivity and efficiency" means less jobs. (But also a higher standard of living since things become cheaper.)
What you want is more demand. (Which depletes natural resources.)
If you want, you can have "well off poor". That's someone who is poorer than his neighbors, but due to efficiency still has everything necessary for a comfortable life. Due to human nature people don't really like this.
>"increased productivity and efficiency" means less jobs.
it means less of mundane and low productive, time wasting jobs. More value produced by less people. That increased amount of value allows for more investment (and spending as well) which creates more jobs.
Following your logic, the 20000 years ago was the golden era of employment - everybody was employed full-time gathering edible roots and hunting.
>If you want, you can have "well off poor". That's someone who is poorer than his neighbors,
Due to some unfortunate law of the Universe there is always a half which, by whatever criteria you choose, is worse off than the other half.
> It means less of mundane and low productive, time wasting jobs.
Unfortunately not everyone can do less mundane jobs, especially when the skills needed change within a generation - there isn't even time to go to school to learn them.
> More value produced by less people. That increased amount of value allows for more investment (and spending as well) which creates more jobs.
Maybe. But only if the investment creates more demand. It doesn't always.
> Following your logic, the 20000 years ago was the golden era of employment
Certainly. But who said employment was the only goal? It's _a_ goal, but not the only one.
> is worse off than the other half.
Yup, which is why people don't like it. But your plan (of higher productivity) won't fix that.
If MIT will have no voting authority under this new arrangement then I wonder what the value of actually giving the shares is. Couldn't Bose just donate all their earnings to MIT every fiscal year instead, earn a tax deduction and avoid the dividend tax that will be assessed to MIT?
I attended one special lecture by Prof. Bose while at MIT. I can't remember the subject matter specifically -- something about acoustics. But I remember the feeling of the man: humble, wise, noble. This news reminds me of that feeling.
What a wasteful donation. MIT has an over $8 billion endowment, and it teaches the most privileged technical students in the world. If MIT was at least trying to expand to teach more students, but of course it can't since it needs to maintain it's high selectivity in order to preserve its reputation. I can think of a thousand better donations than wasting it on rich ivy schools.
Dr. Bose has always felt that MIT was good to him and so he gives back. It is what it is.
BTW, Bose does have a Corporate Contributions Committee that people can solicit for donations if they feel they have a worth cause: Contributions@bose.com It didn't work for me (EAW generously stepped in) but others may have better luck.
MIT just added a new dorm and is expanding its undergrad population by about 200-300 students. And even if it wasn't, it helps the general fund of research and other programs. I can think of a lot of things at MIT that aren't a waste of research money...
MIT also tends to be generous with its financial aid money. When I went there, I ended up paying less than any other school that accepted me - including my state university.
First, as was said already, MIT is actually expanding to teach more students. Second, the OCW initiative at MIT has given thousands of people access to educational material. Finally, it makes sense to me to donate money to an institution that takes "the most privileged technical students in the world" and transforms them from kids that are good at math/science to people that will change the world.
This is an admirable and inspiring gesture. I only hope one day I can do this for my alma mater (moreso my high school than university). Thank you Dr. Bose.
this is what is called as a life well lived, you do something great that creates an impact and then the earnings are donated back to enhance your creation or somebody else's as long as innovation happens for the +ve.Too good.
I am surprised at some comments that still people have the nag to find a fault in this thing as well :)
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadhttp://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...
Although he has given them majority shares they are nonvoting only. The terms of.the gift forbid them from selling the shares or participating in any management or governance of the company.
Bose is remaining a private / independent company still run by said founder. This is essentially a gift that should pay nice stock dividends for MIT.
The likelier problem is management controlling the board and creeping up exec comp.
There will always be a trade-off between dividend payments and re-investment, but presumably here the voting equity's interests are basically aligned with the non-voting minority.
But, shouldn't you have instead said, "Wasn't Bose a bootstrapped company?" if you were talking about how the company was funded?
Seems like Bose is at least one counterpoint to this view: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2338140
I think maybe it's a hard thing to figure out because there are so few Googles, Amazons, and Apples in the world. If you only have a few extreme outliers to look at as your data, your conclusions might be completely wrong, even though they fit the data perfectly.
Regardless of the lack of an exit, the Bose founders are extremely rich today, and they don't have to remain involved in Bose for it to continue to operate and grow. I believe the original use of the term "lifestyle" implied an ongoing requirement for the founders to be involved to keep the company going, but it's come to mean "a company that did not raise huge sums of money and did not choose to exit via acquisition or IPO within a few years of founding".
In short, I don't like the term, as it provides little useful information about a company, and is colored by the most common users of the term (VCs).
Assuming a decent P/E ratio, total stock value is probably in the 10s of $billions minimum (I know, as a private company things are different, I'm just thinking off the top of my head).
He's been good to MIT over the years (MIT students, faculty and affiliates get substantial discount) and this is another example of him giving back. I hope this encourages MIT to resurrect some of their acoustics programs (aside from a couple of projects coming out of the Media Lab and a telephony class or two, acoustics has been dead at MIT since the late 1990's) but I suspect they'll just use it as a cash cow.
His work today in no way lessens the impact of an audiophile's criticism of his company's products. Not only are they overpriced in consideration of value delivered, they are in many respects poor implements for faithfully reproducing sound.
But those criticisms are criticisms of product and market, not criticisms of people and principles.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...
I own a pair of Grado phones, and a pair of Sennheiser, high end. There's a pretty big difference between the two.
The Sennheiser is, for lack of a better word, "transparent". It's like the sound is coming not from a pair of cans, but from "out there". It's very easy to forget you're wearing phones. It's like they don't have any personality of their own.
The Grado, OTOH, is very different. The sound is very much "in your face". Can you hear all sorts of tiny details and nuances? Sure, but that's because they were magnified a lot, to force them to become obvious. A look at the response curve tells you why: Grado likes to crank up the high-frequency response on their cans. They are great, though, if you're mixing audio tracks and are keeping an eye out for tiny mistakes.
The Sennheiser is like a wide-screen TV. The Grado is like a microscope. Both are useful, but for different purposes.
But you'll have to try them out, all of them have several lines with different sounds, and each company has distinct characteristics.
You'll need to try them out.
I also discovered Headfonia ( http://www.headfonia.com/ ), a nice blog.
After reading http://www.headfonia.com/closed-cans-shootout-m-50-esw-9-t50... and many discussions on Head-Fi, I bought a Sennheiser HD-25-1, and I'm really happy with it ;)
This does not directly answer your question, but I think it may still be of interest.
It helps to have access to decently-equipped wood shop, but if you don't you can try asking a local custom-cabinet maker if they will cut and assemble the box for you. IME they are receptive to these types of projects since they can often use scrap from their other projects which allows them to make some money from material that would typically be wasted.
Some resources:
http://www.madisound.com/
http://www.parts-express.com/ (full disclosure: I am a PE reseller)
http://www.diyaudio.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Loudspeaker-Design-Cookbook-Vance-Dick...
http://www.speakerworkshop.com/
Pair with heavy-duty 2-channel amplifier like the Onkyo M-282, or a decent Denon, Harman Kardon, NAD, etc. home theater receiver.
Speakers (as in, small-mid-size near-field monitors, from very expensive to why-not cheap): Genelec ($3000), Adam ($2000), KRK ($750), Logitech ($100). Tastes in speakers vary a lot, and it makes a difference where you will be using them. These numbers are for the upper-middle end of the range. I like KRKs for their clear but slightly forward sound. I don't need a pair of Genelecs, but they are amazingly good. Some people swear by the Adams, they don't evoke any strong response from me. At the cheapie end the Logitech stuff strikes me as having a surprising level of bang for the buck, but it's been a while since I listened carefully to anything like that.
Buy powered speakers. Don't waste money on passive + amp combinations unless you have strong opinions on the electronics of different amplifier classes, in which case you probably want to build your own at some point.
Headphones: Sony MDR7506. The end.
Definitely. I've recommended them on HN before. They're the best 'pro' headphones at a very fair price that the companies making overpriced 'amateur professional' products don't want you to know about, including Sony themselves.
That's a testable statement. It would be difficult to ABX headphones to prove it, but do you have any objective quality comparisons?
I have a pair of Bose speakers. They cost me $100. I wouldn't use them for pro work, but I don't feel ripped off by them because when I put my TV out or music through them, they deliver on the ads' promise of "room-filling sound".
I have to admit, though, "faithful reproduction" sounds like a great platform for Republicans in 2012.
For anyone interested in reading about underwater ocean acoustics:
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5922/1734.full?ijkey=t...
[2] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/311/5761/660.full?ijkey=bc...
Interesting way of donating your fortune to a school.
Beyond those small perks, his stories working with Norbert Wiener and his inspirations have completely transformed and shaped my personality and how I solve problems. Above all, the highest integrity one would have with his/her work, has been my #1 beacon thanks to Dr. Bose. I will always cherish that end-of-term field trip at his corporate headquarters where I witnessed amazing demos (including the active automobile suspensions), and heard even more stories that made me believe that anything is possible when you put your mind and heart into it.
Bose often told the story of the initial encounter, in which he spent 6 months fearing for his life because his level of math versus that of Wiener was equivalent to a child who knows basic arithmetic versus someone well versed with Calculus.
They worked together on a wide variety of projects, including bio-engineering projects where they measured brain signals of hospital patients who lost, say, their arms but was asked to pretend to move their fingers as if their arms were still attached.
According to Bose, Wiener was a total genius who had an amazing memory. He fully memorized AND understood the human anatomy down to every detail, and often corrected experienced Harvard doctors from mistakes, large or small.
Wiener told Bose that he resented his upbringing because his parents wanted to see if they could raise a genius. By age 7, Wiener's eyesight was nearly shot from so much reading, but his parents pushed on and made Wiener do everything in his head instead.
I have Weiners book "Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" (unfortunately not in the hardback version) and although I don't understand the math in the book I still read it to the best of my ability.
Another book that I did understand and which made me understand Weiners book a little better conceptually was Valentino Braitenbergs "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" a fantastick book for math morons like myself.
Thank you so much for your little story.
Looks like they were pretty successful.
Unlimited time and free food is a good thing? I went to Harvey Mudd and the only thing more terrifying than an unlimited time exam was an unlimited time exam with free food. It was a surefire indicator that you were about to lose a significant chunk of your time working on a nigh-impossible exam. I guess it's just weird to find out that this isn't universal.
If you knew your materials, it would have taken about 1 to 1.5 hrs to finish the exam. The vast majority finished within 2 hrs (typical duration of MIT night exams). But indeed there were a few who stuck around for 4-5 hrs. At least one TA had to stick around too.
This isn't really the usual case (most of the unlimited time exams are take home exams rather than proctored), but it's still terrifying.
In one of our exams, there was supposedly a student who remained in the hall until 3 or 4am. It was unlimited time and s/he decided to take advantage of it. I took the class pass/fail (I was an Mech E so I didn't have a great background in the advanced EE stuff underpinning some of the concepts) so I always left sooner than I really should have since I didn't sweat the small stuff.
So how did he fund the company initially? According to Dr. Bose, Lee handed over his entire life savings because he firmly believed that Bose would succeed!
every time i hear that i'm surprised what a fairy tale! Of course politicians forced to say comfortable "we need more spending" than the suicidal "we need more working", yet it is obvious for any sane normal person what only increased productivity and efficiency can get us out of this small hole-in-the-road current recession and the really big crises looming tomorrow - healthcare, energy, education - and the day after tomorrow - social security. Look at who's leading the recovery - the companies reporting large profits without much increased sales, if any. I.e. increased productivity and efficiency, less waste. The waste in the business is still extremely large, yet much smaller than compare to heydays of 2005-7. Instead of being wasted, at least some part of these profits would get invested and thus would spread around in the economy and help overall recovery.
What you want is more demand. (Which depletes natural resources.)
If you want, you can have "well off poor". That's someone who is poorer than his neighbors, but due to efficiency still has everything necessary for a comfortable life. Due to human nature people don't really like this.
it means less of mundane and low productive, time wasting jobs. More value produced by less people. That increased amount of value allows for more investment (and spending as well) which creates more jobs.
Following your logic, the 20000 years ago was the golden era of employment - everybody was employed full-time gathering edible roots and hunting.
>If you want, you can have "well off poor". That's someone who is poorer than his neighbors,
Due to some unfortunate law of the Universe there is always a half which, by whatever criteria you choose, is worse off than the other half.
Unfortunately not everyone can do less mundane jobs, especially when the skills needed change within a generation - there isn't even time to go to school to learn them.
> More value produced by less people. That increased amount of value allows for more investment (and spending as well) which creates more jobs.
Maybe. But only if the investment creates more demand. It doesn't always.
> Following your logic, the 20000 years ago was the golden era of employment
Certainly. But who said employment was the only goal? It's _a_ goal, but not the only one.
> is worse off than the other half.
Yup, which is why people don't like it. But your plan (of higher productivity) won't fix that.
Dr. Bose has always felt that MIT was good to him and so he gives back. It is what it is.
BTW, Bose does have a Corporate Contributions Committee that people can solicit for donations if they feel they have a worth cause: Contributions@bose.com It didn't work for me (EAW generously stepped in) but others may have better luck.