My early times in Hungary, My Parents, and a hint of device physics....

Lately I have written a bit about Hungary, without hiding my obvious roots there. My parents seemed to talk about everything, but perhaps because of the scars, really neglected much about themselves, their history, or their countries history. Most of this is new to me,but tonite I went down an interesting path.  I of course knew about 1956 in Hungary from my father, he told me occasional funny stories about being in the military (every male was but he was never deployed), and joked about kayaking for speed inside the wake of a big boat to go faster on the Danube, but no social science for sure.

I can't remember a single one now, but I know that I once knew the name of all the bridges in Budapest across the Danube from my time there as a child. My mother was interesting, and prolific, starting as I did, as an artist making awesome stained glass windows (I could not do art, but music was my baby as well as my escape), moving to architecture, and later acupuncture, but never really being satisfied. She did not ever talk about Hungarian history, or much of her childhood either. I lived with her parents for a long time when young, but them being "middle class" and her an only child, they still had the same 1972 VW Bug they bought when they died, and their garage was actually an old bomb shelter under their house. 

I knew from a young age, especially when this my father would calmly eat even the apple core, he was raised in incredible poverty relative to what we conceive of as normality. I stayed with my grandparents for a large part of my childhood. When I was tiny tiny I bathed in an old school porcelain wash basin (yes in the early 80s, in Hungary, they did laundry by hand and hung it up to dry as well). The whole time you went to the store almost daily, because a "refrigerator" basically had room for milk and eggs. I don't know many people who had to share bath water, but there was never hot water for another bath (what's a shower?).

As usual I had to learn about my history from google again. But tonight, randomly, as I plan to finish filing my first patent tomorrow (you wouldn't believe the challenge getting the USPTO to accept a PDF), I looked up my father. Most of this will only make sense to my EE friends (circuit diagrams in all the electronics links below....), but other than my dad being able to do pullups with one arm when I was young, nothing even comes close to looking up his patents.

I distinctly remember talking with my dad about his failed attempts at "bubble memory" once upon a time. But the title of his first patent, actually cracks me up:

"Nucleation bubble generator for bubble domain devices"

That makes me want to laugh. We can, because it was a complete failure. Back then as I remember it was IBM, Rockwell, or Burroughs for my father. That was one patent at Rockwell, but then the laughs stop. He joined Burroughs, where former treasury secretary Michael Blumenthal engineered a notorious hostile takeover of Sperry, creating Unisys, while my father created the future of electronics.

Integrated circuit having three power bases and proportioned parasitic resistive and capacitive coupling to reduce output noise

Interesting. I focused on circuits and communications, but when device physics came into play, that was where I could no longer go. But what I see there is an order of magnitude decrease in noise, and that's never a bad thing. So we've moved from bubbles to transistors, but that patent is raw device physics.

Integrated logic circuit incorporating a module which generates a control signal that cancels switching noise

interesting. All BJTs. Old school! Starting to move up into more than one transistor.

So I'll list a few more

Logic circuit having testability for defective via contacts

Three-state logic circuit for wire-ORing to a data bus (Once again, BJT logic circuits...... I thought they were only for amplifiers!)

Nonsaturating bipolar logic gate having a low number of components and low power dissipation

I remember hearing BiCmos at a young age and here it comes.

Semicustom chip whose logic cells have narrow tops and wide bottoms (Yeah. It's CMOS time baby!)

Synchronizer having dual feedback loops for avoiding intermediate voltage errors (Cool circuit. BJT? CMOS? Your choice)

Module for preventing instability in integrated circuit testers (I understand the title. I have no idea what's going on there)

Fast change standard cell digital logic chip (note here, in 1989 they are still talking about a standard chip having 15 THOUSAND gates)

Signal translator for interconnecting CMOS and BiCMOS logic gates. CMOS is great for logic, and BJTs are great for amplifiers. I think this last one might be a seminal work.

Device physics goes back a bit before my father, but not much. For my EE peeps, as well as myself, this might be an interesting trip through semiconductors in the 80s.

Not bad for a poor eastern european immigrant. I just need 10 more to catch up!

"Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish."

~Steve Jobs/The Whole Earth Catalog

The Mighty Magyars and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956

"There is no more illustrious history than the history of the Magyar nation"
--Theodore Roosevelt

Yes, sometimes the Hungarian pride comes out. Hungary has existed in many forms over the years. For those of you who know me, I have long believed that a sustained diaspora from Hungary in the 20th century has affected the world broadly, and positively in many ways. However, a lot of cool things have come from within Hungary as well.

Watching Italy and England play today I'm inspired to share the story of The Magical Magyars of the 1950's. A team that once upon a time revolutionized soccer and dominated the world for years such that losing to West Germany in the 1954 world cup (beating Brazil in the quarters, and holders Uraguay in the semis) is referred to as "Das Wunder von Bern" ("The Miracle of Bern"). Just a year earlier they stunned England, and the entire world with the first foreign win at Wembley against England ever:

To quote directly from the FIFA website:

Sometimes referred to as the 'Match of the Century', Hungary's 6-3 demolition of England at Wembley Stadium in 1953 is seen by many to mark the birth of football's modern age. If so, then Gusztav Sebes, the manager of the 'Magical Magyars,' was the man most responsible for the game's shaping place in football history.
Though rightly remembered for the beauty of their play and the brilliance of the world-class players in their ranks, the feats of Hungary's Aranycsapat (Golden Team) also marked a turning point in tactics, group dynamics and on-field fluidity. Sebes's side have come to be regarded as a precursor for the most skilled and intelligent teams in the sport's subsequent history. As Hungary's inspirational captain Ferenc Puskas once said: "When we attacked, everyone attacked, and in defence it was the same. We were the prototype for Total Football."

And Johnathan Stevenson from the BBC Relates (quoting Jackie Sewell and of great England fame Sir Bobby Robson):

As if to prove their point, the rampant Hungarians demolished England 7-1 in a friendly in Budapest six months later. The old way of playing was over but a bond between the teams that would last several decades had begun.
In November 1993, the remaining survivors were invited to Budapest for a grand dinner to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Hungary's famous win. "I've never experienced the sort of camaraderie with anyone else that we had with that team," Sewell told me. "There was a terrific bond between the players and it never went away.
"We were shown around Budapest, taken to some vineyards and then plonked on a big stage with TV cameras around where they presented us with these gold cups. It was marvellous, they really looked after us - but that's the sort of people they were."

I

Some interesting records:

• World Record: most consecutive games scoring at least one goal: 73 games (April 10, 1949 to June 16, 1957).
• World Record: longest time undefeated in 20th and 21st centuries: 4 years 1 month (June 4, 1950 to July 4, 1954). 
• World Cup Record: 27 goals scored in a single World Cup finals tournament.
• World Cup Record: 5.4 goals-per-match in a single World Cup finals tournament.
• World Cup Record: +17 goal differential in a single World Cup finals tournament.
• World Cup Record: 2.2 goals-per-match average for individual goal scoring in a single World Cup finals tournament (Sándor Kocsis 11 goals in 5 games).
• World Cup Record: highest margin of victory ever recorded in a World Cup finals tournament match ( Hungary 9, South Korea 0 – July 17, 1954).

Some interesting notables:

• First national side from outside the British Isles to defeat England at home since the codification of association football in 1863, a span of 90 years
• First non-South American national side to defeat Uruguay (July 30, 1954), breaking a 17 game Uruguayan unbeaten run against non-South American competition dating from May 26, 1924.
• First national side to defeat the Soviet Union at home (Sept. 23 1956)

Unfortunately the story's end begins just one month later with the start of the hungarian revolution. The revolt began with a student protest marching on parliament. When state security forces fired on the demonstrators, killing one, the news spread and violence erupted in the capital. Within a week militias quickly formed, fighting with the state and soviet troops, and had disbanded the existing government.

The majority of the team played for Budapest Honvéd and was out of the country playing Athletic Bilbao and chose, not to return as the revolution had erupted. While some players eventually chose to return to Hungary, 3 notables moved to Spain to play for Real Madrid and Barcelona.

On October 30th, the Soviet politburo decided to withdraw from Hungary. For a short time it looked like the peace would continue. On October 31st, the committee reversed it's decision, and by November 3rd Russian tanks had encircled Budapest, and on the 4th they rolled in, and the rest is history.

Hungary was brought back into the fold, and the diaspora continued. One other interesting interesting side story is the Hungarian waterpolo team which was training in the mountains near Budapest in preparation for the Sydney Olympics. They left the country, avoiding the revolution, and by December when the olympics happened, the revolution had been fully suppressed. Hungary beat the Soviet Union 4-0, in a heated match. Photos of a bleeding Ervin Zádor spread, and before to long the contest had been termed "The blood in the water match."

~~~~~~~~~~~~
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Magyars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria-Hungary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_in_the_Water_match

Awesome 30 minute video about Ferenc Puskás
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STBQTqMnd8o

Intellectual Libertarians!

I read a great piece today entitled "Confessions of a former Libertarian: My personal, psychological and intellectual epiphany." And what an epiphany it gave me indeed. Alas if you are hoping for political talk, this one is not for you.

Some of the realizations expressed in this essay gave me some great self insight on the process I've been through the last decade. To me libertarianism was politics, not a lifestyle, or philosophy. My libertarian bent is more along the lines of "the more you let government do, the more wasteful they can be." I'll confess that many things like roads, schools, and police seem like obvious places for the government, and I think almost everyone agrees. But just bring up the environment, or even worse (in the US) HEALTHCARE and people are up in arms (I support the environment deeply, and think basic healthcare is just as obvious)!

I can see now that my 20s were, in retrospect, the time I resolved the conflicts between my head and my heart. My life philosophy when I was younger was heavily driven by my life experience which mostly related around being the best at reading, logic, math, science etc, and being terrible with people.

For me I fell back on what I will now call "Intellectual Libertarianism," but let's be honest, everyone has some skew in there life at a young age, and most people just don't self analyze that much. When the world came to things like sense, logic, or math.... I always won, and still do, so why not fall back on what works? This was probably what affected my ethos the most. Alas, to assume that really anyone thinks just like you, or even close, is a huge fallacy. I had such an amazing disconnect from the real world, and had no idea! You can never hope to comprehend their life experience in any meaningful way via pure logic. I see that a lot of my perspective was based on a truly ignorant notion the author spoke well:

"the truth an ideologue is at pains to accept is that no life can live up to ideology. We are a messy species living messy lives. And we are lucky for this. The intellectual libertarian wants the world to be the kind of ideal world it never can be. He (and it’s often he) is unable to live with ambiguity and compromise. The beautiful (it is a kind of beauty) logical edifice of Libertarianism is built on the faulty premise that this is the kind of world that is built on logical edifices."

Accepting that the world could be so complicated took me MANY years. I still have a world of flaws to conquer, but this one, at least for me has been the most profound process of my last epoch. I expect this realization to guide me in the future to continue to use my values of empathy and compassion to understand rather than judge people. I'll keep my early life skills at work changing the world with cool and innovative tech forever!

FUD, Marketing, and Vested Interests in the Car Industry

An article I read this morning observes that California car dealers complain:

"[they] also [note] that Tesla's quoted new-car prices net out a $7,500 Federal income-tax credit for purchase of a plug-in electric car. According to the California dealers, just 20 percent of all car shoppers qualify for that credit--and the group attributes that statistic to the Congressional Budget Office. "

While they happily quote financing that only 5% of people can get, on prices that often exist only on one car on the lot out of hundreds to get you in the door, while Tesla's pricing is a done deal.

And of course while all electric car manufacturers use similar tactics on their websites "We note that the California New Car Dealers Association, however, does not attack Chevrolet, Mitsubishi, or Nissan for this practice--only Tesla."

Smells like FUD as usual, rather than something real, as in both cases, everything is disclosed (even if the print is tiny, or it's the guy talking 1M mph at the end of the commercial)...

We watch this time and time again, and in particular with another Elon Musk company that is revolutionizing the mechanics and COST of space travel. How do we clear the path for future technologies and encourage them? It seems it takes a Crisis in the USA to incite change (hopefully). We could have been on the vanguard of raising fuel efficiency standards in the USA, but instead we waited til all of our car companies were bankrupt!

Rocky (a.k.a. Van) goes to Russia

Remember Rocky 4? Rocky goes to Russia, beats the Russian behemoth at his own game, and rather than smugly gloating he turns it into a passionate speech about how as the fight progressed he and the crowd realized how similar Americans and Russians actually are. The scene where the Russian premier stands up and applauds (then followed by his aides) was a poignant illustration of the slowly thawing relations between our two great nations.

Did you know this actually happened in real life once? It just wasn't the way you think. When I was young I had a great Russian piano teacher for many years, who always used the example of Van Cliburn to motivate me. "You can't just be a little better" he would say, "the reason Van Cliburn, an American could go to the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war and still win was because he was so much better there was no question!"

Van Cliburn died yesterday (2-27-13) at the age of 78. I actually saw him at one of his last public performance when I was a child. I was lucky enough to see him on the first stop of the tour, as he cancelled the rest! Through my teacher, Dimitri, and that one concert he has for ever been a poignant influence in my life. How could one man, single handedly (figuratively of course!) endear himself to Russians and Americans alike, while for the first time showing that American musicians could compete against the best in the world?

The impact of Mr. Cliburn’s victory was enhanced by a series of vivid articles written for The New York Times by Max Frankel, then a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and later an executive editor of the paper. The reports of Mr. Cliburn’s progress — prevailing during the early rounds, making it to the finals and becoming the darling of the Russian people, who embraced him in the streets and flooded him with fan mail and flowers — created intense anticipation as he entered the finals.

He was a sensation! The boxing ring was a little different. Other than perhaps a judge ignoring something not allowed, the International Tchaikovsky competition could very obviously be influenced, and even controlled by the Party in a way we only see on a large scale in China these days. In fact his performance was so amazing, then premier Nikita Khruschev in fact gave the judges the nod to his victory! Van Cliburn, or course was completely oblivious:

“Oh, I never thought about all that,” Mr. Cliburn recalled in 2008 during an interview with The Times. “I was just so involved with the sweet and friendly people who were so passionate about music.” The Russians, he added, “reminded me of Texans.”

Really? Think of Rocky when the crowd in Russia started chanting:

On the night of the final round, when Mr. Cliburn performed the Tchaikovsky First Concerto, a solo work by Dmitry Kabalevsky (written as a test piece for the competition) and the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto, the audience broke into chants of “First prize! First prize!” Emil Gilels, one of the judges, went backstage to embrace him.

The jury agreed with the public, and Moscow celebrated. At a Kremlin reception, Mr. Cliburn was bearhugged by Khrushchev. “Why are you so tall?” Khrushchev asked. “Because I am from Texas,” Mr. Cliburn answered.

Much like the made up Rocky in a short while Van Cliburn endeared himself to the Russian public in a way that was unimaginable. Unlike Rocky however, that moment was his coming out to America as well:

When Mr. Cliburn returned to New York he received a ticker-tape parade in Lower Manhattan, the first musician to be so honored, cheered by 100,000 people lining Broadway. In a ceremony at City Hall, Mayor Robert F. Wagner proclaimed that “with his two hands, Van Cliburn struck a chord which has resounded around the world, raising our prestige with artists and music lovers everywhere.”

A worldwide rockstar 2 years before The Beatles started their run on the world! The rest of his life seemed downhill from there. When he returned he recorded his performance from Moscow, and it sold over a million copies in the fist year. He quickly started pulling in massive rates for performances, but it was not long to be. His forays into other works were mostly not well received. Most people just wanted to hear the Tchaikovsky and the Rachmaninov 3. He of course became fabulously wealthy, but became increasingly erratic, and left the stage for years at a time.

In any case I will not dwell on his later life. I saw him perform the Tchaikovsky and was forever changed.   I spent my last two years of Piano back when I lived in Austin working on the Tchaikovsky - 1, and my preferred Rachmaninov - 2 because of his impact. Two days ago a legend, and American hero who indirectly played a big part in my life passed away. Rest in Peace Van Cliburn. I want to thank Dimitri Kirichenko in San Diego, and Julia Krueger in Austin Texas for the amazing impact they also had on my life. I am also grateful beyond belief for the love and passion for music I derived from all those years on the Piano, and Clarinet.

New York Times article with lots of good info which I have excerpted a few times above: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/arts/music/van-cliburn-pianist-dies-at-78.html

Van Cliburn plays the Tchaikovsky 1st Piano Concerto. It's opening is the most grandiose and powerful around in my opinion. AMAZING close ups of his hands. Note about 5:30 in. Those are octaves in both hands! There's a similar section about 8 minutes in. By do I remember toiling over those sections. If you click through to the second half of the first movement there is an amazing virtuoso finish as well. The third movement also has an amazing finish, and I LOVE the way he looks at the conductor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M7M4UoqBpA&list=PL4C3471E0755BFCF2&index=1

Van Cliburn plays the Rachmaninov 2nd Piano Concerto. This one has a powerful opening, but rather than being grandiose, it's power is in passion. I absolutely LOVE this piece. It does get rather grandiose when those big Rachmaninov chords come in on occasion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds9CrdY3R2M

My 3rd favorite Piano Concerto, Grieg's first, performed by Evgeny Kissin. Not related to Van Cliburn in any way. Just a side note.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO-H37t1fQQ

Time management, quality -vs- quantity, and diminishing returns

Growing up I have watched many people ruin their lives with a lack of balance. Those who have known me long enough have known I was TERRIBLE at balance, and have worked terribly hard to get to where I am today. Both of my parents, upon immigrating from Hungary (where I don't think they take it easy easy as Western Europe) in my opinion were seduced by the American dream, just like most of the parents of children from my era. I watched them ruin their lives, health, and spirits by not balancing work and all the other things that life involves.

With this background and perhaps the advice of a few key friends, bosses, and mentors I learned well to balance my life (or focus on balance as a key element), but it was hard. For me it took an odyssey into triathlon, where balance between going hard and easy is a key element of a successful plan, and a long term burnout in a job where I was literally doing 5 peoples jobs! What was profound when I first came to this realization was that it decreased my ability to be highly available and observant. I wrote about this in an article called Carpe Diem, where I observed that because I was burned out and uninterested, I was only mediocre in situations where the game really was on the line (think a last minute bug or redesign needed to fix a major problem); I also saw that in addition to always being tired, and snippy with my co-workers and friends, I never had time to "stop and smell the roses" which is where a LOT of creative and problem solving influence really comes from.

Unfortunately we learn from many sources over the years a fact that is well espoused in this Inc article entitled: "Why working more than 40 hours a week is useless." I interpret this as constantly working more than 40 hours on the same thing. I believe you can have other "big rocks" (read major passions and devotions as the well known time management analogy goes) in your jar, but you can't have too many, and you certainly can't fill your jar with gravel, sand, and water (busy work, email/SMS, and the WEB/Social Media) first. If you ignore your health, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and personal life you'll just end up with one under maintained big rock, and a bunch of crap:

Research by the Business Roundtable in the 1980s found that you could get short-term gains by going to 60- or 70-hour weeks very briefly — for example, pushing extra hard for a few weeks to meet a critical production deadline," she wrote. But Robinson stressed that "increasing a team’s hours in the office by 50 percent (from 40 to 60 hours) does not result in 50 percent more output...In fact, the numbers may typically be something closer to 25-30 percent more work in 50 percent more time."

But the unfortunate temptation is to be sucked in by focusing on quantity over quality when we think of things in a superficial form:

there's actually a pretty strong correlation between how busy we are and how important we feel. "We live in a competitive society, and so by lamenting our overwork and sleep deprivation — even if that requires workweek inflation and claiming our worst nights are typical — we show that we are dedicated to our jobs and our families,"

But we know these things. Yet people and management have both seemed to ignore these facts in America like crazy.  I have been quite successful in the right situations, but I need help. I have an unfortunate propensity to be able to go hard for a much longer time then most people, but I'm simply able to push past exhausted mediocrity to sickness, and a host of other interpersonal issues that can be hard to notice for me because I am so bland. This brings down my employers, myself, and my inner circle. I have been a great performer, for extended periods of time, in the context of my "big rock" when I'm able to incorporate the following:
1) work HARD for more like 6 hours a day (3-4 chunks with at least a little break, and often a workout thrown in the middle).
2) I have and am able to use vacation, and
3) I have a boss who watches me and occasionally helps me refuse tasks or take a break.

I also need to have the bandwidth to also have my "Smell the roses" moments so I can get creative, and ingenuous inspirations which often come at random times, and often from random people.  That said it's still not a popular thing to talk about. As I have moved up the ladder, and especially work with many time zones I have accepted that I am inevitably forced to become a bit more available, especially at random times. My response to this is to resolve conflicts with life more often by not forcing all my errands and appointments to take over my lunch, evenings, and weekends. I feel like there's a fair balance between taking some incursion by work into my personal life, and responding by allowing myself things like haircuts, doctors appointments, and such to occasionally have me step away from work for a while. I also feel like 2 and preferably 3 weekends a month MUST be disconnected. This is JUST medium term maintenance though... You still need vacations.

I recently raid an article entitled "Cheryl Sandberg leaves work at 5:30. Why can't you?" And then follows with:

Facebook's COO comes out as a proud believer in leaving the office on time, and creating balance in your life.

I also wrote an article about exercise called "Exercise and the Body Mind Connection" which called out articles citing MASSIVE improvements in health AND intellectual performance. So just adding the balance of some cardio a few times a week can make you miss less days sick, focus and think better,  AND give you (admittedly subjective) feeling of improvement in BOTH your professional and personal lives! Which leads to another more recently published McKinsey articles titled: "A personal approach to organizational time management," and another article called "An organizational approach to time management."

These articles reveal how both organizations from CEO down need to focus on time management institutionally, as well as individuals themselves:

Imagine its impact on senior executives. The scope, complexity, and ambiguity of senior leaders’ roles not only create near-infinite permutations of priorities but also make it more difficult to get real-time performance or productivity feedback. Is it any wonder that only 52 percent of 1,500 executives McKinsey surveyed said that the way they spent their time largely matched their organizations’ strategic priorities? (For more on this research, see “Making time management the organization’s priority.”)

So it's already hard for an individual on their own. If a CEO is not able to instill this in themselves AND their employees, they and their employees will suffer:

Our research and experience suggest that leaders who are serious about addressing this challenge must stop thinking about time management as primarily an individual problem and start addressing it institutionally. Time management isn’t just a personal-productivity issue over which companies have no control; it has increasingly become an organizational issue whose root causes are deeply embedded in corporate structures and cultures.

 Luckily they also say that....

Fortunately, this also means that the problem can be tackled systematically. Senior teams can create time budgets and formal processes for allocating their time. Leaders can pay more attention to time when they address organizational-design matters such as spans of control, roles, and decision rights. Companies can ensure that individual leaders have the tools and incentives to manage their time effectively. And they can provide institutional support, including best-in-class administrative assistance—a frequent casualty of recent cost-cutting efforts.

There's a lot more amazing content in those articles with real suggestions on how to improve the problem. They are a great read.  It's taboo in America, but a lot of smart people are seeing the european view of quality over quantity, and diminishing returns. A literally great analogy is Soccer -vs- American Football. The NFL is literally the most stunning representation of American mentality that I mention in an earlier article I mentioned: "Bigger, Better, Faster, More." Alas that is just naive. At times like these I have to fall back to music, which is my first love. We all want to be in the hall of fame. We may have 300 pound lineman who can tackle you and run a 40yd that you can't believe, but life ain't a track meet, it's a marathon. Or maybe even an ironman these days :)

Attitudes toward Money, Wealth Inequality, and what it means.

I've written before on the Gini Coefficient. It it is a measure of the Lorenz Curve relation of wealth distribution. It is commonly used to measure income inequality. I recently saw an economist chart called Attitudes toward being rich...

So I immediately thought, hmmmm, what's the relationship to Gini coefficient here? I assume that people  are fairly perceptive, and know their relative wealth. A poor person is by definition someone without too much money, that has a lot to worry about other than being rich and having expensive things. Yet oddly, by my perception, it's these really poor people who are often willing to work harder, and are more successful, and frugal. 

My quick check showed 42 for Russia, and 25 for Sweden. I know of the top of my head that Mexico, and Russia have a large number of Billionaires with a lot of really poor people so I'm thinking people focusing on wealth inherently results in a less equal distribution of wealth. I grabbed some numbers from Wikipedia, so it's spread across a few years, but let's assume fairly accurate: 

Slovenia appears to have something going on because it's WAY out of the way on my assumption, but in general the numbers seem to show a clear correlation. We must always be wary of assuming that correlation equals causality, for it is not always so. But I wonder. Sweden, Norway, The Netherlands, and Finland, "Nordic" countries by my reckoning seem to be more wealthy then most, and have a high GDP Per head. These four countries are all in the top 13 when it comes to nominal GDP per capita,  and the top 21 when adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity, or cost of goods.

So I augmented my chart to add in Nominal GDP per capita, and took out two huge outliers (Bulgaria and Ukraine) for the sake of the chart.

These numbers are not normalized, so it doesn't say that GDP/head is MORE correlated. To me it's just very clear that attitudes on money, wealth inequality, and wealth of a nation are all related. But what's the cause and effect? Can it be legislated away, or is it a fundamental issue of perception, and society? Or even just a function of the Bell Curve? It's clear to me the logic of a more equal and successful society being related. But what's the cause and what's the effect?

There's a lot of talk in politics in the US these days about taxing rich, and taxing poor. Will it make the rich run away, or actually help everyone? I do believe that financial chicanery has rigged the system toward big banks, and that's why a lot of people are mad. The bankers are not giving more value then they were 10, 20, 50, and a hundred years ago, and their piece of the pie (profits/valuation relative to S&P total) has grown dramatically. I can't cite this directly but I saw a fairly authoritative chart on CNBC recently.

Looking forward to comments on the Business/Finance front, as well as Socio-Political aspects...