There are three types of gifts: Things, Experiences, and Sentiments (obviously gifts can combine two of these types). The primary purpose of a gift is to signal that the giver paid some cost, in cash, time, or consideration, to give the gift. It's a signal of friendship or appreciation.

There are 4 ways to spend money: 1) Spend your money on yourself: you care about price and value. 2) Spend other people's money on yourself: you care about value but not about price. 3) Spend your money on other people: you care about price, but not their value. 4) Spend other people's money on other people (government): you care about neither price nor value. Giving a gift implies you care about the price but not the benefit the person gets from the gift, as the price is the main signal. We've all received rotten gifts, and this scenario is serviceable but not optimal. The best gifts are valuable to the recipient, but this usually isn't the giver's primary concern.

Things: These are the cheapest gifts - the cheapest in terms of time and consideration. In my experience they're the least likely to be valuable to the recipient. A bad "thing" gift must be avoided at all costs - it costs the giver and has no value to the recipient, beyond the price signal.

The acceptability of cash or gift cards as gifts varies inversely with knowledge of the recipient's preferences and spending habits. If my best friend gave me $20 for my birthday, I'd be pretty disappointed, because he knows the sort of things I spend money on - the cash gift represents a lack of care. On the other hand, I would gladly take $20 from my grandpa because he's likely to buy something I would value less than $20. On a related note, here's a site showing the relation between gift cards and cash.

Experiences: Happiness research has shown that experiences tend to make people happier than things (the "high" from new things wears off rather quickly, and you have more clutter). It's hard to go wrong giving this gift, although it's usually most expensive type of gift.

Sentiment: These giftsare generally cheap but carry a high benefit to the recipient. Things like a photo album/framed photo, a hat or socks you knitted, or a long letter are excellent gifts with value for the recipient.

Unexpected gifts can be good gifts. I am thinking of gifts given with an eye at broadening the recipient's horizons (something they wouldn't buy for themselves, but you know the benefit). Examples are books given with an eye on exposing the recipient to a new way of seeing the world, or products that would save the recipient time or improve their life in some way. These are risky gifts but the potential benefit is large.

Unique gifts are better than replicable gifts. Few people give gasoline.

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The Washington Post has an article today about some people trying to get Obama to spend stimulus money on "green-collar jobs," defined in the article as new wind grids, solar farms, or clean-water projects, as opposed to traditional highway funding. I think this is a bad idea.

Congestion is a huge pollutant. Our nation's highways are more congested than ever, and when cars are stuck in traffic they idle and pollute. Furthermore, congestion wastes drivers' time.

Carpool lanes are designed to provide an incentive to share rides and limit congestion. However, these lanes often add to total congestion and pollution by forcing four lanes' worth of traffic into three.

An excellent solution to the congestion problem would be to raise the price of gasoline. When gas reached $4.50 this summer, driving was down, people were taking less trips and driving/buying smaller cars. This is perhaps the best possible time to implement higher gasoline taxes: gas prices are at their lowest since 2002, we have an extremely popular incoming president, and many states face urgent budget crises. For the near future this solution remains politically untenable, even if we make it budget-neutral by rebating the tax to our poorest citizens, or using it to pay for mass transit.

Building more lanes on our highways would ease congestion, reduce pollution, save people time, and create new construction jobs. Roads are also the cheapest form of transportation to build, when you measure cost per passenger mile traveled, and thus will provide the most benefit for the stimulus dollar. Solar and wind energy are becoming cheaper, but are not cost-competitive yet, and will add to our total energy supply.

Cars are the dominant form of transportation in our society and will be for some time. Mass transit is well-meaning but limited to a small share of the population, outside of urban areas. Currently our nation's roads aren't wide enough for the amount of cars on the road.

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Homer, The Iliad

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The Federalist Papers

Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Work Week

Sophocles, Oedipus

Ian McEwan, Atonement

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and other essays

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons

Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America

Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity

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Malcolm Gladwell has a long article in New Yorker about problems schools face predicting which people will be good at teaching. In summary, teachers are the most important factor affecting student learning, more important than class size, or a "good" school vs a "bad" school. Schools can't predict which teachers will be good, but the current pay structure and tenure system makes it difficult to remove bad teachers and reward good ones, and as a result no one's really happy with school quality. Gladwell says we should open up the discipline to anybody who proves they're competent, and rework the pay schedules so that we can eliminate bad teachers more easily and keep the good ones.

My response is:

Duh!

Shout it from the rooftops, Malcolm! This set of conclusions must not be obvious to some people. Teacher quality matters. I spent four hours in the Dean of Faculty's office sorting through teacher evaluations, picking out the best teachers, because I want to make sure I get good teachers. I want to put those evaluations online for everyone to see, and why teacher's unions are pure evil and the main obstacle to school improvement today. School effectiveness is all about culling and removing bad teachers and giving the good ones bonuses to get them to stay. Bad teachers are cancerous parts of a school. They don't mean to be awful, but they are.

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Assuming you have enough qualifications to start at the entry level:

Writer
Basketball/other sport coach
Musician
Traditional career to CEO
Academic
Entrepreneur
Finance

Writing, music, and entrepreneurship are scalable at every level - pay is tied to output and demand, there's no billable "per hour" component. Beginning careerists, academics, Wall Street lifers and coaches are paid a fixed salary, but as people move up the ladder their salaries become more tied to output and less tied to a per-hour consideration.

In which fields are the skills necessary to be successful relevant to the material? For example, to become CEO you must master office politics, and to be a successful coach you have to be able to recruit players. I guess these are part of the job description in each case.

My initial reaction is that difficulty depends on two factors - the size of the field and the amount of luck required. It's difficult to be a lucky coach or a lucky academic, but extremely easy to be lucky in finance, almost as easy in music, a little harder in writing. There is also a political aspect - consider which fields we would expect someone's son or daughter to have a leg up on the competition.

Entrepreneurship may be the easiest but the perceived risk of entry is the highest.

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