A society that answers the questions What to produce?, How to produce?, and For whom to produce? by doing things as they were done by the previous generation lacks a key ingredient for economic growth: entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are risk takers; they bring innovation and new technology into use. Understanding why some societies are better at producing entrepreneurs than others may help explain why some nations have remained poor, while others have grown rapidly. One theory is that entrepreneurs often come from blocked minorities. Some individuals in the traditional society are blocked from holding prestigious jobs or political office because of discrimination. This discrimination can be based on race, religion, or immigrant status. Because discrimination keeps them from the best traditional occupations, these minority groups can achieve wealth and status only through entrepreneurship. The Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Jews in Europe, and the Indians in Africa were all blocked minorities, forced to turn to entrepreneurship to advance themselves.

Whether we consider professionals working for a Fortune 500 company or volunteers at the local hospital, the same rule holds true: People in every organization want to be actively engaged — to be emotionally connected—with their role(s). Sadly, many organizational cultures actively prevent people from becoming so engaged. I have had countless discussions with people in a wide range of industries who share this same idea: They want to care about their work, but find they cannot care and still do their jobs effectively. Many people faced with this dilemma choose to leave their jobs, which increases costs due to lost productivity, new-hire training, and a lack of cohesiveness that disrupts projects throughout the organization. Other people faced with this same dilemma simply stay at their present job and become disengaged workers, which also hurts the bottom line of the organization, usually in hidden ways that do not readily appear on the company's books. Either way, your organization loses.

Chemical elements may be transferred from one plant to another through air or water. Plants cannot flee to escape from aggressors, but that does not mean that they remain passive. According to recent studies, volatile substances of vegetal origin can trigger defensive mechanisms in healthy plants situated near infested plants. It has also been demonstrated, both in the laboratory and in agricultural systems, that an attack by herbivores increases the emission of volatile organic compounds which attract predators of the herbivores to the infested plants. In other words, the plants mobilize their 'life guards' to protect themselves against their enemies. Wild tobacco manages to rid itself of 90% of its herbivore predators in this way. It still remains to be understood in detail why and how such volatile substances can be emitted by plants under stress and how healthy plants utilize this information, but the phenomenon as such appears to be well established. Given these circumstances, it is legitimate to consider whether plants might not be able to anticipate certain risks thanks to signals informing their recipient of danger in the vicinity.

Whenever you fly, you are trusting not only the crew but the plane itself. However, the engines that power the plane may not belong to the airline: they may be renting them from a company such as Rolls-Royce, one of the largest engine manufacturers and lessors in the world. In the late 1990s, Rolls-Royce realized that many airlines did not actually want to buy engines, though they needed access to them, so the 'power by the hour' system was created. For a set fee, the engines could be rented, but they remained in the ownership of Rolls-Royce, who maintained them, serviced them, repaired them and retired them when necessary. This rental system benefits everyone: the airlines have access to the engines and the manufacturer gains working knowledge of their equipment in action and retains precious materials and resources-nothing is 'lost' or thrown 'away'. Whether you are an individual or part of a large business, renting makes a lot of sense.

At the moment, we tend to conflate working and flourishing. We believe that to succeed in work is to flourish in life, so the skills required are the same. But when considering a world with less work due to technological progress, the skills needed to flourish in the future will be very different from those in demand today. This would require a significant overhaul in what we teach-but big shifts of this magnitude are not unprecedented. If we traveled back to the ancient Sparta and took a look at its curriculum, we would be startled. Known as agoge, it was essentially a two-decade-long PE class designed to prepare men for war. Today, to the dismay of no one except perhaps PE teachers, organized exercise in schools is confined to a few hours a week. We no longer need to train young people to be warriors. In the future, we may no longer need to train them to work, either, but will have to teach them to flourish through leisure instead.

For decades, tremendous scholarly investigation has been devoted to deciphering the sports fan: who he or she is, what he or she does, and —perhaps most importantly —why he or she does it. The associations people have with their sports teams are, in many ways, inexplicable; Benedict Anderson writes of an "imagined community" when talking about bonds felt within national borders, yet when he writes of the impossibility of knowing even a small fraction of people within one's own country, he could just have easily been writing of the lack of familiarity one has among one's own fan base —and lack of knowledge of even the individual athlete or team itself. The majority of people who root for their favorite professional or college team have never met a single person who plays on that team, yet, nonetheless, can be moved to tears when this group of people —strangers all-achieve greatness on the athletic field.

The field of personal decision widens through pursuits of laudable freedoms of thought, speech, and action and the increasing reliance on reason and science for insight. Although still beset by superstitions, taboos, and myths, contemporary societies nevertheless are incomparably less so than their tribal, or even recent predecessors. Instead of following the rules set by chiefs, kings, and mystics, the present-day citizen is expected to approach very many choices autonomously and responsibly. Nowhere is this easier to observe than in democracies, where calls and procedures to decide who governs are inscribed in the foundations of law. The wider the field of personal choice, the more and the more varied are the decisions that the citizen is asked to make. Constrained by time, attention, and the regularities of economics, the citizen will seek advice and be confronted to the difficult question of how to respond to it, of whether to accept it.

Critics warn that "real" political engagement, the kind that gets people out of their chairs and into the streets organizing and acting, may be replaced by "virtual" engagement, in which reading political blogs and chatting about politics online provides an illusion of political engagement. "Simulated activism is no substitute for the real thing," wrote Hartelius, summarizing this critique. Concerns about authenticity are endemic to the reception of new media. But some evidence suggests that people who use digital media may be more likely to be politically engaged offline than those who do not. Internet users have been found to be more likely than non-users to engage in political activities, read magazines and newspapers, attend to campaign coverage in TV shows and interviews, and, perhaps most importantly, vote. Several researchers found that when people used their mobile phones to discuss and exchange opinions on issues, they were also more likely to "attend a political meeting, rally, or speech, circulate a petition for a candidate or issue, and to contact a public official or political party."