Swarm Creativity Blog

Today I played around with Google ngrams . In particular, I was curious how the popularity of the two concepts "altruism" and "egoism" developed over the last one hundred years. It turns out - at least among the English speaking writers - that there was a tipping point around 1978, where the egoists became a minority, and altruists became more popular. Unfortunately, altruism peaked in 1998, and has been going down since then. There is a bit of hope, however, as towards the very end it seems to be picking up again. For the sake of comparing the different cultures, I then ran the same query in German, using the German words "Selbstlosigkeit"(altruism) and "Selbstsucht" (egoism). Here are the results: It's very different! For the most part of the last century, the Germans were obsessed with egoism. Altruism has basically stayed flat over the last one hundred years, while egoism peaked during the two World Wars. At least German egoism (to be mor...

Coolhunt Log #17 Tuesday, May 8, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Gary Smith, moderator MODERATOR: I’d like to welcome everyone to today’s coolhunt for Tuesday, May 8. We are hosting daily conference calls with the authors of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing published by Amacom Books. You can view logs of previous Coolhunts at The Swarm Creativity blog at swarmcreativity.blogspot.com. On stage today is Scott Cooper and Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliates with the Sloan School of Management, and co-authors of Coolhunting—Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. I’m Gary Smith and I’ll be moderating today’s Coolhunt. Authors, can you identify yourselves so we’ll know your voice and tell us where you’re calling from today? PETER: I'm Peter Gloor and I'm calling in today from my home office in Switzer...