Reasons for Hope

Reader Contribution by Staff
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Initiatives that protect natural resources and improve social justice are being hatched all over the world, every day. Most of these initiatives are the products of grass-roots innovation. Micro-lending is a perfect example of how individuals are finding solutions and about 100 million people are improving their lives and their communities with small, profitable, targeted loans from micro-lending institutions, both public and private. Micro-lending was, of course, invented by a few individuals trying to help the poor.

At the peak of the boom in sport-utility vehicles, Honda and Toyota started building clean, efficient hybrid cars and they are only now catching up with the demand almost a million hybrid cars later, even with a 20-percent price premium on the hybrids. Now in business, it’s more expensive to manufacture too few units of a popular product than it is to manufacture too many. Honda, Toyota, Ford and the other automobile manufacturers have consistently underestimated the demand for their hybrid products and they haven’t been able to sufficiently curb the demand by overpricing the cars, either. I get tickled every time I think about the automobile marketers trying to figure out how big a premium they can put on clean technology – and then falling short.

  • Published on Apr 30, 2007
Tagged with: Reader Contributions
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