Despite the high of the 1997-98 season, Karpaty Lviv steadily declined as the 20thCentury came to an end. Finishing fourth and achieving qualification to the 1999-2000 UEFA Cup, the Lions once struggled on the European stage. Defeated in the first round, Lviv would have to wait eleven years until they would see a European competition once again.
The decline of mediocrity
Finishing tenth during the 2000-01 season, the break of the 20thCentury was one of despair and decline. Despite a slight resurgence in the seasons that followed, Karpaty Lviv fate was sealed during the 2003-04 season when the Lions were relegated to the Persha Liha. Losing a total of sixteen games, Lviv suffered their worst league performance since the establishment of the Vyshcha Liha.
The question remains, how can organisations avoid embarking on a slow, downward spiral, given that a good proportion of its managers will be B-players, many of whom could be emotionally unprepared to hire better people? The stakes are high: Once there are too many mediocre people in a workplace, its climate deteriorates. As professionalism and productivity slide, the best people feel marginalised and leave. By the time profits decline and alarm bells start ringing, it is often too late to halt the organisational decline.
2.In an extended bear market, the portfolio declines by 5.4% per year for 5 years. At the end of the decline, the portfolio rallies a whopping 23.3%/year for the next 5 years to get back to the original growth trend.
3.In a protracted difficult market environment, the portfolio declines by only 1.5% per year but the declines last 10 years. As the markets eventually hit a valuation bottom, the market rallies forth at 18.4%/year for the next 10 years, finally recovering back to the original growth pace after 20 years.
All three of these results represent -2 standard deviation events over a 1-, 5-, and 10-year time horizon, respectively. Thus, these would actually be results that are uncommon but entirely probable in a typical Monte Carlo analysis, although notably clients tend to focus much more on the first scenario (the sharp market decline) than the third scenario (the protracted slightly-declining market).
As it slips further down the slope to mediocrity, the slide gains momentum, and stopping the slide becomes more and more difficult. This slippage has gained considerable momentum in the last 2 or 3 seasons.
I love how actor Will Smith says it (among MANY brilliant insights) in this video collection of his interviews: "Being realistic is the most commonly traveled road to mediocrity". We need to strive to be above-average and unrealistic in our goals.
No! Working hard and pushing yourself (with appropriate opportunities for leisure and recharging) energizes you and gives you purpose. Living with mediocrity makes living purpose-less.
WASHINGTON—The heart-wrenching events taking place in Gaza confirm what has been apparent since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995—the mediocrity of Israel’s political leadership. By mediocrity, I mean the supremacy of knee-jerk reaction over groundbreaking initiative, of petty politics over vision.
"The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people," the authors thundered in one of its best-known passages.
"A Nation at Risk" cited statistics such as: "The average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched," and "[The SAT demonstrates] a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980. Average verbal scores fell over 50 points and average mathematics scores dropped nearly 40 points."
In all but a few states, teachers earn less than what other professionals with a similar level of education are making. Just 11 states direct more money to districts full of impoverished students than to affluent districts in consideration of their greater needs, a figure that has declined by half since the Great Recession.
Almost 25 later, unfortunately I am still writing about how our education system has deviated from its primary role and purpose. This purposefulness was and should always be about inculcating facts and knowledge to our children, and not mediocrity or a diluted form of academic instruction mixed with superficial subject matter mastery, politics and political correctness, post-modern moral and ethical relativism, and the rejection of American patriotism and love for this country.
In statistics, regression toward the mean (also called reversion to the mean, and reversion to mediocrity) is the phenomenon where if one sample of a random variable is extreme, the next sampling of the same random variable is likely to be closer to its mean.[1][2][3] Furthermore, when many random variables are sampled and the most extreme results are intentionally picked out, it refers to the fact that (in many cases) a second sampling of these picked-out variables will result in "less extreme" results, closer to the initial mean of all of the variables.
The concept of regression comes from genetics and was popularized by Sir Francis Galton during the late 19th century with the publication of Regression towards mediocrity in hereditary stature.[8] Galton observed that extreme characteristics (e.g., height) in parents are not passed on completely to their offspring. Rather, the characteristics in the offspring regress toward a mediocre point (a point which has since been identified as the mean). By measuring the heights of hundreds of people, he was able to quantify regression to the mean, and estimate the size of the effect. Galton wrote that, "the average regression of the offspring is a constant fraction of their respective mid-parental deviations". This means that the difference between a child and its parents for some characteristic is proportional to its parents' deviation from typical people in the population. If its parents are each two inches taller than the averages for men and women, then, on average, the offspring will be shorter than its parents by some factor (which, today, we would call one minus the regression coefficient) times two inches. For height, Galton estimated this coefficient to be about 2/3: the height of an individual will measure around a midpoint that is two thirds of the parents' deviation from the population average.
The effect can also be exploited for general inference and estimation. The hottest place in the country today is more likely to be cooler tomorrow than hotter, as compared to today. The best performing mutual fund over the last three years is more likely to see relative performance decline than improve over the next three years. The most successful Hollywood actor of this year is likely to have less gross than more gross for his or her next movie. The baseball player with the highest batting average by the All-Star break is more likely to have a lower average than a higher average over the second half of the season.
Jeremy Siegel uses the term "return to the mean" to describe a financial time series in which "returns can be very unstable in the short run but very stable in the long run." More quantitatively, it is one in which the standard deviation of average annual returns declines faster than the inverse of the holding period, implying that the process is not a random walk, but that periods of lower returns are systematically followed by compensating periods of higher returns, as is the case in many seasonal businesses, for example.[22]
The United States Department of Labor released a report last week that chronicled the continued decline of the American labor movement in 2019. In our boom economy, more than 2.1 million new jobs were added to the market last year, but the number of unionized workers fell by 170,000. The percentage of union workers, both public and private, fell from 10.5 percent to 10.3 percent, or roughly 14.6 million workers out of 141.7 million. The percentage of unionized workers dipped even lower in the private sector, from about 20 percent in 1983 to 6.2 percent of workers in 2019, a far cry from the 35 percent union membership high mark last seen in 1954. Decline was lower in the public sector, where just over one-third of workers are union members, as a modest increase in state government employees partially offset somewhat larger declines in federal and local unionized workers.
All of these pro-union critiques miss the basic point that the decline of union power is good news, not bad. That conclusion is driven not by some insidious effort to stifle the welfare of workers, but by the simple and profound point that the greatest protection for workers lies in a competitive economy that opens up more doors than it closes. The only way to achieve that result is by slashing the various restrictions that prevent job formation, as Justin Haskins of the Heartland Institute notes in a recent article at The Hill. The central economic insight is that jobs get created only when there is the prospect of gains from trade. Those gains in turn are maximized by cutting the multitude of regulations and taxes that do nothing more than shrink overall wealth by directing social resources to less productive ends.
True to standard classical liberal principles, the market has responded to lower transaction costs with improvements that Obama, as President, could only have dreamed of creating. Overall job growth was 5.53 million jobs between 2007 and 2017. But new job creation has exceeded 7 million in the first three years of the Trump administration. In addition, the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs that started in the late Clinton years and which continued throughout the Obama years has also been reversed. Over 480,000 manufacturing jobs have been added to the economy since Trump took office, compared to the 300,000 manufacturing jobs lost in the eight years under Obama. 2ff7e9595c
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