“Climate Change Was One of the Forces that Led to the Triumph of Homo Sapiens”

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“The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins in Washington includes this 30,000-year-old handprint from France.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C32) The exhibition’s theme is “What Does It Mean to Be Human?” And the new image of the human it creates is different from the one from a century ago. It isn’t that nature has suddenly become a pastoral paradise. Some of the most unusual objects here are fossilized human bones bearing scars of animal attacks: a 3-year-old’s skull from about 2.3 million years ago is marked by eagle talons in the eye sockets; an early human’s foot shows the bite marks of a crocodile. In one of the exhibition’s interactive video stations, in which you are cleverly shown how excavated remains are interpreted, you learn that the teeth of a leopard’s lower jaw found in a cave at the Swartkrans site in South Africa match the puncture marks in a nearby early-human skull: evidence of a 1.8 million-year-old killing.

. . .
During the brief 200,000-year life of Homo sapiens, at least three other human species also existed. And while this might seem to diminish any remnants of pride left to the human animal in the wake of Darwin’s theory, the exhibition actually does the opposite. It puts the human at the center, tracing how through these varied species, central characteristics developed, and we became the sole survivors. The show humanizes evolution. It is, in part, a story of human triumph.
. . .
. . . at recent excavations in China, at Majuangou, stone tools were found in four layers of rock dating from 1.66 million to 1.32 million years ago; fossil pollen proved that each of these four time periods was also associated with a different habitat. “The toolmaker, Homo erectus,” we read, “was able to survive in all of these habitats.”
That ability was crucial. The hall emphasizes that enormous changes in the planet’s climate accompanied hominin development, suggesting that the ability to adapt to such differing circumstances was the human’s strength. Climate change was one of the forces that led to the triumph of Homo sapiens.

For the full review, see:
EDWARD ROTHSTEIN. “Exhibition Review; Hall of Human Origins; Searching the Bones of Our Shared Past.” The New York Times (Fri., March 19, 2010): C25 & C32.
(Note: italics in original; ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review is dated March 18, 2010.)

Class Action Suit Did Little for Class Members, But “Enriched” Attorneys

Many attorneys are good people, including my late father, one of my brothers, and one of my favorite former students.
But a few attorneys must be conscience-challenged; for instance the ones “representing” the class in the case described below.
More importantly, class-action litigation increases the costs and uncertainty of doing business, and thereby increases the prices of the products and services we buy.
In speaking to one of my classes a few years ago, Omaha entrepreneur Joe Ricketts made a strong case for tort reform. it is hard to disagree, unless, like the Democratic Party, you are receiving large contributions from trial lawyers.

(p. B1) . . . , a 2008 settlement of a class action against Ford Motor Co., involving incidents in which Firestone tires exploded on Ford Explorers, offered certain Explorer owners coupons worth $500 toward the purchase of a new Explorer and $300 toward the purchase of any other Ford vehicle.

As of March, only 148 people had redeemed a coupon out of 1,647 people eligible. The plaintiffs’ attorneys who led that litigation collected about $19 million in fees.
“It was rather absurd,” said Julie Hamilton Webber of Glendale, Calif., a class member who has a 1993 Ford Explorer. “The net result was the attorneys were enriched and did nothing for the class.”

For the full story, see:
DIONNE SEARCEY. “Toyota Owners May Reap Little.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., MAY 20, 2010): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the slightly different title “Toyota Owners May See Little.”)

Exposing the Hot Air of Wind Power

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) So you want to build a wind farm? OK, Mr. Bryce says, to start you’ll need 45 times the land mass of a nuclear power station to produce a comparable amount of power; and because you are in the middle of nowhere you’ll also need hundreds of miles of high-voltage lines to get the energy to your customers. This “energy sprawl” of giant turbines and pylons will require far greater amounts of concrete and steel than conventional power plants–figure on anywhere from 870 to 956 cubic feet of concrete per megawatt of electricity and 460 tons of steel (32 times more concrete and 139 times as much steel as a gas-fired plant).

Once you’ve carpeted your tract of wilderness with turbines and gotten over any guilt you might feel about the thousands of birds you’re about to kill, prepare to be underwhelmed and underpowered. Look at Texas, Mr. Bryce says: It ranks sixth in the world in total wind-power production capacity, and it has been hailed as a model for renewable energy and green jobs by Republicans and Democrats alike. And yet, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which runs the state’s electricity grid, just “8.7 percent of the installed wind capability can be counted on as dependable capacity during the peak demand period.” The wind may blow in Texas, but, sadly, it doesn’t blow much when it is most needed–in summer. The net result is that just 1% of the state’s reliable energy needs comes from wind.

For the full review, see
TREVOR BUTTERWORTH. “BOOKSHELF; The Wrong Way To Get to Green; Once you’ve carpeted the wilderness with wind-farm turbines, and crushed any guilt about the birds you’re about to kill, prepare to be underwhelmed and underpowered.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., APRIL 27, 2010): A15.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated APRIL 30, 2010.)

The book under review is:
Bryce, Robert. Power Hungry; the Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010.

Becker Believes the Fight for Liberty Can Be Won

(p. A13) My last question involves a little story. Not long before Milton Friedman’s death in 2006, I tell Mr. Becker, I had a conversation with Friedman. He had just reviewed the growth of spending that was then taking place under the Bush administration, and he was not happy. After a pause during the Reagan years, Friedman had explained, government spending had once again begun to rise. “The challenge for my generation,” Friedman had told me, “was to provide an intellectual defense of liberty.” Then Friedman had looked at me. “The challenge for your generation is to keep it.”

What was the prospect, I asked Mr. Becker, that this generation would indeed keep its liberty? “It could go either way,” he replies. “Milton was right about that.”
Mr. Becker recites some figures. For years, federal spending remained level at about 20% of GDP. Now federal spending has risen to 25% of GDP. On current projections, federal spending would soon rise to 28%. “That concerns me,” Mr. Becker says. “It concerns me a great deal.
“But when Milton was starting out,” he continues, “people really believed a state-run economy was the most efficient way of promoting growth. Today nobody believes that, except maybe in North Korea. You go to China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, even Western Europe. Most of the economists under 50 have a free-market orientation. Now, there are differences of emphasis and opinion among them. But they’re oriented toward the markets. That’s a very, very important intellectual victory. Will this victory have an effect on policy? Yes. It already has. And in years to come, I believe it will have an even greater impact.”
The sky outside his window has begun to darken. Mr. Becker stands, places some papers into his briefcase, then puts on a tweed jacket and cap. “When I think of my children and grandchildren,” he says, “yes, they’ll have to fight. Liberty can’t be had on the cheap. But it’s not a hopeless fight. It’s not a hopeless fight by any means. I remain basically an optimist.”

For the full interview, see:
PETER ROBINSON. “‘Basically an Optimist’–Still; The Nobel economist says the health-care bill will cause serious damage, but that the American people can be trusted to vote for limited government in November.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 27, 2010): A13.
(Note: the online version of the interview is dated March 26, 2010.)

At Apple Wozniak Was the Inventor, and Jobs Was the Entrepreneur

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Source of book image: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_TwOg8fVl5Og/SkXmn7MyaxI/AAAAAAAAAug/G-klN-KQHis/s1600/iWoz.jpg

iWoz is a fun read, with wild fluctuations in the significance of what is written. When Wozniak writes about the ingredients of inventiveness, it is significant. When he talks about his pranks, or his obsessions with certain number combinations, it is strange. (Maybe I just haven’t figured out the significance of Wozniak’s quirks—I once heard George Stigler say that even the mistakes of a great mind were worth pondering.)
In the next few weeks I’ll be quoting a few of the more significant passages.
An over-riding lesson from the book, is the extent to which both Wozniak and Jobs were necessary for the Apple achievement. Wozniak was a genius inventor, but he did not have the drive or the skills, or the judgment of the entrepreneur.
Schumpeter famously distinguished invention from innovation. Wozniak was the inventor, and Jobs was the innovator (aka, the entrepreneur).

Book discussed:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

“The Intellectual Energy is No Longer with the Economists Who Construct Abstract and Elaborate Models”

(p. A23) In The Wall Street Journal, Russ Roberts of George Mason University wondered why economics is even considered a science. Real sciences make progress. But in economics, old thinkers cycle in and out of fashion. In real sciences, evidence solves problems. Roberts asked his colleagues if they could think of any econometric study so well done that it had definitively settled a dispute. Nobody could think of one.

“The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists,” Roberts wrote.
In a column called “A Crisis of Understanding,” Robert J. Shiller of Yale pointed out that the best explanation of the crisis isn’t even a work of economic analysis. It’s a history book — “This Time is Different” by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff — that is almost entirely devoid of theory.
One gets the sense, at least from the outside, that the intellectual energy is no longer with the economists who construct abstract and elaborate models. Instead, the field seems to be moving in a humanist direction. Many economists are now trying to absorb lessons learned by psychologists, neuroscientists and sociologists.

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID BROOKS. “The Return of History.” The New York Times (Fri., March 26, 2010): A23.
(Note: the online version of the commentary was dated March 25, 2010.”)

Did the Rothschilds Anticipate Atlas Shrugged?

DrumlummonMineRothschilds2010-05-18.jpg“A consulting geologist, Ben Porterfield, exiting the Drumlummon Mine.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 14) Marysville, a dot of a town in the mountains near Helena, was covered in gold dust in its heyday in the late 1800s. It was home to one of the great mother-lode gold and silver fortunes of the West, the Drumlummon Mine. Then it petered out — familiar story — to near ghost-town status through the long decades after the mine closed around 1904.

. . .
Old mysteries of law and public relations cloud the story of the Drumlummon — especially how and why it closed in the early 1900s. Its owners at the time, the Rothschild family from Europe, were locked in an extended court battle over nearby mining claims when they announced in 1901 that the mine’s lower levels would be allowed to flood because profitable ore had not been found there.
RX’s mining operations director, Mike Gunsinger, said he became convinced in reading the old accounts that the Rothschilds had lied — flooding the mine not because it was played out, but to conceal its riches. The company suing the Rothschilds eventually won, but they never had the capital to drain the water. A last attempt, by a new set of owners, failed in 1951.
“I think it was a dog-in-the-manger attitude,” Mr. Gunsinger said, referring to the Rothschilds. “If I can’t have it, nobody can.”
That told him, he said, that the gold was still down there.

For the full story, see:
KIRK JOHNSON. “Marysville Journal; As a Near Ghost Town in Montana Watches, a Gold Mine Is Reborn.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., May 2, 2010): 14.
(Note: the online version of the commentary was dated April 30, 2010.)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

When Life Really Stunk

(p. 51) The situation of the rural town of Marney was one of the most delightful easily to be imagined. In a spreading dale, contiguous to the margin of a dear and lively stream, surrounded by meadows and gardens, and backed by lofty hills, undulating and richly wooded, the traveller (sic) on the opposite heights of the dale would often stop to admire the merry prospect that recalled to him the traditional epithet of his country.

Beautiful illusion! For behind that laughing landscape, penury and disease fed upon the vitals of a miserable population.
The contrast between the interior of the town and its external aspect was as striking as it was full of pain. With the exception of the dull high street, which had the usual characteristics of a small agricultural market town, some sombre mansions, a dingy inn, and a petty bourse, Marney mainly consisted of a variety of narrow and crowded lanes formed by cottages built of rubble, or unhewn stones without cement, (p. 52) and, from age or badness of the material, looking as if they could scarcely hold together. The gaping chinks admitted every blast; the leaning chimneys had lost half their original height; the rotten rafters were evidently misplaced; while in many instances the thatch, yawning in some parts to admit the wind and wet, and in all utterly unfit for its original purpose of giving protection from the weather, looked more like the top of a dunghill than a cottage. Before the doors of these dwellings, and often surrounding them, ran open drains full of animal and vegetable refuse, decomposing into disease, or sometimes in their imperfect course filling foul pits or spreading into stagnant pools, while a concentrated solution of every species of dissolving filth was allowed to soak through, and thoroughly impregnate, the walls and ground adjoining.
These wretched tenements seldom consisted of more than two rooms, in one of which the whole family, however numerous, were obliged to sleep, without distinction of age, or sex, or suffering. With the water streaming down the walls, the light distinguished through the roof, with no hearth even in winter, the virtuous mother in the sacred pangs of childbirth gives forth another victim to our thoughtless civilisation (sic); surrounded by three generations whose inevitable presence is more painful than her suffering in that hour of travail; while the father of her coming child, in another corner of the sordid chamber, lies stricken by that typhus which his contaminating dwelling has breathed into his veins, and for whose next prey is perhaps destined his new-horn child. These swarming walls had neither windows nor doors sufficient to keep out the weather, or admit the sun, or supply the means of ventilation; the humid and putrid roof of thatch exhaling malaria like all other decaying vegetable matter. The dwelling-rooms were neither boarded nor paved; and whether it were that some were situate in low and damp places, occasionally flooded by the river, and usually much below the level of the road; or that the springs, as was often the case, would burst through the mud floor; the ground was at no time better than so much clay, while sometimes you might see little channels cut from the centre under the doorways to carry off the water, the door itself removed from its hinges; a resting-place for infancy in its deluged home. These hovels were in many instances not (p. 53) provided with the commonest conveniences of the rudest police; contiguous to every door might be observed the dungheap on which every kind of filth was accumulated, for the purpose of being disposed of for manure, so that, when the poor man opened his narrow habitation in the hope of refreshing it with the breeze of summer, he was met with a mixture of gases from reeking dunghills.

Source:
Disraeli, Benjamin. Sybil. paperback ed, Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1845].