January 2013 – Page 2 – artdiamondblog.com

Socialism Failed in Jamestown

(p. 226) Stephen Slivinski discusses “Economic History: The Lessons of Jamestown.” In the years after the Jamestown settlement of 1607, the settlers often lacked food. “The company sent Sir Thomas Dale, a British naval commander, to take over the office of colony governor in 1611. Yet, upon arrival in May–a time when the farmers should have been tending to their fields–Dale found virtually no planting activity. Instead, the workers were devoted mainly to leisure and ‘playing bowls.’ . . . All land was owned by the company and farmed collectively. . . . The workers would not hope to reap more compensation from a productive farming of the land any more than the farmers would be motivated by an interest in making their farming operations more efficient and, hence, more profitable. Seeing this, Dale decided to change the labor arrangements: When the seven-year contracts of most of the original surviving settlers were about to expire in 1614, he assigned private allotments of land to them. Each got three acres, 12 acres if he had a family. The only obligation was that they needed to provide two and a half barrels of corn annually to the company so it could be distributed to the newcomers to tide them over during their first year. Dale left Jamestown for good in 1616. By then, however, the new land grants had unleashed a vast increase in agricultural productivity. In fact, upon returning to England with Dale, John Rolfe–one of the colony’s former leaders–reported to the Virginia Company that the Powhatans were now asking the colonists to give them corn instead of vice versa.”

As quoted in:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 219-26.
(Note: ellipses added by Taylor.)

The Slivinski article is:
Slivinski, Stephen. “The Lessons of Jamestown.” Region Focus 14, no. 1 (First Quarter 2010): 27-29.

Capitalism Would Bring Economic Growth to Bitouga, and Thereby Save the Elephants

“SEIZED AND DESTROYED; Gabon burned 10,000 pounds of ivory in June to show its commitment against poaching, but elephants are still being slaughtered.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) But as the price of ivory keeps going up, hitting levels too high for many people to resist, Gabon’s elephants are getting slaughtered by poachers from across the borders and within the rain forests, proof that just about nowhere in Africa are elephants safe.

In the past several years, 10,000 elephants in Gabon have been wiped out, some picked off by impoverished hunters creeping around the jungle with rusty shotguns and willing to be paid in sacks of salt, others mowed down en masse by criminal gangs that slice off the dead elephants’ faces with chain saws. Gabon’s jails are filling up with small-time poachers and ivory traffickers, destitute men and women like Therese Medza, a village hairdresser arrested a few months ago for selling 45 pounds of tusks.
“I had no idea it was illegal,” Ms. Medza said, almost convincingly, from the central jail here in Oyem, in the north. “I was told the tusks were found in the forest.”
She netted about $700, far more than she usually makes in a month, and the reason she did it was simple, she said. “I got seven kids.”
It seems that Gabon’s elephants are getting squeezed in a deadly vise between a seemingly insatiable lust for ivory in Asia, where some people pay as much as $1,000 a pound, and desperate hunters and traffickers in central Africa.
. . .
In June, Gabon’s president, Ali Bongo, defiantly lighted a pyramid of 10,000 pounds of ivory on fire to make the point that the ivory trade was reprehensible, a public display of resolve that Kenya has put on in years past. It took three days for all the ivory to burn, and even after the last tusks were reduced to glowing embers, policemen vigilantly guarded the ashes. Ivory powder is valued in Asia for its purported medicinal powers, and the officers were worried someone might try to sweep up the ashes and sell them.
Some African countries, like Zimbabwe and Tanzania, are sitting on million-dollar stockpiles of ivory (usually from law enforcement seizures or elephants that died naturally) that someday may be legal to sell.
. . .
(p. A10) The growing resentment of the government is undermining conservation efforts, too, with villagers grumbling about not seeing a trace of the oil money and saying Mr. Bongo should not lecture them about poaching for a living.
. . .
The children here eat thumb-size caterpillars, cooked in enormous vats, because there is little else to eat. Many men have bloodshot eyes and spend their mornings sitting on the ground, staring into space, reeking of sour, fermented home-brew.
. . .
International law enforcement officials say the illicit ivory trade is dominated by Mafia-like gangs that buy off local officials and organize huge, secretive shipments to move tusks from the farthest reaches of Africa to workshops in Beijing, Bangkok and Manila, where they are carved into bookmarks, earrings and figurines.
But often the first link in that chain is a threadbare hunter, someone like Mannick Emane, a young man in Bitouga. Adept in the forest, he was trained nearly from birth to follow tracks and stalk game, and was puffing idly on a cigarette he had just lighted with a burning log.
He conceded he would kill elephants, “for the right price.”
“Life is tough,” he said. “So if someone is going to give us an opportunity for big money, we’re going to take it.”
Big money, he said, was about $50.
His friend Vincent Biyogo, also a hunter, nodded in agreement.
“When I was born,” he said, “I dreamed of a better life, I dreamed of driving a car, going to school, living like a normal human being.”
“Not this,” he added quietly, staring at a pot of boiling caterpillars. “Not this.”

For the full story, see:
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. “In Gabon, Lure of Ivory Is Hard for Many to Resist.” The New York Times (Thurs., December 27, 2012): A5 & A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 26, 2012.)

“A man in Bitouga, where people live in extreme poverty and say they resent the government’s telling them not to poach.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT story quoted and cited above.

Steve Jobs Was Deeply Influenced by Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma”

(p. 408) Microsoft was willing to license its Windows Media software and digital rights format to other companies, just as it had licensed out its operating system in the 1980s. Jobs, on the other hand, would not license out Apple’s FairPlay to other device makers; it worked only on an iPod. Nor would he allow other online stores to sell songs for use on iPods. A variety of experts said this would eventually cause Apple to lose market share, as it did in the computer wars of the 1980s. “If Apple continues to rely on a proprietary architecture,” the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen told Wired, “the iPod will likely become a niche product.” (Other than in this case, Christensen was one of the world’s most insightful business analysts, and Jobs was deeply (p. 409) influenced by his book The Innovator’s Dilemma.) Bill Gates made the same argument. “There’s nothing unique about music,” he said. “This story has played out on the PC.”

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

A Well-Researched Case Study on How Mulally Saved Ford

Source of book image: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/04/01/business/01-SHELF/01-SHELF-articleInline.jpg

(p. C12) Tomes by management gurus telling you how to remake your company are a dime a dozen. Well-researched case studies are much rarer. In “American Icon,” Bryce G. Hoffman takes a careful look at how Alan Mulally, recruited from Boeing in 2006, restructured Ford Motor Co. in the midst of the steepest economic downturn since the 1930s. An engineer with no automotive background, Mr. Mulally came into a company on the verge of collapse and brought it back with insistent demands for accountability, information-sharing and tough decisions. Mr. Hoffman, who wrote this book with the company’s cooperation, provides a fascinating and detailed examination of how a dynamic leader brought about change. He makes clear that much of the credit goes to others, not least Don Leclair, then the chief financial officer, who, even before Mr. Mulally’s arrival, was arranging to mortgage everything up to Ford’s blue-oval trademark to amass the $23.6 billion in cash that enabled the company to survive the recession.

For the full review essay, see:
Marc Levinson. “Boardroom Reading of 2012.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 15, 2012): C12.
(Note: the online version of the review essay has the date December 14, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Hoffman, Bryce G. American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company. New York: Crown Business, 2012.

Descartes Saw that a Great City Is “an Inventory of the Possible”

(p. 226) Joel Kotkin writes about “The Broken Ladder: The Threat to Upward Mobility in the Global City.” “A great city, wrote Rene Descartes in the 17th Century, represented ‘an inventory of the possible,’ a place where people could create their own futures and lift up their families. In the 21st Century–the first in which the majority of people will live in cities–this unique link between urbanism and upward mobility will become ever more critical.”

Source:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 219-26.

“Modern Cognitive Capacity Emerged at the Same Time as Modern Anatomy”

“ARTIFACTS; The excavations have uncovered caches of advanced stone hunting tools, including spear tips and other small blades, or microliths, which suggest that modern Homo sapiens in Africa had a grasp of complex technologies. The research team’s report challenges a Eurocentric theory of modern human development.” [This photo shows spear tips; another photo included with the article showed three small blades (aka microliths).] Source of quoted part of caption and of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) At a rock shelter on a coastal cliff in South Africa, scientists have found an abundance of advanced stone hunting tools with a tale to tell of the evolving mind of early modern humans at least 71,000 years ago.
. . .
“Ninety percent of scientists are comfortable that fully modern humans and human cognition developed in Africa,” Dr. Marean said. “Now they have moved on. The questions are, how much earlier than 71,000 years did these behaviors emerge? Was it an accretionary process, or was it an abrupt event? Did these people have language by this time?”
Like many other archaeologists, Dr. Marean and his team have concentrated their investigations in the caves and rock shelters overlooking the Indian Ocean. In a global ice age beginning 72,000 years ago, many Africans fled the continent’s arid interior, heading for the more benign southern shore. Access to seafood and more plentiful plant and animal resources may have increased populations and encouraged technological advances, Dr. Marean said.
The well-preserved artifacts at Pinnacle Point, collected over a recent 18-month period, led the researchers to conclude that the advanced technologies in Africa “were early and enduring.” Other archaeologists who reached different conclusions may have been misled by the “small sample of excavated sites,” they said.
Richard G. Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford University who has favored a more sudden and recent origin of modern behavior, about 50,000 years ago, questioned the reliability of the dating method for the tools, noting that “there is another team that has already argued for a much longer” time period for the toolmaking culture.
. . .
The hypothesis of earlier African origins of modern human behavior and cognition has been gaining strength over the last decade or two. Two archaeologists, Alison S. Brooks of George Washington University and Sally McBrearty of the University of Connecticut, led the charge with publications of their analysis of increasing evidence of African art and ornamentations expressing a modern cognitive capacity and symbolic thinking.
In a commentary accompanying the Nature report, Dr. McBrearty, who was not involved in the research, wrote that she believed that “modern cognitive capacity emerged at the same time as modern anatomy, and that various aspects of human culture arose gradually” over the course of subsequent millenniums.

For the full story, see:
JOHN NOBLE WILFORD. “Stone Tools Point to Creative Work by Early Humans in Africa.” The New York Times (Tues., November 13, 2012): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 12, 2012.)

The research discussed in the passages quoted above, appeared in Nature:
Brown, Kyle S., Curtis W. Marean, Zenobia Jacobs, Benjamin J. Schoville, Simen Oestmo, Erich C. Fisher, Jocelyn Bernatchez, Panagiotis Karkanas, and Thalassa Matthews. “An Early and Enduring Advanced Technology Originating 71,000 Years Ago in South Africa.” Nature 491, no. 7425 (22 November 2012): 590-93.

With iTunes, Apple Leapfrogged CD Burners (a Boat Apple Had Missed)

Is the example sketched below, and in a previous entry, a case of a first mover disadvantage? Or is it simply a case of a lucky or wise bounce-back from a genuine mistake?

(p. 382) . . . [Job’s] angry insistence that the iMac get rid of its tray disk drive and use instead a more elegant slot drive meant that it could not include the first CD burners, which were initially made for the tray format. “We kind of missed the boat on that,” he recalled. “So we needed to catch up real fast.” The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis and bracketed “Job’s” added.)

Harvard University Press Dropped Watson’s “The Double Helix” as Too Controversial

“Partners; James D. Watson, left, with Francis Crick and their model of part of a DNA molecule in 1953. Crick did not like Dr. Watson’s book at first.” Source of caption: print version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D2) Anyone seeking to understand modern biology and genomics could do much worse than start with the discovery of the structure of DNA, on which almost everything else is based. The classic account of the discovery, “The Double Helix,” by James D. Watson, was first published in 1968 and has now been reissued in an annotated and illustrated edition.
. . .
An appendix makes it clear how close “The Double Helix” came to being suppressed. Dr. Watson sent the manuscript to many of the central players, inviting their comments on its accuracy. Harvard University Press had accepted it for publication, but the Harvard authorities came to feel it was too hot a potato and dropped it.
Atheneum Publishers, which picked it up, requested a blander title — previous versions had included “Honest Jim” and “Base Pairs.” The latter — referring to the paired sets of chemical bases that form the steps in the double helix, and by extension to the two discoverers — gave particular offense to Crick, who failed to see why he should be considered base. Atheneum’s lawyers then tried to make the text inoffensive to the many possible litigants.
But Dr. Watson was able to resist many changes. He had cannily persuaded Bragg to write a foreword, and this endorsement from an establishment figure provided sufficient protection for the book to be published. It proceeded to sell more than a million copies.

For the full review, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “BOOKS ON SCIENCE; Twists in the Tale of the Great DNA Discovery.” The New York Times (Tues., November 13, 2012): D2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 12, 2012.)

The annotated version of the Watson book is:
Watson, James D. The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.

Solow Testifies on Irrelevance of DSGE Macro Models

In Nobel-prize-winner Robert Solow’s congressional testimony, quoted below, “DSGE” is an abbreviation for “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium.”

(p. 221) Solow argues: “It may be unusual for the Committee to focus on so abstract a question, but it is certainly natural and urgent. Here we are, still near the bottom of a deep and prolonged recession, with the immediate future uncertain, desperately short of jobs, and the approach to macroeconomics that dominates serious thinking, certainly in our elite universities and in many central banks and other influential policy circles, seems to have absolutely nothing to say about the problem. Not only does it (p. 222) offer no guidance or insight, it really seems to have nothing useful to say. . . . Especially when it comes to matters as important as macroeconomics, a mainstream economist like me insists that every proposition must pass the smell test: does this really make sense? I do not think that the currently popular DSGE models pass the smell test.”

Source:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 219-26.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)

Humans Used Stone-Tipped Spears as Early as a Half Million Years Ago

“Views of a stone point used for hunting 500,000 years ago.” Source of caption: print version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) Human ancestors were using stone-tipped spears to hunt 500,000 years ago, 200,000 years earlier than previously thought.

A new study reports that the stone tips, found in South Africa, were probably once attached to wooden spears and then hurled at animals by hominins of the species Homo heidelbergensis.
Homo heidelbergensis was the last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, said Jayne Wilkins, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto and the study’s first author. The spears “suggest that the behavioral complexity of these early humans was greater than expected,” she said. Creating a stone-tipped spear would have required attaching stone to wood, handling multiple types of material at once, planning and goal-oriented behavior.

For the full story, see:
SINDYA N. BHANOO. “OBSERVATORY; When Stone Met Stick to Ease Hunters’ Work.” The New York Times (Tues., November 20, 2012): D3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 19, 2012.)

The original Science article is:
Wilkins, Jayne, Benjamin J. Schoville, Kyle S. Brown, and Michael Chazan. “Evidence for Early Hafted Hunting Technology.” Science 338, no. 6109 (16 November 2012): 942-46.

Apple “Finding a Way to Leapfrog Over Its Competitors”

Isaacson says Jobs wanted two refinements in the iMac. One was new colors. The other is discussed below.
I am not sure what to make of this episode. Is Isaacson suggesting that it was good for Apple that Jobs made a mistake on the type of CD hardware to put in the iMac? That this added constraint “would then force Apple to be imaginative and bold”?
Or is the moral that good people who make a lot of quick decisions, make mistakes, sometimes big mistakes, and that Jobs found a way to bounce back from this one?

(p. 356) There was one other important refinement that Jobs wanted for the iMac: getting rid of that detested CD tray. “I’d seen a slot-load drive on a very high-end Sony stereo,” he said, “so I went to the drive manufacturers and got them to do a slot-load drive for us for the version of the iMac we did nine months later.” Rubinstein tried to argue him out of the change. He predicted that new drives would come along that could burn music onto CDs rather than merely play them, and they would be available in tray form before they were made to work in slots. “If you go to slots, you will always be behind on the technology,” Rubinstein argued.

“I don’t care, that’s what I want,” Jobs snapped back. They were having lunch at a sushi bar in San Francisco, and Jobs insisted that they continue the conversation over a walk. “I want you to do the slot-load drive for me as a personal favor,” Jobs asked. Rubinstein agreed, of course, but he turned out to be right. Panasonic came out with a CD drive that could rip and burn music, and it was available first for computers that had old-fashioned tray loaders. The effects of this (p. 357) would ripple over the next few years: It would cause Apple to be slow in catering to users who wanted to rip and burn their own music, but that would then force
Apple to be imaginative and bold in finding a way to leapfrog over its competitors when Jobs finally realized that he had to get into the music market.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.