Month: January 2024

“To Save the World”

(p. A21) The task of improving the world may seem impossible, but it isn’t. All it takes is the proper sequence of correct discrete decisions. Decisions are just resolutions with teeth.

An editor of mine told me a story from his childhood on his grandparents’ farm in Iowa. The little boy, looking out over acres and acres of corn, asked his grandfather, “How are we going to shuck all that corn?” His grandfather said, “One row at a time.”

. . .

At an event a couple of months ago, someone asked me why I wrote something the way I did, and I found myself blurting out, “To save the world.” It was laughable, preposterous and true.

For the full commentary, see:

Roger Rosenblatt. “Resolve About Something Bigger Than Yourself.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 30, 2023): A21.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 26, 2023, and has the title “This Year, Make a Resolution About Something Bigger Than Yourself.”)

Tom Watson, Jr. Managed IBM’s Rare and Successful Self-Disruption by “Transitioning the Firm to Electronic Computing”

(p. 9) Thomas J. Watson Jr. seemed, from a young age, to be destined for failure.

. . .

“He played with fire, shot animals in the nearby swamps and pilfered things from neighbors’ houses,” Ralph Watson McElvenny and Marc Wortman write in “The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived,” a compelling new biography of Watson Jr.

. . .

This is far from the first book about IBM.

. . .

But this is probably the most theatrical book about IBM ever published. McElvenny, who happens to be Watson Jr.’s eldest grandson, is privy to “personal and corporate papers” and, as the endnotes mysteriously specify, many “family sources.”

. . .

“The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived” is about the challenges of corporate and family succession, an essential topic given that IBM itself was the father figure to most of the computing and tech industry. Watson Sr., “the old man,” was a type familiar to our times: the tech titan who runs a large company as an extension of himself. (The IBM machine that beat the “Jeopardy!” champion Ken Jennings bears his name.) For four decades, IBM was Watson Sr.’s fief. The company “was run entirely out of one man’s breast pocket,” McElvenny and Wortman write. Watson Sr. “made all strategic decisions and most minor ones” and “delegated almost no authority.”

To his lasting credit, he did truly take care of his employees and their families in a manner that bred a strong loyalty. That said, Watson Sr. demanded conformity and could be erratic and cruel.

. . .

IBM faced a classic version of what the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has termed the “innovator’s dilemma” and what the Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow described as a monopoly’s disinclination to innovate. IBM was making plenty of profit on punched cards and accounting machines, its customers were happy, so why rock the boat?

Watson Jr.’s intense antipathy toward his father ended up saving IBM. Just before the United States entered World War II, Junior gained self-confidence the old-fashioned way: by joining the Army Air Corps and flying a B-24. When he eventually returned to IBM (pushed to do so by his commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Follett Bradley, who thought Watson would be wasted as an airline pilot), he became the internal champion of transitioning the firm to electronic computing. He was perhaps the only person who could oppose his father in a company built on yes men.

While the book’s title calls him “the greatest capitalist,” it might more accurately, if less ringingly, call him “the greatest manager,” for Watson Jr. was much better at delegating and using his employees’ talents.

For the full review, see:

Tim Wu. “Next-Gen.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, December 17, 2023): 9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Dec. 15, 2023, and has the title “The Father-Son Struggle That Helped Ensure IBM’s Success.”)

The book under review is:

McElvenny, Ralph Watson, and Marc Wortman. The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. and the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age. New York: PublicAffairs, 2023.

Alleged Upper Bounds to Lifespans Continue to Be Surpassed

(p. A2) In a 2002 paper, “Broken Limits to Life Expectancy” the demographers Jim Oeppen and James Vaupel showed that for nearly 100 years, estimates of when life expectancy would hit its limit were proven wrong, often in just a few years. In 2020, Max Roser of the University of Oxford noted that this trend was still intact.

There is no guarantee, of course, that this trend will continue over time or everywhere. Perhaps pandemics, weather disasters or fentanyl deaths will become widespread enough to outweigh improvements in cancer treatment and so on. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

The better bet, according to demographers, is that children born this year will live longer than children born in any previous year.

For the full commentary, see:

Josh Zumbrun. “THE NUMBERS; The Good News About Life Expectancy.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, December 16, 2023): A2.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 15, 2023, and has the title “THE NUMBERS; The (Surprisingly) Good News on Life Expectancy: It’s Still Going Up.”)

The Oeppen and Vaupel article mentioned above is:

Oeppen, Jim, and James W. Vaupel. “Broken Limits to Life Expectancy.” Science 296, no. 5570 (May 10, 2002): 1029-31.

The 2020 article by Roser, updating the Oeppen and Vaupel paper, is:

Roser, Max. “The Rise of Maximum Life Expectancy: Predictions of a Maximum Limit of Life Expectancy Have Been Broken Again and Again.” Last updated March 1, 2020 [cited Sat., Dec. 16, 2023]. Available from https://ourworldindata.org/the-rise-of-maximum-life-expectancy.

“Bow Only to the Truth”

(p. A19) Jiang Ping, a legal scholar who helped lay the foundation for China’s civil code, and whose experiences with political persecution shaped his relentless advocacy for individual rights in the face of state power, died on Dec. 19 [2023] in Beijing.

. . .

Often called “the conscience of China’s legal world,” Mr. Jiang established himself in the 1980s as a highly regarded teacher and a leading scholar, one of four professors who helped oversee the drafting of China’s first civil rights framework. His reputation was cemented during the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, when as university president he publicly supported the student protesters.

After the government quashed the protests and massacred the protesters, Mr. Jiang was removed from the university presidency. But he remained wildly popular on campus. Even after his removal, law students wore T-shirts printed with one of his best-known refrains: “Bow only to the truth.”

. . .

His moral authority was augmented by his own story. In the 1950s, as a young teacher, he was denounced as anti-Communist after criticizing excessive top-down bureaucracy and ordered to be “reformed,” as the government called it, through labor. He was not allowed to teach law for two decades. And, while working, he was hit by a train, leaving him with a prosthetic leg.

. . .

He lamented the lost decades, but he was never bitter. “Adversity gave me the ability to meditate and look back, and see things calmly,” he said at a celebration of his 70th birthday. “There was nothing to believe in blindly anymore.”

Mr. Jiang rose quickly after his political rehabilitation. He oversaw the drafting not only of civil and commercial laws, but also of China’s first administrative litigation law, which gave citizens a limited right to sue official agencies for misconduct.

In 1988, he was named president of the university. The next spring, protests broke out on Tiananmen Square. Mr. Jiang, fearing bloodshed, sat on the ground at the campus gate despite his bad leg and pleaded with students not to go.

When the students went, Mr. Jiang lent his support. Along with nine other university presidents, he signed an open letter urging the government to open a dialogue with the students.

After his ouster in 1990, Mr. Jiang stayed on as a professor.

For the full obituary, see:

Vivian Wang and Joy Dong. “Jiang Ping, 92, Called ‘Conscience’ Of China’s Legal World, Is Dead.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 30, 2023): A19.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Dec. 29, 2023, and has the title “Jiang Ping, the ‘Conscience of China’s Legal World,’ Dies at 92.”)

Intel Was a Feared Monopoly but Now “Is in a Fight for Its Life”

(p. B3) It might not look like it yet, but Intel is in a fight for its life.

. . .

The threats to Intel are so numerous that it’s worth summing them up: The Mac and Google’s Chromebooks are already eating the market share of Windows-based, Intel-powered devices. As for Windows-based devices, all signs point to their increasingly being based on non-Intel processors. Finally, Windows is likely to run on the cloud in the future, where it will also run on non-Intel chips.

. . .

It wasn’t always this way. For decades, Intel enjoyed PC market dominance with its ride-or-die partner, Microsoft, through their “Wintel” duopoly.

. . .

I asked Dan Rogers, vice president of silicon performance at Intel, if all of this is keeping him up at night. He declined to comment on Intel’s past, but he did say that since Pat Gelsinger, who had spent the first 30 years of his career at Intel, returned to the company as CEO in 2021, “I believe we are unleashed and focused, and our drive in the PC has in a way never been more intense.”

. . .

Geopolitical factors, for one, have the potential to change the entire chip industry virtually overnight. Intel could suddenly become the only game in town for the most advanced kind of chip manufacturing, if American tech companies lose access to TSMC’s factories on account of China’s aggression toward Taiwan, says Patrick Moorhead, a former executive at Intel competitor AMD, and now head of tech analyst firm Moor Insights & Strategy.

When it comes to Intel, he adds, “Never count these guys out.”

For the full commentary, see:

Christopher Mims. “KEYWORDS; Is This the End of ‘Intel Inside’? Not If Intel Has Anything to Say About It.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023): B13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 1, 2023, and has the title “KEYWORDS: CHRISTOPHER MIMS; Is This the End of ‘Intel Inside’?”)

“We Don’t Talk Anymore About Freedom”

(p. 25) “Gorbachev will pay for his sins! I can’t stand the sight of his pig’s mug!” On a winter day early in 2001, Grigori Romanov, once the party boss of Leningrad and an odds-on favorite to take over the Kremlin, stood on a Moscow sidewalk ranting to me, a Moscow correspondent for Time magazine, about Mikhail Gorbachev.

In the spring of 1985, Romanov had famously lost his shot at the government’s top post to the prematurely balding apparatchik from Russia’s south. It was Gorbachev — “a peasant who had no right coming to the big city,” Romanov all but shouted at me — who “started this disaster.”

. . .

. . . it’s only fitting that in “The Picnic,” Matthew Longo, an American political scientist who teaches in the Netherlands, revisits in captivating detail the actions of ordinary people during that heady summer of 1989, when the Iron Curtain cracked and a magical word — “freedom” — swept across the Eastern bloc. Within two years, the Soviet empire was over.

. . .

Longo sets himself a tight focus: the “Pan-European Picnic,” a stunt of political theater — organized by “budding” oppositionists (including the future prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orban, then a 26-year-old “with wild black hair and fire in his eyes”) and encouraged by a few reform-minded Communist higher-ups — that turned into political action. The picnic, a “giant, open-air party” convened on Aug. 19, 1989, and attended by hundreds, surprised all by forcing open the barbed-wire border between Austria and Hungary.

Blending oral history and political theory (including cameos by Plato and Isaiah Berlin), Longo recounts the drama in a vivid, fast-paced narrative.  . . .  . . ., Longo’s argument rings clear: “Sometimes the most important moments in history are forged by ordinary people.”

For Longo, the picnic was a revolutionary moment, bringing not only euphoria but an estimated 600 East Germans (in Hungary on “vacation”) across the border. “The scene was utter chaos,” Longo writes. “East Germans celebrating on the other side of the line; Hungarian officers in heated conversations; Austrians walking into Hungary, Hungarians crossing into Austria.” Three months later, the Berlin Wall fell. And in August 1991 — on the second anniversary of the picnic — a crew of revanchist putschists failed miserably in Moscow, speeding the demise of the Soviet Union.

. . .

“We don’t talk anymore about freedom like we did in 1989,” Longo writes, “freedom for collectivities, continents even; freedom for people fleeing oppression, wherever it is they were coming from.” He is right.

. . .

“All nations should have the opportunity for freedom,” Gorbachev said in one of his final interviews. This may sound like wishful thinking. But it happened to be the foolhardy belief that animated the ordinary heroes of Longo’s tale, both those who acted (politicians and civilians) and, just as vitally, those who did not (border guards and party lifers, who owed all they had ever known to the status quo), as well as, not least, the “peasant” who rose to the Kremlin.

For the full review, see:

Andrew Meier. “Bringing Down the Curtain.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, November 19, 2023): 25.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 5, 2023, and has the title “The ‘Picnic’ That Brought Down the Iron Curtain.”)

The book under review is:

Longo, Matthew. The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Charlie Munger Had “Epistemic Humility,” Endorsing Confucius’s Claim “That Real Knowledge Is Knowing the Extent of One’s Ignorance”

Epistemic humility is honest and useful, but is often punished. We often admire the confident, whether their confidence is justified or not. But I do not agree with Confucius–we can have real knowledge beyond knowing we are very ignorant.

(p. B1) I had the extraordinary good luck to get to know Charlie Munger in the past two decades.

. . .

More than almost anyone I’ve ever known, Munger also possessed what philosophers call epistemic humility: a profound sense of how little anyone can know and how important it is to open and change your mind.

. . .

(p. B4) Munger—who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School without ever earning a college degree—knew perfectly well how smart he was. And it is an understatement to say he didn’t suffer fools gladly. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2019, he used the phrase “massively stupid” at least seven times to describe other people and even entire professions.

So was he a cocky, cranky old man yelling at the clouds?

No. If there was one thing Munger knew, it was himself. As he told me in 2014, “Confucius said that real knowledge is knowing the extent of one’s ignorance . . . .  Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.”

For the full commentary, see:

Jason Zweig. “THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR; Charlie Munger’s Reflections on His Life, Luck and Success.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipses between paragraphs added; ellipsis internal to the penultimate quoted paragraph in original.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 29, 2023, and has the title “THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR; Charlie Munger’s Life Was About Way More Than Money.”)

Communists Extinguish Hong Kong’s “Brash Flash”

(p. 8) It was never just about the neon, that Cubist, consumerist razzle-dazzle cantilevered over Hong Kong’s streets announcing pawnbrokers and mooncake bakers, saunas and shark’s fin soup shops.

. . .

Because while the government’s crackdown on the neon signs stems from safety and environmental concerns, the campaign evokes the fading of Hong Kong itself: the mournful allegory for an electric city’s decline, the literal extinguishing of its brash flash.

Nights in Hong Kong these days feel as if still in the pall of a plague, or a deep political malaise.

Many of the tourists and resident foreigners are gone, the old party spots unsullied by their beer-guzzling excess.

Hong Kongers have left, too. More than 110,000 permanent residents departed last year, and the city’s population of those worth more than $30 million shrank by 23 percent, according to government and wealth survey data.

Their departure, a quarter-century after the territory reverted from British to Chinese rule, has been spurred by the territory’s economic decline and by an acute diminishment of political rights.

. . .

A national security law, imposed in 2020, criminalizes acts considered threatening to the state. Students, former legislators and a former media mogul sit in prison because of it.

. . .

The Hong Kong filmmaker Anastasia Tsang’s directorial debut, “A Light Never Goes Out,” is about a family coping with the death of a neon sign maker. The film, Hong Kong’s submission for next year’s Oscars, is an elegy for a disappearing craft that could also be a requiem for something larger.

“Hong Kong people have a very strong feeling of loss,” Ms. Tsang said. “Every day you’ve got a friend or relative who’s going to emigrate. Every day you feel like some part of your flesh is being taken from your skeleton.”

For the full story, see:

Hannah Beech. “A City Where a Lot More Than Neon Is Fading Out.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, December 10, 2023): 8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 9, 2023, and has the title “Where Did All the Hong Kong Neon Go?”)

Elon Musk Is Not Antisemitic; He Is Anti the Censorship of “a Specific Jewish Group, the Anti-Defamation League”

(p. A15) Major papers like the Journal, New York Times and Washington Post report that advertisers are again fleeing the service previously known as Twitter because, these papers explain, owner Elon Musk endorsed “an antisemitic post.”  . . .

. . .  A user @breakingbaht expressed a lack of sympathy for “Jewish communities” (emphasis added) that allegedly encouraged “the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them” while supporting immigration of “hordes of minorities.”

After Mr. Musk responded “You have said the actual truth,” the New York Times cited equally undefined “Jewish groups” as detecting in the original tweet a common antisemitic trope. In one Times account, the phrase “Jewish communities” was transmuted into “Jewish people.”

. . .

The Journal examined the context and suggested Mr. Musk was really exercised about a specific Jewish group, the Anti-Defamation League, which has largely adopted the identitarian and censorship agendas of the progressive left.

For the full commentary, see:

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. “BUSINESS WORLD; How Elon Became an ‘Antisemite’.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipses added. In the original version, the phrase “Jewish communities” (but not the rest) is emphasized by italics.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated November 28, 2023, and has the title “BUSINESS WORLD; Opinion: How Elon Became an ‘Antisemite’.”)