This episode of the Reason Roundtable podcast was posted on Mon., Nov. 24, 2025.
Category: Books
Innovative Entrepreneur Alfred Beach Privately Built and Operated America’s First Subway
Even classical liberals, strong supporters of free markets, often believe that utilities and mass transit need to be built and operated by governments. So I was delighted to learn from the book review quoted below that the first subway in the United States was privately built by a spirited innovative entrepreneur. That spirit still lives today, if we let it. (Ponder Travis Kalanick.)
(p. C9) In November 1869, the New York inventor Alfred Beach pushed the “move fast and break laws” principle to the limit in developing America’s first underground passenger railway. Without city approval—officials thought he was building a small system to improve mail delivery—he carved out a tunnel 8 feet wide, 300 feet long and right under Broadway.
. . .
Beach (1826-96) . . . was a remarkable character, a precocious innovator who channeled the forces—mass media and technological change—that were making the world modern. His father owned the New York Sun, the country’s most popular paper, and co-founded the Associated Press. Beach went to work for the Sun as a teenager; by 22 he was running it with his brother, and by 25 he sold his share to concentrate on his real passion: Scientific American, which he had bought a few years earlier. He and his partner made the publication a success and built a complementary business filing patents for the inventors who read it. When his client Thomas Edison “perfected the phonograph in 1877,” Mr. Algeo notes, he gave Beach the first demonstration, recording himself singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
In 1849, when he was 23, Beach outlined in the magazine’s pages his vision of a railroad beneath Broadway, with two tracks, gas lights and stops on every corner. “The proposal was radical—the world’s first subway wouldn’t open in London for another fourteen years—and the technological hurdles were immense,” Mr. Algeo writes. The projected route involved a tunnel 20 times as long as the longest extant.
. . .
Beach . . . struggled to get approval for his plan, stymied by the interlocking corruption of Tammany bosses and real-estate interests. Elevated railways and other mass-transit rivals threatened in the meantime to crowd him out. When his railway finally did open, it lasted a mere three years, doomed by the financial crisis of 1873.
For the full review see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 25, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘New York’s Secret Subway’: Tunnel Visions.”)
The book under review is:
Algeo, Matthew. New York’s Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2025.
Nimble Wine Entrepreneurs Adapt Grapes, and Wine-Making Method, to Warmer Temperatures and Changing Tastes
I have argued briefly in my Openness book, and at greater length in my “Innovative Dynamism Improves the Environment” article, that we tend to overestimate the harm from global warming in part because we tend to underestimate the nimble adaptability of entrepreneurs. The essay quoted below describes how wine entrepreneurs in Spain are returning to old grape varieties and old technologies for aging the wine, varieties and technologies that both are better adapted to warmer temperatures and are better at making the lighter and less alcoholic wines that are currently in higher demand.
(p. C3) In the rolling hills of Valencia in Spain, winemaker Pablo Calatayud has joined forces with scientists and archaeologists to mount a small viticultural revolution—one that reaches back to pre-Roman times to recreate what have become known as ancestral wines.
At his Celler del Roure, Calatayud is using large, egg-shaped clay amphorae to make wine pressed from grapes native to the region. The process is reconstructed from old texts and drawings carved into archaeological finds across the Mediterranean, including an ancient Iberian settlement that overlooks his own vineyard.
This sort of winemaking is not just a stunt, and Calatayud is hardly alone. Rising temperatures in most European wine regions are changing the taste and potency of red wine. Warmer weather means that grapes ripen more quickly and more intensely, with more sugar and thus more alcohol. In Spain, the alcohol level in notable wines aged in oak barrels now routinely exceeds 15%. But many consumers are turning away from such dark, heavy, tannin-rich wines, demanding instead reds that are lighter, more refreshing and lower in alcohol.
The grape varieties used to make ancestral wines are better suited to warmer climes than such stars of modern winemaking as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Tempranillo. The ancient varieties tend to ripen later, some even in late October, with lower sugar levels, and some have thinner skins, which makes them less tannic.
And in contrast to the oak barrels favored for aging modern red wines, which can add heavy, smoky flavors, amphorae don’t affect a wine’s taste. The clay allows for gentle micro-oxygenation—exposure to outside air—helping to preserve acidity and aromatic freshness.
As a result, the new amphora wines are breezy, light-colored and fruity on the nose—but never sweet nor exceeding 13% alcohol.
The results have pleased both critics and consumers. Wines by Celler del Roure now receive ratings as high as 96 points from top reviewers like Robert Parker Wine Advocate and are exported globally, including to the U.S.
For the full essay, see:
(Note: the online version of the essay has the date July 17, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)
The Review of Austrian Economics Publishes Diamond’s Review of Creative Destruction
The Review of Austrian Economics published my review of Dalton and Logan’s Creative Destruction book on Sept. 17. It can be viewed, but not printed or saved, at: https://rdcu.be/eIMJN
Norma Swenson Defended Health Freedom for Women
A recurring question raised by my libertarian and classical liberal friends is: how can we persuade others of the value of freedom? One answer is to especially seek conversation with those who strongly object to losing their freedom in some part of their life that they value. As I read the obituary of Norma Swenson, co-author of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves, I thought I recognized her as a libertarian fellow-traveler. She passionately sought for herself and other women to have greater freedom in making their own medical decisions.
Today, born out of outrage over the government’s over-reaching Covid controls, a “health freedom” movement has grown and organized, seeking more broadly (though not always consistently) for all adults to be able to make their own medical decisions.
Libertarians and classical liberals should let those seeking health freedom know that we are with them, in principle and in practice. Many of my own blog entries defend health freedom, for instance here and here.
(p. B11) Norma Swenson was working to educate women about childbirth, championing their right to have a say about how they delivered their babies, when she met the members of the collective that had put out the first rough version of what would become the feminist health classic “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”
. . .
She . . . [knew] quite a bit about the medical establishment, the paternalistic and condescending behavior of male doctors (only 6 percent of incoming medical students were women in 1960) and the harmful effect such behavior had on women’s health. She had lived it, during the birth of her daughter in 1958.
. . .
She would go on to help make “Our Bodies, Ourselves” a global best seller.
. . .
The author Barbara Ehrenreich called it a manifesto of medical populism.
. . .
It was her daughter’s birth that had made Ms. Swenson an activist. She wanted to deliver the baby naturally, without medication. Her decision was such an anomaly that residents at the Boston Lying-In Hospital gathered to watch her labor. It went swimmingly.
But Ms. Swenson, who was in a 12-bed ward, was surrounded by women who were suffering. They were giving birth according to the practices of the era: with a dose of scopolamine, a drug that induced so-called twilight sleep and hallucinations, followed by a shot of Demerol, an opioid.
She remembered the women screaming, trying to climb out of their beds, calling for their mothers and cursing their husbands before being knocked out by the Demerol, their babies delivered by forceps.
It was barbaric, she thought. “These women weren’t being helped,” she said in 2018, “they were being controlled.”
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated June 16, 2025, and has the title “Norma Swenson, an Author of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves,’ Dies at 93.”)
The most recent edition of the book co-authored by Norma Swenson is:
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Atria Books, 2011.
Brigham and Epstein Have the Guts to Nudge the Overton Window
The Overton Window is the range of “officially acceptable” or “politically correct” policy views. The left has been successful at shifting the window in their direction, for instance, in cancelling those who question any aspect of the global warming ideology for being outside polite discourse. In the face of cancel culture it takes courage to challenge the current Overton Window. Brigham and Epstein (see below) have that courage. Their views should be considered.
(p. B12) Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum and other oil giants are expected to receive billions of dollars of incentives to collect and bury carbon emissions. Texas oil billionaire Ben “Bud” Brigham and pro-fossil-fuels activist Alex Epstein want to turn off the tap.
Brigham, a serial entrepreneur and libertarian from Austin, is urging President Trump and the Republicans who are considering slashing a host of energy incentives to go further and nix tax credits for carbon capture.
. . .
Brigham says he doubts carbon capture can be profitable without public funding and that it is a distraction from firms’ core mission of finding oil and gas. He says that the subsidies distort markets and encourage cronyism.
A geophysicist by training, Brigham made his fortune building and selling two oil companies for a total of about $7 billion. He is an Ayn Rand fan who has produced two movies based on the philosopher’s work. He was also a major backer of what is now the Civitas Institute, a conservative center that launched in 2022 at the University of Texas at Austin.
Brigham first met Epstein, another Rand fan, about a decade ago. The two men bonded over a common belief in the importance of free markets and fossil fuels. Epstein is the author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” a book saying that the imperative to fuel societies flourishing with oil and gas outweighs climate-change risks. It has given Republicans ammunition to counter the left’s climate push, oil lobbyists say.
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 28, 2025, and has the title “The Oil Tycoon and the Philosopher Threatening Big Oil’s Bet on Carbon Capture.”)
Epstein’s book, mentioned above, is:
Epstein, Alex. The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. New York: Portfolio, 2014.
artdiamondblog.com Is 20 Years Old Today and Will Now Switch to Weekly Entries (on Mondays)
On October 16, 2024 I announced some changes in my artdiamondblog.com web log. For instance, I was going to focus more entries on my next book project: Less Costs, More Cures: Unbinding Medical Entrepreneurs, and I was to include some brief entries on my memories of important economists such as George Stigler and Gary Becker. I implemented both changes, though more of the former than the latter.
One other change that I have made, especially in the last few months, is to precede almost all entries with (sometimes detailed) introductory commentary.
I believe that these changes have improved the average quality of my entries, but may have narrowed the audience who will find them of interest. My blog entries in the last several months may be of increased interest to those who are willing to follow me into the weeds of healthcare policy, but may be of decreased interest to those who care more about the broader set of issues that I dealt with in my Openness to Creative Destruction book.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about the changes to my blog. On the one hand I feel some pride and satisfaction on the higher quality of entries, and have some hope that many of the entries will end up being useful early notes toward my bigger project. On the other hand, the changes have not reduced the overall time I invest in the blog, as I had hoped they would.
The bottom line is that I have been spending too much time on the blog, and too little time on my writing and research projects. Or as an economist might say, the opportunity cost of marginal time spent on the blog is too high. So I have decided to implement another change. Starting on July 15, 2025, I will commit to running a new entry on Monday of each week, but will not post on the other days of the week unless something big comes up.
I want to see how this change works–it may be permanent, or after the end of the summer, I may switch back to daily posts.
I make this change with some twinge of sadness and regret, since I take some pride in having run a daily post on almost all days from July 15, 2005 through July 15, 2025.
On July 15 of every year Aaron Brown sends me happy blog birthday greetings. (I continue to be grateful to Aaron for his thoughtful comments on blog entries, and for letting me know when an entry is missing or when something in an entry is amiss.)
This year on July 15 my blog will be 20 years old.
Perseverance is sometimes praiseworthy; pivoting is sometimes praiseworthy too. I hope I am right to pivot.
Father Spends 20 Years Researching to Cure His Children’s Type 1 Diabetes
The development of a new drug to cure Type 1 diabetes is big news, a triumph of medicine. The process of developing the medicine and bringing it to market interests me for several reasons. One is that Doug Melton spent 20 years of effort on it. His passion was due to having skin in the game: he has two children with the disease. Another is that it took so many years “of painstaking, repetitive, frustrating work.” I emphasize the common importance of trial-and-error in many major medical discoveries. Another is that the trial-and-error was to develop a “chemical cocktail to turn stem cells into islet cells.” Several major medical advances have required nimble and persistent trial-and-error to adjust drug cocktails, in terms of components and doses. Examples include HIV, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and childhood leukemia.
A final reason I am interested in the case is that Melton selected the Vertex company to bring the drug to market. Vertex is an interesting case of a large firm struggling to keep the innovative culture of its startup roots. I read a book about its struggles called The Antidote. I intend to read an earlier book about its early years called The Billion Dollar Molecule.
(p. 17) A single infusion of a stem cell-based treatment may have cured 10 out of 12 people with the most severe form of type 1 diabetes. One year later, these 10 patients no longer need insulin. The other two patients need much lower doses.
The experimental treatment, called zimislecel and made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston, involves stem cells that scientists prodded to turn into pancreatic islet cells, which regulate blood glucose levels. The new islet cells were infused and reached the liver, where they took up residence.
The study was presented Friday evening [June 20, 2025] at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association and published online by The New England Journal of Medicine.
“It’s trailblazing work,” said Dr. Mark Anderson, professor and director of the diabetes center at the University of California in San Francisco. “Being free of insulin is life changing,” added Dr. Anderson, who was not involved in the study.
. . .
The treatment is the culmination of work that began more than 25 years ago when a Harvard researcher, Doug Melton, vowed to find a cure for type 1 diabetes. His 6-month-old baby boy developed the disease and, then, so did his adolescent daughter. His passion was to find a way to help them and other patients.
He began, he said, with an “unwavering belief that science can solve the most difficult problems.”
It took 20 years of painstaking, repetitive, frustrating work by Dr. Melton and a team of about 15 people to find the right chemical cocktail to turn stem cells into islet cells. He estimated that Harvard and others spent $50 million on the research.
Dr. Peter Butler, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles and a consultant to Vertex, said he was awed by the achievement of the Harvard team.
“The fact that it worked at all is just freaking amazing to me,” he said. “I can guarantee there were a thousand negative experiments for every positive one.”
When Dr. Melton finally succeeded, he needed a company to take the discovery into the clinic. He joined Vertex, which took up the challenge.
For the full story see:
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 21, 2025, and has the title “People With Severe Diabetes Are Cured in Small Trial of New Drug.” The online version says that the article appeared on page 24 of the New York edition of the print version. But the article appeared on page 17 of my National edition.)
The NEJM academic article co-authored by Melton and mentioned above is:
The books that I mentioned about Vertex are:
Werth, Barry. The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Werth, Barry. The Billion-Dollar Molecule: One Company’s Quest for the Perfect Drug. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Increasing the Illumination “of Everyday Hardship”
History records much more on the lives of the rich, powerful, and articulate, than on the lives of ordinary citizens. But if we want to deeply understand what happened in the past, and how far we have come, we need to tease out evidence of the lives of ordinary citizens. Gabriel Zucktriegel makes the case that the ruins of Pompeii provide us some evidence. The volcano did not care if you were rich, powerful, articulate or ordinary–it buried everyone who did not escape in time. And more importantly, it buried the artifacts and settings of everyone.
(p. C11) After lying inert beneath volcanic ash for nearly 17 centuries, the Roman city of Pompeii, near Naples, is today a site of continuous change. New discoveries emerge constantly, even as conservators struggle to protect what’s been found from damage by weather, looters and crowds. Articles and books about these findings have steadily appeared as excavations expand into parts of the town that remain buried.
In 2021 Gabriel Zuchtriegel, a German classicist then in his late 30s, was given the enormous task of directing this dynamic site.
. . .
“Pompeii is like a rip in the screen, through which we have the opportunity to take a peek behind the official version of history,” writes Mr. Zuchtriegel. He describes in vivid detail his 2021 discovery of a small room containing the remains of three beds and other quotidian objects. Perhaps it was the dwelling, as well as the workspace, of slaves. A newspaper described the discovery as “the rarity of the everyday,” and Mr. Zuchtriegel takes the phrase as a rallying cry. “The ‘rarity of the everyday’ could also be the title for my personal access to archaeology and Pompeii,” he writes.
“What we found here was different, precisely because it wasn’t a temple, grave or palace,” says Mr. Zuchtriegel, just some 50 square feet “of everyday hardship.” He recounts how he noticed a nail on the wall for hanging an oil lamp and, beneath it, a white painted rectangle designed to reflect the lamplight and increase illumination. Moved by this simple effort to lighten a dark existence, he ponders how the room’s occupants, who no doubt lacked paint and brushes, got that rectangle made. It’s one of many instances where he reimagines the lives of Rome’s downtrodden.
. . .
“The Buried City,” translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch, offers many such glimpses of common Pompeians, some of whom stand before us today in the form of plaster casts made from cavities in the ash where their bodies decayed. Mr. Zuchtriegel is deeply moved by these casts, the phantoms of those who were trying to hide or flee when a searingly hot blast of dust and ash swept in. As he contemplates them, he tells us, “the academic in me switches off.”
For the full review see:
James Romm. “An Ordinary Day in Pompeii.” The Wall Street Journal (Sunday, June 28, 2025): C11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 27, 2025, and has the title “‘The Buried City’: Pompeii on Display.”)
The book under review is:
Zuchtriegel, Gabriel. The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii. Translated by Jamie Bulloch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.
Gram and Boudreaux Present Data to Refute Myths About the History of Capitalism
Donald Boudreaux makes the case for economic freedom more clearly, effectively, and persistently than almost anyone. I have not yet read his book with former senator Phil Gram, but I look forward to doing so.
(p. A13) . . . if you control the historical narrative surrounding economic questions, you are more than halfway toward winning the policy battles. This is the insight Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux bring to “The Triumph of Economic Freedom.”
. . .
In eight chapters, Messrs. Gramm and Boudreaux tackle seven longstanding historical myths about American capitalism that still influence economic discussion today. In each case, they are careful not to caricature the conventional wisdom they challenge.
But having given their opponents’ positions more than a fair shake, Messrs. Gramm and Boudreaux turn to extensive rebuttals. These are supported by detailed attention to data sets. The authors also outline alternative explanations for the path taken by American manufacturing since the 1970s, and for the state of poverty in America today.
For the full review see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 16, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘The Triumph of Economic Freedom’: A Few Lessons From History.”)
The book under review is:
Gramm, Phil, and Donald J. Boudreaux. The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2025.
During Covid-19 “Bureaucratic Authorities Erred in Pretending . . . Certainty”
(p. A13) Adam Kucharski, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, takes the reader on a fascinating tour of the history of what has counted as proof.
. . .
What should we do, . . ., when a mathematical proof of truth is unavailable, but we must nonetheless act?
This leads us to a discussion of probability and statistics, and of pioneers such as William Gosset, a brewer at Guinness who figured out how to quantify random errors in experiments, and Janet Lane-Claypon, an English scientist who first thought to investigate confounding factors while analyzing children’s health. Some innovations, though, have hardened into unhelpful dogma. The scientific notion of “statistical significance” relies, Mr. Kucharski explains, on a wholly arbitrary cutoff, which incentivizes researchers to massage their data. Such issues, he says, can be hard for scientists, let alone the laity, to understand.
Mr. Kucharski speaks from experience, since he was one of the experts first called upon by the British government for advice on the Covid-19 pandemic. He explains brilliantly the fragmentary and confusing nature of the data then available, and the provisional conclusions they led to. As a public face of this effort, Mr. Kucharski was bombarded daily with abusive and threatening messages from angry citizens who simply didn’t believe what they were being told.
The lesson Mr. Kucharski draws isn’t that he and his colleagues were right (though they largely were), but that bureaucratic authorities erred in pretending there was certainty when all that was possible at the time was messy and provisional. Notoriously, in March 2020 the World Health Organization tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airbone.” (As it turns out, it was, and it is.) The author regrets, too, that politicians claimed to be “following the science,” because science can never tell you what you should do.
For the full review see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 5, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘Proof’: Finding Truth in Numbers.”)
The book under review is:
Kucharski, Adam. Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. New York: Basic Books, 2025.