Books – Page 115 – artdiamondblog.com

Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” Tells Us Much About the Innovative Project Entrepreneur

Source of book image: http://www.internetmonk.com/wp-content/uploads/walter-isaacson-steve-jobs1.png

Steve Jobs is one of my favorite examples of what I call the “project entrepreneur.” Walter Isaacson has written a fascinating biography of Jobs, full of memorable examples for any student of the innovative entrepreneur.
During the next few weeks, I will occasionally add entries that quote some of the more important or thought-provoking passages.

The book under review is:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Personal DNA Data, Smart Phones, and the Social Network Can Democratize Medicine

(p. 236) With the personal montage of your DNA, your cell phone, your social network—aggregated with your lifelong health information and physiological and anatomic data—you are positioned to reboot the future of medicine. Who could possibly be more interested and more vested in your data? For the first time, the medical world is getting democratized. Think of the priests before the Gutenberg printing press. Now, nearly six hundred years later, think of physicians and the creative destruction of medicine.

Source:
Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

American Innovators Created Synergies and Interchangeable Parts

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

(p. A13) . . . the post-Civil War industrialization had an important and largely overlooked predecessor in the first decades of the 19th century, when, as Charles Morris writes in “The Dawn of Innovation,” “the American penchant for mechanized, large-scale production spread throughout industry, presaging the world’s first mass-consumption economy.” It is a story well worth telling, and Mr. Morris tells it well.
. . .
Whole industries sprang up as the country’s population boomed and spilled over into the Middle West. The rich agricultural lands there produced huge surpluses of grain and meat, especially pork. The city of Cincinnati–whose population grew to 160,000 in 1860, from 2,500 in 1810–became known as “Porkopolis” because of the number of hogs its slaughterhouses processed annually.
Mr. Morris does a particularly good job of explaining the crucial importance of synergy in economic development, how one development leads to another and to increased growth. The lard (or pig fat) from the slaughterhouses, he notes, served as the basis for the country’s first chemical industry. Lard had always been used for more than pie crust and frying. It was a principal ingredient in soap, which farm wives made themselves, a disagreeable and even dangerous task thanks to the lye used in the process.
But when lard processing was industrialized to make soap, it led to an array of byproducts such as glycerin, used in tanning and in pharmaceuticals. Stearine, another byproduct, made superior candles. Just in the decade from the mid-1840s to the mid-1850s, Cincinnati soap exports increased 20-fold, as did the export of other lard-based products. Procter & Gamble, founded in Cincinnati in 1837 by an Irish soap maker and an English candle maker who had married sisters, grew into a giant company as the fast-rising middle class sought gentility.
Mr. Morris goes into great detail on the development of interchangeable parts–the system of making the components of a manufactured product so nearly identical that they can be easily substituted and replaced.

For the full review, see:
John Steele Gordon. “BOOKSHELF; The Days Of Porkopolis.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., November 20, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was updated November 19, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2012.

Progress Will Slow If Consumers Wait for Doctors to Creatively Destroy Medicine

(p. 195) . . . it remains unclear whether there is adequate plasticity of a plurality of physicians to embrace the digital world and acknowledge that the era of paternalism is passé. My sense is that young physicians who are digital natives will be likely to assimilate but that it will be quite difficult for the vast majority who are in practice and inculcated with an older idea of how medical care should be rendered. Eventually there will be enough digital native physicians to take charge, but that will take decades to be accomplished. In the meantime, consumers are fully capable of leading the movement and contributing to medicine’s creative destruction. And so they must.

Source:
Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. New York: Basic Books, 2012.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Highly Leveraged Economies, . . . , Seldom Survive”

Source of book image: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AK313_book10_DV_20091008170122.jpg

(p. 762) Every once in a while, a work comes along whose key points ought to be part of the information set of every literate economist. Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff’s This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly is such a work. It describes and analyzes a long international history of several types of financial crises.
. . .
The authors resist giving too much structural interpretation to their analysis. Most would agree with their conclusion that ” . . . highly leveraged economies, particularly those in which continual rollover of short-term debt is sustained only by confidence in relatively illiquid underlying assets, seldom survive” (p. 292).

For the full review, see:
Boskin, Michael J. “Review of: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.” Journal of Economic Literature 48, no. 3 (September 2010): 762-66.
(Note: ellipsis internal to the final quotation, and the italics, are in the original; ellipsis between paragraphs is added.)
(Note: the “p. 292” refers to a page in the book, and not a page of the review.)(

The book being reviewed, is:
Reinhart, Carmen M., and Kenneth Rogoff. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Sclerotic Doctors Resist Change

(p. 177) Atherosclerosis, referring to a progressive and degenerative process of artery walls, is typically translated for a lay audience as “hardening of the arteries.” We’ve never needed a similar word to describe the medical community. It came with sclerosis built in. Of all the professions represented on the planet, perhaps none is more resistant to change than physicians. If there were ever a group defined by lacking plasticity, it would first apply to doctors.
(p. 178) The inherent “hardness” of physicians and the medical community suggests they will have a difficult time adapting to the digital world. Before the emergence of the Internet, physicians were high priests, holding all the knowledge and expertise, not to be challenged or questioned by the lowly consumer patient. “Doctor knows best” was the pervasive sentiment, shared by patients and especially physicians.

Source:
Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

Entrepreneurs of Coffee, the Battlefield, and Missing Minerals

Source of book image: http://img.qbd.com.au/product/l/9780691143705.jpg

[p. 167] The book . . . contains a variety of entertaining stories and colorful facts about entrepreneurship that could potentially be used for teaching. [p. 168] Murray, for instance, explains that the word “entrepreneur” was borrowed from the French language in the late Middle Ages, a time when it was used to describe a battlefield commander (p. 88). Kuran describes how Middle Eastern coffee entrepreneurs originally faced harsh resistance from many clerics who believed that “coffee drinkers reap hell-fire” (pp. 71-72). Hudson traces early merchant activity and entrepreneurship all the way back to Sumerian cities in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC (pp. 11-17). These cities, made rich by their fertile alluvial soil, still needed to acquire other important minerals, missing in their own ground, from the distant Iranian plateau or Anatolia. Since military conquest proved too expensive and because the Sumerian cities really needed these resources, they pioneered international import-export activities in their temples and palaces.

For the full review, see:
Bikard, Michael, and Scott Stern. “The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times.” Journal of Economic Literature 49, no. 1 (March 2011): 164-68.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the page numbers in square parentheses refer to the review; the page numbers in curved parentheses refer to the book under review.)

Book being reviewed:
Landes, David S., Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol, eds. Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

The Case for More Climate Adaptations and Fewer Climate Mitigations

Source of book image: http://perseuspromos.com/images/covers/200/9780465019267.jpg

(p. 777) Climatopolis begins with the assumption that our future will bring some combination of higher temperatures, sea level rise, more intense natural disasters, and changes in precipitation and drought conditions. The forecast is considered inevitable because of humanity’s deep and (p. 778) growing dependence on energy from fossil fuels, the burning of which generates emissions that cause climate change. In a way that some readers are likely to find overly pessimistic, dismissive, or both, Kahn asserts that we are unlikely to invent a “magical” technology that allows us to live well without producing greenhouse gases. He is equally skeptical about whether geo-engineering will help stabilize the climate. So when it comes to facing a future that includes climate change, Kahn has concluded as soon as page 5 that “unlike a ship, we cannot turn away.”

Economics is, after all, the dismal science, but early pessimism in Climatopolis quickly gives way to an overall optimistic theme. It is first encountered, somewhat surprisingly, in a chapter titled “What We’ve Done When Our Cities Have Blown Up.” With examples that range from fires and floods to wars and terrorist attacks, Kahn makes the case that we humans are a surprisingly resilient species. Among the lessons he draws are that destruction often triggers economic booms, people learn from their mistakes, cities are shaped by the accumulation of small decisions by millions of self-interested people, and when conditions are bad in one location people migrate to where it is better.
Kahn gets traction out of the notion that people “vote with their feet,” and he describes how climate change will affect where people want to go. Rising temperatures will cause Sun Belt cities in the United States to suffer, for example, while northern cities such as Minneapolis and Detroit will become more attractive places to live.
. . .
Climatopolis . . . cautions against maladaptive policies, and the recommendation here will be familiar to economists: prices should be left undistorted to reflect real costs and risks. Kahn is critical of a policy in Los Angeles under which people who demand more water pay a lower marginal price, and thereby face exactly the wrong incentive for conservation as water becomes increasingly scarce. He also points to the problems of subsidized insurance or caps on premiums for residents in climate-vulnerable areas, as these policies only promote greater vulnerability. What is more, Kahn would like us to stop treating people who move into harm’s way as victims in need of a bailout when natural disasters strike. He writes that, “Ironically, to allow capitalism to help us adapt to climate change, the government must precommit to not protect ‘the victims’.”

For the full review, see:
Kotchen, Matthew J. “Review of Kahn’s Climatopolis.” Journal of Economic Literature 49, no. 3 (September 2011): 777-79.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Book under review:
Kahn, Matthew E. Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

“The Resistance from the Priesthood of Medicine Is at Its Height”

(p. 77) In December 2010 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Nicholas Volker, a five-year-old boy with a gastrointestinal condition that had not previously been seen, who had undergone over a hundred surgical operations and was almost constantly hospitalized and intermittently septic, was virtually on death’s door. But when his DNA sequence was determined, his doctors found the culprit mutation. That discovery led to the proper treatment, and now Nicholas is healthy and thriving. Even though this was only the first clearly documented case of the life-saving power of human genomics in medicine, (p. 78) few could now deny that the field was going to have a vital role in the future of medicine. Some would argue that the treatment led to an even bigger breakthrough: health insurance coverage of sequencing costs for select cases.
It took the better part of a decade from the completion of the first draft of the Human Genome Project for genomics to reach the clinic in such a dramatic way. To make treatment like Volker’s common will likely take more time still. Even if that’s the ultimate prize, the creative destruction of medicine still has various other, less comprehensive, genomic tools for us to use, based on investigations of things like single-nucleotide polymorphisms, the exome, and more. The material can be a bit heady, but it’s worth pushing through: these tools could effect not just dramatic corrections of faulty genes but a better, more scientific understanding of disease susceptibility and what drugs to take. Moreover, as they empower patients and democratize medicine, they make medical knowledge available to all and deep knowledge of ourselves available to each of us. Nevertheless, at this level, perhaps more than anywhere else in this ongoing medical revolution, the resistance from the priesthood of medicine is at its height. The fight might be tougher than the material, but in neither case can we afford to give up.

Source:
Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

When Trade Is a Matter of Life and Death (and the Progress of Knowledge)

Source of book image: http://www.mikedash.com/assets/images/Batavia-l.jpg

(p. 236) In Mike Dash’s book, Batavia’s Graveyard, the mutineers on the ship Batavia get stranded on a parched sand bar with the liquor and foodstuffs, but no fresh water. A few hundred watery yards away are the remnants of the loyal crew, stuck on another islet without liquor or provisions, but with plentiful fresh water. Trade proves impossible. The analog of this breakdown is the current relationship between history and the social sciences.

Source:
Clark, Gregory. “The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England.” Journal of Economic History 71, no. 1 (March 2011): 236-37.
(Note: italics in original.)

Dash’s book that Clark mentions:
Dash, Mike. Batavia’s Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History’s Bloodiest Mutiny. New York: Crown, 2002.

When Bibliometrics Are a Matter of Life and Death

(p. 51) . . . it is essential, if at all possible, to have a go-to physician expert and authority when one has a newly diagnosed, serious condition, such as a brain or, neurologic conditions like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, heart valve abnormality. How do you find that individual doctor?
In order to leverage the Internet and gain access to state-of-the-art expertise, you need to identify the physician who conducts the leading research in the field. Let’s pick pancreatic cancer as an example of a serious condition that often proves to be rapidly fatal. The first step is to go to Google Scholar and find the top-cited articles for that condition by typing in “pancreatic cancer.” They are generally listed in order by descending number of citations. Look for the senior, last author of the articles. The last author of the top-listed paper in the Journal of Clinical Oncology from 1997 is Daniel D. Von Hoff, with over 2,000 citations (“cited by … ” appears at the end of each hit). Now you may have identified an expert. Enter “Daniel Von Hoff” into PubMed (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/pubmed) to see how many papers he has published: 567. Most are related to pancreatic cancer or cancer research.
(p. 52) Now go back to Google Scholar and enter his name, and you’ll see over 24,000 hits–this number includes papers that cite his work. There are some problems with these websites, since getting citations by other peer-reviewed publications takes time; if a breakthrough paper is published, it will be years to accumulate hundreds, if not thousands, of citations. Thus, the lag time or incubation phase of citations may result in missing a rising star. If it is a common name, there may be admixture of citations of different researchers with the same name, albeit different topics, so it is useful to enter in all elements including the middle initial and to scan the topic list to alleviate that problem. For perspective, a paper that has been cited 1,000 times by others is rare and would be considered a classic. In this example, the top paper by Von Hoff in 1997 is a long time ago, and he is no longer at the University of Texas, San Antonio-he moved to Phoenix, Arizona. How would you find that out? Look for Daniel D. Von Hoff using a search engine such as Google or Bing, and look up his profile on Wikipedia. Without any help from any doctor, you will have found the country’s leading authority on pancreatic cancer. And you will have also identified some backups at Johns Hopkins using the same methodology.

Source:
Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. New York: Basic Books, 2012.
(Note: initial ellipsis added; parenthetical ellipsis in original.)