Books – Page 126 – artdiamondblog.com

Manifesto for a Rising Standard of Living

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

(p. A13) Mr. Diamandis is the chairman and chief executive of the X Prize Foundation and the founder of more than a dozen high-tech companies. With his journalist co-author, he has produced a manifesto for the future that is grounded in practical solutions addressing the world’s most pressing concerns: overpopulation, food, water, energy, education, health care and freedom. The authors suggest that “humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation where technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standard of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet.”
. . .
Predictions of a rosy future have a way of sounding as unrealistic as end-is-nigh forecasts. But Messrs. Diamandis and Kotler are not just dreamers. They lay out a plausible road map, discussing, among other things, the benefits of do-it-yourself tinkering–like the work by geneticist J. Craig Venter in beating the U.S. government in the race to sequence the human genome–and the growing willingness of techno-philanthropists like Bill Gates to tackle real-world problems.
The biggest hurdles, however, are not scientific or technological but political. There are still too many corrupt dictators and backward-looking governments keeping millions in penury. But as we have seen lately, the misruled have a way of throwing off despotic governments. With ever more people reaching for freedom, countless millions are tacitly embracing the Diamandis motto: “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”

For the full review, see:
MICHAEL SHERMER. “BOOKSHELF; Defying the Doomsayers; Abundance” argues that growing technologies have the potential not only to spread information but to solve some of humanity’s most vexing problems.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., FEBRUARY 22, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The book being reviewed is:
Diamandis, Peter H., and Steven Kotler. Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. New York: Free Press, 2012.

“The Patience of Jobs”

(p. 7) Steve Jobs was missing from the scene of the meeting, though he would soon be Disney’s largest individual shareholder (the acquisition was a stock-for-stock trade) and the newest member of Disney’s board. Lasseter was right about his money; Jobs had driven a hard bargain in buying Lucas’s Computer Division for five million dollars (not ten million, as is sometimes reported), but as it turned out, he put ten times that amount into the company over the course of a decade to keep it afloat. Few other investors would have had the patience of Jobs.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Nasar Gives Compelling Portrait of Joseph Schumpeter and His Vienna

Source of book image: http://luxuryreading.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/grand-pursuit.jpg

(p. C31) Ms. Nasar gives us Belle Époque Vienna — infatuated with modernity and challenging London in the race to electrify with new telephone service, state-of-the-art factories and power-driven trams — and then a devastating picture of Vienna at the end of World War I: war veterans loitering outside restaurants waiting for scraps, and desperate members of a middle class that saw inflation wipe out all its savings trading a piano for a sack of flour, a gold watch chain for a few sacks of potatoes.
. . .
Among the more compelling portraits in this volume is that of Joseph Alois Schumpeter, the brilliant European economist who argued that the distinctive feature of capitalism was “incessant innovation” — a “perennial gale of creative destruction” — and who identified the entrepreneur as the visionary who could “revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention” or “an untried technological possibility.”

For the full review, see:
MICHIKO KAKUTANI. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Economist’s Progress: Better Living Through Fiscal Chemistry.” The New York Times (Fri., December 2, 2011): C31.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated December 1, 2011.)

“What Success Had Brought Him, . . . , Was Freedom”

(p. 5) The success of Pixar’s films had brought him something exceedingly rare in Hollywood: not the house with the obligatory pool in the backyard and the Oscar statuettes on the fireplace mantel, or the country estate, or the vintage Jaguar roadster–although he had all of those things, too. It wasn’t that he could afford to indulge his affinity for model railroads by acquiring a full-size 1901 steam locomotive, with plans to run it on the future site of his twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion in Sonoma Valley wine country. (Even Walt Dìsney’s backyard train had been a mere one-eighth-scale replica.)
None of these was the truly important fruit of Lasseter’s achievements. What success had brought him, most meaningfully, was freedom. Having created a new genre of film with his colleagues at Pixar, he had been able to make the films he wanted to make, and he was coming back to Disney on his own terms.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis in title was added.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

“Human Progress Is Built on Man’s Desire to Correct His Mistakes”

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

(p. A17) Yu Hua is one of China’s most acclaimed novelists, hugely popular in his own country and the recipient of several international literary prizes. He brings a novelist’s sensibility to “China in Ten Words,” his first work of nonfiction to be published in English. This short book is part personal memoir about the Cultural Revolution and part meditation on ordinary life in China today. It is also a wake-up call about widespread social discontent that has the potential to explode in an ugly way.
. . .
Mr. Yu argues that corruption infects every aspect of modern Chinese society, including the legal system. Historically, Chinese peasants with grievances could go to the capital and petition the emperor for redress. Today, Mr. Yu writes, millions–yes, millions–of desperate citizens flock to Beijing each year hoping to find an honest official who will dispense justice where the law has failed them at home. What will happen when they discover that their leaders at the national level are just as corrupt as those at the local level?
The violence and deprivations of the Cultural Revolution are by now well known, but Mr. Yu’s reminiscences add color and texture to what the world has learned in recent years about that lost decade. The youthful Yu Hua is something of a wise guy and a schemer, pitting himself against bureaucratic inanities. It is sometimes impossible to know whether to laugh or cry.
. . .
As awful as the Cultural Revolution was, in Mr. Yu’s telling its horrors sometimes pale next to those of the present day. The chapter on “bamboozle” describes how trickery, fraud and deceit have become a way of life in modern China. “There is a breakdown of social morality and a confusion in the value system of China today,” he states. He writes, for example, about householders around the country who are evicted from their homes on the orders of unscrupulous, all-powerful local officials.
Mr. Yu’s portrait of contemporary Chinese society is deeply pessimistic. The competition is so intense that, for most people, he says, survival is “like war.” He has few hopeful words to offer, other than to quote the ancient philosopher Mencius, who taught that human progress is built on man’s desire to correct his mistakes. Meanwhile, he writes, “China’s pain is mine.”

For the full review, see:
MELANIE KIRKPATRICK. “BOOKSHELF; Cultural Lexicon; People, leader, reading, revolution, disparity, copycat and bamboozle–some words that serve as a springboard for critiques of China.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., December 7, 2011): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:
Yu, Hua. China in Ten Words. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.

Pixar as a Case Study on Innovative Entrepreneurship

Source of book image: http://murraylibrary.org/2011/09/the-pixar-touch-the-making-of-a-company/

Toy Story and Finding Nemo are among my all-time-favorite animated movies. How Pixar developed the technology and the story-telling sense, to make these movies is an enjoyable and edifying read.
Along the way, I learned something about entrepreneurship, creative destruction, and the economics of technology. In the next couple of months I occasionally will quote passages that are memorable examples of broader points or that raise thought-provoking questions about how innovation happens.

Book discussed:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Creative Destruction Helps Us Be Well

WSJ review quoted and cited below.

Dr. Eric Topol’s credible and thought-provoking comments on the over-use of stents appeared in entries in this blog in August 2006 and in December 2006.

(p. A15) “The U.S. government has been preoccupied with health care ‘reform,’ but this refers to improving access and insurance coverage and has little or nothing to do with innovation,” even though, as Dr. Topol notes, adopting new approaches would improve care and lower costs. . . .
. . .
“The Creative Destruction of Medicine”–an allusion to economist Joseph Schumpeter’s description of “creative destruction” as an engine of business innovation–is a venture capitalist’s delight, describing dozens of medical technologies that show great promise. The book also provides colorful anecdotes about Dr. Topol’s own sampling of these products, as both a doctor and stand-in patient.
. . .
. . . , full adoption of the new tools will require the Food and Drug Administration to alter the way it evaluates products. The FDA, he says, should allow the testing of drugs on patients who are selected for their prospect of deriving a benefit. Right now, the FDA usually requires drugs to be tested in a scattershot fashion on large populations. With drugs being tested on cancer patients, he notes, the “FDA insists on a body count to be able to quantify how much and how long the new drug improves survival”–even though diagnostic markers can sometimes reveal in advance which patients are unlikely to gain a benefit.
Dr. Topol worries that doctors will resist technologies that empower patients because the tools will also diminish the doctors’ gatekeeper role. The American Medical Association, for example, battled firms that provide genetic information directly to patients. “This arrangement ultimately appears untenable,” the author writes, “and eventually there will need to be full democratization of DNA for medicine to be transformed.”

For the full review, see:
SCOTT GOTTLIEB. “BOOKSHELF; Digital Doctoring; It’s hard to fake sleep to avoid your spouse’s bedtime chatter when a ‘Zeo clock’ is displaying your real-time brain waves.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., February 3, 2012): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the title “BOOKSHELF; Digital Doctoring; The digital revolution can spur unprecedented advances in the medical sciences, argues Eric Topol in “The Creative Destruction of Medicine”.”)

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

The Tasmanian Technological Regress: “Slow Strangulation of the Mind”

(p. 78) The most striking case of technological regress is Tasmania. Isolated on an island at the end of the world, a population of less than 5,000 hunter-gatherers divided into nine tribes did not just stagnate, or fail to progress. They fell steadily and gradually back into a simpler toolkit and lifestyle, purely because they lacked the numbers to sustain their existing technology. Human beings reached Tasmania at least 35,000 years ago while it was still connected to Australia. It remained connected – on and off – until about 10,000 years ago, when the rising seas filled the Bass Strait. Thereafter the Tasmanians were isolated. By the time Europeans first encountered Tasmanian natives, they found them not only to lack many of the skills and tools of their mainland cousins, but to lack many technologies that their own ancestors had once possessed. They had no bone tools of any kind, such as needles and awls, no cold-weather clothing, no fish hooks, no hafted tools, no barbed spears, no fish traps, no spear throwers, no boomerangs. A few of these had been invented on the mainland after the Tasmanians had been isolated from it – the boomerang, for instance – but most had been made and used by the very first Tasmanians. Steadily and inexorably, so the archaeological history tells, these tools and tricks were abandoned. Bone tools, for example, grew simpler and simpler until they were dropped altogether about 3,800 years ago. Without bone tools it became impossible to sew skins into clothes, so even in the bitter winter, the Tasmanians went nearly naked but for seal-fat grease smeared on their skin and wallaby pelts over their shoulders. The first Tasmanians caught and ate plenty of fish, but by the time of Western contact they not only ate no fish (p. 79) and had eaten none for 3,000 years, but they were disgusted to be offered it (though they happily ate shellfish).
The story is not quite that simple, because the Tasmanians did invent a few new things during their isolation. Around 4,000 years ago they came up with a horribly unreliable form of canoe-raft, made of bundles of rushes and either paddled by men or pushed by swimming women (!), which enabled them to reach offshore islets to harvest birds and seals. The raft would become waterlogged and disintegrate or sink after a few hours, so it was no good for re-establishing contact with the mainland. As far as innovation goes, it was so unsatisfactory that it almost counts as an exception to prove the rule. The women also learnt to dive up to twelve feet below the water to prise clams off the rocks with wooden wedges and to grab lobsters. This was dangerous and exhausting work, which they were very skilled at: the men did not take part. So it was not that there was no innovation; it was that regress overwhelmed progress.
The archaeologist who first described the Tasmanian regress, Rhys Jones, called it a case of the ‘slow strangulation of the mind’, which perhaps understandably enraged some of his academic colleagues. There was nothing wrong with individual Tasmanian brains; there was something wrong with their collective brains. Isolation – self-sufficiency – caused the shrivelling of their technology. Earlier I wrote that division of labour was made possible by technology. But it is more interesting than that. Technology was made possible by division of labour: market exchange calls forth innovation.

Source:
Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010.

How to Slow Down Creative Destruction

(p. 356) This catallaxy will not go smoothly, or without resistance. Natural and unnatural disasters will still happen. Governments will bail out big corporations and big bureaucracies, hand them special favours such as subsidies or carbon rations and regulate them in such a way as to create barriers to entry, slowing down creative destruction. Chiefs, priests, thieves, financiers, consultants and others will appear on all sides, feeding off the surplus (p. 357) generated by exchange and specialisation, diverting the life-blood of the catallaxy into their own reactionary lives. It happened in the past. Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the price of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers.

Source:
Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010.

Kickstarter Helps Finance Projects

“The creators of the TikTok Watchband, left, and the Elevation Dock have raised far more money on Kickstarter than they initially sought.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) Kickstarter is a “crowd-funding” site. It’s a place for creative people to get enough start-up money to get their projects off the ground. The categories include music, film, art, design, food, publishing and technology. The projects seeking support might be recording a CD, putting on a play, producing a short film or developing a cool new tech product.

Suppose you’re the one who needs money. You describe your project with a video, a description and a target dollar amount. Listing your project is free.
If the citizens of the Web pledge enough money to meet your target by the deadline you set, then you get your money and (p. B7) you proceed with your project. At that point, Kickstarter takes 5 percent, and you pay 3 to 5 percent to Amazon.com’s credit card service.
If you don’t raise the money by the deadline, the deal is off. Your contributors keep their money, and Kickstarter takes nothing.
But here’s the part I had trouble understanding: These are not investments. If you make a pledge, you’ll never see your money again, even if the play, movie or gadget becomes a huge hit. You do get some little memento of your financial involvement — a T-shirt or a CD, for example, or a chance to preorder the gadget being developed — but nothing else tangible. Not even a tax deduction.
Furthermore, you have no guarantee that the project will even see the light of day. All kinds of things happen between inspiration and production. People lose interest, get married, move away, have trouble lining up a factory. The whole thing dies, and it was all for nothing.
So why, I kept wondering, does anybody participate? Who would give money for so little in return?
. . .
I started reading about . . . projects. The one that seemed to be drumming up the most interest lately is called the Elevation Dock. It’s just a charging stand for the iPhone, but wow, what a stand. It’s exquisitely milled from solid, Applesque aluminum. You don’t have to take your iPhone (or iPod Touch) out of its case to insert it into this dock. And the dock is solid enough that you can yank the phone out of it with one hand. The dock stays on the desk.
. . .
Other projects seeking your support: Jaja, a drawing stylus for iPad and Android tablets that’s pressure-sensitive (makes fatter lines when you bear down harder); LED Side Glow Hats (baseball caps with illuminated brims for working in dark places); Eye3 (an inexpensive flying drone for aerial photography); and so on.
Not all of them will reach their financing goals (only 44 percent do). Even fewer will wind up on store shelves.
But in dark economic times, Kickstarter offers aspirational voyeurism: you can read about the big dreams of the little people. And you can give the worthy artists a small financial vote of confidence — and enjoy the ride with them.

For the full story, see:
DAVID POGUE. “STATE OF THE ART; Embracing the Mothers of Invention.” The New York Times (Thurs., January 26, 2012): B1 & B7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated January 25, 2012.)

Creative Destruction Creates as Many New Jobs as It Destroys

(p. 113) It was Joseph Schumpeter who pointed out that the competition which keeps a businessman awake at night is not that from his rivals cutting prices, but that of entrepreneurs making (p. 114) his product obsolete. As Kodak and Fuji slugged it out for dominance in the 35mm film industry in the 1990s, digital photography began to extinguish the entire market for analogue film – as analogue records and analogue video cassettes had gone before. Creative destruction, Schumpeter called it. His point was that there is just as much creation going on as destruction – that the growth of digital photography would create as many jobs in the long run as were lost in analogue, or that the savings pocketed by a Wal-Mart customer are soon spent on other things, leading to the opening of new stores to service those new demands. In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created.

Source:
Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010.