Category: Books

Bathtubs Started Out “Extremely Expensive” and Then Prices Fell

(p. 372) At last the world had baths that looked good and stayed looking good for a long time. But they were still extremely expensive. A bath alone could easily cost $200 in 1910 – a price well beyond the range of most households. But as manufacturers improved the processes of mass manufacture, prices fell and by 1940 an American could buy an entire bath suite – sink, bath and toilet – for $70, a price nearly everyone could afford.

Elsewhere, however, baths remained luxuries. In Europe a big part of the problem was a lack of space in which to put bathrooms. In 1954 just one French residence in ten had a shower or bath. In Britain the journalist Katharine Whitehorn has recalled that as recently as the late 1950s she and her colleagues on the magazine Woman’s Own were not allowed to do features on bathrooms as not enough British homes had them, and such articles would only promote envy.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

The Lancet Accused Snow of Being “in the Pocket of Business Interests”

(p. 365) It is hard now to appreciate just how radical and unwelcome Snow’s views were. Many authorities actively detested him for them. The Lancet concluded that he was in the pocket of business interests which wished to continue to fill the air with ‘pestilent vapours, miasms and loathsome abominations of every kind’ and make themselves rich by poisoning their neighbours. ‘After careful enquiry,’ the parliamentary inquiry concluded, ‘we see no reason to adopt this belief.’

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Finance and Strategy Should Be More Integrated

ChristensenClayton2011-07-19.jpg“‘God never said that finance and strategy are fundamentally different functions.’ –Clayton Christensen” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ interview quoted and cited below.

MR. MURRAY: We’ve talked about the innovator’s dilemma, but what’s the solution?
MR. CHRISTENSEN: The financial function stands in the way of much of this. God never said that finance and strategy are fundamentally different functions, yet the business schools decided to teach strategy and teach finance. This gets implemented in companies where strategy is the responsibility of this group, and finance this group. And a lot of the things that make sense financially make no sense strategically.
. . .
MR. MURRAY: The United States has led the world in various types of innovation for much of the past century. Is that something that will continue?
MR. CHRISTENSEN: I am very worried about America. I was thinking about this hard over the past year. It turns out that the majority of the entrepreneurs that made Silicon Valley happen weren’t Americans. They were from Israel, China and India. We were a magnet to bring to our shores the best technologists in the world. Now our message to the rest of the world is, “You guys, we don’t want you.” The minute we say that and push those to Singapore and to Britain and elsewhere, I worry.

For the full interview, see:
Alan Murray, interviewer. “The Innovator’s Solution; Clayton Christensen, Glenn Hutchins and Ellen Kullman on being cutting edge–without breaking the bank.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., June 27, 2011): C9.
(Note: bold and italics in original; ellipsis added.)

Larry Page’s Wonderful Crusade to Save Us Time

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Source of book image: http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/intheplex.jpg

On C-SPAN’s book TV I saw the last part of an interesting and entertaining interview with Steven Levy that was originally recorded at the Computer History Museum on April 6, 2011. Levy is the author of of In the Plex which I have not read, but which is now on my to-read list.
At the end of the interview, Levy read a passage from his book about how Larry Page is obsessed with reducing latency, which is a technical term for how long we have to wait for something to happen on a computer.
Isn’t it wonderful that Larry Page is on a crusade to save us from wasted time?

Book discussed above:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: “latency” appears on the following pages of Steven Levy’s book: 93, 184, 185, 186, 187, 207, 262, and 398.)

If Truman Had Not Used the Bomb, Hundreds of Thousands More American Soldiers Would Have Died

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

(p. A15) . . . , the author reminds us of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who had died in the conventional bombings of places like Tokyo and Kyoto while Roosevelt was president, but with relatively little opprobrium attaching to FDR. Father Miscamble cites as well the horrific massacre of innocents for which the Japanese were responsible, a savagery still being unleashed in the summer of 1945, and the awful cost of battle in the Pacific, including 6,000 American dead and 20,000 wounded at Iwo Jima and 70,000 casualties suffered while capturing Okinawa. With these precedents, Herbert Hoover warned Truman that an invasion of the Japanese home islands could result in the loss of between half a million and a million American lives. Marshall, Leahy and Gen. Douglas MacArthur each had his own projected figures, none of them wildly different from Hoover’s.

Under these circumstances, it was inconceivable that Truman would not have ordered the use of a potentially war-winning weapon the moment it could be deployed. It is impossible to imagine the depth of the public’s fury if after the war Americans had discovered that their president, out of concern for his own conscience, had not used the weapons but instead condemned hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to certain death on the beaches and in the cities of mainland Japan.

For the full review, see:
ANNE JOLIS. “BOOKSHELF; In Defense Of ‘Little Boy’; Herbert Hoover warned President Truman that invading Japan would cost at least half a million American lives.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 13, 2011): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book reviewed:
Miscamble, Wilson D. The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan, Cambridge Essential Histories. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

The Stinking Past

(p. 356) The people who cleaned cesspits were known as nightsoil men, and if there has ever been a less enviable way to make a living I believe it has yet to be described. They worked in teams of three or four. One man – the most junior, we may assume – was lowered into the pit itself to scoop waste into buckets. A second stood by the pit to raise and lower the buckets, and the third and fourth carried the buckets to a waiting cart. Nightsoil work was dangerous as well as disagreeable. Workers ran the risk of asphyxiation and even of explosions since they worked by the light of a lantern in powerfully gaseous environments. The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1753 related the case of one nightsoil man who went into a privy vault in a London tavern and was overcome almost at once by the foul air. ‘He call’d out for help, and immediately fell down on his face,’ one witness reported. A colleague who rushed to the man’s aid was similarly overcome. Two more men went to the vault, but could not get in because of the foul air, though they did manage to open the door a little, releasing the worst (p. 357) of the gases. By the time rescuers were able to haul the two men out, one was dead and the other was beyond help.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

“Insanely Great” Entrepreneur Steve Jobs Wanted “a Chance to Change the World”

Steve Jobs died yesterday (Weds., October 5, 2011).
Jobs was an innovator of my favorite kind, what I call a “project entrepreneur.” He showed us what excitement and progress is possible if we preserve the institutions that allow entrepreneurial capitalism to exist.
When he was recruiting John Sculley to leave Pepsi and join Apple, Jobs asked him: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” (p. 90).
Steve Jobs wanted to change the world. He got the job done.

Source of quote of Jobs’ question to Sculley:
Sculley, John, and John A. Byrne. Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple. paperback ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1988.

In Middle Ages “Nearly Everyone Itched Nearly All the Time”

(p. 346) . . . in the Middle Ages the spread of plague made people consider more closely their attitude to hygiene and what they might do to modify their own susceptibility to outbreaks. Unfortunately, people everywhere came to exactly the wrong conclusion. All the best minds agreed that bathing opened the epidermal pores and encouraged deathly vapours to invade the body. The best policy was to plug the pores with dirt. For the next six hundred years most people didn’t wash, or even get wet, if they could help it – and in consequence they paid an uncomfortable price. Infections became part of everyday life. Boils grew commonplace. Rashes and blotches were routine. Nearly everyone itched nearly all the time. Discomfort was constant, serious illness accepted with resignation.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Neuroscientist Sees Entrepreneurs as “Never Satisfied” Due to “Attenuated Dopamine Function”

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Source of book image: http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/The-Compass-of-Pleasure-Linden-David-J-9780670022588.jpg

David J. Linden is the author of The Compass of Pleasure and a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Professor of Neuroscience.

(p. 4) . . . , the psychological profile of a compelling leader — think of tech pioneers like Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Steven P. Jobs — is also that of the compulsive risk-taker, someone with a high degree of novelty-seeking behavior. In short, what we seek in leaders is often the same kind of personality type that is found in addicts, whether they are dependent on gambling, alcohol, sex or drugs.

How can this be? We typically see addicts as weak-willed losers, and chief executives and entrepreneurs are people with discipline and fortitude. To understand this apparent contradiction we need to look under the hood of the brain, and in particular at the functions that relate to pleasure and reward.
. . .
Crucially, genetic variants that suppress dopamine signaling in the pleasure circuit substantially increase pleasure- and novelty-seeking behaviors — their bearers must seek high levels of stimulation to reach the same level of pleasure that others can achieve with more moderate indulgence. Those blunted dopamine receptor variants are associated with substantially increased risk of addiction to a range of substances and behaviors.
. . .
The risk-taking, novelty-seeking and obsessive personality traits often found in addicts can be harnessed to make them very effective in the workplace. For many leaders, it’s not the case that they succeed in spite of their addiction; rather, the same brain wiring and chemistry that make them addicts also confer on them behavioral traits that serve them well.
So, when searching for your organization’s next leader, look for someone with an attenuated dopamine function: someone who is never satisfied with the status quo, someone who wants the feeling of success more than others — but likes it less.

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID J. LINDEN. “Addictive Personality? You Might be a Leader.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., July 24, 2011): 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated July 23, 2011.)

The book mentioned above is:
Linden, David J. The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good. New York: Viking Adult, 2011.

Americans Resented Being Kept as a Captive Market

(p. 300) This suppression of free trade greatly angered the Scottish economist Adam Smith (whose Wealth of Nations, not coincidentally, came out the same year that America declared its independence) but not nearly as much as it did the Americans, who naturally resented the idea of being kept eternally as a captive market. It would be overstating matters to suggest that the exasperations of commerce were the cause of the American revolution, but they were certainly a powerful component.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.