Books – Page 158 – artdiamondblog.com

Becker and Farmer on the Economics of Discrimination

“ROYAL SUBJECTS; Donna Farmer, with her children, applauds Disney’s efforts.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

In Gary Becker’s initially controversial doctoral dissertation, he argued that those who discriminate in the labor market pay a price for their prejudice: they end up paying higher wages, than do those employers are not prejudiced.
The bottom line is that the free market provides incentives for the encouragement of diversity and tolerance.
Similarly, Donna Farmer argues, in the passages below, that the marketplace provides the Disney company with incentives to have “The Princess and the Frog” appeal to black audiences.

(p. 1) “THE Princess and the Frog” does not open nationwide until December, but the buzz is already breathless: For the first time in Walt Disney animation history, the fairest of them all is black.
. . .
After viewing some photographs of merchandise tied to the movie, which is still unfinished, Black Voices, a Web site on AOL dedicated to African-American culture, faulted the prince’s relatively light skin color. Prince Naveen hails from the fictional land of Maldonia and is voiced by a Brazilian actor; Disney says that he is not white.
“Disney obviously doesn’t think a black man is worthy of the title of prince,” Angela Bronner Helm wrote March 19 on the site. “His hair and features are decidedly non-black. This has left many in the community shaking (p. 8) their head in befuddlement and even rage.”
Others see insensitivity in the locale.
“Disney should be ashamed,” William Blackburn, a former columnist at The Charlotte Observer, told London’s Daily Telegraph. “This princess story is set in New Orleans, the setting of one of the most devastating tragedies to beset a black community.”
ALSO under scrutiny is Ray the firefly, performed by Jim Cummings (the voice of Winnie the Pooh and Yosemite Sam). Some people think Ray sounds too much like the stereotype of an uneducated Southerner in an early trailer.
Of course, armchair critics have also been complaining about the princess. Disney originally called her Maddy (short for Madeleine). Too much like Mammy and thus racist. A rumor surfaced on the Internet that an early script called for her to be a chambermaid to a white woman, a historically correct profession. Too much like slavery.
And wait: We finally get a black princess and she spends the majority of her time on screen as a frog?
. . .
Donna Farmer, a Los Angeles Web designer who is African-American and has two children, applauded Disney’s efforts to add diversity.
“I don’t know how important having a black princess is to little girls — my daughter loves Ariel and I see nothing wrong with that — but I think it’s important to moms,” she said.
“Who knows if Disney will get it right,” she added. “They haven’t always in the past, but the idea that Disney is not bending over backward to be sensitive is laughable. It wants to sell a whole lot of Tiana dolls and some Tiana paper plates and make people line up to see Tiana at Disney World.”

For the full article, see:

BROOKS BARNES. “Her Prince Has Come. Critics, Too.” The New York Times, SundayStyles Section (Sun., May 31, 2009): 1, 8-9.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The published version of Becker’s doctoral dissertation is:
Becker, Gary S. The Economics of Discrimination. 2nd Rev ed, Economic Research Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.

Movie still of Princess Tiana from Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog” to be released in December 2009. Source of movie still: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Costs of Entry Were Low in Entrepreneurial Garment Industry in 1900

(p. 146) This was the second great advantage of the garment
industry. It wasn’t just that it was growing by leaps and bounds. It was also explicitly entrepreneurial. Clothes weren’t made in a single big factory. Instead, a number of established firms designed patterns and prepared the fabric, and then the complicated stitching and pressing and button attaching were all sent out to small contractors. And if a contractor got big enough, or ambitious enough, he started designing his own patterns and preparing his own fabric. By 1913, there were approximately (p. 147) sixteen thousand separate companies in New York City’s garment business, many just like the Borgenichts’ shop on Sheriff Street.

“The threshold for getting involved in the business was very low. It’s basically a business built on the sewing machine, and sewing machines don’t cost that much,” says Daniel Soyer, a historian who has written widely on the garment industry. “So you didn’t need a lot of capital. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was probably fifty dollars to buy a machine or two. All you had to do to be a contractor was to have a couple sewing machines, some irons, and a couple of workers. The profit margins were very low but you could make some money.”

Source:
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008.

Major Advances Seldom Come from Big Incumbent Firms

(p. 109) Most of today’s Fortune 500 were not there fifty years ago. All of the private sector’s net new jobs in the United States during the past twenty years were added by companies not on the Fortune 1000 twenty years ago: two thirds of the net new jobs came from companies with fewer than twenty employees twenty years ago. Ten years ago our automobile giants seemed invincible. Today we wonder whether more than one will survive.

In 1960, Theodore Levitt of Harvard wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Marketing Myopia,” in which he pointed out that every industry was once a growth industry. Perversely, a vicious cycle sets in. After experiencing continued growth for a while, managers in the industry come to believe that continuing growth is assured. They persuade themselves that there is no competitive substitute for their product, and develop too much faith in (p. 110) the benefits of mass production and the inevitable steady cost reduction that results as output rises. Managements become preoccupied with products that lend themselves to carefully controlled improvement and the benefits of manufacturing cost reduction. All of these forces combine to produce an inevitable stagnation or decline.
In Dynamic Economics, the economist Burton Klein puts forward a carefully researched and very similar view: “Assuming that an industry has already reached the stage of slow history, the advances will seldom come from the major firms in the industry. In fact, of some fifty inventions [fifty key twentieth-century breakthrough innovations that he studied] that resulted in new S-shaped curves [major new growth patterns] in relatively static industries, I could find no case in which the advance in question came from a major firm in the industry.” George Gilder elaborates on Klein’s work “The very process by which a firm becomes most productive in an industry tends to render it less flexible and inventive.”
It appears that evolution is continuously at work in the marketplace; that adaptation is crucial; and that few big businesses, if any, pull it off. Many of our excellent companies most probably will not stay buoyant forever. We would merely argue that they’ve had a long run–a much longer and more successful run than most–and are coming much closer than the rest to maintaining adaptability and size at the same time.

Source:
Peters, Thomas J., and Robert H. Waterman. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
(Note: italics and brackets in original.)

The Ascent of Science Led to Belief that the World Could Improve

I believe the following paragraph expresses the central message of Steven Johnson’s book The Invention of Air:

(p. 211) In the popular folklore of American History, there is a sense in which the founders’ various achievements in natural philosophy—Franklin’s electrical experiments, Jefferson’s botany—serve as a (p. 212) kind of sanctified extracurricular activity. They were statesmen and political visionaries who just happened to be hobbyists in science, albeit amazingly successful ones. Their great passions were liberty and freedom and democracy; the experiments were a side project. But the Priestley view suggests that the story has it backward. Yes, they were hobbyists and amateurs at natural philosophy, but so were all the great minds of Enlightenment-era science. What they shared was a fundamental belief that the world could change—that it could improve— if the light of reason was allowed to shine upon it. And that believe emanated from the great ascent of science over the past century, the upward trajectory that Priestley had s powerfully conveyed in his History and Present State of Electricity. The political possibilities for change were modeled after the change they had all experience through the advancements in natural philosophy. With Priestley, they grasped the political power of the air pump and the electrical machine.

Source:
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)

The Meaningful Work of Immigrant Sweatshop Entrepreneurs

(p. 141) “To me the greatest wonder in this was not the mere
quantity of garments–although that was a miracle in
itself–” Borgenicht would write years later, after he
became a prosperous manufacturer of women’s and children’s
clothing, “but the fact that in America even poor
people could save all the dreary, time-consuming labor of
making their own clothes simply by going into a store and
walking out with what they needed. There was a field to
go into, a field to thrill to.”

Borgenicht took out a small notebook. Everywhere he
went, he wrote down what people were wearing and what
was for sale–mens wear, women’s wear, children’s wear. He
wanted to find a “novel” item, something that people would
wear that was not being sold in the stores. For four more
days he walked the streets. On the evening of the final day
as he walked toward home, he saw a half dozen girls playing
hopscotch. One of the girls was wearing a tiny embroidered
apron over her dress, cut low in the front with a tie in the
back, and it struck him, suddenly, that in his previous days
of relentlessly inventorying the clothing shops of the Lower
East Side, he had never seen one of those aprons for sale.
He came home and told Regina. She had an ancient
sewing machine that they had bought upon their arrival in
America. The next morning, he went to a dry-goods store
on Hester Street and bought a hundred yards of gingham
and fifty yards of white crossbar. He came back to their
tiny apartment and laid the goods out on the dining room
table. Regina began to cut the gingham–small sizes for
toddlers, larger for small children–until she had forty (p. 142)
aprons. She began to sew. At midnight, she went to bed
and Louis took up where she had left off. At dawn, she rose
and began cutting buttonholes and adding buttons. By ten
in the morning, the aprons were finished. Louis gathered
them up over his arm and ventured out onto Hester Street.
“Children’s aprons! Little girls’ aprons! Colored ones,
ten cents. White ones, fifteen cents! Little girls’ aprons!”
By one o’clock, all forty were gone.
“Ma, we’ve got our business,” he shouted out to Regina,
after running all the way home from Hester Street.
He grabbed her by the waist and began swinging her
around and around.
“You’ve got to help me,” he cried out. “We’ll work
together! Ma, this is our business.”

Source:
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)

Medical Care is Much Advanced Since Victorian Era of Mid-1800s

In the final sentences quoted below, note the under-appreciated role of air conditioning, and electric light, in advancing medical education.

(p. W6) “Gray’s Anatomy” is one of the most famous medical books of all time, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, then the man most responsible for the success of the book was its long-forgotten illustrator, Henry Vandyke Carter. In “The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy,” Ruth Richardson shows how Carter and Henry Gray came together to produce a classic that originally bore neither of their names — it was published as “Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical” — but she also affords us a remarkable glimpse of science in the 19th century.
. . .
Not much of a paper record exists regarding Henry Gray’s life. Ms. Richardson speculates that his possessions were burned in the “Victorian terror” stirred by smallpox, the disease that would kill him at age 34. Henry Carter kept a diary, but its contents are not exactly a trove of detail about his life and times. . . .
. . .
Describing their methods, Ms. Richardson reminds us of what we now take for granted in medicine by relating what wasn’t feasible back then. The “dissecting season” was the colder months, January-March, to make the most of the cadavers’ preservation. And the work day had to begin soon after dawn because sunlight was so much better for close observation than any other light source.

For the full review, see:
MARK F. TEAFORD. “Dissecting an Unheralded Alliance; A classic medical text bears one man’s name, but it was the product of a true collaboration.” Wall Street Journal (Fri., MARCH 27, 2009): W6.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The reference to the reviewed book is:
Richardson, Ruth. The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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

Adams, as a Point of Honor, Defended the Innovations of Science

(p. 211) It is no accident that, despite the long litany of injuries Adams felt had been dealt him in Jefferson’s letters to Priestley, he chose to begin his counterassault by denying, as a point of honor, that he had ever publicly taken a position as president that was resistant to the innovations of science. Remember that Jefferson had also insinuated that Adams had betrayed the Constitution with his “libel on legislation.” But Adams lashed out first at the accusation that he was anti-science. That alone tells us something about the gap that separates the current political climate from that of the founders.

Source:
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

Entrepreneurs, Not MITI, Decided Japan Outcomes in ’60s, ’70s and ’80s

(p. 164) Ishibashi’s regime was followed in the early 1960s by the “income-doubling campaign” of his associate Hayato Ikeda, who assumed power in 1961 and continued the supply-side thrust. The result was a steady upsurge of domestic growth, with firms and industries rapidly gaining experience in intense rivalries at home before entering the global arena as low-cost producers, and with government cutting taxes and increasing revenues and savings.

It is from this domestic crucible of intense competition with normal rates of bankruptcy far above those in the United States, with scores of rivals in every field, that the great Japanese companies have emerged. At various times during the last three decades, for example, there have been 58 integrated steel firms, 50 motorbike companies, 12 auto firms, 42 makers of hand-held calculators, 13 makers of facsimile machines, and 250 producers of robots. Overlooking this welter are always the crested bureaucrats of MITI, sometimes offering useful aid and guidance–but at the center, deciding outcomes, have always been the entrepreneurs.

Source:
Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.

“The American Experiment Was, Literally, an Experiment”

(p. 199) This is politics seen through the eyes of an Enlightened rationalist. The American experiment was, literally, an experiment, like one of Priestley’s elaborate concoctions in the Fair Hill lab: a system of causes and effects, checks and balances, that could only be truly tested by running the experiment with live subjects. The political order was to be celebrated not because it had the force of law, or divine right, or a standing army behind it. Its strength came from its internal balance, or homeostasis, its ability to rein in and subdue efforts to destabilize it.

Source:
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

Gladwell Misses His Own Central Message: Long Hard Work Matters Most

Source of book image: http://bharatkhetan.com/akanksha/?p=19

Malcolm Gladwell is on a roll. His three recent books have been best-sellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, and now Outliers. All three books are well-written, and deal with important issues.
I suspect that sometimes Gladwell over-simplifies and over-generalizes. But he often makes plausible, thought-provoking claims, and he presents academic research in a clear, painless way.
In the Outliers book, I enjoyed his examples: the NHL hockey players who are overwhelmingly born in the same three months, the entrepreneurial immigrant Jews entering the clothing business, silicon valley superstars having access to computers at an early age.
To Gladwell, the main point of the book is that over-achievers owe their success to lucky circumstances. But to me, the main point was a different one: in case after case, the successful put in a huge number of hours (about 10,000) of practice to achieve the mastery of their activities.
To use the memorable analogy from Collins’ Good to Great: hour after hour, day after day, year after year, they all kept “pushing the flywheel” to reach the threshold of excellence.

The reference for Outliers is:
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008.

The reference for Collins’ book is:
Collins, Jim. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap. And Others Don’t. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001.

In the United States “Innovation” Became a Positive Word

(p. 198) “All advances in science were proscribed as innovations.” Jefferson is using the older, negative sense of the word “innovation” here: a new development that threatened the existing order in a detrimental way. (The change in the valence of the word over the next century is one measure of society’s shifting relationship to progress.) But that regressive age was now over, and Priestley–the most forward-thinking mind of his generation–could now consider himself fully at home:

Our countrymen have recovered from the alarm into which art and industry had thrown them: science and honesty are replaced on their high ground, and you, my dear Sir, as their great apostle, are on its pinnacle. It is with heartfelt satisfaction that in the first moments of my public action, I can hail you with welcome to our land, tender to you the homage of its respect and esteem, cover you under the protection of those laws which were made for the wise and good like you, and disdain the legitimacy of that libel on legislation which under the form of a law was for some time placed among them.

Perhaps inspired by the legendary optimism of Priestley himself, Jefferson then added some of the most stirringly hopeful words that he ever put to paper:

(p. 199) As the storm is now subsiding, and the horizon becoming serene, it is pleasant to consider the phenomenon with attention. We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great extent of our Republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new. But the most pleasing novelty is, it’s so quietly subsiding over such an extent of surface to its true level again. The order and good sense displayed in this recovery from delusion, and in the momentous crisis which lately arose, really bespeak a strength of character in our nation which augurs well for the duration of our Republic; and I am much better satisfied now of it’s stability than I was before it was tried.

Source:
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.