Category: Books

Joe Biden’s “First Principle of Life”: “Get Up!”

(p. xxii) To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can’t learn at the feet of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you’ve been knocked down. It’s a lesson taught by example and learned in the doing. I got that lesson every day while growing up in a nondescript split-level house in the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware. My dad, Joseph Robinette Biden Sr., was a man of few words. What I learned from him. I learned from watching. He’d been knocked down hard as a young man, lost something he knew he could never get back. But he never stopped trying. He was the first one up in our house every morning, clean-shaven, elegantly dressed, putting on the coffee, getting ready to go to the car dealership, to a job he never really liked. My brother Jim said most mornings he could hear our dad singing in the kitchen. My dad had grace. He never, ever gave up, and he never complained. The world doesn’t owe you a living, Joey,” he used to say, but without rancor. He had no time for self-pity. He didn’t judge a man by how many times he got knocked down but by how fast he got up.

Get up! That was his phrase, and it has echoed through my life. The world dropped you on your head? My dad would say, Get up! You’re lying in bed feeling sorry for yourself? Get up! You got knocked on your ass on the football field? Get up! Bad grade? Get up! The girl’s parents won’t let her go out with a Catholic boy? Get up!

Source:
Biden, Joe. Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics. New York: Random House, 2007.
(Note: the italics in the quoted passage are in the original.)

An Environment Where Long-Term Hunches Could Thrive

An environment in which long-term hunches can be pursued, is important not just to science and invention. I speculate that it is also important to entrepreneurship.

(p. 74) If great ideas usually arrive in fragments, a partial cluster of neurons, then part of the secret to having great ideas lies in creating a working environment where those fragments are nurtured and sustained over time. This obviously poses some difficulty in modern work environments, with deadlines and quarterly reports and annual job reviews. (The typical middle manager doesn’t respond favorably to news that an employee has a hunch about something that probably won’t see results for twenty years.) But Priestley had created an environment for himself where those long-term hunches could thrive with almost no pressure, and his habit of simultaneously writing multiple documents (on multiple topics) kept the fragments alive in his mind over the decades. In the final pages of his memoirs, he mentions a lifelong habit of writing down “as soon as possible, every thing I wish not to forget.”

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

How Democratic Presidents Save Us

Andrew Jackson was the first in a long line of populist Democratic presidents:

(p. 24) He relished the roles of protector and savior. Just after dusk on a cold March day in 1791, when Jackson was practicing law on the circuit around Jonesborough, Tennessee, he and his friend John Overton were traveling with a small group through dangerous territory. Reaching the banks of the Emory River in the mountains, the lawyers spotted a potentially hostile Indian party. “The light of their fires showed that they were numerous,” Overton recalled to Henry Lee, and “that they were painted and equipped for war.” Under Jackson’s leadership (Overton credited him with a “saving spirit and elastic mind”), the travelers scrambled into the hills on horseback, riding roughly parallel to the river–which they had to cross to make it home. Pursued by the Indians, Jackson, Overton, and two others pressed on through the night, coming to a place where the water looked smooth enough to allow a hastily constructed raft and the horses to make it to the other side. Jackson look charge of the raft piled high with saddles and clothes. Overton would follow with the horses.

There was immediate trouble. The waters were not as smooth as they had appeared; a powerful undercurrent swept the boat–and Jackson– downstream, toward a steep waterfall. “Overton and his companion instantly cried out and implored Jackson to pull back,” Lee wrote. But he either not being so sensible of the danger, or being unwilling to yield to it, (p. 25) continued to push vigorously forward.” Jackson struggled with his oars; disaster was at hand. He and the saddles could he lost, and the Indians were still on their trail. “Finding himself just on the brink of the awful precipice,” Lee recounted, Jackson extended his oar to Overton, who “laid hold of it and pulled the raft ashore, just as it was entering the suck of the torrent.” Catching their breath on the bank of the river, Overton and Jackson looked at each other.

“You were within an ace, Sir, of being dashed to pieces,” Overton told him. Jackson waved him off, replying, “A miss is as good as a mile; it only shows how close I can graze danger. But we have no time to lose–follow me and I’ll save you yet.” They eluded the Indians, arriving home exhausted but safe.

Source:
Meacham, Jon. American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. New York: Random House, 2008.
(Note: the semi-colons in the above passage were hard to distinguish, in the online version, from colons. I judged them to be semi-colons from context, but I could be wrong.)

More Accurate Measurements Reveal Previously Undetected Anomalies

(p. 69) This is a standard pattern in the history of science: when tools for measuring increase their precision by orders of magnitude, new paradigms often emerge, because the newfound accuracy reveals anomalies that had gone undetected. One of the crucial benefits of increasing the accuracy of scales is that it suddenly became possible to measure things that had almost no weight. Black’s discovery of fixed air, and its perplexing mixture with common air, would have been impossible without the state-of-the-art scales he employed in his experiments. The whole inquiry had begun when Black heated a quantity of white magnesia, and discovered that it lost a minuscule amount of weight in the process–a difference that would have been imperceptible using older scales. The shift in weight suggested that something was escaping from the magnesia into the air. By then running comparable experiments, heating a wide array of substances, Black was able to accurately determine the weight of carbon dioxide, and consequently prove the existence of the gas. It weighs, therefore it is.

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

Philanthro-Capitalism Is Inefficient, and Betrays Shareholders

CreativeCapitalismBK.jpg

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

(p. A13) One of the more interesting ideas found in this somewhat rambling book contends that “philanthropic” business activity is in fact at odds with what is best about capitalism itself and thus counterproductive.

Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary, states the difficulty succinctly: “It is hard in this world to do well. It is hard to do good. When I hear a claim that an institution is going to do both, I reach for my wallet. You should too.” He offers as an example Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-created corporations that were supposed to achieve a social goal — affordable housing — while operating as businesses. They did neither well, eventually leaving their catastrophic debts for taxpayers to pay.

U.S. Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner, along with other contributors, notes that companies often suffer losses when they set out to address a social problem. If they could really make a profit by doing good works, the argument goes, they would no doubt already be hard at it. But if they do good works at the expense of profit, they will become less efficient, making themselves more vulnerable to competitors. Economist Steven Landsburg suggests that companies sacrificing profit to accomplish philanthropic goals end up betraying their shareholders, who rightly expect the best return on investment. Sometimes acting philanthropically will result in an indirect business benefit, such as improving worker skills. In that case, philanthro-capitalism might be in a company’s interest — but Judge Posner and others of like mind suspect that such instances are rare.

Their skepticism echoes Milton Friedman’s objections to “corporate social responsibility,” expressed in a 1970 article that is usefully reprinted in the book’s appendix.

For the full review, see:

LESLIE LENKOWSKY. “Bookshelf; The Do-Good Marketplace; Reducing poverty, improving lives – maybe ‘philanthro-capitalism’ is just another name for capitalism.” Wall Street Journal (Fri., JANUARY 2, 2009): A13.

The book under review is:
Kinsley, Michael, and Conor Clarke, eds. Creative Capitalism. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Magdeburg Sphere Let Scientists “See” the Vacuum

(p. 68) When we think of technological advances powering scientific discovery, the image that conventionally comes to mind is a specifically visual one: tools that expand the range of our vision, that let us literally see the object of study with new clarity, or peer into new levels of the very distant, the very small. Think of the impact that the telescope had on early physics, or the microscope on bacteriology. But new ways of seeing are not always crucial to discovery. The air pump didn’t allow you to see the vacuum, because of course there was nothing to see: but it did allow you to see it indirectly, in the force that held the Magdeburg Sphere together despite all that horsepower.

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

System of Capitalism without Capitalists Is Failing in Europe

(p. 164) The reason the system of capitalism without capitalists is failing throughout most of Europe is that it misconceives the essential nature of growth. Poring over huge aggregations of economic data, economists see the rise to wealth as a slow upward climb achieved through the marginal productivity gains of millions of workers, through the slow accumulation of plant and machinery, and through the continued improvement of “human capital” by advances in education, training, and health. But, in fact, all these sources of growth are dwarfed by the role of entrepreneurs launching new companies based on new concepts or technologies. These gains generate the wealth that finances the welfare state, that makes possible the long-term investments in human capital that are often seen as the primary source of growth.

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

Most Great Inventors Were Blessed with Leisure Time

(p. 49) With his wife running the household and tending to their four-year-old daughter, Sally, Priestley simply had more time on his hands to explore, invent, and write. Priestley was retracing a pattern that Franklin had originally carved two decades before, when he handed over day-to-day operation of his printing business to his foreman, David Hall, in 1748 and then spent the next three years transforming the science of electricity. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but most of the great inventors were blessed with something else: leisure time.

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

World Astonished that an American Tradesman Tamed Lightning

(p. 24) Within five years of his speculative note to Collinson, lightning rods had become a common sight on church steeples throughout Europe and America. Franklin’s biographer Carl Van Doren aptly describes the astonishment that greeted these events around the world: “A man in Philadelphia in America, bred a tradesman, remote from the learned world, had hit upon a secret which enabled him, and other men, to catch and tame the lightning, so dread that it was still mythological.”

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

God’s “Perverse Appetite for Burning Down the Buildings Erected in His Honor”

(p. 22) Humans had long recognized that lighting had a pro-(p. 23)pensity for striking the tallest landmarks in its vicinity, and so the exaggerated height of church steeples–not to mention their flammable wooden construction–presented a puzzling but undeniable reality: the Almighty seemed to have a perverse appetite for burning down the buildings erected in His honor.

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

The Policy Agenda to Euthanize the Entrepreneur

(p. 151) The agenda is simple: the stealthy and unannounced euthanasia of the entrepreneur. It can be accomplished easily by following two seductive themes of policy: lowering tax and interest costs for large corporations and a few other favored institutions, while shifting the burden increasingly to individuals and families. By reducing corporate taxes, subsidizing corporate loans, sponsoring a wide range of favored borrowers, institutionalizing personal savings, and discreetly allowing taxes to rise on personal income, government can painlessly extinguish the disposable wealth of entrepreneurs.

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