Category: Books

Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air

InventionOfAirBK.jpg

Source of book image: http://stevenberlinjohnson.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/10/invention_final_81908.jpg

Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, about the determined entrepreneurial detective work that uncovered the cause of cholera, is one of my all-time favorite books, so I am now in the mode of reading everything else that Steven Johnson has written, or will write.
The most recent book, The Invention of Air, is not as spectacular as The Ghost Map, but is well-written on a thought-provoking topic. It focuses on Joseph Priestley’s role in the American Revolution. Priestley is best known as an early chemist, but Johnson paints him as a poly-math whose science was of a piece with his philosophy, politics and his religion.
Johnson’s broader point is that for many of the founding fathers, science was not a compartment of their lives, but part of the whole cloth (hey, it’s my blog, so I can mix as many metaphors as I want to).
And the neat bottom line is that Priestley’s method of science (and polity) is the same broadly empirical/experimental/entrepreneurial method that usually leads to truth and progress.
Along the way, Johnson makes many amusing and thought-provoking observations, such as the paragraphs devoted to his coffee-house theory of the enlightenment. (You see, coffee makes for clearer thinking than beer.)

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

FDR’s “Mucking About in the Economy Crowded Out Private Investment”

DinnerLineDepression2009-04-10.jpg

“Men lining up for free dinner in New York in the early days of the Great Depression.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) In this interpretation Roosevelt is a well-meaning but misguided dupe who not only prolonged the Depression but also exacerbated it.
. . .
Amity Shlaes, a syndicated columnist who works at the Council on Foreign Relations, helped ignite this latest revisionist spurt with her 2007 book, “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.”
“The deepest problem was the intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace,” she wrote, lumping Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt together as overzealous government meddlers.
. . .
(p. C7) Nonetheless, they argue that most of his mucking about in the economy crowded out private investment and antagonized the business world, and thus delayed recovery.
Unemployment remained high throughout the decade until World War II, Ms. Shlaes told conference attendees, because the uncertainty created by Roosevelt’s continual tinkering paralyzed private investors.
When the federal government keeps changing the rules, it’s like having Darth Vader in control, John H. Cochrane, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said during a panel. “I have changed the deal,” he intoned like Vader, the “Star Wars” villain. “Pray I don’t change it any further.”
. . .
“No episode in American history has been so misinterpreted as the Great Depression,” declared Richard K. Vedder, an economist at Ohio University. By artificially keeping prices and wages high, he argued, both Hoover and Roosevelt prevented the economy from adjusting, which is why unemployment remained in double digits until the United States entered the war.
Anna Schwartz, who collaborated with Milton Friedman on a classic study of the Depression, and the Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas Jr. argued that the idea of stimulating the economy with federal spending is a fairy tale. Government spending just crowds out private investment, they asserted; the money supply is the only thing that matters.
. . .
At the final panel, a questioner asked at what point on the 1930s timeline is the United States right now.
. . .
To Ms. Shlaes, the best analogy is 1937 — “the depression within the Depression” — when the unemployment rate shot back up to the middle and high teens after falling. “The economy wanted to recover,” she said, but the government’s interventions ended up paralyzing the business world.
. . .
Mr. Vedder playfully offered another analogy: the recession of 1920. Why was that slump, over and done with by 1922, so much shorter than the following decade’s? Well, for starters, he said, President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke at the end of 1919, while his successor, Warren G. Harding, universally considered one of the worst presidents in American history, preferred drinking, playing poker and golf, and womanizing, to governing. “So nothing happened,” Mr. Vedder said.
Of course Mr. Vedder does not wish ill health — or obliviousness — on any chief executive. Still, in his view, when you’re talking about government intervention in the economy, doing nothing is about the best you can hope for from any president.

For the full story, see:

PATRICIA COHEN. “New Deal Revisionism: Theories Collide.” The New York Times (Sat., April 3, 2009): C1 & C7.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The full reference on on Shlaes’ excellent book, is:
Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Entrepreneurs Are the Main Source of Economic Growth

(p. 144) 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. The Spirit of Enterprise. 1 ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

New Orleans Was and Will Be: “Disorganized, Impoverished, Violent, Screwed Up, Corrupt”

Dan Baum’s book has received some positive reviews, and sounds appealing. He admits to being a “partisan” of New Orleans, but note that even he knows that New Orleans’ problems are primarily due to the people and institutions of New Orleans, and not primarily due to the weather or to George W. Bush.

Widely celebrated as one of those outsiders who gets New Orleans, the writer Dan Baum appeared at Octavia Books Tuesday night and found himself having to account for disparaging remarks he’d made about the city days before.

The crowd was at the bookstore to celebrate Baum’s book, “Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans,” a book drawing lots of attention for its compassionate portrayal of New Orleans through the lives of nine residents chosen by the author.
But before much could be said about the book, Baum was asked about an interview that had been broadcast on NPR Marketplace. He had said so many good things about the city that host Kai Ryssdal asked him, “Do you worry that maybe you’ve been too captivated by New Orleans to see the destruction?”
Baum answered, “I’m a partisan. I’ll admit it. I love the city. People ask me, ‘What’s going to happen to New Orleans?’ And I say, look, you know I think that in 10 or 15 years New Orleans will be the disorganized, impoverished, violent, screwed up, corrupt city it was before the storm and that’s really the way they want it.”

Source is online version of:
“Author’s gaffe hurts the ones he loves.” Posted by Jarvis DeBerry, Columnist, The Times-Picayune February 22, 2009 1:00AM

“Capitalism without Capitalists”

(p. 131) . . . suffusing all the most visionary and idealistic prose of leftist economics is the same essential dream of the same static and technocratic destiny: capitalism without capitalists. Wealth without the rich, choice without too many things to choose, political and intellectual freedom without a vulgarian welter of individual money and goods, a social revolution every week or so without all this disruptive enterprise.

Source:
Gilder, George. The Spirit of Enterprise. 1 ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Did Bourgeois Victorians, or Bloomsbury Rebels, Treat Servants Better?

MrsWoolfAndTheServantsBK.jpg

Source of book image: http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/27400000/27406153.jpg

(p. W14) Like Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and others in the Bloomsbury group, Woolf came from a well-to-do Victorian family living in a large house. When her family woke in the morning, the fires were already lit; while the family was out, the house was cleaned; when the family members arrived home, dinner was served. Part of Woolf’s rebellion against her patrimony was trying to free herself from the limitations placed on the education of women, on their sexual freedom, on their earning power. But another part, as Ms. Light reminds us, was trying to free herself from the strictures of a bourgeois household. As soon as possible, Virginia and her sister, Vanessa, wore simpler clothes, refused to change for dinner, had slighter meals at irregular times and rejoiced in clutter.

It’s not easy so to escape one’s class, however. When the daughters of Leslie and Julia Stephen left home after their father’s death in 1904, they took the household cook with them. And though they pursued busy bohemian lives thereafter — routinely challenging the legacy of Victorian propriety even as they married and set up households of their own — they preserved at least one assumption of privilege: They always had servants, whom they often passed around among themselves as their own needs and desires changed.

One of the ironies that emerges from Ms. Light’s book is that Woolf’s mother, a product of the Victorian age, treated her servants with both dignity and affection, and they were in turn devoted to her. Anybody who has read in Woolf’s diaries and letters, however, knows that she can be a dreadful snob, and worse. The shocking extent of her acrimonious journal entries about Nellie Boxall, her cook of 18 years — a “mongrel” and “rubbish,” according to Woolf — partly inspired Ms. Light’s book.

For the full review, see:

ALEXANDRA MULLEN. “BOOKS; Review; The Brooms of Bloomsbury.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., SEPTEMBER 13, 2008): W14.

The book under review, see:
Light, Alison. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants. Bloomsbury Press, 2008.

Congress Blocked Navy’s Grab of Radio Airwaves

HelloEverybodyBK.jpg

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

(p. A15) “Hello Everybody!” is at its most valuable when it chronicles the early regulatory fights over the new medium. In the days after World War I, the Navy pushed hard for control of all “wireless” facilities, which were then used primarily used for point-to-point messaging. If the admirals had succeeded in that grab, which was blocked by Congress, the advent of broadcast radio would no doubt have been delayed and the industry might have developed more along the lines of European radio, with a great deal of government control.

For the full review, see:
RANDALL BLOOMQUIST. “”Bookshelf; A Journey Across the Dial.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., OCTOBER 9, 2008): A15.

The reference to the book under review, is:
Rudel, Anthony. Hello, Everybody! Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2008.

The Difference Between Shirts and Ideas

In the discussion of public goods, economists distinguish between rivalrous goods (like shirts) and non-rivalrous goods (like ideas). With a rivalrous good, if I consume the good, the good is no longer there for you to consume it. With a non-rivalrous good, we can both consume it at the same time.
Entrepreneur Wayne Copeland, Jr., as quoted by Gilder, states it with over-the-top exuberance:

(p. 127) “If you give a man your shirt, you no longer have it. That is the world before the integrated circuit. But if you give a man an idea, you both have it. That is the magic of the solid-state world; it is essentially an ever-expanding circuitry of ideas. A truth that sets us free . . .”

Source:
Gilder, George. The Spirit of Enterprise. 1 ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)

Google Not Likely to Be “An Unstoppable Juggernaut”

PlanetGoogleBK.jpg

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

(p. A25) But Messrs. Page and Brin, when they launched Google, had no idea how to make money from it. Two years into their venture, they developed a service that delivered small text ads based on the search terms that a user submitted. As Randall Stross notes in “Planet Google,” his even-handed and highly readable history of the company, the service proved to be a turning point in the history of advertising, offering ads tailored for “an audience of one at the one best moment, when a relevant topic was on the user’s mind.” It also proved to be a goldmine for Google. The company started serving up ads in 2000. In 2002, it had revenues of $400 million; in 2005, $6.1 billion; in 2007, $16.5 billion. Roughly 99% of its income stills springs from those modest text ads that appear at the top of Google’s results page.
. . .
Is Google an unstoppable juggernaut fated not only to “organize all information” — as the company has itself put its goal — but to control it as well? Mr. Stross poses the question but does not answer it. He notes that one of Google’s ambitions is to usher in an age of “cloud computing,” in which all the work we do on our personal computers would actually take place on servers that Google owns. The servers would hold the programs we use and store our data. That image — Google as Skynet from the “Terminator” movies — is a mite unsettling.

Yet the evidence in “Planet Google” suggests that this eventuality is less likely than Googlers might hope. Outside its core search and advertising business, Google has had few successes. Its home-grown products, such as Orkut, Knols and Google Checkout (knockoffs of Facebook, Wikipedia and PayPal, respectively), have largely been failures. Google’s biggest successes have come from acquisitions. Google bought YouTube only after its own attempt at video on the Web, Google Video, crashed and burned. And even the “successful” acquisitions that Google has made — Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Docs and Blogger were all purchases, too — have taken up resources without creating significant revenue.
. . .
Remember, people thought that Microsoft was fated to rule the world, too. Today, the once-feared operating-system giant is fighting to stay relevant. And the evolutionary parallels between Google and Microsoft are strikingly similar: Both hit upon a Big Idea at the perfect moment; both parlayed it into a mountain of cash; and both used the money to embark on a string of expansions that paid few dividends. The years have brought Microsoft back to Earth. They’ll probably do the same to Planet Google.

For the full review, see:
Last, Jonathan V. “BOOKS; Search for Tomorrow.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., SEPTEMBER 17, 2008): A25.
(Note: ellipses added.)

he book under review is:
Stross, Randall E. Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know. New York: Free Press, 2008.

High Progressive Income Taxes Result in “Demoralization of Entrepreneurs”

(p. 127) High progressive and unnegotiable gouges like those in Sweden and England drive people altogether out of the country into offshore tax havens, out of income-generating activities into perks and leisure pursuits, out of money and savings into collectibles and gold, and, most important, out of small business ventures into the cosseting arms of large established corporations and government bureaucracies. The result is the demoralization of entrepreneurs and the stultification of capital. The experimental knowledge that informs and refines the process of economic growth is stifled, and the metaphysical capital in the system collapses, even while all the indices of capital formation rise.

Source:
Gilder, George. The Spirit of Enterprise. 1 ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Steuben Saw “The Genius of this Nation”

SteubenBaronVon.jpg

“German soldier of fortune and American ally Baron von Steuben (1730-94)” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. W9) The essence of Steuben’s achievement was his modification of the brutal, robotic precision of the Prussian system to fit American conditions. He was able to do this because he was one of the first foreign observers, military or civilian, to grasp an essential strain of the American character. “The genius of this nation,” he wrote a European friend, “is not in the least to be compared with that of the Prussians, Austrians or French. You say to your soldier, ‘Do this,’ and he doeth it. I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,’ and then he does it.”
. . .
While Mr. Lockhart tends to soft-pedal some of Steuben’s more dubious deeds — ignoring, for instance, his attempt to interest Prince Henry of Prussia, Frederick the Great’s younger brother, in becoming king of the independent colonies before the adoption of the Constitution — the author generally treats his subject with balance, understanding and great good humor, aptly concluding that, “although he blurred a few details of the past in order to seek preferment in the United States, somewhere between his arrival and the achievement of American independence, the Baron became something very much like the man he had pretended to be.”

For the full review, see:
ARAM BAKSHIAN JR. “BOOKS; Revolutionary Scamp.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., NOVEMBER 8, 2008): W9.
The reference to the book under review is:
Lockhart, Paul. The Drillmaster of Valley Forge. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

DrillmasterOfValleyForgeBK.jpg

Source of book image: http://robertos-book-picks.blogspot.com/2008/11/drillmaster-of-valley-forge-baron-de.html