Category: Books

Beebe’s “Colleagues Reacted Coolly”

 

    Photos of strange deep sea creatures.  Source of photos:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

 

When, more than 70 years ago, William Beebe became the first scientist to descend into the abyss, he described a world of twinkling lights, silvery eels, throbbing jellyfish, living strings as “lovely as the finest lace” and lanky monsters with needlelike teeth.

“It was stranger than any imagination could have conceived,” he wrote in “Half Mile Down” (Harcourt Brace, 1934). “I would focus on some one creature and just as its outlines began to be distinct on my retina, some brilliant, animated comet or constellation would rush across the small arc of my submarine heaven and every sense would be distracted, and my eyes would involuntarily shift to this new wonder.”

Beebe sketched some of the creatures, because no camera of the day was able to withstand the rigors of the deep and record the nuances of this cornucopia of astonishments.

Colleagues reacted coolly. Some accused Beebe of exaggeration. One reviewer suggested that his heavy breathing had fogged the window of the submarine vessel, distorting the undersea views.

Today, the revolution in lights, cameras, electronics and digital photography is revealing a world that is even stranger than the one that Beebe struggled to describe.

The images arrayed here come from “The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss” (University of Chicago Press, 2007), by Claire Nouvian, a French journalist and film director.

. . .

Beebe, who ran the tropical research department at the New York Zoological Society, surely had intimations of what lay beyond the oceanic door he had opened. “The Deep” brings much of that dark landscape to light, even while noting that a vast majority of the planet’s largest habitat remains unexamined, awaiting a new generation of explorers. 

 

For the full story, see: 

WILLIAM J. BROAD.  "Mysteries to Behold in the Dark Down Deep: Seadevils and Species Unknown."  The New York Times  (Tues.,  May 22, 2007):  D3.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

 

    "A Ping-Pong tree sponge."  Source of caption and photo:  online version of the NYT article cited above.

 

Hispanic Immigrants May Help Rejuvinate Aging Workforce

 

   Source of graphic:  online version of the WSJ article cited below. 

 

The article excerpted below sketches one solution to the "problem" of the aging boomer workforce.  Michael Milken has suggested that the problem itself may be bogus, because aging, healthy, boomers will just keep on trucking a lot longer and stronger than is usually believed. 

 

The quality of life for some 80 million graying baby boomers in the U.S. may depend in large part on the fortunes of another high-profile demographic group: millions of mostly Hispanic immigrants and their children.

With a major part of the nation’s population entering its retirement years and birth rates falling domestically, the shortfall in the work force will be filled by immigrants and their offspring, experts say. How that group fares economically in the years ahead could have a big impact on everything from the kind of medical services baby boomers receive to the prices they can get for their homes.

Immigrants and baby boomers are two groups whose destinies are converging in the next 20 years," says Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California. "Baby boomers will surrender their economic role to this generation of immigrants and their children," who will evolve into a critical pool of laborers and taxpayers, he says.

Prof. Myers, author of the recent book "Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America," is among a crop of academics studying the link between the giant generation born between 1946 and 1964 and newcomers to the U.S., mainly Latin American immigrants.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

MIRIAM JORDAN. "Boomers’ Good Life Tied To Better Life for Immigrants." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., May 7, 2007):  A2.

 

Sturm und Drang Schumpeterianism

 

I am conflicted about how to evaluate Zachary’s Schumpeterian article in a recent Sunday New York Times.  On the one hand he says much that is true and useful about Schumpeter and capitalism.  On the other hand he seems to relish the destructive side of creative destruction, extending it beyond what Schumpeter intended, to include disasters such as war and environmental crises.

My view, on the other hand, is that the destructive side is usually over-estimated, can be reduced further, and is an unfortunate cost of innovation and progress.

Here is a part of the Zachary op-ed piece that I like:

 

An Austrian economist who taught at Harvard, Mr. Schumpeter in 1942 coined the term ”creative destruction” to describe what he viewed as the engine of capitalism: how new products and processes constantly overtake existing ones. In his classic work, ”Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,” he described how unexpected innovations destroyed markets and gave rise to new fortunes.

The historian Thomas K. McCraw writes in his new biography of Schumpeter, ”Prophet of Innovation” (Belknap Press): ”Schumpeter’s signature legacy is his insight that innovation in the form of creative destruction is the driving force not only of capitalism but of material progress in general. Almost all businesses, no matter how strong they seem to be at a given moment, ultimately fail and almost always because they failed to innovate.”

Mr. Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction is justly celebrated. The economics writer David Warsh calls it the most memorable economic phrase since Adam Smith’s ”invisible hand.” Peter Drucker, the late business guru, went so far as to declare Mr. Schumpeter the most influential economist of the last century.

Clearly, any quick survey of technological change validates Mr. Schumpeter’s essential insight. The DVD destroyed the videotape (and the businesses around it). The computer obliterated the typewriter. The automobile turned the horse and buggy into an anachronism.

Today, the Web is destroying many businesses even as it gives rise to others. Though the compact disc still lives, downloadable music is threatening to make the record album history.

”Schumpeter’s central idea is just as important now as ever,” says Louis Galambos, a business historian at Johns Hopkins University. ”The heart of capitalism and its claim as an efficient economic system over the long term is the role that innovation plays.”

 

For the full commentary, see:

G. PASCAL ZACHARY.  "PING; The Silver Lining to Impending Doom."  The New York Times, Section 3  (Sun., May 6, 2007):   3.

 

The Legacy of Rachel Carson

 

GoreDreamingRachelCarson.gif   Al Gore dreams of Rachel Carson.  Source of image:  online version of the WSJ article cited below.

 

. . .   The World Health Organization now estimates that there are between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria annually, causing approximately one million deaths. About 80% of those are young children, millions of whom could have been saved over the years with the regular application of DDT to their environments.

Carson cannot be blamed directly for these deaths. She didn’t urge total bans in "Silent Spring." Instead, on the single page obliquely acknowledging DDT as an anti-malarial agent, she writes, "Practical advice should be ‘Spray as little as you possibly can’ rather than ‘Spray to the limit of your capacity.’"

In the National Archives exhibit, Carson is described as "a passionate voice for protecting the environment and human health." Her concerns about the effects of insect death on bird populations were well-founded. But threats to human health were central to her argument, and Carson was wrong about those. Despite massive exposure in many populations over several decades, there is no decisive evidence that DDT causes cancer in people, and it is unforgivable that she overlooked the enormous boon of DDT for malaria control in her own time.

. . .

. . .   DDT remains the cheapest and most powerful tool for stopping malaria. When sprayed on interior walls, it has virtually zero interaction with wild ecosystems. Yet when the topic of relaxing restrictions in order to save millions of lives comes up, someone inevitably brandishes a copy of "Silent Spring" and opposition is silenced so completely that you could hear a mosquito buzzing in the next room. 

 

For the full commentary, see: 

KATHERINE MANGU-WARD.  "Suffering in Silence."   The Wall Street Journal  (Fri., April 20, 2007):   W13.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

 

“The Individual Dominates the Story of American Innovation and Is Insufficiently Honored”

 

When an innovator is overlooked or an innovation misrepresented it is not simply a question of equity; it distorts our perception of the essence of innovation and the essential qualities of an innovator. It clouds our perception of what it takes to survive in global competition.

The individual dominates the story of American innovation and is insufficiently honored in our histories — to say nothing of the abysmal history courses in schools and colleges. Only recently did Columbia University honor Armstrong with a plaque in his laboratory, and Rutgers University is still short of funds to catalog properly the immeasurable riches of Thomas Edison’s papers — all five million pages of them.

The research departments of major corporations have not been unproductive — one thinks of the Bell Labs for the transistor and today Monsanto in biotechnology — but can anyone have had more impact on our world than the 23-year-old trucker who got frustrated at the day he spent on the noisy pier in Hoboken, N.J., waiting to have his cotton bales unloaded from his truck, loaded onto the cargo ship, and then unloaded and loaded again at the other end?

For nearly 20 years, Malcom McLean did nothing about his inspiration that it would have saved everyone a lot of time and trouble if he had just been able to drive his truck on to the ship. Why didn’t anybody facilitate that before he organized the sailing of the Ideal X from Port Newark, N.J., on April 26, 1956? Might as well ask why it took us so long to put wheels on luggage.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

HAROLD EVANS.  "The American Way."  The Wall Street Journal  (Sat., February 17, 2007):  A9.  

 

Evans is the author of a huge, very interesting book:

Evans, Harold. They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2004.

 

“The Least Hospitable Environment on Earth”

 

   Source of the book image:  http://images.usatoday.com/money/_photos/2007/03/26/cubicle-bookx-large.jpg

 

Office humor is an oxymoron. At least that was the prevailing view until Scott Adams’s "Dilbert" comic strip and, more recently, British television import "The Office" opened up this fertile ground for mainstream ridicule. The latest entry in the growing corpus of workplace-whacking is "The Cubicle Survival Guide: Keeping Your Cool in the Least Hospitable Environment on Earth," by first-time author and Web-site production coordinator James F. Thompson.

Mr. Thompson’s target: the cubicle, or "cube," as it is not so fondly known. It’s surprising to learn that this ubiquitous steel-and-fabric prison was not invented until the 1960s, the dubious brainstorm of a Colorado fine-arts professor named Bob Probst. His goal, according to Mr. Thompson, was to encourage co-workers to "freely exchange ideas and inspiration" — and not, as commonly believed, to breed a legion of the undead who feel they are somehow unworthy of, say, a door.

 

For the full review, see: 

MARTIN KIHN.  "BOOKS; The Best Way to Labor Away in Our Little Boxes." The Wall Street Journal  (Weds., March 14, 2007):  D9. 

 

The reference to the book, is: 

James F. Thompson.  THE CUBICLE SURVIVAL GUIDE.  (Villard, 216 pages, $12.95)

 

Neglect of the Important Issues, Is the Opportunity Cost of Pursuing the Cutely Clever

 

The Wall Street Journal summarizes an April 2, 2007 article by Noam Scheiber in The New Republic:

 

A new generation of economists has become so addicted to cleverness that dull but genuinely useful research is under threat.

"Freakonomics," the 2005 best seller that sought to explain the mysteries of everyday life through economics, is only partly to blame, writes Noam Scheiber. The deeper roots lie in a 1980s crisis of faith over economists’ ability to reliably crunch numbers. Influential economist H. Gregg Lewis kicked it off by demonstrating that a host of broad, worthwhile empirical surveys of unions’ impact on wages came to opposite conclusions, mostly thanks to the differing original assumptions by the studies’ authors.

As a result, some economists retrenched, opting to focus on finding "solid answers to modest questions."

 

For the full summary, see:

"Informed Reader; Economics; How ‘Freakonomics’ Quashes Real Debates." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., March 28, 2007):  B11.

 

“Roosevelt Warned us of Fearing Fear Itself; Now We Fear Life Itself”

 

   Source of book image:  http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/159523005X.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_V46468787_SS500_.jpg

 

I saw Todd Buchholz on C-Span and on CNBC, and I enjoyed hearing his views, so I decided to buy his Bringing the Jobs Home.  I don’t like the title, because it sort of implies that the job market is a zero-sum-game, in which one country’s gain implies another country’s loss.  Us true-blue free marketers believe that the market is a non-zero-sum game in which everyone everywhere can have jobs, and have better ones over time.

But Buchholz’s little book is fun to read, and says much that is plausible about how the government hurts the worker and reduces the efficiency of the labor market. 

Read the following excerpt for part of his rousing conclusion to the book.

(And, Aaron, I agree with you that Buchholz is wrong to say the American spirit is "innate.") 

 

(p. 177)  . . . :  Since the 1960s, each year we’ve lost a little nerve, gained another bureaucrat, another lawyer, another layer of protection against life’s uncertainties.  We have gotten used to a government that aims to coddle us but ends up both preventing us from growing and dampening the innate American spirit.  The spirit still stirs but gets buried under the weight of the nanny state.

. . .

(p. 178)  American government officials today cannot put our standard of living in a lockbox to preserve, protect and defend us.  Franklin D. Roosevelt warned us of fearing fear itself; now we fear life itself. 

. . .

(p. 179)  To paraphrase Churchill, Americans did not sail the perilous Atlantic, scale the Appalachians and struggle past the Rockies because we were made of cotton candy.

 

Source: 

Buchholz, Todd G. Bringing the Jobs Home: How the Left Created the Outsourcing Crisis–and How We Can Fix It. New York: Sentinel, 2004.

 

“Unlikely Collection of French Socialists” Liberated Global Capital Flows?

 

CapitalRulesBK.jpg   Source of book graphic:  http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/ADBCAP.html

 

Rawi Abdelal, a Harvard Business School professor, has advanced a novel theory in "Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance." Drawing on extensive documentary evidence, as well as dozens of interviews with high-level finance officials and midlevel bureaucrats, he tells a fascinating (and largely unknown) tale: how a clutch of French socialists helped to upend economic orthodoxy and lead the charge for lifting restrictions on capital flows within Europe and throughout the world.

. . .

Mr. Abdelal’s story heats up with the election of Francois Mitterrand in 1981. The new president, together with his majority Socialist Party, set out to storm the Bastille of the economy. He announced plans to nationalize the banks and restrict cross-border capital flows to such a degree that French citizens could take the equivalent of only $427 with them for leisure travel outside France (and were prohibited from using credit cards during such travel). Rather than create a socialist Shangri-La, the moves led to economic chaos. The French had to devalue the franc three times in two short years. Mitterrand then made what the French would elegantly refer to as a tournant but we may bluntly call a U-turn.

This painful episode provided a powerful lesson to a number of senior French officials. Said one: "We recognized, at last, that in an age of interdependence capital would find a way to free itself, and we were obliged to liberate the rest." And so in a Nixon-goes-to-China move, an unlikely collection of French socialists set out to liberalize the country’s controls on cross-border capital flows with a determination that gave new meaning to laissez-faire.

. . .

Mr. Abdelal is unequivocal about the value of Europe’s action: "Global financial markets are global primarily because the process of European financial integration became open and uniformly liberal." He also highlights how free capital flows got a boost from the two primary credit-rating agencies, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s. In the 1990s, both began to give higher ratings to government-backed debt when the country in question had an open capital account.

 

For the full review, see: 

MATTHEW REES.  "Business Bookshelf:  Why Money Can Now Make Its Way Around the World."  The Wall Street Journal (Weds., February 14, 2007):  D12.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

 

Boof reference: 

Rawi Abdelal.  CAPITAL RULES.  Harvard University Press, 304 pages, $49.95.

 

The Importance of Entrepreneurial Innovation

 

The U.S. in the midst of the most entrepreneurial era in its history, with more than 500,000 Americans involved in launching their own companies each year and an estimated 10% to 15% of all working adults engaged in some kind of entrepreneurial activity. And among these entrepreneurs, it is the innovators who matter most.

Their enterprises are the ones which create the jobs and industries of the future — as they have lifted the economy’s productivity in the past. The automobile, the airplane, the telephone, air conditioning, the personal computer and its software, and Internet search engines — all were launched by innovative entrepreneurs rather than large companies.  

 

For the full commentary, see: 

ROBERT E. LITAN.  "Innovators Matter Most."  The Wall Street Journal  (Sat., February 24, 2007):   A8. 

 

Mexican Federal Taxi “Charters” Increase Taxi Prices

 

     A non-federally-chartered taxi leaves the Cancun Hilton, headed for the Cancun airport, charging $23.  An identical, but federally-chartered cab, making the reverse trip, charges $40.  (Photo by Art Diamond.)

 

When we arrived at the Cancun airport we faced a chaotic environment where many Mexicans were yelling at us to buy taxi tickets.  After buying a ticket for $40, someone escorted us to a crowded, chaotic place to wait for a cab.  We waited and waited in the noise and the heat.  At some point, my daughter Jenny commented, "These people need to get organized."

Yes, Jenny they sure do!  And you might think that what they need in order to get organized, is for the government to come in to organize them.

But it turns out that the government has already come in.  Only federally charged taxis are allowed to take passengers from the airport to the hotel zone.  The price is fixed at $40.  On the other hand, any taxi may take passengers back to the airport, from the hotel zone.  The base price for a return trip was $23 .  (I added a $2 tip out of sympathy for the cabbie not driving a federally anointed cab.)

So, yes, these people need to get organized, and the best way to do that is to get their government out of their way, so that they can organize themselves through the free market.

 

Note:  relevant guide book passage:  "[Returning to the airport] the rate will be much less for the trip from the airport.  (Only federally chartered taxis may take fared from the airport, but any taxi may bring passengers to the airport.)"  (p. 78)

Note:  italics in original; bracketed phrase added.

 

Source:   

Baird, David, and Lynne Bairstow.  Frommer’s Cancun, Cozumel  &  the Yucatan 2007.  Hoboken, NJ:  Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2006.