Books – Page 180 – artdiamondblog.com

The Case for Clutter

Cartoon clutter by Edward Koren. Source of cartoon: online version of the NYT article cited below.

(p. D1) But contrarian voices can be heard in the wilderness. An anti-anticlutter movement is afoot, one that says yes to mess and urges you to embrace your disorder. Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat ”office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.

. . .

(p. D6) Mr. Freedman is co-author, with Eric Abrahamson, of ”A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder,” out in two weeks from Little, Brown & Company. The book is a meandering, engaging tour of beneficial mess and the systems and individuals reaping those benefits, . . .

For the full story, see:

PENELOPE GREEN. "Saying Yes to Mess." The New York Times (Thurs., December 21, 2006): D1 & D6.

(Note: the ellipses are added.)

The reference to the new book:

Abrahamson, Eric, and David H. Freedman. A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2007.

Don Springer won his company’s contest for having the worst clutter. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article cited above.

Reagan’s Resolve

In this anecdote from the Bosch book, Reagan’s son Ron (who has often been critical of his father) tells of an expedition with his father to collect flagstone for eventual use in building a patio:

(p. 140, footnote 11) We went out to retrieve a lot of these big heavy stones and load them into a little trailer that would be then hauled behind this ancient old original Jeep. I mean this was just like the proto-Jeep that he still had, because he’d never throw anything away. And so we’d, you know, spend a few hours hauling these big heavy rocks and we’d load them into the little trailer. It’s now piled high. It must weigh tons. Climb back into the Jeep and head up this slope that’s steep. I mean this is steep. And on one side you’ve got a sheer drop to the Santa Ynez Valley, you know, 2,000 feet below, and on the other side a gully full of rocks. And we’re hauling this huge mass of sandstone behind us. Now this Jeep, this poor thing, it’s…it’s not going to make it. And about three-quarters of the way up this steep hill, it starts to give out. And it’s mmm-mmm-mmm, and it becomes apparent that we’re not going to crest the hill. And now we’re actually going backwards. We’re not hauling the rocks, the rocks are hauling us. And I’m ready to get out. Not him. He’s—handling it. He’s going to back this thing down, by God. And he does…and we make it down…the rocks haul us back down the hill, but we manage to stay on the road. Now I’m thinking, well, OK, so now we’re going to turn around and go some other way, because there’s no way we’re going up, we’re not going to try that again. Oh no, no, we’re going to go up that hill. You know, by God, we’re going up that hill. I…it must have taken us three or four tries, of getting almost up the hill and being hauled back down, and each time I’m thinking OK, you know, which way do I jump. He’s cool as a cucumber. Didn’t bother him at all.

Source:

Bosch, Adriana. Reagan: An American Story. TV Books Inc., 1998.

(Note: ellipses in original.)

At Screen Actors Guild, Communists Threatened to Disfigure His Face

Source of book image: http://www.shopaim.org/assets/images/large/458i.jpg

There are better books on Reagan. But Bosch’s book has a few illuminating anecdotes. Here is one:

(p. 63) Reagan first learned about Communists and their intentions as a member of a Hollywood union, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). He had been introduced to the Screen actors Guild by his wife Jane Wyman and had quickly risen to become a member of the Guild’s board. As a SAG Board member, and later as its president, he mediated a dispute between two rival unions. One of the unions, the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), was led by a suspected Communist, Herb Sorrell.

. . .

(p. 64) Sorrell and Reagan went head to head. When Reagan crossed a picket line outside Warner Brothers, Sorrell called for a boycott of his movies. Reagan was called a fascist. An anonymous phone caller threatened to disfigure his face so he could never act again. He began to carry a gun and accepted police protection. He became an informant for the FBI

"These were eye-opening years for me," he later wrote. "Now I knew form first-hand experience how Communists used lies, deceit, violence, or any other tactic that suited them to advance the cause of Soviet expansionism."

Source:

Bosch, Adriana. Reagan: An American Story. TV Books Inc., 1998.

George Washington Was a Good Man

Source of book image: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471744964.html

On December 31, 2006 on C-SPAN2, I heard part of a presentation by Harlow Giles Unger on his new book on George Washington. I found the presentation wise, sincere, impassioned and delightful. Almost every story and fact was new to me. It appears that George Washington was an inventor, a solid businessman, and in most ways a genuinely good person. Great leaders do not have to be good people in order to be great leaders, but it is nice when they are.

Reference to the book:

Unger, Harlow Giles. The Unexpected George Washington: His Private Life. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006.

Harlow Giles Unger. Source of photo: http://www.brickstoremuseum.org/UngerHeadshot.jpg

“Nature Cannot be Fooled”

In his famous minority report on the Challenger shuttle disaster, written near the end of his life, Richard Feynman does not mince words. He argues that the actual risk of shuttle mission failure was on the order of one in a hundred. Then he says:

(p. 168) Official management, . . ., claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason (p. 169) for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds.

. . .

(p. 169) For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Source:

Feynman, Richard P. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. New York: Perseus Books, 1999.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Feynman on Viking Evidence of No Life on Mars

Based on the Viking tests, astronomers concluded that there probably was no life on Mars. Begley (2006) documents the recent research showing that applying the Viking tests to earth, results in the conclusion that there is no life on earth, either. Once again, Feynman was way ahead of his time:

(p. 204) We like to sit down and talk about how different things could be from what we expected; take the Viking landers on Mars, for example, we were trying to think how many ways there could be life that they couldn’t find with that equipment.

Source:

Feynman, Richard P. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. New York: Perseus Books, 1999.

(Note: italics in original.)

The reference on the Begley article:

Begley, Sharon. "Science Journal; Scientists Revisit Data on Mars with Minds More Open to ‘Life’." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., October 27, 2006): B1.

“The Blogger as DJ”

(p. 220) Increasingly, the winning strategy is to separate content into its component parts ("microchunks"), so that people can consume it the way they want, as well as remix it with other content to create something new. Newspapers are microchunked into individual articles, which are in turn linked to by more specialist sites that create a different, often more focused, product out of the content form multiple sources—the blogger as DJ, remixing the news, to create something new.

Source:

Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail. New York: Hyperion, 2006.

Hugely Wasteful Health-Care Spending

Source of book image: http://www.encounterbooks.com/books/cure/

Milton Friedman is gone now, but the new book reviewed below, includes a forward written by him. Friedman can be praised for many reasons; a minor one is that he was tireless and generous in offering praise and support for others who were seeking to better understand free markets.

About 10 years ago, I broke my leg playing basketball. After I came out of surgery, with a cast stretching from my ankle to the top of my leg, an orderly asked me whether I had ever used crutches before. I hadn’t, so he showed me what to do, swinging through them from one end of the room to the other. The whole lesson lasted about 90 seconds. When I got my hospital bill, I saw that I had been charged $150 for "gait training on crutches." I did what all insured Americans do: I forwarded the bill to my insurance company. Why should I care? I wasn’t paying for it.

One of the problems with American health care, as David Gratzer notes in "The Cure," is precisely a payment system that takes the patient out of the equation. In the early 1960s, the average American paid out of pocket one of every two dollars that he spent on health care; today the figure is one dollar in seven. The inevitable effect is hugely wasteful spending (and inflated hospital bills like mine). In fact, per-patient costs have gone up almost exactly in inverse proportion to the share of spending borne by the consumer.

Dr. Gratzer cites a remarkable Rand Corp. study that tracked health-care spending by 2,000 families over eight years. The families who got free health care spent 40% more than the families with cost-sharing arrangements. And yet the health outcomes for the two groups were the same. The lesson: Market-based health insurance systems, such as health savings accounts, cut out inefficiencies and lower costs without compromising quality.

. . .

. . . : America is clearly at a crossroads in medical care. Within the next decade we will get either some version of Hillary-care or more free-market medicine, starting with universally available health savings accounts. Let’s hope that our nation’s policy makers read "The Cure" before they decide. They will learn that the government route flattens costs only by holding back the pace of technology, artificially controlling its price and rationing its use. That is not a prescription for better health.

For the full review, see:

STEPHEN MOORE. "BOOKS; The Market and Its Medicine." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., By December 5, 2006; Page D6.

The reference to the book under review, is:

Dr. David Gratzer. The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care. Encounter Books, 2006. (233 pages, $25.94)

“Drawing the Best Minds into a Whirlpool of Mathematical Solipsism”

Source of book image: http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=689539

Physicists rightly feel uneasy about descriptions of the physical world that divide it into discrete clusters of equations and axioms, each cluster explaining one part of existence but not another. Better would be finding a Theory of Everything capable of conjoining, in a few equations, planet-pulling gravitation and the microcosmic weirdness that goes on in the quantum world of atoms and particles. Physicists would like to stitch time and space together as well.

Einstein tried and failed. In recent years, "string theory" has been the favored means of attempting to tie everything together, but it has unraveled into mathematical frippery, positing ever more intricate elaborations extending into anywhere from 10 to 26 dimensions, some arising from themselves, some hidden in ways so baroquely scrolled that you can get a migraine just thinking about thinking about them. Little wonder that, as an experimental science, string theory seems to have nowhere to go.

That is the problem that Lee Smolin identifies in "The Trouble With Physics." He laments a kind of sociological imperative drawing the best minds into a whirlpool of mathematical solipsism.

For the full review, see:

RUSSELL SEITZ. "BOOKS; Untangling the Knots in String Theory." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 2, 2006): P9.

The reference to the book under review, is:

Lee Smolin. The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. (392 pages, $26)

Coolidge: A Popular Pro-Business, Small Government, President

Source of book image: http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/11530000/11530321.jpg

"Silent Cal" was a pro-business, small-government president to a degree beyond the wildest dreams of today’s conservatives. The tax cuts effected by Coolidge and by his Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon ("under whom three presidents served," goes the old quip), were so effective that, as Mr. Greenberg reports, "by the end of Coolidge’s second term most Americans paid no federal income taxes at all." William Humphrey, who was Coolidge’s appointee to the Federal Trade Commission, described the FTC as "an instrument of oppression and disturbance and injury" to U.S. industry. Americans liked Coolidge’s policies because of the great prosperity that resulted. Inflation-adjusted GNP grew 49% during the Harding and Coolidge presidencies, the highest growth on record. Inflation and unemployment statistics were just as impressive.

. . .

In 1994 John Coolidge, the president’s older son, told me: "My father could not possibly be elected to anything today." That is surely true. Looking at the people who do get elected to our republic’s highest offices today, it is also regrettable.

For the full review, see:

JOHN DERBYSHIRE. "BOOKS; A Quiet Man in a Roaring Time." Wall Street Journal (Tues., December 12, 2006): D8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Risk Diversification Only Works If Risks are Random

Source of book image: http://www.inbubblewrap.com/2006/08/should_i_do_it_should_i.php

According to Mr. Apgar, managing director of the Corporate Executive Board and a former McKinsey consultant, the problem is that our traditional tool set deals only with random risk. Equity prices, interest rates, natural catastrophes — all operate, more or less, as perfect markets, distributing risk with equal probability among all the players. No one consistently knows more about what drives these phenomena than anyone else. We can bear or hedge these risks in the secure sense that competitors don’t have an inside lead on the future.

. . .

In real business, though, many of the risks that can potentially wipe us out are non-random — what Mr. Apgar calls "learnable risks" — involving customers, technologies, marketing strategies, supplier relationships and so on. The challenge is not just to learn, quickly, enough about them to survive but to determine whether someone else can learn about them even faster and thus put us out of business.

. . .

. . . Mr. Apgar also explains how to perform a "risk audit," judging a company’s current projects by how they diversify total risk or demonstrate risk intelligence. Here is where his program differs most widely from conventional wisdom — because, as he notes, risk diversification is no virtue if the risks are non-random and we have little intelligence of any of them. If you don’t know much about poisonous snakes, keeping several different species won’t make you any safer.

Like liberty, risk intelligence demands eternal vigilance — and for the same reason: threats evolve. Mr. Apgar’s analysis of the life cycle of a business risk is particularly fruitful. He notes that a successful company needs to maintain a risk pipeline, constantly probing into areas where it has higher risk intelligence and opportunities for real diversification — just as technology and pharmaceutical companies need a proportion of blue-sky research to innovate into the future.

For the full review, see:

MICHAEL KAPLAN. "BOOKS; The Hazards of Fortune." Wall Street Journal (Fri., December 8, 2006): W6.

(Note: ellipses added.)