Category: Books

Entrepreneur Marconi Was Driven by Wireless Communication Project

(p. C5) Marconi is another example of the Victorian “self-made man,” in this case a precocious youth fascinated by electricity and electrical wave pulses.
. . .
Sending the letter “S” in Morse code to his assistant, Mignani, on the far side of the meadow several hundred yards away was great, but not enough. What if, instead, Mignani took the receiver to the other side of the hill, out of sight of the house, and then fired a gunshot if the pulses got through? “I called my mother into the room to watch the momentous experiment. . . . I waited to give Mignani time to get to his place. Then breathlessly I tapped the key three times. . . . Then from the other side of the hill came the sound of a shot. . . . That was the moment when wireless was born.”
. . .
A combination of technological insight, organizational skill and business acumen gave him, like Steve Jobs in the next century, his place in history. To the end of his life Marconi was driven by a vision of the whole world communicating through wireless waves in the air.
. . .
. . ., Mr. Raboy exhaustively if deftly tells the tale of the next few critical years: Marconi’s long stay in England, the search for funding (without losing control), the critical establishment of patents, the embrace by officials in the British Post Office and Royal Navy, the ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship wireless transmissions. There’s a fine chapter on the critical long-range, trans-Atlantic experiments in 1901. These were conducted in wintry, gusty Newfoundland, whose supportive provincial government grasped almost immediately what Marconi offered: instant and vastly less expensive communication to Canada, Boston and New York and, above all, to Britain and its empire. Little wonder that such powerful entities as the (state-subsidized) Anglo-American Telegraph Co. were alarmed at this interloper. . . .
In 1909, at the age of 35, the Italian entrepreneur would stand up proudly to receive the Nobel Prize in physics.

For the full review, see:
PAUL KENNEDY. “When the World Took to the Air; Like Steve Jobs, Marconi combined technological insight, organizational skill and business acumen.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 10, 2016): C5-C6.
(Note: ellipses internal to second quoted paragraph, in original; other ellipses, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 9, 2016, an has the title “The World’s First Communications Giant; Like Steve Jobs, Marconi combined technological insight, organizational skill and business acumen.”)

The book under review, is:
Raboy, Marc. Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

We Want Meaningful Work

(p. 1) HOW satisfied are we with our jobs?
Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be.
Why? One possibility is that it’s just human nature to dislike work. This was the view of Adam Smith, the father of industrial capitalism, who felt that people were naturally lazy and would work only for pay. “It is the interest of every man,” he wrote in 1776 in “The Wealth of Nations,” “to live as much at his ease as he can.”
This idea has been enormously influential. About a century later, it helped shape the scientific management movement, which created systems of manufacture that minimized the need for skill and close attention — things that lazy, pay-driven workers could not be expected to have.
Today, in factories, offices and other workplaces, the details may be different but the overall situation is the same: Work is structured on the assumption that we do it only because we have to. The call center employee is monitored to ensure that he ends each call quickly. The office worker’s keystrokes are overseen to guarantee productivity.
. . .
(p. 4) To start with, I don’t think most people recognize themselves in Adam Smith’s description of wage-driven idlers. Of course, we care about our wages, and we wouldn’t work without them. But we care about more than money. We want work that is challenging and engaging, that enables us to exercise some discretion and control over what we do, and that provides us opportunities to learn and grow. We want to work with colleagues we respect and with supervisors who respect us. Most of all, we want work that is meaningful — that makes a difference to other people and thus ennobles us in at least some small way.
. . .
You enter an occupation with a variety of aspirations aside from receiving your pay. But then you discover that your work is structured so that most of those aspirations will be unmet. Maybe you’re a call center employee who wants to help customers solve their problems — but you find out that all that matters is how quickly you terminate each call. Or you’re a teacher who wants to educate kids — but you discover that only their test scores matter. Or you’re a corporate lawyer who wants to serve his client with care and professionalism — but you learn that racking up billable hours is all that really counts.
Pretty soon, you lose your lofty aspirations. And over time, later generations don’t even develop the lofty aspirations in the first place. Compensation becomes the measure of all that is possible from work. When employees negotiate, they negotiate for improved compensation, since nothing else is on the table. And when this goes on long enough, we become just the kind of creatures that Adam Smith thought we always were.

For the full commentary, see:

BARRY SCHWARTZ. “Rethinking Work.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., AUG. 30, 2015): 1 & 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date AUG. 28, 2015,)

The commentary is related to Schwartz’s book:
Schwartz, Barry. Why We Work, Ted Books. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Israelis Are Tenacious, Informal, Question Authority, and Tolerate Failure

(p. A15) Israel is a country of eight million people that at its narrowest point is 9 miles wide. It is surrounded on all sides by enemies who would like to see it wiped off the map: Hezbollah to the north, Hamas to the south, plus Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Islamic State and Iran to the east. It wouldn’t take a particularly pessimistic person to bet against this besieged slice of desert. Yet this tiny nation has also built an air force, anti-missile defense system and intelligence apparatus that is revered around the world–and relied on by the U.S. military, among many others. And it’s done it with a minuscule fraction of the budget available to larger nations.
How has Israel pulled it off? In “The Weapon Wizards” Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot tell the story of how the Jewish state’s military and defense sector became one of the most cutting-edge in the world. In chapters focused on particular technologies and weapons, such as drones, satellites and cyber warfare, the authors make the case that the same factors that have made Israel a tech giant have also allowed it to become a “high-tech military superpower.” The country’s military, its schools and its extracurricular institutions inculcate in its young people tenacity, insatiable questioning of authority, determined informality, cross-disciplinary creativity and tolerance of failure.
. . .
While “The Weapon Wizards” can be a bit technical for the lay reader, the authors have skillfully conveyed a key component of the dynamic innovation culture that has made the Jewish state one of the most important entrepreneurial and technology-driven economies in the world. Not bad for a country 9 miles wide.

For the full review, see:
DAN SENOR. “BOOKSHELF; Drafting Up Innovation.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Feb. 2, 2017): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 3 [sic], 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Katz, Yaakov, and Amir Bohbot. The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Founder-Led Firms Do Better

(p. A19) A study out earlier this year from Bain & Company, where we work, shows that over the past 15 years founder-led companies delivered shareholder returns that are three times higher than those of other S&P 500 companies.
. . .
Great founders imbue their companies with three measurable traits that make up what we dubbed “the founder’s mentality.”
The first is insurgency: The founding team declares war on its industry on behalf of underserved customers.
. . .
The second trait is an obsession with how customers are treated–an attention to detail that borders on compulsive.
. . .
Third, these companies are steeped in an owner’s mind-set. Too often in business, the founder’s vision becomes distorted.
Bain’s research found that the best companies–the top 20% of performers, founder-led or not–exhibit the three traits we’ve described four or five times as often as the bottom performers. The bad news: Only about 7% of companies, founder-led or not, manage to maintain these traits as they grow to scale. Yet those that do create more than 50% of the net value in the stock market in any given year.

For the full commentary, see:
CHRIS ZOOK and JAMES ALLEN. The Company Founder’s Special Sauce; No one leads a firm as effectively as the person who started it.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Dec. 19, 2016): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 18, 2016.)

The Bain research mentioned above, is:
Chris, Zook. “Founder-Led Companies Outperform the Rest — Here’s Why.” Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (March 24, 2016): 2-5.

The passages quoted above are related to the authors’ book:
Zook, Chris, and James Allen. The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press Books, 2016.

Mokyr Credits the Great Enrichment to a Culture That Values Scientific Inquiry

(p. A13) Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” Thomas Hobbes proclaimed in 1651, and it had been that way ever since humans had inhabited the Earth. At the time Hobbes wrote those words, life expectancy averaged about 30 years old in his native England and income per person typically was around $5 a day (in 2016 dollars). Thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the Great Enrichment that followed, the typical subject of Queen Elizabeth II lives to almost 80 and has an income of over $100 a day. Perhaps more impressively, most people in the world today face the prospect of living at least that well within a generation or two.

What brought about the Great Enrichment? And why did it all start in England? Joel Mokyr, in his fine book, attributes it to the unique and productive culture that evolved there. It was a culture that welcomed change and favored scientific inquiry that spurred radical technological improvements.

. . .

According to Mr. Mokyr, three factors led to the ultimate triumph of the new modern search for scientific truth over the largely inaccurate “science” of the ancients. First, Europe’s fractured political environment was a blessing: Scientists who were banned or ostracized in one political jurisdiction fled to other locales more tolerant of their views. The controversial Franciscan monk, Bernardino Ochino (1487-1564), for example, was often in trouble and moving to evade authorities, leading him to flee from Italy to Switzerland and later, England, Poland and Moravia. Second, the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press around 1440 enormously lowered the cost of widely disseminating knowledge over large areas. Third, an extraordinary intellectual community evolved–Voltaire and others called the Republic of Letters–that made the dissemination of new information (through letters to fellow scientists) obligatory for anyone who wanted to gain respect in the growing international community of scientists.

For the full review, see:

RICHARD VEDDER. “BOOKSHELF; The Genesis of Prosperity; What brought about the Great Enrichment? And why did it start in England? It had a culture that embraced change and scientific inquiry.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 11, 2016): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 10, 2016.)

The book under review, is:

Mokyr, Joel. A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Graz Schumpeter Lectures. New Haven, CT: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Christian Praise for Ayn Rand Novels

(p. A13) Andy Puzder, the CEO of CKE restaurants and a practicing Roman Catholic, finds nothing worrisome in that fact: “I encouraged my six children to read both ‘Fountainhead’ and ‘Mere Christianity’ by C.S. Lewis,” he told me. Each child later read “Atlas Shrugged.” Mr. Puzder argued that “there’s no contradiction between raising my children in the church, and urging them to lead the kind of lives of achievement, integrity and independence that Ayn Rand celebrated in her novels.”
Randall Wallace, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of 1995’s “Braveheart,” and the director of 2014’s “Heaven Is for Real,” is such an admirer of Rand’s work that he wrote a screen adaptation of “Atlas Shrugged.” Mr. Wallace, a Southern Baptist, said, “My faith isn’t contradicted by her beliefs. We live in a world of labels, but God surely cares less about the labels we give ourselves than about how we live because of them.” Rand, Mr. Wallace feels, wrote fiercely and fearlessly about bold and brave characters. “I think it would contradictory to my own beliefs not to admire her.”

For the full commentary, see:
JENNIFER ANJU GROSSMAN. “Can You Love God and Ayn Rand?; A friend claims the atheist philosopher at one point saw the appeal of spirituality.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 11, 2016): A13.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 10, 2016.)

The Ayn Rand novels praised above, are:
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943.

“Fear Moved Aside to Make Room for Hope”

(p. B11) Joyce Appleby, a distinguished historian and author who argued that ideas about capitalism and liberty were fundamental in shaping the identity of early Americans, died on Dec. 23 [2016] at her home in Taos, N.M.
. . .
Dr. Appleby, a former journalist who began her Ph.D. training at 32 while caring for three children, rose to the top ranks of the discipline, serving as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
. . .
In books like “Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s” (1984) and “Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination” (1992). Dr. Appleby argued that the revolutionaries were more individualistic and optimistic than they had been given credit for.
John Locke and Adam Smith had as much influence on founders like Jefferson as the radical Whigs — if not more, she said. In her view, the revolutionaries believed that the public good would arise out of the harmonious pursuit of private interests in a market economy.
“For me, liberalism had entered American consciousness as a potent brew blended from 17th-century entrepreneurial attitudes and the Enlightenment’s endorsement of liberty and reason,” Dr. Appleby said in the 2012 lecture. “Because nature had endowed human beings with the capacity to think for themselves and act on their own behalf, representative government seemed the perfect fit for them.
“Rather than classical republicanism’s fixation on social traumas, liberalism was optimistic, moving forward with the rational, self-improving individual who was endowed with natural rights to be exercised in a widened ambit of freedom.”
Or, as she put it in a 2007 essay on the intellectual underpinnings of American democracy, “Fear moved aside to make room for hope.”

For the full obituary, see:
SEWELL CHAN. “Joyce Appleby, Scholar of Capitalism and American Identity.” The New York Times (Fri., January 6, 2017): B11.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JAN. 2 [sic], 2017, and has the title “Joyce Appleby, Historian of Capitalism and American Identity, Is Dead at 87.”)

The Appleby books mentioned above, are:
Appleby, Joyce. Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, Anson G. Phelps Lectureship on Early American History. New York: NYU Press, 1984.
Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

In 1596 Luis de Carvajal Was Burned at the Stake for “Observing Jewish Practices”

(p. C1) It is perhaps the most significant artifact documenting the arrival of Jews in the New World: a small, tattered 16th-century manuscript written in an almost microscopic hand by Luis de Carvajal the Younger, the man whose life and pain it chronicled.
Until 1932, the 180-page booklet by de Carvajal, a secret Jew who was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in Spain’s colony of Mexico, resided in that country’s National Archives.
. . .
(p. C6) De Carvajal was a Jew who posed as Catholic in New Spain, now Mexico, during a period when the Inquisition ruthlessly persecuted heretics and false converts with deportation, imprisonment, torture and grisly public executions.
. . .
In 1596, after having been found guilty again of observing Jewish practices, he was burned at the stake. He was 30.

For the full story, see:
JOSEPH BERGER. “A Jewish Treasure in Fine Print.” The New York Times (Weds., JAN. 4, 2017): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 1, 2017, and has the title “A Secret Jew, the New World, a Lost Book: Mystery Solved.”)

Carvajal’s writings were translated into English and published in:
Carvajal, Luis de. The Enlightened; the Writings of Luis De Carvajal, El Mozo. Translated by Seymour B. Liebman. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1967.

Robert Conquest Documented the Millions Killed by Stalin

(p. A7) Mr. Conquest’s master work, “The Great Terror,” was the first detailed account of the Stalinist purges from 1937 to 1939. He estimated that under Stalin, 20 million people perished from famines, Soviet labor camps and executions–a toll that eclipsed that of the Holocaust. Writing at the height of the Cold War in 1968, when sources about the Soviet Union were scarce, Mr. Conquest was vilified by leftists who said he exaggerated the number of victims. When the Cold War ended and archives in Moscow were thrown open, his estimates proved high but more accurate than those of his critics.
. . .
Though Mr. Conquest’s body count was on the high end of estimates, he remained unwavering at the publication of “The Great Terror: A Reassessment,” a 1990 revision of his masterwork. When Mr. Conquest was asked for a new title for the updated book, his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis, proposed, “I Told You So, You F–ing Fools.”
. . .
He was also an enthusiastic crafter of limericks, a form in which his irreverence and flair for language flourished. One version of an often-quoted one reads:
There was a great Marxist named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
–That’s a lot to have done in,
But where he did one in
That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

For the full obituary, see:
BRENDA CRONIN and ALAN CULLISON. “Historian Exposed Stalin’s Reign of Terror.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Aug. 5, 2015): A7.
(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Aug. 4, 2015, and has the title “Robert Conquest, Seminal Historian of Soviet Misrule, Dies at 98.”)

The revised edition of Conquest’s master work, is:
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. 40th Anniversary ed. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2007.

Automation Raises Productivity, Consumer Spending, and Creates New Jobs

(p. B1) Since the 1970s, when automated teller machines arrived, the number of bank tellers in America has more than doubled. James Bessen, an economist who teaches at Boston University School of Law, points to that seeming paradox amid new concerns that automation is “stealing” human jobs. To the contrary, he says, jobs and automation often grow hand in hand.
Sometimes, of course, machines really do replace humans, as in agriculture and manufacturing, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology labor economist David Autor in a succinct and illuminating TED talk, which could have served as the headline for this column. Across an entire economy, however, Dr. Autor says that’s never happened.
. . .
(p. B4) . . . a long trail of empirical evidence shows that the increased productivity brought about by automation and invention ultimately leads to more wealth, cheaper goods, increased consumer spending power and ultimately, more jobs.
In the case of bank tellers, the spread of ATMs meant bank branches could be smaller, and therefore, cheaper. Banks opened more branches, and in total employed more tellers, Mr. Bessen says.

For the full commentary, see:
CHRISTOPHER MIMS. “KEYWORDS; Automation Actually Can Lead to More Job Creation.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Dec. 12, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 11, 2016, and has the title “KEYWORDS; Automation Can Actually Create More Jobs.”)

Bessen more fully presents his ATM example in his book:
Bessen, James. Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.

British Socialized Medicine Refused to Save Life of Critic Who Loved America

(p. A29) A. A. Gill, an essayist and cultural critic whose stylishly malicious restaurant reviews for The Sunday Times made him one of Britain’s most celebrated journalists, died on Saturday [December 7, 2016] in London. He was 62.
Martin Ivens, the editor of The Sunday Times, announced the death, calling Mr. Gill “the heart and soul of the paper.” The cause was lung cancer.
. . .
In a long article published Sunday [December 8, 2016], after his death, Mr. Gill wrote, without rancor, that Britain’s National Health Service had refused to pay for immunotherapy that he said might have extended his life.
. . .
As a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he dismissed the pâté at the beloved Paris bistro L’Ami Louis as tasting like “pressed liposuction.” The shrimp and foie gras dumplings at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Asian restaurant 66, in Manhattan, were “fishy liver-filled condoms,” he wrote, “with a savor that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital.”
Vituperation was not his only mode. He could praise. He could turn an elegant phrase and toss off a pithy bon mot. “America’s genius has always been to take something old, familiar and wrinkled and repackage it as new, exciting and smooth,” he wrote in “The Golden Door: Letters to America” (2012), published in the United States in 2013 as “To America With Love.”
. . .
“When people fatuously ask me why I don’t write constructive criticism, I tell them there is no such thing,” he wrote in his memoir. “Critics do deconstructive criticism. If you want compliments, phone your mother.”

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “A. A. Gill Dies at 62; Skewered Britain’s Restaurants.” The New York Times (Tues., DEC. 13, 2016): A29.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date DEC. 12, 2016, and has the title “A. A. Gill, Who Gleefully Skewered Britain’s Restaurants, Dies at 62.”)

Gill’s book praising America, is:
Gill, A.A. To America with Love. Reprint ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.