Category: Books

Dignity and Equality Before the Law Unleashes Creativity in the Poor

(p. A23) We can improve the conditions of the working class. Raising low productivity by enabling human creativity is what has mainly worked. By contrast, taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little — and anyway expropriation is a one-time trick.
. . .
Look at the astonishing improvements in China since 1978 and in India since 1991. Between them, the countries are home to about four out of every 10 humans. Even in the United States, real wages have continued to grow — if slowly — in recent decades, contrary to what you might have heard. Donald Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, and others who have looked beyond the superficial have shown that real wages are continuing to rise, thanks largely to major improvements in the quality of goods and services, and to nonwage benefits. Real purchasing power is double what it was in the fondly remembered 1950s — when many American children went to bed hungry.
What, then, caused this Great Enrichment?
Not exploitation of the poor, not investment, not existing institutions, but a mere idea, which the philosopher and economist Adam Smith called “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” In a word, it was liberalism, in the free-market European sense. Give masses of ordinary people equality before the law and equality of social dignity, and leave them alone, and it turns out that they become extraordinarily creative and energetic.

For the full commentary, see:
DEIRDRE N. McCLOSKEY. “Economic View; Equality, Liberty, Justice and Wealth.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., SEPT. 4, 2016): 6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date SEPT. 2, 2016, and has the title “Economic View; The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice.”)

McCloskey’s commentary, quoted above, is related to her book:
McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital, Transformed the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Intellectuals Embrace Despair

(p. A23) Public conversation is dominated by people’s ahistorical insistence that this country is sliding toward decline. As Arthur Herman writes in his book “The Idea of Decline in Western History,” “The sowing of despair and self-doubt has become so pervasive that we accept it as a normal intellectual stance — even when it is directly contradicted by our own reality.”

For the full commentary, see:
Brooks, David. “The Age of Reaction.” The New York Times (Tues., SEPT. 27, 2016): A23.

The book quoted in the above passage from the Brooks commentary, is:
Herman, Arthur. The Idea of Decline in Western History. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Do Manic Spells Help or Hurt Entrepreneurial Boldness?

(p. C1) In an author’s note, Mr. Kidder explains that “A Truck Full of Money” is a kind of sequel to “The Soul of a New Machine” (1981), his Pulitzer Prize-winner about the race to build a next-generation minicomputer. Fair enough: The writer is returning to his roots.
But a book about a software guy and software culture in 2016 isn’t nearly as novel as a book about hardware guys and hardware culture in 1981, and Mr. Kidder is not in the same command of his material.
. . .
(p. C4) There is, however, an element of Mr. English’s story that’s quite striking, one that makes “A Truck Full of Money” feel very much like a Tracy Kidder book.
In his 20s, Mr. English was told he had bipolar disorder. For a long time, he kept his diagnosis a secret. But today, he is wonderfully open and courageous about it.
Many of Mr. Kidder’s subjects are coiled with enough energy to launch a missile, of course, but Mr. English has a psychiatric diagnosis to go with it. The questions Mr. Kidder raises — Are Mr. English’s manic spells responsible for his entrepreneurial boldness? Or does he succeed in spite of them? — are well worth probing, and Mr. Kidder’s portrayal of living with manic depression is as nuanced and intimate as a reader might ever expect to get. On a good day, Mr. English’s mind is gaily swarming with bumblebees. On a bad one, though, he’s “Gulliver imprisoned by the tiny Lilliputians, laid out on his back, tied to the ground with a web of tiny ropes.”
Many of the features of Mr. English’s biography fit a familiar pattern. He was a low-achieving student with a high-watt intelligence. He discovered computer programming in middle school and was instantly smitten; today, he thinks fluently in layers of code — “each hanging from the one above, like a Calder mobile” — and his brain is a regular popcorn maker of ideas.
. . .
When he’s “on fire” (his term), he grows irritable with the slow dial-up connection of other people’s brains. He exaggerates. He slurs his words. His ideas range from extremely creative to flat-out wackadoo.
. . .
Over the years, Mr. English has tried a Lazy Susan of medications to subdue his highs and avert his lows. Many left him feeling listless and without affect. Being bipolar meant constantly weighing the merits of instability versus a denatured, drained sense of self.

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SENIOR. “Books of The Times; The Road from Mania to Wealth and Altruism.” The New York Times (Tues., SEPT. 13, 2016): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date SEPT. 12, 2016, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: ‘A Truck Full of Money’ and a Thirst to Put It to Good Use.”)

The book under review, is:
Kidder, Tracy. A Truck Full of Money: One Man’s Quest to Recover from Great Success. New York: Random House, 2016.

Kidder’s wonderful early book, is:
Kidder, Tracy. The Soul of a New Machine. 1st ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1981.

“The Stone Age Did Not Come to an End Because We Ran Out of Stone”

(p. A11) Far from recovering a sense of hopefulness during the relative peace of the 21st century, gloominess has become the default position of the intellectual classes in the Western world.
. . .
Ronald Bailey begs to differ. As his book demonstrates, a careful examination of the evidence shows that, at least in material terms (which is not unimportant, particularly for the world’s poor), life is getting better. The overriding reason for this, according to Mr. Bailey, is continuing technological progress, facilitated–and this is crucial–by the global triumph of market capitalism.
Among the scares examined by Mr. Bailey in “The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century” are overpopulation, the exhaustion of natural resources (particularly oil), the perils of biotechnology and genetic modification, and global warming.
. . .
No doubt the age of oil will one day come to an end. But as my old friend Saudi Arabia’s Sheikh Yamani used to point out, the Stone Age did not come to an end because we ran out of stone.
. . .
“The End of Doom” is not quite in the same class as Matt Ridley’s classic, “The Rational Optimist,” but it is a good book and deserves to be widely read.

For the full review, see:
NIGEL LAWSON. “BOOKSHELF; Apocalypse Later; Despite an explosion in population greater than Malthus could have ever imagined, global living standards are higher than ever.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 27, 2015): A11.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 27, 2015.)
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review, is:
Bailey, Ronald. The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015.

Is Asperger’s a Disease to Be Cured or “a Way of Being” to Be Celebrated?

(p. C1) . . . until eight years ago, Mr. Robison, who wrote the 2007 memoir “Look Me in the Eye,” a touchstone in the literature of Asperger’s syndrome, had never experienced the most obvious aspect of music that neurotypical people do: its simple emotional power.
That all changed, Mr. Robison explains in “Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening,” when he participated in a pioneering Asperger’s study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston in 2008. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, doctors hoped to activate neurological pathways in his brain that would deepen his emotional intelligence.
Driving home after his first session, Mr. Robison cranked up a song he’d heard countless times before. Before he knew it, tears were streaming down his face.
. . .
(p. C6) “Switched On” is subversive in more ways than one. In this age of heightened sensitivity to neurodiversity, one of the most uncomfortable notions you can raise about Asperger’s is that it can cruelly obscure the most basic elements of personality. The very idea is offensive and wounding to many people, because it frames a difference as a deficit; to wistfully suggest that a person with Asperger’s might be someone else without Asperger’s is to denature them completely, to wish their core identities into oblivion.
“Asperger’s is not a disease,” Mr. Robison wrote in “Look Me in the Eye.” “It’s a way of being. There is no cure, nor is there a need for one.”
In “Switched On,” Mr. Robison, 58, retains his Asperger’s pride. Part of him even fears he’ll lose his special gifts, on the (beguiling, I thought) theory that “perhaps the area that recognizes emotions in people was recognizing traits of machinery for me.”
But he is also torn. He did not come of age when “neurodiversity” was part of our vocabulary of difference. He did not come of age when “Asperger’s” was part of our vocabulary at all. He received his autism diagnosis at 40, and he has many memories of being bullied, losing jobs and mishandling social situations because of his inability to read others.
. . .
Mr. Robison still believes autism is not a disease. “But I also believed in being the best I could be,” he writes, “particularly by addressing the social blindness that had caused me the most pain throughout my life.”
But if the effects of Asperger’s can be mitigated, what consequences will that have? And what does it mean for the future of the neurodiversity movement?

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SENIOR. “Books of The Times; Tradeoffs to Easing Asperger’s Strong Grip.” The New York Times (Mon., MARCH 21, 2016): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MARCH 20, 2016, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: In ‘Switched On,’ John Elder Robison’s Asperger’s Brain Is Changed.”)

The book under review, is:
Robison, John Elder. Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2016.

Many Great Inventors Grew Up Poor and Had Little Education

(p. A13) Mr. Baker is good at pointing out the unanticipated consequences that arose from some inventions: Richard Jordon Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, a fearsome instrument of battlefield butchery still in use in some forms today, believed that his contribution would save lives–depending on which side of the gun you were on–because one man operating the weapon would reduce the need for other soldiers. The inventor who created television, Philo Farnsworth, believed that his device could bring about world peace. “If we were able to see people in other countries and learn about our differences, why would there be any misunderstandings?” he wrote. “War would be a thing of the past.” And you wouldn’t need the Gatling gun.
Like Farnsworth, many of the inventors in “America the Ingenious” came from impoverished upbringings and had little formal education. Walter Hunt, creator of the safety pin, was educated in a one-room schoolhouse but went on to invent scores of other items, including a device that allowed circus performers to walk upside-down on ceilings. Elisha Graves Otis, of Otis elevator fame, was a high-school dropout who, according to his son, Charles, “needed no assistance, asked no advice, consulted with no one, and never made much use of pen or pencil.” Of the innovators who undertook world-changing engineering feats, it is remarkable how often they brought them in under budget and ahead of schedule, among them the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam and New York’s Hudson and East River railroad tunnels.

For the full review, see:
PATRICK COOKE. “BOOKSHELF; The Character of Our Country; Copper-riveted jeans, the first oil rig, running shoes, dry cleaning and the 23-story-high clipper ship–as American as apple pie.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 5, 2016): A13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 4, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Baker, Kevin. America the Ingenious: How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants, and Tinkerers Changed the World. New York: Artisan, 2016.

When People’s Lives Stagnate They “Often Become Angry, Resentful”

(p. 3) Benjamin M. Friedman of Harvard University, in his book “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth” (Knopf, 2005), said that at a deep level people make judgments about the economic progress that they see in their own lifetimes, and in comparison with the progress made by the previous generation, especially their own parents. Few people study economic growth statistics. But nearly everyone knows what they are being paid. If they realize that they are doing less well than their forebears, they become anxious. And if they can’t see themselves and others in their cohort as progressing over a lifetime, their social interactions often become angry, resentful and even conspiratorial.

For the full commentary, see:
ROBERT J. SHILLER. “Economic View; Weak Economies Foment Ethnic Nationalism.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., OCT. 16, 2016): 3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 14, 2016, and has the title “Economic View; What’s Behind a Rise in Ethnic Nationalism? Maybe the Economy.”)

The Benjamin Friedman book mentioned in the commentary above, is:
Friedman, Benjamin M. The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Immigration Depresses Wages of Low-Wage Americans

(p. A11) Mr. Borjas is himself an immigrant, having at age 12 fled from Cuba to Miami with his widowed mother in 1962, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis shut down legal exits. As a labor economist, he has spent much of his academic career studying the effects of immigration on the American jobs market, often arguing that immigration depresses wages, or job opportunities, at the lower end of the scale. Here he notes that, on balance, the added production supplied by immigrants makes a modest contribution to U.S. economic growth. He generously provides readers with arguments on all sides, including Milton Friedman’s wry observation that illegal immigrants are of more net benefit to the American economy than legals because they make less use of welfare-state services.
. . .
After totting up the pluses and minuses, Mr. Borjas concludes that immigration has very little effect on the lives of most Americans. He does worry, however, that some future wave might bring along with it the “institutional, cultural and political baggage that may have hampered development in the poor countries” from which immigrants often come, and he sees a need for reforms.

For the full review, see:

GEORGE MELLOAN. “BOOKSHELF; The Immigration Debate We Need.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Oct. 19, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The book under review, is:
Borjas, George J. We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.

Let Individual Indians Own Land on Reservations

Mortgaging homes is a common way for entrepreneurs to provide initial funds for their startups. So our keeping individual Indians from owning land on reservations, cuts off their access to funds for entrepreneurship.
The commentary quoted below is related to a book edited by Anderson and contributed to by Regan.

(p. A13) . . . , Native Americans showed a remarkable ability to adapt to new goods and technology. Italian trade beads became an integral part of American Indian decoration and art. The Spanish horse transformed Plains Indian hunting and warfare.

Over centuries, however, these adaptations and innovations have been replaced by subjugation by the U.S. government. In 1831, Chief Justice John Marshall declared the Cherokees to be a “domestic dependent nation” and characterized the relationship of tribes to the U.S. as resembling “that of a ward to his guardian.” Marshall’s words were entrenched when Congress became trustee of all Indian lands and resources under the Dawes Act of 1887.
In recent decades, the government has paid lip service to “tribal sovereignty,” but in practice Native Americans have little autonomy. Tribes and individual Indians still cannot own their land on reservations. This means Native Americans cannot mortgage their assets for loans like other Americans, thus allowing them little or no access to credit. This makes it incredibly difficult to start a business in Indian Country. Even when tribes try to engage in economic activity, the feds impose mountains of regulations, all in the name of looking after Indian affairs.

For the full commentary, see:
TERRY L. ANDERSON and SHAWN REGAN. “It’s Time for the Feds to Get Out of Indian Country; A permit to develop energy resources requires 49 steps on tribal lands and just four steps off reservations.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 8, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 7, 2016.)

The book mentioned at the top of this entry, is:
Anderson, Terry L., ed. Unlocking the Wealth of Indian Nations. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2016.

Once Great A.&P. Was “Going Out of Business for a Long Time”

(p. 17) Linda Fisch stopped at the A.&P. on Riverdale Avenue in the Bronx on Thursday and bought eight prepackaged containers of cottage cheese and fruit. She did not realize the store had become a footnote to history.
That A.&P. is the last in New York City, where the once-mighty chain was born just before the Civil War. Now the company has filed for bankruptcy protection for the second time in five years. Once its plan for liquidating is approved, the store’s A.&P. signs will come down. And the A.&P. name will vanish from New York.
. . .
Once, A.&P. had no competition. It all but invented the grocery store in the 19th century, and in the 20th century, it reinvented itself as a low-price, cash-and-carry chain. Its thousands of stores were “so devoid of frills that they are simply machines for selling food,” according to “The Great Merchants,” a history of retailers and retailing published in 1974.
But it had been fading for years. In the mid-1980s, a former A.&P. executive published a book “The Rise and Decline of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company” even as A.&P. continued to expand, buying Waldbaum’s and the Food Emporium chain in New York City and the Farmer Jack chain in the Midwest. A.&P. acquired Pathmark in 2007 for $679 million in a deal that involved significant debt. It also operated Super Fresh and Food Basics stores.
. . .
It began as a sideline for a hide and leather importer, George H. Gilman. “At some point around 1859 or 1860, there’s no precise date, he started selling tea,” said Marc Levinson, a historian and the author of “The Great A.&P. and the Struggle for Small Business in America.” “In 1860 or 1861, he gave up on the leather business, gave it to his brother, and decided to go into business as a tea wholesaler. He leased a property on Front Street. It’s the area where most of the ships carrying tea would come in.”
Mr. Levinson said a Gilman employee, George Huntington Hartford, became involved in the new business. Some accounts say it was Hartford who proposed eliminating middlemen — and cutting prices to consumers. From its earliest years, the little tea company promised in advertisements, it would “do away with various profits and brokerages, cartages, storages, cooperage and waste, with the exception of a small commission paid for purchasing to our correspondents in Japan and China.”
. . .
“I grew up on Long Island and the A.&P. was the only supermarket in the town I grew up in, which was Lynbrook,” said Ms. Fisch, 71. “Of course that’s where we shopped. It was bright and it was clean, which is totally different from the one in Riverdale. It’s like it’s been going out of business for a long time.”

For the full story, see:
JAMES BARRON. “A.& P. Bankruptcy Means New York, Chain’s Birthplace, Will Lose Last Store.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., AUG. 2, 2015): 17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 1, 2015.)

The first book mentioned above, is:
Mahoney, Tom, and Leonard Sloane. The Great Merchants: America’s Foremost Retail Institutions and the People Who Made Them Great. Updated and Enlarged ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

The second book mentioned above, is:
Walsh, William I. The Rise and Decline of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company. Secaucas, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1986.

Levinson’s great book, mentioned above, is:
Levinson, Marc. The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.

Peter Thiel Asks “What Happened to the Future?”

(p. B4) Mr. Thiel has been an important player in Silicon Valley since the first dot-com boom, but he has recently taken on a much more public role. He was born in Germany and came to the United States as an infant when his father, a chemical engineer, found work here. He was raised in Silicon Valley and went to Stanford, where he developed the views in his first book, “The Diversity Myth,” about the multiculturalism debate on campuses, written with the entrepreneur David O. Sacks.
In 1998, Mr. Thiel helped found the online payments company PayPal, an immediate success. He was the first outside investor in Facebook. Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.7 billion. Last year, he became a part-time partner at Y Combinator, a loosely defined advisory position.
A handful of others in Silicon Valley have similar investing track records. Where Mr. Thiel really separates himself from his peers is his skepticism that Silicon Valley is building a better world for all. His investment firm, Founders Fund, used to begin its online manifesto with the complaint, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters,” a reference to Twitter. Now it says simply, “What happened to the future?”
San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington, D.C., are doing well, but the presidential campaign has laid bare the angst of many other places. Feelings of decline are rampant. “Most of the millennials have lower expectations than their baby boomer parents,” Mr. Thiel said. “Where I differ from others in Silicon Valley is in thinking that you can’t fence yourself off. If it continues, it will ultimately be bad for everybody.”

For the full story, see:
DAVID STREITFELD. “Peter Thiel, Contrarian Tech Billionaire, Defends His Support of Trump.” The New York Times (Mon., OCT. 31, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 29, 2016, and has the title “Peter Thiel Defends His Most Contrarian Move Yet: Supporting Trump.”)

The book mentioned above, that was co-authored by Thiel, is:
Sacks, David O., and Peter A. Thiel. The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford. Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 1995.