Books – Page 96 – artdiamondblog.com

Edison Sold General Electric Shares to Keep His Lab and Mine Open

(p. 193) In 1902, at a time when General Electric shares were trading at a historic high and well after Edison had sold his, Mallory happened to be traveling with him and saw in the newspaper the eye-popping closing price. Edison asked what his stake would have been worth had he held on to it. Mallory quickly worked out the number: over $4 million. Hearing this, Edison remained silent, keeping a serious expression for about fifteen seconds. Then his face lit up and he said, “Well, it’s all gone, but we had a good time spending it.”
(p. 194) The story would be retold by Edison’s hagiographers many times. The evidence suggests that Edison did have a jolly time, which, to him, was well worth the $4 million.

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.

“Man Is Born Free, But He Is Everywhere in Cubicles”

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

(p. C21) I’ve spent about half my working life sitting in, and loathing, cubicles. You’ve probably spent years in one, too. About 60 percent of us work in cubicles, and 93 percent of us dislike them.
. . .
(p. C31) Mr. Saval describes the image we have of the cubicle today: “the flimsy, fabric-wrapped, half-exposed stall where the white-collar worker waited out his days until, at long last, he was laid off.”
. . .
When he discovers that half of Americans report that their bathrooms are larger than their cubicles, for example, he writes: “One wonders to what extent the extravagant growth of the American bathroom, and of the suburban home in general, is partly a reaction against the shrinking of cubicles, where the owners of those bathrooms spend so much of their time.”
. . .
Putting a spin on Rousseau, he says,
. . .
By the end of “Cubed,” the author is dropping in on Silicon Valley offices, where companies like Google cater to their employees’ every need, almost eliminating the distinction between work and leisure. Mr. Saval savors the fact that so many well-known Silicon Valley figures dropped out of college yet want their offices to resemble college campuses.

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “Books of The Times; The Office Space We Love to Hate.” The New York Times (Fri., APRIL 25, 2014): C21 & C31.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date APRIL 24, 2014.)

The book under review is:
Saval, Nikil. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. New York: Doubleday, 2014.

Edison Failed to Stop Film Projectors from Disrupting His Kinetoscope

Edison tried to kill film projection because he thought the whole country would only need 10 projectors, while they could sell a great many of the single-view kinetoscopes. But the wonderful twist to the story is that it DID NOT WORK because Edison could not stop the Lathams and others from coming forward and disrupting the kinetoscope.

(p. 205) The Lathams were not the only exhibitors frustrated with Edison’s kinetoscope, and the others urged Edison to introduce a projection machine. Edison was adamant: no. He reasoned that the peephole machines (p. 206) were selling well and at a good profit. The problem with projection was that it would work all too well–if he replaced the inefficient kinetoscope with projection systems that could serve up the show to everyone, “there will be a use for maybe about ten of them in the whole United States.” He concluded, “Let’s not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”

At Edison’s lab in Orange, without his boss’s approval, W. K. L. Dickson carried out research on film projection on his own and shared his findings with a friend who was a keen listener: Otway Latham. And when Dickson accepted an invitation to try a projection experiment in a physics laboratory at Columbia, who should show up but Otway’s father, Professor Latham. The Lathams made an offer to Dickson–come join us and we’ll give you a quarter-share interest in the business–but Dickson was unwilling to make the leap. When Edison got word of his fraternizing with the Lathams, however, and failed to reassure Dickson that he believed Dickson’s dealings had been perfectly honorable, Dickson felt he had no choice but to resign. The exact chronology of what he did and what he knew at various points preceding his resignation would be the subject of much litigation that followed. But regardless of intellectual-property issues, Edison lost the one person on his staff who would have been most valuable to him in developing a projection system.
The Lathams and Dickson had discovered that sending a bright light through a moving strip of film did not project satisfactorily because any given image did not absorb enough light before it sped on. The Lathams came up with a partial solution, which was to make the film wider, providing more area for the light to catch as each image went by. The projected images were about the size of a window and good enough to unveil publicly. Professor Latham gave a demonstration of his newly christened Pantoptikon to reporters in April 1895.

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.

Galeano Repudiates His Chávez-Endorsed Latin Leftist Classic

“Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, handing President Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America” in 2009.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) For more than 40 years, Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America” has been the canonical anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist and anti-American text in that region. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s populist president, even put a copy of the book, which he had called “a monument in our Latin American history,” in President Obama’s hands the first time they met. But now Mr. Galeano, a 73-year-old Uruguayan writer, has disavowed the book, saying that he was not qualified to tackle the subject and that it was badly written. . . .

” ‘Open Veins’ tried to be a book of political economy, but I didn’t yet have the necessary training or preparation,” Mr. Galeano said last month while answering questions at a book fair in Brazil, where he was being honored on the 43rd anniversary of the book’s publication. He added: “I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over. For me, this prose of the traditional left is extremely leaden, and my physique can’t tolerate it.”
. . .
(p. C6) In the United States, “Open Veins” has been widely taught on university campuses since the 1970s, in courses ranging from history and anthropology to economics and geography. But Mr. Galeano’s unexpected takedown of his own work has left scholars wondering how to deal with the book in class.
. . .
In the mid-1990s, three advocates of free-market policies — the Colombian writer and diplomat Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the exiled Cuban author Carlos Alberto Montaner and the Peruvian journalist and author Álvaro Vargas Llosa — reacted to Mr. Galeano with a polemic of their own, “Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.” They dismissed “Open Veins” as “the idiot’s bible,” and reduced its thesis to a single sentence: “We’re poor; it’s their fault.”
Mr. Montaner responded to Mr. Galeano’s recent remarks with a blog post titled “Galeano Corrects Himself and the Idiots Lose Their Bible.” In Brazil, Rodrigo Constantino, the author of “The Caviar Left,” took an even harsher tone, blaming Mr. Galeano’s analysis and prescription for many of Latin America’s ills. “He should feel really guilty for the damage he caused,” he wrote on his blog.

For the full story, see:
LARRY ROHTER. “Author Changes His Mind on ’70s Manifesto.” The New York Times (Sat., MAY 24, 2014): C1 & C6..
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MAY 23, 2014.)

The Vargas Llosa book mentioned above is:
Mendoza, Plinio Apuleyo, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Alvaro Vargas Llosa. Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot. Lanham, Maryland: Madison Books, 2000.

Source of book image:
http://img2.imagesbn.com/p/9781568332369_p0_v1_s260x420.JPG

When Labor Markets Are Flexible, Workers Need Not Fear New Technology

(p. 6) Driverless vehicles and drone aircraft are no longer science fiction, and over time, they may eliminate millions of transportation jobs. Many other examples of automatable jobs are discussed in “The Second Machine Age,” a book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and in my own book, “Average Is Over.” The upshot is that machines are often filling in for our smarts, not just for our brawn — and this trend is likely to grow.
How afraid should workers be of these new technologies? There is reason to be skeptical of the assumption that machines will leave humanity without jobs. After all, history has seen many waves of innovation and automation, and yet as recently as 2000, the rate of unemployment was a mere 4 percent. There are unlimited human wants, so there is always more work to be done. The economic theory of comparative advantage suggests that even unskilled workers can gain from selling their services, thereby liberating the more skilled workers for more productive tasks.
. . .
Labor markets just aren’t as flexible these days for workers, especially for men at the bottom end of the skills distribution.
. . .
Across the economy, a college degree is often demanded where a high school degree used to suffice.
. . .
The law is yet another source of labor market inflexibility: The number of jobs covered by occupational licensing continues to rise and is almost one-third of the work force. We don’t need such laws for, say, barbers or interior designers, although they are commonly on the books.
. . .
Many . . . labor market problems were brought on by the financial crisis and the collapse of market demand. But it would be a mistake to place all the blame on the business cycle. Before the crisis, for example, business executives and owners didn’t always know who their worst workers were, or didn’t want to engage in the disruptive act of rooting out and firing them. So long as sales were brisk, it was easier to let matters lie. But when money ran out, many businesses had to make the tough decisions — and the axes fell. The financial crisis thus accelerated what would have been a much slower process.
Subsequently, some would-be employers seem to have discriminated against workers who were laid off in the crash. These judgments weren’t always fair, but that stigma isn’t easily overcome, because a lot of employers in fact had reason to identify and fire their less productive workers.

For the full commentary, see:
TYLER COWEN. “Economic View; Automation Alone Isn’t Killing Jobs.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., APRIL 6, 2014): 6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 5, 2014.)

The Brynjolfsson and McAfee book mentioned is:
Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

The Cowen book that Cowen mentions is:
Cowen, Tyler. Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation. New York: Dutton Adult, 2013.

Young Inca Woman Was Probably Murdered

“The Incan mummy.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Hobbes famously wrote that for most of human existence, life has been “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Further evidence:

(p. D4) Scientists who have examined the mummy of a young Inca say that her death was most likely a homicide and that it was not because of Chagas disease, the tropical parasitic infection that she had.

For the full story, see:
“Observatory; A Verdict of Murder.” The New York Times (Tues., MARCH 4, 2014): D4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 3, 2014.)

The famous Hobbes quote can be found on p. 70 of:
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, Dover Philosophical Classics. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2006 [first published 1651].

In Bringing Us Electricity, Westinghouse Rejected the Precautionary Principle

(p. 180) The defensive position that Westinghouse found himself in is illustrated by the way he contradicted himself as he tried to defend overhead wires. The wires that were supposedly safe were also the same wires that he had to admit, yes, posed dangers, yes, but dangers of various kinds had to be accepted throughout the modern city. Westinghouse said, “If all things involving the use of power were to be prohibited because of the danger to life, then the cable cars, which have already killed and maimed a number of people, would have to be abolished.” Say good-bye to trains, too, he added, because of accidents at road crossings.

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.

Psychological Theorizing Based on False Facts

Source of book image:
http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/k/kitty-genovese/9780393239287_custom-113f9b45a7b76ac664f82c62c6604fd07d7ad5f9-s6-c30.jpg

(p. C7) The Kitty Genovese myth has turned out to be as enduring an urban legend as the tale of alligators prowling the New York sewers. In March 1964 the young Queens bar manager was stabbed to death at three in the morning outside her Kew Gardens apartment while 38 neighbors watched from their windows and did nothing to save her–or so the tale has gone for the past half-century.

In fact, hardly anything about the Genovese story is what it first appeared to be, although it has calcified into a metaphor of urban alienation and prompted research into a psychological phenomenon that has come to be known as the “Genovese syndrome.” As Kevin Cook writes in his heavily padded but provocative new book, “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America,” the tale is as much about the alchemy of journalism as urban pathology.
. . .
. . . , as it turns out, only a few neighbors understood the attack for what it was and failed to respond.
. . .
Journalism is a blunt instrument, and allowances must be made. Even so, it’s plain that the original story was more hype than first draft of history.

For the full review, see:
EDWARD KOSNER. “BOOKS; What the Neighbors Didn’t See; A woman was stabbed and raped steps from her door. Did no one call the police?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 1, 2014): C7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 28, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Kitty Genovese’ by Kevin Cook; A woman was stabbed and raped steps from her door. Did no one call the police?”)

The book under review is:
Cook, Kevin. Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2014.

Entrepreneurial Consumer J.P. Morgan “Handled Setbacks with Equanimity”

Schumpeter wrote that the entrepreneur is the one who overcomes obstacles to get the job done (1950, p. 132). Obstacles come in many forms. One of them is consumer resistance to change. So one key contributor to the technological progress is the “entrepreneurial consumer” who is willing to invest in new, buggy, possibly dangerous technologies at an early stage. (Paul Nodskov, a student in my spring 2014 Economics of Technology seminar suggested using the phrase “entrepreneurial consumer.”)
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that in contrast to Europeans, Americans were “restless in the midst of their prosperity” (2000 [first published 1835], Ch. 13). Perhaps even that early, America had more entrepreneurial consumers?

(p. 131) Morgan prized being ahead of everyone else, and the next year was concerned that his plant was already less than state of the art, a suspicion that was confirmed when he persuaded Edison to send Edward Johnson to the house for an evaluation. Johnson was instructed to upgrade the equipment and also to devise a way to provide an electric light that would sit on Morgan’s desk in his library. At a time when the very concept of an electrical outlet and detachable electrical appliances had yet to appear, this posed a significant challenge. Johnson’s solution was to run wires beneath the floor to metal plates that were installed in different places beneath the rugs. One of the legs of the desk was equipped with sharp metal prongs, designed to make contact with one of the plates when moved about the room.

In conception, it was clever; in implementation, it fell short of ideal. On the first evening when the light was turned on, there was a flash, followed by a fire that quickly engulfed the desk and spread across the rug before being put out. When Johnson was summoned to the house the next morning, he was shown into the library, where charred debris was piled in a heap. He expected that when Morgan appeared, he would angrily announce that the services of Edison Electric were no longer needed.
(p. 132) “Well?” Morgan stood in the doorway, with Mrs. Morgan standing behind him, signaling Johnson with a finger across her lips not to launch into elaborate explanations. Johnson cast a doleful eye at the disaster in the room and remained silent.
“Well, what are you going to do about it?” Morgan asked. Johnson said the fault was his own and that he would personally reinstall everything, ensuring that it would be done properly.
“All right. See that you do.” Morgan turned and left. The eager purchaser of first-generation technology handled setbacks with equanimity. “I hope that the Edison Company appreciates the value of my house as an experimental station,” he would later say. A new installation with second-generation equipment worked well, and Morgan held a reception for four hundred guests to show off his electric lights. The event led some guests to place their own orders for similar installations. Morgan also donated entire systems to St. George’s Church and to a private school, dispatching Johnson to oversee the installation as a surprise to the headmistress. The family biographer compared Morgan’s gifts of electrical power plants to his sending friends baskets of choice fruit.

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.

Schumpeter’s book is:
Schumpeter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. 3rd ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1950.

The other book I mention, is:
de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [first published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840].

Edison Genuinely Believed that AC Was More Dangerous than DC

(p. 174) In Edison’s view, . . . , Westinghouse did not pose a serious threat in the power-and-light business because he used the relatively more dangerous alternating current, certain to kill one of his own customers within six months.
Edison’s conviction that direct current was less dangerous than alternating current was based on hunch, however, not empirical scientific research. He, like others at the time, focused solely on voltage (the force that pushes electricity through a wire) without paying attention to amperage (the rate of flow of electricity), and thought it would be best to stay at 1,200 volts or less. Even he was not certain that his own system was completely safe–after all, he had elected to place wires in underground conduits, which was more expensive than stringing wires overhead but reduced the likelihood of electrical current touching a passerby. Burying the wires could not give him complete peace of mind, however. Privately, he told Edward Johnson that “we must look out for crosses [i.e., short-circuited wires] for if we ever kill a customer it would be a bad blow to the business.”

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.
(Note: ellipsis added, bracketed words in original.)

G.D.P. Is a Useful, But Biased Downward, Measure of Growth

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

(p. 6) Dr. Coyle concludes that while imperfect, the G.D.P. is good enough as a measure of how fast the economy is growing and better than any alternative. It is closely correlated with things that do contribute to happiness. (Nobody is happy in a recession.)

“We should not be in a rush to ditch G.D.P.,” Dr. Coyle writes. “Yet it is a measure of the economy best suited to an earlier era.”
For one thing, it fails to count the value of the staggering growth in consumer choice. Where once we had three television networks, we now have 1,000 channels; greater choice equals greater freedom, she declares. It does poorly in measuring the Internet economy, in which so many benefits — like Google searches — are offered free. It badly lags behind the headlong pace of innovation and creativity. It struggles with the true value of a host of products or services that didn’t exist before. To the degree that it misses those new benefits to consumers, it understates the pace of economic growth.

For the full review, see:
FRED ANDREWS. “Off the Shelf; An Economic Gauge, Imperfect but Vital.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., APRIL 6, 2014): 6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date APRIL 5, 2014.)

The book under review is:
Coyle, Diane. GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014.