John O’Donnell interviewed me at 6 PM 11/8/19, about my book “Openness to Creative Destruction” on his weekly Friday show on Power Trading Radio. (In the screen capture above, Merlin Rothfeld is on the left and John O’Donnell is on the right.)
Category: Creative Destruction
Chapter 4 on “The Benefits–New Goods” for Free Until Nov. 8, 2019
Until November 8, 2019, Oxford University Press is making available for free Chapter 4 of Openness for Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. The chapter is “The Benefits: New Goods.” You can download it as a PDF, and then save it or print it, from:
Art Diamond Interviewed on the Small Business Advocate Radio Show
Yesterday morning, Jim Blasingame, the host of his nationally syndicated “The Small Business Advocate” radio show, interviewed me on issues related to my book Openness to Creative Destruction, and “A Disney Story for Young Socialists,” my Oct. 10 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. You can click on the links below to listen to each segment of the interview.
Hunter Hastings Posts “Professor Arthur Diamond on Sustaining Innovative Dynamism” Podcast to His “Economics for Entrepreneurs (E4E)”
The podcast episode “Professor Arthur Diamond on Sustaining Innovative Dynamism,” is also posted at the Mises Institute site: https://mises.org/library/professor-arthur-diamond-sustaining-innovative-dynamism
UNO MBA Blog Highlights Diamond’s Openness to Creative Destruction
As of 10/11/19, the URL for the entry was: https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-business-administration/mba/about-us/mba-blog.php
(My seminars on “Economics of Entrepreneurship” and “Economics of Technology” are electives in the MBA program, the economics masters program, and the undergraduate economics program.)
“A Disney Story for Young Socialists” Op-Ed in Wall Street Journal
My op-ed touches on a couple of the themes of my book Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. The URL for the online version of my op-ed piece is: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-disney-story-for-young-socialists-11570661652
Wright Stuff Op-Ed by Art Diamond Is Published in Davis Enterprise
My op-ed piece “When New Yorkers Cheered the Wright Stuff” has a message that is complementary to my book Openness to Creative Destruction.
Addendum: “When New Yorkers Cheered the Wright Stuff” was syndicated through InsideSources.com. To be best of my knowledge, it was run by three newspapers. Davis Enterprise. [California.] Sun., Sept. 22, 2019, p. B5; Findlay Courier. [Ohio.] Sat., Sept. 28, 2019, p. A4; Monroe News. [Michigan.], Tues., Oct. 1, 2019, p. 4A.
Firm Revives Cassette Tape Production
(p. A1) SPRINGFIELD, Mo.— Steve Stepp and his team of septuagenarian engineers are using a bag of rust, a kitchen mixer larger than a man and a 62-foot-long contraption that used to make magnetic strips for credit cards to avert a disaster that no one saw coming in the digital-music era.
The world is running out of cassette tape.
National Audio Co., where Mr. Stepp is president and co-owner, has been hoarding a stockpile of music-quality, ⅛-inch-wide magnetic tape from suppliers that shut down in the past 15 years after music lovers ditched cassettes. National Audio held on. Now, many musicians are clamoring for cassettes as a way to physically distribute their music.
The company says it has less than a year’s supply of tape left. So it is building the first manufacturing line for (p. A10) high-grade ferric oxide cassette tape in the U.S. in decades. If all goes well, the machine will churn out nearly 4 miles of tape a minute by January. And not just any tape. “The best tape ever made,” boasts Mr. Stepp, 69 years old. “People will hear a whole new product.” Continue reading “Firm Revives Cassette Tape Production”
Ryan Bourne Calls Openness to Creative Destruction Book “a New Tour De Force”
“Charging Scooters Is a Great Job for Independent-Minded Entrepreneurs”
(p. 1B) Downtown Omaha resident Rob Luhrs spends his early mornings and late nights hunting for scooters.
Luhrs, 41, is a “juicer” of Lime scooters (“Lime juicer” — get it?) who charges scooters and then sets them out again around town. He said he makes about $60 a day, seven days a week, doing the work. During the College World Series, he said, he was making between $80 and $90 a day.
Luhrs also is an instructor of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and a part-time real estate broker who works for a grocery delivery service. But he said he hopes to make charging scooters his primary source of income.
(p. 2B) “I want to work when I want to,” he said. “When I want to take a day off, I don’t want anybody complaining about it, and if I work extra hard, I want to get paid more. I can’t just go apply to somewhere and get that job.”
. . .
Luhrs said charging scooters is a great job for “independent-minded entrepreneurs.”
“For me personally, I’m willing to spend time during the day picking up scooters and make it a full-time gig,” he said. “I see other people out there, during the daytime, picking up scooters, so I know that they’re trying to make it a full-time gig, too.”
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jul 3, 2019, and has the title “Unorthodox working hours don’t steer Lime ‘juicer’ away from job charging scooters in Omaha.”)
Patenting a Better Vacuum Tube as Semiconductors Emerge
After his disappointing improved-vacuum-tube invention (see below), Kates did not give up. He went on to make important contributions in coordinating traffic lights to ease traffic flows.
(p. A9) When he demonstrated a computer tic-tac-toe game called Bertie the Brain in 1950, Josef Kates thought he was on the verge of making a fortune. The game, introduced at the Canadian National Exhibition, featured streamlined vacuum tubes invented by the Austrian-born Dr. Kates, who came to Canada in the 1940s as a refugee from Nazism. He hoped the tubes would revolutionize computing.
His timing was off. The rise of semiconductors was about to render vacuum tubes obsolete as computer components. “I got the patent, but the patent was useless,” he said in an oral history. “Okay, so on goes the world.”
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date July 27, 2018, and has the title “Josef Kates Found Ways to Unsnarl Traffic and Solve Business Problems With Computers.”)