Category: Economics

The “Miracle Machines” of Farming

(p. 75) Nobody had washing machines, vacuum cleaners, or incandescent light bulbs. But the farmers did have their miracle machines. In fifteen years, the Lucas family had gone from a walking plow pulled along behind a mule, to a riding plow, in which horses carried the blade through the soil, to a fine-tuned internal combustion plow.
“Machinery is the new Messiah,” said Henry Ford, and though that sounded blasphemous to a devout sodbuster, there was something to it. Every ten seconds a new car came off Ford’s factory line, and some of them were now parked next to dugouts in No Man’s Land.

Source:
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Marxist Chinese Education Minister Bans “Western Values” from Textbooks and Lectures

(p. D8) This week [the week starting Sun. January 25, 2015], China’s ideological drive against Western liberal ideas broadened to take in a new target: foreign textbooks.
Meeting in Beijing with the leaders of several prominent universities, Education Minister Yuan Guiren laid out new rules restricting the use of Western textbooks and banning those sowing “Western values.”
“Strengthen management of the use of original Western teaching materials,” Mr. Yuan said at a meeting with university officials, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. “By no means allow teaching materials that disseminate Western values in our classrooms.”
The strictures on textbooks are the latest of a succession of measures to strengthen the Communist Party’s control of intellectual life and eradicate avenues for spreading ideas about rule of law, liberal democracy and civil society that it regards as dangerous contagions, which could undermine its hold on power.
On Jan. 19, the leadership issued guidelines demanding that universities make a priority of ideological loyalty to the party, Marxism and Mr. Xi’s ideas.
Mr. Yuan’s message this week spelled out how universities should do that.
“Never allow statements that attack and slander party leaders and malign socialism to be heard in classrooms,” he said, according to the Xinhua report. “Never allow teachers to grumble and vent in the classroom, passing on their unhealthy emotions to students.”

For the full story, see:
CHRIS BUCKLEY. “China Warns Against ‘Western Values’ in Imported Textbooks.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 31, 2015): A9.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed words, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 30, 2015.)

“Valuable Things Should Be Paid For . . . Music Should Not Be Free”

(p. R10) Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.

For the full commentary, see:
Swift, Taylor. “WSJ 125 (A Special Report): Music — it’s Too Soon to Write Off the Album: Yes, Musicians Aren’t Selling as Many of them; but Taylor Swift Argues that the Best Artists Will always Find Ways to Break through to the Audience.” Wall Street Journal (Tues., July 8, 2014): R10.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 7, 2014, and has the title “For Taylor Swift, the Future of Music Is a Love Story.”)

Ezra Pound, a Major Literary Figure of the 20th Century, “Loved the Movies of Walt Disney”

(p. C5) “Mussolini asked,” in A. David Moody ‘s retelling, “what was his aim in writing The Cantos, and Pound replied, ‘to put my ideas in order’; and Mussolini said, ‘What do you want to do that for?’ ” When the poet turned from this dismissal to economic policy, which had lately become the central obsession of his life, the dictator was unimpressed by Pound’s list of 18 proposals, alighting particularly on his assertion that “in the Fascist state taxes were no longer necessary”: “Have to think about THAT,” Mussolini said and ended the interview. To the fascist dictator, Pound, by any measure one of the 20th century’s major literary figures, merited hardly more bother than a fly.
. . .
(p. C7) . . . he was not always an elitist. He loved the movies of Walt Disney, . . .

For the full review, see:
DAVID MASON. “The Makers of Modernism; Pound’s generous spirit looms over 20th-century literature, and in the early years his megalomania seemed harmless.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 6, 2014): C5 & C7.
(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 5, 2014, and has the title “The Tragic Hero of Literary Modernism; Ezra Pound’s generous spirit looms over 20th-century literature, and in the early years his megalomania seemed harmless.” The first part of the title in the print version was intended to cover both the review of the Pound biography and an accompanying review of a biography of the writer and publisher James Laughlin.)

The book under review is:
Moody, A. David. Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Lower Cost LEDs Will Reduce Light Prices, and Increase Quantity Consumed (Yes, Virginia, There Really Is a Law of Demand)

(p. A29) The growing evidence that low-cost efficiency often leads to faster energy growth was recently considered by both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency. They concluded that energy savings associated with new, more energy efficient technologies were likely to result in significant “rebounds,” or increases, in energy consumption. This means that very significant percentages of energy savings will be lost to increased energy consumption.
. . .
That’s not a bad thing. Most people in the world, still struggling to achieve modern living standards, need to consume more energy, not less. Cheap LED and other more efficient energy technologies will be overwhelmingly positive for people and economies all over the world.

For the full commentary, see:
MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER and TED NORDHAUS. “The Problem With Energy Efficiency.” The New York Times (Thurs., OCT. 9, 2014): A29.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 8, 2014.)

“It Is the Individual Who Is the Agent of the Action”

(p. C6) Mr. Mischel begins by describing how, in the late 1960s, he and his colleagues devised a straightforward experiment to measure self-control at the Bing Nursery School at Stanford University. In its simplest form, children between the ages of 4 and 6 were given a choice between one marshmallow now or two marshmallows if they waited 15 minutes. Some kids ate the marshmallow right away, but most would engage in unintentionally hilarious attempts to overcome temptation.
. . . About a third of the original subjects, the researchers reported, deferred gratification long enough to get the second treat.
. . . in 2006, . . . Mr. Mischel published a new paper in the prestigious journal Psychological Science. The researchers had done a follow-up study with the students they had tested 40 years before, examining the sort of adults they had grown into. They found that the children who were able to delay gratification had higher SAT scores entering college, higher grade-point averages at the end of college and made more money after college. Perhaps not surprisingly, they also tended to have a lower body-mass index.
. . .
In his commencement address, Adm. McRaven explained his final life lesson with an anecdote: “In SEAL training there is a bell,” he explained. “A brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see. All you have to do to quit–is ring the bell. Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at 5 o’clock. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the freezing cold swims. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT–and you no longer have to endure the hardships of training. Just ring the bell.” To ring the bell is to give up.
Interestingly, one of Mr. Mischel’s lesser-known marshmallow experiments had a similar setup, with a bell that the children could ring to call back the experimenter and save them from themselves. For the children, though, ringing the bell was not giving up but calling in the cavalry. His book is an encouraging reminder that, despite all the factors that urge us to indulge, “at the end of that causal chain, it is the individual who is the agent of the action and decides when to ring the bell.” You are ultimately in control of your self.

For the full review, see:
MICHAEL SHERMER. “Willpower and Won’t Power; To resist the tempting treat, kids looked away, squirmed, sang or simply pretended to take a bite.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 20, 2014): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 19, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘The Marshmallow Test’ by Walter Mischel; To resist the tempting treat, kids looked away, squirmed, sang or simply pretended to take a bite.”)

The book under review is:
Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.

As with Airplanes, Lives Must Be Risked to Achieve Routine Safety in Spaceships

(p. A21) SEATTLE — ONE clear winter day in 1909, in Hampshire, England, a young man named Geoffrey de Havilland took off in a twin-propeller motorized flying machine of his own design, built of wood, piano wire and stiff linen hand-stitched by his wife. The launch was flawless, and soon he had an exhilarating sensation of climbing almost straight upward toward the brilliant blue sky. But he soon realized he was in terrible trouble.
The angle of ascent was unsustainable, and moments later de Havilland’s experimental plane crashed, breaking apart into a tangled mass of shards, splinters and torn fabric, lethal detritus that could easily have killed him even if the impact of smashing into the ground did not. Somehow, he survived and Sir Geoffrey — he was ultimately knighted as one of the world’s great aviation pioneers — went on to build an astonishing array of military and civilian aircraft, including the world’s first jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet.
I thought immediately of de Havilland on Friday when I heard that Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, a rocket-powered vehicle designed to take well-heeled tourists to the edge of space, had crashed on a flight over the Mojave Desert, killing one test pilot and seriously injuring the other.
. . .
Certainly the Wright brothers and others like de Havilland were involved in what we now view as an epic quest, but many experts of the day were certain that flight, however interesting, was destined to be not much more than a rich man’s hobby with no practical value.
“The public has greatly over-estimated the possibilities of the aeroplane, imagining that in another generation they will be able to fly over to London in a day,” said a Harvard expert in 1908. “This is manifestly impossible.” Two other professors patiently explained that while laymen might think that “because a machine will carry two people another may be constructed that will carry a dozen,” in fact “those who make this contention do not understand the theory of weight sustentation in the air.”
. . .
There will be tragedies like the crash of SpaceShipTwo and nonlethal setbacks such as the fiery explosion, also last week, of a remote-controlled rocket intended for a resupply mission to the International Space Station. There will be debates about how to improve regulation without stifling innovation. Some will say private industry can’t do the job — though it’s not as if the NASA-sponsored Apollo or space shuttle missions went off without a hitch (far from it, sadly).
But at the heart of the enterprise there will always be obsessives like Sir Geoffrey, who forged ahead with his life’s work of building airplanes despite his own crash and, incredibly, the deaths of two of his three sons while piloting de Havilland aircraft, one in an attempt to break the sound barrier. Getting to routine safety aloft claimed many lives along the way, and a hundred years from now people will agree that in that regard, at least, spaceships are no different from airplanes.

For the full commentary, see:
SAM HOWE VERHOVEK. “Not a Flight of Fancy.” The New York Times (Tues., NOV. 4, 2014): A21.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 3, 2014.)

Obamacare Advisor Says Obscure Law Passed Due to “Stupidity of the American Voter”

(p. A4) Jonathan Gruber, the economist at the heart of a fresh debate about the Affordable Care Act, has had more than a dozen appointments to visit the White House since Democrats began drafting the health law in 2009, records show.
The visits included at least one group meeting with President Barack Obama , as well as appointments with senior administration officials who helped shape the 2010 law that expanded health insurance to millions of Americans.
The White House in recent days has tried to distance itself from Mr. Gruber, a 49-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, since a 2013 video surfaced last week in which he said the law passed because of the “huge political advantage” of the legislation’s lacking transparency. He also referred to the “stupidity of the American voter.”
Republicans have seized on the comments as evidence that supporters of the law purposely misled the public about its costs.
“It is amusing to watch Washington liberals discount Mr. Gruber’s truth-telling as a gaffe and disown” his involvement in the law, said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah).

For the full story, see:
STEPHANIE ARMOUR and COLLEEN MCCAIN NELSON. “Health Adviser Gruber Logged Regular White House Visits.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Nov. 18, 2014): A4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 17, 2014.)

Leading Computability Expert Says Humans Can Do What Computers Cannot

(p. B4) What does Turing’s research tell us?
“There is some scientific basis for the view that humans are doing something that a machine isn’t doing–and that we don’t even want our machine to do,” says S. Barry Cooper, a mathematician at Leeds and the foremost scholar of Turing’s work.
The math behind this is deep, but here’s the short version: Humans seem to be able to decide the validity of statements that should stump us, were we strictly computers as Turing described them. And since all modern computers are of the sort Turing described, well, it seems that we’ve won the race against the machines before it’s even begun.
. . .
The future of technology isn’t about replacing humans with machines, says Prof. Cooper–it’s about figuring out the most productive way for the two to collaborate. In a real and inescapable way, our machines need us just as much as we need them.

For the full commentary, see:
Mims, Christopher. “KEYWORDS; Why Humans Needn’t Fear the Machines All Around Us; Turing’s Heirs Realize a Basic Truth: The Machines We Create Are Not, Indeed Cannot Be, Replacements for Humans.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., DEC. 1, 2014): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 30, 2014, and has the title “KEYWORDS; Why We Needn’t Fear the Machines; A Basic Truth: Computers Can’t Be Replacements for Humans.”)

One of the major books by the Turing and computability expert quoted in the passages above, is:
Cooper, S. Barry. Computability Theory, Chapman Hall/CRC Mathematics Series. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman and Hall/CRC Mathematics, 2003.

Bezos Devices Aim to Create a Virtuous Cycle ‘Flywheel’

(p. B1) Amazon now makes four different kinds of devices. There are dedicated e-readers, multipurpose tablets and, starting this year, a TV streaming device and a smartphone, the Fire Phone. Just this week, Amazon introduced another streaming machine, the Fire TV Stick, a $39 gadget that is the size of a USB stick and promises to turn your television into an Amazon-powered video service.
. . .
(p. B9) What is Amazon’s endgame with all these devices? Mr. Bezos has always said that his mission, with hardware, is to delight users with devices that are priced fairly. The devices also contribute to Mr. Bezos’s famous “flywheel,” the virtuous cycle by which greater customer satisfaction leads to more sellers in his store, which leads to more products, greater efficiencies, lower prices and, in turn, more customers.
“Everything is about getting that flywheel spinning, and it isn’t necessarily about building a big and successful tablet business of their own,” said Benedict Evans, an analyst who works at the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz and has studied Amazon closely. “Whether they actually drive meaningful commerce isn’t entirely clear, but Amazon is rigorously focused on data, so if they’re doing it, you can trust that there must be data that justifies it.”
And if this year’s devices don’t take off, you can bet that Mr. Bezos will try a slightly different tack next year.

For the full commentary, see:
Farhad Manjoo. “STATE OF THE ART; Amazon’s Grand Design for Devices.” The New York Times (Thurs., OCT. 30, 2014): B1 & B9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 29, 2014, and has the title “STATE OF THE ART; Amazon’s Grand Design in Devices.”)

Bezos’s enthusiasm for Jim Collins’s “flywheel” idea is discussed in:
Stone, Brad. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

Solution to Problems of Retirement: Don’t Retire

(p. A13) Unsurprisingly, one response to the retirement challenge is: Don’t do it. Not, at least, until you really must. As Mr. Farrell argues (with plenty of supporting evidence), there is no magic element of personal doom attached to one’s 65th birthday or whatever age is believed to separate honest labor from a twilight of idleness. If you like what you do well enough, can perform your tasks competently and could use the income, why not keep working? The satisfactions of work are too often unrecognized in the popular imagination. Without it, a lot people wouldn’t know what to do.
And the longer you work, of course, the more money you will have when you eventually do retire, a strategy that works to the good of society too, since your paychecks will be contributing to FICA and will help keep the system running.

For the full review, see:
GEOFFREY NORMAN. “BOOKSHELF; Second Acts After 65; People who could be playing golf and doting on their grandchildren are starting businesses. One senior launched a coffee house in Detroit.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Sept. 24, 2014): A13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 23, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Unretirement’ by Chris Farrell; People who could be playing golf and doting on their grandchildren are starting businesses. One senior launched a coffee house in Detroit.”)

The book under review is:
Farrell, Chris. Unretirement: How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Think About Work, Community, and the Good Life. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.