Economics – Page 174 – artdiamondblog.com

Steve Jobs’ “Nasty Edge” Helped Him Create an Apple “Crammed with A Players”

(p. 565) . . . I think . . . [Jobs] actually could have controlled himself, if he had wanted. When he hurt people, it was not because he was lacking in emotional awareness. Quite the contrary: He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at will.
The nasty edge to his personality was not necessary. It hindered him more than it helped him. But it did, at times, serve a purpose. Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change. Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible. And he created a corporation crammed with A players.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipses and bracketed “Jobs” added.)

Entrepreneur Mackey Says Whole Foods Drops Prices as Larger Size Creates Economies of Scale

“John Mackey.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 16) In your new book, “Conscious Capitalism,” you write that Whole Foods sees its customers as its “most important stakeholders” and that the company is obsessed with their happiness. The biggest complaint I hear about Whole Foods is how expensive it is. Why not drop prices to make your customers happier?
People always complain about prices being too high. Whole Foods prices have dropped every year as we get to be larger and we have economies of scale. Also, people are not historically well informed about food prices. We’re only spending about 7 percent of our disposable personal income on food. Fifty years ago, it was nearly 16 percent.
. . .
In 2009, some Whole Foods customers organized boycotts after you wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal expressing opposition to Obama’s health care proposals. Do you wish you hadn’t written it?
No, I don’t. I regret that a lot of people didn’t actually read it and it got taken out of context. President Obama asked for ideas about health care reform, and I put my ideas out there. Whole Foods has a good health care plan. It’s not a solution to America’s health care problems, but it’s part of the solution.
So did you vote for Romney?
I did.
I imagine a certain percentage of Whole Foods customers will also boycott because of this.
I don’t know what to say except that I’m a capitalist, first. There are many things I don’t like about Romney, but more things I don’t like about Obama. This is America, and people disagree on things.

For the full interview, see:
Andrew Goldman, Interviewer. “TALK; The Kale King.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., January 20, 2013): 16.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original, indicating interviewer questions.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date January 18, 2013, and has the title “TALK; John Mackey, the Kale King.”)

Mackey’s book is:
Mackey, John, and Rajendra Sisodia. Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.

Higher Taxes Would Slow Creation of Entrepreneur Bronfein’s Time-Saving Medical Robotic Systems

(p. A11) . . . in Baltimore, . . . a local entrepreneur, following the logic of need, invested seven years and $30 million developing a robotic system for packaging prescription drugs for long-term patients in nursing homes and hospitals.
In a conversation last year, inventor Michael Bronfein told me if he’d known what it would cost him in time and money, he might never have started. How many entrepreneurs say the same? Probably all of them. But Mr. Bronfein saw a need and the power of technology to meet it, and the result was the Paxit automated medication dispensing system.
He saw workers spending hours under the old system sticking pills in monthly blister packs known as “bingo cards,” a process expensive and error-prone. He saw nurses on the receiving end then spending time to pluck the pills out of blister packs and into paper cups, to create the proper daily drug regimen for each patient.
. . .
He followed the economic logic that indicated that all the people involved in the old system were becoming too valuable to have their time wasted by the old system. Backed by his company, Remedi SeniorCare, Paxit–in which a robot packages, labels and dispatches a daily round of medicines for each patient–is spreading across the mid-Atlantic and Midwest and winning plaudits from medical-care providers.
. . .
We need to preserve the incentive for investors to bring us the robots that will make the future bearable, rather than burying entrepreneurs in taxes in a vain attempt to seize the returns of investments before those investments are made.

For the full commentary, see:
Jenkins, HOLMAN W., JR. “BUSINESS WORLD; Robots to the Rescue? The flip side of an entitlements crisis is a labor shortage.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., January 9, 2013): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 8, 2013.)

IKEA Says Government Bureaucracy Slows Job Creation

“The economy ‘will remain challenging for a long time,’ says IKEA Chief Executive Mikael Ohlsson.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B3) MALMO, Sweden–IKEA is poised to embark on a global spending spree, but its departing chief executive says red tape is slowing how fast the home-furnishings retailer can open its pocket book.

With the company set to report record sales on Wednesday, CEO Mikael Ohlsson said the amount of time it takes to open a store has roughly doubled in recent years.
“What some years ago took two to three years, now takes four to six years. And we also see that there’s a lot of hidden obstacles in different markets and also within the [European Union] that’s holding us back,” he said in an interview recently at an IKEA store on Sweden’s western coast.
. . .
IKEA plans to invest €2 billion in stores, factories and renewable energy this year. But the company fell €1 billion short of its goal of investing €3 billion in new projects last year, largely because of bureaucratic obstacles, he said. For 10 years IKEA has tried unsuccessfully to relocate a store in France, for example. The company also is challenging German policy dictating what can be sold and where, saying the rules are out of sync with EU legislation.
“It’s a pity, because it can help create jobs and investments at a time when unemployment is high in many countries,” Mr. Ohlsson said. A new IKEA store creates construction and store jobs for about 1,000 workers, he said.
. . .
The company’s highest-profile headaches have come in India, an untapped market where IKEA wants to open a first store in at least five years and roll out an additional three soon thereafter.

For the full story, see:
ANNA MOLIN. “IKEA Chief Takes Aim at Red Tape.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., January 23, 2013): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 22, 2013.)

Behavioral Economists and Psychologists Pledged to Keep Silent on Their Advice to Re-Elect Obama

(p. D1) Late last year Matthew Barzun, an official with the Obama campaign, called Craig Fox, a psychologist in Los Angeles, and invited him to a political planning meeting in Chicago, according to two people who attended the session.
“He said, ‘Bring the whole group; let’s hear what you have to say,’ ” recalled Dr. Fox, a behavioral economist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
So began an effort by a team of social scientists to help their favored candidate in the 2012 presidential election. Some members of the team had consulted with the Obama campaign in the 2008 cycle, but the meeting in January signaled a different direction.
“The culture of the campaign had changed,” Dr. Fox said. “Before then I felt like we had to sell ourselves; this time there was a real hunger for our ideas.”
. . .
(p. D6) When asked about the outside psychologists, the Obama campaign would neither confirm nor deny a relationship with them.
. . .
For their part, consortium members said they did nothing more than pass on research-based ideas, in e-mails and conference calls. They said they could talk only in general terms about the research, because they had signed nondisclosure agreements with the campaign.
In addition to Dr. Fox, the consortium included Susan T. Fiske of Princeton University; Samuel L. Popkin of the University of California, San Diego; Robert Cialdini, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University; Richard H. Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago’s business school; and Michael Morris, a psychologist at Columbia.
“A kind of dream team, in my opinion,” Dr. Fox said.

For the full story, see:
BENEDICT CAREY. “Academic ‘Dream Team’ Helped Obama’s Effort.” The New York Times (Tues., November 13, 2012): D1 & D6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 12, 2012.)

The War on Drugs Likely “Increased the Rate of Addiction”

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ commentary quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971. The expectation then was that drug trafficking in the United States could be greatly reduced in a short time through federal policing–and yet the war on drugs continues to this day. The cost has been large in terms of lives, money and the well-being of many Americans, especially the poor and less educated. By most accounts, the gains from the war have been modest at best.

The direct monetary cost to American taxpayers of the war on drugs includes spending on police, the court personnel used to try drug users and traffickers, and the guards and other resources spent on imprisoning and punishing those convicted of drug offenses. Total current spending is estimated at over $40 billion a year.
These costs don’t include many other harmful effects of the war on drugs that are difficult to quantify. For example, over the past 40 years the fraction of students who have dropped out of American high schools has remained large, at about 25%. Dropout rates are not high for middle-class white children, but they are very high for black and Hispanic children living in poor neighborhoods. Many factors explain the high dropout rates, especially bad schools and weak family support. But another important factor in inner-city neighborhoods is the temptation to drop out of school in order to profit from the drug trade.
The total number of persons incarcerated in state and federal prisons in the U.S. has grown from 330,000 in 1980 to about 1.6 million today. Much of the increase in this population is directly due to the war on drugs and the severe punishment for persons convicted of drug trafficking. About 50% of the inmates in federal prisons and 20% of those in state prisons have been convicted of either selling or using drugs. The many minor drug traffickers and drug users who spend time in jail find fewer opportunities for legal employment after they get out of prison, and they develop better skills at criminal activities.
. . .
(p. C2) It is generally harder to break an addiction to illegal goods, like drugs. Drug addicts may be leery of going to clinics or to nonprofit “drugs anonymous” groups for help. They fear they will be reported for consuming illegal substances. Since the consumption of illegal drugs must be hidden to avoid arrest and conviction, many drug consumers must alter their lives in order to avoid detection.
Usually overlooked in discussions of the effects of the war on drugs is that the illegality of drugs stunts the development of ways to help drug addicts, such as the drug equivalent of nicotine patches. Thus, though the war on drugs may well have induced lower drug use through higher prices, it has likely also increased the rate of addiction. The illegality of drugs makes it harder for addicts to get help in breaking their addictions. It leads them to associate more with other addicts and less with people who might help them quit.
. . .
The decriminalization of both drug use and the drug market won’t be attained easily, as there is powerful opposition to each of them. The disastrous effects of the American war on drugs are becoming more apparent, however, not only in the U.S. but beyond its borders. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon has suggested “market solutions” as one alternative to the problem. Perhaps the combined efforts of leaders in different countries can succeed in making a big enough push toward finally ending this long, enormously destructive policy experiment.

For the full commentary, see:
GARY S. BECKER and KEVIN M. MURPHY. “Have We Lost the War on Drugs? After more than four decades of a failed experiment, the human cost has become too high. It is time to consider the decriminalization of drug use and the drug market.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., January 5, 2013): C1 & C2.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date January 4, 2013.)

Apple’s Corporate Culture Under Jobs: “Accountability Is Strictly Enforced”

(p. 531) In theory, you could go to your iPhone or any computer and access all aspects of your digital life. There was, however, a big problem: The service, to use Jobs’s terminology, sucked. It was complex, devices didn’t sync well, and email and other data got lost randomly in the ether. “Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed to Be Reliable,” was the headline on Walt Mossberg’s review in the Wall Street Journal.
Jobs was furious. He gathered the MobileMe team in the auditorium on the Apple campus, stood onstage, and asked, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” After the team members offered their answers, Jobs shot back: “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” Over the next half hour he continued to berate them. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he said. You should hate each other for having let each other down. Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.” In front of the whole audience, he got rid of the leader of the MobileMe team and replaced him with Eddy Cue, who oversaw all Internet content at Apple. As Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky reported in a dissection of the Apple corporate culture, “Accountability is strictly enforced.”

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Is America Moving Toward a Less Upwardly Mobile Future?

Source of book image: http://catholicexchange.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Coming-Apart.jpg

(p. C6) The future as described by Charles Murray in “Coming Apart” is bleak enough to have been imagined by George Orwell. Unfortunately, “Coming Apart” is nonfiction, meticulously documented and depressingly real. Mr. Murray examines America as it moves away from an upwardly mobile, socially mobile country with shared purpose and shared identities to a country dividing into two isolated and disparate camps.

For the full review essay, see:
Jeb Bush (author of passage quoted above, one of 50 contributors to whole article). “Twelve Months of Reading; We asked 50 of our friends to tell us what books they enjoyed in 2012–from Judd Apatow’s big plans to Bruce Wagner’s addictions. See pages C10 and C11 for the Journal’s own Top Ten lists.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 15, 2012): passim (Bush’s contribution is on p. C6).
(Note: the online version of the review essay has the date December 14, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Murray, Charles. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. New York: Crown Forum, 2012.

Ending College Affirmative Action Would Only Cause Minor Lowering in Black Admissions

(p. 113) This research examines the determinants of the match between high school seniors and postsecondary institutions in the United States. I model college application decisions as a nonsequential search problem and specify a unified structural model of college application, admission, and matriculation decisions that are all functions of unobservable individual heterogeneity. The results indicate that black and Hispanic representation at all 4-year colleges is predicted to decline modestly–by 2%–if race-neutral college admissions policies are mandated nationwide. However, race-neutral admissions are predicted to decrease minority representation at the most selective 4-year institutions by 10%.

Source of abstract:
Howell, Jessica S. “Assessing the Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in Higher Education.” Journal of Labor Economics 28, no. 1 (January 2010): 113-66.

“Rome’s Rise Is a Story of Economic Growth, Not Divine Intervention or Native Virtue”

(p. C7) In chronicling the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon declared that “if a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” Gibbon himself elegantly narrated how happiness and prosperity withered after this flowering between 96 and 180 A.D. But what about the near-millennium of Roman history that came before? “What was it,” as Anthony Everitt asks in “The Rise of Rome,” “that enabled a small Italian market town by a ford on the river Tiber to conquer the known world” and thereby made Gibbon’s golden years possible?
. . .
Most of that economic activity, whether it developed autonomously as a result of lower costs or was driven by the coercive rule of the state, was catalyzed by the Mediterranean, with which even the sophisticated Roman road network could not compete. Yet in the period from the middle of the third century B.C. to the middle of the first, Mr. Everitt, following his literary sources, directs our attention to Hamilcar, the Carthaginian general; and to Hannibal, his hot-tempered son, leading elephants first across the Pyrenees and then the Alps. Both are important, and, had they not been defeated, Rome would have had a very short “rise” indeed. But the real action was on the Mediterranean. As the number of shipwrecks datable to these years attests, it was being crossed by trading vessels with a frequency never yet seen and never again matched–including the halcyon years hymned by Gibbon.
Sometimes the data can preserve an astonishingly precise record of a trade route. For example, storage containers–probably for wine–salvaged from the spectacular wrecks at Grand Congloué, off Marseilles, bear the stamp “SES.” Archaeologists have confidently linked this mark with a certain Sestius, who must have manufactured the wares at the villa we know he owned in southwestern Tuscany, no mean distance away.
When the shipwreck data, which suggest increased economic activity, are considered alongside the population contraction that Rome suffered in its bloody military campaigns, a tentative but rich answer to Mr. Everitt’s question begins to emerge: Rome’s rise is a story of economic growth, not divine intervention or native virtue. And although even this account, like all our conclusions about the distant past, must be provisional, it is at least anchored in an empirical model of how income gains from trade and lowered transaction costs were not swallowed up by an ever-expanding population.

For the full review, see:
BRENDAN BOYLE. “BOOKSHELF; The Economy of Empire; The rise of the world’s greatest empire is as much a story of shipping and markets as of divine providence and individual virtue.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., September 22, 2012): C7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated September 21, 2012.)

Social Scientists Prefer Articles that Contain Bogus Math

Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A2) . . . research has shown that even those who should be especially clear-sighted about numbers–scientific researchers, for example, and those who review their work for publication–are often uncomfortable with, and credulous about, mathematical material. As a result, some research that finds its way into respected journals–and ends up being reported in the popular press–is flawed.

In the latest study, Kimmo Eriksson, a mathematician and researcher of social psychology at Sweden’s Mälardalen University, chose two abstracts from papers published in research journals, one in evolutionary anthropology and one in sociology. He gave them to 200 people to rate for quality–with one twist. At random, one of the two abstracts received an additional sentence, the one above with the math equation, which he pulled from an unrelated paper in psychology. The study’s 200 participants all had master’s or doctoral degrees. Those with degrees in math, science or technology rated the abstract with the tacked-on sentence as slightly lower-quality than the other. But participants with degrees in humanities, social science or other fields preferred the one with the bogus math, with some rating it much more highly on a scale of 0 to 100.
“Math makes a research paper look solid, but the real science lies not in math but in trying one’s utmost to understand the real workings of the world,” Prof. Eriksson said.

For the full story, see:
CARL BIALIK. “THE NUMBERS GUY; Don’t Let Math Pull the Wool Over Your Eyes.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., January 5, 2013): A2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 4, 2013,)

A pdf of Eriksson’s published article can be downloaded from:
Eriksson, Kimmo. “The Nonsense Math Effect.” Judgment and Decision Making 7, no. 6 (November 2012): 746-49.