Category: Entrepreneurship

New Technology Creates More Jobs Than It Destroys

(p. 3) The pessimist’s basic mistake is to focus too much on what is lost to competition and technology, and too little on what is gained. Over the past 25 years, as McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, has pointed out, about a third of the new jobs created in the United States were types that did not exist or barely existed 25 years ago.

. . .

In New York City the car replaced the horse carriage within the first 15 years of the 20th century, killing off the carriage trade and giving birth to the taxi trade — as well as to highly paid auto mechanics. Uber threatens the taxi trade, and the self-driving car threatens the Uber driver. But it has also brought multimillion-dollar signing bonuses for self-driving-car engineers and created new opportunities for mechanics. People tend to find a way to work with and profit from new technology.

. . .

In most cases, an industry without enough workers to meet customer demand would simply hire more, or at least raise wages to attract them.

Yet, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, neither of those things happened last year. The number of pharmacists employed in the United States dropped about 1 percent from 2020 to 2021. On balance, employers did not raise wages — in fact, median pay fell slightly, even without adjusting for inflation.

. . .

. . . there is no evidence so far to support forecasts of a nearly jobless future. If robots threatened human labor, human joblessness would be growing. But it’s not. In fact, since 2008, job growth has been strongest in countries like Germany and Japan, which deploy the most robots.

For the full commentary, see:

Ruchir Sharma. “No, That Robot Will Not Steal Your Job.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sunday, October 8, 2017): 3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 7, 2017, and has the same title as the print version.)

Improvisational Ingenuity of Ukrainians “In Stark Contrast to the Slow, Plodding, Doctrinal” Russian Invaders

(p. A1) From the sinking of the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea flagship, in April [2022] to the attack on a Russian air base in Crimea this month, Ukrainian troops have used American and other weapons in ways few expected, the experts and Defense Department officials say.

By mounting missiles onto trucks, for instance, Ukrainian forces have moved them more quickly into firing range. By putting rocket systems on speedboats, they have increased their naval warfare ability. And to the astonishment of weapons experts, Ukraine has continued to destroy Russian targets with slow-moving Turkish-made Bayraktar attack drones and inexpensive, plastic aircraft modified to drop grenades and other munitions.

“People are using the MacGyver metaphor,” said Frederick B. Hodges, a former top U.S. Army commander in Europe, in a reference to the 1980s TV show in which the title character uses simple, improvised contraptions to get himself out of sticky situations.

. . .

(p. A10) . . ., the engineering ingenuity of the Ukrainians lies in stark contrast to the slow, plodding, doctrinal nature of the Russian advance.

In the attack on the Moskva, for example, the Ukrainians developed their own anti-ship missile, called the Neptune, which they based on the design of an old Soviet anti-ship missile, but with substantially improved range and electronics. They appear to have mounted the Neptune missiles onto one or more trucks, according to one senior American official, and moved them within range of the ship, which was around 75 miles from Odesa. The striking of the Moskva was, in essence, the Neptune’s proof of concept; it was the first time the new Ukrainian weapon was used in an actual war, and it took down Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea.

“With the Moskva, they MacGyvered a very effective anti-ship system that they put on the back of a truck to make it mobile and move it around,” General Hodges, who is now a senior adviser at Human Rights First, said in an interview.

. . .

A senior Pentagon official said Ukrainian forces had put American-supplied HARM anti-radiation missiles on Soviet-designed MiG-29 fighter jets — something that no air force had ever done. The American HARM missile, designed to seek and destroy Russian air defense radar, is not usually compatible with the MiG-29 or the other fighter jets in Ukraine’s arsenal.

Ukraine managed to rejigger targeting sensors to allow pilots to fire the American missile from their Soviet-era aircraft. “They have actually successfully integrated it,” the senior official told reporters during a Pentagon briefing. He spoke on the condition of anonymity per Biden administration rules.

. . .

. . . Ukraine conducted the first of the recent strikes in Crimea — a series of blasts at the Saki military airfield on Aug. 9 [2022] — without notifying American and other Western allies in advance, officials said.

“It’s all homegrown,” the official said, . . .

For the full story, see:

Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt. “Ukraine Forces ‘MacGyvering’ Their Arsenal.” The New York Times (Monday, August 29, 2022): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed years, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 28, 2022, and has the title “The ‘MacGyvered’ Weapons in Ukraine’s Arsenal.”)

During December 2022, Kindle Version of McCloskey’s Bourgeois Equality Is Only $2.99

The long, but wonderful, third volume of Deirdre’ McClokey’s Bourgeois trilogy, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, is on offer from Amazon during the month of December 2022 in eText Kindle version for only $2.99.

Gig Work Thrives Because Workers Value Flexibility to Pursue Balance or Fulfilment

(p. B1) American workers are experiencing, by many measures, one of the best job markets ever. The unemployment rate has matched a 53-year low. Job listings per available worker are at historic highs. Wages, while not quite keeping up with inflation, are rising at their fastest pace in decades.

So why would people keep doing gig work, a notoriously difficult and insecure way to make a living?

. . .

Picking up shifts offers something that traditional permanent employment still generally doesn’t: the ability to work when and as much as you want, demand permitting, which is often essential to balance life obligations like school or child care.

. . .

(p. B5) “We were seeing this move towards multiple income streams, because that work was picked up as a stopgap and then continued,” Dr. Gervis said.

Take Denae Bettis, a 23-year-old Steady user living in Severn, Md. After dropping out of college, she got a job at UPS, and after a few years rose to become a safety supervisor, usually starting at 4 a.m. During the pandemic, she took on more responsibilities.

“The job got really stressful, and I felt like I had no way out,” Ms. Bettis said. So in June 2020, she started a side gig through Instacart, shopping for people holed up at home. The next month, she quit her job, making it easier for her to pursue her passion: working as a personal makeup artist, which often requires taking early-morning appointments.

Surviving on income from gigs — which for Ms. Bettis now include DoorDash as well as Instacart — isn’t easy. But Ms. Bettis thinks she can save enough money to open her own storefront.

“We just went through a period where millions died, so are you going to spend your time at your job if it doesn’t fulfill you?” Ms. Bettis said, summing up gig work’s appeal. “Everybody loves stability, but if the flexibility isn’t there, I don’t think a lot of people are going to go back.”

For the full story, see:

Lydia DePillis. “Why Gig Work Is Thriving.” The New York Times (Tuesday, August 16, 2022): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Aug. 17, 2022, and has the title “If the Job Market Is So Good, Why Is Gig Work Thriving?.”)

Initially Socialist Israeli Kibbutzim Gradually Embraced Entrepreneurial Capitalism

(p. C4) Today, in a break with . . . [its] communal past, Ms. Barnea’s kibbutz is farming for profit, and its main cash crop is medical marijuana. She recently retired from managing the greenhouse that grows the drug.

The shift at Kibbutz Beit HaEmek is just the latest sign of how much Israel’s kibbutzim are changing, as both Israel and the kibbutz movement move away from their socialist roots to become more entrepreneurial and profit-driven.

“We have to survive,” said Ms. Barnea, now 64, walking around the greenhouse as the smell of marijuana wafted past.

. . .

Facing a bleak financial future, young people abandoned the kibbutzim in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Israel’s vibrant technology sector took off, providing an additional pull away from the communes.

To reverse the exodus, Israel’s kibbutzim dismantled much of their socialist model. In 1995, Kibbutz Merom HaGolan became the first to go through a so-called privatization process, paying members salaries on a scale.

Today, most kibbutzim have undergone some form of privatization. Many members now earn salaries outside the kibbutz but pay taxes for the community’s upkeep. New members can take out mortgages with banks and buy land on the kibbutz for their homes.

. . .

Only about 40 kibbutzim still share resources and give equal allowances as envisioned in the original model. Most of these communities had created successful businesses that helped them maintain the communal way of living.

One such community is Kibbutz Sdot Yam, on Israel’s central coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa. In the 1980s, the kibbutz opened a factory that constructed quartz surfaces for tables and floors. Despite that venture’s success, the kibbutz is now considering whether to allow members—most of whom work outside the community—to earn their own salaries, rather than sharing them with the commune, said Doron Stansill, a 47-year-old member.

For the full essay, see:

Rory Jones. “The Kibbutz in a Capitalist Israel.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 14, 2017 ): C4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date Oct. 13, 2017 , and has the title “The Kibbutz Movement Adapts to a Capitalist Israel.”)

Entrepreneurs Find New Uses for Bacon Grease and Waste Crabs

(p. A1) OCEAN CITY, Md.—Kristie Williams sells Bumble Soap at her health-food store in this beach town. Its unusual main ingredient, she said, is hard to detect—unless you’re a dog.

“I can’t smell the bacon in the soap,” she said. “My dogs can. Whenever I bring one home, they go crazy.”

The yucky-sounding soap bars are being cooked up less than 4 miles away from Ocean City Organics at Sunrise Diner, . . . (p. A10) Owner Sam Delauter said he branched into soap making when the price of a case of bacon jumped to $90, from $45 last year.

Thinking he could squeeze a few dollars out of his bacon grease in a time of high inflation, he dusted off his great-grandmother’s soap recipe from the Great Depression. He sells the bars for $5.99.

. . .

Searching for new sources of revenue and greener ways to deal with waste, business owners have started coming up with some funky new products. Vodka distilled from dairy-making waste. Compost made from crabs. Reactions from consumers range from enthusiastic to aghast.

For the full story, see:

Harriet Torry. “Inflation’s Byproducts: Bacon Soap or Dairy Vodka, Anyone?” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 27, 2022): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 26, 2022, and has the title “Inflation’s Funky Byproducts: Bacon Soap or Dairy Vodka, Anyone?”)

Resilient Entrepreneurs Quickly Rebuilt Chicago After “Great Fire” of 1871

(p. C8) Along with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 stands as one of America’s foundational urban legends, a story of death and rebirth, a monument to the resiliency of the nation’s character.

. . .

Photographs taken immediately after the fire show the utter devastation facing residents: a flattened, rubble-strewn landscape, with only the jagged husks of buildings jutting into the smoky air. But “Chicago’s Great Fire” goes beyond the disaster and its cause to recount the remarkable way the city sprang back. An energizing sense of optimism and opportunity, along with a heavy dose of boosterism, had fueled the city’s explosive growth, and those elements quickly went to work. “Almost immediately,” Mr. Smith writes, “many Chicagoans paradoxically came to see the heroic destruction of their city as an unexpectedly positive event, a stage in its irresistible upward development rather than a dispiriting setback.”

“CHEER UP,” exhorted the headline on an editorial in the Chicago Tribune’s first postfire edition, three days after the inferno started. Even while tens of thousands of residents remained homeless, an emissary assured Eastern financiers that the city warranted a new round of investment. Local entrepreneurs built crude shacks in the rubble to sell necessities. Debris not used for rebuilding was dumped on the edge of Lake Michigan, thus enlarging the size of the downtown.

For the full review, see:

Richard Babcock. “A Cow, a Lantern, a City in Flames.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 17, 2020): C8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 16, 2020, and has the title “‘Chicago’s Great Fire’ Review: Rising From the Ashes.”)

The book under review is:

Smith, Carl. Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020.

If Apple and Google Ban Twitter from Their Phone App Stores, Musk Will Start Making Phones

Elon Musk said he would make his own smartphone if Google and Apple were to ban Twitter from their app stores.

Musk said in a tweet responding to conservative podcaster Liz Wheeler that he hopes the situation does not come to that but that he will make that decision if necessary.

“I certainly hope it does not come to that, but, yes, if there is no other choice, I will make an alternative phone,” he said.

Wheeler first proposed the idea, saying that half of the country would “happily ditch the biased, snooping iPhone and Android.”

“The man builds rockets to Mars, a silly little smartphone should be easy, right?” she tweeted.

For the full story, see:

JARED GANS. “Elon Musk says he would make his own smartphone if app stores ban Twitter.” THE HILL (Saturday, Nov. 26, 2022). URL: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3750849-elon-musk-says-he-would-make-his-own-smart-phone-if-app-stores-ban-twitter/.

A Plant Entrepreneur Saw a Use for the Unused

(p. B1) In the summer of 1978, Allen Wilke slammed the brakes.

He did this often. A true plantsman, he observed everything but the road itself. He would spy a flowering prickly pear in the ditch, a wild grapevine. He would double back without warning, often sending his son and daughter — half-asleep in his gutted cargo van’s backseat — tumbling forward with their luggage.

This time, the plantsman was alone. He was puttering through the Sandhills on Nebraska Highway 91, a mile (p. B2) west of Taylor, when a tall, skinny evergreen — like an Italian Cypress, he thought — punctured his periphery. He slammed the brakes. He doubled back. And like he had so many times before, the owner of the Wilke Landscape Center in Columbus knocked on a stranger’s door.

“Would you mind?”

Rancher Marlin Britton led the plantsman to that eastern redcedar on the hill, rising like a steeple behind snot-nosed cattle. To Britton, the tree wasn’t remarkable. But to Wilke, scrambling up the bank for a closer look, it was a perfect fit for Nebraska’s landscaping industry. He took a few 10-inch cuttings, shook Britton’s hand and hit the road.

By the early 1980s, Wilke began retailing this new type of tree he called the “Taylor Juniper,” a play on both its origins and its naturally tailored appearance.

. . .

. . ., the Taylor Juniper is ubiquitous across Nebraska, from the town square in Taylor to the capitol grounds in Lincoln; from The Gardens at Yanney Park in Kearney to the track at Hastings College. They fill the nurseries come spring and sell out come fall — each a perfect clone of that single mother tree in Britton’s pasture.

For the full story, see:

Carson Vaughan Flatwater Free Press. “Tale of the Taylor Juniper, Tree That’s Everywhere in Nebraska.” Omaha World-Herald (Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022): B1-B2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 15, 2022, and has the title “Taylor Junipers stand tall across Nebraska.”)

Future Disney Fashion Designer Was “Fascinated” by “Snow White” Movie as a Child

(p. A20) Alice Davis, a Disney Company costume designer who created the outfits worn by the animatronic figures in two of the company’s most enduring and popular rides, It’s a Small World and Pirates of the Caribbean, died on Nov. 3 [2022] at her home in Los Angeles.

. . .

Ms. Davis had been designing lingerie and other garments for several years when Walt Disney himself asked her in 1963 if she wanted to work on the costumes for It’s a Small World.

. . .

She had been fascinated with animation since seeing “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” when she was 8 (“I just about vibrated out of my seat,” she said), and she hoped to pursue the form as a career.

. . .

She was steered to costume design, although Ms. Chouinard suggested that she also take an animation drawing class with a new instructor at the school: Marc Davis, who was by then one of a core group of animators Mr. Disney referred to as his “nine old men.”

She graduated in 1950 and married Mr. Davis in 1956; he died in 2000. She leaves no immediate survivors.

Ms. Davis’s other Disney work included establishing costuming and quality-control procedures for the company and creating standards for three-dimensional characters in other rides and shows.

In 2012, Disney recognized Ms. Davis as its most famous costume designer with a tribute that is among the company’s highest honors: a commemorative window installed on a storefront on Disneyland’s Main Street. It sits next to a similar pane honoring her husband.

For the full obituary, see:

Ed Shanahan. “Alice Davis, 93, Who Designed Outfits For Two of Disney’s Most Popular Rides.” The New York Times (Saturday, November 19, 2022): A20.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Nov. 18, 2022, and has the title “Alice Davis, Costume Designer for Disney Rides, Dies at 93.”)

“Advances in Gene Sequencing” Have Not “Unlocked the Key to Cures for Cancer”

(p. 10) In his new book, “The Song of the Cell,” Siddhartha Mukherjee has taken on a subject that is enormous and minuscule at once. Even though cells are typically so tiny that you need a microscope to see them, they also happen to be implicated in almost anything to do with medicine — and therefore almost anything to do with life.

. . .

If Mukherjee were another kind of storyteller — tidier, if less honest — he could have showcased a more linear narrative, emphasizing how developments in cell research have yielded some truly amazing possibilities. He himself has been collaborating on a project to engineer certain cells in the immune system so that they eat tumors without stirring up an indiscriminate inflammatory response.

But as a practicing physician, he has seen too much suffering and death to succumb to an easy triumphalism. He recalls the “exuberance” of the mid-2000s, when spectacular advances in gene sequencing had made it appear as if “we had unlocked the key to cures for cancer.” Such exuberance turned out to be fleeting; the data from clinical trials were “sobering.”

Many medical mysteries remain unsolved. If the book’s protagonist — our understanding of cell biology — seemed to be riding high again on new advances in immunology, such “self-assuredness” was laid low by the Covid-19 pandemic. Mukherjee presents a string of questions that are still unsettled. “The monotony of answers is humbling, maddening,” he writes. “We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know.”

For the full review, see:

Jennifer Szalai. “Building Blocks.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, November 13, 2022): 10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Nov. 2, 2022, and has the title “Siddhartha Mukherjee Finds Medical Mystery — and Metaphor — in the Tiny Cell.”)

The book under review is:

Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human. New York: Scribner, 2022.