Category: Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs Are Happier Because Autonomy and More Meaningful Work Matter More Than Stress and Workload

(p. R1) “If you look at the data, it turns out that entrepreneurs on average earn less money than a typical employed person, work 13 hours more a week and report that it’s a very stressful occupation,” says Boris Nikolaev, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. “But despite that, there’s overwhelming evidence in the literature that entrepreneurs report significantly higher levels of job satisfaction.”

. . .

“Entrepreneurs are happier in terms of all indications (p. R4) of life satisfaction and work satisfaction,” says Ute Stephan, professor of entrepreneurship at King’s College London, who conducted a comprehensive review of more than 100 academic studies on entrepreneurship and well-being. “However, they might be more stressed than the rest of us, as well.”

This unusual mix of stress and happiness comes about, she says, because entrepreneurs tend to be deeply invested in their businesses, and their passion is a double-edged sword: It gives them a strong sense of purpose and autonomy, but it can also lead to worry, late nights, overwork and stress.

. . .

The stress and workload have a strong negative effect, as is evident in other studies, but the sense of doing something important and being their own boss is so gratifying that it outweighs all those negatives and leaves them happier overall.

“What they are doing is important to them, it’s part of who they are, it’s part of their identity, and that’s why it has such a positive impact on well-being,” says Prof. Stephan.

. . .

. . . in a recent study, Prof. Stephan discovered that autonomy alone isn’t enough. It’s important, to be sure—but what entrepreneurs need, above all, is meaning. She analyzed survey data from over 22,000 people in 16 European countries, comparing their feelings of happiness with the extent to which their work gives them a sense of meaning and autonomy.

. . .

She found that entrepreneurs experienced higher levels of happiness than wage-earning employees (4.37 vs. 4.28 on a scale of 1 to 6), as well as higher levels of meaning (4.56 vs. 4.25 on a scale of 1 to 5) and autonomy (2.66 vs. 1.95 on a scale of 0 to 3). Using regression analysis, she discovered that meaning was the decisive factor in entrepreneurial happiness.

“What we found is that much more important than decision-making freedom is the sense of doing something profoundly meaningful,” she says. “That really energizes you, and as an entrepreneur you really need that energy to be creative and to do the work that’s important to you.”

But finding meaning in work doesn’t have to be about changing the world. Framing work in terms of performing an important service can help even entrepreneurs in less glamorous industries find meaning and happiness—such as contractors who help people build a dream home, or accountants saving people from disastrous money problems.

For the full story, see:

Andrew Blackman. “Are Entrepreneurs Happier Than Other People?” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Nov. 04, 2021): R1 & R4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 3, 2021 , and has the title “Are Entrepreneurs Happier Than Everybody Else?”)

The comprehensive review by Prof. Stephan mentioned above is:

Stephan, Ute. “Entrepreneurs’ Mental Health and Well-Being: A Review and Research Agenda.” Academy of Management Perspectives 32, no. 3 (Aug. 2018): 290-322.

The recent study by Prof. Stephan mentioned above is:

Stephan, Ute, Susana M. Tavares, Helena Carvalho, Joaquim J. S. Ramalho, Susana C. Santos, and Marc van Veldhoven. “Self-Employment and Eudaimonic Well-Being: Energized by Meaning, Enabled by Societal Legitimacy.” Journal of Business Venturing 35, no. 6 (Nov. 2020): DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2020.106047.

Could Amateur Investors Return the Walt Disney Company to the Principles of Walt Disney?

I wonder what amateur investors could do if they had more serious motives than hatred of elite short-sellers? What if they had the motive, for example, of returning the Walt Disney Company to the principles of Walt Disney? I do not endorse the ambiguity (how much fictional and how much nonfictional) of the book reviewed below. But the GameStop and AMC episodes are intriguing proofs-of-concept.

(p. A15) Until late last year, GameStop was a typical and not very successful corporation. The company sold videogames through a chain of retail outlets and lost money on every sale. But its stock caught the interest of small investors who traded on Robinhood, a mobile trading app, and the stock began to levitate.

From single digits in October 2020 the stock price doubled to 20 late last year. Then, over a few manic days in January, it vaulted “like a lid flying off a pot,” as Ben Mezrich puts it in “The Antisocial Network.” It went up to 77, then 148, then 348 and then an intraday high of 483—at which point GameStop was worth more than $30 billion. Briefly, it was the most heavily traded issue on the stock market.

The source of the mayhem was, to borrow from the book’s subtitle, “a ragtag group of amateur traders.” Few of the devotees who flocked to GameStop thought of themselves as even armchair security analysts. They were infected by crowd psychology and, in some cases, driven by the hope that the high price would punish well-to-do short sellers.

. . .

Even when the price hit the stratosphere, retail buyers professed not to be worried. They would “never” sell; they weren’t concerned with the possibility of losing money. “Oh im [sic] fully aware that I may end up a bagholder,” went one post. “But it’s worth being a bagholder to stick it to those Wall Street f—s who’ve gamed the system for so long at our expense.”

To Mr. Mezrich, such fulminations suggest that a revolution is a-coming. His thesis is vented in excited metaphors. The “pillars” of Wall Street are shaking; Melvin Capital faces an “existential moment” (which, actually, it survived); angry traders constitute a “millennial version of the French Revolution.”

A little of this gas comes from investors; most of it is supplied by Mr. Mezrich. “The Antisocial Network” is built on scenes that the author has re-created; quotation marks, in the main, are conveniently absent. He writes of one novice but gung-ho investor, who worked in a hair salon: “She believed something deeper was happening.” Did she say that? Is it a paraphrase? Is it what Mr. Mezrich thinks she believed?

For the full review, see:

Roger Lowenstein. “BOOKSHELF; Let Them Eat Shorts.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Sept. 07, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 6, 2021, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘The Antisocial Network’ Review: Let Them Eat Shorts.”)

The book under review is:

Mezrich, Ben. The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2021.

Ford and Edison Tried to Build and “Gift the Nation” a “Utopian Garden City”

I have greatly benefitted from two of Hager’s previous books: The Alchemy of Air and The Demon Under the Microscope. A third one, Ten Drugs, was OK. I am looking forward to reading the new Hager book discussed in the passages quoted below from a WSJ review. I wonder if an inference from the book will be that more infrastructure could be privately provided, if the government would allow it? (By the way, I am by no means as convinced as the reviewer that the TVA was one of FDR’s greatest accomplishments.)

(p. A17) Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison were the twin wizards of the first decades of the 20th century in America.

. . .

The story of this pair’s vain effort to build a utopian garden city powered by a mammoth hydroelectric dam at Muscle Shoals, Ala., is all but forgotten. Now it’s been disinterred by Thomas Hager, in “Electric City: The Lost History of Ford and Edison’s American Utopia,” a well-researched, crisply written account tinged with irony.

. . .

During World War I, the government hatched a plan to dam the river and use the electricity generated to power two plants turning out nitrates for munitions. The dam was half built and the factories equipped when the war ended and the project was abandoned.

President Warren Harding didn’t want to spend the $30 million needed to finish the mile-wide 10-story dam and told underlings to lease the whole works to private interests. Ford had already been tempted to acquire the nitrate plants, which could be refitted to turn out the kind of fertilizer used by regional farmers. He envisioned the completed dam supplying cheap power for his blended new American community of garden cities strung for miles along the river. Worker-farmers would commute—in their Model T’s, of course—to small factories running on electricity from the dam. They would be given time off in planting and harvesting season to raise crops they could sell to supplement their incomes. It was a Jeffersonian vision of America updated to the age of the automobile and bounteous electricity.

Ford enlisted the prestige and smarts of his camping buddy Edison. They wanted, Mr. Hager writes, “to gift the nation they loved with a titanic, living example of how they thought America should work . . . The results would be new kinds of cities, new ways of making things, new approaches to labor and leisure, and improved lives for everyone.”

. . .

In the end, Edison faded from the picture, and Norris ended Ford’s hopes—passing legislation that made Muscle Shoals a federal undertaking, although Coolidge refused to sign it. And in the wondrous alchemy of American politics, when the Great Depression propelled Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House, Muscle Shoals became the core of the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the first and greatest of FDR’s accomplishments.

For the full review, see:

Edward Kosner. “BOOKSHELF; Bright Lights, Big River.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Dec. 23, 2021): A17.

(Note: ellipses between paragraphs were added; ellipsis in the middle of a paragraph was in the original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 22, 2021, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Electric City’ Review: Bright Lights, Big River.”)

The book under review is:

Hager, Thomas. Electric City: The Lost History of Ford and Edison’s American Utopia. New York: Harry N. Abrams Press, 2021.

Tesla Could Switch Chips By Internally Modifying Software Code that Other Car Companies Had Outsourced

(p. 1) For much of last year, established automakers like General Motors and Ford Motor operated in a different reality from Tesla, the electric car company.

G.M. and Ford closed one factory after another — sometimes for months on end — because of a shortage of computer chips, leaving dealer lots bare and sending car prices zooming. Yet Tesla racked up record sales quarter after quarter and ended the year having sold nearly twice as many vehicles as it did in 2020 unhindered by an industrywide crisis.

Tesla’s ability to conjure up critical components has a greater significance than one year’s car sales. It suggests that the company, and possibly other young electric car businesses, could threaten the dominance of giants like Volkswagen and G.M. sooner and more forcefully than most industry executives and policymakers realize. . . .

Tesla and its enigmatic chief executive, Elon Musk, have said little about how the carmaker ran circles around the rest of the auto industry. Now it’s becoming clear that the company simply had a superior command of technology and its own supply chain. Tesla appeared to better forecast demand than businesses that produce many more cars than it does. Other automakers were surprised by how quickly the car market recovered from a steep drop early in the pandemic and had simply not ordered enough chips and parts (p. 12) fast enough.

When Tesla couldn’t get the chips it had counted on, it took the ones that were available and rewrote the software that operated them to suit its needs. Larger auto companies couldn’t do that because they relied on outside suppliers for much of their software and computing expertise. In many cases, automakers also relied on these suppliers to deal with chip manufacturers. When the crisis hit, the automakers lacked bargaining clout.

Just a few years ago, analysts saw Mr. Musk’s insistence on having Tesla do more things on its own as one of the main reasons the company was struggling to increase production. Now, his strategy appears to have been vindicated.

. . .

“Tesla, born in Silicon Valley, never outsourced their software — they write their own code,” said Morris Cohen, a professor emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in manufacturing and logistics. “They rewrote the software so they could replace chips in short supply with chips not in short supply. The other carmakers were not able to do that.”

“Tesla controlled its destiny,” Professor Cohen added.

. . .

Doing more on its own also helps explain why Tesla avoided shortages of batteries, which have limited companies like Ford and G.M. from selling lots of electric cars. In 2014, when most carmakers were still debating whether electric vehicles would ever amount to anything, Tesla broke ground on what it called a gigafactory outside Reno, Nev., to produce batteries with its partner, Panasonic. Now, that factory helps ensure a reliable supply.

“It was a big risk,” said Ryan Melsert, a former Tesla executive who was involved in construction of the Nevada plant. “But because they have made decisions early on to bring things in house, they have much more control over their own fate.”

As Professor Cohen of Wharton pointed out, Tesla’s approach is in many ways a throwback to the early days of the automobile, when Ford owned its own steel plants and rubber plantations. In recent decades, the conventional auto wisdom had it that manufacturers should concentrate on design and final assembly and farm out the rest to suppliers. That strategy helped reduce how much money big players tied up in factories, but left them vulnerable to supply chain turmoil.

For the full story, see:

Jack Ewing. “Tesla’s Edge in Pandemic: Superior Command of Supply Chain.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, January 9, 2022): 1 & 12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 8, 2022, and has the title “Why Tesla Soared as Other Automakers Struggled to Make Cars.”

After Escaping Communism, Karikó Achieved “Critical Breakthrough” on Covid-19 Vaccine

(p. C8) “Infectious” is a chronicle of the “ongoing arms race between host and infection,” as Mr. Tregoning puts it, as well as the astounding medical progress in the past 100 years that has tipped this struggle in favor of humanity.

. . .

Before the pandemic, many doubted that vaccines based on messenger RNA would work at all, as the technique had a reputation for being finicky and unstable. That these new technologies have thus far outperformed traditional vaccines is an upset akin to Buster Douglas’s 1990 knockout of Mike Tyson. According to Mr. Tregoning, a large share of the credit belongs to the biochemist Katalin Karikó, who had a critical breakthrough that “massively improved the potency of the vaccine.” Ms. Karikó, “who fled Communist Hungary in 1985 with $1,200 hidden in a teddy bear,” was able to stabilize messenger RNA by studding it with methyl groups. This enabled the RNA to survive in the body just long enough to produce viral proteins for the immune system to target.

For the full review, see:

John J. Ross. “The Battle Inside Your Body.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 11, 2021): C8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 10, 2021, and has the title “The Defenders: Three Books on the Science of Immunity.”)

The book under review in the passages quoted above is:

Tregoning, John S. Infectious. London, UK: Oneworld, 2021.

Passion, Dedication, and Caffeine Led to Muscular Dystrophy Progress, After Mutating Millions of Viruses to Find One That Works

Trial and error still matters in science and medicine.

(p. D1) CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When Sharif Tabebordbar was born in 1986, his father, Jafar, was 32 and already had symptoms of a muscle wasting disease. The mysterious illness would come to define Sharif’s life.

Jafar Tabebordbar could walk when he was in his 30s but stumbled and often lost his balance. Then he lost his ability to drive. When he was 50, he could use his hands. Now he has to support one hand with another.

No one could answer the question plaguing Sharif and his younger brother, Shayan: What was this disease? And would they develop it the way their father had?

As he grew up and watched his father gradually decline, Sharif vowed to solve the mystery and find a cure. His quest led him to a doctorate in developmental and regenerative biology, the most competitive ranks of academic medical research, and a discovery, published in September in the journal Cell, that could transform gene therapy — medicine that corrects genetic defects — for nearly all muscle wasting diseases. That includes muscular dystrophies that affect about 100,000 people in the United States, according to the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Scientists often use a disabled virus called an adeno-associated virus, or AAV, to deliver gene therapy to cells. But damaged muscle cells like the ones that afflict Dr. Tabebordbar’s father are difficult to treat. Forty percent of the body is made of muscle. To get the virus to those muscle cells, researchers must deliver enormous doses of medication. Most of the viruses end up in the liver, damaging it and sometimes killing patients. Trials have been halted, researchers stymied.

Dr. Tabebordbar managed to develop viruses that go directly to muscles — very few end up in the liver. His discovery could allow treatment with a fraction of the dosage, and without the disabling side effects.

. . .

(p. D4) There, fueled by caffeine, he works typically 14 hours a day, except on the days when he plays soccer with a group at M.I.T.

“He is incredibly productive and incredibly effective,” said Amy Wagers, who was Dr. Tabebordbar’s Ph.D. adviser and is a professor and co-chair of the department of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard. “He works all the time and has this incredible passion and incredible dedication. And it’s infectious. It spreads to everyone around him. That is a real skill — his ability to take a bigger vision and communicate it.”

. . .

He got a position in the lab of Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute and set to work. His plan was to mutate millions of viruses and isolate those that went almost exclusively to muscles.

The result was what he’d hoped — viruses that homed in on muscle, in mice and also in monkeys, which makes it much more likely they will work in people.

As scientists know, most experiments fail before anything succeeds and this work has barely begun.

“I will do 100 experiments and 95 will not work,” Dr. Tabebordbar said.

But he said this is the personality that is required of a scientist.

“The mind-set I have is, ‘this is not going to work.’ It makes you very patient.”

. . .

Now Dr. Tabebordbar has moved on to his next step. His life, other than his brief stint in biotech, has been in academia, but he decided that he wants to develop drugs. About a year ago, he co-founded a drug company, called Kate Therapeutics, that will focus on gene therapy for muscle diseases and will move there for the next phase of his career.

For the full story, see:

Gina Kolata. “Determined Yet Patient, He Looks for a Cure.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 9, 2021): D1 & D4.

(Note: ellipses bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 4, 2021, and has the title “He Can’t Cure His Dad. But a Scientist’s Research May Help Everyone Else.”)

Infrastructure Can Be Privately Provided

(p. B5) In less than a decade, four tech giants— Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Meta (formerly Facebook ) and Amazon —have become by far the dominant users of undersea-cable capacity. Before 2012, the share of the world’s undersea fiber-optic capacity being used by those companies was less than 10%. Today, that figure is about 66%.

And these four are just getting started, say analysts, submarine cable engineers and the companies themselves. In the next three years, they are on track to become primary financiers and owners of the web of undersea internet cables connecting the richest and most bandwidth-hungry countries on the shores of both the Atlantic and the Pacific, according to subsea cable analysis firm TeleGeography.

By 2024, the four are projected to collectively have an ownership stake in more than 30 long-distance undersea cables, each up to thousands of miles long, connecting every continent on the globe save Antarctica.

. . .

Undersea cables can cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. Installing and maintaining them requires a small fleet of ships, from surveying vessels to specialized cable-laying ships that deploy all manner of rugged undersea technology to bury cables beneath the seabed. At times they must lay the relatively fragile cable—at some points as thin as a garden hose—at depths of up to 4 miles.

All of this must be done while maintaining the right amount of tension in the cables, and avoiding hazards as varied as undersea mountains, oil-and-gas pipelines, high-voltage transmission lines for offshore wind farms, and even shipwrecks and unexploded bombs, says Howard Kidorf, a managing partner at Pioneer Consulting, which helps companies engineer and build undersea fiber optic cable systems.

In the past, trans-oceanic cable-laying often required the resources of governments and their national telecom companies. That’s all but pocket change to today’s tech titans. Combined, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon poured more than $90 billion into capital expenditures in 2020 alone.

The four say they’re laying all this cable in order to increase bandwidth across the most developed parts of the world and to bring better connectivity to under-served regions like Africa and Southeast Asia.

For the full commentary, see:

Christopher Mims. “KEYWORDS: Tech Giants Weave a Web Of Power Under the Sea.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, January 15, 2022): B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the same date as the print version, and has the title “KEYWORDS: Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft Weave a Fiber-Optic Web of Power.”)

“In a World Filled With Distraction,” Apolo Ohno Praises “Deep Work”

(p. C12) Cal Newport’s “Deep Work” eloquently describes how to find an advantage in a world filled with distraction.

For the full review, see:

Apolo Ohno. “12 Months of Reading; Apolo Ohno.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 11, 2021): C12.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 10, 2021, and has the title “Who Read What: Business Leaders Share Their Favorite Books of 2021.”)

The book praised by Ohno is:

Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016.

Silicon Valley Pioneer at Age 16 Survived on 5 Cents of Carrots a Day

(p. A23) Jay Last, a physicist who helped create the silicon chips that power the world’s computers, and who was among the eight entrepreneurs whose company laid the technical, financial and cultural foundation for Silicon Valley, died on Nov. 11 [2021] in Los Angeles.

. . .

Ultimately, he agreed to join the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory because it sat in the Northern California valley where he had spent a summer harvesting fruit after hitchhiking there from his home in Pennsylvania steel country.

But he and seven of his collaborators at the lab clashed with Dr. Shockley, who later became infamous for his theory that Black people were genetically inferior in intelligence to white people. They quickly left the lab to create their own transistor company. They later came to be called “the traitorous eight,” and their company, Fairchild Semiconductor, is now seen as ground zero for what became known as Silicon Valley.

. . .

With the blessing of his parents — and carrying a letter from the local police chief saying he was not running away from home — he hitchhiked to San Jose, Calif., which was then a small farming town. He had planned on making a little money picking fruit, but he arrived before the harvest began.

Until it did, he lived, as he often recalled in later years, on a nickel’s worth of carrots a day. Whenever he faced a difficult situation, he said in an interview for the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute) in 2004, he told himself, “I got through that when I was 16, and this is not that bad a problem.”

. . .

Using materials like silicon and germanium, Dr. Shockley and two other scientists had shown how to build the tiny transistors that would one day be used to store and move information in the form of an electrical signal. The question was how to connect them together to form a larger machine.

After using chemical compounds to etch the transistors into a sheet of silicon, Dr. Last and his colleagues could have cut each one from the sheet and connected them with individual wires, much like any other electrical device. But this was enormously difficult, inefficient and expensive.

One of the founders of Fairchild, Robert Noyce, suggested an alternative method, and this was realized by a team Dr. Last oversaw. They developed a way of building both the transistors and the wires into the same sheet of silicon.

This method is still used to build silicon chips, whose transistors are now exponentially smaller than those manufactured in the 1960s, in accordance with Moore’s Law, the famous maxim laid down by another Fairchild founder, Gordon Moore.

For the full obituary, see:

Cade Metz. “Jay Last, 92, Physicist and a Pioneer of Silicon Valley.” The New York Times (Monday, November 22, 2021): A23.

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

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Nov. 20, 2021, and has the title “Jay Last, One of the Rebels Who Founded Silicon Valley, Dies at 92.”)

Charles Morris Uncovered “Tantalizing Nuggets” on Innovation and Entrepreneurship

In researching my Openness to Creative Destruction, I found two of Charles Morris’s books very useful, providing thought-provoking analysis and compelling examples. The two were The Dawn of Innovation and The Tycoons.

(p. A24) Charles R. Morris, a former government official, banker and self-taught historian of economics who as a prolific, iconoclastic author challenged conventional political and economic pieties, died on Monday [December 13, 2021] in Hampton, N.H.

. . .

Mr. Morris wrote his signature first book, “The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment” (1980), after serving as director of welfare programs under Mayor John V. Lindsay and as secretary of social and health services in Washington State.

The book was a trenchant Emperor’s New Clothes analysis of how the Lindsay administration’s unfettered investment in social welfare programs to ward off civil unrest had delivered the city to the brink of bankruptcy, and it pigeonholed Mr. Morris as a neoconservative.

But as a law school graduate with no formal training in economics, he defied facile labeling.

While his 15 nonfiction books often revisited well-trodden topics — including the Great Depression, the nation’s tycoons, the cost of health care, the Cold War arms race and the political evolution of the Roman Catholic church — he injected them with revealing details, provocative insights and fluid narratives.

“The Cost of Good Intentions” (1981) was less a screed about liberal profligacy as it was an expression of disappointment that benevolent officials had become wedded to programs that didn’t work. He concluded that the best and the brightest in the government, as well as complicit players on the outside, had figured that if a day of reckoning ever came, it would not be on their watch.

. . .

He would . . . belie Thomas Carlyle’s characterization of economics as “the dismal science” by injecting tantalizing nuggets.

Reviewing Mr. Morris’s “A Time of Passion: America 1960-1980” (1984) for The Times Book Review, Michael Kinsley wrote that “some of the most vivid moments in this book come when he stops the rush of history to describe incidents from his own time as a poverty-program and prison administrator.”

“He truly has been ‘mugged by reality,’ in Irving Kristol’s famous definition of a neoconservative,” Mr. Kinsley added, but concluded, “Overall, his book radiates a generosity and good will that set it apart from the typically sour neoconservative creed.”

. . .

“I think we’re heading for the mother of all crashes,” Mr. Morris wrote his publisher, Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs books, early in 2007, adding, “It will happen in summer of 2008, I think.”

Mr. Osnos recalled that after the book was published, “George Soros and Paul Volcker called me and asked, ‘Who is this Morris, and how did he get this so right, so early?’”

For the full obituary, see:

Sam Roberts. “Charles R. Morris, Author Who Disputed Economic Dogma, Dies at 82.” The New York Times (Wednesday, December 15, 2021): A24.

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

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Dec. 15, 2021, and has the title “Charles R. Morris, Iconoclastic Author on Economics, Dies at 82.”)

The books by Morris that I found especially useful were:

Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2012.

Morris, Charles R. The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy. New York: Times Books, 2005.

Entrepreneurial Bystander Identifies Stranger’s Cancerous Mole and Saves His Life

(p. B9) Nadia Popovici kept shifting her eyes from the hockey game to the back of Brian Hamilton’s neck.

Mr. Hamilton, an assistant equipment manager for the Vancouver Canucks, had a small mole there. It measured about two centimeters and was irregularly shaped and red-brown in color — possible characteristics of a cancerous mole, signs that Ms. Popovici had learned to spot while volunteering at hospitals as a nursing assistant.

Maybe he already knew? But if so, why was the mole still there? She concluded that Mr. Hamilton did not know.

“I need to tell him,” Ms. Popovici, 22, told her parents at the Oct. 23 [2021] N.H.L. game between the Canucks and the Seattle Kraken at the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle.

Ms. Popovici typed a message on her phone and waited for the game to end. After waving several times, she finally drew Mr. Hamilton’s attention, and placed her phone against the plexiglass.

“The mole on the back of your neck is possibly cancerous. Please go see a doctor!” the message read, with the words “mole,” “cancer” and “doctor” colored bright red.

Mr. Hamilton said he looked at the message, rubbed the back of his neck and kept walking, thinking, “Well, that’s weird.”

. . .

Indeed, Ms. Popovici was correct, and she had just saved his life.

. . .

Specifically, doctors later told him, it was type-2 malignant melanoma, a type of skin cancer that, because it was detected early, could be easily removed and treated.

For the full story, see:

Eduardo Medina. “Discovering Cancerous Mole From Stands, She Saves a Life.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 4, 2022): B9.

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

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Jan. 4, 2022, and has the title “Hockey Fan Spots Cancerous Mole at Game and Delivers a Lifesaving Note.”)