Hope for Film Version of Atlas Shrugged

  Rand, Ruddy, Wallace, and Jolie.  Source of photos: http://ustimes.us/ayn_rand_no_longer_has_script_approval.htm

 

(p. 9)  BACK in the 1970s Albert S. Ruddy, the producer of ”The Godfather,” first approached Ayn Rand to make a movie of her novel ”Atlas Shrugged.” But Rand, who had fled the Soviet Union and gone on to inspire capitalists and egoists everywhere, worried aloud, apparently in all seriousness, that the Soviets might try to take over Paramount to block the project.

”I told her, ‘The Russians aren’t that desperate to wreck your book,’ ” Mr. Ruddy recalled in a recent interview.

Rand’s paranoia, as Mr. Ruddy remembers it, seems laughable. But perhaps it was merely misplaced. For so many people have tried and failed to turn the book she considered her masterpiece into a movie that it could easily strike a suspicious person as evidence of a nefarious collectivist conspiracy. Or at least of Hollywood’s mediocrity.

Of course Rand herself had a hand in blocking some of those attempts before she died in 1982. Her heirs in the Objectivist school of thought helped sink some others. And plans for at least a couple of television mini-series fell to the vicissitudes of network politics and media mergers.

But Rand’s grand polemical novel keeps selling, and her admirers in Hollywood keep trying, and the latest effort involves a lineup of heavy hitters, starting with Angelina Jolie. Randall Wallace, who wrote ”Braveheart” and ”We Were Soldiers,” is working on compressing the nearly 1,200-page book into a conventional two-hour screenplay. Howard and Karen Baldwin, the husband-and-wife producers of ”Ray,” are overseeing the project, and Lions Gate Entertainment is footing the bill.

Whether Ms. Jolie, who has called herself something of a Rand fan, will bring the novel’s heroine, Dagny Taggart, to life on screen, or merely wind up on a list with other actresses who sought or were sought for the role — including Barbara Stanwyck, Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett and Sharon Stone — remains to be seen. Until now, at least, no one in Hollywood has figured out a formula that promises both to sell popcorn and to do justice to the original text, let alone to the philosophy that it hammers home endlessly, at times in lengthy speeches. (The final one is 60 pages long.)

But Mr. Baldwin said he believed that Mr. Wallace and the rest of their team were up to the task. ”We all believe in the book, and will be true to the book,” he said.

 

For the full story, see: 

KIMBERLY BROWN.  "FILM; Ayn Rand No Longer Has Script Approval."  The New York Times, Section 2  (Sun., January 14, 2007):  9 & 14.

 

    A 1957 photo of Rand in New York.  Source of photo:  http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/11/news/atlas.php

 

“Bitter Cold Grips the Nation”: Evidence for Global Cooling?


   Screen capture from the MSN web site whose link is given below.

 

Several weeks ago, when much of the nation was experiencing above-average temperatures, network reports intoned how the warmth was a sign of global warming.  So using consistent reasoning, should they not now intone that the bitter cold is a sign of global cooling?  

Note that there is no mention of global warming (or cooling) in the Today Show report mentioned below.

 

On one of the NBC web sites, the Today Show report was described this way:  "Deep freeze Feb. 5: Midwest and Northeast residents hunker down for a deep freeze expected to last most of the week. NBC’s Kevin Tibbles reports."


Here is the link to the report: 

http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?f=00&g=0de6ae06-e747-4aaf-9a7e-7e81ef9224f7&p=hotvideo_m_edpicks&t=m5&rf=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16987213/&fg=

 

Good Intentions Are Not Enough

 

Another lesson from an intriguing book by Steven Johnson, is that Edwin Chadwick’s good intentions were not enough to beat the cholera epidemic in London.  Johnson tells of Chadwick’s two catastrophic illusions:

 

The first was his belief that, since the mephitic odors of private cesspools posed such a clear and present danger to health, sewage ought instead to be discharged down public drains into the Thames, from which most Londoners took their drinking water. As the great builder Thomas Cubitt remarked: "The Thames is now made a great cesspool instead of each person having one of his own."

The consequences of this well-intentioned blunder were worse even than those of the decision of the Lord Mayor during the Great Plague of 1665-66 to exterminate all the city’s dogs and cats because of the false rumor that they were spreading the plague, thus allowing an exponential increase in the population of the rats who were the real transmitters.

Having contaminated a large part of the population he was trying to protect, Chadwick committed his second mistake, sternly setting his face against the simple explanation that would bring about a cure. To his dying day — which did not come until 1890 — Chadwick remained an unrepentant miasmatist, as proponents of the airborne explanation for cholera were known. So was Florence Nightingale. The Lancet, the leading medical journal, venomously denounced the waterborne theory and its dogged proponent, John Snow.

 

For the full review, see: 

FERDINAND MOUNT.  "BOOKS; Lost in a Time of Cholera; How a doctor’s search solved the mystery of an epidemic in Victorian London."  The Wall Street Journal   (Sat., October 21, 2006):  P8.

 

The reference to the book is:

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.  299 pages, $26.95

 

Middendorf “Studied Under Joseph Schumpeter”

GloriousDisasterBK.jpg   Source of book image:  http://basicbooks.com/perseus/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0465045731

 

William Middendorf was important in the Goldwater campaign for president.  Here is a brief excerpt from his recent book about the campaign:

 

(p. 8)  . . ., I became a disciple of the Austrian libertarian school of economics, having studied under Joseph Schumpeter (an odd-man-out at Harvard, later named by the Wall Street Journal as the most important economist of the twentieth century) and Ludwig Von Mises (at New York University).  Schumpeter and Von Mises saw entrepreneurship as a major driving force in economic development, considered private property—protected by an independent judiciary—essential to the efficient use of resources, and held that government intereference in market processes was usually counterproductive.

 

The reference to the book is: 

Middendorf, J. William, II. Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater’s Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

 

To Help Poor: “Allow Entrepreneurs to Flourish”

 

Of the three "views" discussed in Wessel’s original commentary, the following excerpt just includes the one that I share:

 

With the billions of dollars they are spending, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Bill Clinton and Bono are likely to make progress in their quest to prevent treatable diseases from killing millions of people.  Nearly all of these people live or will live in poor countries.

That worries economist Simon Johnson.  He doesn’t doubt the moral imperative to fight disease.  Still, he wonders:  "Do we really know how to help the poor people — the increasing number of poor people?  Do we really know how to help them out of poverty?"

Such questions haunt academics, governments, international institutions and global do-gooders.  They are impressed with China’s rapid modernization, though puzzled that it has done so well without following standard precepts.  They are disappointed and puzzled that Latin America nations haven’t done better, especially because so many did take the advice of the experts.  They are depressed and puzzled by the continued widespread misery in Africa.

With intellectual humility, Mr. Johnson, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, faced a roomful of peers at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association last weekend and said, "Public health had the germ theory of disease.  Economics has made great progress, but it’s still waiting for its ‘germ theory of disease.’"  That probably overstates the challenges remaining to public-health warriors — avian flu, AIDS/HIV, malaria and all — but not the shortcomings of economic understanding of what poor countries should do to achieve sustained growth.

. . .

A third view is that earlier economists focused on the wrong thing.  Mr. Johnson, among others, argues that what really matters is having solid political, legal and economic institutions — courts, central banks, honest bureaucrats, private-property rights — that allow entrepreneurs to flourish.  Imposing what seem to be sound economic policies on corrupt, incompetent or myopic governments is doomed.  Building strong institutions is a necessary prerequisite.  In this camp, there is a running side argument about which comes first:  the institutions or the educated people who create them.  Was the Constitution key to U.S. success, or was it Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton?

 

For the full commentary, see:

DAVID WESSEL.  "CAPITAL; Why Economists Are Still Grasping For Cure to Global Poverty."  The Wall Streeet Journal  (Thurs.,  January 11, 2007):  A7.

 

Americans Believe “Individuals Are Responsible for their Own Success”

BrooksDavid.jpg   David Brooks.  Source of photo:  online version of the NYT commentary cited below.

 

David Brooks wrote some useful reflections on some of the work of sociologist Seymour Martin Lipsett, who died on New Year’s Eve at the end of 2006:

 

Lipset was relentlessly empirical, and rested his conclusions on data as well as history and philosophy. He found that Americans have for centuries embraced individualistic, meritocratic, antistatist values, even at times when income inequality was greater than it is today.

Large majorities of Americans have always believed that individuals are responsible for their own success, Lipset reported, while people in other countries are much more likely to point to forces beyond individual control. Sixty-five percent of Americans believe hard work is the key to success; only 12 percent think luck plays a major role.

In his “American Exceptionalism” (1996), Lipset pointed out that 78 percent of Americans endorse the view that “the strength of this country today is mostly based on the success of American business.” Fewer than a third of all Americans believe the state has a responsibility to reduce income disparities, compared with 82 percent of Italians. Over 70 percent of Americans believe “individuals should take more responsibility for providing for themselves” whereas most Japanese believe “the state should take more responsibility to ensure everyone is provided for.”

America, he concluded, is an outlier, an exceptional nation.

 

For the full commentary, see:

DAVID BROOKS.  "The American Way of Equality."  The New York Times, Section 4 (Sun., January 14, 2007):  12.

 

The Difference Between Being a University President and Being a Cabinet Officer

 

At a dinner last week to announce the winner of the business book of the year award, Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary, poked fun at his tenure as the president of Harvard.  . . .

Specifically, he said he was woefully naïve when he had been first asked to describe the difference between being a university president and being a cabinet officer. ”I guess I didn’t get it right in the answer I gave in my first year or two,” he said, ”because I used to say, ‘Well, in Washington, it’s so political; there’s organized opposition to everything.’ ”

 

For the full story, see: 

JANE L. LEVERE.  "OPENERS: SUITS; HARVARD EDUCATION."  The New York Times, Section 3 (Sun., October 29, 2006):  2.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

 

Increase in Minimum Wage Hurts Poor

 

The strong bipartisan support for increasing the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour from the current $5.15 — a 40% increase — is a sad example of how interest-group politics and the public’s ignorance of economics can combine to give us laws that manage to be both inefficient and inegalitarian.

An increase in the minimum wage raises the costs of fast foods and other goods produced with large inputs of unskilled labor. Producers adjust both by substituting capital inputs and/or high-skilled labor for minimum-wage workers and, because the substitutes are more costly (otherwise the substitutions would have been made already), by raising prices. The higher prices reduce the producers’ output and thus their demand for labor. The adjustments to the hike in the minimum wage are inefficient because they are motivated not by a higher real cost of low-skilled labor but by a government-mandated increase in the price of that labor. That increase has the same misallocative effect as monopoly pricing.

Although some workers benefit — those who were paid the old minimum wage but are worth the new, higher one to the employers — others are pushed into unemployment, the underground economy or crime. The losers are therefore likely to lose more than the gainers gain; they are also likely to be poorer people. And poor families are disproportionately hurt by the rise in the price of fast foods and other goods produced with low-skilled labor because these families spend a relatively large fraction of their incomes on such goods. And many, maybe most, of the gainers from a higher minimum wage are not poor. Most minimum-wage workers are part time, and for the majority their minimum-wage income supplements an income derived from other sources. Examples are retirees living on Social Security or private pensions who want to get out of the house part of the day and earn pin money, stay-at-home spouses who want to supplement their spouse’s earnings, and teenagers working after school. An increase in the minimum wage will thus provide a windfall to many workers who are not poor.

Some economists deny that a minimum wage reduces employment, though most disagree. And because most increases in the minimum wage have been slight, their effects are difficult to disentangle from other factors that affect employment. But a 40% increase would be too large to have no employment effect; about a tenth of the work force makes less than $7.25 an hour. Even defenders of minimum-wage laws must believe that beyond some point a higher minimum would cause unemployment. Otherwise why don’t they propose $10, or $15, or an even higher figure?

A number of countries, including France, have conducted such experiments; the ratio of the minimum wage to the average wage is much higher in these countries than in the U.S. Economists Guy Laroque and Bernard Salanie find that the high minimum wage in France explains a significant part of the low employment rate of married women. Mr. Salanie has argued that the minimum wage also contributes to the dismal employment prospects of young persons in France, including Muslim youths, an estimated 40% of whom are unemployed. 

 

For the full commentary, see: 

GARY S. BECKER and RICHARD A. POSNER.  "How to Make the Poor Poorer."  The Wall Street Journal (Fri., January 26, 2007):  A11.

 

Schumpeterian Alan Greenspan Receives Second Richest Book Advance Ever Paid

GreenspanAlanGrin.jpg   Why is this man smiling?  (Alan Greenspan has reason to grin.)  Source of photo:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

 

I believe that the market for economists is imperfectly competitive, since the supply and demand for academics is highly regulated by governmental and quasi-governmental institutions.  But it is interesting that the second highest book advance ever paid is going to Alan Greenspan.  Greenspan is a practical, eclectic, economist who believes that Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction is important for understanding the workings of a capitalist economy. 

 

(p. C1)  Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, has agreed to sell his memoir for an advance of more than $8.5 million, according to people involved in the negotiations, making a deal that appears to give him the second-largest advance ever paid for a nonfiction book. 

. . .

(p. C8)  Mr. Greenspan’s advance ranks second only to the more than $10 million paid to former President Bill Clinton for his memoir, "My Life," which was published in June 2004. Pope John Paul II received an advance of $8.5 million in 1994 for his book, "Crossing the Threshold of Hope," and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton received an $8 million advance for her memoir, "Living History," published in 2003.

 

For the full story, see: 

EDWARD WYATT.  "Greenspan’s Book Deal Is Said to Be Among the Richest."  The New York Times (Weds.,  March 8, 2006): C1 & C8.

 

Empirical Science at Its Best

   Source of book image:  http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/11460000/11468284.jpg

 

I have not yet read The Ghost Map, but from the review excerpted below, it sounds like a wonderful book.  One lesson from the book appears to be that much good can come from a careful collection of evidence, and that much harm can come from sticking to a theory in spite of the evidence.  It is also interesting that in this tale, the villain turns out to be the advocate of public works, whose good intentions resulted in much death and suffering. 

 

(p. P8) The sociology of error is a wonderful subject. Some university ought to endow a chair in it — and then make Steven Johnson the first professor. Mr. Johnson last provoked the public with his counterintuitive polemic "Everything Bad Is Good For You," in which he argued that TV and videogames actually improve our cognitive skills. In "The Ghost Map" he tells the story of how for 30 years and more the medical establishment in Victorian London refused to accept what was staring them in the face, namely that cholera was a waterborne disease.

Thousands of Londoners died while doctors and public-health officials stubbornly clung to the view that the plague was an airborne miasma that hung in the foul atmosphere of the slums and was inhaled by the wretched creatures who lived there. Every kind of cure was proposed: opium, linseed oil and hot compresses, smoke, castor oil, brandy — everything but the simple, obvious remedy of rehydration, which reduces the otherwise fatal disease to a bad case of diarrhea.

The fact that the cholera toxin tricks the cells in the lining of the colon into expelling water at a terrifying rate (victims have been known to lose 30% of their body weight in a matter of hours) should surely have alerted someone to the possibility that putting this Niagara back into the body might be worth trying. Only one doctor, Thomas Latta, hit upon the answer, in 1832, just a few months after the first outbreak ever in Britain. His mistake was not to inject enough salty water, and his lone initiative was soon overwhelmed by the brainless babble of the quacks.

Chief among the villains of Mr. Johnson’s unputdownable tale was the man whom we were brought up to revere as the father of public sanitation, Edwin Chadwick. This dour, tactless, unpopular reformer laid the foundations for all the government interventions in public health that we now take for granted. Yet in this story he labored under not one but two illusions that proved catastrophic.

. . .

With the austere teetotaller and vegetarian Dr. Snow and his devoted helper in the Soho slums, the Rev. Henry Whitehead, "The Ghost Map" gains not one but two heroes. Patiently they mapped the patterns of victims and survivors and narrowed down the most likely source of the cholera plague to the Broad Street pump. But even after the pump handle was removed so that Londoners could no longer fill their buckets there and the illness subsided, the miasmatists were not convinced. Snow then tramped the streets of Battersea and Vauxhall to demonstrate that those who had their water from higher up the Thames, above the reach of the tide, remained unharmed, while those who took it from the foul tidewater perished in the hundreds. This was no easy task, since the pattern of water pipes under London’s houses was as tangled as the pattern of Internet service providers are today.

Why did it take so long? Because mapping epidemics was only in its infancy, though Snow’s famous map was not quite the first. Because the questions that Chadwick’s public-health board researched were self-fulfilling, all having to do with the smells and personal habits of the poor and not with the water they drank. The researchers mistook correlation for causation: Nobody died on the high ground of Hampstead, where the air was purer, therefore higher was safer — or so it seemed until a Mrs. Eley, who had retired thither, arranged to receive a jugful of water from her beloved Broad Street pump and got cholera.

But above all Chadwick and his crew were certain of themselves because the stench of the slums was so utterly disgusting and because smell acts so powerfully on our imaginations. Only the most careful and dispassionate investigators were free of the obsession with stench. Henry Mayhew, for example, noted in his "London Labour and the London Poor" (1851) that sewer-hunters, who scavenged deep underground knee-deep in muck, lived to a ripe old age. The Great Stink of 1858, which finally persuaded the government to commission Sir Joseph Bazalgette to lay down the magnificent network of sewers that have lasted to this day, did not kill a single Londoner — yet still Chadwick did not believe.

 

For the full review, see: 

FERDINAND MOUNT.  "BOOKS; Lost in a Time of Cholera; How a doctor’s search solved the mystery of an epidemic in Victorian London."  The Wall Street Journal   (Sat., October 21, 2006):  P8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

 

The reference to the book is:

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.  299 pages, $26.95

 

SnowJohn.jpg   Dr. John Snow.  Source of photo:  online version of the WSJ article cited above.

ChadwickEdwin.jpg   Edwin Chadwick.  Source of photo:  online version of the WSJ article cited above.

 

Health Care Spending Increases Faster than Inflation, But Slower than Previous Year

HealthCareSpendingGraph.gif   Source of graph:  online version of NYT article cited below.

 

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 — Spending on health care in the United States increased in 2005 at the slowest pace in six years, mostly because of much slower growth in spending on prescription drugs, the government reported Monday.

It was the third consecutive year of slower growth in the nation’s medical bills. Total health spending reached nearly $2 trillion in 2005, growing only a bit faster than the economy as a whole, officials said.

But with new medical technology becoming available every month and with a generation of baby boomers approaching old age, federal officials made no bold claims about having tamed health costs.

“It is unclear whether this phenomenon is temporary or indicative of a longer-term trend,” said Aaron C. Catlin, the principal author of the government’s annual report on health spending, published in the journal Health Affairs.

 

For the full story, see: 

ROBERT PEAR. "In ’05, Medical Bills Grew At Slowest Pace in 6 Years."  The New York Times  (Tues., January 9, 2007):  A13.