Tweet This Post

Last week I reviewed Hans Fallada’s 1932 novel about a young couple enduring hard times in late-Weimar Germany. The book was made into an American movie, released in 1934, which I watched last night. Here is the original NYT review of the the film.

The movie generally follows the book, with one huge exception. At the end of the book, the unemployed Sonny (who has come into Berlin to pick up his dole payment) is taken by a policeman for an undesirable tramp and is shoved off the sidewalk. Utterly in despair, he returns home and is at first unable to confess his humiliation to Lammchen. But when he finally does, he is lifted up and given hope by her love and understanding. In the movie, Sonny is also shoved by the cop…but when he returns home, his friend Mr Heilbutt has arrived to tell the couple that he has moved to Holland, started a business there, and is offering Sonny a job. The couple’s problems are solved.

Psychologically, the messages of these two alternative endings are about as different as you can get.

Margaret Sullavan plays Lammchen and Douglass Montgomery is Sonny: I thought Sullavan came off as much too elegant for a working-class girl who lacks self-confidence because she has been told all her life that she is “not pretty.” Alan Hale is good as the roguish but sometimes benign Jachmann. Muriel Kirkland overacts the heck out of Marie Kleinholz, the undesirable daughter of Sonny’s employer–Donald Haines does a much better job in the very minor role of the employer’s son. The best acting in the movie is by Christian Rub as a cart-driver and furniture-maker who becomes the couple’s landlord in Berlin…the screenwriters completely transformed his character from the extremely unpleasant individual he was in the book (I believe the phrase “drunken animal” was used) to a man who is wistful, quirky, and very helpful. In this case, the change from the book works well.

Overall, I thought the movie could have been better done. For example, at the end of the book there is a flashback from the cold and starry night outside the couple’s residence to an earlier and warmer starry night on the beach where they first made love. This could have been given a very nice cinematic treatment even within the constraints of 1934 Hollywood. There were other missed opportunities. The film is definitely worth seeing, especially if you’re interested in the era, but I think the book deserved better.

There have also been several German movies made from Little Man, What Now?…not sure whether any of them are available with English subtitles.

Tweet This Post

Rich Karlgaard of Forbes has some thoughts on the Facebook IPO. Best line:

Zuckerberg’s view of shareholders is like President Obama’s view of blue collar workers. He needs them but secretly laughs at them.

Not sure this is totally fair to Zuck (completely accurate as far as Obama goes), but pretty funny.

Note especially Karlgaard’s comment about the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley on public market investors:

The insider pig pile of PE firms and celebrity Silicon Valley angels took it all. This is a rather new, post-Sarbanes-Oxley fact and it should make Americans very, very angry. When Microsoft when public in 1986, its market value was $780 million. Microsoft’s market value would rise more than 700 times in the next 13 years. Bill Gates made millionaires of thousands of ordinary public investors. When Google went public in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation, it left less on the table for you and me. Still, if you had invested in Google then and held your stock, you would be sitting atop a 9x return. Zuckerberg and his Facebook friends took it all.

Tweet This Post

Little Man, What Now?

I’ve often seen this 1932 book footnoted in histories touching on Weimar Germany; not having previously read it I had been under the vague impression that it was some sort of political screed. Actually it is a novel, and a good one. The political implications are indeed significant, but they’re mostly implicit rather than explicit.

Johannes and Emma, known to one another as Sonny and Lammchen, are a young couple who marry when Lammchen unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Their world is not the world of Weimar’s avant-garde artists and writers, or of its risque-to-outright-degenerate cabaret scene. It is far from the world of a young middle-class intellectual like Sebastian Haffner, whose invaluable memoir I reviewed here. Theirs is the world of people at the absolute bottom of anything that could be considered as even lower-middle-class, struggling to hold on by their fingernails.

When we first meet our protagonists, Sonny is working as a bookkeeper–he was previously a reasonably-successful salesman of men’s clothing, working for the kindly Jewish merchant Mr. Bergmann, but a pointless quarrel with Bergmann’s wife, coupled with a job offer from the local grain merchant (Kleinholz) led to a career change. Sonny soon finds that as a condition of continued employment he is expected to marry Kleinholz’s ugly and unpleasant daughter, never an appealing proposition and one which his marriage to Lammchen clearly makes impossible. Lammchen is from a working-class family: her father is a strong union man and Social Democrat who sees himself as superior to lower-tier white-collar men like Sonny.

When Sonny and Lammchen set up housekeeping, their economic situation continually borders on desperate. Purchasing a stew pot, or indulging in the extravagance of a few bites of salmon for dinner, represents a major financial decision. An impulsive decision on Sonny’s part to please Lammchen by acquiring the dressing table she admires will have long-lasting consequences for their budget.

The great inflation of Weimar has come and gone; the psychological damage lingers. Sonny and Lammchen’s landlady cannot comprehend what happened to her savings:

Young people, before the war, we had a comfortable fifty thousand marks. And now that money’s all gone. How can it all be gone?…I sit here reckoning it up. I’ve written it all down. I sit here, reckoning. Here it says: a pound of butter, three thousand marks…can a pound of butter cost three thousand marks?…I now know that my money’s been stolen. Someone who rented here stole it…he falsified my housekeeping book so I wouldn’t notice. He turned three into three thousand without me realizing…how can fifty thousand have all gone?

Inflation is no longer the problem, unemployment is. There are millions of unemployed, and those who do hold jobs are desperately afraid of losing them and will do anything to keep them.

Both Sonny and Lammchen are limited and flawed people with many redeeming and even lovable attributes. Sonny, possibly as a result of upbringing by his cold and sleazy mother, is lacking in a sense of worth and in self-confidence–when he returns to the business of selling menswear, the store’s establishment of a quota system (apparently a radical innovation at the time) is so stressful to him as to greatly harm his sales performance. His devotion to Lammchen and to the coming baby (“the Shrimp”) is unshakable and keeps him going. Lammchen herself, despite her generally sweet nature, can on occasion be a irrational, unrealistic, and very unfair to Sonny, although these episodes are of short duration.

In pursuit of possible employment for Sonny, they move to Berlin, where life definitely does not get any better. Germany’s vaunted social-welfare system does provide a certain amount of help for the couple, but there is a psychic cost. When they apply for the nursing-mother allowance to which Lammchen is clearly entitled when Shrimp is born, they find themselves enmeshed in a bureaucratic paperwork nightmare. They finally do get the money, but Lammchen is so upset by the experience that she resolves to vote Communist in the next election. (Yeah, that’ll help.) Sonny does receive compensation during his periods of unemployment, but this does little to ease his feeling of uselessness and fears for the future. After finally getting hired by Mandel’s Department Store, he passes a group of still-unemployed men:

Pinneberg had the feeling, despite the fact that he was about to become a wage-earner again, that he was much closer to those non-earners than to people who earned a great deal. He was one of them, any day he could find himself standing here among them, and there was nothing he could do about it. He had no protection. He was one of millions.

Despite the social safety net, despite a few helpful friends and acquaintances, the dominant feeling of Sonny and Lammchen is that they are utterly alone in the world, like children in a dark wood or like American pioneers on the great plains–but without the hope.

Neither Sonny nor Lammchen is a very political person, but they have the strong feeling that “the system” is rigged against them. While Lammchen does make an anti-Semitic remark early in the book (“I’m not too keen on Jews”), neither she nor Sonny seems to be among the growing number who blame Germany’s Jews for their economic difficulties–indeed, Sonny is appalled when a Jewish businesswoman tells him of her mistreatment at the hands of Jew-haters. The couple’s (rather vague) political leanings are to the Left, and they attribute the source of their problems to the rich and the powerful generically. They have no faith in the political system or leadership.

Ministers made speeches to him, enjoined him to tighten his belt, to make sacrifices, to feel German, to put his money in the savings-bank and to vote for the constitutional party. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t, according to the circumstances, but he didn’t believe what they said. Not in the least. His innermost conviction was: they all want something from me, but not for me.

Of Lammchen’s political views, the author says:

She had a few simple ideas: that most people are only bad because they have been made bad, that you shouldn’t judge anybody because you never know what you would do yourself, that the rich and powerful think ordinary people don’t have the same feelings as they do–that’s what Lammchen instinctively believed, though she hadn’t thought it out.

Sonny is resolved to succeed in his sales job at Mandel’s department store, and is greatly helped by an older salesman, the very dignified Mr. Heilbutt, who possesses both practical sales skills and general life skills that Sonny has not yet developed. For the most part, though, the relationship among store employees is of a dog-eat-dog, knife-in-the-back nature, and some of the customers are very difficult–like the man who comes into the store accompanied by his wife AND his sister AND his mother-in-law, with vociferous opinions about each item from the first two women and a constant repetition of the complaint we-should-have-gone-to-a-different-store from the mother-in-law.

When Sonny again becomes unemployed, this time for a protracted period, Lammchen is able to bring in a little money by doing sewing for more-affluent families, while Sonny takes on the role of a house-husband. The author implies that this situation has become common in Germany, as Lammchen asks:

What d’you think, Mr Jachmann? D’you think it’s going to be like this from now on with the men at home doing the housework while the women work? It’s impossible.

There are many interesting minor characters in the book–Mr. Heilbutt the senior salesman, Mr. Jachmann, who is Sonny’s mother’s gangsterish but sporadically helpful boyfriend, the famous actor Schlueter, who Sonny much admires and who he actually meets while working in the store. Fallada’s obvious liking and sympathy for Sonny and Lammchen and some of the other characters doesn’t keep him from being able to develop and show their weaknesses and even to laugh at them every now and then–in this the book reminds me a bit of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full. Overall, Little Man, What Now? is very human, readable, and engrossing, and I was sorry to say goodbye to Sonny and Lammchen when reaching the end. Highly recommended–Amazon link here.

Fallada originally intended this book to be a cheerful one, to be simply “a story about a marriage, a quite simple good little marriage–a baby is born: two are happy, three are happy.” But the times inevitably pointed him in a different direction. For the details of the book’s setting and action, he drew not only on his personal experiences but on the 1930 study by Siegfried Kracauer: White-collar Workers . (Title also translated as The Salaried Masses.) In the Afterword to Little Man, Philip Brady notes that “To Kracauer the white-collar worker–twenty percent of all workers and numbering three and a half million–was a vast underclass, undefined hitherto and, in contrast to the proletariat, overlooked.”

It’s hard to avoid seeing parallels between the plight of these lower-tier white-collar workers and that of today’s unemployed/underemployed college graduates in America. Not many of the latter, of course, have (so far) reached the stage of being unable to afford the purchase of a stew-pot, but the senses of disappointment and lack of hope for the future are too similar to be comfortable And Sonny’s certainty that the politicians are opportunistic speech-givers who care nothing about him, which goes beyond the normal politician-bashing to be expected in any democracy, certainly finds an echo in the America of today.

The plight of Sonny and Lammchen, I must note, is note entirely a matter of social and economic forces beyond their control–their fate is not entirely in the stars rather than in themselves. The case of the senior salesman Mr Heilbutt demonstrates that a more confident and astute individual could carve out at least a little more security, affluence, and sense of agency for himself than our protagonists have been able to do. But–as a customer review at Amazon points out–all Sonny and Lammchen were able to offer the world was “hard work and honesty”..and in their place and time that was not enough.

Again, I recommend this book highly. Amazon has it on Kindle as well as in paper format.

An American movie based on Little Man, What Now? was released in 1934, starring Douglass Montgomery as Sonny and Margaret Sullivan as Lammchen. I’ve ordered it and will post a review after I’ve seen it.

Tweet This Post

Here’s the S-1.


Is this company really worth the $100 billion or so implied by the IPO pricing? A few points of comparison: the market capitalization of Duke Energy is $29 billion. Target stores is $36B. Yahoo is $19B while Amazon is $101B and Cisco Systems is $89B. CSX railroad is $22B, Ford is $38B, and General Electric is $194B.


Do you think a $100B valuation for Facebook is realistic? What strategies and future environments could lead to this number being sustainable or even understated?


(I don’t have any direct financial interest in Facebook currently, but may do something with the stock at some point, more likely in the short than in the long direction. This post is for sharing of general information and discussion and does not represent financial advice.)

Tweet This Post

The hot energy story of the last few years has been the vast expansion in the available supplies of natural gas, and the very significant economic implications thereof. I though it might be interesting to take a look at the past, present, and future of this commodity.
The first known use of natural gas was by the Chinese, circa 500 BC…they captured gas from places where it was seeping to the surface, transported it in bamboo pipelines, and burned it for a heat source to distill seawater and capture the resulting salt and fresh water. The modern gas era began circa 1800 with the use of gas for lighting–initially of streets and later of homes and other buildings. Since there was no network of gas wells and long-distance pipelines, the gas used for these applications was usually not true natural gas, but rather “town gas,” made by heating coal. (Gas stoves seem to have become popular circa 1880, and apparently had quite an impact….I’ve read that the term “gas-stove wife” was enviously applied to women who were so fortunate as to have one of these appliances and were thereby spared the labor of tending a wood or coal stove, and hence had some leisure time available.)


The transition from coal gas to true natural gas had to wait on the build-out of a long-haul pipeline network, which took place mainly from 1920 to 1960. Although electricity became the glamor “fuel” and displaced gas in many cases for cooking and heating, the generation of electricity itself has in recent years become a major source of gas demand. Natural gas is also important as a feedstock for the production of fertilizer and of various plastics. By the early 2000s, there were serious concerns that the US was running out of natural gas–see for example this 2003 TIME Magazine story. The article cites Alan Greenspan’s concerns that high nat gas prices would make us uncompetitive in many industries, as well as citing direct economic pain inflicted on consumers. The only solution seemed to be large-scale imports of natural gas via LNG (liquified natural gas) ships. (Gas is far more difficult to transport than oil, because it needs to be liquified in order to make the volumes manageable, which in turn requires refrigerating it to very low temperatures.) In late 2005, US natural gas prices hit an inflation-adjusted level of almost $16 per million BTUs.


The price is now about $2.50 per million BTUs. What happened?

What happened was “fracking,” or hydraulic fracturing, which uses the injection of fluids under pressure to crack open rock formations and make accessible gas/oil which would otherwise be unavailable. Although fracking has been used for decades, the technology has been intensively developed in recent years, especially thru the efforts of independent oilman George Mitchell. (It’s interesting that Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson was also involved in fracking experiments when he was a young geologist.) This video explains how fracking is enabled by three related technologies: horizontal drilling, microseismic mapping, and slickwater injection.


In his state-of-the-union address, Obama was quick to cite “public research dollars” involved in the development of fracking technologies (although he avoided actually using the term “fracking”)…it would have been nice if he’d had the grace to acknowledge the role played by entrepreneurs such as George Mitchell in this revolution rather than exclusively emphasizing the government role.


The expansion of natural gas supplies has many implications. It will help to hold down and even reduce electricity prices, and help the nation avoid Obama’s promise of electricity prices that would “necessarily skyrocket” as a result of his war on coal and on fossil fuels in general. These lower electricity prices will in turn help to make manufacturing more competitive, as will the availability of natural gas as a low-priced feedstock for chemicals and plastics production. See for example Plastics News:


Newfound supplies of natural gas from shale deposits throughout the (North American) region have altered the dynamics of polyethylene and other plastics that use ethylene as a feedstock. Natural gas can be used to make ethane, which is converted into ethylene and then into PE and other resins. Proved shale gas deposits in the U.S. alone jumped 75 percent between 2008 and 2009. The discoveries have prompted several firms — including Dow Chemical Co. and Shell Oil — to announce plans to build new North American ethylene crackers, with Shell making the almost-unheard-of decision to place its new cracker in western Pennsylvania, near the gas-rich Marcellus Shale. Other companies, including Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. LLC and Formosa Plastics Corp. USA, have announced plans to increase their North American PE output as a result of the shale gas wave. “It’s like the gold rush,” Dow executive Mauro Gregorio said of the shale boom in an interview at NPE2012, held April 1-5 in Orlando. “The discovery of shale gas is one of the most important events in the U.S. in a long time.

(via Carpe Diem, which has more on the gas revolution here.) Also see how unconventional gas fuels America’s manufacturing revival at the GE blog (although I have to note in passing that GE’s excessive hyping of wind/solar over the last several years has been less than helpful for the development of an intelligent national energy policy.) Low gas prices also encourage natural gas use in transportation: there is already considerable use of compressed gas for local vehicles such as delivery trucks and buses, and there are potential applications for LNG with long-haul trucking and even with rail. Indeed, the natural gas revolution has been one of the very few bright spots in the American economy over the last few years, and has the potential to contribute greatly to this country’s economic recovery and growth.


So what could go wrong?


It is possible that decline curves are being calculated incorrectly and that the fields now being developed could hold significantly less potential than believed by their developers and investors and that the economics will turn out to be terrible. It is possible that there will turn out to be genuine environmental problems which are so serious that they justify the shutting down or extreme restriction of advanced fracking technologies.


But I think the technology and the industry are well enough developed that these risks are fairly minimal.  The primary risk is political: that environmental extremists will do to natural gas what they did to nuclear power and will apply irrational fear-mongering to get fracking suppressed or tied up in enough regulatory knots to inhibit the fulfillment of its potential. This danger is certainly much, much higher if Barack Obama is reelected: the President, and the Democratic Party in general, have repeatedly demonstrated extreme hostility to the fossil-fuel industry (see for example this: the administration is killing even more energy jobs than we thought) and extreme obesiance to environmental pressure groups.  It should be obvious that if Obama had succeeded in establishing the degree of energy-industry control of which he dreams, the natural gas revolution never would have taken place. Regardless of how much credit Obama in his campaign speeches tries to take for increases in gas production, you can be very sure that a second Obama administration would involve a much more constrained role for natural gas than would a Romney administration–with very malign consequences for the entire national economy.


Disclosure: I ‘m an investor in many natural-gas-related enterprises. 

Tweet This Post

…and its successor, the computer-driven phototypesetting machine.

Because in the Olden Days, when typesetting was done by hand, the typesetter would need a physical piece of type for each occurrence of a specific letter in a particular composition.

If we were still at that level of technology, there would be a serious “I” shortage for print-media reporting of the speeches of a certain individual.

Tweet This Post

Arthur Brooks (surely one of the very few people to pursue a career as a professional player of the French horn before becoming a professor of business and government) has a good piece in today’s WSJ.

The opposite of earned success is “learned helplessness,” a term coined by Martin Seligman, the eminent psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It refers to what happens if rewards and punishments are not tied to merit: People simply give up and stop trying to succeed.

During experiments, Mr. Seligman observed that when people realized they were powerless to influence their circumstances, they would become depressed and had difficulty performing even ordinary tasks. In an interview in the New York Times, Mr. Seligman said: “We found that even when good things occurred that weren’t earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people’s well-being. It produced helplessness. People gave up and became passive.”

Read the whole thing.

Tweet This Post

The prospect of terminating Barack Obama’s employment inspired Bookworm and her commenters to link various breakup songs.

Which reminded me of this great song: Goodbye to You!

Irritating 10-second ad at the beginning, but it’s worth it.

Tweet This Post

From an Amazon customer review of one of Tom Russell’s albums:

Twice in my life, while driving in heavy freeway traffic, I’ve heard songs so good on the radio that I had to pull off the road and collect my thoughts. Turns out Tom Russell wrote both of ‘em.

I’ve never had to actually pull off the road, but there’s no denying that TR’s songs pack a considerable emotional punch…indeed, I think Russell is one of the most talented singer/songwriters working today. I’ve been meaning to write a review of his work for some time, and was stirred into action by L C Reese’s post Grasshoppers and Frost, which reminded me of some lines from Russell’s song Ambrose Larsen:

The blackbirds and the locusts, destroyed our corn and wheat
The hawks they ate the chickens, the wolves our mutton meat
With traps and dogs and shotguns loud, we fought this old wild ground
Our children caught the fever, but no doctors were around

(listen here)

The above is from TR’s album The Man From God Knows Where, a song-cycle about the American immigrant experience based in part on the lives of his own Norwegian and Irish ancestors. “Concept albums often fall flat because they are too explicit” noted an SFGate review of this work, “…but The Man From God Knows Where triumphs by laying out the story of one man’s family in intimate detail while developing general themes that inform all our lives.”

The stories are told in first person, Here’s Mary Clare Malloy, one of 700 “picture brides” immigrating from Ireland to join the men they have arranged to marry:

We disembarked and stood in line with chalk marks on our coats
It was X for mental illness, if E back on the boat
They asked us what our breeding was, and could we read or write
The sound of women weeping filled the dormitories at night

My best friend was deported back, to a poor Killea home
Another sent to Swinbourne Isle, died of cholera alone
The rest of us were shipped to trains bound for Midwest states
To wild and stormy prairie lands and our prospective mates

(listen here)

The album captures the almost unbearable nostalgia that must have afflicted immigrants in a time when there was no fast and low-cost transoceanic travel, no international phone calls, especially in The Old Northern Shore. Those who inhabited the country prior to the coming of the immigrants are not neglected–a passage from the epynonymous Man from God Knows Where:

I’ve heard the sound of Indian drums, I’ve heard the bugles blow.
Before they rewrote history, into a Wild West Show.
My kin sailed toward America, to steal their Indian ground.
They passed Bill Cody’s circus ships, European bound.

…segues into:

Look at me, brave Sitting Bull, in this gondola canoe
Bill Cody brings us smoke and meat, so what are we to do?
I came across the water, in a boat no man could row
To play war in front of strangers, in Cody’s Wild West show

(The reference is to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which toured Europe several times between 1887 and 1906. Sitting Bull did participate in the show, though there is some question about whether he was actually in Venice.)

The album ends with the beautiful song Love Abides, which can be heard in full here. (Different version from the one on this album, though.) And here is a tracklist for the entire album, with playable samples of about half the songs.

Singers contributing to this album, in addition to Russell himself, include Iris DeMent, Dolores Keane, and Dave Van Ronk. The voice of Walt Whitman is also present, via an old cylinder recording. Most of the songs were written by Russell; there are also several traditional songs and David Massengill’s Rider on an Orphan Train. This album is a very ambitious piece of work, and one that worked out extremely well. Highly recommended. Almost all the songs work fine on a stand-alone basis, but I suggest listening to the album straight through on initial hearing.

See also reviews from SFGate and SoundStage.

The Man From God Knows Where is only one of the 20 or so albums that Russell has done. I’ll talk about some of the songs on these other albums in a future post.

Tweet This Post

Link

via Instapundit

See also Claire Berlinski’s post A hidden history of evil.

Tweet This Post

It’s been obvious for some time that Obama simply cannot stand Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s also increasingly obvious that the President feels a real sense of liking for and fellow-spiritedness with Turkish leader Recep Erdogan, who has moved his country away from secular democracy and disturbingly far in the direction of Islamic fundamentalism and hostility to Israel.


Which says plenty about the kind of leadership we are getting from Obama himself.


More here.

Tweet This Post

Nick Schulz interviews Jim Manzi about Manzi’s forthcoming book Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society. Excerpt from the interview:

We are all, to some extent, the prisoners of our experience. Like everyone, my experiences have surely created numerous biases to which, by definition, I am blind. But I have drawn some conscious lessons from my various jobs. Mostly, I suppose they relate to humility about how much harder it is to get anything done out there in the world than it seems like it ought to be when you read about it in a book or discuss it in a conference room. 

A good example is that I think that most mainstream economists radically underestimate the importance in any business of what in another context Carl von Clausewitz called “friction.” Headquarters rarely knows what is going on in the field; people in frontline positions have little idea of the big picture, and react to local conditions as best they can; entrepreneurs are mostly making it up as they go, and so on. Economists are of course aware of this issue conceptually, but their attempts to incorporate it into their models of the firm and the economy are inadequate in the extreme. As compared to mainstream economic doctrine, therefore, I believe that uncertainty plays a far bigger role in real world decision-making, that quantitative models of the economy are less useful as guides to action, and that trial-and-error learning as embodied in existing institutions and practices is more important.

(via Grim’s Hall)

Tweet This Post

Last week, long-time Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen published an extremely vitriolic column attacking Mitt Romney as “a man of falsehoods.” What I want to focus on in this post, though, is not the positives and negatives of Mr Romney, but rather the concluding paragraph of Cohen’s article:

He often cites his business background as commending him for the presidency. That’s his forgivable absurdity. Instead, what his career has given him is the businessman’s concept of self — that what he does is not who he is. This is what enables the slumlord to be a charitable man. This is what enables the corporate raider to endow his university. Business is business. It’s what you do. It is not who you are. Lying isn’t a sin. It’s a business plan.

So, in Cohen’s view, the businessman’s “concept of self” inherently involves a separation of what he does from who he is…a more forthright way he could have put this, I guess, would have been to simply say that all businessmen are weasels. (It’s interesting that Cohen chooses to use the term “businessman” rather than the gender-neutral term “businessperson.” Does he believe that there are no female slumlords? Does he think women inherently lack the analytical skills and competitive spirit required to be a successful corporate raider?) Evidently, Cohen believes that businesspeople are much more prone to unethical behavior (“Lying isn’t a sin. It’s a business plan.”) than are, say, tort lawyers, college professors, civil-service employees, or the executives of “nonprofit” organizations.

Of course, there is a long tradition of aristocrats looking down their long noses at those who are “in trade.” (Although I expect that average aristocrat’s view of a newspaper columnist wouldn’t be much more positive than his view of a storeowner or a factory manager.)

Cohen is far from being on the leftmost pole of the Washington journalistic establishment, and that fact that he feels able to make such pejorative drive-by assertions about the nature of businesspeople, without the need to build a case for their validity, speaks volumes about the current climate of opinion among those who today identify themselves as liberals and “progressives”–ie, the controlling elements of the Democratic Party.

A corporate executive who despised salespeople or manufacturing people would be unlikely to be able to run the sales function or the manufacturing function of his company effectively. There is no chance that politicians from a party dominated by people like Cohen–and much worse–will be able to supervise a free-market economy in a way leading to sustainable economic recovery and growth.

Tweet This Post

Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. Screenwriter Robert Avrech has posted the first part of his Emmy-award-winning film The Devil’s Arithmetic, which is based on Jane Yolen’s book of the same name, for on-line viewing.

The DVD is available from the usual sources, including Amazon and Netflix. Highly recommended.

Tweet This Post

The 70th anniversary of the Doolittle Toyko raid is being marked at the National Museum of the USAF near Dayton, OH. Four of the original raiders will be present.

Video here.

Tweet This Post

Speaking of the Titanic….there must have been at least a thousand books written about this ship, and quite a few of these books have been getting a marketing push from the 100th anniversary of the sinking. One worthy book that could have done with a little marketing assistance is this 1998 novel, which currently stands at #5,797,127 on Amazon.

Passenger Sumner Jordan is a 12-year-old from a wealthy Boston family, returning from a visit to his father in England. Sumner was named for the abolitionist Charles Sumner, who was beaten and nearly killed–on the Senate floor–by a proponent of slavery, and he desperately wants to live up to the level of courage shown by his namesake. He has a crush on 19-year-old Ivy Earhshaw, a dedicated suffragette.

When the ship hits the iceberg, each of them will have some decisions to make about ideals versus personal safety.

(Writing this review from memory and information on Amazon, since I can’t find my copy and it’s not available on Kindle.)

Tweet This Post

(I originally posted this in early 2010–today seems like an appropriate day for a re-post)

Chevy Chase, MD, is an affluent suburb of Washington DC. Median household income is over $200K, and a significant percentage of households have incomes that are much, much higher. Stores located in Chevy Chase include Tiffany & Co, Ralph Lauren, Christian Dior, Versace, Jimmy Choo, Nieman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Saks-Jandel.

PowerLine observed that during the 2008 election season, yards in Chevy Chase were thick with Obama signs–and wonders how these people are now feeling about the prospect of sharp tax increases for people in their income brackets.

The PowerLine guys are very astute, but I think they’re missing a key point on this one. There are substantial groups of people who stand to benefit financially from the policies of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate, and these benefits can greatly outweigh the costs of any additional taxes that these policies require them to pay. Many of the residents of Chevy Chase–a very high percentage of whom get their income directly or indirectly from government activities–fall into this category.

Consider, for starters, direct employment by the government. Most Americans still probably think of government work as low-paid, but this is much less true than it used to be. According to this, 19% of civil servants now make $100K or more. A significant number of federal employees are now making more than $170,000. And, of course, the more the role of government is expanded, the more such jobs will be created, and the better will be the prospects for further pay increases.

If one member of a couple is a federal employee making $100K and the other is making $150K, that would be sufficient to allow them to live in Chevy Chase and occasionally partake of the shopping and restaurants. But to make the serious money required to really enjoy the Chevy Chase lifestyle, it’s best to look beyond direct government employment and pursue careers which indirectly but closely benefit from government activity…which are part of the “extended government,” to coin a phrase.

Lobbying, for example. And this has been a very, very good year for lobbyists. Which was practically inevitable. The more the government micromanages the economy, the more having friends in Washington becomes a key success factor–maybe the key success factor–for every business in the country.

The great expansion of government’s role is also very good, and for the same reasons, for lawyers whose practice is focused on regulation. Ditto for executives of trade associations, which typically exist largely to represent the common interests of the industry in governmental forums.

Trial lawyers, of course, benefit from Obama/Pelosi/Reid and their unwillingness to do anything to rein in the more predatory excesses of that industry.

Much of the federal government’s thinking, as well as day-to-day operations, is now outsourced to various consulting firms and “policy” nonprofits. Executives of these firms, including the “nonprofit” ones, often make far more money than even the highest-paid direct government employees. And higher government spending means more contracts and more opportunities for promotions and raises.

One of the best ways to make serious money in government-related work is to become an executive with one of those not-exactly-public-not-exactly-private institutions like Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae–whose headquarters is, conveniently, just a few miles south from Chevy Chase. (I am picking on Chevy Chase, of course, only for exemplary purposes: the phenomenon I’m discussing is a national one, although it is most obviously visible in the DC area.)

There are other groups of people who may not be quite as affluent as some of those mentioned above, but who also stand to benefit directly from Obamaism. K-12 school administrators, for example, can look forward to increased funding flowing to their schools–always the key element of the “progressive” solution to educational problems–and, surely, some of it will stick to them. At the same time, the Democratic worldview makes it unlikely that any serious performance standards will be put in place, thereby helping to ensure their employment security.

Now, I have no problem at all with people making large amounts of money…in fact, I’m all for it…as long as they are making money based on voluntary exchange and they are actually helping to produce the wealth from which they are being paid.

There are certainly some government employees, and employees of the “extended government,” who are in fact wealth-producers. An air traffic controller is as much a productive part of the air transportation system as is a private-sector airline pilot. A real research scientist at NIH or CDC is as much a part of the productive healthcare research system as is a researcher at Pfizer or Medtronic. (I use the “real research scientist” qualifier because these agencies seem to be devoting an increasing portion of their resources to nanny-state scolding.)

But the productive elements of government surely represent a declining percentage of the total government and extended-government employment. Many of the individuals making $100-$170K in government probably couldn’t learn to control air traffic or develop new drugs if their lives depended on it…rather, their skill is in manipulating language, in constructing verbal formulations along the approved patterns, and their activity is primarily about the transferring and absorption of wealth. Lawyers, lobbyists, and trade associations that exist to protect companies and industries from government overreach may sometimes be beneficial in that they keep economically-disastrous things from happening; OTOH, their activities also often distort economic activities in favor of the entities that are paying them, in ways that reduce the efficiency of the overall system.

The danger is that we are entering an era in which the best way to gain wealth–indeed, the only reliable way to gain wealth–is to use the power of government to take it from others and redistribute it in your direction. The belief that Obama/Pelosi/Reid redistributionism is exclusively or even primarily about helping those with low incomes is incorrect. It is indeed class warfare, but of a horizontal rather than a vertical nature.

Once again I quote Benjamin Franklin:

There are two passions which have a powerful influence in the affairs of men. These are ambition and avarice—the love of power and the love of money. Separately, each of these has great force in prompting men to action; but, when united in view of the same object, they have, in many minds, the most violent effects.

…and Irving Kristol:

Now, the pursuit of power is a zerosum game: you acquire power only by taking it away from someone else. The pursuit of money, however, is not a zero-sum game, which is why it is a much more innocent human activity. It is possible to make a lot of money without inflicting economic injury on anyone. Making money may be more sordid than appropriating power—at least it has traditionally been thought to be so—but, as Adam Smith and others pointed out, it is also a far more civil activity.

By tightly coupling the pursuit of money to the pursuit of political influence and power, Obama/Pelosi/Reid are doing great harm to the spirit of America as well as to its economy.

Tweet This Post

Ran across some information about a project to create an open-source Jacquard loom. A Jacquard has the ability to weave elaborately-patterned fabrics by controlling each individual warp thread in the weaving process. Machines that can handle a large number of threads are pretty costly…numbers I’ve seen are in the $30K-60K range…and there are evidently a lot of hobbyists and small businesspeople who would like such a loom but are unable to afford one. Hence, the open-source loom project.

The Jacquard is important in the history of technology, and I’ve been intending to write about this topic for a while. A good source is Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age, by James Essinger. (I’m not a weaver, so hope that those who are will forgive and correct any inaccuracies or incorrect use of terminology in this post.)

Traditionally, the weaving of patterned fabric was a very labor intensive process requiring that for each throw of the shuttle, a number of cords must be pulled or not pulled in order to lift or not lift specific threads. Essinger estimates only 1 inch of fabric per day, for a weaver and his assistant, could be produced–so these fabrics were definitely luxury goods.

In 1802, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, son of a master weaver in Lyons, perfected a machine which used perforations in paper cards to perform the selection function. An earlier attempt at automation had involved music-box-like rotating cylinders, but with Jacquard’s approach the cards could be chained together without limit–2000-card patterns were fairly common–and were cheap and relatively easy to prepare. The image of M Jacquard himself, at the top of the post, required 24000 cards for its creation. The loom did a lot for the prosperity of the French textile industry and especially for the city of Lyons; Jacquard was paid substantial money by the government for his patent and was personally recognized by Napoleon.

Circa 1837, the British mathematician/inventor Charles Babbage proposed the use of a Jacquard mechanism to control a programmable mechanical computer he called the Analytical Engine. In an elegant simile, Babbage’s collaborator Ada Lovelace wrote: We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves. The Analytical Engine was never completed, but in starting in the 1880s, the American inventor Herman Hollerith developed a family of machines for processing information punched on cards. (While Hollerith never credited Jacquard as a source for his ideas, the connection seems pretty clear given that his brother-in-law owned a silk mill including Jacquard machines.) The company that Hollerith created became IBM, and in 1944 this company partnered with Harvard University to create a general-purpose electromechanical computer using punched paper tape for programming. (Speaking of paper tape, this technology was applied circa 1857 for storing and transmitting/retransmitting telegraph messages. It was later heavily used for computer input, along with punched cards, and was also used for the numerical control of machine tools—cutting metal to design in a way similar to the way the Jacquard weaves to design.)

Returning to Jacquard weaving per se–at some point (in the early 1980s, it appears), the looms began evolving from purely mechanical devices to computer-controlled systems in which the threads were lifted by electrical solenoids responding to computer command. I’m not clear on how many of the classical Jacquards versus the computer-controlled versions are currently in use–this 2004 NYT article is about Scalamandré, a high-end textile company in NYC, shutting down its purely mechanical Jacquards and moving production to a computer-based operation in South Carolina. It seems fair to say that perforated paper was the world’s primary means of digital and machine-readable information storage for close to 200 years, which is a pretty good run.

Which brings us back to the open-source loom project, which is concisely described by project instigator/leader Margarita Benitez in this video…more information about the project here. They did hit their Kickstarter funding target of $10K, and the project status is being maintained at this site.

It’s an ambitious effort, involving as it does a combination of mechanical, electrical, and software technologies. The idea is that both the software and the plans for the hardware will be made publicly available–cost of purchased components I would expect will be nontrivial, but hopefully a lot less than $30,000.

The project is an interesting intersection of the worlds of hacking (in the benign sense) and crafting.

Very cool.

Tweet This Post

Last week Ginny critiqued an article by a University of Iowa professor, in which said professor (who moved to Iowa from San Francisco 20 years ago) had some not-terribly-positive things to say about the people among whom he has spent the last two decades and remarked that of the places he has lived, many of them foreign countries, “none has been more foreign to me than Iowa.”

Coincidentally, while resorting documents in my office I ran into the July/August 04 issue of the (sadly now defunct) magazine The American Enterprise, which has several articles on the theme “Plain America,” that is, western, midwestern, and rural America. Happily, the whole issue is online, and these essays are thoughtful and thought-provoking. They include:

–a piece on the cowboy archetype, by Andrew and Judith Kleinfield
–growing up in Fargo, by James Lileks
–culture in Inner America, by Bill Kauffman
–rediscovering our Midwest, by Joel Kotkin
–small lives well-lived in small places, by Blake Hurst
–the significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition, by Karl Zinsmeister
–some thoughts by the then-governor of Colorado, Bill Owens

These essays make a good complement to Ginny’s post. The text display format used at the linked site is not greatly to my liking, but it is readable, and it’s well worth doing so.

Tweet This Post

…would be the predictable result of a second Obama term. So says Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, in this video.

via Instapundit