Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
I posted the question “What would you do if you were running General Motors?” A lively discussion resulted, with over 100 comments…thought it might be worthwhile reposting in view of recent events.
One of the most memorable comments was from Ralf, on another discussion thread:
“What would you do if you were running General Motors?”
I would stop running the company and start just plain running. :)
Newly-elected Congressman Jared Polis (a Democrat!) offers some interesting thoughts on the politics of the automotive industry:
Our United States Congress of lawyers, doctors, diplomats, retired military officers and career politicians — along with their staffs of intelligent young political science majors and MBAs — now finds itself poring over “business plans” submitted this week by Ford, GM and Chrysler. People who have never before in their lives seen — no less implemented — a business plan are now trying to decide if these companies will succeed by means of a “capital infusion” with various imposed preconditions and negotiate what we taxpayers (investors) should be getting for our money. Something is wrong with this picture.
Here’s an open thread, if anyone feels like discussing this issue.
British drunkenness is not a pleasant story. I can remember years ago reading for some class or other of gin and the 18th century. Hogarth portrays a world little different from the ghetto of the crack whores a decade or two ago. Alcohol may seem fun, but it doesn’t always look all that good.
One of the numerous reasons I got fed up with running a business in the notorious strip across from our local university were the tiresome drunks. Wedged between bars, our copy shop gave us a front row seat on well, on a guy pissing on the window with such glazed over eyes that his only reason was probably the most primitive nature called. The night guy complained to me the next day- he’d tried to place himself between the window and the young girls working with him; he knew animals he’d just gotten his PhD. in ag and he knew the world he’d just returned from a Peace Corps tour in Africa; he wasn’t shocked but he was angry. Thirteen years of locking up late at night and walking out into the cool night air to see two drunks “helping” an equally drunken girl into a car, of seeing evidence that many had relieved themselves in the bushes and in the gutter around us didn’t make me sad to sell. Yes, drunken man is not noble man; he does show us how vulgar and selfish our instincts can be and why it is a good thing they are restrained. Then there was the guy whose intentions were clearly dishonorable toward another of my workers as she moved toward her car; since he was falling down, tangled in the pants he was trying to get off, she found him less threatening than disgusting. Man can be loutish. (And if drunks dominate here, I don’t remember the druggies on the Drag in Austin being any prizes, either.)
What England did in the Victorian years is Himmelfarb territory and it is a remarkable century in terms of restraint and duty and productivity. For instance, the number of crimes that were punished by hanging went down, but the police became respected and so were women. (The few crimes more punished at the end of the century than the beginning were against women.) Those gin-soaked mothers became the hands that rocked the cradle. As both the Chicagoboyz and Dalyrmple note our culture can encourage or discourage. But we also need models. The manliness of firefighters asking for last rites as they went into the burning towers or of the Iraqi man throwing himself on the suicide bomber headed toward his mosque – these are in my head and I’m thankful for them.
But if our species demonstrates an instinctive & eternal vulgarity, an ugly & base self that seeks oblivion in drinks or drugs or mob violence, we also long for consciousness, our heroism instinctive, too.
Kaus critiques the Mumbai responses, but if the tragedy demonstrated failings in law enforcement, it also showed us what man could be. A&L often links to cynical academia, but this time it found virtue. Michael Pollock’s “Heroes at the Taj” concludes:
It is much easier to destroy than to build, yet somehow humanity has managed to build far more than it has ever destroyed. Likewise, in a period of crisis, it is much easier to find faults and failings rather than to celebrate the good deeds. It is now time to commemorate our heroes.
Among liberals, “progressives,” and especially academics, there is great joy at the prospect of an administration dominated by people who had very high SAT scores and who possess advanced degrees.
At the same point in time, we are experiencing a serious credit crisis, brought about to a substantial extent by naive and inadequate mathematical models–mostly developed by people with very high SAT scores and very often with advanced degrees.
About 20 years ago, Peter Drucker wrote a wonderful pseudo-autobiography, “Adventures of a Bystander.” It tells his own story only indirectly, via profiles of people he has known. These range from from his grandmother and his 4th-grade teacher in Austria to Henry Luce (Time-Life) and Alfred Sloan (GM).
In the chapter titled “Ernest Freedberg’s World,” Drucker writes about two old-line merchants. The first of these, called “Uncle Henry” by those who knew him, was the founder and owner of a large and succesful department store. When Drucker met him, he was already in his eighties. Uncle Henry was a businessman who did things by intuition more than by formal analysis, and his own son Irving, a Harvard B-School graduate, was appalled at “the unsystematic and unscientific way the store was being run.”
Drucker remembers his conversations with Uncle Henry. “He would tell stories constantly, always to do with a late consignment of ladies’ hats, or a shipment of mismatched umbrellas, or the notions counter. His stories would drive me up the wall. But gradually I learned to listen, at least with one ear. For surprisingly enough he always leaped to a generalization from the farrago of anecdotes and stocking sizes and color promotions in lieu of markdowns for mismatched umbrellas.”
Reflecting many years later, Drucker observes: “There are lots of people with grasshopper minds who can only go from one specific to another–from stockings to buttons, for instance, or from one experiment to another–and never get to the generalization and the concept. They are to be found among scientists as often as among merchants. But I have learned that the mind of the good merchant, as also of the good artist or good scientist, works the way Uncle Henry’s mind worked. It starts out with the most specific, the most concrete, and then reaches for the generalization.”