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.
A lot of people are asking why the both the government and private response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is so inept.
No major failure has a single cause but I think one major cause has been completely overlooked:
Everyone involved is simply out of practice.
Frances Anne Kemble was a British actress who achieved considerable fame subsequent to her 1829 appearance in a production of Romeo and Juliet. I recently ran across her description of an experience she had in 1830, when she became one of the first people to ride on the newly-constructed London & Manchester railway line. Railway travel was then as exotic as space travel is now…arguably more so. Fannie’s escort for the trip was none other than George Stephenson, the self-taught engineer who had been the driving force behind the line’s construction.
She was impressed with the experience of railroad travel (“You can’t imagine how strange it seemed to be journeying on thus, without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical, unvarying pace, between these rocky walls, which are already clothed with moss and ferns and grasses”) and with Stephenson (“the master of all these marvels, with whom I am most horribly in love”) She offers an interesting analysis of the roles of government vs the private sector in the creation of this railroad (“The Liverpool merchants, whose far-sighted self-interest prompted them to wise liberality, had accepted the risk of George Stephenson’s magnificent experiment, which the committee of inquiry of the House of Commons had rejected for the government. These men, of less intellectual culture than the Parliament members, had the adventurous imagination proper to great speculators, which is the poetry of the counting-house and wharf, and were better able to receive the enthusiastic infection of the great projector’s sanguine hope than the Westminster committee.”) The relevant section of her memoir is here.
The phrase “oil addiction” has come into common use…in his speech the other night, Obama generalized this to “addiction to fossil fuels.”
A little historical perspective…
Before we were addicted to oil, we were addicted to coal. This fuel was used to heat homes, to drive locomotives and steamships, to power steam engines in factories, and for many other things in addition to its present-day uses in power generation and iron/steel production. While coal has many positive qualities as a fuel, the age of coal had its drawbacks. Coal mining was dangerous and often injurious to health. Stoking of furnaces involved backbreaking labor…although automatic stokers were developed for locomotives and power plants, the firing of steamship boilers still required the round-the-clock effort of large numbers of human beings. (See Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape.) And coal was and is heavy and bulky in proportion to its energy, so that it could not enable the development of such things as airplanes, automobiles, and farm tractors. All of these factors were changed by the large-scale availability of oil. The need for human beings to serve as Hairy Apes was greatly reduced.
David Brooks argues that the crime wave of the 1970s has had a long-term effect on the American psyche, and especially on parenting. (via FFOF)
Victor Davis Hanson reflects on small-town America.
Paul Levy describes redesign of the pharmacy in the hospital he runs, making use of Lean principles, including mock-ups and heavy participation from those who will be using the new space. (via Lean Blog)
Big Brother on the Make….or perhaps, the take….
Outside of specific and targeted investigational contexts for law enforcement and intelligence, the Federal government really does not need to know what products we buy at the grocery store, what books we buy or check out at the library, the magazines to which we subscribe, our car payments, what kind of food we eat, the websites we visit, how we use our credit cards and where. It’s not actually the government’s business, and presumably, the 4th Amendment indicates they need a compelling interest before they are allowed to snoop.
Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn) is working hard….to make sure the Feds are watching your every move. Unless you are an illegal alien of course.
What passes for Liberalism these days is a strange ideology – American citizens are to be treated as criminals to be kept under continuous government surveillance but if you are a foreigner who enters the country illegally, you should get special dispensations from police questioning. Or unless you are a foreign terrorist overseas or in communication with one. WTF?
Cross-posted at Zenpundit