Joyce Appleby: Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination
Niall Ferguson: The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets, 1798-1848
Jonathan Israel: The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806
Jerry Z. Muller: The Mind and the Market : Capitalism in Modern European Thought
Kotkin has again come through with the most brilliant and clear statement about our current state of world affairs.
The Ukraine has made three new world alliances visible.
Here is the final sentence in his dire but vital prediction:
“Until the West wakes up from its self-referential slumbers, the tide of history may turn out less friendly to Ukraine’s loyal friends than to those who either abet aggression or maintain a steady indifference.”
I was actually trained as an economist but the U.C. Berkeley econ department was so Marxist that I was saved from the misery of becoming a PhD econ professor. My special interests were the definition of capital and business cycles aka Wesley Mitchell.
In earlier blog posts I’ve pointed out that the current inflation was caused by the Biden suppression of American oil production on his first day in office. The current inflation (and the one in the 1970s) had nothing to do with deficit spending, the classic economic theory to explain inflation.
Since the beginning of the Biden inflation the Federal Reserve has been trying to fight it using the classic econ model of raising the core interest rate. In theory raising the interest rate is intended to suppress capital investment (return on investment is supposed to be tied to base interest return) which will lead to a recession. Since this is a wrong analysis it isn’t working.
In fact we have had the longest economic expansion in the history of the world, fourteen years.
The reason for this is not understood by anyone in economics. The cause is simple. America is the recipient of much of the computer and Internet revenues of the whole planet. The cell phone networks, the computers, and everything related to them create money that pours into the American economy. This money is of such great magnitude that it swamps the ebbs and flows of the traditional American economy.
The longest previous economic expansion was from 1991 to 2001, ten years. That long expansion was due to the end of the Cold War and the transfer of capital spending from military to civilian investments.
The current expansion is from 2009 to the present, fourteen years so far. Don’t pay attention to the dip in 2020 due to the economic freeze of the Covid interruption. It had nothing to do with economic forces; it was a government-induced suppression of business.
We get to watch the longest economic expansion and see how incredible it is.
Another obituary; Dick died a week ago. The other obits I’ve seen about Dick are accurate but lack the personal elements.
I knew Dick when I helped start the Marketing Research department at the Bank of America and then started a national organization of my fellow bank marketing officers.
When I started my new job at the Bank of California, I went next door to let my friend, Dick, at Wells Fargo know about it. There were two other marketing men in his office. That was the meeting that created the future MasterCard.
Dick and I saw each other regularly for the next three years. Later, when he was president of Bank of America I phoned him to get his help on a project of mine. I wanted to create an index of the weighted major five global currencies to be used as a standard international currency for internal use in reporting financial statements for multinational corporations. Dick remembered me after two decades. He said he was getting rid of his international currency department and couldn’t help.
Dick was a genius exemplified by his purchase of Security Pacific National Bank. He knew, as I did, that all big organizations had internal politics that are very damaging to management. He picked a top executive at Security and promised him a raise of $5 million to tell him who was productive at Security and who wasn’t. After he bought and merged the banks he fired the losers and put his friend on the newly merged board of directors.
I saw Dick often, after he retired, at the symphony. He liked symphonic music and was a big financial supporter.
Dick was a very smart man, with a great sense of humor and a warmth that I can never forget.
It's time for me to start commenting on my history with the key people in the history of the modern computer.
Start with Doug Engelbart. I knew Doug from my monthly board meeting of the Portola Institute in Menlo Park. Doug was part of a circle of Menlo friends, most of whom were runners. I visited Doug’s office at SRI by invitation once. He is credited with inventing the mouse. His mouse was clunky and had 6 keys on it. Those were the days when we did line editing. Each change required citing the line and replacing the whole line, even for a change of one letter. Doug’s office had a small monitor that matched one on the other side of a wall. The goal was to write back and forth between the monitors.
Another friend, a very close friend of ten years, Stewart Brand, helped Doug to present his work to the public in San Francisco. Doug, with Stewart’s help, created the ‘Mother of All Demos.’
Stewart deserves a role as a personal and Internet computer father but has not been credited in his recent biography. Stewart convened the first Hackers’ Conference. Hackers were the backbone of the personal computer. Stewart also created the Well, the first active and long lasting community website.
My other friend from that circle was Bill English. Bill created and ran the Xerox PARC research center for nearly 15 years. PARC was the source of much if not most of the personal computer. Steve Jobs has publicly admitted that most of the first Apples came from PARC. Bill, as manager, will not get the credit he deserves. But people who understand management will know that he is responsible for the dozens of brilliant inventions that came out of his project.
Bill and I were on the board of the Point Foundation (Whole Earth Catalog money). We met quarterly for three years all day. His wife Roberta was a good friend. I spent time with them both in Tokyo where Bill was trying to create a Japanese keyboard. His system wasn’t used.
Lastly, I have had daily coffee for fifteen years with Scott Prevost who developed natural language for Microsoft’s Bing, then created AI for Adobe, a leader in the field. Scott is certainly a prime mover in AI.
All four of these men look like Prince Charles, now King Charles. Only Stewart is not an engineer. All four would prefer not to carry on a social conversation. Except for Stewart you would not look twice at any of them, you wouldn’t try to seek them out for a discussion. But all were/are calm, moderate, subdued and kind. Their conversation was intelligent but never provocative. Again, except for Stewart none had interests outside of work, except Bill loved Japan and Japanese art and Scott is interested in the politics of the gay male community.
All were/are confident, strong, honest and very male.
I knew and loved Judy, who died at 75 a few days ago.
Her obituaries fail to mention Ed Roberts, her partner in the Disability Movement. I give Judy credit for being the mother of the movement but never has the role of a father been clearer; Ed Roberts was the father and the prime mover of the movement. The true founder of a global revolution.
Ed’s disabilities were so great that he was severely limited in his daily movement. Judy did all the things that Ed needed. Judy was in a wheelchair but she had energy, administrative skills and mobility that Ed lacked.
This obituary has one purpose. To contrast Ed and Judy. I loved Judy; she was kind, deeply caring and honest (meaning frank). But the disability movement succeeded because of Ed.
Go back and take the time to read my obituary of Ed. A man who stood out from history with his incredibly intense humanity. When you met Ed you felt the meaning of being human. Ed moved our hearts.
Judy used the shaming and victimhood methodology of political action. She was effective because her anger was moderate and because Ed had opened the doors of the world.
I once asked Judy why men were attracted to her, as they were. She said it was the injured bird syndrome. Many men see an injured bird and they want to help. A wonderful part of maleness.
I am reminded of my big date, when I recently cleaned and washed Miners' Lettuce.
In the early 1970s I attended a casual soiree at the San Francisco Zen Center (relevant later) where I met an attractive woman and invited her to my house for dinner.
I then asked around about who she was. It turned out she was a rising star in the chef-restaurant world. Her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, was already globally famous.
The night of the dinner arrived and my solution to serving a famous chef was to collect local ingredients. One dish was Miner’s Lettuce since it was Spring and growing nearby in San Francisco. I collected a separate salad of five local greens from the parklet next door. I drove out to get wild spinach from the point near Sutro Baths.
She was due at 7PM. I started the main course and lit the hearth fire. Then she phoned to say she would be two hours late, delayed by a wine sales rep.
When she finally arrived, everything was wilted and reheated.
When she saw the Miner’s Lettuce she expressed horror and shock. She and her father had just lost $200,000 on a Central Valley farm trying to commercially grow Miner’s Lettuce and failed.
She later asked about the apple in my five layer dessert. ‘Yes’ I had cut the apple on the same board that I had cut onions.
I fell asleep after this disaster and she left by herself.
Years later, when I was the founder of Green’s Restaurant, we sent Debbie Madison, our future first chef, to study for a year as a cook at Chez Panisse. Debbie was a student at the Zen Center.
There is no leading anarchist theorist that I can refer to. I know many of the anarchist writers, a few of whom wrote in the post-Civil War period. Anarchy theory has always assumed that small groups of people, size of the groups is seldom specified, will self-organize and that a government structure, whether kingship or democracy will not be needed.
The most salient attribute of an anarchist society is the absence of a police or military.
Most public functions in an anarchist society are locally self-organized like fire brigades, water supplies, roads and sewers. Some anarchist models have private enterprise organizations and others are more kibbutz-like.
No anarchist has seen anything like what we have today. An entire city with all the traditional city services and functions but no functional government. San Francisco, a leader in most other areas, is now the first truly anarchist city on a scale of 800,000 people.
The city government doesn’t work. Taxes are collected and salaries to 33,000 city employees are paid as are the pensions of retired employees. But virtually no one works. Streets are rarely repaired, a few fire stations, very few, respond to fire calls but there are three times as many fire personnel as are needed. Most importantly the police, which operate at one-third of the standard street patrol staffing level, seldom carry out police functions because the police know that the courts and District Attorney will not prosecute most arrests. A small proportion of crimes are reported, and they only result in filing a paper on an internet form.
Pretty amazing. Crime is up, especially minor crimes. Anarchy works fairly well. Few people complain. Crime is a nuisance that results in complaining but most people live with it.
In a large established prosperous city where most life is established and functioning, anarchy works.
(Footnote to the photo: I created and promoted the first 'painted ladies' postcard for my Third World Tours.)
There is an online fact site that seems to be very popular, Quora, which is consistently wrong on one point. I just wanted to set the matter straight.
Quora is consistently asked whether people in the Medieval period took baths or cleaned themselves significantly. The answer is always ‘yes’ and the readers are told that taking a bath in a large tub was common.
The first problem with this answer is that it doesn’t refer to any geography. The questioners are probably talking about people in Europe. In this case Quora is completely wrong in the answer.
In Finland, Hungary and Turkey, the citizens regularly took steam baths, used bathing pools or saunas throughout history. The same is true in Japan. In the areas of West Africa that I am familiar with, bathing was ubiquitous. This was also true, much earlier, in the Roman Empire.
For the rest of Europe, bathing and washing the body was not done. The popular theories of the time were that being unwashed was healthy and deterred skin infections. Additionally the smells of everyday life were so egregious that covering one’s body with notions was necessary to survive the fetid smells of everyday life. Sewer systems were unknown in the English-speaking and European worlds.
All of this is readily determined by reading the literature of the time. The Japanese were so offended by the horrid smell of Europeans, they were made to stand outside during all encounters with Japanese and forced to live on a separate island. Africans reacted the same way to Europeans as did Muslims to the Crusaders.
In summary, most Europeans for 1,000 years didn’t bathe or wash. Many other parts of the world testify to the foul smells of Europe.
Elon Musk happened. Nearly all the big tech companies laid off workers in large numbers within the past few months of 2022 and 2023.
This seems to be a big secret. None of the media reports what just happened. I want historians to know first- hand.
Two things happened.
Any action by Elon Musk is significant. Mr. Musk is a technical and a managerial genius of historic proportions. He created the first successful electric car in this century, the Tesla, which has the largest global market as of this date and is very profitable. He created the first successful commercial space rocket company in history. Musk’s SpaceX launched more successful rockets last year than NASA launched in its whole history.
Bed Bath just escaped the second threat of bankruptcy. But it won’t survive.
“At its peak in 2017, Bed Bath & Beyond had 1,560 stores with 65,000 employees, bringing in $12.3 billion in revenue. But in the nine months through November 2022, it posted sales of just $4.2 billion, and its headcount dwindled to fewer than 30,000.” said a past CEO.
BedBath was founded in 1971. It filled an important cluster of niches that were formerly many of the niches filled by department stores. It was a smaller version of Macy’s with a greater selection in each category.
The big marketing mistake was sending millions of 20% discount cards to everyone in their marketing areas. That is a terrible marketing mistake. It has the following problems:
All national stores need an online outlet. Bed Bath was foreclosed from this vital business option.
Management knew the problem but was trapped in this marketing nightmare.
“Like any form of promotion, it becomes a drug,” a former CEO said. Over the years, attempts to pull back on the mailings or reduce the discount backfired. “Once you’re addicted to it and your customer is addicted to it, it’s a very difficult thing to wean them off of.”
It is impossible to stop mail-out discounts.
Discount mail-outs work for grocery stores because so much inventory is seasonal and the effect is to be a seasonal reminder. Such grocery mailers are also for specific items that are sometimes temporary real loss leaders.
This is a lesson for all businesses. Sales of any type are risky unless done with a specific marketing goal in mind. Even then they are questionable.
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