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"Errol Joseph and his wife, Esther, at their Forstall Street property in New Orleans. Mr. Joseph, 62, had spent his life fixing houses." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) NEW ORLEANS -- Errol Joseph has the doorknobs. He has the doors, too, as well as a bathtub and a couple of sinks, stacks of drywall, a hot water heater, pipes, an air-conditioner compressor, and big pink rolls of insulation. They are sitting in a shed.

A few blocks up the street sits the gaunt frame of a house, the skeleton in which all these insides are supposed to fit. They have sat apart for years. The gap between: permits, procedures, policies, rules and the capricious demands of bureaucracy.

As people in the Northeast set off on the road back from Hurricane Sandy, there are those here, like Mr. Joseph, who are keen to offer warnings that recovery can be far more difficult than they imagine. Mr. Joseph sees his own story as a cautionary tale, though he admits he is unsure what he would have, or should have, done differently.

"Do the right thing and fall further behind," said Mr. Joseph, a big man with a soft voice.

. . .

(p. A4) But Mr. Joseph, who had spent his life repairing houses, figured he could do it himself, and would be back at home by that summer. He spent most of his rebuilding grant buying materials, including windows, shingles and everything else in the shed. In the spring of 2009, he elevated the frame of the house, leaving it propped on wooden cribbing.

Before he took any further steps, he contacted the state for an inspection, as he had been instructed.

Then the inspectors showed up.

" 'Do not do anything to this house until you get a letter of continuance,' " he recalled one inspector saying. "He said that three times. He said you would lose your money."

So Mr. Joseph did not do anything to the house. Months went by. No letter arrived. The inspector disappeared. Officials denied that anyone had ever said anything about a letter, said Mr. Joseph, who in his regular visits to state offices would then ask for written permission to move forward anyway.

In 2010, told that he would not be allowed to do the work himself, he drew up a contract with an elevation specialist. But permission from the state to move forward was still elusive. "Your paperwork is in the system," Mr. Joseph was told.

Though Mr. Joseph did not know it, his paperwork was blocked for months in the federal clearance process, but for reasons that remain a mystery.

The drywall rotted in the shed. The frame sat in the elements. The city, unaware of Mr. Joseph's travails, warned of demolition.

For the full story, see:

CAMPBELL ROBERTSON. "Katrina Rebuilder Can't Rise Above Red Tape." The New York Times (Thurs., February 21, 2012): A1 & A4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 20, 2012, and has the title "Routed by Katrina, Stuck in Quagmire of Rules.")

"A photograph of Mr. Joseph's block taken shortly after Hurricane Katrina. It took years to prove his house was salvageable." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway apparently has a large stake in DaVita Healthcare Partners. An earlier entry on this blog discussed accusations that DaVita Healthcare Partners has committed substantial healthcare fraud by charging the taxpayer millions of dollars for medicine that is needlessly thrown away. Apparently the DaVita investment is due to Ted Weschler, one of two deputies to whom Buffett has delegated the investment of some of Berkshire's funds.

(p. 3D) Weschler is believed to be behind Berkshire's aggressive move into DaVita Healthcare Partners -- a stock he owned when he ran his own hedge fund. Berkshire bought 10.9 million shares last year, becoming Da-Vita's largest stakeholder with 15.7 percent of the company. DaVita provides kidney dialy­sis services and is seen as a consistent cash-flow genera­tor. In November, the company closed its $4.7 billion purchase of Healthcare Partners, one of the country's largest operators of medical groups and physi­cian networks. DaVita shares rose more than 35 percent in the past 12 months.

For the full story, see:

MarketWatch . "Buffett was avid hunter of 6 stocks last year; Wells Fargo, GM and DirecTV top Berkshire's list." Omaha World-Herald (Tues., March 12, 2013): 1D & 3D.

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Source of book image: http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/manually-added/fineprint_custom-c26eb6a3f6c4d9bc09220769911f3cbeaa900b7f-s6-c10.jpg

I saw an informative C-SPAN interview with David Cay Johnston a while back. I had known from Johnston's previous books and reporting, that he was devoted to exposing the outrages of crony capitalism. What the interview revealed to me was that Johnston was not opposed to capitalism in general, and in fact viewed himself as friendly to entrepreneurial capitalism.

I believe that big companies are not bad when they got and stay big by honestly earning big profits from willing and delighted consumers. But big companies are bad when, as often happens, they use their size to get the government to suppress start-up competitors or to take money from taxpayers to subsidize their activities.

I have not yet read Johnston's latest book on the big and bad, but I expect it to present sad, but useful, examples.

Book discussed:

Johnston, David Cay. The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind. New York: Portfolio, 2012.

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Source of book image: http://javelindc.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/regulating_to_disaster.jpg

I caught part of a C-SPAN presentation on the Regulating to Disaster book. It sounded plausible and intriguing---consistent with other evidence I have seen that "green" jobs have been over-hyped and under-delivered.

Perhaps more important, there are the high opportunity costs of the tax dollars devoted to the "green" jobs, in terms of the non-green jobs that would have been created by entrepreneurs if less of their income had been taxed away.

I hope to look at the book in the near future.

Book discussed:

Furchtgott-Roth, Diana. Regulating to Disaster: How Green Jobs Policies Are Damaging America's Economy. New York: Encounter Books, 2012.

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(p. A23) Higher taxes will produce long-term changes in social norms, behavior and growth. Edward Prescott, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, found that, in the 1950s when their taxes were low, Europeans worked more hours per capita than Americans. Then their taxes went up, reducing the incentives to work and increasing the incentives to relax. Over the next decades, Europe saw a nearly 30 percent decline in work hours.

The rich tend to be more sensitive to tax-rate changes because they've got advisers who are paid to be. Martin Feldstein, an economics professor at Harvard, looked into tax changes in the 1980s and concluded that raising rates causes people to shift compensations to untaxed fringe benefits and otherwise suppresses their economic activity. A study last year by the economists Michael Keane and Richard Rogerson found that tax rates can have a surprisingly large influence on how much people invest in education, how likely they are to create businesses and which professions they go into.

For the full commentary, see:

DAVID BROOKS. "The Progressive Shift." The New York Times (Tues., March 19, 2013): A23.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 18, 2013.)

The Keane and Rogerson paper summarized by Brooks is:

Keane, Michael, and Richard Rogerson. "Micro and Macro Labor Supply Elasticities: A Reassessment of Conventional Wisdom." Journal of Economic Literature 50, no. 2 (June 2012): 464-76.

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(p. A20) UNITED NATIONS -- When the United Nations began renovating its Manhattan headquarters in 2009, one of the first casualties of the construction was the storied Delegate's Lounge, where for decades the delicate work of diplomacy was aided by a good stiff drink.

The loss of the bar led to protest from diplomats and their staffs, and a temporary outpost was soon established.

That bar is also now gone, but the thirst for liquor at the United Nations is apparently still strong.

This week, an American diplomat offered what he called a "modest proposal" that he hoped would speed along the United Nations' notoriously protracted budgetary proceedings. He asked delegates to put a cork in it.

"The negotiation rooms should in future be an inebriation-free zone," the diplomat, Joseph M. Torsella, said.

. . .

The United States' plea for sobriety was reported on the Web site of Foreign Policy magazine. The article cited anonymous diplomats saying that the most recent budget negotiations, which concluded in December, featured at least one delegate who became sick from too much alcohol.

. . .

The United States, Japan and western European countries provide the majority of the United Nations' budget. And many of the dozens of countries that make up the committee that sets the budget have little financial stake in the negotiations, so partaking of alcohol may seem a good way to endure marathon sessions that can last well into the night.

For the full story, see:

MARC SANTORA. "Diplomat Calls for End to Drunkenness During Negotiations at United Nations." The New York Times (Fri., March 8, 2013): A20.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 7, 2013 and has the title "Diplomat Calls for End to Drunkenness During U.N. Negotiations.")

(Note: ellipses added.)

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Source of book image: http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/i/island-of-vice/9780385519724_custom-e38a25fc66f104a049d4d24aa39dbe92d42fbd57-s6-c10.jpg

(p. C9) . . . as Richard Zacks's excellent "Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York" ably shows, while we might like to believe that the stretch from 1970 to 1995 represents the city's nadir, it was just about business as usual in New York over the centuries.

From its time as a Dutch colonial outpost, the city has always been pretty bad. You'd almost think New Yorkers prefer it that way. Of course, we don't like fraud, robbery, assault, arson, rape or murder any more than anyone else does. But the deliberate injury of one's fellow citizen isn't the only way to break the law. There are also those crimes that fall under the broad category of "vice": things such as gambling, prostitution, indecent exposure and selling alcohol at a convenient time. Historically, the average New Yorker has not greeted these acts with the same immediate urge to suppress that many of his or her fellow Americans have had. You don't get a nickname like "The City That Never Sleeps" without having a certain amount of things worth staying up for.

. . .

In the end, Mr. Zacks's exhaustively researched yet lively story is a classic battle between an irresistible force, Roosevelt's ego, and an immovable object, the people of New York's unwillingness to follow laws they thought were stupid. In this case, the object won, and handily. Mr. Zacks's account of the way the city's saloonkeepers instantly turned their establishments into hotels to take advantage of a loophole in the law is particularly amusing. Eventually, the police department, not unsympathetic to the Sunday tippler, began finding ways to wriggle out from under the commissioner's thumb, and beer-friendly Tammany Hall, with the people solidly behind it, began peeling away his allies.

For the full review, see:

DAVID WONDRICH. "BOOKSHELF; Teddy's Rough Ride." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 17, 2012): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 30, 2012.)

Book under review:

Zacks, Richard. Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean up Sin-Loving New York. New York: Doubleday, 2012.

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(p. A1) CHICAGO -- Not a single gun shop can be found in this city because they are outlawed. Handguns were banned in Chicago for decades, too, until 2010, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that was going too far, leading city leaders to settle for restrictions some describe as the closest they could get legally to a ban without a ban. Despite a continuing legal fight, Illinois remains the only state in the nation with no provision to let private citizens carry guns in public.

And yet Chicago, a city with no civilian gun ranges and bans on both assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, finds itself laboring to stem a flood of gun violence that contributed to more than 500 homicides last year and at least 40 killings already in 2013, including a fatal shooting of a 15-year-old girl on Tuesday.

To gun rights advocates, the city provides stark evidence that even some of the toughest restrictions fail to make places safer. "The gun laws in Chicago only restrict the law-abiding citizens and they've essentially made the citizens prey," said Richard A. Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association.

For the full story, see:

MONICA DAVEY. "Strict Gun Laws in Chicago Can't Stem Fatal Shots." The New York Times (Weds., January 30, 2013): A1 & A18.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 29, 2013, and has the slightly different title "Strict Gun Laws in Chicago Can't Stem Fatal Shots.")

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"Theodore Ogunbiyi-Roche, 10, who is visiting from London, drank a large soda in Times Square . . . " Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A18) . . . , New Yorkers are cool to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's plan to prohibit sales of large sugary drinks in city restaurants, stadiums and movie theaters, according to a . . . poll by The New York Times.

Six in 10 residents said the mayor's soda plan was a bad idea, compared with 36 percent who called it a good idea. A majority in every borough was opposed; Bronx and Queens residents were more likely than Manhattanites to say the plan was a bad idea.

. . .

. . . those opposed overwhelmingly cited a sense that Mr. Bloomberg was overreaching with the plan and that consumers should have the freedom to make a personal choice . . .

"The ban is at the point where it is an infringement of civil liberties," Liz Hare, 43, a scientific researcher in Queens, said in a follow-up interview. "There are many other things that people do that aren't healthy, so I think it's a big overreach."

Bob Barocas, 64, of Queens, put it more bluntly: "This is like the nanny state going off the wall."

For the full story, see:

MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and MARJORIE CONNELLY. "60% in City Oppose Soda Ban, Calling It an Overreach by Bloomberg, Poll Finds." The New York Times (Thurs., August 23, 2012): A18.

(Note: ellipses in caption and article added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date August 22, 2012, and the title "60% in City Oppose Bloomberg's Soda Ban, Poll Finds.")

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(p. A13) Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, gave a remarkable interview this month to The Washington Post. So remarkable that Post editors preceded the transcript with this disclosure: "He had just come from the dentist. And he had a toothache."

Perhaps it was the Novocain talking, but Mr. Schmidt has done us a service. He said in public what most technologists will say only in private. Whatever caused him to speak forthrightly about the disconnects between Silicon Valley and Washington, his comments deserve wider attention.

Mr. Schmidt had just given his first congressional testimony. He was called before the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee to answer allegations that Google is a monopolist, a charge the Federal Trade Commission is also investigating.

"So we get hauled in front of the Congress for developing a product that's free, that serves a billion people. OK? I mean, I don't know how to say it any clearer," Mr. Schmidt told the Post. "It's not like we raised prices. We could lower prices from free to . . . lower than free? You see what I'm saying?"

. . .

"Regulation prohibits real innovation, because the regulation essentially defines a path to follow," Mr. Schmidt said. This "by definition has a bias to the current outcome, because it's a path for the current outcome."

. . .

Washington is always slow to recognize technological change, which is why in their time IBM and Microsoft were also investigated after competing technologies had emerged.

Mr. Schmidt recounted a dinner in 1995 featuring a talk by Andy Grove, a founder of Intel: "He says, 'This is easy to understand. High tech runs three times faster than normal businesses. And the government runs three times slower than normal businesses. So we have a nine-times gap.' All of my experiences are consistent with Andy Grove's observation."

Mr. Schmidt explained there was only one way to deal with this nine-times gap, which this column hereby christens "Grove's Law of Government." That is "to make sure that the government does not get in the way and slow things down."

Mr. Schmidt recounted that when Silicon Valley first started playing a large role in the economy in the 1990s, "all of a sudden the politicians showed up. We thought the politicians showed up because they loved us. It's fair to say they loved us for our money."

He contrasted innovation in Silicon Valley with innovation in Washington. "Now there are startups in Washington," he said, "founded by people who were policy makers. . . . They're very clever people, and they've figured out a way in regulation to discriminate, to find a new satellite spectrum or a new frequency or whatever. They immediately hired a whole bunch of lobbyists. They raised some money to do that. And they're trying to innovate through regulation. So that's what passes for innovation in Washington."

For the full commentary, see:

L. GORDON CROVITZ. "INFORMATION AGE; Google Speaks Truth to Power; About the growing regulatory state, even Google's Eric Schmidt--a big supporter of the Obama administration--now feels the need to tell it like it is." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., October 24, 2011): A13.

(Note: ellipses between paragraphs added; ellipsis internal to Schmidt quote, in original WSJ commentary.)

The original Eric Schmidt interview with the Washington Post, can be read at:

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-10-01/national/35278181_1_google-chairman-eric-schmidt-regulation-disconnects

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"Fotis Antonopoulos's struggles to start OliveShop.com have made him a reluctant emblem of thwarted Greek entrepreneurship." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Vassilis Korkidis, who is quoted below, is (p. A3) "the president of the National Confederation of Hellenic Commerce, a trade association in Athens."

(p. A1) ATHENS -- It was about a year ago that Fotis I. Antonopoulos, a successful Web program designer here, decided he wanted to open an e-business selling olive products.

Luckily, he already had a day job.

It took him 10 months -- crisscrossing the city to collect dozens of forms and stamps of approval, including proof that he was up to date on his pension contributions -- before he could get started. But even that was not enough. In perhaps the strangest twist of all, his board members were required by the Health Department to submit lung X-rays -- and stool samples -- since this was a food company.

. . .

With Greece's economy entering its fourth year of recession, its entrepreneurs are eager to reverse a frightening tide. Last year, at least 68,000 small and medium-size businesses closed in Greece; nearly 135,000 jobs associated with them vanished. Predictions for 2012 are also bleak.

But despite the government's repeated promises to improve things, the climate for doing business here remains abysmal. In a recent report titled "Greece 10 Years Ahead," McKinsey & Company described Greece's economy as "chronically suffering from unfavorable conditions for business." Start-ups faced immense amounts of red tape, complex administrative and tax systems and procedural disincentives, it said.

. . .

(p. A3) Part of Mr. Antonopoulos's problem, Mr. Korkidis ventured, was his unwillingness to pay what is routinely referred to here as the "speed tax" -- bribes to move things along.

Nor is Mr. Korkidis much of a fan of recent government efforts to improve things. He pointed to a pamphlet produced by the Ministry of Development, which explained a new "one-stop shop" program for new businesses.

"This doesn't work," he said. "You have to collect 10 papers first -- and then it is one-stop shopping. Ridiculous."

At 36, Mr. Antonopoulos is an aging computer whiz kid with long hair and an easy smile.

. . .

The worst moment, he said, was when representatives from two agencies came to inspect the shop and disagreed about the legality of a circular staircase. They walked out telling him that he "would have to figure it out."

"At that point, we actually thought about just going to the U.K. with this," he said. "One of the inspectors knew about new legislation. The other didn't. And they just refused to come up with a solution."

At one point, the company got a huge order from Denmark, he said. But the paperwork for what amounted to a wholesale transaction was so onerous that they decided not to even try to fill the order.

For the full story, see:

SUZANNE DALEY. "A Tale of Greek Enterprise and Olive Oil, Smothered in Red Tape." The New York Times (Mon., March 19, 2012): A1 & A3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 18, 2012.)

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"John Mackey." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 16) In your new book, "Conscious Capitalism," you write that Whole Foods sees its customers as its "most important stakeholders" and that the company is obsessed with their happiness. The biggest complaint I hear about Whole Foods is how expensive it is. Why not drop prices to make your customers happier? People always complain about prices being too high. Whole Foods prices have dropped every year as we get to be larger and we have economies of scale. Also, people are not historically well informed about food prices. We're only spending about 7 percent of our disposable personal income on food. Fifty years ago, it was nearly 16 percent.

. . .

In 2009, some Whole Foods customers organized boycotts after you wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal expressing opposition to Obama's health care proposals. Do you wish you hadn't written it?
No, I don't. I regret that a lot of people didn't actually read it and it got taken out of context. President Obama asked for ideas about health care reform, and I put my ideas out there. Whole Foods has a good health care plan. It's not a solution to America's health care problems, but it's part of the solution.

So did you vote for Romney?
I did.

I imagine a certain percentage of Whole Foods customers will also boycott because of this.
I don't know what to say except that I'm a capitalist, first. There are many things I don't like about Romney, but more things I don't like about Obama. This is America, and people disagree on things.

For the full interview, see:

Andrew Goldman, Interviewer. "TALK; The Kale King." The New York Times Magazine (Sun., January 20, 2013): 16.

(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original, indicating interviewer questions.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date January 18, 2013, and has the title "TALK; John Mackey, the Kale King.")

Mackey's book is:

Mackey, John, and Rajendra Sisodia. Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.

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(p. 544) The meeting . . . lasted forty-five minutes, and Jobs did not hold back. "You're headed for a one-term presidency," Jobs told Obama at the outset. To prevent that, he said, the administration needed to be a lot more business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs.

Jobs also attacked America's education system, saying that it was hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers' unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said, not as industrial assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they were. Schools should be staying open until at least 6 p.m. and be in session eleven months of the year. It was absurd, he added, that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.

Source:

Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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(p. A11) . . . in Baltimore, . . . a local entrepreneur, following the logic of need, invested seven years and $30 million developing a robotic system for packaging prescription drugs for long-term patients in nursing homes and hospitals.

In a conversation last year, inventor Michael Bronfein told me if he'd known what it would cost him in time and money, he might never have started. How many entrepreneurs say the same? Probably all of them. But Mr. Bronfein saw a need and the power of technology to meet it, and the result was the Paxit automated medication dispensing system.

He saw workers spending hours under the old system sticking pills in monthly blister packs known as "bingo cards," a process expensive and error-prone. He saw nurses on the receiving end then spending time to pluck the pills out of blister packs and into paper cups, to create the proper daily drug regimen for each patient.

. . .

He followed the economic logic that indicated that all the people involved in the old system were becoming too valuable to have their time wasted by the old system. Backed by his company, Remedi SeniorCare, Paxit--in which a robot packages, labels and dispatches a daily round of medicines for each patient--is spreading across the mid-Atlantic and Midwest and winning plaudits from medical-care providers.

. . .

We need to preserve the incentive for investors to bring us the robots that will make the future bearable, rather than burying entrepreneurs in taxes in a vain attempt to seize the returns of investments before those investments are made.

For the full commentary, see:

Jenkins, HOLMAN W., JR. "BUSINESS WORLD; Robots to the Rescue? The flip side of an entitlements crisis is a labor shortage." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., January 9, 2013): A11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 8, 2013.)

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"The economy 'will remain challenging for a long time,' says IKEA Chief Executive Mikael Ohlsson." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B3) MALMO, Sweden--IKEA is poised to embark on a global spending spree, but its departing chief executive says red tape is slowing how fast the home-furnishings retailer can open its pocket book.

With the company set to report record sales on Wednesday, CEO Mikael Ohlsson said the amount of time it takes to open a store has roughly doubled in recent years.

"What some years ago took two to three years, now takes four to six years. And we also see that there's a lot of hidden obstacles in different markets and also within the [European Union] that's holding us back," he said in an interview recently at an IKEA store on Sweden's western coast.

. . .

IKEA plans to invest €2 billion in stores, factories and renewable energy this year. But the company fell €1 billion short of its goal of investing €3 billion in new projects last year, largely because of bureaucratic obstacles, he said. For 10 years IKEA has tried unsuccessfully to relocate a store in France, for example. The company also is challenging German policy dictating what can be sold and where, saying the rules are out of sync with EU legislation.

"It's a pity, because it can help create jobs and investments at a time when unemployment is high in many countries," Mr. Ohlsson said. A new IKEA store creates construction and store jobs for about 1,000 workers, he said.

. . .

The company's highest-profile headaches have come in India, an untapped market where IKEA wants to open a first store in at least five years and roll out an additional three soon thereafter.

For the full story, see:

ANNA MOLIN. "IKEA Chief Takes Aim at Red Tape." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., January 23, 2013): B3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 22, 2013.)

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(p. D1) Late last year Matthew Barzun, an official with the Obama campaign, called Craig Fox, a psychologist in Los Angeles, and invited him to a political planning meeting in Chicago, according to two people who attended the session.

"He said, 'Bring the whole group; let's hear what you have to say,' " recalled Dr. Fox, a behavioral economist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

So began an effort by a team of social scientists to help their favored candidate in the 2012 presidential election. Some members of the team had consulted with the Obama campaign in the 2008 cycle, but the meeting in January signaled a different direction.

"The culture of the campaign had changed," Dr. Fox said. "Before then I felt like we had to sell ourselves; this time there was a real hunger for our ideas."

. . .

(p. D6) When asked about the outside psychologists, the Obama campaign would neither confirm nor deny a relationship with them.

. . .

For their part, consortium members said they did nothing more than pass on research-based ideas, in e-mails and conference calls. They said they could talk only in general terms about the research, because they had signed nondisclosure agreements with the campaign.

In addition to Dr. Fox, the consortium included Susan T. Fiske of Princeton University; Samuel L. Popkin of the University of California, San Diego; Robert Cialdini, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University; Richard H. Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago's business school; and Michael Morris, a psychologist at Columbia.

"A kind of dream team, in my opinion," Dr. Fox said.

For the full story, see:

BENEDICT CAREY. "Academic 'Dream Team' Helped Obama's Effort." The New York Times (Tues., November 13, 2012): D1 & D6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 12, 2012.)

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Source of graph: online version of the WSJ commentary quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) President Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs" in 1971. The expectation then was that drug trafficking in the United States could be greatly reduced in a short time through federal policing--and yet the war on drugs continues to this day. The cost has been large in terms of lives, money and the well-being of many Americans, especially the poor and less educated. By most accounts, the gains from the war have been modest at best.

The direct monetary cost to American taxpayers of the war on drugs includes spending on police, the court personnel used to try drug users and traffickers, and the guards and other resources spent on imprisoning and punishing those convicted of drug offenses. Total current spending is estimated at over $40 billion a year.

These costs don't include many other harmful effects of the war on drugs that are difficult to quantify. For example, over the past 40 years the fraction of students who have dropped out of American high schools has remained large, at about 25%. Dropout rates are not high for middle-class white children, but they are very high for black and Hispanic children living in poor neighborhoods. Many factors explain the high dropout rates, especially bad schools and weak family support. But another important factor in inner-city neighborhoods is the temptation to drop out of school in order to profit from the drug trade.

The total number of persons incarcerated in state and federal prisons in the U.S. has grown from 330,000 in 1980 to about 1.6 million today. Much of the increase in this population is directly due to the war on drugs and the severe punishment for persons convicted of drug trafficking. About 50% of the inmates in federal prisons and 20% of those in state prisons have been convicted of either selling or using drugs. The many minor drug traffickers and drug users who spend time in jail find fewer opportunities for legal employment after they get out of prison, and they develop better skills at criminal activities.

. . .

(p. C2) It is generally harder to break an addiction to illegal goods, like drugs. Drug addicts may be leery of going to clinics or to nonprofit "drugs anonymous" groups for help. They fear they will be reported for consuming illegal substances. Since the consumption of illegal drugs must be hidden to avoid arrest and conviction, many drug consumers must alter their lives in order to avoid detection.

Usually overlooked in discussions of the effects of the war on drugs is that the illegality of drugs stunts the development of ways to help drug addicts, such as the drug equivalent of nicotine patches. Thus, though the war on drugs may well have induced lower drug use through higher prices, it has likely also increased the rate of addiction. The illegality of drugs makes it harder for addicts to get help in breaking their addictions. It leads them to associate more with other addicts and less with people who might help them quit.

. . .

The decriminalization of both drug use and the drug market won't be attained easily, as there is powerful opposition to each of them. The disastrous effects of the American war on drugs are becoming more apparent, however, not only in the U.S. but beyond its borders. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon has suggested "market solutions" as one alternative to the problem. Perhaps the combined efforts of leaders in different countries can succeed in making a big enough push toward finally ending this long, enormously destructive policy experiment.

For the full commentary, see:

GARY S. BECKER and KEVIN M. MURPHY. "Have We Lost the War on Drugs? After more than four decades of a failed experiment, the human cost has become too high. It is time to consider the decriminalization of drug use and the drug market." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., January 5, 2013): C1 & C2.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date January 4, 2013.)

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"Dr. Robert Langer's research lab is at the forefront of moving academic discoveries into the marketplace." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) HOW do you take particles in a test tube, or components in a tiny chip, and turn them into a $100 million company?

Dr. Robert Langer, 64, knows how. Since the 1980s, his Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spun out companies whose products treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases, and even thicken hair.

The Langer Lab is on the front lines of turning discoveries made in the lab into a range of drugs and drug delivery systems. Without this kind of technology transfer, the thinking goes, scientific discoveries might well sit on the shelf, stifling innovation.

A chemical engineer by training, Dr. Langer has helped start 25 companies and has 811 patents, issued or pending, to his name. More than 250 companies have licensed or sublicensed Langer Lab patents.

Polaris Venture Partners, a Boston venture capital firm, has invested $220 million in 18 Langer Lab-inspired businesses. Combined, these businesses have improved the health of many millions of people, says Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris.

. . .

(p. 7) Operating from the sixth floor of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Langer's lab has a research budget of more than $10 million for 2012, coming mostly from federal sources.

. . .

David H. Koch, executive vice president of Koch Industries, the conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., wrote in an e-mail that "innovation and education have long fueled the world's most powerful economies, so I can't think of a better or more natural synergy than the one between academia and industry." Mr. Koch endowed Dr. Langer's professorship at M.I.T. and is a graduate of the university.

For the full story, see:

HANNAH SELIGSON. "Hatching Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens at M.I.T." The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., November 25, 2012): 1 & 7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 24, 2012.)

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(p. 196) In 2004, the Hugo Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters who had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to household survey respondents to measure the economic effects of being identified as a Chávez political opponent. We find that voters who were identified as Chávez opponents experienced a 5 percent drop in earnings and a 1.3 percentage point drop in employment rates after the voter list was released.

Source:

Hsieh, Chang-Tai, Edward Miguel, Daniel Ortega, and Francisco Rodriguez. "The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela's Maisanta." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3, no. 2 (2011): 196-214.

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"Xerox PARC headquarters." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A11) A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: "The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet."

. . .

Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: "The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks."

If the government didn't invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.

But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.

According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with."

For the full commentary, see:

Gordon Crovitz. "INFORMATION AGE; Who Really Invented the Internet?" The Wall Street Journal (Mon., July 23, 2012): A11.

(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs was added; ellipsis internal to last paragraph was in original.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 22, 2012.)

I read the Hiltzik book several years ago, and my memory of it is not sharp, but I remember thinking that it was a useful book:

Hiltzik, Michael A. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: HarperBusiness, 1999.

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"A Chávez supporter. The president runs a well-oiled patronage system, a Tammany Hall-like operation but on a national scale. Government workers are frequently required to attend pro-Chávez rallies, and they come under pressure to vote for him." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

After the story quoted below was published, Chávez (alas) was re-elected.

(p. A1) Many Venezuelans who are eager to send Mr. Chávez packing, fed up with the country's lackluster economy and rampant crime, are nonetheless anxious that voting against the president could mean being fired from a government job, losing a government-built home or being cut off from social welfare benefits.

"I work for the government, and it scares me," said Luisa Arismendi, 33, a schoolteacher who cheered on a recent morning as Mr. Chávez's challenger, Henrique Capriles Radonski, drove by in this northeastern city, waving from the back of a pickup truck. Until this year, she always voted for Mr. Chávez, and she hesitated before giving her name, worried about what would happen if her supervisors found out she was switching sides. "If Chávez wins," she said, "I could be fired."

. . .

(p. A6) The fear has deep roots. Venezuelans bitterly recall how the names of millions of voters were made public after they signed a petition for an unsuccessful 2004 recall referendum to force Mr. Chávez out of office. Many government workers whose names were on the list lost their jobs.

Mr. Chávez runs a well-oiled patronage system, a Tammany Hall-like operation but on a national scale. Government workers are frequently required to attend pro-Chávez rallies, and they come under other pressures.

"They tell me that I have to vote for Chávez," said Diodimar Salazar, 37, who works at a government-run day care center in a rural area southeast of Cumaná. "They always threaten you that you will get fired."

Ms. Salazar said that her pro-Chávez co-workers insisted that the government would know how she voted. But experience has taught her otherwise. She simply casts her vote for the opposition and then tells her co-workers that she voted for Mr. Chávez.

"I'm not going to take the risk," said Fabiana Osteicoechea, 22, a law student in Caracas who said she would vote for Mr. Chávez even though she was an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Capriles. She said she was certain that Mr. Chávez would win and was afraid that the government career she hoped to have as a prosecutor could be blocked if she voted the wrong way.

"After the election, he's going to have more power than now, lots more, and I think he will have a way of knowing who voted for whom," she said. "I want to get a job with the government so, obviously I have to vote for Chávez."

For the full story, see:

WILLIAM NEUMAN. "Fear of Losing Benefits Affects Venezuela Vote." The New York Times (Sat., October 6, 2012): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date October 5, 2012, and has the title "Fears Persist Among Venezuelan Voters Ahead of Election.")

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"Lunch hour at Middle School 104 in Manhattan, where, on Friday, several seventh graders pronounced vegetables "gross." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) Outside Pittsburgh, they are proclaiming a strike, taking to Twitter and Facebook to spread the word. In a village near Milwaukee, hundreds staged a boycott. In a small farming and ranching community in western Kansas, they have produced a parody video. And in Parsippany, N.J., the protest is six days old and counting.

They are high school students, and their complaint is about lunch -- healthier, smaller and more expensive than ever.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which required public schools to follow new nutritional guidelines this academic year to receive extra federal lunch aid, has created a nationwide version of the age-old parental challenge: persuading children to eat what is good for them.

Because the lunches must now include fruits and vegetables, those who clamor for more cheese-laden nachos may find string beans and a peach cup instead. Because of limits on fat and sodium, some of those who crave French fries get baked sweet-potato wedges. Because of calorie restrictions, meat and carbohydrate portions are smaller. Gone is 2-percent chocolate milk, replaced by skim.

"Before, there was no taste and no flavor," said Malik Barrows, a senior at Automotive High School in Brooklyn, who likes fruit but said his classmates threw away their mandatory helpings on the cafeteria floor. "Now there's no taste, no flavor and it's healthy, which makes it taste even worse."

Students organized lunch strikes in a suburb of Pittsburgh, where in late August the hashtag "brownbagginit" was trending on Twitter, and outside Milwaukee, where the Mukwonago High School principal, Shawn McNulty, said participation in the lunch program had fallen 70 percent.

. . .

(p. A3) In Sharon Springs, Kan., lunch protesters at Wallace County High School posted a video on YouTube, "We Are Hungry"; in it, students faint in the hallways and during physical education class, acting as if they had been done in by meager helpings of potato puff casserole and chicken nuggets. To the tune of the song "We Are Young" by Fun, one student on the video sings, "My friends are at the corner store, getting junk so they don't waste away."

Since it was uploaded three weeks ago, "We Are Hungry" has had nearly 900,000 views.

Callahan Grund, a junior who stars in the video, said, "My opinion as a young farmer and rancher is that we produced this protein and it's not being used to its full advantage." He wakes up early every morning to do chores, stays after school for two hours of football practice and returns home for another round of chores. If it were not for the lunches his mother now packs him, he said, he would be hungry again just two hours after lunch.

In New York City, where school officials introduced whole-wheat breads, low-fat milk and other changes several years ago, the most noticeable change this year is the fruit and vegetable requirement, which has resulted in some waste, according to Eric Goldstein, the Education Department official who oversees food services. It is not hard to see why. At Middle School 104 in Gramercy Park on Friday, several seventh graders pronounced vegetables "gross."

"I just throw them out," said Danielson Gutierrez, 12, carrying a slice of pizza, which he had liberally sprinkled with seasonings, and a pear. He also offered his opinion on fruit: "I throw them out, too. I only like apples."

For the full story, see:

VIVIAN YEE. "No Appetite for Good-for-You School Lunches." The New York Times (Sat., October 6, 2012): A1 & A3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date October 5, 2012.)

"Dissatisfied with healthier school lunches, some Kansas students made a video parody." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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Source of book image: http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320716933l/11797348.jpg

I have not yet read Barry's book on Roger Williams, but I did enjoy and learn from his earlier The Great Influenza book.

(p. 12) Williams struck overland, through snow and bitter cold, "wch I feele yet," he reminisced later in life. He survived because he had help. "The ravens fed me in the wilderness," he said, comparing himself to the scriptural prophets sustained by bird-borne morsels, though his "ravens" were Indians. With their assistance, he reached the upper bend of a bay that would be named for its inhabitants, the Narragansett. There, Williams bought land from its native proprietors and established a settlement he called Providence, to honor the divine assistance given to him and other Christians on their flights from persecution.

. . .

Next, Williams refused to take an oath of fidelity to Massachusetts, on the grounds that anything sworn in God's name for worldly purposes was corrupt.

The authorities in Massachusetts were so outraged that having failed to arrest Williams, they tried to obliterate his new settlement. He went back to England to get a charter to protect his colony on his own terms: with a "hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernes of the world." In several publications, he argued that the individual conscience should not -- could not -- be governed, let alone persecuted. If God was the ultimate punisher of sin, it was impious for humans to assume his authority. And it was "directly contrary to the nature of Christ Jesus . . . that throats of men should be torne out for his sake."

Barry shows how controversial these beliefs were at the time, and in this way reinforces the standard image of Williams as an early proponent of liberty of conscience.

For the full review, see:

JOYCE E. CHAPLIN. "Errand in the Wilderness." The New York Times Book Review (Sun., May 26, 2012): 12.

(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs was added; ellipsis internal to quotation was in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 25, 2012 and has the title "Roger Williams: The Great Separationist.")

The book being reviewed, is:

Barry, John M. Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. New York: Viking Adult, 2012.

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"Any takers?: Two EV chargers sit unused in White Plains, MD." Source of photo: http://metablognews.com/wp-content/plugins/rss-poster/cache/d6fff_MK-BP785_CHARGE_G_20111016172708.jpg Source of caption: slightly edited from print version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) When McDonald's franchisee Tom Wolf built his latest restaurant in Huntington, W. Va., late last year, he installed two chargers for all-electric cars so customers could juice their batteries while eating. So far, the charging station has been used a few times.

. . .

Across the U.S., such equipment is proliferating even though it is unclear whether plug-in cars will prove popular.

. . .

Fewer than 15,000 all-electric cars are on U.S. roads, says Plug In America, a group promoting the technology.

. . .

(p. B11) Charging equipment is popping up largely because of subsidies. As part of a $5 billion federal program to subsidize development of electric vehicles and battery technology, the U.S. Energy Department over the past two years provided about $130 million for two pilot projects that help pay for chargers at homes, offices and public locations.

. . .

Opinions vary on demand. J.D. Power & Associates expects all-electric vehicles will account for less than 1% of U.S. auto sales in 2018, or about 102,000 cars and light trucks. Including hybrids and plug-in hybrids the market share is forecast at 8%.

"The premiums associated with these products are still more than what the consumer is willing to bear," says Mike VanNieuwkuyk, executive director of global vehicle research at J.D. Power.

For the full story, see:

JAMES R. HAGERTY And MIKE RAMSEY. "Charging Stations Multiply But Electric Cars Are Few." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., OCTOBER 17, 2011): B1 & B11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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(p. 538) The only benefit of war rationing, of which I am aware, is that an alert entrepreneur invented the bikini so as to conserve on the textiles that were then hard to come by for civilian use.

Source:

Shughart II, William F. "The New Deal and Modern Memory." Southern Economic Journal 77, no. 3 (Jan. 2011): 515-42.

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"Nigel Farage has waged a 20-year campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A7) Strasbourg, France  THE floor of the European Union's cavernous and mostly vacant parliamentary chamber here is hardly known for its lively debates. At least not until Nigel Farage, the Brussels-bashing leader of Britain's fastest growing political party, gets up to speak.

The vast majority of the European Parliament's 754 members, as they process the torrent of rules and regulations that Europe bestows upon them, are not inclined to question why they are here. The pay and perks are generous for those elected to five-year terms in low-turnout elections throughout the European Union's 27 member countries. And the mission -- to extend the sweep of European federalism -- is for most a shared one.

But for Mr. Farage, who has waged a 20-year campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, Strasbourg has become the perfect stage to disseminate his anti-European Union message by highlighting the bloc's bureaucratic absurdities and spendthrift tendencies as well as by mocking with glee the most prominent proponents of a European superstate: the head of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and the European Council president, Herman Van Rompuy. "I said you'd be the quiet assassin of nation-state democracy," Mr. Farage has declared, as his target, Mr. Van Rompuy, squirmed in his seat just opposite, "and sure enough, in your dull and technocratic way, you've gone about your course."

. . .

Last year, in net terms, Britain paid $16 billion to the European Union. But according to a recent study by the economist Tim Congdon, himself an Independence Party member, if the cost of regulation, waste and misallocated resources is included, the annual cost of membership rises to $238 billion a year, or about 10 percent of Britain's economic output.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this profligacy is the spot where Mr. Farage has found fame: the European Parliament. As most of the legislative work is done in Brussels, the building is in use just three days each month. Analysts estimate that it costs taxpayers about $250 million a year to transport each month 754 members of Parliament, several thousand support staff members and lobbyists to this French city.

Mr. Farage lights another cigarette and shakes his head. "I just would like for my grandchildren to read some day that I did my part in saving my country from this lunacy," he said with a sigh.

For the full story, see:

LANDON THOMAS Jr. "THE SATURDAY PROFILE; An Enemy of Brussels, and Not Afraid to Say So." The New York Times (Sat., December 8, 2012): A11.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date December 7, 2012.)

The Tim Congdon report mentioned is:

Congdon, Tim. "How Much Does the European Union Cost Britain?" UK Independence Party, 2012.

(Note: the report calculates a total cost of about 150 billion British pounds, which when converted to dollars is equal to the $238 billion reported in the article, at an exchange rate of about $1.587 per British pound.)

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"Mike Taylor displays a gas-log set at Acme Stove in Rockville, Md." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A8) Rett Rasmussen sells gas-log sets, which use a "dancing flame" design that his father invented more than 50 years ago to replicate a cozy wood fire.

They are just for decoration, he says. But as the season approaches for families to gather around the hearth--real or fake--Mr. Rasmussen and other makers of hearth products are having a flare-up with the Department of Energy. The federal agency says it has the authority to regulate the log sets as heating equipment, though it isn't proposing any changes now.

The issue "just hit us out of left field," said Mr. Rasmussen. His company of about 50 employees--Rasmussen Iron Works Inc. of Whittier, Calif.--has spent at least $20,000 to fight any regulatory change, he says.

. . .

Judge A. Raymond Randolph expressed sympathy for the industry, saying that an object is not a heater simply "because it makes the air around it warm."

"I don't understand that as a matter of pure English," said Judge Randolph, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush. He added: "That's like saying a match is designed to furnish warm air. It's designed to furnish a flame."

H. Thomas Byron, a Justice Department lawyer, said it was "rhetorical hyperbole" to suggest Washington wanted to regulate everything that's warm.   . . .

Mr. Rasmussen, who says the family business has struggled in the weak economy, monitors the case closely. "We're alive and kicking, but it's not what it used to be, and when you have to fight your government, it's hard to see where it's going to get back anywhere near where it has been," he said.

For the full story, see:

RYAN TRACY. "Hearth Makers Get Hot Over Regulations." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., October 23, 2012): A8.

(Note: ellipses and bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the article was dated October 22, 2012.)

(Note: in the third paragraph "he says" appeared in the online, but not the print, version.)

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Source of book image: http://images.indiebound.com/636/044/9780807044636.jpg

(p. C8) As Mr. Wooten recounts, obstacles abounded from a municipality bent on redesigning New Orleans while the city was still in crisis. Neighborhoods from middle-class Lakeview to the devastated Lower Ninth Ward began to fear that the city they loved didn't love them back.

"Planning is crap," said Martin Landrieu, a member of a prominent local political family, at a meeting of Lakeview residents. "What you really need is the cleaning up of houses . . . . Where are the hammers and nails?" Yet five months after Katrina, a city commission called Bring New Orleans Back presented an ambitious plan to restore the city that included converting neighborhoods that had heavy flooding into green space. The commission also imposed a temporary moratorium on rebuilding there. Residents would have to show that their communities were viable or risk being planned out of existence; they were given four months.

For the full review, see:

CARLA MAIN. "After the Waters Receded." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., August 4, 2012): C8.

(Note: ellipsis in original.)

(Note: the online version of the article was dated August 3, 2012.)

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I saw this clip broadcast on Wolf Blitzer's "Situation Room" broadcast on 11/29/12 (if memory serves--it might have been the day before).

The clip shows the magnitude of the fraud, but also emphasizes that there were significant incentives for those who knew about the fraud to keep their mouths shut.

This is one huge case of over-billing, but over-billing happens all the time. Taxpayers could have used that money for other purposes. The opportunity cost is huge.

A link to the clip posted on CNN, is:

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/29/company-accused-of-giant-medicare-fraud/?iref=allsearch

(Note: I believe the November 29, 2012 date in the image above is the date that Drew Griffin posted the clip to the CNN blog, not necessarily the date of the broadcast.)

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The "Walgreens flap" mentioned below was the episode in 2010 when Walgreens announced that it would cell a genome testing saliva kit, but was pressured by government regulatory agencies, and withdrew the kit from the market within two days of the announcement.

(p. 119) . . . there will likely never be a "right time"---after we have passed some imaginary tipping point giving us critical, highly actionable, and perfectly accurate information---for it to be available to the public. The logical conclusion is that the tests should be made available. What's more, the fact that they have been available has meant that democratization of DNA is real. Consumers now realize that they have the right to obtain data on their DNA. As a blogger wrote in response to the Walgreens flap, "To say that this information has to be routed through your doctor is a little like the Middle Ages, when only priests were allowed (or able) to read the Bible. Gutenberg came along with the printing press even though few people were able to read. This triggered a literacy/literature spiral that had incredible benefits for civilization, even if it reduced the power of the priestly class."

The American Medical Association (AMA) sees things differently. In a pointed letter to the FDA in 2011, the AMA wrote: "We urge the Panel ... that genetic testing, except under the most limited circumstances, should carried out under the personal supervision of a qualified health professional." The FDA has indicated it is likely to accept the AMA recommendations, which will clearly limit consumer direct access to their DNA information. But this arrangement ultimately appears untenable, and eventually there will need to be full democratization of DNA for medicine to (p. 120) be transformed. Of course, health professionals can be consulted as needed, but it is the individual who should have the decision authority and capacity to drive the process.

The physician and entrepreneur Hugh Rienhoff, who has spent years attempting to decipher his daughter's unexplained cardiovascular genetic defect and formed the online community MyDaughtersDNA.org, had this to say: "Doctors are not going to drive genetics into clinical practice. It's going to be consumers .... The user interface, whether software or whatever will be embraced first by consumers, so it has to be pitched at that level, and that's about the level doctors are at. Cardiologists do not know dog shit about genetics."

Source:

Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

(Note: first ellipsis added; other ellipses in original.)

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(p. 118) Government regulation of consumer genomics companies has been centerpiece (and the semblance of a circus) in their short history. Back in 2008, the states of California and New York sent "cease and desist" letters to the genome scan companies. State officials were concerned that the laboratories that generated the results were not certified as CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments) and that the tests were being performed without a physician's order. All three companies developed work-around plans in California and remained operational but were unable to market the tests in New York.

In 2010, the regulation issues escalated to the federal level. In May it was announced that 7,500 Walgreens drugstores throughout the United States would soon sell Pathway Genomics's saliva kit for disease susceptibility and pharmacogenomics. While the tests produced by all four companies had been widely available via the Internet for three years, the announcement of wide-scale availability in drugstores (which was cancelled by Walgreens within two days) appeared to "cross the line" and set off a cascade of investigations and hearings by the FDA, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the Congressional House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The FDA's Alberto Gutierrez said, "We don't think physi-(p. 119)cians are going to be able to interpret the results," and "genetic tests are medical devices and must be regulated." The GAO undertook a "sting" operation with its staff posing as consumers who bought genetic tests and detailed significant inconsistencies, misleading test results, and deceptive marketing practices in its report.

All four personal genomics companies are struggling.

Source:

Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

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Source of book image: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Nhhn-YcP9IY/TjkQHfGGEeI/AAAAAAAAAVA/_jKMGRBm9Ac/s1600/life-keith-richards.jpg

(p. 289) The tax rate in the early '70s on the highest earners was 83 percent, and that went up to 98 percent for investments and so-called unearned income. So that's the same as being told to leave the country. ... The last thing I think the powers that be expected when they hit us with the super-super tax is that we'd say, fine, we'll leave. We'll be another one not paying tax to you. They just didn't factor that in. It made us bigger than ever, and it produced Exile on Main St., which was maybe the best thing we did. They didn't believe we'd be able to continue as we were if we didn't live in England. And in all honesty, we were very doubtful too. We didn't know if we would make it, but if we didn't try, what would we do? Sit in England and they'd give us a penny out of every pound we earned? We had no desire to be closed down. And so we upped and went to France.

Source:

Richards, Keith. Life. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010.

(Note: I first saw the quote on the back cover of: Journal of Political Economy 119, no. 1 (Feb. 2011).)

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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Some consumers let their guard down on medical issues, assuming that the government Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and large incumbent bureaucratic non-profits, like the American Cancer Society (ACS), will protect them---it ain't necessarily so. Caveat emptor should remain the rule for consumers.

(p. 39) Of note, one of the reasons for the lack of updating the rules and acknowledging UVA rays has been heavy pressure from sunscreen manufacturers, which include Johnson and Johnson (Neutrogena), Merck-Schering Plough (Coppertone), Proctor and Gamble (Olay), and L'Oreal. Interestingly, in Europe products that provide solid UVA protection have been available for years. The concerns run even deeper because many of the products (41 percent in the United States) contain a form of vitamin A known as retinyl palmitate, which has been associated with increased likelihood of skin cancer. There are, however, no randomized studies, but biological plausibility and the observational findings of a rising incidence of basal cell (p. 40) carcinoma and melanoma, despite the widespread use of sunscreens. In mid-2011, the FDA finally unveiled some new rules about sunscreen claims.

This issue really hit home when my wife brought out a tube of Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Dry-Tough SPF 30 Sunblock. It claims "Broad Spectrum UVNUVB Protection" despite repeatedly failing UVA tests. But the real eye-opener is to find the American Cancer Society logo on the front of the tube with the message "Help Block Out Skin Cancer." Now what is the American Cancer Society logo doing on the tube of Neutrogena? The fine print on the bottom reads: "The American Cancer Society (ACS) and Neutrogena, working together to help prevent skin cancer, support the use of sunscreen. The ACS does not endorse any specific product. Neutrogena pays a royalty to the ACS for the use of its logo."

Source:

Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

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Source of book image: http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-UU147_mcgreg_DV_20121001022644.jpg





In the passages quoted below "SOE" means "state-owned enterprise."

(p. B1) If the U.S. needs another wake-up call, it will get one this week with the publication of a bracing account of the danger that China's state capitalism poses to global business--and to China itself. James McGregor's new book, "No Ancient Wisdom, No Followers: The Challenges of Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism," dissects the complex policies and state structures that produced China's novel system. And it describes the limited recourse the U.S. and other nations have. (Full disclosure: Mr. McGregor is a friend and former colleague at the Journal.)

"The Communist Party of China has two unwavering objectives: Make China rich and powerful and guarantee the Party's political monopoly," Mr. McGregor writes. "At the center of this are behemoth state-owned enterprises that dominate all key sectors and have been instrumental to the country's current success.

"As China's global reach expands, this one-of-a-kind system is challenging the rules and organizations that govern global trade as well as the business plans and strategies of multinationals around the globe. At the same time, the limits of authoritarian capital-(p.B2)ism are increasingly evident at home, where corruption is endemic, the SOEs are consuming the fruits of reform, and the economic engine is running out of gas."

Born in the 1950s when 10,000 Soviet advisers helped China organize central planning, the state-owned enterprises quickly became bloated extensions of the Party's patronage and power.

. . .

The enterprises themselves, meanwhile, crowded out private competition. SOEs account for about 96% of China's telecom industry, 92% of power and 74% of autos. The combined profit of China Petroleum & Chemical and China Mobile in 2009 alone was greater than all the profit of China's 500 largest private firms, Mr. McGregor writes.

An independent Chinese study, he adds, says that if you subtract government subsidies from the biggest SOEs they actually lose money.

Mr. McGregor believes pressures are building within China for change--the result of SOEs that don't innovate enough, slowing growth, an angry private sector, and a pending leadership change, among other factors. Even some top leaders say reform is needed.

For the full commentary, see:

JOHN BUSSEY. "THE BUSINESS; Tackling the Many Dangers of China's State Capitalism." The New York Times (Fri., September 28, 2012): B1 & B2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date September 27, 2012.)

Book under discussion:

McGregor, James. No Ancient Wisdom, No Followers: The Challenges of Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism. Westport, CT: Prospecta Press, 2012.

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"Amanda Rocafort and her son Quintn in Woodstock, Ga. Quintn takes the medication Risperdal." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) CANTON, Ga. -- When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall.

The pills boost focus and impulse control in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder "made up" and "an excuse" to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children's true ill -- poor academic performance in inadequate schools.

For the full story, see:

ALAN SCHWARZ. "Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School." The New York Times (Tues., October 9, 2012): A1 & A18.

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(p. 242) This paper has investigated the role of natural disaster shocks in determining gross migration flows, controlling for other place-based features. Using two micro datasets, we documented that in the 1920s and 1930s population was repelled from tornado-prone areas, with a larger effect on potential in-migrants than on existing residents, while flood events were associated with net inmigration. The differential migration responses by disaster type raises the question of whether public efforts at disaster mitigation counteract individual migration decisions. The nascent investment in rebuilding and protecting flood-prone areas could provide one example of public investment crowding out private self-protection (i.e., migration).

(p. 243) In future work, we plan to explore the role of New Deal disaster management more directly by exploiting variation across SEAs in federal expenditures and representation on key congressional committees. We predict that residents of areas that received federal largesse after a disaster in the 1930s will be less likely to move out and that new arrivals may be more likely to move in, while residents of areas that benefited less from New Deal spending will continue to use migration as a means of self-protection.

For the full article, from which the above conclusion is quoted, see:

Boustan, Leah Platt, Matthew E. Kahn, and Paul W. Rhode. "Moving to Higher Ground: Migration Response to Natural Disasters in the Early Twentieth Century." American Economic Review 102, no. 3 (May 2012): 238-44.

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"Blitz gasoline cans, at Ace Hardware in Miami, Okla., will soon disappear from stores. The company closed because of the costs of lawsuits contending that the cans were unsafe." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The "Mr. Flick" quoted below is Rocky Flick, the former CEO of Blitz.

(p. B1) Crusading against what it considers frivolous lawsuits, the United States Chamber of Commerce has had no shortage of cases to highlight, like the man suing a cruise line after burning his feet on a sunny deck or the mother claiming hearing loss from the screaming at a Justin Bieber concert.

Now, the lobbying group's Institute for Legal Reform is showing a 30-second commercial that uses Blitz USA, a bankrupt Oklahoma gasoline can manufacturer, to illustrate the consequences of abusive lawsuits. The ad shows tearful workers losing their jobs and the lights going out at the 46-year-old company as a result of steep legal costs from lawsuits targeting the red plastic containers, according to the company and the institute.

The closing of the 117-employee operation this summer became a rallying point for proponents of tort reform. . . .

. . .

(p. B2) Blitz executives note that the company, which was the nation's leading gas can producer, sold more than 14 million cans a year over the last decade, with fewer than two reported incidents per million cans sold. The company said the most serious incidents usually involved obvious misuse of the cans, like pouring gasoline on an open fire.

. . .

A decade ago, Mr. Flick said, the company would face one or two lawsuits a year. The number grew to six or seven a year, and finally to 25 or so last year when Blitz filed for bankruptcy.

For the full story, see:

CLIFFORD KRAUSS. "Two Sides of Product Liability: A Factory's Closing Focuses Attention on Tort Reform." The New York Times (Fri., October 4, 2012): B1.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 5, 2012 and has the shorter title "A Factory's Closing Focuses Attention on Tort Reform.")

View the Chamber video clip on the Blitz example:

"Rocky Flick, Blitz's former chief executive." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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"Dan Senor, left, a leading campaign adviser, at a briefing on Saturday for the Romney campaign on the plane en route to Israel." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A10) WASHINGTON -- Moments after making remarks in Jerusalem about Middle East culture that enraged Palestinians and undermined the public relations value of his trip to Israel, Mitt Romney looked around the room for Dan Senor, one of his campaign's top foreign policy advisers.

It was Mr. Senor's book about entrepreneurs in Israel that informed his comments, Mr. Romney explained to the group of Jewish-American donors he had assembled at the King David hotel. The book, "Start-up Nation," is among Mr. Senor's writings that Mr. Romney frequently cites in public.

For the full story, see:

MICHAEL D. SHEAR. "Adviser Draws Attention to Romney Mideast Policy." The New York Times (Thurs., August 2, 2012): A10.

(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 1, 2012.)

The Senor book is:

Senor, Dan, and Saul Singer. Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle. hb ed. New York: Twelve, 2009.

"L. Paul Bremer III, left, in 2004 when he was the top United States envoy in Iraq, with Mr. Senor, who was his spokesman." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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Source of book image: http://rsirving.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/destinyrepublic.jpeg

(p. 15) Had Garfield been left where he lay, he might well have survived; the bullet failed to hit his spine or penetrate any vital organs. Instead, he was given over to the care of doctors, who basically tortured him to death over the next 11 weeks. Two of them repeatedly probed his wound with their unsterilized fingers and instruments before having him carted back to the White House on a hay-and-horsehair mattress.

There, control of the president was seized by a quack with the incredible name of Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss. Dr. Doctor Bliss insisted on stuffing Garfield with heavy meals and alcohol, which brought on protracted waves of vomiting. He and his assistants went on probing the wound several times a day, causing infections that burrowed enormous tunnels of pus throughout the president's body.

Garfield's medical "care" is one of the most fascinating, if appalling, parts of Millard's narrative. Joseph Lister had been demonstrating for years how his theories on the prevention of infection could save lives and limbs, but American doctors largely ignored his advice, not wanting to "go to all the trouble" of washing hands and instruments, Millard writes, enamored of the macho trappings of their profession, the pus and blood and what they referred to fondly as the "good old surgical stink" of the operating room.

Further undermining the president's recovery was his sickroom in the White House -- then a rotting, vermin-ridden structure with broken sewage pipes. Outside, Washington was a pestilential stink hole; besides the first lady, four White House servants and Guiteau himself had contracted malaria. Hoping to save Garfield from the same, Bliss fed him large doses of quinine, causing more intestinal cramping.

The people rallied around their president even as his doctors failed him. The great Western explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell helped design Ameri­ca's first air-conditioning system to relieve Garfield's agony. Alexander Graham Bell worked tirelessly to invent a device that could locate the bullet. (It failed when Dr. Bliss insisted he search only the wrong side of Garfield's torso.) Two thousand people worked overnight to lay 3,200 feet of railroad track, so the president might be taken to a cottage on the Jersey Shore. When the engine couldn't make the grade, hundreds of men stepped forward to push his train up the final hill.

The president endured everything with amazing fortitude and patience, even remarking near the end, when he learned a fund was being taken up for his family: "How kind and thoughtful! What a generous people!"

"General Garfield died from malpractice," Guiteau claimed, defending himself at his spectacle of a trial. This was true, but not enough to save Guiteau from the gallows.

For the full review, see:

KEVIN BAKER. "Death of a President." The New York Times Book Review (Sun., October 2, 2011): 14-15.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 30, 2011, and has the title "The Doctors Who Killed a President.")

The full reference for the book under review, is:

Millard, Candice. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. New York: Doubleday, 2011.

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(p. 351) The intense aversion to trading increased risk for some other advantage plays out on a grand scale in the laws and regulations governing risk. This trend is especially strong in Europe where the precautionary principle, which prohibits any action that might cause harm, is a widely accepted doctrine. In the regulatory context, the precautionary principle imposes the entire burden of proving safety on anyone who undertakes actions that might harm people or the environment. Multiple international bodies have specified that the absence of scientific evidence of potential damage is not sufficient justification for taking risks. As the jurist Cass Sunstein points out, the precautionary principle is costly, and when interpreted strictly it can be paralyzing. He mentions an impressive list of innovations that would not have passed the test, including "airplanes, air conditioning, antibiotics, automobiles, chlorine, the measles vaccine, open-heart surgery, radio, refrigeration, smallpox vaccine, and X-rays." The strong version of the precautionary principle is obviously untenable. But enhanced loss aversion is embedded in a strong and widely shared moral intuition; it originates in System 1. The dilemma between intensely loss-averse moral attitudes and efficient risk management does not have a simple and compelling solution.

Source:

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

(Note: italics in original.)

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Source of book image: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-N1hV093ckVc/T8YmCXE2sQI/AAAAAAAAAYc/1B5hWDeXbzQ/s1600/basement.jpg

(p. 17) In June 2008, The Atlantic published an essay by an adjunct instructor of English, identified only as "Professor X," whose job filled him with despair. Although the courses he taught were introductory, success was beyond many of his students, who, he wrote, were "in some cases barely literate." X found giving F's to be excruciating -- "I am the man who has to lower the hammer," he lamented -- in part because he identified with his older students, who seemed to have lost their way in their careers much as X himself had.

. . .

. . . X's function, in the ecology of the colleges where he teaches, is gatekeeper -- most students who fail his classes will drop out -- and he articulates the ethical challenge before him this way: "What grade does one give a college student who progresses from a 6th- to a 10th-grade level of achievement?" X gives F's.

. . .

X and his wife got snookered in the housing bubble, and he wonders if the misery in his classroom might result from a similar education bubble. In 1940, there were 1.5 million college students in America; in 2006, there were 20.5 million. In X's opinion, a glut of degrees has led to a spurious inflation of the credentials required for many jobs. Tuitions are rising, and two-thirds of college graduates now leave school with debt, owing on average about $24,000. A four-year degree is said to increase wages about $450,000 over the course of a lifetime, but X doubts the real value of degrees further down on the hierarchy of prestige. To him, the human cost is more conspicuous.

. . .

Professor X can be caustic about the euphemism and somewhat willed optimism that sometimes befog discussion of how to teach unprepared students. To relieve his and his students' unhappiness, he proposes that employers stop demanding unnecessary degrees: a laudable suggestion, unlikely to be realized until the degree glut has dried up.

For the full review, see:

CALEB CRAIN. "Lost in the Meritocracy." The New York Times Book Review (Sun., May 1, 2011): 17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 29, 2011.)

The full reference for the book under review, is:

X, Professor. In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic. New York: Viking, 2011.

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A burning Mockingjay symbol appears on this movie poster for "The Hunger Games." Source of poster: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D4) "They're funny birds and something of a slap in the face to the Capitol," Katniss explains in the first book. And the nature of that slap in face is a new twist on the great fear about genetic engineering, that modified organisms or their genes will escape into the wild and wreak havoc. The mockingjay is just such an unintended consequence, resulting from a failed creation of the government, what Katniss means when she refers to "the Capitol." But rather than being a disaster, the bird is a much-loved reminder of the limits of totalitarian control.

. . .

I asked Joan Slonczewski, a microbiologist and science fiction writer at Kenyon College in Ohio, about her take on the mockingjay. Dr. Slonczewski, whose recent books include a text and a novel, "The Highest Frontier," teaches a course called "Biology in Science Fiction." The tools needed to modify organisms are already widely dispersed in industry and beyond. "Now anybody can do a start-up," she said.

That's no exaggeration. Do-it-yourself biology is growing. The technology to copy pieces of DNA can be bought on eBay for a few hundred dollars, as Carl Zimmer reported in The New York Times in March. As to where D.I.Y. biology may lead, Freeman Dyson, a thinker at the Institute for Advanced Study known for his provocative ideas, presented one view in 2007 in The New York Review of Books. He envisioned the tools of biotechnology spreading to everyone, including pet breeders and children, and leading to "an explosion of diversity of new living creatures."

Eventually, he wrote, the mixing of genes by humans will initiate a new stage in evolution. Along the way, if he is right, the world may have more than its share of do-it-yourself mockingjays.

For the full story, see:

JAMES GORMAN. "SIDE EFFECTS; D.I.Y. Biology, on the Wings of the Mockingjay." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 15, 2012): D4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date May 10, 2012.)

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Source of map: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) Royal Dutch Shell . . . is spending billions of dollars to drill the first oil wells in U.S. Arctic waters in 20 years, backed by an Obama administration eager to show it wasn't opposed to offshore exploration.

But the closely watched project isn't going the way the company or the government hoped--illustrating the continuing challenge of plumbing for natural riches in one of the world's most unforgiving locations.

Sea ice in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off the northern Alaska coast was slow to break up this year, leaving the drilling areas inaccessible much later than anticipated.

For the full story, see:

TOM FOWLER. "Shell Races the Ice in Alaska; Delays Put $4.5 Billion Arctic Drilling Plan in Danger of Missing Window Before Next Freeze." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., August 20, 2012): B1-B2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date August 19, 2012.)

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"Mrs. Thatcher at a Conservative Party Conference in 1982." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ commentary quoted and cited below.

(p. C2) . . . , it was Mrs. Thatcher . . . , a couple of years after she left office, who identified the problem with European construction. It was, she said, "infused with the spirit of yesterday's future." It made the "central intellectual mistake" of assuming that "the model for future government was that of a centralized bureaucracy." As she concluded, "The day of the artificially constructed megastate is gone."

For the full commentary, see:

CHARLES MOORE. "What Would The Iron Lady Do? She preached a gospel of self-discipline, free enterprise and national autonomy. As Europe implodes and the West's economic woes mount, it's time to re-examine Margaret Thatcher's ambiguous legacy, writes Charles Moore." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 17, 2011): C1-C2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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(p. 592) Using data drawn from the March Current Population Survey, we find that state and federal minimum wage increases between 2003 and 2007 had no effect on state poverty rates. When we then simulate the effects of a proposed federal minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour, we find that such an increase will be even more poorly targeted to the working poor than was the last federal increase from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour. Assuming no negative employment effects, only 11.3% of workers who will gain live in poor households, compared to 15.8% from the last increase. When we allow for negative employment effects, we find that the working poor face a disproportionate share of the job losses. Our results suggest that raising the federal minimum wage continues to be an inadequate way to help the working poor.

For the full article, from which the above abstract is quoted, see:

Sabia, Joseph J., and Richard V. Burkhauser. "Minimum Wages and Poverty: Will a $9.50 Federal Minimum Wage Really Help the Working Poor?" Southern Economic Journal 76, no. 3 (Jan. 2010): 592-623.

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Abstract

The U.S. public biomedical research system is renowned for its peer review process that awards federal funds to meritorious research performers. Although congressional appropriators do not earmark federal funds for biomedical research performers, I argue that they support allocations for those research fields that are most likely to benefit performers in their constituencies. Such disguised transfers mitigate the reputational penalties to appropriators of interfering with a merit‐driven system. I use data on all peer‐reviewed grants by the National Institutes of Health during the years 1984-2003 and find that performers in the states of certain House Appropriations Committee members receive 5.9-10.3 percent more research funds than those at unrepresented institutions. The returns to representation are concentrated in state universities and small businesses. Members support funding for the projects of represented performers in fields in which they are relatively weak and counteract the distributive effect of the peer review process.

Source:

Hegde, Deepak. "Political Influence Behind the Veil of Peer Review: An Analysis of Public Biomedical Research Funding in the United States." Journal of Law and Economics 52, no. 4 (Nov. 2009): 665-90.

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Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state. Let the Government do this: the People will assuredly do the rest.

Source:

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord. "Review of: Robert Southey's "Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society"." In Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1830.

(Note: the quote above appeared on the back cover of The Cato Journal 30, no. 1 (Winter 2010); Macaulay's full review, including the quote, can be viewed online at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/macS1.html )

(Note: the online version does not give page numbers, but gives what I think are "screen" numbers. The passage quoted is all of "SC.96" which appears at the very end of the essay.)

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Source of book image: http://mittromneycentral.com/uploads/No-Apology1.jpg

(p. 108) Innovation and Creative Destruction

The key to increasing national prosperity is to promote good ideas and create the conditions that can lead them to be fully exploited--in existing businesses as well as new ones. Government is generally not the source of new ideas, although innovations from NASA and the military have provided frequent exceptions. Nor is government where innovation is commercially developed. But government policies do, in fact, have a major impact on the implementation of innovative ideas. The degree to which a nation makes itself productive, and thus how prosperous its citizens become, is determined in large measure by whether government adopts policies that stimulate innovation or that stifle it.

The government policy that has the greatest effect on innovation is simply whether or not the government will allow it. It's sad but true: Government can and often does purposefully prevent innovation and the resulting improvement in productivity. Recall my hypothetical example of a society in which half the farming jobs were lost due to innovation in the use of a plow? Some nations accept and encourage such "creative destruction," recognizing that in the long run it leads to greater productivity and wealth for its citizens. But other nations succumb to the objections of those in danger of becoming unemployed and prevent innovation that may reduce short-term employment.

Two centuries ago, more than three-quarters of our workforce actually did labor on farms. Over the succeeding decades, innovations like irrigation, fertilizer, and tractors were welcomed, and eventually large farming corporations were allowed to prosper, despite protests from family farmers and the often heart-wrenching dislocations that accompanied consolidation of farmlands. The result was the disappearance of millions of agricultural jobs and the large-scale migration of Americans from rural regions to our cities. Once there, they provided the labor that powered America's new industrial age. And at the same time, because farming innovation and productivity were allowed to flourish, America became the leader in agriculture education, research, and industry. Innovations from these sources have enabled us to produce sufficient food to feed not only our growing population but other parts of the world as well.

Source:

Romney, Mitt. No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2010.

(Note: bold in original.)

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Mayor of London Boris Johnson. Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 16) While I was reading your book "Johnson's Life of London," in which you take readers on a tour of the city while discussing some of history's most famous Londoners, I thought to myself, Being mayor of London can't be that taxing if you could find time to write such a decent book.
The job of mayor of London is unbelievably taxing, particularly in the run-up to the Olympics. It just happens I write fast and always have done. Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books.

. . .

Do you remember the moment you knew that you were a Conservative?
When I was a 22- or 23-year-old reporter in a place called Wolverhampton. I got impatient with some of the stuff I saw going on about damp and mold, about who's ultimately responsible for improving the ventilation in people's houses. I felt that people were being infantilized and made dependent by the system and that the local Labour politicians had no interest in sorting it out, were content to harvest these people's votes without improving their lives.

Wow. You were politically formed by mold.
It was the spores of damp, of mold forming on the walls in Wolverhampton.

For the full interview, see:

ANDREW GOLDMAN, interviewer. "TALK; Boris Johnson, Tory With an Attitude." The New York Times Magazine (Sun., June 3, 2012): 16.

(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)

Johnson's book is:

Johnson, Boris. Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City That Made the World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012.

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People have a right to be overly-optimistic when they invest their own money in entrepreneurial projects. But governments should be prudent caretakers of the money they have taken from taxpayers. The overly-optimistic bias of subsidy-seeking entrepreneurs weakens the case for government support of entrepreneurial projects.

(p. 259) The optimistic risk taking of entrepreneurs surely contributes to the economic dynamism of a capitalistic society, even if most risk takers end up disappointed. However, Marta Coelho of the London School of Economics has pointed out the difficult policy issues that arise when founders of small businesses ask the government to support them in decisions that are most likely to end badly. Should the government provide loans to would-be entrepreneurs who probably will bankrupt themselves in a few years? Many behavioral economists are comfortable with the "libertarian paternalistic" procedures that help people increase their savings rate beyond what they would do on their own. The question of whether and how government should support small business does not have an equally satisfying answer.

Source:

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

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Source of book image: http://files.list.co.uk/images/2011/09/15/arguably-lst090367.jpg

(p. 8) Anyone who occasionally opens one of our more serious periodicals has learned that the byline of Christopher Hitchens is an opportunity to be delighted or maddened -- possibly both -- but in any case not to be missed. He is our intellectual omnivore, exhilarating and infuriating, if not in equal parts at least with equal wit. He has been rather famously an aggressive critic of God and his followers, after cutting his sacrilegious teeth on Mother Teresa. He wrote a deadpan argument for trying Henry Kissinger as a war criminal, then was branded an apostate by former friends on the left for vigorously supporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (He memorably -- a lot of what Hitchens has written merits the adverb -- shot back that his antiwar critics were "the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.") And he is dying of esophageal cancer, a fact he has faced with exceptional aplomb.

This fifth and, one fears, possibly last collection of his essays is a reminder of all that will be missed when the cancer is finished with him.

. . .

(p. 9) At times the book feels like an ongoing argument with the leftist intellectuals on the other side of the Atlantic, who tend to view America as lacking in history, culture or moral standing.

In an essay on the journalism of Karl Marx, written for the left-leaning Guardian, he puts an elbow in the ribs of his old socialist friends: "If you are looking for an irony of history, you will find it . . . in the fact that he and Engels considered Russia the great bastion of reaction and America the great potential nurse of liberty and equality. This is not the sort of thing they teach you in school (in either country)."

"There is currently much easy talk about the 'decline' of my adopted country, both in confidence and in resources," he writes in his introduction. "I don't choose to join this denigration."

Christopher Hitchens: American patriot. We've done a lot worse.

If there is a God, and he lacks a sense of irony, he will send Hitchens to the hottest precinct of hell. If God does have a sense of irony, Hitchens will spend eternity in a town that serves no liquor and has no library. Either way, heaven will be a less interesting place.

For the full review, see:

BILL KELLER. "Christopher Hitchens, a Man of His Words." The New York Times Book Review (Sun., September 11, 2011): 8-9.

(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs was added; ellipsis internal to a Hitchens quote was in the original.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 9, 2011.)

The full reference for Arguably, is:

Hitchens, Christopher. Arguably: Essays. New York: Twelve, 2012.

"Christopher Hitchens." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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Source of book image: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653083743832432.html?KEYWORDS=Catherine+Great

(p. C3) Bereft of husband and child, a lonely Catherine began to read the histories, philosophy and literature of Greece and Rome and of the Enlightenment. Montesquieu's "The Spirit of Laws," which analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of despotic rule, had a powerful impact on her. She was particularly interested in his thesis that the conduct of a specific despot could partially redeem that form of rule. Thereafter, she attributed to herself a "republican soul" of the kind advocated by Montesquieu.

Voltaire, the venerated patriarch of the Enlightenment, had concluded that a despotic government might well be the best possible form of government--if it were reasonable. But to be reasonable, he said, it must be enlightened; if enlightened, it could be both efficient and benevolent. Soon after ascending to the throne, Catherine began a correspondence with Voltaire that eventually extended to hundreds of letters over more than 20 years.

. . .

Near the end of her reign Catherine was asked how she understood the "blind obedience with which her orders were obeyed." Catherine smiled and answered, "It is not as easy as you think.... I examine the circumstances, I take advice, I consult the enlightened part of the people, and so in this way I find out what sort of effect my laws will have. And when I am already convinced in advance of good approval, then I issue my orders and have the pleasure of observing what you call blind obedience."

Catherine died in 1796, when George Washington was finishing his second term in office. Since then, the temptations of absolute power have remained great; despots have continued to appear, afflicting people everywhere. We have learned, at enormous cost, the difficulty of combining despotism with benevolence. Few rulers have even tried. Catherine tried.

For the full commentary, see:

ROBERT K. MASSIE. "Catherine the Great's Lessons for Despots; Russia's erudite empress tried to redeem absolute rule; her failures highlight dangers still present today." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., November 12, 2011): C3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

For Massie's full biography of Catherine the Great, see:

Massie, Robert K. Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman. New York: Random House, 2011.

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(p. B3) Millions of Chinese flooded the popular micro blogging site Sina Weibo to tweet their condolences on the death of Steve Jobs over the past two days. They also raised the question: Why isn't there a Steve Jobs in China?

. . .

One of the most popular postings on Mr. Jobs' legacy came from scholar Wu Jiaxiang. "If Apple is a fruit on a tree, its branches are the freedom to think and create, and its root is constitutional democracy," he wrote. "An authoritarian nation may be able to build huge projects collectively but will never be able to produce science and technology giants." On that, Wang Ran, founder of a boutique investment bank China eCapital Corp., added, "And its trunk is a society whose legal system acknowledges the value of intellectual property."

For the full story, see:

Li Yuan. "China Frets: Innovators Stymied Here." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., October 8, 2011): B3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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"Charlie Seemann at the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nev., home to an annual festival that draws thousands of cowboy poets and their fans." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) ELKO, Nev. -- This isolated town in the northeast Nevada mountains is known for gold mines, ranches, casinos, bordellos and J. M. Capriola, a destination store with two floors of saddles, boots, spurs and chaps. It is also the birthplace of the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a celebration of range song and poetry that draws thousands of cowboys and their fans every January and receives some money from the federal government.

. . .

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat and the majority leader, invoked the event in arguing against Republican cuts in arts financing in the budget debate, setting off a conflagration of conservative scorn.

. . .

"He was trying to defend the National Endowment for the Humanities and the N.E.A., and he thought, this is something that he was familiar with and he's always liked, and he was holding this up as an example," said Charlie Seemann, the executive director of the Western Folklife Center, a converted 98-year-old hotel on Railroad Street. "And, whoops! In this political climate it was too good a target: 'Cowboy poetry, say what? We're paying for that?'

. . .

"Given where we are with our financial situation -- and some people would argue regardless of that -- this is not something that the federal government should be doing," said Thomas A. Schatz, the president of Citizens Against Government Waste. "If people want to support a certain amount of activity in the arts or humanities, they should be paying for it. And the fact that Senator Reid for some reason picked this as an example of how extreme the Republican budget was -- he might have picked something else."

Inevitably, some of the argument, as it were, is taking place in verse. Representative Jeff Flake, a conservative Republican from Arizona, posted this on his Twitter account:

Way out in the prairie

To a rustler named Harry

Being broke ain't no reason to sweat

Just sit in yer barn

Spin a rhythmic yarn

And you'll pay down the national debt!

For the full story, see:

ADAM NAGOURNEY. "For Cowboy Poets, Unwelcome Spotlight in Battle Over Spending." The New York Times (Mon., April 11, 2011): A15 & A17.

(Note: ellipses added; italics and indents in original print version.)

(Note: the date of the online version of the article is April 10, 2011.)

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(p. 250) This should not come as a surprise: overly optimistic forecasts of the outcome of projects are found everywhere. Amos and I coined the term planning fallacy to describe plans and forecasts that

• are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios
• could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases

. . .

The optimism of planners and decision makers is not the only cause of overruns. Contractors of kitchen renovations and of weapon systems readily admit (though not to their clients) that they routinely make most of their profit on additions to the original plan. The failures of forecasting in these cases reflect the customers' inability to imagine how much their wishes will escalate over time. They end up paying much more than they would if they had made a realistic plan and stuck to it.

Errors in the initial budget are not always innocent. The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved--(p. 251)whether by their superiors or by a client--supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times. In such cases, the greatest responsibility for avoiding the planning fallacy lies with the decision makers who approve the plan. If they do not recognize the need for an outside view, they commit a planning fallacy.

Source:

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)

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"Rachel Billow is the co-founder of La Cocinita, a food truck in New Orleans that serves Latin American cuisine. She says the city's requirement that mobile food vendors change locations after 45 minutes in one spot isn't feasible. "It takes about a half-hour to set up," she says." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B8) A street fight is brewing between gourmet food-truck vendors and restaurants--not over the grub, but how it's sold.

Under pressure to protect bricks-and-mortar restaurants from increased competition, several big cities are starting to apply the brakes on a rising tide of food-truck vendors with fully loaded kitchens.

Boston, Chicago, St. Louis and Seattle are among the cities enacting laws that restrict where food trucks can serve customers in proximity to their rivals and for how long. Some food-truck operators argue that they shouldn't be punished for offering an innovative service, especially since many cities already allow restaurants to open up alongside one another.

"The rules are unfair," says Amy Le, owner of Duck N Roll, a food truck in Chicago serving Asian-style cuisine that includes short ribs and mango lychee.

Three weeks after she launched the business last fall, she received a ticket from local law enforcement for doing business about 150 feet from a wine bar--50 feet within the city's limit for how close food trucks can park outside of retail food establishments.

Ms. Le says she later had to spend nearly a full day in court to find out what the violation would cost her--about $300--and that she lost an estimated $600 to $700 in sales as a result.

"The 200-foot buffer prohibits me from competing," says Ms. Le, 32 years old, who also opposes a new rule requiring food trucks to install global-positioning devices so the city can track their whereabouts. "It is a free market. Let the consumers decide when and where they want to eat."

. . .

Gourmet food-truck operators say another problem is that in many cities they are still relegated to antiquated rules intended for ice-cream, hot-dog and other traditional mobile vendors with smaller and less complex menus.

New Orleans, for example, requires mobile food vendors to change locations after 45 minutes in one spot, among other restrictions.

"It's not a feasible amount of time for this business model," says 31-year-old Rachel Billow, who last year co-founded La Cocinita, a food truck that serves Latin American cuisine such as plantains and arepas. "It takes about a half-hour to set up."

Ms. Billow says she and her business partner, Venezuelan chef Benoit Angulo, started La Cocinita after several years of working in the restaurant industry. They invested $50,000 in start-up costs, an amount that included $12,000 in modifications to their vehicle to satisfy the city's fire code, she adds.

For the full story, see:

SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN. "Street Fight: Food Trucks vs. Restaurants; Some Big Cities Jump Into the Fray, Enacting Parking Restrictions to Cope With Rising Tide of Gourmet Vendors." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., August 9, 2012): B8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

"Amy Le, owner of Duck N Roll, an Asian-style food truck in Chicago, says last fall she received a fine for doing business about 150 feet from a wine bar--50 feet within the city's limit for how close food trucks can park outside of retail food establishments." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

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(p. A15) Under the Bloomberg plan, any cup or bottle of sugary drink larger than 16 ounces at a public venue would be verboten, beginning early next year.

. . .

Here is the ultimate justification for the Bloomberg soft-drink ban, not to mention his smoking ban, his transfat ban, and his unsuccessful efforts to enact a soda tax and prohibit buying high-calorie drinks with food stamps: The taxpayer is picking up the bill.

Call it the growing chattelization of the beneficiary class under government health-care programs. Bloombergism is a secular trend. Los Angeles has sought to ban new fast-food shops in neighborhoods disproportionately populated by Medicaid recipients, Utah to increase Medicaid copays for smokers, Arizona to impose a special tax on Medicaid recipients who smoke or are overweight.

For the full commentary, see:

HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. "BUSINESS WORLD; The 5th Avenue to Serfdom; Nobody thought about taking away your Big Gulp until the government began to pay for everyone's health care." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 2, 2012): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 1, 2012.)

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

Vets face less government regulation and so are freer to rapidly innovate. They may thus be a promising source of innovative hypotheses for medical doctors.

(p. D2) Cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz made her first foray into the world of animal medicine when she was asked to treat Spitzbuben, an exceedingly cute emperor tamarin suffering from heart failure.

But first, the veterinarian at the Los Angeles Zoo warned Dr. Natterson-Horowitz: Mere eye contact with the tiny primate could trigger a potentially fatal surge of stress hormones. What she learns from that experience spurs a journey to examine the links between the human and animal condition--and the discovery that the species are closer than she ever imagined.

. . .

The authors recommend that doctors, who often look with disdain on veterinarians, go the next step and collaborate with them in a cross-disciplinary "zoobiquitous" approach--using knowledge about how animals live, die and heal to spark innovative hypothesis for advancing medicine.

For the full review, see:

LAURA LANDRO. "Healthy Reader." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., June 12, 2012): D2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 11, 2012.)

The book being reviewed, is:

Natterson-Horowitz, Barbara, and Kathryn Bowers. Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

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(p. 8) When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 -- already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations -- journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.

"You can say without any shadow of a doubt," as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had "made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts."

While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we'd be harming rather than helping ourselves.

. . .

When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they've continued to support Dr. Stamler's "inconsistent and contradictory" assessment. Last year, two such "meta-analyses" were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back "the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease." The second concluded that "we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes."

. . .

(p. 9) A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a "safe upper limit" is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time.

. . .

One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies -- involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure -- reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.

. . .

Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed. The British scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin's bulldog for his advocacy of evolution, may have put it best back in 1860. "My business," he wrote, "is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations."

For the full commentary, see:

GARY TAUBES. "OPINION; Salt, We Misjudged You." The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., June 3, 2012): 8-9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 2, 2012.)

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Source of book image:
http://media.oregonlive.com/books_impact/photo/9635633-large.jpg

Reading the review quoted below, reminded me of how much I will miss Christopher Hitchens.

(p. 12) If General Pershing's fresh and plucky troops had not reached the scene in the closing stages of the bloodbath, universal exhaustion would almost certainly have compelled an earlier armistice, on less savage terms. Without President Wilson's intervention, the incensed and traumatized French would never have been able to impose terms of humiliation on Germany; the very terms that Hitler was to reverse, by such relentless means, a matter of two decades later. In this light, the great American socialist Eugene V. Debs, who publicly opposed the war and was kept in prison by a vindictive Wilson until long after its ending, looks like a prescient hero. Indeed, so do many of the antiwar militants to whose often-buried record Hochschild has done honor. (Unsentimental to the last, though, he shows that many of them went on to lose or waste their lives on Bolshevism, the other great mutant system to emerge from the abattoir.) This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard.

For the full review, see:

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS. "Mortal Debate." The New York Times Book Review (Sun., May 15, 2011): 1 & 12.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 13, 2011, and has the title "The Pacifists and the Trenches.")

The book under review is:

Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2011.

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"As unrest flared in the U.K. on Aug. 7, fire raged through a building in Tottenham, north London--an area also the scene of riots 26 years ago." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A8) LONDON--After furious race riots broke out in London's Tottenham area 26 years ago, government and local authorities poured millions of pounds into the district and especially Broadwater Farm estate, a notorious housing project that was the epicenter of the 1985 unrest.

Yet last week, Tottenham returned to an unwelcome spotlight as the point of ignition for riots here--and this time the unrest spread far beyond the neighborhood, to other parts of London and distant cities like Birmingham and Manchester.

What started as a peaceful protest over the killing of a local man by police was quickly seized on as an excuse for looting, arson and other unruly behavior by roaming packs of people that gripped the country for days. The result as of Sunday night: 1,401 arrests nationwide and a debate over who is to blame and how to prevent it happening again.

Tottenham's repeat appearance in the rioting shows the sometimes limited effectiveness of urban-regeneration programs that fail to tackle the deep-seated problems of poor communities. The state largesse lavished on Tottenham has resulted in better facilities and nicer surroundings, yet the area is still blighted by high unemployment, a thriving gang culture and social breakdown, according to official data.

For the full story, see:

GUY CHAZAN And ALISTAIR MACDONALD. "State Aid Failed to Stem U.K. Unrest; Tottenham, Site of Past Violence, Saw Renewed Clashes Despite Government Efforts to Boost the Area." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., August 15, 2011): A8.

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"Bicyclists weave through pedestrians and motor traffic on Friday in San Francisco, where a fatal bike-pedestrian collision has sparked debate." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) SAN FRANCISCO--City prosecutors said they would file felony vehicular-manslaughter charges against a bicyclist who allegedly hit and killed a pedestrian, in a case that has become a flash point for debate over bicyclists' rights in the city.

The manslaughter charges--unusually stiff for a bicycle accident--stem from a March 29 incident, when 36-year-old bicyclist Chris Bucchere allegedly ran a red traffic light and plowed into 71-year-old Sutchi Hui in a crosswalk. Mr. Hui died April 2 of injuries related to the collision.

. . .

The bicycle backlash has come to a head after a series of pedestrian deaths in the San Francisco Bay area. A 67-year-old woman died last August after a bicyclist allegedly hit her in a crosswalk after running a red light; the cyclist was convicted of a misdemeanor. Earlier this month, a cyclist allegedly struck and killed a 92-year-old woman in the suburb of El Cerrito while crossing a street; that case is under investigation.

For the full story, see:

JIM CARLTON. "U.S. NEWS; Reckless Riders Spur Backlash; Fatal Collision in San Francisco Leads to Manslaughter Charges Against Cyclist." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 16, 2012): A3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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"Ali Mesgaran and a friend at the sandwich shop he opened this year in Tehran. He said his shop was one place where he controlled his destiny." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A4) TEHRAN -- About two months ago, when many Iranian families were stocking up on rice and meat to prepare for seemingly inevitable military conflict with the West over Iran's nuclear program, Ali Mesgaran, 35, decided to open a sandwich shop.

Iran's national currency, the rial, had just lost nearly half of its value amid new international sanctions, and banks and exchange offices were spilling over with orders for gold and foreign currency from people hoping to protect family savings from soaring inflation.

"There are always problems in this country," Mr. Mesgaran said, explaining why he decided to open his shop, Piyaz Jafari, named after a traditional Iranian sandwich spread of onions and herbs. "We felt that if we ever wanted to be successful, we just had to ignore those."

. . .

The widespread sense of hopelessness is reinforced by memories of the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, Mr. Ahmadinejad's predecessor, who was in power from 1997 to 2005. During his two terms, he tried to promote personal freedom, to encourage better relations with the West and to relax suffocating dress codes, drawing anger from conservatives but attracting millions of votes from youths and women.

. . .

(p. A12) On a recent day at Mr. Mesgaran's sandwich shop, the talk was not about politics, but about the odd torrential rains that in recent weeks had flooded even parts of the city's subway system. "This is my world," he said, gesturing at his shop and his customers. "At least here I am in control of my destiny. That is a good feeling."

For the full story, see:

THOMAS ERDBRINK. "TEHRAN JOURNAL; Pinched Aspirations of Iran's Young Multitudes." The New York Times (Tues., May 8, 2012): A4 & A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date May 7, 2012.)

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Source of book image: http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/thinkingfastandslow.jpg

Daniel Kahneman first gained fame in economics through research with Tversky in which they showed that some of economists' assumptions about human rationality do not always hold true.

Kahneman, whose discipline is psychology, went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics, sharing the prize with Vernon Smith. (Since the Prize is not normally awarded posthumously, Tversky was not a candidate.)

I have always thought that ultimately there should be only one unified science of human behavior---not claims that are "true" in economics and other claims that are "true" in psychology. (I even thought of minoring in psychology in college, before I realized that the price of minoring included taking time-intensive lab courses where you watched rats run through mazes.)

But I don't think the implications of current work in behavioral economics are as clear as has often been asserted.

Some important results in economics do not depend on strong claims of rationality. For instance, the most important "law" in economics is the law of demand, and that law is due to human constraints more than to human rationality. Gary Becker, early in his career, wrote an interesting paper in which he showed that the law of demand could also be derived from habitual and random behavior. (I remember in conversation, George Stigler saying that he did not like this paper by Becker, because it did not hone closely to the rationality assumption that Stigler and Becker defended in their "De Gustibus" article.)

The latest book by Kahneman is rich and stimulating. It mainly consists of cataloging the names of, and evidence for, a host of biases and errors that humans make in thinking. But that does not mean we cannot choose to be more rational when it matters. Kahneman believes that there is a conscious System 2 that can over-ride the unconscious System 1. In fact, part of his motive for cataloging bias and irrationality is precisely so that we can be aware, and over-ride when it matters.

Sometimes it is claimed, as for instance in a Nova episode on PBS, that bias and irrationality were the main reasons for the financial crisis of 2008. I believe the more important causes were policy mistakes, like Clinton and Congress pressuring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make home loans to those who did not have the resources to repay them; and past government bailouts encouraging finance firms to take greater risks. And the length and depth of the crisis were increased by government stimulus and bailout programs. If instead, long-term cuts had been made in taxes, entrepreneurs would have had more of the resources they need to create start-ups that would have stimulated growth and reduced unemployment.

More broadly, aspects of behavioral economics mentioned, but not emphasized, by Kahneman, can actually strengthen the underpinnings for the case in favor of entrepreneurial capitalism. Entrepreneurs may be more successful when they are allowed to make use of informal knowledge that would not be classified as "rational" in the usual sense. (I discuss this some in my forthcoming paper, "The Epistemology of Entrepreneurship.")

Still, there are some useful and important examples and discussions in Kahneman's book. In the next several weeks, I will be quoting some of these.

Book discussed:

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

The Becker article mentioned above is:

Becker, Gary S. "Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory." Journal of Political Economy 70, no. 1 (Feb. 1962): 1-13.

The Stigler-Becker article mentioned above is:

Stigler, George J., and Gary S. Becker. "De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum." American Economic Review 67, no. 2 (March 1977): 76-90.

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(p. B2) First Solar's solar-panel business, which is focused on large solar installations that feed electricity to power companies, is dependent on government subsidies awarded to such developments.

. . .

But some worry that First Solar isn't well positioned for industry trends. The global solar-power market is moving toward rooftop solar-power systems, rather than the large-scale utility power plants where First Solar's products are most effective, said Jesse Pichel, an analyst at Jefferies Group Inc.

"This was a market leader, but its technology is being usurped or surpassed by the Chinese," said Mr. Pichel. "Their product is not competitive in the most economic and sustainable solar market, which is rooftop."

For the full story, see:

CASSANDRA SWEET And RUSSELL GOLD. "First Solar Cuts 2,000 Jobs; Panel Maker Laying Off 30% of Workers, Slashing Production Amid Supply Glut." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., April 18, 2012): B2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: online version of the story is dated April 17, 2012.)

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The YouTube video embedded above was from a CBS Evening News broadcast in June 2012. It illustrates the difficulty of the government successfully selecting the technologies, and companies, that will eventually prove successful. (The doctrine that government can and should do such selection is often called "industrial policy.")

The Obama administration has bet billions of tax dollars on lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles that A123 Systems won $249 million of. But as Sharyl Attkisson reports, expensive recalls and other setbacks have put substantial doubt in the company's ability to continue.

The text above, and the embedded video clip were published on YouTube on Jun 17, 2012 by CBSNewsOnline at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4Ugklc0rIo

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"A grassland field in North Dakota that was burned and then seeded with soybeans. More than one million acres have become farmland in the state since 2007." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) By guaranteeing income, farmers say, crop insurance removes almost any financial risk for planting land where crop failure is almost certain.

"When you can remove nearly all the risk involved and guarantee yourself a profit, it's not a bad business decision," said Darwyn Bach, a farmer in St. Leo, Minn., who said that he is guaranteed about $1,000 an acre in revenue before he puts a single seed in the ground because of crop insurance. "I can farm on low-quality land that I know is not going to produce and still turn a profit."

. . .

Environmentalists, hunting groups and even some farmers say the prospect of expanding insurance will only speed the push to turn grasslands into farms.

. . .

The existing crop insurance subsidy ballooned to $7.3 billion last year from $951 million in 2000, or about $1.2 billion adjusted for inflation, according to another G.A.O. report released in April. The costs of the program have risen as the value of crops has increased. Over the next 10 years, a Congressional Budget Office study estimates, the premium subsidy for the existing program will cost about $90 billion.

"This is better than a government bailout," said Steve Ellis, vice president of the Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group in Washington. "A bailout is a one-time thing when something bad happens. But crop insurance keeps giving, good or bad. And it's about to give even more."

For the full story, see:

RON NIXON. "Amid Growth, Plan to Insure Risks on Crops." The New York Times, First Section (Thurs., June 7, 2012): A1 & A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date June 6, 2012 and has the title "Crop Insurance Proposal Could Cost U.S. Billions.")

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"One vocal opponent of the tax is Courtland Boozé, a City Council member who calls it a hardship on poor people." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 14) Even here at a sweaty Zumba class sponsored by a nonprofit group called Weigh of Life, the city's proposal for a one-cent-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, which is to appear on the November ballot, meets up against the hard realities of residents' lives.

"What don't I have?" asked Rita Cerda, a longtime soda devotee, ticking off her ailments, including diabetes, high blood pressure and asthma. She is also overweight.

"I have problems drinking water," she said. "I don't like water."

The proposed tax, a license fee on businesses selling sweetened drinks, would require owners of bodegas, theaters, convenience stores and other outlets to tally ounces sold and, presumably, pass the cost on to customers.

. . .

Courtland Boozé is a City Council member and a vocal opponent of the soda tax. "We are primarily an economically suppressed community," he said. "It will be a huge hardship.

"I eat sweet potato pie and candied yams," continued Mr. Boozé, who is from Louisiana. "And what about cupcakes? Are they going to tax those?"

The city's Chamber of Commerce is also opposed to the tax. A group fighting the tax that includes the beverage industry has begun dropping off "Community Coalition Against Beverage Taxes" placards at La Flore de Jalisco Market, a small, cheerful grocery store where soda bottles in dozens of hues match the colorful piñatas hanging from the ceiling.

. . .

Charles Finnie, known as Chuck, a vice president of BMWL, a San Francisco lobbying firm, called the tax "an administrative nightmare for local businesses" that would also put them at a competitive disadvantage, with customers opting for cheaper soda in nearby cities.

. . .

At the RYSE Youth Center, founded 12 years ago after the killing of four high school students, the soda issue seemed both close to the heart and far away.

Kayla Miller, an 18-year-old college freshman, said that if complexion problems from too much sugar would not deter her friends from drinking sodas, neither would a tax.

Shivneel Sen, 14, does not favor the tax but knows how the money should be spent if it passes.

"The police came heck of late," he said, recalling the recent death of a best friend. "We need more of them."

Kimberly Aceves, the center's executive director, says that too often, the burden for making healthy choices falls unfairly on young people. Society may say "go exercise," she said, "but if the community isn't safe, how many kids are going to go out running?"

"Soda is bad for you," Ms. Aceves said. "So is violence."

For the full story, see:

PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN. "RICHMOND JOURNAL; Plan to Tax Soda Gets a Mixed Reception." The New York Times, First Section (Sun., June 3, 2012): 14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date June 2, 2012.)

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) In 1912, . . . , Robert Lincoln uncharacteristically leapt into the arena of national debate to challenge Theodore Roosevelt's appropriation of his father's name for TR's "New Nationalism" agenda. Robert, writing in the Boston Herald, labeled Roosevelt's progressivism a doctrine that the elder Lincoln "would abhor if living."

For the full review, see:

RYAN L. COLE. "BOOKSHELF; The Son Also Rises; Prominent lawyer, self-made millionaire, cabinet secretary--Robert Lincoln was more than just his father's greatest advocate." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., May 9, 2012): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 9, 2012.)

The book under review is:

Emerson, Jason. Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.

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"Xavier Lauth, a scientist, working with zebra fish in a lab at the Center for Aquaculture Technologies." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) SAN DIEGO -- If Americans ever eat genetically engineered fast-growing salmon, it might be because of a Soviet biologist turned oligarch turned government minister turned fish farming entrepreneur.

That man, Kakha Bendukidze, holds the key to either extinction or survival for AquaBounty Technologies, the American company that is hoping for federal approval of a type of salmon that would be the first genetically engineered animal in the human food supply.

But 20 months since the Food and Drug Administration tentatively concluded that the fish would be safe to eat and for the environment, there has been no approval. And AquaBounty is running out of money.

Mr. Bendukidze, the former economics minister of Georgia and AquaBounty's largest shareholder, says the company can stay afloat a while longer. But he is skeptical that genetically altered salmon will be approved in the United States in an election year, given the resistance from environmental and consumer groups.

"I understand politically that it's easier not to approve than to approve," Mr. Bendukidze said during a recent visit to a newly acquired laboratory in San Diego, where jars of tiny zebra fish for use in genetic engineering experiments are stacked on shelves. While many people would be annoyed by the approval, he said, "There will be no one except some scientists who will be annoyed if it is not approved."

. . .

(p. B6) Mr. Bendukidze, 56, began his career as a molecular biologist in a research institute outside Moscow, working on genetically engineering viruses for vaccine use. He later started a company selling biology supplies. When parts of the Soviet economy were privatized, he earned a reputation as a corporate raider, building through acquisitions and leading United Heavy Machinery, a large maker of equipment for mining, oil drilling and power generation.

In 2004, Mr. Bendukidze returned to his native Georgia as economics minister under Mikheil Saakashvili, the newly elected president. With a free-market philosophy and a penchant for insulting those who disagreed with him, Mr. Bendukidze earned his share of enemies as he moved to deregulate and privatize the economy.

He still lives in Georgia and now spends his time as chairman of the Free University of Tbilisi, which he founded. He also set up Linnaeus Capital Partners to manage his money. It has increasingly focused on aquaculture, with stakes in companies in Greece, Israel and Britain, in addition to AquaBounty.

For the full story, see:

ANDREW POLLACK. "An Entrepreneur Bankrolls a Genetically Engineered Salmon." The New York Times (Tues., May 22, 2012): B1 & B6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date May 21, 2012.)

"Kakha Bendukidze acquired the lab after agreeing to give AquaBounty more cash." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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(p. A3) Craig Dedo, a computer consultant and Walker supporter, said the race boiled down to one question: Who runs Wisconsin? "The Democrats and the unions, who are the takers?" he asked, "or the Republicans, the party of the private sector and the people who pay the bills?"

For the full story, see:

MONICA DAVEY. "Recall Election Could Foretell November Vote." The New York Times (Fri., June 1, 2012): A1 & A3.

(Note: the online version of the article is dated May 31, 2012.)

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(p. 94) Western Union's lawyers carne up with a dusty old New York Stale law, dated 1905, that said no one could buy more than 10 percent of a telegraph company chartered in that state without the approval of Albany lawmakers. Hard to believe, but it was right there in black and white and there was no possibility of getting the New York State legislature to understand why it was vital to build digital highways.

Talk about unintended consequences!

(p. 95) Originally, the law was written to stop Western Union from monopolizing the telegram business, but the law backfired and was used by the monopolist for its own protection.

Source:

Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.

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'The Falcon 9 rocket seen in a time-exposure photograph during liftoff." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- He does not have the name recognition of some other space entrepreneurs, people like Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin empire, or Paul Allen of Microsoft fame, or Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com billionaire.

That will probably change if things keep going his way. Elon Musk, a computer prodigy and serial entrepreneur whose ambitions include solving the world's energy needs and colonizing the solar system, was the man of the hour -- or of 3:44 a.m. Tuesday, Eastern time -- when the rocket ship built by his company, SpaceX, lifted off gracefully in a nighttime launching and arced off in a streak of light amid loud applause.

. . .

If all goes as planned, his unmanned Dragon capsule, lifted into orbit by his Falcon 9 rocket, will berth at the International Space Station on Friday bearing a modest cargo: 162 meal packets (45 of them low-sodium), a laptop computer, a change of clothes for the station astronauts and 15 student experiments.

Far more important than the supplies is the proof of concept. Mr. Musk is trying to show the world that a determined entrepreneur can start a rocket company from scratch and, a decade later, end up doing a job that has until now been the exclusive province of federal governments.

. . .

Just four years ago, SpaceX went through a near-death experience. The first three launchings of the company's small Falcon 1 rocket failed. One more failure, Mr. Musk said, and he would have run out of money. As he went through a divorce from his first wife, with whom he has five sons, he had to borrow money from friends.

The fourth launching succeeded. Late in 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX the cargo contract. The first two Falcon 9 launchings, in 2010, also succeeded.

Early Tuesday morning, the success streak continued. As the countdown clock hit zero, the engines remained ignited. Less than 10 minutes later, the Dragon was in orbit. It then aced several other early tasks like the deployment of solar arrays and navigational sensors and the testing of GPS equipment.

"Anything could have gone wrong," Mr. Musk said. "And everything went right, fortunately."

For the full story, see:

KENNETH CHANG. "Big Day for Entrepreneur Who Promises More." The New York Times (Weds., May 23, 2012): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story is dated May 22, 2012, and has the title "Big Day for a Space Entrepreneur Promising More.")

"Elon Musk." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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(p. A2) In essence, Justice says that, beginning in 2008, several plankton, in the form of five publishers, conspired against a whale, Amazon, whose monopoly clout had imposed a $9.99 retail price for e-books.

The deal the publishers eventually reached with Apple unfixed the price of e-books by linking their prices to the cover price of the print version. More importantly, publishers could begin to reclaim the right to set e-book retail prices generally.

. . .

Apple, with 15% of the e-book market, is no monopolist. The five publishers, though Justice insists they dominate trade publishing, account for only about half of e-book sales. Crucially for antitrust, the barriers to entry are zilch: Amazon, with 60% market share, could create its own e-book imprint tomorrow and begin bidding for the most popular authors.

. . .

Let's go back to "per se" vs. "rule of reason." Because the 1890 Sherman Act is so sweeping and almost any business arrangement could be read as prohibited, courts understandably evolved a "rule of reason" to distinguish the permissible from the impermissible. Unfortunately, the result has been antitrust as we know it: wild and fluctuating discretion masquerading as law. Retail price maintenance alone has been embraced and dumped so many times by the courts that it must feel like Jennifer Aniston.

"Do no harm" would be a better principle for trustbusters.

For the full commentary, see:

HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. "BUSINESS WORLD; Washington vs. Books; What about piracy, low barriers to entry and the fact that literature isn't chopped liver?" The Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 14, 2012): A15.

(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated April 13, 2012.)

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"Akis Tsochatzopoulos on April 11 became the highest-ranking Greek official ever to be detained on corruption charges." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A6) Prosecutors accuse the former defense minister, Akis Tsochatzopoulos, 73, a founding member of the Socialist Party and the highest-ranking Greek official ever to be detained on corruption charges, of pocketing at least $26 million in kickbacks for Greece's purchase of submarines and missile systems and funneling the money through offshore accounts to buy property.

. . .

The case of Mr. Tsochatzopoulos (pronounced zok-at-ZOP-ou-los) marks the rise -- and perhaps fall -- of a political culture that has dominated Greece for decades, in which alternating Socialist and center-right New Democracy governments helped spread the spoils and, critics say, the corruption, during the boom years. That system helped drive up Greece's public debt to the point that it was forced to seek a foreign bailout in 2010.

As the money has run out, an entrenched favors-for-votes culture is now coming unglued, and Greeks have become less forgiving of high-level missteps.

For the full story, see:

RACHEL DONADIO and NIKI KITSANTONIS. "Corruption Case Hits Hard in a Tough Time for Greece." The New York Times (Thurs., May 3, 2012): A6 & A11.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story is dated May 2, 2012.)

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Joel Kotkin. Source of image: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) 'California is God's best moment," says Joel Kotkin. "It's the best place in the world to live." Or at least it used to be.

. . .

Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.

. . .

"Basically, if you don't own a piece of Facebook or Google and you haven't robbed a bank and don't have rich parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak," says Mr. Kotkin.

. . .

And things will only get worse in the coming years as Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre implement their "smart growth" plans to cram the proletariat into high-density housing. "What I find reprehensible beyond belief is that the people pushing [high-density housing] themselves live in single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want everyone else to live like my grandmother did in Brownsville in Brooklyn in the 1920s," Mr. Kotkin declares.

"The new regime"--his name for progressive apparatchiks who run California's government--"wants to destroy the essential reason why people move to California in order to protect their own lifestyles."

Housing is merely one front of what he calls the "progressive war on the middle class." Another is the cap-and-trade law AB32, which will raise the cost of energy and drive out manufacturing jobs without making even a dent in global carbon emissions. Then there are the renewable portfolio standards, which mandate that a third of the state's energy come from renewable sources like wind and the sun by 2020. California's electricity prices are already 50% higher than the national average.

Oh, and don't forget the $100 billion bullet train. Mr. Kotkin calls the runaway-cost train "classic California." "Where [Brown] with the state going bankrupt is even thinking about an expenditure like this is beyond comprehension. When the schools are falling apart, when the roads are falling apart, the bridges are unsafe, the state economy is in free fall. We're still doing much worse than the rest of the country, we've got this growing permanent welfare class, and high-speed rail is going to solve this?"

For the full interview, see:

ALLYSIA FINLEY, interviewer. "THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Joel Kotkin: The Great California Exodus; A leading U.S. demographer and 'Truman Democrat' talks about what is driving the middle class out of the Golden State." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 21, 2012): A13.

(Note: ellipses added; bracketed words in original.)

(Note: the online version of the interview is dated April 20, 2012.)

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(p. A15) Last June, the Los Angeles Times reported that about 70 golden eagles are being killed per year by the wind turbines at Altamont Pass, about 20 miles east of Oakland, Calif. A 2008 study funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency estimated that about 2,400 raptors, including burrowing owls, American kestrels, and red-tailed hawks--as well as about 7,500 other birds, nearly all of which are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act--are being killed every year by the turbines at Altamont.

A pernicious double standard is at work here. And it riles Eric Glitzenstein, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who wrote the petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He told me, "It's absolutely clear that there's been a mandate from the top" echelons of the federal government not to prosecute the wind industry for violating wildlife laws.

Mr. Glitzenstein comes to this issue from the left. Before forming his own law firm, he worked for Public Citizen, an organization created by Ralph Nader. When it comes to wind energy, he says, "Many environmental groups have been claiming that too few people are paying attention to the science of climate change, but some of those same groups are ignoring the science that shows wind energy's negative impacts on bird and bat populations."

For the full commentary, see:

ROBERT BRYCE. "Windmills vs. Birds; About 70 golden eagles are killed every year by turbines at California's Altamont Pass, reports the LA Times.." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., March 8, 2012): A15.

(Note: the online version of the article is dated March 7, 2012.)

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(p. 260) In 2007 Forbes magazine named Steve Jobs the highest-paid exec-(p. 261)utive of any of America's five hundred largest companies, based on gains in the value of stock granted to him at Apple. He was on the board of directors of the Walt Disney Co. Yet his former residence in Woodside, where he had once met with Catmull and Smith and mused about buying Lucasfilm's Computer Division, was now in a state of decay under his ownership.

He had wanted to demolish it; after a group of neighborhood residents opposed his plan to do so, he left the house open to the elements. The interior suffered damage from water and mold. Vines crept up the stucco walls and wandered inside.

The memories that haunted its hallways were those of Jobs's darkest times. He had bought the house only months before the humiliation of his firing from Apple; he lived in it through that firing and through the hard, money-hemorrhaging years of Pixar and NeXT. He left it as his fortunes were about to change, as he was sending Microsoft away from Pixar, convinced that he had something he should hold on to.

When a judge ruled against his quest for a demolition permit, Jobs appealed in 2006 and 2007 all the way to the California Supreme Court, but he lost at every stage. He received proposals from property owners offering to cart the house away in sections and restore it elsewhere; he rejected them. One way or another, it seemed, he meant for the house to be destroyed.

Source:

Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

(Note: italics in original.)

(Note: The passage above is from the Epilogue and the pages given above are from the hardback edition (pp. 260-261). The identical passage also appears in the 2009 paperback edition, but on p. 265.

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"Robert Caro in his Manhattan office. The later volumes of his L.B.J. biography have taken more years to write than it took the former president to live them." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 37) "There was never a plan," Caro said to me, explaining how he had become a historian and biographer. "There was just a series of mistakes."

. . .

(p. 38) Caro had a[n] . . . epiphany about power in the early '60s. He had moved on to Newsday by then, where he discovered that he had a knack for investigative reporting, and was assigned to look into a plan by Robert Moses to build a bridge from Rye, N.Y., across Long Island Sound to Oyster Bay. "This was the world's worst idea," he told me. "The piers would have had to be so big that they'd disrupt the tides." Caro wrote a series exposing the folly of this scheme, and it seemed to have persuaded just about everyone, including the governor, Nelson Rockefeller. But then, he recalled, he got a call from a friend in Albany saying, "Bob, I think you need to come up here." Caro said: "I got there in time for a vote in the Assembly authorizing some preliminary step toward the bridge, and it passed by something like 138-4. That was one of the transformational moments of my life. I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: 'Everything you've been doing is baloney. You've been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here's a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don't have the slightest idea how he got it.' "

The lesson was repeated in 1965, when Caro had a Nieman fellowship at Harvard and took a class in land use and urban planning. "They were talking one day about highways and where they got built," he recalled, "and here were these mathematical formulas about traffic density and population density and so on, and all of a sudden I said to myself: 'This is completely wrong. This isn't why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don't find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest.' "

For the full story, see:

CHARLES McGRATH. "Robert Caro's Big Dig." The New York Times Magazine (Sun., April 15, 2012): 34-39 & 52.

(Note: ellipses and bracketed letter added.)

(Note: the online version of the story is dated April 12, 2012.)

Caro's book on Robert Moses is:

Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1974.

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""I don't go out to get gas at night. I don't run to any stores. I try to do everything in the daytime and to be back before night falls," said Juanita Kennedy, a resident of Highland Park, Mich." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A11) HIGHLAND PARK, Mich. -- When the sun sets in this small city, its neighborhoods seem to vanish.

In a deal to save money, two-thirds of the streetlights were yanked from the ground and hauled away this year, and the resulting darkness is a look that is familiar in the wide open cornfields of Iowa but not here, in a struggling community surrounded on nearly all sides by Detroit.

Parents say they now worry more about allowing their children to walk to school early in the morning. Motorists complain that they often cannot see pedestrians until headlights -- and cars -- are right upon them. Some residents say they are reshaping their lives to fit the hours of daylight, as the members of the Rev. D. Alexander Bullock's church did recently when they urged him to move up Saturday Bible study to 4 p.m. from the usual 7 p.m.

"It's just too dark," said Mr. Bullock, of Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church. "I come out of the church, and I can't see what's in front of me. What happened to our streetlights is what happens when politicians lose hope. All kinds of crazy decisions get made, and citizens lose faith in the process."

. . .

(p. A16) "The people were basically left in the dark," said DeAndre Windom, who was elected mayor in November. He said the disappearing streetlights were the top concern of residents as he campaigned door to door.

"When you come through at night, it's scary; you have to wonder if anyone is lurking around waiting to catch you off your guard," said Juanita Kennedy, 65, who said she had installed a home security system and undergone training to carry a handgun in the weeks since workmen carried away the streetlight in front of her house. "I don't go out to get gas at night. I don't run to any stores. I try to do everything in the daytime and to be back before night falls."

For the full story, see:

MONICA DAVEY. "Darker Nights as Some Cities Turn Off Lights for Savings." The New York Times Book Review (Fri., December 30, 2011): A11 & A16.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story is dated December 29, 2011, and has the title "Darker Nights as Some Cities Turn Off the Lights.")

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Source of book image: http://www.bibliovault.org/thumbs/978-0-8047-7672-1-frontcover.jpg

In the quote below, "NGO" means "Non-Government Organization," for instance, a philanthropy.

(p. 17) As for the state's representatives, their authority was what Coburn calls a "useful fiction." The district governor wielded his connections to Kabul as best he could, but did not possess great influence, in part because -- in keeping with the most sophisticated state-building methods -- government aid was mainly distributed by locally elected committees. Istalif's police were seen as hapless at best, predatory at worst; Coburn found that villagers were eager to protect him from a local officer. The French soldiers who periodically showed up in the bazaar had little impact, though their presence did become an excuse for keeping women out of the area. But Coburn observed that "no group was less effective at accumulating influence" than the NGO community. The best development experts accomplished little: their turnover was high, and they frequently bestowed their largess on deserving locals -- women, refugees who'd returned from abroad with some education, victims of wartime injuries -- who didn't have the connections or ability to capitalize on their good fortune. NGO workers seemed less concerned with achieving a valuable outcome than with demonstrating to their backers that they had followed a mission plan to the letter.

For the full review, see:

ALEXANDER STAR. "Applied Anthropology." The New York Times Book Review (Sun., November 20, 2011): 16-17.

(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated November 18, 2011, and has the title "Afghanistan: What the Anthropologists Say.")

The book being discussed is:

Coburn, Noah. Bazaar Politics: Power and Pottery in an Afghan Market Town. Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.

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(p. A13) Pat Moynihan once reportedly told Richard Nixon (who was known for his disdain for intellectuals), "Mr. President, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention to what he has to say."

. . .

At one point in my academic career, I called Jim for advice about how best to navigate the waters of liberal academia when one is openly conservative. "Simple," he told me lightheartedly, "Be twice as productive and four times as nice as your colleagues." It was a formula he himself had followed.

For the full commentary, see:

ARTHUR C. BROOKS. "OPINION; Social Science With a Soul; Life for James Q. Wilson was like a roadside curio shop, full of hidden and unrecognized intellectual treasures.." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 3, 2012): C4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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"In this April 22, 2000 file photo, Elian Gonzalez is held in a closet by Donato Dalrymple, one of the two men who rescued the boy from the ocean, right, as government officials search the home of Lazaro Gonzalez, early Saturday morning, April 22, 2000, in Miami. Armed federal agents seized Elian Gonzalez from the home of his Miami relatives before dawn Saturday, firing tear gas into an angry crowd as they left the scene with the weeping 6-year-old boy." Source of caption and photo: online version of JENNIFER KAY and MATT SEDENSKY. "10 years later, few stirred by Elian Gonzalez saga." Omaha World-Herald (Thurs., April 22, 2010): 7A. (Note: the online version of the article is dated April 21, 2010 and has the title "10 years after Elian, US players mum or moving on.")





Today (April 22, 2012) is the twelfth anniversary of one of the darkest days in American history---when the Democratic Clinton Administration seized a six year old child in order to force him back into the slavery that his mother had died trying to escape.

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Source of book image: http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/files/2011/10/my-long-trip-home.jpg

(p. C1) As a social studies major in his junior year at Harvard, Mark Whitaker attended a debate on the subject of ethnicity. One participant was the chairman of the department. Mr. Whitaker stood up to raise some questions.

"What would you tell someone who didn't have a clear ethnic identity?" he asked. "For example, what would you tell someone who had one parent who was black and another who was white? Who had one parent who was American and another who was European? Who had moved dozens of times as a child and didn't have a specific place to call home?" Everyone in the room knew that Mr. Whitaker was talking about himself.

"I guess I would say that that's too bad," the professor answered. "In the future I hope we don't have too many more people like you."

Mr. Whitaker recounts this story in "My Long Trip Home," a book filled with as much family tumult as Jeannette Walls described in "The Glass Castle" and a racial factor to boot. It's a story that registers not only for its shock value but also for the perspective and wisdom with which it can now be told.

The episode did not anger him, he said. He saw it as his professor's Freudian slip, "exposing a wish to hold on to a sense of certainty about his roots in the face of a gathering demographic storm that threatened to wash them away." But Mr. Whitaker's troubled and combative black father, who is the book's central figure through sheer force of personality, had a more heated reaction. "As I always say, scratch a white liberal and you'll find a bigot," Cleophaus Sylvester Whitaker Jr. told his son.

For the full review, see:

JANET MASLIN. "BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Born Along the Racial Fault Line." The New York Times (Mon., November 7, 2011): C1 & C4.

(Note: the online version of the review is dated November 6, 2011.)

The book under review is:

Whitaker, Mark. My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

"Mark Whitaker" Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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"Gov. Matt Mead at a meeting in the Capitol in Cheyenne. A portrait of his grandfather Clifford P. Hansen, a former governor, hangs behind him." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) If Washington is broken and unable to lead -- as millions of Americans believe, according to polls -- then who is left to fill the void? Mr. Mead's answer: States functional enough to soldier on through a time of dystopian crisis should be given the room to run. Whether they are led by conservatives or liberals does not matter so much, he said, as the ability to get things done.

"There certainly have to be national policies, and national rules and regulations -- I understand that," Mr. Mead, 49, a Republican and former prosecutor, said in an interview in his office here. "But I am in part a states' rights guy because I think we can do so many things better."

Better or not, Wyoming's way -- always idiosyncratic in the windblown, rural grain that mixes mind-your-own-business cowboy libertarianism and fiscal penny-pinching -- is getting its moment in the spotlight.

For the full story, see:

KIRK JOHNSON. "STATEHOUSE JOURNAL; Idiosyncrasy Runs Deep in the Soil of Wyoming." The New York Times (Fri., November 25, 2011): A15.

(Note: the online version of the story is dated November 24, 2011.)

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John Mackey is the entrepreneur behind the Whole Foods Market.

(p. A17) The success of economic freedom in increasing human prosperity, extending our life spans and improving the quality of our lives in countless ways is the most extraordinary global story of the past 200 years.

. . .

Economic freedom is declining in the U.S. In 2000, the U.S. was ranked third in the world behind only Hong Kong and Singapore in the Index of Economic Freedom, published annually by this newspaper and the Heritage Foundation. In 2011, we fell to ninth behind such countries as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland.

The reforms we need to make are extensive.

. . .

According to the Small Business Administration, total regulatory costs amount to about $1.75 trillion annually, nearly twice as much as all individual income taxes collected last year. While some regulations create important safeguards for public health and the environment, far too many simply protect existing business interests and discourage entrepreneurship. Specifically, many government regulations in education, health care and energy prevent entrepreneurship and innovation from revolutionizing and re-energizing these very important parts of our economy.

A simple reform that would make a monumental difference would be to require all federal regulations to have a sunset provision. All regulations should automatically expire after 10 years unless a mandatory cost-benefit analysis has been completed that proves the regulations have created significantly more societal benefit than harm. Currently thousands of new regulations are added each year and virtually none ever disappear.

For the full commentary, see:

JOHN MACKEY. "OPINION; To Increase Jobs, Increase Economic Freedom; Business is not a zero-sum game struggling over a fixed pie. Instead it grows and makes the total pie larger, creating value for all of its major stakeholders, including employees and communities.." The New York Times (Fri., November 16, 2011): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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"Randy E. Barnett has argued against the health care law." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) WASHINGTON -- When Congress passed legislation requiring nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance, Randy E. Barnett, a passionate libertarian who teaches law at Georgetown, argued that the bill was unconstitutional.

. . .

. . . over the past two years, through his prolific writings, speaking engagements and television appearances, Professor Barnett has helped drive the question of the health care law's constitutionality from the fringes of academia into the mainstream of American legal debate and right onto the agenda of the United States Supreme Court.

. . .

. . . the challenge championed by Professor Barnett: that Congress's power to set rules for commerce does not extend to regulating "inactivity," like choosing not to be insured.

. . .

(p. A14) He is a fierce advocate of economic freedom who is accustomed to being a legal underdog. In 2004, in his first (and, he says, probably his last) appearance before the Supreme Court, he argued that Congress could not criminalize the production of home-grown marijuana for personal medical use. There again, critics said he would lose 8 to 1. He did lose, but took satisfaction in the actual vote, 6 to 3.

. . .

Professor Barnett's work on the health care law fits into a much broader intellectual project, his defense of economic freedom. He has long argued that the Supreme Court went too far in upholding New Deal economic laws -- a position that concerns his liberal critics.

Even a close friend and fellow Georgetown law professor, Lawrence B. Solum, says that Professor Barnett is aware of the "big divide between his views and the views of lots of other people," and that his political philosophy is "much more radical" than his legal argument in the health care case. Professor Barnett, for his part, insists that if the health law is struck down, it will not "threaten the foundation of the New Deal." But, he allowed, it would be "a huge symbolic victory for limited government."

For the full story, see:

SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and CHARLIE SAVAGE. "Libertarian's Pet Cause Reaches Supreme Court." The New York Times (Tues., March 27, 2012): A1 & A14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story is dated March 26, 2012 and has the title "Vindication for Challenger of Health Care Law.")

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"The car is driven by a computer that steers, starts and stops itself. A 360 degrees laser scanner on top of the car, a GPS system and other sensors monitor the surrounding traffic." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p A13) Expect innovations that change the nature of driving more than anything since the end of the hand-crank engine--so long as the legal and regulatory systems don't strangle new digital technologies before they can roll off the assembly line.

. . .

Mr. Ford outlined a future of what the auto industry calls "semiautonomous driving technology," meaning increasingly self-driving cars. Over the next few years, cars will automatically be able to maintain safe distances, using networks of sensors, V-to-V (vehicle-to-vehicle) communications and real-time tracking of driving conditions fed into each car's navigation system.

This will limit the human error that accounts for 90% of accidents. Radar-based cruise control will stop cars from hitting each other, with cars by 2025 driving themselves in tight formations Mr. Ford describes as "platoons," cutting congestion as the space between cars is reduced safely.

. . .

Over the next decade, cars could finally become true automobiles. Our laws will have to be updated for a new relationship between people and cars, but the benefits will be significant: fewer traffic accidents and fewer gridlocked roads--and, perhaps best of all, young people will be in self-driving cars, not teenager-driven cars.

For the full commentary, see:

L. GORDON CROVITZ. "INFORMATION AGE; The Car of the Future Will Drive You; A truly auto-mobile is coming if liability laws don't stop it." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., March 5, 2012): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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"Swati Ramanathan, a founder of the site I Paid a Bribe, in India." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) The cost of claiming a legitimate income tax refund in Hyderabad, India? 10,000 rupees.

The going rate to get a child who has already passed the entrance requirements into high school in Nairobi, Kenya? 20,000 shillings.

The expense of obtaining a driver's license after having passed the test in Karachi, Pakistan? 3,000 rupees.

Such is the price of what Swati Ramanathan calls "retail corruption," the sort of nickel-and-dime bribery, as opposed to large-scale graft, that infects everyday life in so many parts of the world.

Ms. Ramanathan and her husband, Ramesh, along with Sridar Iyengar, set out to change all that in August 2010 when they started ipaidabribe.com, a site that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid and requests that were expected but not forthcoming.

About 80 percent of the more than 400,000 reports to the site tell stories like the ones above of officials and bureaucrats seeking illicit payments to provide routine services or process paperwork and forms.

"I was asked to pay a bribe to get a birth certificate for my daughter," someone in Bangalore, India, wrote in to the Web site on Feb. 29, recording payment of a 120-rupee bribe in Bangalore. "The guy in charge called it 'fees' " -- except there are no fees charged for birth certificates, Ms. Ramanathan said.

Now, similar sites are spreading like kudzu around the globe, vexing petty bureaucrats the world over. Ms. Ramanathan said nongovernmental organizations and government agencies from at least 17 countries had contacted Janaagraha, the nonprofit organization in Bangalore that operates I Paid a Bribe, to ask about obtaining the source code and setting up a site of their own.

For the full story, see:

STEPHANIE STROM. "Web Sites Shine Light on Petty Bribery Worldwide." The New York Times (Weds., March 7, 2012): B1 & B4.

(Note: the online version of the article has the date March 6, 2012.)

"Antony Ragui started an I Paid a Bribe site in Kenya." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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Source of book image: http://images.borders.com.au/images/bau/97801997/9780199747405/0/0/plain/a-culture-of-freedom-ancient-greece-and-the-origins-of-europe.jpg

(p. C9) A city's central space reveals much about the society that built it. In the middle of the typical Greek city-state, or polis, stood neither a palace nor a temple--the dominant centering structures of Asian and Egyptian cities--but an open public square, an agora, useful for gatherings and the conduct of business. When Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, first encountered Greeks on his western boundaries, he sneered at the race of shopkeepers who hung about the agora cheating one another all day. Yet that same race would later defeat his descendants, Darius and Xerxes, in two of the most consequential battles the Western world has seen, at Marathon in 490 B.C. and at Salamis 10 years later.

. . .

Mr. Meier's approach runs counter to a tendency in recent classical scholarship to trace Greek ideas to non-Greek sources or to seek common ground on which East and West once met. The polis itself has been claimed in the past few decades as a Near Eastern, or Phoenician, invention; Carthage too, it seems, had an agora at its hub. But Mr. Meier takes pains to dismiss this claim. Relying on expertise amassed in his long academic career, he reasserts the uniqueness of Greek political evolution, the mysterious and somewhat miraculous process that culminates, at the end of this account, in the emergence of Athenian democracy.

. . .

After surveying the crucial reforms of the Athenian leader Cleisthenes, the foundation stones of the world's first democratic constitution, Mr. Meier asks: "Was it just a matter of time before the Attic citizenry was reorganized--so that Cleisthenes did something that would have happened sooner or later anyway? Or were Cleisthenes' achievements beyond the scope of men less able and daring?"

For the full review, see:

JAMES ROMM. "The Greeks' Daring Experiment." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., FEBRUARY 11, 2012): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:

Meier, Christian. A Culture of Freedom: Ancient Greece and the Origins of Europe. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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Source of book image: http://www.chinarhyming.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/51Hr-aIgESL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Marxists and others on the left often claim that big business is the main force behind U.S. imperialism. Is it not ironic that the most imperialistic U.S. President was the anti-big-business "progressive" Teddy Roosevelt who was vehemently opposed by big businessman Andrew Carnegie?

Mark Twain is sometimes accused of insufficient sympathy with the downtrodden. Those who so accuse, misunderstand his message. He too opposed Roosevelt's war on the Filipinos.

(Carnegie and Twain's friendship is discussed in David Nasaw's biography of Carnegie.)

(p. 13) There was within the United States a strong and vocal anti-imperialist movement, which included former President Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, but it struggled to tamp down the country's growing expansionist zeal, and to compete with the energy, tenacity and bulldog ambition of one man in particular: Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who in just six years rose meteorically from New York City police commissioner to president, nurtured a deep and unshakable contempt for what he called the "unintelligent, cowardly chatter for 'peace at any price.' " Not only had the "clamor of the peace faction" left him unmoved, Roosevelt wrote, it had served to strengthen his conviction that "this country needs a war."

. . .

Although Roosevelt moves in and out of Jones's narrative, disappearing for long stretches, he still manages to steal the spotlight, just as he does in every book in which he appears. When McKinley dragged his feet before sending troops to Cuba, Roosevelt sneered that the president had "no more backbone than a chocolate éclair." In the Department of the Navy, Roosevelt gleefully took over while his boss was on summer vacation, anointing himself the "hot weather secretary" and crowing to a friend that he was having "immense fun running the Navy." In Cuba, after choosing his regiment of Rough Riders from 23,000 applicants, he ordered his famous charge up Kettle Hill wearing a custom-made fawn-colored Brooks Brothers uniform with canary-yellow trim.

For the full review, see:

CANDICE MILLARD. "Looking for a Fight; At the Turn of the 20th Century, Theodore Roosevelt Set Out to Transform the United States into a Major World Power." The New York Times Book Review (Sun., February 19, 2012): 13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 17, 2012 and has the title "Looking for a Fight; A New History of the Philippine-American War.")

The book under review is:

Jones, Gregg. Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America's Imperial Dream. New York: New American Library, 2012.

The Nasaw book on Carnegie mentioned in my initial comments is:

Nasaw, David. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.

(Note: the pagination of the hardback and paperback editions of Nasaw's book are the same.)

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"Shi Kang, a millionaire writer living in Beijing, started thinking about emigrating after a long road trip last year around the U.S." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) BEIJING--This time last year, Shi Kang considered himself a happy man.

Writing 15 novels had made him a millionaire. He owned a luxury apartment and a new silver Mercedes. He was so content with his carefree life in Beijing that he never even traveled overseas.

Today, a year later, Mr. Shi is considering emigrating to the U.S.--one of a growing number of rich Chinese either contemplating leaving their homeland or already arranging to do it.

. . .

(p. A12) A survey published in November found that 60% of about 960,000 Chinese people with assets over 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) were either thinking about emigrating or taking steps to do so. The U.S. was the top destination, followed by Canada, Singapore and Europe, according to the survey by the state-run Bank of China and Hurun Report, which analyzes trends among China's wealthy.

. . .

Mr. Su was no dissident, though. Like many of his generation, he turned his attention to getting rich. Today, at 46, Mr. Su runs his own aerospace technology company and estimates his own net worth, including the various properties he owns, at around 80 million yuan, or close to $13 million.

His main reason for leaving, he says, is the business environment. "The government has too much power," he says. "Regulations here mean that businessmen have to do a lot of illegal things. That gives people a real sense of insecurity." He said four of his distributors have also applied for investment immigration to Canada.

. . .

"The problem is that government power is too great," Mr. Su says. "When the economy is going up, they think that everything they are doing is right." If they don't change, he worries, "another revolution will come soon."

. . .

The current migrant wave is different in that they are escaping neither poverty nor political unrest--and many say they are leaving for good. The Hurun survey showed that the average respondent had 60 million yuan in assets and was 42, old enough to remember the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, but young enough to have learned how to prosper in a market economy.

Deng Jie fits the profile. Twenty-seven years ago, in the fledgling years of China's market reforms, he began his career in a state-run ceramics factory in Beijing, sharing a cramped dormitory with colleagues and earning 50 yuan a month (about $13 in those days).

Today, at 48, he runs his own chemical pigments business and lives with his wife and daughter in one of the three luxury apartments he owns. In dollar terms, he is a millionaire several times over. His properties alone have appreciated by 800% in a decade.

Yet the hope he felt for his country in the 1980s, he says, has "been doused with bucket after bucket of cold water." He cited a host of concerns, including rampant corruption among the officials he deals with, and new labor regulations that he says have made his work force too costly and demanding.

"I'm representing a lot of other people like me," he says. "We used to want to contribute to the nation. But now we just feel so disappointed. China cannot continue like this. It has to change."

For the full story, see:

JEREMY PAGE. "Plan B for China's Wealthy: Moving to the U.S., Europe." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., FEBRUARY 22, 2012): A1 & A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

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(p. A13) Like the mythical monster Hydra--who grew two heads every time Hercules cut one off--President Obama, in both his State of the Union address and his new budget, has defiantly doubled down on his brand of industrial policy, the usually ill-advised attempt by governments to promote particular industries, companies and technologies at the expense of broad, evenhanded competition.

Despite his record of picking losers--witness the failed "clean energy" projects Solyndra, Ener1 and Beacon Power--Mr. Obama appears determined to continue pushing his brew of federal spending, regulations, mandates, special waivers, loan guarantees, subsidies and tax breaks for companies he deems worthy.

Favoring key constituencies with taxpayer money appeals to politicians, who can claim to be helping the overall economy, but it usually does far more harm than good. It crowds out valuable competing investment efforts financed by private investors, and it warps decisions by bureaucratic diktats susceptible to political cronyism. Former Obama adviser Larry Summers echoed most economists' view when he warned the administration against federal loan guarantees to Solyndra, writing in a 2009 email that "the government is a crappy venture capitalist."

For the full commentary, see:

MICHAEL J. BOSKIN. "OPINION; Washington's Knack for Picking Losers; Former Obama adviser Larry Summers warned the administration against federal loan guarantees to Solyndra, writing in a 2009 email that 'the government is a crappy venture capitalist'." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., FEBRUARY 15, 2012): A13.

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(p. A19) Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: "The right to rise."

Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn't seem like something we should have to protect.

But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

That is what economic freedom looks like. Freedom to succeed as well as to fail, freedom to do something or nothing. . . .

. . .

But when it comes to economic freedom, we are less forgiving of the cycles of growth and loss, of trial and error, and of failure and success that are part of the realities of the marketplace and life itself.

. . .

. . . , we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.

For the full commentary, see:

JEB BUSH. "OPINION; Capitalism and the Right to Rise; In freedom lies the risk of failure. But in statism lies the certainty of stagnation." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., December 19, 2011): A19.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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Welfare states' debt due
Ratings downgrades, states default
Euro muddles through

Arthur Diamond

The haiku above was my entry in response to the haiku challenge in the Kauffman Foundation's First Quarter 2012 survey "of top economics bloggers." The haiku challenge was: "The euro is troubled, so what is its fate in 2012 and/or what should policymakers do?"

The results of the Q1 2012 survey can be found at: http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/econ_bloggers_outlook_q1_2012.pdf

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(p. 356) This catallaxy will not go smoothly, or without resistance. Natural and unnatural disasters will still happen. Governments will bail out big corporations and big bureaucracies, hand them special favours such as subsidies or carbon rations and regulate them in such a way as to create barriers to entry, slowing down creative destruction. Chiefs, priests, thieves, financiers, consultants and others will appear on all sides, feeding off the surplus (p. 357) generated by exchange and specialisation, diverting the life-blood of the catallaxy into their own reactionary lives. It happened in the past. Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the price of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers.

Source:

Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010.

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"Professor Bennett's work opened a window to deciphering tablets written in Linear B, a Bronze Age Aegean script." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. 22) Deciphering an ancient script is like cracking a secret code from the past, and the unraveling of Linear B is widely considered one of the most challenging archaeological decipherments of all time, if not the most challenging.

. . .

Linear B recorded the administrative workings of Mycenaean palatial centers on Crete and the Greek mainland 3,000 years ago: accounts of crops harvested, flocks tended, goods manufactured (including furniture, chariots and perfume), preparations for religious feasts and preparations for war.

It was deciphered at last in 1952, not by a scholar but by an obsessed amateur, a young English architect named Michael Ventris. The decipherment made him world famous before his death in an automobile accident in 1956.

As Mr. Ventris had acknowledged, he was deeply guided by Professor Bennett's work, which helped impose much-needed order on the roiling mass of strange, ancient symbols.

In his seminal monograph "The Pylos Tablets" (1951), Professor Bennett published the first definitive list of the signs of Linear B. Compiling such a list is the essential first step in deciphering any unknown script, and it is no mean feat.

. . .

"We know how much Ventris admired Bennett, because he immediately adopted Bennett's sign list of Linear B for his own work before the decipherment," said Mr. Robinson, whose book "The Man Who Deciphered Linear B" (2002) is a biography of Mr. Ventris. "He openly said, 'This is a wonderful piece of work.' "

. . .

As meticulous as Professor Bennett's work was, it once engendered great confusion. In 1951, after he sent Mr. Ventris a copy of his monograph, a grateful Ventris went to the post office to pick it up. As Mr. Robinson's biography recounts, a suspicious official, eyeing the package, asked him: "I see the contents are listed as Pylos Tablets. Now, just what ailments are pylos tablets supposed to alleviate?"

For the full obituary, see:

MARGALIT FOX. "Emmett L. Bennett Jr., Ancient Script Expert, Dies at 93." The New York Times, First Section (Sun., January 1, 2012,): 22.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated December 31, 2011, and has the title: "Emmett L. Bennett Jr., Expert on Ancient Script, Dies at 93.")

The book on the amateur, uncredentialed Ventris is:

Robinson, Andrew. The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris. London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

"Emmett L. Bennett Jr." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited above.

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Source of caricature: online version of the WSJ interview quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Governments have long dominated space, starting with the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik 1. The U.S. soon followed. "If they'd used just a small fraction of that money as prize money and given it to the best commercial companies, that money would've been far better spent," Mr. Branson muses. "The $10 million [Ansari] X Prize very much sparked our move into space travel," he notes, referring to the competition organized by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis and launched in 1996.

Mr. Branson had dreamed of exploring the final frontier for decades. "I think it just simply goes back to watching the moon landing on blurry black-and-white television when I was a teenager and thinking, one day I would go to the moon--and then realizing that governments are not interested in us individuals and creating products that enable us to go into space," he says. In 1995, after making billions of dollars in the music and airline businesses, Mr. Branson registered a new company, Virgin Galactic (the name "sounded good"), at London's Companies House. Then the company started searching for rocket scientists and the right technology.

Several years later, in July 2002, Virgin's team traveled to California to check on American aerospace designer Burt Rutan's progress on the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer, a plane built "to circumnavigate the globe non-stop on a single tank of fuel," according to Virgin's website. Virgin discovered that Mr. Rutan intended to compete for the X Prize with SpaceShip One, the world's first privately developed spacecraft, financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Mr. Branson quickly struck a deal: Virgin would license Mr. Rutan's SpaceShip One technology from Mr. Allen if he won the competition. In 2004, Mr. Rutan did just that, and Virgin Galactic was off to the races.

. . .

So what advice does Mr. Branson have for aspiring entrepreneurs? "Think of what frustrates you--and if you're frustrated by something and you feel 'Dammit, if only people could do this better,' then go try to do it better yourself. It can start off in a really small way . . . and you'll be surprised: If you're doing it better yourself, in whatever field it is, you'll be filling a gap and you suddenly might start creating a business."

For the full interview, see:

MARY KISSEL. "THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Richard Branson; Space: The Next Business Frontier; By next Christmas the airline mogul could be ferrying paying customers outside the atmosphere--and, later, to the bottom of the ocean." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 17, 2011): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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"Partho Nag, a childhood friend of Shubhrangshu Roy's who lives in the same New Delhi suburb. Mr. Nag, who runs an IT service company out of his home, joined Mr. Roy and other friends as they volunteered at the Hazare protests. "We've been told since our childhoods, 'Politics is bad, don't get into politics,'" Mr. Nag said. "But the point is that somebody has to clean it up. We can't just scold people."" Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) DWARKA, India -- Shubhrangshu Barman Roy and his childhood friends are among the winners in India's economic rise. They have earned graduate degrees, started small companies and settled into India's expanding middle class. They sometimes take vacations together and meet for dinners or parties, maybe to celebrate a new baby or a new business deal.

Yet in August, Mr. Roy and his friends donned white Gandhi caps, boarded a Metro train in this fast-growing suburb of the Indian capital and rode into New Delhi like a band of revolutionaries to join the large anticorruption demonstrations led by the rural activist Anna Hazare. They waved Indian flags, distributed water to the crowds and vented their outrage at India's political status quo.

"I could feel that people really wanted change," Mr. Roy, 36, recalled proudly.

It may seem unlikely that middle-class Indians would crave change. They mostly live in rapidly growing cities and can afford cars, appliances and other conveniences that remain beyond the reach of most Indians. Theirs is the fastest growing demographic group in the country, and their buying power is expected to triple in the next 15 years, making India one of the most important consumer markets in the world.

But buying power is not political power, at least not yet in India. The wealthier India has become, the more politically disillusioned many of the beneficiaries have grown -- an Indian paradox. The middle class has vast economic clout yet often remains politically marginalized in a huge democracy where the rural masses still dominate the outcome of elections and the tycoon class has the ear of politicians.

. . .

(p. 10) "This middle class is less about 'what the state can do for me' than 'the state is preventing me from doing what I want to do,' " said Devesh Kapur, director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Hazare movement rattled India's political establishment because it offered a glimpse of what could happen if the middle class was mobilized across the country. Professionals and college students provided the organizational spine, and money, that brought hundreds of thousands of people of all backgrounds onto the streets in what many described as a political awakening.

. . .

Mr. Roy and his friends, including Mr. Nag, had grown up in New Delhi in the same government housing development. They were all the sons of government bureaucrats who would later offer similar advice: Get a government job.

"He always insisted," Mr. Nag recalled of his father's prodding. "But we had an idea that a government job was too lousy."

They were teenagers in the early 1990s when Indian leaders embarked on the reforms that began dismantling the stifling licensing regulations that had choked the economy. Private enterprise, large and small, would steadily emerge as the engine of Indian growth and the delivery vehicle of growing aspirations. Mr. Nag would open a small IT service firm. Two other friends would start a textile trading company. Mr. Roy would earn graduate degrees and start a consulting firm.

. . .

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Roy pointed to a crude asphalt scar in the road where workers had installed an underground water connection. The scar extended along the road toward Mr. Roy's house, only to abruptly turn left in the direction of another building.

"You see this?" he asked, angrily. "This is a connection that comes here, but it is illegal."

For Mr. Roy, the scar in the street marks the corruption and collusion and the failure of the state to deliver on its end of India's social contract. His family is supposed to get water from a legal connection for $4 a month. Except that water is unusable. For years, his father had paid a fee to fill large jugs from a private water tanker -- until his father slipped while carrying one of them.

Mr. Roy then spent about $1,000 to build an underground water storage tank beside his home. Now, every week a tanker delivers a $30 shipment of water into the tank, while Mr. Roy also buys bottled water for drinking, bringing his monthly bill to about $160. Mr. Roy suspects that local officials, rather than correcting the situation, allow it to continue in exchange for kickbacks from the owners of the private water tankers. In the end, though, he pays.

These tales of petty graft proliferate across India, but especially in cities, analysts say, for the simple reason that cities now have more money.

McKinsey Global Institute, a consulting group, has estimated that India's middle class could grow to nearly 600 million people by 2030. Today, nearly three-quarters of India's gross domestic product comes from cities, where less than a third of India's population lives, an imbalance that correlates with the divide between middle-class economic and political power.

"For politicians, the city has primarily become a site of extraction, and the countryside is predominantly a site of legitimacy and power," Ashutosh Varshney, an India specialist at Brown University, wrote recently. "The countryside is where the vote is; the city is where the money is. Villages do have corruption, but the scale of corruption is vastly greater in cities."

For the full story, see:

JIM YARDLEY. "INDIA'S WAY; Protests Help Awaken a Goliath in India." The New York Times, First Section (Sun., October 30, 2011): 1 & 10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 29, 2011 and has the title "INDIA'S WAY; Protests Awaken a Goliath in India.")

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"Pedro de Verona Rodrigues Pires" Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A10) MONROVIA, Liberia -- Pedro de Verona Rodrigues Pires, the former president of Cape Verde, the desertlike archipelago about 300 miles off the coast of West Africa, has won one of the world's major prizes, the $5 million Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership.

The record of governing in Africa has been poor enough lately that the Mo Ibrahim Foundation decided not to award the prize for the past two years. In many African countries, leaders have refused to leave office after losing elections, tried to alter constitutions to ensure their continued tenure or gone back on pledges not to run for re-election.

. . .

Mr. Pires served two terms -- 10 years -- as president until stepping down last month. During that period, the foundation noted, Cape Verde became only the second African nation to move up from the United Nations' "least developed" category. The foundation says the prize is given only to a democratically elected president who has stayed "within the limits set by the country's constitution, has left office in the last three years and has demonstrated excellence in office."

For the full story, see:

ADAM NOSSITER. "Ex-President of Cape Verde Wins Good-Government Prize." The New York Times (Tues., October 11, 2011): A10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 10, 2011.)

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"Neil Blumenthal, one of the founders of Warby Parker, an online eyewear company, was invited to Washington in an initiative to encourage companies owned by members of the millennial generation." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B7) Mr. Blumenthal, 31, one of the founders of Warby Parker, an online eyewear company that sells designer frames for less than $100, was among 150 young chief executives invited to Washington by Our Time, a youth advocacy group, . . .

. . .

The following is a condensed version of a recent conversation in which Mr. Blumenthal spoke, among other things, about what politicians don't understand about business, . . .

. . .

Q. What was it like trying to get an S.B.A. loan?

A. Finding a bank that did S.B.A.-term loans was a challenge. We were surprised that they needed two years and that banks had absolutely no flexibility. Many of the loan officers said we had a reputable business that was cash-flow positive and we had the most sophisticated business plan they'd ever seen, but they can't provide loans to people who don't have two years of tax returns.

Q. Isn't that a reasonable request when you're talking about using taxpayer dollars to guarantee a loan to a private company?

A. I understand where the banks are coming from. It probably was necessary to implement hard and fast rules to stop the bleeding when the crisis hit, but they should be looking at the policies and thinking: Does this make sense now?

Q. Was the application process difficult?

A. We had to sign so many documents that my hand hurt after I was done. I had to pledge not to open a zoo, swimming pool or aquarium. It struck me as strange. Yes, it's the bank's duty to do due diligence, but this was just a silly restriction.

Q. But there was a happy ending, right?

A. Yes, after being turned down by 15 banks, it was a personal relationship that introduced us to a regional bank in New Jersey that gave us a $200,000 loan.

Q. What reasons did the 15 banks give for turning you down?

A. They didn't have the authority to bypass the rule that you have to have two years of tax returns.

Q. Was your company profitable at the time?

A. Yes, we were profitable and we had a ton of traction. We had higher customer satisfaction scores than Zappos or Apple. A rational bank should have wanted to support us, even though we were a more risky bet than a company that had been around longer.

Q. What did the bank that lent you money do differently? Did it demand collateral?

A. We came through a personal relationship at a very high level at a regional bank in New Jersey that didn't have the draconian guidelines because their management was empowered to make decisions. For the $200,000 S.B.A.-backed loan that we got, the bank wanted $100,000 in collateral in either cash or marketable products. The reason they wanted so much collateral was that if we default, the regional bank is not going to go through the process of getting the money from the S.B.A. because it's so onerous.

. . .

Q. Are you involved in the political process?

A. We have never met with politicians. I don't know the first thing about how to get heard. My suspicion is that it's to donate a lot of money.

. . .

Q. What do you make of the economic turmoil we've been experiencing?

A. It highlights that it might be too much to ask Washington to help with entrepreneurship when they can't even get the basics right, like maintaining a decent credit rating.

For more of the conversation, see:

HANNAH SELIGSON. "SMALL BUSINESS; Young Entrepreneur Sees Little Help In Washington." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., August 18, 2011): C12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 17, 2011.)

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The WSJ tells us the credentials of the authors of the following advice: "Mr. Muller is CEO of GenOn Energy. Mr. Zimpleman is president and CEO of the Principal Financial Group."

(p. A15) In our view, there is no hope of giving consumers renewed confidence in America unless governments at all levels mount a vigorous effort to get rid of rules that discourage entrepreneurs from launching and growing new businesses.

The Kauffman Foundation recently proposed a way to do that with a set of ideas aptly called the Startup Act. Those ideas, which would cost the government virtually nothing, include:

• Letting in immigrant entrepreneurs who hire American workers.

• Reducing the cost of capital through capital gains tax relief for early stage investments.

• Reducing barriers to IPOs by allowing shareholders to opt out of Sarbanes-Oxley.

• Charging higher fees for patent applicants who want quick decisions to remove the backlog of applications at the Patent Office.

• Giving licensing freedom to academic entrepreneurs at universities to accelerate the commercialization of their ideas.

• Having the government provide data to permit rankings of startup friendliness of states and localities.

• Regular sunsets for regulations and a consistent policy of putting new ones in place only if their benefits exceed their costs.

For the full commentary, see:

EDWARD R. MULLER and LARRY ZIMPLEMAN. "OPINION; An Entrepreneurial Fix for the U.S. Economy; Several reforms can make it faster and easier for new business startups.." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., AUGUST 29, 2011): A15.

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(p. F2) . . . solar power, which makes extensive use of robots in fabricating the cells, and has no moving parts to service once it is up and running, may be an odd choice for job creation.

"It's just not that labor-intensive," said Howard Axelrod, an engineer and economist. And as for the jobs it creates, there may be a price elsewhere, Dr. Axelrod said.

. . .

Build enough solar plants and some coal plants will shut down; that would amount to firing Peter to hire Paul.

. . .

And, economists point out, some of the work that renewable energy creates goes to people who already have jobs -- roofers who install the panels or truck drivers who move them around, or steel workers who make towers for new wind machines.

Some of the jobs could eventually go elsewhere. Two years ago, Evergreen Solar, which got $58 million in aid from Massachusetts for a factory in Devens, said it would shift production to China instead.

. . .

The debate is part of a larger discussion of what constitutes a "green" job. In October 2009, Congress gave the Bureau of Labor Statistics a special appropriation to count them.

. . .

"Driving a bus is driving a bus, right?" said Connie Mack, Republican of Florida. Hilda Solis, the secretary of labor, said they were "green buses." But aides later clarified that the bureau counted any bus driving job as green because it preserved natural resources.

None of this suggests that green is bad, just that it is not particularly job-heavy. In December 2010, Susan Combs, the comptroller of Texas, reported that school districts in her state were giving tax abatements to lure new jobs, but had to give $1.6 million for every wind energy job. Manufacturing jobs could be created for $166,000 each.

For the full story, see:

MATTHEW L. WALD. "Solar Power Industry Falls Short of Hopes in Job Creation." The New York Times (Weds., October 26, 2011): F2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date October 25, 2011.)

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(p. A18) Last week, Pinellas County, on Florida's west coast, voted to stop adding fluoride to its public water supply after starting the program seven years ago. The county joins about 200 jurisdictions from Georgia to Alaska that have chosen to end the practice in the last four years, motivated both by tight budgets and by skepticism about its benefits.

Eleven small cities or towns have opted out of fluoridating their water this year, including Fairbanks, Alaska, which acted after much deliberation and a comprehensive evaluation by a panel of scientists, doctors and dentists. The panel concluded that in Fairbanks, which has relatively high concentrations of naturally occurring fluoride, the extra dose no longer provided the help it once did and may, in fact, be harmful.

. . .

The movement to stop fluoridating water has gained traction, in large part, because the government has recently cautioned the public about excessive fluoride. A report released late last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked fluoride to an increase among children in dental fluorosis, which causes white or yellow spots on teeth. About 40 percent of children ages 12 to 15 had dental fluorosis, mostly very mild or mild cases, from 1999 to 2004. That percentage was 22.6 in a 1986-87 study.

Fluorosis is mostly a cosmetic problem that can sometimes be bleached away. But critics argue that spotted teeth are a warning that other bones in the body may be absorbing too much fluoride. Excessive fluoride can lead to increases in bone fractures in adults as well as pain and tenderness.

"Teeth are the window to the bones," said Paul Connett, a retired professor of environmental chemistry and the director of the Fluoride Action Network, which advocates an end to fluoridated water.

Experts say that one possible factor in this increase may be that fluoridated water is consumed in vegetables and fruit, and juice and other beverages as well as tap water. And the consumption of beverages continues to increase.

. . .

The conclusion among these communities is that with fluoride now so widely available in toothpaste and mouthwash, there is less need to add it to water, which already has naturally occurring fluoride. Putting it in tap water, they say, is an imprecise way of distributing fluoride; how much fluoride a person gets depends on body weight and water consumed.

Doctors, scientists and dentists, including Dr. Bailey of the Public Health Service, mostly agree that fluoride works best when applied topically, directly to the teeth, as happens with brushing.

"The fact that no one really knows what dosage a given person receives from fluoridated water makes the subject of benefits and harms very difficult to quantify," said Rainer Newberry, a professor of geochemistry at University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who sat on the committee that studied the issue prior to the June vote in Fairbanks. "And this presumably explains the number of studies with diverging conclusions."

For the full story, see:

LIZETTE ALVAREZ. "Looking to Save Money, More Places Decide to Stop Fluoridating the Water." The New York Times (Fri., October 14, 2011): A18.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 13, 2011.)

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(p. 72) In her authoritative book The Challenger Launch Decision, sociologist Diane Vaughan demolishes the myth that NASA managers ignored unassailable data and launched a mission absolutely known to be unsafe. In fact, the conversations on the evening before launch reflected the confusion and shifting views of the participants. At one point, a NASA manager blurted, "My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?" But at another point on the same evening, NASA managers expressed reservations about the launch; a lead NASA engineer pleaded with his people not to let him make a mistake and stated, "I will not agree to launch against the contractor's recommendation." The deliberations lasted for nearly three hours. If the data had been clear, would they have needed a three-hour discussion? Data analyst extraordinaire Edward Tufte shows in his book Visual Explanations that if the engineers had plotted the data points in a compelling graphic, they might have seen a clear trend line: every launch below 66 degrees showed evidence of (p. 73) O-ring damage. But no one laid out the data in a clear and convincing visual manner, and the trend toward increased danger in colder temperatures remained obscured throughout the late-night teleconference debate. Summing up, the O-Ring Task Force chair noted, "We just didn't have enough conclusive data to convince anyone."

Source:

Collins, Jim. How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2009.

(Note: italics in original.)

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"Mr. Caswell, here in the motel's lobby, is not accused of any wrongdoing but stands to lose his business under a law that calls for the forfeiture of properties linked to crimes." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) TEWKSBURY, Mass.--The $57-a-night Motel Caswell, magnet for hard-luck cases, police patrol cars and the occasional drug deal, is the unlikely prize in a high-stakes tug-of-war between conservative legal activists and the government.

The motel's owner, spurred by a recent Supreme Court decision, is trying to convince a federal court that the Constitution bars the U.S. Department of Justice from seizing his property, where guests have been found guilty of drug offenses. The owner, Russell Caswell, isn't accused of any wrongdoing. But he stands to lose his business nonetheless under a law that calls for the forfeiture of properties linked to

Mr. Caswell's federal court case challenges the U.S. government's ballooning asset-forfeiture system that in more than 15,000 cases last year confiscated cash, cars, boats and real estate valued at $2.5 billion. While many asset forfeitures are tied to convictions, the federal government can seize properties stained by crime even if owners face no charges.

"People shouldn't lose their property if they haven't been convicted of any crime," said Scott Bullock, a lawyer for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm in Arlington, Va., that has joined in the motel's defense. "Mr. Caswell hasn't even been accused."

(p. A14) Civil rights groups, libertarians and attorneys defending against seizures say the government is overstepping its bounds in a practice that has swelled in the past decade to encompass some 400 federal statutes, covering crimes from drug trafficking to racketeering to halibut poaching.

For the full story, see:

JOHN R. EMSHWILLER, GARY FIELDS and JENNIFER LEVITZ. "Motel Is Latest Stopover in Federal Forfeiture Battle." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., OCTOBER 18, 2011): A1 & A14.

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"Police officers, firefighters and coast guard officers protested austerity measures in Athens on Monday." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) ATHENS -- Stories of eye-popping waste and abuse of power among Greece's bureaucrats are legion, including officials who hire their wives, and managers who submit $38,000 bills for office curtains.

The work force in Greece's Parliament is so bloated, according to a local press investigation, that some employees do not even bother to come to work because there are not enough places for all of them to sit.

. . .

Some experts believe that Greece could reap significant savings by reducing its bureaucracy, which employs one out of five workers in the country and by some estimates could be trimmed by as much as a third without materially affecting services. But though salaries have been cut, the government has yet to lay off anyone.

The main reason is also one of the very reasons that Greece got into trouble in the first place: The government is in many ways an army of patronage appointments built up over decades. When election time rolls around, state workers become campaign workers, and their reach is enormous. There are so many of them that almost every family has one.

. . .

Whether the right workers will be laid off remains an open question. "A lot of people in the government are terrified," Mr. Hlepas said. "They don't think any of those people over in Parliament are going to go. They think the ones that do the work will get cut."

Thomas Tsamatsoulis, 41, who works for the Greek equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration, said he found himself on an early list headed for the reserve pool, though he had been sent to the United States for electronics training and now has a skill that is rare in his agency. At the same time, Mr. Tsamatsoulis said, the agency, which has just two airplanes, has more than 15 pilots.

"You want to believe the government will do this right," he said. "But it is very difficult. It's not how it has worked in the past. It's all about who you know."

Greece's bureaucracy has been growing steadily since democracy was reinstated in 1974, with each new administration adding its supporters to the payroll -- and wages rising steeply in the past decade, experts say.

"There was really a party going on," said Yannis Stournaras, an economist and the director of the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research in Athens. "The government kept adding bonuses and benefits and pensions. At election time there was a boom cycle as they handed out jobs."

"Now they need to cut," he added. "But they have already lost precious time."

Stories of excesses abound. Mr. Papandreou told Parliament that one of his ministers found a predecessor's $38,000 bill for curtains when the Socialists returned to power in 2009. Mr. Mossialos said he found that his own ministry, for media and communication, was spending $750,000 a year for office space for just 11 people.

But some experts question whether the culture of bloat and favoritism will ever be conquered.

For the full story, see:

SUZANNE DALEY. "Bureaucracy in Greece Defies Efforts to Cut It." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., October 18, 2011): A2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 17, 2011.)

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(p. 444) At the height of the agricultural crisis, the British government under the Liberals did an odd thing. It invented a tax designed to punish a class of people who were already suffering severely and had done nothing in particular to cause the current troubles. The class was large landowners. The tax was death duties. Life was about to change utterly for thousands of people, including our own Mr Marsham.

The designer of the new tax was Sir William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, the chancellor of the exchequer, a man who seems not to have been liked much by anyone at any point in his life, including his own family. Known familiarly, if not altogether affectionately, as 'Jumbo' because of his magnificent rotundity, Harcourt was an unlikely persecutor of the landed classes since he was one of them himself. The Harcourt family home was Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire, which we have visited in this book already. Nuneham, you may remember, was where an earlier Harcourt reconfigured the estate but failed to recollect where the old village well had been, fell into it and drowned. For as long as there had been (p. 445) Tories, the Harcourts had numbered themselves among them, so William's joining of the Liberals was seen within his family as the darkest treachery. Even Liberals were startled by his tax. Lord Rosebery, the prime minister (who was himself a big landowner), wondered if some relief should at least be granted in those cases where two inheritors died in quick succession. It would be harsh, Rosebery thought, to tax an estate a second time before the legatee had had a chance to rebuild the family finances. Harcourt, however, refused all appeals for concessions.

That Harcourt stood almost no chance of inheriting his own family property no doubt coloured his principles. In fact, to his presumed surprise, he did inherit it when his elder brother's son died suddenly, but heirlessly, in the spring of 1904. Harcourt didn't get to enjoy his good fortune long, however. He expired six months later himself, which meant that his heirs were among the first to be taxed twice over in exactly the way that Rosebery had feared and he had dismissed. Life doesn't often get much neater than that.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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"Street crime, such as a man's killing in Caracas last year, is high." Note the big-brother-sized image of Chávez surveying what his socialism has wrought. Source of quoted part of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

Those who favor socialism should observe Venezuela carefully and ponder whether they like what they see.

(p. A13) Gerardo Urdaneta moved to Houston from Venezuela for a job in 1998, the same year Hugo Chávez was first elected president. Mr. Urdaneta, an energy-shipping specialist, planned for a temporary stop and wouldn't even buy a house.

Thirteen years later, Mr. Chávez is still in power, Mr. Urdaneta is still here. He has been joined by thousands of other Venezuelans, and Houston shops now stock native delicacies like Pampero aged rum and guayanés cheese.

"There are Venezuelans everywhere," Mr. Urdaneta, 50 years old, said. "Before we were passing through. That's not the case anymore."

Waves of white-collar Venezuelans have fled the country's high crime rates, soaring inflation and expanding statist controls, for destinations ranging from Canada to Qatar. The top U.S. destinations are Miami, a traditional shopping mecca for Venezuelans, and Houston, which has long-standing energy ties to Venezuela, a major oil exporter.

There were some 215,000 Venezuelans in the U.S. in 2010, up from about 91,500 in 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The number of Venezuelans living in Spain has quintupled in the same period to more than 40,000, and the number of Venezuelan-born Spaniards has more than doubled to 90,000.

For the full story, see:

ÁNGEL GONZÁLEZ and EZEQUIEL MINAYA. "Venezuelan Diaspora Booms Under Chávez." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., October 17, 2011): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the following phrase, at the end of the quoted portion above, is in the online, but not the print, version of the article: "and the number of Venezuelan-born Spaniards has more than doubled to 90,000."

"Venezuelan exile Stefano Zullian owns a Houston chocolate shop." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

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"CHILDHOOD RELIC; Jungle gyms, like this one in Riverside Park in Manhattan, have disappeared from most American playgrounds in recent decades." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) "There is no clear evidence that playground safety measures have lowered the average risk on playgrounds," said David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University in London. He noted that the risk of some injuries, like long fractures of the arm, actually increased after the introduction of softer surfaces on playgrounds in Britain and Australia.

"This sounds counterintuitive, but it shouldn't, because it is a common phenomenon," Dr. Ball said. "If children and parents believe they are in an environment which is safer than it actually is, they will take more risks. An argument against softer surfacing is that children think it is safe, but because they don't understand its properties, they overrate its performance."

Reducing the height of playground equipment may help toddlers, but it can produce unintended consequences among bigger children. "Older children are discouraged from taking healthy exercise on playgrounds because they have been designed with the safety of the very young in mind," Dr. Ball said. "Therefore, they may play in more dangerous places, or not at all."

Fear of litigation led New York City officials to remove seesaws, merry-go-rounds and the ropes that young Tarzans used to swing from one platform to another. Letting children swing on tires became taboo because of fears that the heavy swings could bang into a child.

"What happens in America is defined by tort lawyers, and unfortunately that limits some of the adventure playgrounds," said Adrian Benepe, the current parks commissioner.

For the full story, see:

JOHN TIERNEY. "FINDINGS; Grasping Risk in Life's Classroom." The New York Times (Tues., July 19, 2011): D1 & D3.

(Note: the online version of the article is dated July 18, 2011, and has the title "FINDINGS; Can a Playground Be Too Safe?.")

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(p. 390) Cotton is such a commonplace material now that we forget that it was once extremely precious - more valuable than silk. But then in the seventeenth century, the East India Company began importing calicoes from India (from the city of Calicut, from which they take their name), and suddenly cotton became affordable. Calico was then essentially a collective term for chintzes, muslins, percales and other colourful fabrics, which caused unimaginable delight among western consumers because they were light and washable and the colours didn't run. Although some cotton was grown in Egypt, India dominated the cotton trade, as we are reminded by the endless numbers of words that came into English by way of that trade: khaki, dungarees, gingham, muslin, pyjamas, shawl, seersucker, and so on.

The sudden surge of Indian cotton pleased consumers, but not (p. 391) manufacturers. Unable to compete with this wonder fabric, European textile workers bayed for protection almost everywhere, and almost everywhere they received it. The importation of finished cotton fabrics was banned in much of Europe throughout the eighteenth century.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

(Note: italics in original.)

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(p. 390) Brummell's fall from grace was abrupt and irreversible. He and the Prince of Wales had a falling out and ceased speaking. At a social occasion, the prince pointedly ignored Brummell and instead spoke to his companion. As the prince withdrew, Brummell turned to the companion and made one of the most famously ill-advised remarks in social history. 'Who's your fat friend?' he asked. Such an insult was social suicide. Shortly afterwards Brummell's debts caught up with him and he fled to France. He spent the last two and a half decades of his life living in poverty, mostly in Calais, growing slowly demented but always looking, in his restrained and careful way, sensational.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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(p. 384) . . . , pretty abruptly, wigs went out of fashion. Wigmakers, in desperation, petitioned George III to make wig-wearing by males compulsory, but the king declined. By the early 1800s nobody wanted them and old wigs were commonly used as dust mops. Today they survive only in certain courtrooms in Britain and the Commonwealth. Judicial wigs these days are made of horsehair and cost about £600,

I'm told. To avoid a look of newness - which many lawyers fear might suggest inexperience - new wigs are customarily soaked in tea to give them a suitable air of age.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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Former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice, British Foreign Secretary William Hague and London statue of Ronald Reagan. Source of photo: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/7/4/1309780763409/London-statue-of-Reagan-u-001.jpg

The McCarthy mentioned in the passage quoted below is a California representative who also serves as majority whip.

(p. A9) The statue of a smiling Reagan, dressed in a crisp suit, was paid for by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation as part of a worldwide effort to promote his legacy, according to the organization's executive director.

. . .

Though Mrs. Thatcher is in poor health and did not attend, she provided a statement that was read by Mr. Hague. "Through his strength and conviction," she wrote, "he brought millions of people to freedom as the Iron Curtain finally came down."

In a speech, Mr. McCarthy described Mr. Reagan's fight not only against the forces of Communism, but against the "tyranny" of debt and big government. He and Mrs. Thatcher, he said, "did not move to the center to gather votes, they moved the center to them."

For the full story, see:

RAVI SOMAIYA. "Finding a New Perch, Americana Takes a Stand in London." The New York Times (Tues., July 5, 2011): A9.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated July 4, 2011 and has the title "Statue of Reagan Is Unveiled in London.")

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(p. 381) Sumptuary laws were enacted partly to keep people within their class, but partly also for the good of domestic industries, since they were often designed to depress the importation of foreign materials. For the same reason for a time there was a Statute of Caps, aimed at helping national capmakers through a depression, which required people to wear caps instead of hats. For obscure reasons, Puritans resented the law and were often fined for flouting it. But on the whole sumptuary laws weren't much enforced. Various clothing restrictions were enshrined in (p. 382) statutes in 1337, 1363, 1463, 1483, 1510, 1533 and 1554, but records show they were never much enforced. They were repealed altogether in 1604.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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From 2007 to 2010 Nina V. Fedoroff was the science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in the Obama administration. Fedoroff is currently a Professor of Biology at Penn State. The passages quoted below are from her courageous commentary in The New York Times op-ed section:

(p. A21) . . . even as the Obama administration says it wants to stimulate innovation by eliminating unnecessary regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency wants to require even more data on genetically modified crops, which have been improved using technology with great promise and a track record of safety. The process for approving these crops has become so costly and burdensome that it is choking off innovation.

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology. The use of chemicals for fertilization and for pest and disease control, the induction of beneficial mutations in plants with chemicals or radiation to improve yields, and the mechanization of agriculture have all increased the amount of food that can be grown on each acre of land by as much as 10 times in the last 100 years.

These extraordinary increases must be doubled by 2050 if we are to continue to feed an expanding population. . . .

. . .

Myths about the dire effects of genetically modified foods on health and the environment abound, but they have not held up to scientific scrutiny. And, although many concerns have been expressed about the potential for unexpected consequences, the unexpected effects that have been observed so far have been benign. Contamination by carcinogenic fungal toxins, for example, is as much as 90 percent lower in insect-resistant genetically modified corn than in nonmodified corn. This is because the fungi that make the toxins follow insects boring into the plants. No insect holes, no fungi, no toxins.

. . .

Only big companies can muster the money necessary to navigate the regulatory thicket woven by the government's three oversight agencies: the E.P.A., the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.

. . .

. . . the evidence is in. These crop modification methods are not dangerous. The European Union has spent more than $425 million studying the safety of genetically modified crops over the past 25 years. Its recent, lengthy report on the matter can be summarized in one sentence: Crop modification by molecular methods is no more dangerous than crop modification by other methods. Serious scientific bodies that have analyzed the issue, including the National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society, have come to the same conclusion.

For the full commentary, see:

NINA V. FEDOROFF. "Engineering Food for All." The New York Times (Fri., August 19, 2011): A21.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was dated August 18, 2011.)

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"Protesters outside the Los Angeles Courthouse on Thursday denounced the police's moves against Rawesome, which offers raw milk products." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

LOS ANGELES -- Raw food enthusiasts fit right in here, in the earthy, health-conscious beach communities of Venice and Santa Monica, along with the farmers' markets, health food stores and vegan restaurants.

But this week, the police cleared the shelves of Rawesome, an establishment in Venice Beach, loading $70,000 of raw, organic produce and dairy products on the back of a flatbed truck.

And then, on Thursday, James Stewart, the proprietor, was arraigned on charges of illegally making, improperly labeling and illegally selling raw milk products, as well as other charges related to Rawesome's operations. Two farmers who work with Rawesome were also named in the district attorney's complaint.

. . .

The raid on Rawesome has riled people here who say that unpasteurized milk is safer and healthier. About 150 raw food advocates gathered at the Los Angeles County Courthouse on Thursday to oppose the crackdown.

"It's our right to choose what we want to put in our bodies," Ms. Buttery said. "When members filled out an application, they were saying they wanted natural bacteria in their systems. We don't want labeling. We don't want animals full of antibiotics."

For the full story, see:

IAN LOVETT. "Raw Food Co-op Is Raided in California." The New York Times (Fri., August 5, 2011): A11.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story is dated August 4, 2011.)

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) . . . , the author reminds us of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who had died in the conventional bombings of places like Tokyo and Kyoto while Roosevelt was president, but with relatively little opprobrium attaching to FDR. Father Miscamble cites as well the horrific massacre of innocents for which the Japanese were responsible, a savagery still being unleashed in the summer of 1945, and the awful cost of battle in the Pacific, including 6,000 American dead and 20,000 wounded at Iwo Jima and 70,000 casualties suffered while capturing Okinawa. With these precedents, Herbert Hoover warned Truman that an invasion of the Japanese home islands could result in the loss of between half a million and a million American lives. Marshall, Leahy and Gen. Douglas MacArthur each had his own projected figures, none of them wildly different from Hoover's.

Under these circumstances, it was inconceivable that Truman would not have ordered the use of a potentially war-winning weapon the moment it could be deployed. It is impossible to imagine the depth of the public's fury if after the war Americans had discovered that their president, out of concern for his own conscience, had not used the weapons but instead condemned hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to certain death on the beaches and in the cities of mainland Japan.

For the full review, see:

ANNE JOLIS. "BOOKSHELF; In Defense Of 'Little Boy'; Herbert Hoover warned President Truman that invading Japan would cost at least half a million American lives." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 13, 2011): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book reviewed:

Miscamble, Wilson D. The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan, Cambridge Essential Histories. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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John Coustas. Source of image: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) Athens

If you've ever wondered why so many Greeks succeed in shipping, John Coustas has a plausible theory: "Greek shipping has nothing to do with the Greek state."

His firm, Danaos Corporation, is a case in point. Mr. Coustas took over the company, which owns container ships, from his father in 1987 and has since transformed it from a three-vessel outfit into the third-largest company of its kind in the world, with a fleet of 56 ships. Danaos is incorporated in the Marshall Islands, a popular and stable jurisdiction for the global industry, and handles many of its operations through its German, Ukrainian, Russian and Tanzanian offices.

Nevertheless, Mr. Coustas is deeply concerned with the fate of his country. The government is now on the brink of default after passing its latest round of spending cuts and tax hikes. Yet the biggest risk to Greece, he says, is brain drain, that "all the good people, who really have something to offer, are either leaving or seriously considering it."

. . .

On top of misguided government spending, Mr. Coustas says entrepreneurial activity was denigrated for many years and profit was regarded as "wrong." "Anyone who wanted to make an investment here was considered a kind of bloodsucker."

For the full commentary, see:

ANNE JOLIS. "Greece: Where Profit Is Taboo; A shipping magnate on the fate of his country." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 13, 2011): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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(p. A15) Ronald Reagan, who grew up during the Coolidge presidency, admired "Silent Cal," even going so far as to read a biography of the 30th president as he recovered from a surgery in 1985 and to praise him in letters to his constituents. To Reagan, Coolidge wasn't silent, but was silenced by New Deal supporters, whose intellectual heirs control much of Washington today.

. . .

Unlike President Obama, President Coolidge didn't want to "spread the wealth around," but to grow it. He didn't call for "shared sacrifice"--Americans had sacrificed enough during the great war--but for good character.

There "is no surer road to destruction than prosperity without character," he said in a speech at the University of Pennsylvania in 1921. And from the White House lawn in 1924 he said, "I want the people of America to be able to work less for the Government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. That is the chief meaning of freedom."

. . .

As Coolidge saw things in 1924, "A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude." Coolidge helped Americans prosper by letting them be free.

For the full commentary, see:

CHARLES C. JOHNSON. "How Silent Cal Beat a Recession; The late president inherited a bad economy, and he cut taxes and slashed spending to spur growth." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., August 4, 2011): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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McKinsey is probably the best known business consulting and forecasting firm in the United States. Many well-known management gurus, and corporate executives, have spent time working for McKinsey (as did Chelsea Clinton). One of their senior partners (Foster) co-authored a useful book called Creative Destruction.

(p. A2) A report by McKinsey & Co. has found that 30% of employers are likely to stop offering workers health insurance after the bulk of the Obama administration's health overhaul takes effect in 2014.

. . .

Previous research has suggested the number of employers who opt to drop coverage altogether in 2014 would be minimal.

But the McKinsey study predicts a more dramatic shift from employer-sponsored health plans once the new marketplace takes effect. Starting in 2014, all but the smallest employers will be required to provide insurance or pay a fine, while most Americans will have to carry coverage or pay a different fine. Lower earners will get subsidies to help them pay for plans.

In surveying 1,300 employers earlier this year, McKinsey found that 30% said they would "definitely or probably" stop offering employer coverage in the years after 2014. That figure increased to more than 50% among employers with a high awareness of the overhaul law.

For the full story, see:

JANET ADAMY. "Study Sees Cuts to Health Plans." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., JUNE 8, 2011): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

The Foster book is:

Foster, Richard N., and Sarah Kaplan. Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market---and How to Successfully Transform Them. New York: Currency Books, 2001.

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Government "industrial policy" is likely to fail for many reasons. One is that the government decision makers are unlikely to know which future technologies will turn out to be the best ones. Another reason is that even if they know, government decision makers often decide based on what is politically expedient or what is beneficial to their friends.

Solyndra is a case in point, as Jon Stewart hilariously reveals.

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"An empty lot in Wuhan, China, where developers intend to build a tower taller than the Empire State Building in New York." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) . . . the Wuhan Metro is only one piece of a $120 billion municipal master plan that includes two new airport terminals, a new financial district, a cultural district and a riverfront promenade with an office tower half again as high as the Empire State Building.

. . .

The plans for Wuhan, a provincial capital about 425 miles west of Shanghai, might seem extravagant. But they are not unusual. Dozens of other Chinese cities are racing to complete infrastructure projects just as expensive and ambitious, or more (p. A8) so, as they play their roles in this nation's celebrated economic miracle.

In the last few years, cities' efforts have helped government infrastructure and real estate spending surpass foreign trade as the biggest contributor to China's growth. Subways and skyscrapers, in other words, are replacing exports of furniture and iPhones as the symbols of this nation's prowess.

But there are growing signs that China's long-running economic boom could be undermined by these building binges, which are financed through heavy borrowing by local governments and clever accounting that masks the true size of the debt.

The danger, experts say, is that China's municipal governments could already be sitting on huge mountains of hidden debt -- a lurking liability that threatens to stunt the nation's economic growth for years or even decades to come. Just last week China's national auditor, who reports to the cabinet, warned of the perils of local government borrowing. And on Tuesday the Beijing office of Moody's Investors Service issued a report saying the national auditor might have understated Chinese banks' actual risks from loans to local governments.

Because Chinese growth has been one of the few steady engines in the global economy in recent years, any significant slowdown in this country would have international repercussions.

For the full story, see:

DAVID BARBOZA. "Building Boom in China Stirs Fears of Debt Overload." The New York Times (Thurs., July 7, 2011): C8.

(Note: online version of the article is dated July 6, 2011 and has the title "Building Boom in China Stirs Fears of Debt Overload.")

(Note: ellipses added.)

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(p. 297) Many of Monticello's quirks spring from the limitations of Jefferson's workmen. He had to stick to a simple Doric style for the exterior columns because he could find no one with the skills to handle anything more complex. But the greatest problem of all, in terms of both expense and frustration, was a lack of home-grown materials. It is worth taking a minute to consider what the American colonists were up against in trying to build a civilization in a land without infrastructure.

(p. 298) Britain's philosophy of empire was that America should provide it with raw materials at a fair price and take finished products in return. The system was enshrined in a series of laws known as the Navigation Acts, which stipulated that any product bound for the New World had either to originate in Britain or pass through it on the way there, even if it had been created in, say, the West Indies, and ended up making a pointless double crossing of the Atlantic. The arrangement was insanely inefficient, but gratifyingly lucrative to British merchants and manufacturers, who essentially had a fast-growing continent at their commercial mercy. By the eve of the revolution America effectively was Britain's export market. It took 80 per cent of British linen exports, 76 per cent of exported nails, 60 per cent of wrought iron and nearly half of all the glass sold abroad. In bulk terms, America annually imported 30,000 pounds of silk, 11,000 pounds of salt and over 130,000 beaver hats, among much else. Many of these things - not least the beaver hats - were made from materials that originated in America in the first place and could easily have been manufactured in American factories - a point that did not escape the Americans.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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"ALL ABOARD: The Wasp magazine in 1881 lampooned railroad moguls as having regulators in the palms of their hands." Source of caricature: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C8) Mr. Klein has written thoroughly researched and scrupulously objective biographies of the previously much maligned Jay Gould and E.H. Harriman, remaking their public images by presenting them in full. Now he has published the third and final volume of his magisterial history of the Union Pacific railroad, taking the company from 1969 to the present day.

Union Pacific--the only one of the transcontinentals to remain in business under its original name--is now a flourishing business. Thanks to a series of mergers, it is one of the largest railroads in the world, with more than 37,000 miles of track across most of the American West. Thanks to its investment in new technology, it is also among the most efficient.

In 1969, though, the future of American railroading was in doubt as the industry struggled against competition from airplanes, automobiles and trucks--all of which were in effect heavily subsidized through the government's support for airports and the Interstate Highway System.

Another major factor in the decline of the railroads had been the stultifying hand of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The ICC had come into existence in the late 19th century to limit the often high-handed ways of the railroads as they wrestled with the difficult economics of an industry that has very high fixed costs. ( . . . .) But the ICC soon evolved into a cartel mechanism that discouraged innovation and wrapped the railroad industry in a cocoon of stultifying rules.

Mr. Klein notes that in 1975 he wrote a gloomy article about the sad state of an industry with a colorful past: "Unlike many other historical romances," he wrote back then, "the ending did not promise to be a happy one."

Fortunately, a deregulation movement that began under the Carter administration--yes, the Carter administration--limited the power of the ICC and then abolished it altogether. As Mr. Klein shows in the well-written "Union Pacific," the reduction of government interference left capitalism to work its magic and produce--with the help of dedicated and skillful management--the modern, efficient and profitable railroad that is the Union Pacific.

For the full review, see:

JOHN STEELE GORDON. "Tracks Across America." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., JUNE 11, 2011): C8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book reviewed in the part of the review quoted above:

Klein, Maury. Union Pacific: The Reconfiguration: America's Greatest Railroad from 1969 to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2011.

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(p. 2B) CORALVILLE -- Police closed down a lemonade stand in Coralville, telling its 4-year-old operator and her dad that she didn't have a permit.

. . .

Abigail's dad, Dustin Krutsinger, said the ordinance and its enforcers are going too far if they force a 4-year-old to abandon her lemonade stand.

For the full story, see:

AP. "Coralville shuts down girl's lemonade stand." Omaha World-Herald [Iowa Edition] (Weds., August 3, 2011): 2B.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 2, 2011 and has the title "Girl's lemonade stand shut down.")

The next day, the Iowa Edition of the Omaha World-Herald ran an update:

(p. 2B) CORALVILLE -- Four-year-old Abigail Krutsinger wasn't the only lemonade stand operator who was closed down when RAGBRAI bicyclists poured into Coralville last week.

At least three stands run by children were closed down because they hadn't obtained permits and health inspections.

For the full story, see:

AP. "Coralville defends closing kids' stands." Omaha World-Herald [Iowa Edition] (Thurs., August 4, 2011): 2B.

(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 3, 2011, and has the title "More lemonade stands shuttered.")

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"Wayne Gravot, right, and Jeff Sparwasser at the new plant in North Charleston, S.C." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Boeing's gigantic new $750 million airplane factory here is the pride of South Carolina, the biggest single investment ever made in a state that is far more associated with old-line textile mills than state-of-the-art manufacturing. In just a few weeks, 1,000 workers will begin assembling the first of what they hope will be hundreds of 787 Dreamliners.

That is, unless the federal government takes it all away.

In a case that has enraged South Carolinians and become a cause célèbre among Republican lawmakers and presidential hopefuls, the National Labor Relations Board has accused Boeing of illegally setting up shop in South Carolina because of past strikes by the unionized workers at its main manufacturing base in the Seattle area. The board is asking a judge to order Boeing to move the Dreamliner production -- and the associated jobs -- to Washington State.

For the full story, see:

STEVEN GREENHOUSE. "Boeing Labor Dispute Is Making New Factory a Political Football." The New York Times (Fri., July 1, 2011): A10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story is dated June 30, 2011.)

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"Volunteers from Food Not Bombs were arrested at Lake Eola Park in Orlando, Fla., last month after feeding homeless people without a permit." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A10) MIAMI -- The hacker group Anonymous has declared a cyberwar against the City of Orlando, disabling Web sites for the city's leading redevelopment organization, the local Fraternal Order of Police and the mayor's re-election campaign.

. . .

The group described its attacks as punishment for the city's recent practice of arresting members of Orlando Food Not Bombs, an antipoverty group that provides vegan and vegetarian meals twice a week to homeless people in one of the city's largest parks.

"Anonymous believes that people have the right to organize, that people have the right to give to the less fortunate and that people have the right to commit acts of kindness and compassion," the group's members said in a news release and video posted on YouTube on Thursday. "However, it appears the police and your lawmakers of Orlando do not."

A 2006 city ordinance requires organizations to obtain permits to feed groups of 25 people or more in downtown parks. The law was passed after numerous complaints by residents and businesses owners about the twice-weekly feedings in Lake Eola Park, city officials said. The law limits any group to no more than two permits per year per park.

Since June 1, the city police have arrested 25 Orlando Food Not Bombs volunteers without permits as they provided meals to large groups of homeless people in the park. One of those arrested last week on trespassing charges was Keith McHenry, a co-founder of the first Food Not Bombs chapter in 1980 in Cambridge, Mass. He remained in the Orange County Jail on Thursday awaiting a bond hearing.

For the full story, see:

DON VAN NATTA Jr. "Citing Homeless Law, Hackers Turn Sights on Orlando." The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Fri., July 1, 2011): A10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story is dated June 30, 2011.)

"Keith McHenry, a co-founder of the first Food Not Bombs group, serving food at the park in May. He was in jail Thursday." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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"A customer in a Beijing cafe not yet affected by new regulations surfed the Web on Monday." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A4) BEIJING -- New regulations that require bars, restaurants, hotels and bookstores to install costly Web monitoring software are prompting many businesses to cut Internet access and sending a chill through the capital's game-playing, Web-grazing literati who have come to expect free Wi-Fi with their lattes and green tea.

The software, which costs businesses about $3,100, provides public security officials the identities of those logging on to the wireless service of a restaurant, cafe or private school and monitors their Web activity. Those who ignore the regulation and provide unfettered access face a $2,300 fine and the possible revocation of their business license.

. . .

The new measures, it would appear, are designed to eliminate a loophole in "Internet management" as it is called, one that has allowed laptop- and iPad-owning college students and expatriates, as well as the hip and the underemployed, to while away their days at cafes and lounges surfing the Web in relative anonymity. It is this demographic that has been at the forefront of the microblogging juggernaut, one that has revolutionized how Chinese exchange information in ways that occasionally frighten officials.

. . .

One bookstore owner said she had already disconnected the shop's free Wi-Fi, and not for monetary reasons. "I refuse to be part of an Orwellian surveillance system that forces my customers to disclose their identity to a government that wants to monitor how they use the Internet," said the woman, who feared that disclosing her name or that of her shop would bring unwanted attention from the authorities.

For the full story, see:

ANDREW JACOBS. "China Steps Up Web Monitoring, Driving Many Wi-Fi Users Away." The New York Times (Tues., July 26, 2011): A4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story is dated July 25, 2011.)

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"Illegal rice wine for sale in Chinatown. The wine is popular among immigrants from Fujian Province." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A22) The restaurant looks like so many others in the roiling heart of Chinatown, in Lower Manhattan: a garish sign in Chinese and English, slapdash photos of featured dishes taped to the windows, and extended Chinese families crowding around tables, digging into communal plates of steamed fish, fried tofu and sautéed watercress.

But ask a waitress the right question and she will disappear into the back, returning with shot glasses and something not on the menu: a suspiciously unmarked plastic container containing a reddish liquid.

It is homemade rice wine -- "Chinatown's best," the restaurant owner asserts. It is also illegal.

In the city's Chinese enclaves, there is a booming black market for homemade rice wine, representing one of the more curious outbreaks of bootlegging in the city since Prohibition. The growth reflects a stark change in the longstanding pattern of immigration from China.

In recent years, as immigration from the coastal province of Fujian has surged, the Fujianese population has come to dominate the Chinatowns of Lower Manhattan and Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and has increased rapidly in other Chinese enclaves like the one in Flushing, Queens.

These newcomers have brought with them a robust tradition of making -- and hawking -- homemade rice wine. In these Fujianese neighborhoods, right under the noses of the authorities, restaurateurs brew rice wine in their kitchens and sell it proudly to customers. Vendors openly sell it on street corners, and quart-size containers of it are stacked in plain view in grocery store refrigerators, alongside other delicacies like jellyfish and duck eggs.

The sale of homemade rice wine -- which is typically between 10 and 18 percent alcohol, about the same as wine from grapes -- violates a host of local, state and federal laws that govern the commercial production and sale of alcohol, but the authorities have apparently not cracked down on it.

For the full story, see:

KIRK SEMPLE and JEFFREY E. SINGER. "Illegal Sale of Rice Wine Thrives in Chinese Enclaves." The New York Times (Weds., July 20, 2011): A22-A23.

(Note: the online version of the story is dated July 19, 2011.)

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(p. A13) Workers do well only when the economy grows at a healthy and consistent pace. The biggest threat to long-term economic growth is government growth of the magnitude that characterized the past two years and that is forecast for our future.

Our current problems are not a result of acts of nature. They stem from policy choices that dramatically increased the size of the government. In the past two years, the federal budget has grown by a whopping 16%.

. . .

. . . , the price of the stimulus is what appears to be a permanent increase in the size of government that will continue to slow economic growth. Most economists believe that high debt and high taxes each contributes to slow economic growth, which hurts workers both in the short and long run.

For the full commentary, see:

EDWARD P. LAZEAR. "OPINION; How Big Government Hurts the Average Joe; Job growth is very closely linked to GDP growth. If the economy is not growing, then jobs aren't being added." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., August 5, 2011): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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"Online critics have scornfully contrasted the difference between government rhetoric about the promise of high-speed rail and the reality of the troubled network. Local residents mourned victims of the train crash in Wenzhou on July 26." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) China's high-speed rail system is an apt metaphor for the country's hurtling economy over the past decade: a colossal investment project, born of the state, steeped in corruption, built for maximum velocity, and imposed paternalistically on a public that is at once amazed and skeptical. The rail system has married foreign technology with national ambition in a network billed as the biggest and most advanced in the world, in a country whose per capita income ranks below that of Jamaica.

For the full commentary, see:

JASON DEAN And JEREMY PAGE. "Trouble on the China Express; The wreck of a high-speed train has enraged the Chinese public and focused attention on the corruption and corner-cutting behind the country's breakneck economic growth." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., JULY 30, 2011): C1-C2.

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The hilarious (but also seriously sad) clip above is embedded from the Mon., August 15, 2011 "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."

(Note: I thank Deirdre McCloskey for letting me know about the clip.)

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(p. A19) Boulder, Colo.

You have to admit, the cat had moxie.

The 140-pound cougar that was spotted last month among the estates of Greenwich -- and was later struck and killed on the Wilbur Cross Parkway -- has been the talk of southern Connecticut. New England, along with most of the Eastern United States, hasn't been cougar country since the 19th century, when the animals were exterminated by a killing campaign that started in colonial times. So where had this cougar come from?

Now we know the answer, and it couldn't be more astonishing. Wildlife officials, who at first assumed the cat was a captive animal that had escaped its owners, examined its DNA and concluded that it was a wild cougar from the Black Hills of South Dakota. It had wandered at least 1,500 miles before meeting its end at the front of an S.U.V. in Connecticut. That is one impressive walkabout.

You have to appreciate this cat's sense of irony, too. The cougar showed up in the East just three months after the Fish and Wildlife Service declared the eastern cougar extinct, a move that would exempt the officially nonexistent subspecies of the big cat from federal protection. Perhaps this red-state cougar traveled east to send a message to Washington: the federal government can make pronouncements about where cougars are not supposed to be found, but a cat's going to go where a cat wants to go.

For the full commentary, see:

DAVID BARON "The Cougar Behind Your Trash Can." The New York Times (Fri., July 29, 2011): A19.

(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated July 28, 2011.)

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(p. A11) BEIJING-A high-speed train from Beijing is scheduled to glide into Shanghai's Hongqiao railway station on Thursday after its inaugural run, an event meant to showcase China's technological prowess but one that lately has become part of a national debate about the pitfalls of megainvestment projects.

. . .

Detractors focus on corruption and safety problems that have lately tarnished the project's image. Pricey tickets, they say, underscore China's already huge rich-poor gap--and doom the trains to run half-empty, straining the national budget for years to come.

. . .

"Physically, they are good assets," says Ding Yuan, an accounting professor at China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. "Financially, they are all black holes."

More broadly, the high-speed rail problems underscore the shortcomings of a growth strategy that depends ever more heavily on investment in projects whose economic payoffs are uncertain.

. . .

Railways Minister Liu Zhijun proselytized for high-speed rail, telling leaders from Hubei province in January that they needed to "seize the rare opportunity to accelerate the development of the railway," according to a Railways Ministry report.

. . .

Government spending on rail projects ballooned from 155 billion yuan in 2006 ($24 billion) to a budgeted 745 billion yuan ($115 billion) in 2011, according to state-run Xinhua news agency. The ministry's debt ballooned to about 5% of GDP in the first quarter of 2011 from about 2% in 2007.

The project's flaws became painfully clear in February, when Mr. Liu was fired amid allegations that he embezzled around $30 million. Although government investigators didn't cite criticisms of the railway project, Mr. Liu's successor, Sheng Guangzu, has scaled back plans to focus on projects already under construction, rather than expansion. Railway consultants say work has been suspended on new lines, including Hubei projects the fired minister was pushing.

For the full story, see:

BRIAN SPEGELE and BOB DAVIS. "High-Speed Train Links Beijing, Shanghai; Cornerstone of China's Rail Expansion Illustrates Megaprojects' Speed Bumps." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., JUNE 29, 2011): A11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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"A rule against selling food with added vitamins and minerals, like canned pudding, prompted the removal of several popular products from Abigail's, a shop in Copenhagen." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A6) COPENHAGEN -- For the last seven years, Marianne Orum has owned a narrow store in a charming street in the heart of this Danish capital.

A sign advertises "British and South African Food and Drink."

The shelves are lined with products familiar to most Americans, like Betty Crocker Pancake Mix, but also more exotic items, like Heinz's Taste of Home Delightful Spotted Dick Pudding in cans, and bottles of Harviestoun Old Engine Oil porter.

But in January Ms. Orum got a phone call from government food inspectors. Tipped off by a competitor, they told her she was selling products that were fortified with vitamins or minerals, and such products require government approval, which she did not have, so she would have to take them off the shelves.

The culprits were Ovaltine; a shredded wheat cereal called Shreddies; a malt drink called Horlicks; and Marmite, the curiously popular yeast byproduct that functions in England as a sandwich spread, snack or base for a soup (just add boiling water), and is sometimes known as tar-in-the-jar.

"That's four products in one go," said Ms. Orum, clearly angered. "That's a lot for a small company."

Application for approval, she said, costs almost $1,700 per product, and time for approval can run up to six months or more; the fee is not refunded if the product is rejected.

"It's a strange thing, this attitude in Denmark," she said, in a tone of exasperation. "The government wants to decide what we eat and not."

For the full story, see:

JOHN TAGLIABUE. "COPENHAGEN JOURNAL; Extra Vitamins? A Great Idea, Except in Denmark." The New York Times (Fri., June 17, 2011): A6.

(Note: the online version of the story was dated June 16, 2011.)

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Source of book image: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C6) Although the financial crisis of 2008 has left a long trail of casualties, one group has benefited from the cataclysm: financial journalists. Several have already published books shedding light on the unprecedented events that caused investment banks to fail, global stock markets to plummet and borrowers to lose their homes. "Reckless Endangerment," by Gretchen Morgenson, assistant business and financial editor and a columnist at The New York Times, and the financial analyst Joshua Rosner, is a worthy addition to the genre.

. . .

The book begins in 1994 with President Bill Clinton's kicking off a public-private partnership to extend homeownership to more Americans. . . .

. . .

. . . the institution to which the authors devote the most ink is Fannie Mae, the government-supported enterprise created in 1938 to make home loans more accessible. And the person they hold most accountable is someone whose role in the "mortgage maelstrom" has until now "escaped scrutiny": James A. Johnson, Fannie Mae's chief executive from 1991 to 1998. Mr. Johnson was the "anonymous architect of the public-private homeownership drive that almost destroyed the economy in 2008," the authors assert. "He was especially adept at manipulating lawmakers, eviscerating regulators and leaving taxpayers with the bill."

The description of Mr. Johnson's role is damning -- and although the account lacks his perspective, it is thoroughly supported through scores of interviews with academics, government officials and industry executives, some of whom are granted anonymity. While Mr. Johnson didn't respond to interview requests over five months, according to the authors, they overcome this obstacle with impressive use of public records and secondary sources, carefully attributed in the text or described in a two-page "Notes on Sources."

. . .

A particular strength of this book is the number of doubters the authors unearthed: the unsung government analysts, public lawyers and private researchers who dared to question policy decisions and stand up to the formidable "housers," as the true believers in government subsidies for home ownership are called.

The reader has a sickening sense of missed opportunity as these prophets are ignored or, worse, vilified, by those in a position to halt the mania. When a Congressional Budget Office researcher in 1995 reveals the multibillion-dollar extent of the government's subsidy to Fannie Mae and its brother institution, Freddie Mac (and that one-third of these benefits never reached borrowers), he suggests that "Congress may want to revisit the special relationship." Unable to assail the merits of his analysis, outraged Fannie Mae executives resorted to ad hominem attacks, calling budget office officials "digit-heads" and "economic pencil brains."

For the full review, see:

PAM LUECKE. "BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Nation Goes on Its Merry Way to Ruin." The New York Times (Tues., June 28, 2011): C6.

(Note: the online version of the review was dated June 27, 2011.)

(Note: ellipses added.)

Book being reviewed:

Morgenson, Gretchen, and Joshua Rosner. Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. New York: Times Books, 2011.

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(p. 5A) PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Scientists have presented the strongest evidence yet that U.N. peacekeepers imported the chol­era strain that has killed more than 5,500 people in Haiti.

A report published in the July issue of the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal says research findings "strongly suggest" that the U.N. contingent from Nepal contaminated a Haitian river because of poor sanitation at a base. Author Renaud Piarroux had previously blamed peace­keepers. This study is more com­plete and its methodology was reviewed by other scientists.

Source:

AP. "U.N. may have brought cholera strain to Haiti." Omaha World-Herald (Thursday, June 30, 2011): 5A.

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"Volunteers have built a wireless Internet around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, from off-the-shelf electronics and ordinary materials." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The main point of the passages quoted below is to illustrate how, with the right technology, we can dance around tyrants in order to enable human freedom.

(But as a minor aside, note in the large, top-of-front-page photo above, that Apple once again is visibly the instrument of human betterment---somewhere, before turning to his next challenge, one imagines a fleeting smile on the face of entrepreneur Steve Jobs.)

(p. 1) The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy "shadow" Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype "Internet in a suitcase."

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

For the full story, see:

JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF. "U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors." The New York Times, First Section (Sun., June 12, 2011): 1 & 8.

Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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"Kim Ima and Kenny Lao parked their food trucks on Front Street in Dumbo." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D4) FOOD trucks, those rolling symbols of New York City's infatuation with haute casual food, are suddenly being chased from Midtown Manhattan. In the last 10 days, the Treats Truck, which has sold cookies and brownies for four years during lunchtime at West 45th Street near Avenue of the Americas, has been told by police officers that it is no longer welcome there, nor at its late-afternoon 38th Street and Fifth Avenue location. The Rickshaw Dumpling truck, a presence for three years at West 45th Street near the Treats Truck, has been shooed away as well.

The police "have told us they no longer want food trucks in Midtown," said Kim Ima, the owner of the Treats Truck, a pioneer of the city's new-wave food-truck movement, who began cultivating customers on West 45th Street in 2007.

. . .

Mr. Lao and other food-truck operators said they suspect that the police are responding to complaints by brick-and-mortar businesses that resent competition. Such was the case last year, when store merchants on the Upper East Side complained about Patty's Taco Truck, which sold tortas, tacos de lengua and cemitas on Lexington Avenue. The truck was towed several times and the operator arrested, prompting the Street Vendor Project, an advocate for vendors based at the Urban Justice Center, to file the lawsuit that resulted in Judge Wright's ruling, which said food is merchandise that can be regulated.

For the full story, see:

GLENN COLLINS. "Food Trucks Shooed From Midtown." The New York Times (Weds., June 29, 2011): D4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story is dated June 28, 2011.)

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(p. 1A) The Omaha Public Schools used more than $130,000 in federal stimulus dollars to buy each teacher, administrator and staff member a manual on how to become more culturally sensitive.

The book by Virginia education consultants could raise some eyebrows with its viewpoints.

The authors assert that American government and institutions create advantages that "channel wealth and power to white people," that color-blindness will not end racism and that educators should "take action for social justice."

The book says that teachers should acknowledge historical systemic oppression in schools, including racism, sexism, homophobia and "ableism," defined by the authors as discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities.

The authors argue that public school teachers must raise their cultural awareness to better serve minority students and improve academic achievement.

For the full story, see:

Joe Dejka. "OPS Says It Won't Go totally by the Book." Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, July 10, 2011): 1A & 2A.

(Note: the online version of the article has the title "OPS buys 8,000 diversity manuals.")

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(p. C3) Historically, when a farmer has learned to grow a tasty variety, that farmer has actually been scorned and prevented from shipping it.

"Regulations actually prohibit growers in the southern part of Florida from exporting many of the older tasty tomato varieties because their coloration and shape don't conform to what the all-powerful Florida Tomato Committee says a tomato should look like," Mr. Estabrook writes.

For the full review, see:

DWIGHT GARNER. "BOOKS OF THE TIMES; That Perfect Florida Tomato, Cultivated for Bland Uniformity." The New York Times (Weds., July 6, 2011): C3.

(Note: the online version of the review is dated July 5, 2011.)

The web site of the Florida Tomato Committee describes its Federal mandate:

The Florida Tomato Committee is a Federal Marketing Order that was established pursuant to Federal Marketing Agreement and Order No. 966 as amended regulating the handling of tomatoes and has authority over the tomatoes grown in Florida's production area comprising the counties of Pinellas, Hillsborough, Polk, Osceola, Brevard and all counties situated south. It affects tomatoes that are shipped outside the regulated area, which includes that portion of the state of Florida situated east of the Suwanee River and south of the Georgia border.

The Committee funds research and development projects and marketing promotions that focus on maximizing Florida tomato movement, including consumer and marketing research and customized marketing programs.

Florida Tomatoes ... quality you can trust. Each Florida field-grown tomato shipped out of Florida is regulated by a Federal Marketing Order that controls grade, size, quality and maturity. The standards are the toughest in the world and ensure that Florida tomatoes are the best you can buy.

Source:

http://www.floridatomatoes.org/AboutUs.aspx

(Note: ellipsis in original.)

The book under review is:

Estabrook, Barry. Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. Kansas City, Missouri: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2011.

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"Harry Shearer in the documentary "The Big Uneasy."" Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B6) . . . Mr. Shearer is serious about his reasons for adding to a Katrina genre that includes two documentaries by Spike Lee ("When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" and "If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise"), another about custody battles over pets lost in the storm ("Mine"), and Werner Herzog's reinterpretation of "Bad Lieutenant" ("Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans").

"What they are missing is why it happened, why people suffered," said Mr. Shearer, who spoke last week from his home in New Orleans.

At one-day screenings in about 160 theaters around the country on Monday, "The Big Uneasy" will fill in the blanks with a feature-length description of what it sees as failings by the Army Corps of Engineers and others.

Mr. Shearer said he was inspired to make the film last year, after hearing President Obama refer to the hurricane as a "natural disaster." Mr. Shearer argues there was nothing natural about the breakdown of systems that were supposed to protect the city.

For the full story, see:

MICHAEL CIEPLY. "Katrina Film Takes Aim at Army Corps of Engineers." The New York Times (Mon., August 30, 2010): B6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story is dated August 29, 2010.)

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(p. B4) The Italy that Mr. Severgnini describes seethes with frustration. Government works poorly. The legal system barely functions. Too many Italians are crowded into too little space. Fear of failure stymies innovation. Mr. Severgnini is dismayed at the national genius for enjoyment and the Italian inability to plan for the future. "Our sun is setting in installments," he writes. "It's festive and flamboyant, but it's still a sunset."

For the full review, see:

WILLIAM GRIMES. "BOOKS OF THE TIMES; An Insider Explains Italy, Land of Cheery Dysfunction." The New York Times (Weds., August 23, 2006): B1 & B4.

Book under review:

Severgnini, Beppe. La Bella Figura; a Field Guide to the Italian Mind. Translated by Giles Watson. pb ed. New York: Broadway Books, 2006.

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(p. 11) Paxton was very lucky in his timing, for just at the moment of the Great Exhibition glass suddenly became available in a way it never had before. Glass had always been a tricky material. It was not particularly easy to make, and really hard to make well, which is why for so much of its history it was a luxury Item. Happily, two recent technological breakthroughs had changed that. First, the French invented plate glass--so called because the molten glass was spread across tables known as plates. This allowed for the first time the creation of really large panes of glass, which made shop windows possible. Plate glass, however, had to be cooled for ten days after being rolled out, which meant that each table was unproductively occupied most of the time, and then each sheet required a lot of grinding and polishing. This naturally made it expensive. In 1838, a cheaper refinement was developed--sheet glass. This had most of the virtues of plate glass, but ¡t cooled faster and needed less polishing, and so could be made much more cheaply. Suddenly glass of a good size could be produced economically In limitless volumes.

Allied with this was the timely abolition of two long-standing taxes: the window tax and glass tax (which, strictly speaking, was an excise duty). The window tax dated from 1696 and was sufficiently punishing that (p. 12) people really did avoid putting windows in buildings where they could. The bricked-up window openings that are such a feature of man period
buildings in Britain today were once usually painted to look like windows. (It Is sometimes rather a shame that they aren't still.) The tax, sorely resented as "a tax on air and light," meant that many servants and others of constrained means were condemned to live In airless rooms.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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(p. A1) For her first assignment of the school year, Verona Gill, a $100,000-a-year special education teacher whom the city is trying to fire, sat around education offices in Lower Manhattan for two weeks, waiting to be told what to do.

For her second assignment, she was sent to a district office in the Bronx and told to hand out language exams to anyone who came to pick them up. Few did.

Now, Ms. Gill reports to a cubicle in Downtown Brooklyn with a broken computer and waits for it to be fixed. Periodically, her supervisor comes by to tell her she is still working on the problem. It has been this way since Oct. 8.

"I have no projects to do, so I sit there until 2:50 p.m. -- that's six hours and 50 minutes," the official length of the teacher workday, she said. "And then I swipe out."

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg closed the notorious reassignment centers known as rubber rooms this year, he and the city's teachers' union announced triumphantly that one of the most obvious sources of (p. A3) waste in the school system -- $30 million a year in salaries being paid to educators caught up in the glacial legal process required to fire them -- was no more.

No longer would hundreds of teachers accused of wrongdoing or incompetence, like Ms. Gill, clock in and out of trailers or windowless rooms for years, doing nothing more than snoozing or reading newspapers, griping or teaching one another tai chi. Instead, their cases would be sped up, and in the meantime they would be put to work.

While hundreds of teachers have had their cases resolved, for many of those still waiting, the definition of "work" has turned out to be a loose one. Some are now doing basic tasks, like light filing, paper-clipping, tracking down student information on a computer or using 25-foot tape measures to determine the dimensions of entire school buildings. Others sit without work in unadorned cubicles or at out-of-the-way conference tables.

For the full story, see:

SHARON OTTERMAN. "For New York, Teachers Still in Idle Limbo." The New York Times (Weds., December 8, 2010): A1 & A3.

(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated December 7, 2010 and has the title "New York Teachers Still in Idle Limbo.")

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(p. D1) When the Three Mile Island nuclear generating station along the Susquehanna River seemed on the verge of a full meltdown in March 1979, Gov. Richard L. Thornburgh of Pennsylvania asked a trusted aide to make sure that the evacuation plans for the surrounding counties would work.

The aide came back ashen faced. Dauphin County, on the eastern shore of the river, planned to send its populace west to safety over the Harvey Taylor Bridge.

"All well and good," Mr. Thornburgh said in a recent speech, "except for the fact that Cumberland County on the west shore of the river had adopted an evacuation plan that would funnel all exiting traffic eastbound over -- you guessed it -- the same Harvey Taylor Bridge."

. . .

(p. D4) Brian Wolshon, the director of the Gulf Coast Center for Evacuation and Transportation Resiliency, said that he was analyzing one county's emergency plans that seemed to have every detail covered.

"It was a wonderful report, with plans to move senior citizens out of care facilities and even out of hospitals, and they had signed contracts with bus and ambulance providers," said Dr. Wolshon, who is also a professor at Louisiana State University. "But that same low-cost provider had the same contract with the county next door, and they had the capacity to evacuate only one of these counties."

For the full story, see:

GARDINER HARRIS. "Dangers of Leaving No Resident Behind." The New York Times (Tues., March 22, 2011): D1 & D4.

(Note: the online version of the article is dated March 21, 2011.)

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"Anthony Spinelli, outside his store in the Bronx on Thursday, was called brave for shooting a man suspected of trying to rob his shop." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A23) On Arthur Avenue, a group of men piled out of Pasquale's Rigoletto restaurant onto the sidewalk to pay their respects to a sudden local hero.

"Anthony, we love you," they shouted across the street.

They summed up the local sentiment about a man, Anthony Spinelli, celebrated for protecting his livelihood. On Wednesday, Mr. Spinelli pulled one of two licensed guns in the store, and shot one of the three people suspected of trying to rob his Arthur Avenue jewelry store at gunpoint.

The Bronx neighborhood seemed energized by the event, which people here saw as a testament to the toughness of one of the last Italian neighborhoods in New York City.

"You don't come in and try to take a man's livelihood," said Nick Lousido, who called himself a neighborhood regular. "His family's store has 50 years on this block, they're going to come in and rob him?"

On Thursday, Mr. Spinelli, 49, had returned to his shop and sized up the broken front windows and the mess inside. He said that a man and woman had entered his store, and the man had held a gun to his head while the woman had gone through jewelry drawers and stuffed jewelry into a bag. He said he had feared for his life, and that he was still shaken.

. . .

Next door to Mr. Spinelli's shop is M & M Painter Supplies, which has photographs of Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa next to a paint color chart on the wall.

"He's a very brave man," said the store owner, Ernie Verino. "He had the gun, and it takes guts to use it."

For the full story, see:

COREY KILGANNON. "Merchant Shooting to Defend His Store Is Celebrated as Hero of Arthur Avenue." The New York Times (Fri., February 18, 2011): A23.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 17, 2011 and has the title "After Shooting, Merchant Is Hero of Arthur Avenue.")

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Pictures can be doctored, especially in the days of Photoshop. But a visual image still makes a story more memorable, and maybe sometimes more believable. This was so for Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984:

(p. 64) Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed--after the event: that was what counted--concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds.

. . .

(p. 67) . . . , in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It was a half-page torn out of 'The Times' of about ten years earlier--the top half of the page, so that it included the date--and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them, in any case their names were in the caption at the bottom.

The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's memory because it chanced to be midsummer day; but the whole story must be on record in countless other places as well. There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.

Source:

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: The New American Library, 1961 [1949].

(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)

By Canadian law, 1984 is no longer under copyright. The text has been posted on the following Canadian web site: http://wikilivres.info/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

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"Solar panels along Fifth Street in Fair Lawn, N.J. Residents elsewhere were upset they had not been notified before installation." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.