Archive for August 2019
“If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist”*…
Photographic portraits of Marx don’t suggest a guy who wrote poetry, loved his wife with a passion, doted on his kids, and was once a hellraiser of a student—getting drunk, causing mayhem, and being chased by the police after one too many for the road. He was also scarred in a duel and exiled from Germany, Belgium, and France over his barbed and satiric attacks on these countries often despotic rulers. Marx was a man of action always willing to lead the fight who eventually settled for a life of sedentary toil to produce works that changed the world.
He was also a voracious reader who loved the works of Shakespeare and could quote entire plays by the Bard—just as his children could—and generally took an interest in everything. “Art,” he said, “is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.” No idea or philosophy or culture was foreign to him, and there was nothing that didn’t keen his interest.
Yet, he could also be bad tempered and foul to those who went against him. And on occasion was anti-semitic and racist—he described one poor frenemy (Ferdinand Lassalle) as a Jewish n-word. No saint, but all human.
Karl also enjoyed playing parlor games like Confessions, which is now probably better known as the set of questions devised by Marcel Proust. In April 1865, Marx was staying with relatives when he as asked by his daughters to answer a set of confessions. Marx’s responses give an interesting (and at times humorous) insight into the great political and economic philosopher, journalist and writer.
Your favourite virtue: Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man: Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman: Weakness
Your chief characteristic: Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness: To fight
Your idea of misery: To submit
The vice you excuse most: Gullibility
The vice you detest most: Servility
Your aversion: Martin Tupper [popular Victorian author]
Your favourite occupation: Glancing at Netchen [“Netchen, or Nannette, was Antoinette Philips, aged 28 at the time, Marx’s cousin and a member of the Dutch section of the International”]
Your favourite poet: Aeschylus, Shakespeare
Your favourite prose-writer: Diderot
Your hero: Spartacus, Kepler
Your heroine: Gretchen
Your favourite flower: Daphne
Your favourite dish: Fish
Your favourite colour: Red
Your maxim: Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]
Your favourite motto: De omnibus dubitandum [Doubt everything]
A few of his favorite things: “The ‘Confessions’ of Karl Marx.”
* Karl Marx
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As we hum a few bars of “The Internationale,” we might spare a thought for John Bunyan; he died on this date in 1688. A Puritan preacher and writer, he is best remembered for the Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, though he wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them expanded sermons.
“Progress is our most important product”*…
Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past. In antiquity, the ancient Greeks were discoverers of everything from the arch bridge to the spherical earth. By 1100, the successful pursuit of new knowledge was probably most concentrated in parts of China and the Middle East. Along the cultural dimension, the artists of Renaissance Florence enriched the heritage of all humankind, and in the process created the masterworks that are still the lifeblood of the local economy. The late 18th and early 19th century saw a burst of progress in Northern England, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In each case, the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort. Present-day instances include places like Silicon Valley in software and Switzerland’s Basel region in life sciences.
These kinds of examples show that there can be ecosystems that are better at generating progress than others, perhaps by orders of magnitude. But what do they have in common? Just how productive can a cultural ecosystem be? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was early-20th-century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong? Can we deliberately engineer the conditions most hospitable to this kind of advancement or effectively tweak the systems that surround us today?
This is exactly what Progress Studies would investigate…
Entrepreneur Patrick Collison and economist Tyler Cowen argue that humanity needs to get better at knowing how to get better: “We Need a New Science of Progress.”
* GE’s marketing slogan through most of the post-war boom
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As we emphasize improvement, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that “Mo Money Mo Problems” by Notorious B.I.G. (with Puff Daddy with Ma$e) hit the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100.
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”*…
By the late 1970s, workers on Wall Street were already using rudimentary email processes, putting them among the first to adopt personal computers outside of the sciences, academia, and home hobbyists, according to technologist David Wolfe. But finance’s love affair with computers really took off in the early ‘80s when spreadsheets arrived, and firms began providing in-house employee training for this tool—one that, even today, surprisingly few of us feel comfortable with.
At the time, those groundbreaking programs included VisiCalc—the first-ever digital spreadsheet, and “the ‘killer app’ for the Apple II,” [technologist David] Wolfe said—along with Lotus 1-2-3, which offered expanded capabilities in some areas, and similarly boosted IBM’s PCs.
According to Wolfe, co-director of the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, “The spreadsheet immediately started getting picked up by the financial services industry for its ability to do ‘what if’ calculations, like: If the rate changes from 1% to 2% percent, how will it affect my investment capital?”
Almost immediately, Wall Street also started using the technology to create new, more complex kinds of trading and investments. “It became an incredible time saver-tool, but also started to play into the creation of derivatives,” Wolfe explained…
Let it Visi-snow: “How the Invention of Spreadsheet Software Unleashed Wall Street on the World.”
* Father John Culkin, SJ (though often attributed to his friend Marshall McLuhan)
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As we copy and paste, we might send expansionary birthday greetings to Jean-Baptiste Colbert; he was born on this date in 1619. Minister of Finances of France from 1661 to 1683 under the rule of King Louis XIV, Colbert pursued dirigiste policies (those of a strong, directive state, e.g., tariffs, proactive industrial policy) to create a favorable balance of trade and to increase France’s colonial holdings and foreign market access. His policies inspired those of Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary of the United States and foundational architect of the U.S. national economy.
“What goes up must come down”*…
For most of human history, the world’s population grew so slowly that for most people alive, it would have felt static. Between the year 1 and 1700, the human population went from about 200 million to about 600 million; by 1800, it had barely hit one billion. Then, the population exploded, first in the United Kingdom and the United States, next in much of the rest of Europe, and eventually in Asia. By the late 1920s, it had hit two billion. It reached three billion around 1960 and then four billion around 1975. It has nearly doubled since then. There are now some 7.6 billion people living on the planet.
Just as much of the world has come to see rapid population growth as normal and expected, the trends are shifting again, this time into reverse. Most parts of the world are witnessing sharp and sudden contractions in either birthrates or absolute population. The only thing preventing the population in many countries from shrinking more quickly is that death rates are also falling, because people everywhere are living longer. These oscillations are not easy for any society to manage…
Demographic decline– the end of capitalism as we know it? “The Population Bust.”
See also: “UN world population report predicts slowing growth rate, 10.9 billion peak by 2100” (source of the image above) and The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in a Post-Crisis World, by Ruchir Sharma.
* Isaac Newton
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As we ponder population, we might recall that it was on this date in 1845 that the first issue of Scientific American was published. Founded as a weekly by painter and inventor Rufus M. Porter, as a four-page weekly newspaper, its early emphasis was on a broad range of inventions ranging from perpetual motion machines, through an 1860 device for buoying vessels (created by Abraham Lincoln), to the universal joint which now can be found in nearly every automobile manufactured. It became the somewhat more substantial monthly publication that we know and love when,in 1948, three partners (publisher Gerard Piel, editor Dennis Flanagan, and general manager Donald H. Miller, Jr) who were planning on starting a new popular science magazine, to be called The Sciences, purchased the assets of the then century-old Scientific American instead and put its name on the designs they had created for their new magazine.
The first issue of Scientific American
“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation”*…
The librarian greeted me, asked for my name, and scanned a shelf of books along the wall. She pulled one from the collection, and placed it on the counter—but left her hand on the book. She smiled. “Don’t remove this white band,” she said. “Don’t rip it. Don’t touch it. It will cause problems.” I nervously smiled in return. There is nothing more frightening than a confident librarian.
The white band on the book, as fellow devotees of the glorious InterLibrary Loan system know, contains all of the information to facilitate return of the item to the lending library. Removed bands slow down the system. And the last thing that I would ever want to do is hurt, in any way, a system that has been so good to me…
A brief history (and celebration) of the apex of human civilization: “InterLibrary Loan Will Change Your Life.”
* The Books in My Life
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As we disobey Polonius, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that a jealous Robert Frost heckled Archibald MacLeish at a reading of the latter’s poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vt. Bill Peschel recounts:
The gathering was held at Treman Cottage, and Frost was among the attendees, sitting in the back. It was a time when Hitler was on the ascendant, and the United States was divided between warning against the rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy, and those who didn’t want to intervene in another European war. MacLeish was anti-Fascist, and Frost despised MacLeish’s support of Roosevelt.
That night, as MacLeish read from his poetry, Frost began heckling him. “Archie’s poems all have the sametune,” he said in a whisper that could be heard. When MacLeish read the single-sentence poem, “You, Andrew Marvell,” smoke could be smelled. Frost had accidentally, on purpose, set fire to some papers and was beating them out and waving away the smoke.
Most people accepted the story of the accident, and the reading eventually concluded. MacLeish was still the center of attention, and he was asked to read from one of his plays. But Frost was not done with him. As [Wallace] Stegner wrote:
“His comments from the floor, at first friendly and wisecracking, became steadily harsher and more barbed. He interrupted, he commented, he took exception. What began as the ordinary give and take of literary conversation turned into a clear intention of frustrating and humiliating Archie MacLeish, and the situation became increasingly painful to those who comprehended it”. Even Bernard DeVoto, a scholar and friend of Frost, had enough, calling out, “For God’s sake, Robert, let him read!” Frost ignored him, but shortly thereafter, on some pretext, “said something savage,” and left.
Afterwards, Frost’s defenders tried to kick sand over the events. One friend wrote only of “unfounded allusions” and “behavior not proven by fact.” There were people there who didn’t even notice what Stegner saw that night. But baiting MacLeish had caused a permanent rift between DeVoto and Frost. At the end of the conference, when they met and shook hands, DeVoto told him, “You’re a good poet, Robert, but you’re a bad man.”
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