"Playing football at Auburn is not a right; it is a privilege."
Gene Chizik p. 132
Saturday, October 22, 2011
The Steve Jobs Biography
Books of The Times
Making the iBio for Apple’s Genius
By JANET MASLIN
Published: October 21, 2011
Sign In to E-Mail
After Steve Jobs anointed Walter Isaacson as his authorized biographer in 2009, he took Mr. Isaacson to see the Mountain View, Calif., house in which he had lived as a boy. He pointed out its “clean design” and “awesome little features.” He praised the developer, Joseph Eichler, who built more than 11,000 homes in California subdivisions, for making an affordable product on a mass-market scale. And he showed Mr. Isaacson the stockade fence built 50 years earlier by his father, Paul Jobs.
STEVE JOBS
By Walter Isaacson
Illustrated. 630 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.
“He loved doing things right,” Mr. Jobs said. “He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”
Mr. Jobs, the brilliant and protean creator whose inventions so utterly transformed the allure of technology, turned those childhood lessons into an all-purpose theory of intelligent design. He gave Mr. Isaacson a chance to play by the same rules. His story calls for a book that is clear, elegant and concise enough to qualify as an iBio. Mr. Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” does its solid best to hit that target.
As a biographer of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, Mr. Isaacson knows how to explicate and celebrate genius: revered, long-dead genius. But he wrote “Steve Jobs” as its subject was mortally ill, and that is a more painful and delicate challenge. (He had access to members of the Jobs family at a difficult time.) Mr. Jobs promised not to look over Mr. Isaacson’s shoulder, and not to meddle with anything but the book’s cover. (Boy, does it look great.) And he expressed approval that the book would not be entirely flattering. But his legacy was at stake. And there were awkward questions to be asked. At the end of the volume, Mr. Jobs answers the question “What drove me?” by discussing himself in the past tense.
Mr. Isaacson treats “Steve Jobs” as the biography of record, which means that it is a strange book to read so soon after its subject’s death. Some of it is an essential Silicon Valley chronicle, compiling stories well known to tech aficionados but interesting to a broad audience. Some of it is already quaint. Mr. Jobs’s first job was at Atari, and it involved the game Pong. (“If you’re under 30, ask your parents,” Mr. Isaacson writes.) Some, like an account of the release of the iPad 2, is so recent that it is hard to appreciate yet, even if Mr. Isaacson says the device comes to life “like the face of a tickled baby.”
And some is definitely intended for future generations. “Indeed,” Mr. Isaacson writes, “its success came not just from the beauty of the hardware but from the applications, known as apps, that allowed you to indulge in all sorts of delightful activities.” One that he mentions, which will be as quaint as Pong some day, features the use of a slingshot to shoot down angry birds.
So “Steve Jobs,” an account of its subject’s 56 years (he died on Oct. 5), must reach across time in more ways than one. And it does, in a well-ordered, if not streamlined, fashion. It begins with a portrait of the young Mr. Jobs, rebellious toward the parents who raised him and scornful of the ones who gave him up for adoption. (“They were my sperm and egg bank,” he says.)
Although Mr. Isaacson is not analytical about his subject’s volatile personality (the word “obnoxious” figures in the book frequently), he raises the question of whether feelings of abandonment in childhood made him fanatically controlling and manipulative as an adult. Fortunately, that glib question stays unanswered.
Mr. Jobs, who founded Apple with Stephen Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976, began his career as a seemingly contradictory blend of hippie truth seeker and tech-savvy hothead.
“His Zen awareness was not accompanied by an excess of calm, peace of mind or interpersonal mellowness,” Mr. Isaacson says. “He could stun an unsuspecting victim with an emotional towel-snap, perfectly aimed,” he also writes. But Mr. Jobs valued simplicity, utility and beauty in ways that would shape his creative imagination. And the book maintains that those goals would not have been achievable in the great parade of Apple creations without that mean streak.
Mr. Isaacson takes his readers back to the time when laptops, desktops and windows were metaphors, not everyday realities. His book ticks off how each of the Apple innovations that we now take for granted first occurred to Mr. Jobs or his creative team. “Steve Jobs” means to be the authoritative book about those achievements, and it also follows Mr. Jobs into the wilderness (and to NeXT and Pixar) after his first stint at Apple, which ended in 1985.
With an avid interest in corporate intrigue, it skewers Mr. Jobs’s rivals, like John Sculley, who was recruited in 1983 to be Apple’s chief executive and fell for Mr. Jobs’s deceptive show of friendship. “They professed their fondness so effusively and often that they sounded like high school sweethearts at a Hallmark card display,” Mr. Isaacson writes.
STEVE JOBS
By Walter Isaacson
Illustrated. 630 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35
Steve Jobs introduced the new Macintosh personal computer on Jan. 24, 1984.
Of course the book also tracks Mr. Jobs’s long and combative rivalry with Bill Gates. The section devoted to Mr. Jobs’s illness, which suggests that his cancer might have been more treatable had he not resisted early surgery, describes the relative tenderness of their last meeting.
“Steve Jobs” greatly admires its subject. But its most adulatory passages are not about people. Offering a combination of tech criticism and promotional hype, Mr. Isaacson describes the arrival of each new product right down to Mr. Jobs’s theatrical introductions and the advertising campaigns. But if the individual bits of hoopla seem excessive, their cumulative effect is staggering. Here is an encyclopedic survey of all that Mr. Jobs accomplished, replete with the passion and excitement that it deserves.
Mr. Jobs’s virtual reinvention of the music business with iTunes and the iPod, for instance, is made to seem all the more miraculous (“He’s got a turn-key solution,” the music executive Jimmy Iovine said.) Mr. Isaacson’s long view basically puts Mr. Jobs up there with Franklin and Einstein, even if a tiny MP3 player is not quite the theory of relativity. The book emphasizes how deceptively effortless Mr. Jobs’s ideas now seem because of their extreme intuitiveness and foresight. When Mr. Jobs, who personally persuaded musician after musician to accept the iTunes model, approached Wynton Marsalis, Mr. Marsalis was rightly more impressed with Mr. Jobs than with the device he was being shown.
Mr. Jobs’s love of music plays a big role in “Steve Jobs,” like his extreme obsession with Bob Dylan. (Like Mr. Dylan, he had a romance with Joan Baez. Her version of Mr. Dylan’s “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word” was on Mr. Jobs’s own iPod.) So does his extraordinary way of perceiving ordinary things, like well-made knives and kitchen appliances. That he admired the Cuisinart food processor he saw at Macy’s may sound trivial, but his subsequent idea that a molded plastic covering might work well on a computer does not. Years from now, the research trip to a jelly bean factory to study potential colors for the iMac case will not seem as silly as it might now.
Skeptic after skeptic made the mistake of underrating Steve Jobs, and Mr. Isaacson records the howlers who misjudged an unrivaled career. “Sorry Steve, Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work,” Business Week wrote in a 2001 headline. “The iPod will likely become a niche product,” a Harvard Business School professor said. “High tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product,” Mr. Sculley said in 1987.
Mr. Jobs got the last laugh every time. “Steve Jobs” makes it all the sadder that his last laugh is over.
Making the iBio for Apple’s Genius
By JANET MASLIN
Published: October 21, 2011
Sign In to E-Mail
After Steve Jobs anointed Walter Isaacson as his authorized biographer in 2009, he took Mr. Isaacson to see the Mountain View, Calif., house in which he had lived as a boy. He pointed out its “clean design” and “awesome little features.” He praised the developer, Joseph Eichler, who built more than 11,000 homes in California subdivisions, for making an affordable product on a mass-market scale. And he showed Mr. Isaacson the stockade fence built 50 years earlier by his father, Paul Jobs.
STEVE JOBS
By Walter Isaacson
Illustrated. 630 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.
“He loved doing things right,” Mr. Jobs said. “He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”
Mr. Jobs, the brilliant and protean creator whose inventions so utterly transformed the allure of technology, turned those childhood lessons into an all-purpose theory of intelligent design. He gave Mr. Isaacson a chance to play by the same rules. His story calls for a book that is clear, elegant and concise enough to qualify as an iBio. Mr. Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” does its solid best to hit that target.
As a biographer of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, Mr. Isaacson knows how to explicate and celebrate genius: revered, long-dead genius. But he wrote “Steve Jobs” as its subject was mortally ill, and that is a more painful and delicate challenge. (He had access to members of the Jobs family at a difficult time.) Mr. Jobs promised not to look over Mr. Isaacson’s shoulder, and not to meddle with anything but the book’s cover. (Boy, does it look great.) And he expressed approval that the book would not be entirely flattering. But his legacy was at stake. And there were awkward questions to be asked. At the end of the volume, Mr. Jobs answers the question “What drove me?” by discussing himself in the past tense.
Mr. Isaacson treats “Steve Jobs” as the biography of record, which means that it is a strange book to read so soon after its subject’s death. Some of it is an essential Silicon Valley chronicle, compiling stories well known to tech aficionados but interesting to a broad audience. Some of it is already quaint. Mr. Jobs’s first job was at Atari, and it involved the game Pong. (“If you’re under 30, ask your parents,” Mr. Isaacson writes.) Some, like an account of the release of the iPad 2, is so recent that it is hard to appreciate yet, even if Mr. Isaacson says the device comes to life “like the face of a tickled baby.”
And some is definitely intended for future generations. “Indeed,” Mr. Isaacson writes, “its success came not just from the beauty of the hardware but from the applications, known as apps, that allowed you to indulge in all sorts of delightful activities.” One that he mentions, which will be as quaint as Pong some day, features the use of a slingshot to shoot down angry birds.
So “Steve Jobs,” an account of its subject’s 56 years (he died on Oct. 5), must reach across time in more ways than one. And it does, in a well-ordered, if not streamlined, fashion. It begins with a portrait of the young Mr. Jobs, rebellious toward the parents who raised him and scornful of the ones who gave him up for adoption. (“They were my sperm and egg bank,” he says.)
Although Mr. Isaacson is not analytical about his subject’s volatile personality (the word “obnoxious” figures in the book frequently), he raises the question of whether feelings of abandonment in childhood made him fanatically controlling and manipulative as an adult. Fortunately, that glib question stays unanswered.
Mr. Jobs, who founded Apple with Stephen Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976, began his career as a seemingly contradictory blend of hippie truth seeker and tech-savvy hothead.
“His Zen awareness was not accompanied by an excess of calm, peace of mind or interpersonal mellowness,” Mr. Isaacson says. “He could stun an unsuspecting victim with an emotional towel-snap, perfectly aimed,” he also writes. But Mr. Jobs valued simplicity, utility and beauty in ways that would shape his creative imagination. And the book maintains that those goals would not have been achievable in the great parade of Apple creations without that mean streak.
Mr. Isaacson takes his readers back to the time when laptops, desktops and windows were metaphors, not everyday realities. His book ticks off how each of the Apple innovations that we now take for granted first occurred to Mr. Jobs or his creative team. “Steve Jobs” means to be the authoritative book about those achievements, and it also follows Mr. Jobs into the wilderness (and to NeXT and Pixar) after his first stint at Apple, which ended in 1985.
With an avid interest in corporate intrigue, it skewers Mr. Jobs’s rivals, like John Sculley, who was recruited in 1983 to be Apple’s chief executive and fell for Mr. Jobs’s deceptive show of friendship. “They professed their fondness so effusively and often that they sounded like high school sweethearts at a Hallmark card display,” Mr. Isaacson writes.
STEVE JOBS
By Walter Isaacson
Illustrated. 630 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35
Steve Jobs introduced the new Macintosh personal computer on Jan. 24, 1984.
Of course the book also tracks Mr. Jobs’s long and combative rivalry with Bill Gates. The section devoted to Mr. Jobs’s illness, which suggests that his cancer might have been more treatable had he not resisted early surgery, describes the relative tenderness of their last meeting.
“Steve Jobs” greatly admires its subject. But its most adulatory passages are not about people. Offering a combination of tech criticism and promotional hype, Mr. Isaacson describes the arrival of each new product right down to Mr. Jobs’s theatrical introductions and the advertising campaigns. But if the individual bits of hoopla seem excessive, their cumulative effect is staggering. Here is an encyclopedic survey of all that Mr. Jobs accomplished, replete with the passion and excitement that it deserves.
Mr. Jobs’s virtual reinvention of the music business with iTunes and the iPod, for instance, is made to seem all the more miraculous (“He’s got a turn-key solution,” the music executive Jimmy Iovine said.) Mr. Isaacson’s long view basically puts Mr. Jobs up there with Franklin and Einstein, even if a tiny MP3 player is not quite the theory of relativity. The book emphasizes how deceptively effortless Mr. Jobs’s ideas now seem because of their extreme intuitiveness and foresight. When Mr. Jobs, who personally persuaded musician after musician to accept the iTunes model, approached Wynton Marsalis, Mr. Marsalis was rightly more impressed with Mr. Jobs than with the device he was being shown.
Mr. Jobs’s love of music plays a big role in “Steve Jobs,” like his extreme obsession with Bob Dylan. (Like Mr. Dylan, he had a romance with Joan Baez. Her version of Mr. Dylan’s “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word” was on Mr. Jobs’s own iPod.) So does his extraordinary way of perceiving ordinary things, like well-made knives and kitchen appliances. That he admired the Cuisinart food processor he saw at Macy’s may sound trivial, but his subsequent idea that a molded plastic covering might work well on a computer does not. Years from now, the research trip to a jelly bean factory to study potential colors for the iMac case will not seem as silly as it might now.
Skeptic after skeptic made the mistake of underrating Steve Jobs, and Mr. Isaacson records the howlers who misjudged an unrivaled career. “Sorry Steve, Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work,” Business Week wrote in a 2001 headline. “The iPod will likely become a niche product,” a Harvard Business School professor said. “High tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product,” Mr. Sculley said in 1987.
Mr. Jobs got the last laugh every time. “Steve Jobs” makes it all the sadder that his last laugh is over.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Candice Millard - Destiny of the Republic
I am reading this narrative account of the assasination of President Garfield in 1881. This event in American history is not much talked about. The book is riveting and interesting.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
THIS SAYS IT ALL
If you want to know why I am a Democrat read this article. If you wish to know why I am a Progressive, read this article. This says it all---the BEST summary of the Progressive world view that I have ever read. Thanks, Professor Reich!
October 16, 2011
Robert Reich
The Rise of the Regressive Right and the Reawakening of America
Posted: 10/16/11 05:44 PM ET
A fundamental war has been waged in this nation since its founding, between progressive forces pushing us forward and regressive forces pulling us backward.
We are going to battle once again.
Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we're all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.
Regressives take the opposite positions.
Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today's Republican right aren't really conservatives. Their goal isn't to conserve what we have. It's to take us backwards.
They'd like to return to the 1920s -- before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.
In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.
Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s -- the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the "rot" is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).
In truth, if they had their way we'd be back in the late nineteenth century -- before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons -- railroad, financial, and oil titans -- ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.
Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.
The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation's wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America's wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker's wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers' wage.
This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.
Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts (and, all too often, Kennedy) claim they're conservative jurists. But they're judicial activists bent on overturning 75 years of jurisprudence by resurrecting states' rights, treating the 2nd Amendment as if America still relied on local militias, narrowing the Commerce Clause, and calling money speech and corporations people.
Yet the great arc of American history reveals an unmistakable pattern. Whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, the nation eventually rallies and moves forward. Sometimes it takes an economic shock like the bursting of a giant speculative bubble; sometimes we just reach a tipping point where the frustrations of average Americans turn into action.
Look at the Progressive reforms between 1900 and 1916; the New Deal of the 1930s; the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s; the widening opportunities for women, minorities, people with disabilities, and gays; and the environmental reforms of the 1970s.
In each of these eras, regressive forces reignited the progressive ideals on which America is built. The result was fundamental reform.
Perhaps this is what's beginning to happen again across America.
October 16, 2011
Robert Reich
The Rise of the Regressive Right and the Reawakening of America
Posted: 10/16/11 05:44 PM ET
A fundamental war has been waged in this nation since its founding, between progressive forces pushing us forward and regressive forces pulling us backward.
We are going to battle once again.
Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we're all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.
Regressives take the opposite positions.
Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today's Republican right aren't really conservatives. Their goal isn't to conserve what we have. It's to take us backwards.
They'd like to return to the 1920s -- before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.
In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.
Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s -- the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the "rot" is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).
In truth, if they had their way we'd be back in the late nineteenth century -- before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons -- railroad, financial, and oil titans -- ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.
Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.
The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation's wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America's wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker's wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers' wage.
This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.
Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts (and, all too often, Kennedy) claim they're conservative jurists. But they're judicial activists bent on overturning 75 years of jurisprudence by resurrecting states' rights, treating the 2nd Amendment as if America still relied on local militias, narrowing the Commerce Clause, and calling money speech and corporations people.
Yet the great arc of American history reveals an unmistakable pattern. Whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, the nation eventually rallies and moves forward. Sometimes it takes an economic shock like the bursting of a giant speculative bubble; sometimes we just reach a tipping point where the frustrations of average Americans turn into action.
Look at the Progressive reforms between 1900 and 1916; the New Deal of the 1930s; the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s; the widening opportunities for women, minorities, people with disabilities, and gays; and the environmental reforms of the 1970s.
In each of these eras, regressive forces reignited the progressive ideals on which America is built. The result was fundamental reform.
Perhaps this is what's beginning to happen again across America.
Our Primal Scream
America’s ‘Primal Scream’
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: October 15, 2011
IT’S fascinating that many Americans intuitively understood the outrage and frustration that drove Egyptians to protest at Tahrir Square, but don’t comprehend similar resentments that drive disgruntled fellow citizens to “occupy Wall Street.”
There are differences, of course: the New York Police Department isn’t dispatching camels to run down protesters. Americans may feel disenfranchised, but we do live in a democracy, a flawed democracy — which is the best hope for Egypt’s evolution in the coming years.
Yet my interviews with protesters in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park seemed to rhyme with my interviews in Tahrir earlier this year. There’s a parallel sense that the political/economic system is tilted against the 99 percent. Al Gore, who supports the Wall Street protests, described them perfectly as a “primal scream of democracy.”
The frustration in America isn’t so much with inequality in the political and legal worlds, as it was in Arab countries, although those are concerns too. Here the critical issue is economic inequity. According to the C.I.A.’s own ranking of countries by income inequality, the United States is more unequal a society than either Tunisia or Egypt.
Three factoids underscore that inequality:
¶The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans.
¶The top 1 percent of Americans possess more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
¶In the Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the richest 1 percent.
As my Times colleague Catherine Rampell noted a few days ago, in 1981, the average salary in the securities industry in New York City was twice the average in other private sector jobs. At last count, in 2010, it was 5.5 times as much. (In case you want to gnash your teeth, the average is now $361,330.)
More broadly, there’s a growing sense that lopsided outcomes are a result of tycoons’ manipulating the system, lobbying for loopholes and getting away with murder. Of the 100 highest-paid chief executives in the United States in 2010, 25 took home more pay than their company paid in federal corporate income taxes, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.
Living under Communism in China made me a fervent enthusiast of capitalism. I believe that over the last couple of centuries banks have enormously raised living standards in the West by allocating capital to more efficient uses. But anyone who believes in markets should be outraged that banks rig the system so that they enjoy profits in good years and bailouts in bad years.
The banks have gotten away with privatizing profits and socializing risks, and that’s just another form of bank robbery.
“We have a catastrophically bad misregulation of the financial system,” said Amar Bhidé, a finance expert at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “Its consequences led to a taint of the entire system of modern enterprise.”
Economists used to believe that we had to hold our noses and put up with high inequality as the price of robust growth. But more recent research suggests the opposite: inequality not only stinks, but also damages economies.
In his important new book, “The Darwin Economy,” Robert H. Frank of Cornell University cites a study showing that among 65 industrial nations, the more unequal ones experience slower growth on average. Likewise, individual countries grow more rapidly in periods when incomes are more equal, and slow down when incomes are skewed.
That’s certainly true of the United States. We enjoyed considerable equality from the 1940s through the 1970s, and growth was strong. Since then inequality has surged, and growth has slowed.
One reason may be that inequality is linked to financial distress and financial crises. There is mounting evidence that inequality leads to bankruptcies and to financial panics.
“The recent global economic crisis, with its roots in U.S. financial markets, may have resulted, in part at least, from the increase in inequality,” Andrew G. Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry of the International Monetary Fund wrote last month. They argued that “equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth.”
Inequality also leads to early deaths and more divorces — a reminder that we’re talking not about data sets here, but about human beings.
Some critics think that Occupy Wall Street is simply tapping into the public’s resentment and covetousness, nurturing class warfare. Sure, there’s a dollop of envy. But inequality is also a cancer on our national well-being.
I don’t know whether the Occupy Wall Street movement will survive once Zuccotti Park fills with snow and the novelty wears off. But I do hope that the protesters have lofted the issue of inequality onto our national agenda to stay — and to grapple with in the 2012 election year.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: October 15, 2011
IT’S fascinating that many Americans intuitively understood the outrage and frustration that drove Egyptians to protest at Tahrir Square, but don’t comprehend similar resentments that drive disgruntled fellow citizens to “occupy Wall Street.”
There are differences, of course: the New York Police Department isn’t dispatching camels to run down protesters. Americans may feel disenfranchised, but we do live in a democracy, a flawed democracy — which is the best hope for Egypt’s evolution in the coming years.
Yet my interviews with protesters in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park seemed to rhyme with my interviews in Tahrir earlier this year. There’s a parallel sense that the political/economic system is tilted against the 99 percent. Al Gore, who supports the Wall Street protests, described them perfectly as a “primal scream of democracy.”
The frustration in America isn’t so much with inequality in the political and legal worlds, as it was in Arab countries, although those are concerns too. Here the critical issue is economic inequity. According to the C.I.A.’s own ranking of countries by income inequality, the United States is more unequal a society than either Tunisia or Egypt.
Three factoids underscore that inequality:
¶The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans.
¶The top 1 percent of Americans possess more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
¶In the Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the richest 1 percent.
As my Times colleague Catherine Rampell noted a few days ago, in 1981, the average salary in the securities industry in New York City was twice the average in other private sector jobs. At last count, in 2010, it was 5.5 times as much. (In case you want to gnash your teeth, the average is now $361,330.)
More broadly, there’s a growing sense that lopsided outcomes are a result of tycoons’ manipulating the system, lobbying for loopholes and getting away with murder. Of the 100 highest-paid chief executives in the United States in 2010, 25 took home more pay than their company paid in federal corporate income taxes, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.
Living under Communism in China made me a fervent enthusiast of capitalism. I believe that over the last couple of centuries banks have enormously raised living standards in the West by allocating capital to more efficient uses. But anyone who believes in markets should be outraged that banks rig the system so that they enjoy profits in good years and bailouts in bad years.
The banks have gotten away with privatizing profits and socializing risks, and that’s just another form of bank robbery.
“We have a catastrophically bad misregulation of the financial system,” said Amar Bhidé, a finance expert at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “Its consequences led to a taint of the entire system of modern enterprise.”
Economists used to believe that we had to hold our noses and put up with high inequality as the price of robust growth. But more recent research suggests the opposite: inequality not only stinks, but also damages economies.
In his important new book, “The Darwin Economy,” Robert H. Frank of Cornell University cites a study showing that among 65 industrial nations, the more unequal ones experience slower growth on average. Likewise, individual countries grow more rapidly in periods when incomes are more equal, and slow down when incomes are skewed.
That’s certainly true of the United States. We enjoyed considerable equality from the 1940s through the 1970s, and growth was strong. Since then inequality has surged, and growth has slowed.
One reason may be that inequality is linked to financial distress and financial crises. There is mounting evidence that inequality leads to bankruptcies and to financial panics.
“The recent global economic crisis, with its roots in U.S. financial markets, may have resulted, in part at least, from the increase in inequality,” Andrew G. Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry of the International Monetary Fund wrote last month. They argued that “equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth.”
Inequality also leads to early deaths and more divorces — a reminder that we’re talking not about data sets here, but about human beings.
Some critics think that Occupy Wall Street is simply tapping into the public’s resentment and covetousness, nurturing class warfare. Sure, there’s a dollop of envy. But inequality is also a cancer on our national well-being.
I don’t know whether the Occupy Wall Street movement will survive once Zuccotti Park fills with snow and the novelty wears off. But I do hope that the protesters have lofted the issue of inequality onto our national agenda to stay — and to grapple with in the 2012 election year.
Gordon Wood - Empire of Liberty (2)
Gordon S. Wood – Empire of Liberty
In the early days of the Republic, nowhere in the world was business and working for profit more celebrated, which made slavery all the more anomalous. Slavery was condemned, but it not only survived, it flourished. P. 2-3
By 1815 the U.S. was the most evangelical nation in the world. P. 3
By all accounts the new country was an experiment in republicanism. P. 5
Early on the people had a sense of exceptionalism. P. 7
The purpose of the Constitution was to temper the democratic excesses of the state legislatures. P. 16 (Wood seems to give scant notice to Shay’s Rebellion)
The interests of the local was destroying the interests of the people as a whole. P. 17
Once passed in 1791 the Bill of Rights was forgotten about and lay dormant until the 20th Century. P. 72 (amazing)
There were expectations amongst some that the country could have become an elective monarch like Poland. P. 74
It never ceases to amaze me to read about how George Washington invented the office of President. P. 76
According to Adams, GW was the best actor of the presidency we’ve ever had. P. 78
I’ve yet to get a real feel for the supposed tendencies toward monarchism in the 1790’s. P. 85
Hamilton sought to copy 18th century England. P. 93
Some Federalists hoped the states would revert to administrative units of the federal government. P. 97
Hamilton’s program laid the groundwork for the supremacy of the national over the state governments. P. 103
The Federalists were elitists, but this was, in my opinion, necessary in the 90’s to cement the country together. Hamilton felt rightly that the success of the new government depending on attracting the support of the people of means. The rest of the people would follow. Hierarchies were inevitable. P. 105-06
Federalism failed because of the capitalistic and democratic society that emerged after the Federalists established the stability of the new national government. P. 110
American independence was a disaster for Indians. P. 125
Indians had to submit to removal, destruction, or conform to the white man’s ways. P. 128
Hamilton argued for the first national bank based on the famous “necessary and proper” clause in Article 1 Section 8. P. 144-45
Hamilton had a different vision of the country than Jefferson and Madison. I say both were right and both were wrong in different ways. P. 147
Mostly Jefferson was wrong especially in his version of the country as a continuing confederation of independent states. P. 148
That Madison switched from being a nationalist to a states-righter is one of American history’s most debased topics. P. 148
The Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans were like today’s Democrats and Republicans: each believes that the other party is out to destroy the country. P. 161
Some historians believe that the Republican party’s main purpose was to protect slavery in the South. P. 166
Were the Federalists really “monarchical?” P. 172
It’s hard to figure John Adams. I like him even though some historians like to laugh at him. Chapter 6
The so-called crisis of 1798-99 with Citizen Genet and the XYZ Affair is a period of American history and the risk of war with France is a part of American history that I will never totally understand. Chapter 7
Wood seems to think there really was a Jeffersonian Revolution starting with his election in 1800. I suppose he is right, but I think less and less of Jefferson the more I read about him. Chapter 8
The expansion of the country west during Jefferson’s reign does not greatly interest me. Chapter 10
Strict constructionists always find a way to do what they want to do. Hence, they invoked the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution to justify the Louisiana Purchase. P. 371
Lewis and Clark started from St. Louis. P. 378
The Marbury decision was the case where the Marshall Court declared a law unconstitutional. The next time this happened wasn’t until the 1857 Dred Scott decision. P. 442
Jefferson’s record on slavery is horrific. Although he always condemned slavery, he was one of the biggest slaveholders in Virginia. He sold hundreds of slaves. He thought that by the age of 10 a boy should be treated like a man. There was no such thing as a kind slaveholder. P. 514-15
The Revolutionary leaders mistakenly thought that slavery was on its way to extinction. In their eyes there was evidence, obviously wrong, that slavery was dying out. P. 518-19
No matter what is said, everybody at the time knew in their hearts that slavery was wrong. P. 520
Stopping the slave trade did not end slavery. P. 523
In 1799 Washington had 317 slaves. P. 524
The Founders had a naïve faith in the future. The best thing was not to rock the slavery boat. P. 525
From the beginning the nation moved in two different directions with slavery slowly disappearing in the North but persisting and eventually growing in the South. P. 526
Jefferson’s Republicans were the South’s party and the Federalists were the North’s party. There is no way you can tell me that the Jefferson’s party wasn’t at least partly formed to defend slavery. So-called states rights and race go hand in hand and always have. P. 527
The frustrations between the sections began during the Revolution and only got worse as time went on. P. 531
In 1787-1788 Federalists accepted the three-fifths compromise as necessary to keep the South in the Union. Eventually they realized their mistake: that Jefferson owed his election to the three-fifths provision, that his Republican party was Southern based and rested on slavery, and thru the three-fifths provision the South would dominate the federal government. P. 532
Wood devotes three chapter to life during the Republican Era. Chapters 15, 16, & 17
I will never fully understand the War of 1812. Wood devotes a chapter to it. Let it be. Chapter 18
One of Wood’s chief points is that the Founders were elitists who had exalted notions of the disinterested motivations of political leaders---the way it should be---but that they set in motion notions of egalitarianism that made the nation unrecognizable to them by the early years of the 19th century. Chapter 19
In the early days of the Republic, nowhere in the world was business and working for profit more celebrated, which made slavery all the more anomalous. Slavery was condemned, but it not only survived, it flourished. P. 2-3
By 1815 the U.S. was the most evangelical nation in the world. P. 3
By all accounts the new country was an experiment in republicanism. P. 5
Early on the people had a sense of exceptionalism. P. 7
The purpose of the Constitution was to temper the democratic excesses of the state legislatures. P. 16 (Wood seems to give scant notice to Shay’s Rebellion)
The interests of the local was destroying the interests of the people as a whole. P. 17
Once passed in 1791 the Bill of Rights was forgotten about and lay dormant until the 20th Century. P. 72 (amazing)
There were expectations amongst some that the country could have become an elective monarch like Poland. P. 74
It never ceases to amaze me to read about how George Washington invented the office of President. P. 76
According to Adams, GW was the best actor of the presidency we’ve ever had. P. 78
I’ve yet to get a real feel for the supposed tendencies toward monarchism in the 1790’s. P. 85
Hamilton sought to copy 18th century England. P. 93
Some Federalists hoped the states would revert to administrative units of the federal government. P. 97
Hamilton’s program laid the groundwork for the supremacy of the national over the state governments. P. 103
The Federalists were elitists, but this was, in my opinion, necessary in the 90’s to cement the country together. Hamilton felt rightly that the success of the new government depending on attracting the support of the people of means. The rest of the people would follow. Hierarchies were inevitable. P. 105-06
Federalism failed because of the capitalistic and democratic society that emerged after the Federalists established the stability of the new national government. P. 110
American independence was a disaster for Indians. P. 125
Indians had to submit to removal, destruction, or conform to the white man’s ways. P. 128
Hamilton argued for the first national bank based on the famous “necessary and proper” clause in Article 1 Section 8. P. 144-45
Hamilton had a different vision of the country than Jefferson and Madison. I say both were right and both were wrong in different ways. P. 147
Mostly Jefferson was wrong especially in his version of the country as a continuing confederation of independent states. P. 148
That Madison switched from being a nationalist to a states-righter is one of American history’s most debased topics. P. 148
The Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans were like today’s Democrats and Republicans: each believes that the other party is out to destroy the country. P. 161
Some historians believe that the Republican party’s main purpose was to protect slavery in the South. P. 166
Were the Federalists really “monarchical?” P. 172
It’s hard to figure John Adams. I like him even though some historians like to laugh at him. Chapter 6
The so-called crisis of 1798-99 with Citizen Genet and the XYZ Affair is a period of American history and the risk of war with France is a part of American history that I will never totally understand. Chapter 7
Wood seems to think there really was a Jeffersonian Revolution starting with his election in 1800. I suppose he is right, but I think less and less of Jefferson the more I read about him. Chapter 8
The expansion of the country west during Jefferson’s reign does not greatly interest me. Chapter 10
Strict constructionists always find a way to do what they want to do. Hence, they invoked the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution to justify the Louisiana Purchase. P. 371
Lewis and Clark started from St. Louis. P. 378
The Marbury decision was the case where the Marshall Court declared a law unconstitutional. The next time this happened wasn’t until the 1857 Dred Scott decision. P. 442
Jefferson’s record on slavery is horrific. Although he always condemned slavery, he was one of the biggest slaveholders in Virginia. He sold hundreds of slaves. He thought that by the age of 10 a boy should be treated like a man. There was no such thing as a kind slaveholder. P. 514-15
The Revolutionary leaders mistakenly thought that slavery was on its way to extinction. In their eyes there was evidence, obviously wrong, that slavery was dying out. P. 518-19
No matter what is said, everybody at the time knew in their hearts that slavery was wrong. P. 520
Stopping the slave trade did not end slavery. P. 523
In 1799 Washington had 317 slaves. P. 524
The Founders had a naïve faith in the future. The best thing was not to rock the slavery boat. P. 525
From the beginning the nation moved in two different directions with slavery slowly disappearing in the North but persisting and eventually growing in the South. P. 526
Jefferson’s Republicans were the South’s party and the Federalists were the North’s party. There is no way you can tell me that the Jefferson’s party wasn’t at least partly formed to defend slavery. So-called states rights and race go hand in hand and always have. P. 527
The frustrations between the sections began during the Revolution and only got worse as time went on. P. 531
In 1787-1788 Federalists accepted the three-fifths compromise as necessary to keep the South in the Union. Eventually they realized their mistake: that Jefferson owed his election to the three-fifths provision, that his Republican party was Southern based and rested on slavery, and thru the three-fifths provision the South would dominate the federal government. P. 532
Wood devotes three chapter to life during the Republican Era. Chapters 15, 16, & 17
I will never fully understand the War of 1812. Wood devotes a chapter to it. Let it be. Chapter 18
One of Wood’s chief points is that the Founders were elitists who had exalted notions of the disinterested motivations of political leaders---the way it should be---but that they set in motion notions of egalitarianism that made the nation unrecognizable to them by the early years of the 19th century. Chapter 19
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Gene Chizik - All In (7)
Every new coach tries to change up things when he assumes his position. Every coach wants to do things his way. This was certainly the case when Gene Chizik took over the Auburn job. He says so very clearly in his book.
The players weren't close so the Coach did things to bring the players together. He is obviously big on motivation. He does everything he can to motivate his players.
Players have to trust one another. They have to help one another. Let us hope that foundation has been laid and will continue for the duration of the Chizik era.
The players weren't close so the Coach did things to bring the players together. He is obviously big on motivation. He does everything he can to motivate his players.
Players have to trust one another. They have to help one another. Let us hope that foundation has been laid and will continue for the duration of the Chizik era.
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