In the early twentieth century, cancer assumed a more prominent place in the popular imagination as the threat of contagious diseases reduced and Americans lived longer. In this regard, the American Society for the Control of Cancer (ASCC), founded in 1913, had identified three goals: education, service, and research. However, until midcentury, largely due to the limited budget, the society contributed little to cancer research.
Enter Mary Woodard Lasker
One of the most powerful women in mid-twentieth-century New York City, and perhaps North America, Lasker demonstrated that women could command transformations in medical institutions. Born in Wisconsin in 1900, Mary Lasker, at the age of four, found out that the family’s laundress, Mrs. Belter, had cancer treatment. Lasker’s mother explained, “Mrs. Belter has had cancer and her breasts have been removed.” Lasker responded, “What do you mean? Cut off?” Decades later, Mary Lakser would mention this early memory that had inspired her to engage in cancer work.
After having established herself as an influential New York philanthropist, businesswoman, and political lobbyist, when Mary Lasker inquired about the role of the ASCC in 1943, she learned that the organization had no money to support research. Somewhat astounded by this discovery, she immediately contemplated ways to reorganize the society. She wanted to recreate the society into a powerful organization that prioritized cancer research.
Well-versed in public relations, connected to the financial and political circles of the country, Lasker played a central role in the mid-1940s. Despite notable opposition, Lasker convinced the ASCC to change the composition of the board of directors to include more lay members and more experts in financial management. She urged the council to adopt a new name, the American Cancer Society. She also convinced them to earmark one-quarter of its budget for research. This financial reorganization allowed the ACS to sponsor early cancer screening, including the early clinical trials. The newly formed American Cancer Society articulated a mission that explicitly identified research funding as its primary goal.
By late 1944, the American Cancer Society had become the principal nongovernmental funding agency for cancer research in the country. In its first year, it directed $1 million of its $4 million in revenue to study. Her ardent advocacy for greater funding of all the medical sciences contributed to increased funding for the National Institutes of Health and the creation of several NIH institutes, including the Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
Mary Lasker continued to agitate for research funds but resisted any formal association. As she explained it, “I’m always best on the outside.” Undoubtedly, Mary Lasker’s influence and emphasis on funding cancer research contributed to promoting the Pap smear in U.S. culture. As a permanent monument to her efforts, in 1984, Congress named the Mary Woodard Lasker Center for Health Research and Education at the National Institutes of Health.
A portion of a letter ACS administrative director Edwin MacEwan wrote to Lasker encapsulates her contribution to our society. He wrote, “I learned that you were the person to whom present and potential cancer patients owe everything and that you alone really initiated the rebirth of the American Cancer Society late in 1944.”
“If you think research is expensive, try disease.” —Mary Woodard Lasker (November 30, 1900 – February 21, 1994)
Yesterday, I came across this scoop on Twitter; New York Post and several other blogs have since reported it.
Regardless of this scoop’s veracity, the chart of Eight White identities has been around for some time now, and it has influenced young minds. So, here is my brief reflection on such identity-based pedagogy:
As a non-white resident-alien, I understand the history behind the United States’ racial sensitivity in all domains today. I also realize how zealous exponents of diversity have consecrated schools and university campuses in the US to rid the society of prevalent racial power-structures. Further, I appreciate the importance of people being self-critical; self-criticism leads to counter-cultures that balance mainstream views and enable reform and creativity in society. But I also find it essential that critics of mainstream culture don’t feel morally superior to enforce just about any theoretical concept on impressionable minds. Without getting too much into the right vs. left debate, there is something terribly sad about being indoctrinated at a young age —regardless of the goal of social engineering— to accept an automatic moral one-‘downmanship’ for the sake of the density gradient of cutaneous melanin pigment. Even though I’m a brown man from a colonized society, this kind of extreme ‘white guilt’ pedagogy leaves me with a bitter taste. And in this bitter taste, I have come to describe such indoctrination as “Affirmative Guilt-Gradient.”
You should know there is something called the Overton Window, according to which concepts grow larger when their actual instances and contexts grow smaller. In other words, well-meaning social interventionistas easily view each new instance in the decreasingly problematic context of the problem they focus on with the same lens as they consider the more significant problem. This leads to unrealistic enlargement of academic concepts that are then shoved down the throats of innocent, impressionable school kids who will take them as objective realities instead of subjective conceptual definitions overlaid on one legitimate objective problem.
I find the scheme of Eight White identities a symptom of the shifting Overton Window.
According to Thomas Sowell, there is a whole class of academics and intellectuals of social engineering who believe that when the world doesn’t reconcile to their pet theories, that shows something is wrong with the world, not their theories. If we are to project Thomas Sowell’s observation on this episode of “Guilt-Gradient,” it is perfectly reasonable to expect many white kids and their parents to refuse to adopt these theoretically manufactured guilt-gradient identities. We can then —applying Sowell’s observation—predict academics to declare that opposition to the “Guilt Gradient” is evidence for many covert white supremacists in the society who will not change. Such stories may then get blown up in influential Op-Eds, leading to the magnification of a simple problem, soon to be misplaced in the clutter of naïve supporters of such theories, the progressive vote-bank, and hard-right polemics.
We should all acknowledge that attachment to any identity—be it majority or minority—is by definition NOT a hatred for an outgroup. Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University, Ashley Jardina, in her noted research on the demise of white dominance and threats to white identity, concludes, “White identity is not, a proxy for outgroup animus. Most white identifiers do not condone white supremacism or see a connection between their racial identity and these hate-groups. Furthermore, whites who identify with their racial group become much more liberal in their policy positions than when white identity is associated with white supremacism.” Everybody has a right to associate with their identity, and equating one’s association with an ethnic majority identity is not automatically toxic. I feel it is destructive to view such identity associations as inherently toxic because it is precisely this sort of warped social engineering that results in unnecessary political polarization; the vicious cycle of identity-based tinkering is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hence, recognizing the Overton Window at play in such identity-based pedagogy is a must if we have to make progress. We shouldn’t be tricked into assuming that the non acceptance of the Affirmative Guilt Gradient is a sign of our society’s lack of progress.
Finally, I find it odd that ideologues who profess “universalism” and international identities choose schools and universities to keep structurally confined, relative identities going by adding excessive nomenclature so they can apply interventions that are inherently reactionary. However, isn’t ‘reactionary’ a pejorative these ideologues use on others?
Every great civilization has simultaneously made breakthroughs in the natural sciences, mathematics, and in the investigation of that which penetrates beyond the mundane, beyond the external stimuli, beyond the world of solid, separate objects, names, and forms to peer into something changeless. When written down, these esoteric percepts have the natural tendency to decay over time because people tend to accept them too passively and literally. Consequently, people then value the conclusions of others over clarity and self-knowledge.
Talking about esoteric percepts decaying over time, I recently read about the 1981 Act the state of Arkansas passed, which required that public school teachers give “equal treatment” to “creation science” and “evolution science” in the biology classroom. Why? The Act held that teaching evolution alone could violate the separation between church and state, to the extent that this would be hostile to “theistic religions.” Therefore, the curriculum had to concentrate on the “scientific evidence” for creation science.
As far as I can see, industrialism, rather than Darwinism, has led to the decay of virtues historically protected by religions in the urban working class. Besides, every great tradition has its own equally fascinating religious cosmogony—for instance, the Indic tradition has an allegorical account of evolution apart from a creation story—but creationism is not defending all theistic religions, just one theistic cosmogony. This means there isn’t any “theological liberalism” in this assertion; it is a matter of one hegemon confronting what it regards as another hegemon—Darwinism.
So, why does creationism oppose Darwinism? Contrary to my earlier understanding from the scientific standpoint, I now think creationism looks at Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection not as a ‘scientific theory’ that infringes the domain of a religion but as an unusual ‘religion’ that oversteps an established religion’s doctrinal province. Creationism, therefore, looks to invade and challenge the doctrinal province of this “other religion.” In doing so, creation science, strangely, is a crude, proselytized version of what it seeks to oppose.
In its attempt to approximate a purely metaphysical proposition in practical terms or exoterically prove every esoteric percept, this kind of religious literalism takes away from the purity of esotericism and the virtues of scientific falsification. Therefore, literalism forgets that esoteric writings enable us to cross the mind’s tempestuous sea; it does not have to sink in this sea to prove anything.
In contrast to the virtues of science and popular belief, esotericism forces us to be self-reliant. We don’t necessarily have to stand on the shoulders of others and thus within a history of progress, but on our own two feet, we seek with the light of our inner experience. In this way, both science and the esoteric flourish in separate ecosystems but within one giant sphere of human experience — like prose and poetry.
In a delightful confluence of prose and poetry, Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, wrote about the evolution of life in poetry in The Temple of Nature well before his grandson contemplated the same subject in elegant prose:
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.
The prose and poetry of creation — science and the esoteric; empirical and the allegorical—make the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
In 2009, the film An Education came out. It was a Bildungsroman of sorts but it was beyond a coming-of-age story. It showed the life of the aspiring, post-World War II nouveau riche middle-class. The protagonist is a schoolgirl whose aspirationally-minded parents send her to a private school. They have no notion of what a good school is, how to tell if one is good, or why a person should attend one; they only know that “all the best” send their children to fee-paying schools. In the process, they’re swindled. The film’s characters descend into wallowing self-pity as nothing works out quite right for the protagonist. The story showcases a reality that we’re dealing with today. A fiction created by and for the post-War nouveau riche is collapsing. Those caught in its net do not recognize that what is collapsing is a fantasy, believing instead that the social order is declining, that a social contract has been broken.
Adam Smith wrote in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759),
The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world, and that mankind are disposed to go along with him in all those agreeable emotions with which the advantages of his situation so readily inspire him. At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the advantages it procures him. The poor man, on the contrary is ashamed of his poverty.
In the twenty-first century, achievement replaces riches as a font of glory. And that is good. It means that we have reached a point where being monied by itself is no longer a distinction. Achievement is the currency of the realm now (if anyone wants to imagine me saying that in the voice of Cutler Beckett from Pirates of the Caribbean, please feel free). What we face today is a society of rich men whose hearts have dilated but who haven’t reinvested their wealth to procure advantage. And herein lies the rub: procuring advantage requires savoir-faire and those who built and benefitted from the society of post-War nouveau riche for the better part don’t have it.
The savoir-faire needed is a type of street-smarts, but for life and careers rather than the literal streets (though it’s good to have that as well). This knowledge is not particularly secret, yet when caught out, the nouveau riche middle-class squawks and cries foul. Take for example Abigail Fisher and her lawsuit against UT-Austin: the young woman required the Supreme Court to validate UT-Austin’s assertion that graduating above average from a public school, playing in a section of a youth orchestra, and being one of two million Habitat for Humanity volunteers did not make her remarkable. The Abigail Fisher story is not one of racism or affirmative action. It’s a story of lack of savoir-faire. A person who thinks that any of the extracurriculars entered into evidence at the trial were résumé enhancing is as deluded as the parents from An Education who thought that merely forking out money ensured social mobility, a better life, the prospect of great things.
Making unfounded assumptions is part of the nouveau riche middle-class’ lack of savoir-faire. A lawyer I know has made it well into adulthood without knowing that advanced degrees from Ivy League schools are fully funded, i.e. free. Believing that he could neither afford an academic advanced degree nor that it would pay off professionally, he pursued law at a school where he received in-state tuition. He suffers from a stagnant career and fears that he doesn’t have a vocation for law. In contrast, this lawyer has already been surpassed by another attorney I know who is still in her twenties. In addition to being fiercely intelligent overall, she is worldly-wise. When she decided on law school, she pursued only Ivy Plus schools exactly because they were the ones with the best funding and scholarships; name recognition was an aside. She received merit-based full tuition funding, a stipend, and major professional opportunities because she was a prize winner.
Nor is it an anomaly that the highest tiers of education are free, or less expensive than people assume. Those who have read George Elliot’s Daniel Deronda know that Daniel was on track to win a fellowship which would refunded his tuition at Cambridge to his father Sir Hugo Mallinger. This was a huge honor which had almost nothing to do with money. Sir Hugo was fabulously wealthy; he didn’t need the money refunded – though of course it would have been nice. The honor was the primary attraction for him. “Daddy paid all my tuition” can’t be put on a résumé; “___ Fellow” or “winner of ___ Scholarship” can be. To be clear, I fully support parents saving for their children’s college. But I have had genuine conversations with people who told me that even though their children qualified for merit scholarships or grants, they wouldn’t apply for them because “those are for poor people.” The middle-middle class’ false pride of refusing to apply for scholarships and grants, euphemistically call “paying their way,” has only disadvantaged middle-middle class children as they arrive at the ages of twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-six without plums, without proof of their abilities, without signs that someone, some institution took a bet on them and that they held up their end of the bargain. Further as Daniel Deronda’s story shows, this false pride has never been the way of the upper-class.
A lack of savoir-faire affects in career shaping as well. I know two artists, one of whom is quite young, just over thirty, and highly successful; the other has had an unnecessarily disappointing career. Artistically, both are remarkable. The difference between the two is that since undergraduate the first has submitted her work to art journals, competitions, galleries, any opportunity where her art could be seen. Acceptance rates are less than one percent, and it is entirely standard for artists to apply multiple times to a single opportunity. The first artist has learned to take rejection on the chin, get up, and reapply. She said to me once, “all grant applications want to know what journals you’ve been published in, what shows you’ve had and where; all the journals and competitions want to know what grants you’ve won, where you’ve been published, and what shows you’ve had. The only thing to do is to keep having shows, keep applying, keep building.” Her persistence shows as she wins more and more prizes which in turn lead to bigger opportunities. She’s already developed a name and reputation within the professional community.
In contrast, the second artist submitted her work to a handful of opportunities when she graduated but gave up when the everything ended in rejections. Now, decades later, she understands how the “numbers game” works, and she’s submitting her work for consideration again. Just because she “didn’t know” she has lost decades she could have spent building her professional reputation and career. She lives in a kind of disappointed daze, wondering why things never quite worked out. She’s reached the point where she can afford to support herself by art alone, but she feels as though somehow some vague, inchoate rules of the game have been broken.
This is not about having money. The artist who has drifted and the first lawyer both come from and have enough money to do anything they might desire. This is about knowing how things work. In the age of the internet, such ignorance and lack of savoir-faire is inexcusable, and it is only right for it to be treated as a flaw. Back in 1905, my great-grandfather who had grown up in unfathomable, though genteel, poverty managed to figure out that Harvard doctorates were fully funded. He pursued one to the benefit of himself and his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. If he could gather information and take action in 1905, in a part of the country without telephone, running water, electricity, or proper roads, what excuse is there for people today?
Gathering information and then taking action has another name: meritocracy. Both the left and the right have united against meritocracy, as predicted by Michael Dunlop Young, the man who coined the term “meritocracy.” Both sides agree that the meritocracy is bad because it is unfair, it breaks social bonds, however fictious. The rub with meritocracy is that it favors those who have savoir-faire over those who do not.And perhaps it is unfair. For example, the artists are equal in that each is technically strong and expresses interesting concepts with their art. Subjectively speaking, I would pay to go see the work of either of them in galleries. Yet one is ahead of the other in her career because she knew what was needed to cultivate her professional reputation and promote her work.
The second lawyer, the first artist, the UT-Austin students who had superb applications all earned their laurels because they took the extra steps of gathering information and learning how the world works. We owe nothing to people who won’t inform themselves, who create fictions about how the world around them works and then become angry when their ideas are shown to be fantasy. Saying that we are in a social contract with such people is coercive because such a contract compels those with savoir-faire to be the custodians of those without it. It would mean that Abigail Fisher would have to be admitted to the school of her choice because she “didn’t know” that all her extracurriculars were ordinary; it would mean that the first lawyer would have to be elevated to equality with the second one, even though the first one is literally less knowledgeable about the law, because he “didn’t know” that better quality legal training was in his grasp; it would mean that we would have to hold the artist who “didn’t know” to submit to journals and gallery competitions as equal to one who has a strong career and recognition because she submits her work regularly. How is this world, a society of excusing ignorance, pandering to an affluent but uninformed, uninquiring people, more fair than a meritocracy?
This fascinating isochrone map—how many days it took to get anywhere in the world from London in 1914—at first blush evokes the cliché that the world has now shrunk. Obviously it hasn’t shrunk. While the distance between London and New Delhi is still 4,168 miles, what has shrunk is time, and this has had profound aftermaths on our lives.
One of the great ironies in the remarkable proliferation of time-saving inventions is they haven’t made life simple enough to give us more time and leisure. By leisure, I don’t mean a virtue of some kind of inertia, but a deliberate organization based on a definite view of the meaning and purpose of life. In the urban world, the workweek hasn’t shortened. We still don’t have large swaths of time to really enjoy the good life with our families and friends.
In 1956, Sir Charles Darwin, grandson of the great Charles Darwin, wrote an interesting essay on the forthcoming Age of Leisure in the magazine New Scientist in which he argued: “The technologists, working for fifty hours a week, will be making inventions so the rest of the world need only work twenty-five hours a week. […] Is the majority of mankind really able to face the choice of leisure enjoyments, or will it not be necessary to provide adults with something like the compulsory games of the schoolboy?”
He is wrong in the first part. The world may have shrunk but cities have magnified. Travel technologies have incentivized us to live farther away and simply travel longer distances to work and attract anxiety attacks during peak hour traffic [Google Marchetti’s constant]. So, rather than being bored to death, our actual challenge is to avoid psychotic breakdowns, heart attacks, and strokes resulting from being accelerated to death.
Nonetheless, Sir Charles Darwin is accurate about “compulsory games” for adults. What else are social media platforms, compulsive eating, selfies, texts, Netflix bingeing, and 24/7 news media that dominate our lives? They are the real opiates of the masses. We have been so conditioned to search for happiness in these anodyne pastimes that defying these urges appears to be a denial of life itself. It is not surprising that we can no longer confidently tell the difference between passing pleasure and abiding joy. Lockdown or no lockdown, we are all unwittingly participating in these compulsory games with unwritten rules, believing that we are now that much closer to the good life of leisure. But are we?
‘Time is the wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.’— Rabindranath Tagore
What’s the first question in the field of public policy? According to the Indian Economist Ajay Shah, “What should the state do?” is the first question. He says, “A great deal of good policy reform can be obtained by putting an end to certain government activities and by initiating new areas of work that better fit into the tasks of government.”
This question is especially essential for a weak state like India. But what if people prefer government subsidies, assertive intermediaries and a weak state? I don’t know the answer to this question. The story of the Indian farm protest is an illustrative example; it is a rebellion to stay bound to the old status quo, fearful of free choice.
Protest Timeline
04 June 2020: Union Cabinet clears three ordinances meant for reforms in the Indian Agricultural sector. These reforms upgrade farmers from being just producers to free-market traders. Agriculture is a state subject in India, but state governments have had no political will to usher in these reforms. China reformed its agriculture sector first, followed by other industries. India is doing it the other way round and thirty years late. So, the union government followed constitutional means to usher in the reforms.
04 December 2020: The Union Govt offers a work-around the dilution of MSP. By the way, MSP sets an unnaturally high price and cuts out the competition, so the middlemen club in the farmer’s association of Punjab, Haryana, and U.P. want nothing less than the scraping of these reforms.
Bottom line: A) The Ordinances aim to liberalize Agri trade and increase the number of buyers for farmers. B) de-regulation alone may not be sufficient to attract more buyers.
Almost every economist worth his salt acknowledges the merit in point A) and welcomes these essential reforms that are thirty years late but better late than never. Ajay Shah says, “We [Indians] suffer from the cycle of boom and bust in Indian agriculture because the state has disrupted all these four forces of stabilization—warehousing, futures trading, domestic trade and international trade. The state makes things worse by having tools like MSP and applying these tools in the wrong way. Better intuition into the working of the price system would go a long way in shifting the stance of policy.”
However, the middlemen argue on point B), that acts as a broad cover for their real fears of squandering their upper-hand in the current APMC/MSP system. Although nobody denies that a sudden opening of the field for competition will threaten the income of these middlemen, such uncertainties should not justify violent protests, slandering campaigns, that look to derail the entire process of upgrading the lives of a great majority of poor farmers in the country.
Even worse, these events get branded in broad strokes as state violence and human rights abuses by pre-planned Twitter and street campaigns and unnecessary road blockades. Everybody questions internet outages during these protests but no one questions the ethics of protesters blocking essential roads in the city. A section of the Indian society and diaspora hates Prime Minister Modi for sure. I have no qualms with this, but the reckless hate shouldn’t negate all nuances in analyzing perfectly sane reforms. Social justice warriors legitimize the vicious cycle of dissent without nuance because they don’t take the trouble of even reading the farm bill but make it a virtue to reason from their “bleeding hearts.”
Ordinarily, the Indian state works inadequately, experiences confusion when faced with a crisis. It comes out with a communication of a policy package that attempts to address the problem in a short-term way and retreats into indifference. So, there are two aspects to its incompetence, one, there is a lack of political will because special interest groups persuade the government towards the wrong objectives. And two, the state capacity is so weak that it fails to achieve the goal. The farm protest is a hideous third kind of difficulty: a special interest group of assertive, influential middlemen want the strong-willed, long-term thinking Indian government policy—a rare entity— to sway towards short-termism under the pretext of human rights abuse. The hard left is actually supporting the Indian state to remain weak. They will also be the first to blame the state when it comes off as weak in the next debacle.
The most important historical question to help understand our rise from the muck to modern civilization is: how did we go from linear to exponential productivity growth? Let’s call that question “who started modernity?” People often look to the industrial revolution, which is certainly an acceleration of growth…but it is hard to say it caused the growth because it came centuries after the initial uptick. Historians also bring up the Renaissance, but this is also a mislead due to the ‘written bias’ of focusing on books, not actions; the Renaissance was more like the window dressing of the Venetian commercial revolution of the 11th and 12th centuries, which is in my opinion the answer to “who started modernity.” However, despite being the progenitors of modern capitalism (which is worth a blog in and of itself), Venice’s growth was localized and did not spread immediately across Europe; instead, Venice was the regional powerhouse who served as the example to copy. The Venetian model was also still proto-banking and proto-capitalism, with no centralized balance sheets, no widespread retail deposits, and a focus on Silk Road trade. Perhaps the next question is, “who spread modernity across Europe?” The answer to this question is far easier, and in fact can be centered to a huge degree around a single man, who was possibly the richest man of all time: Jakob Fugger.
Jakob Fugger was born to a family of textile traders in Augsburg in the 15th century, and after training in Venice, revolutionized banking and trading–the foundations on which investment, comparative advantage, and growth were built–as well as relationships between commoners and aristocrats, the church’s view of usury, and even funded the exploration of the New World. He was the only banker alive who could call in a debt on the powerful Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, mostly because Charles owed his power entirely to Fugger. Strangely, he is perhaps best known for his philanthropic innovations (founding the Fuggerei, which were some of the earliest recorded philanthropic housing projects and which are still in operation today); this should be easily outcompeted by:
His introduction of double entry bookkeeping to the continent
His invention of the consolidated balance sheet (bringing together the accounts of all branches of a family business)
His invention of the newspaper as an investment-information tool
His key role in the pope allowing usury (mostly because he was the pope’s banker)
His transformation of Maximilian from a paper emperor with no funding, little land, and no power to a competitor for European domination
His funding of early expeditions to bring spices back from Indonesia around the Cape of Good Hope
His trusted position as the only banker who the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire would trust to fund the election of Charles V
His complicated, mostly adversarial relationship with Martin Luther that shaped the Reformation and culminated in the German Peasant’s War, when Luther dropped his anti-capitalist rhetoric and Fugger-hating to join Fugger’s side in crushing a modern-era messianic figure
His involvement in one of the earliest recorded anti-trust lawsuits (where the central argument was around the etymology of the word “monopoly”)
His dissemination, for the first time, of trustworthy bank deposit services to the upper middle class
His funding of the military revolution that rendered knights unnecessary and bankers and engineers essential
His invention of the international joint venture in his Hungarian copper-mining dual-family investment, where marriages served in the place of stockholder agreements
His 12% annualized return on investment over his entire life (beating index funds for almost 5 decades without the benefit of a public stock market), dying the richest man in history.
The story of Fugger’s family–the story, perhaps, of the rise of modernity–begins with a tax record of his family moving to Augsburg, with an interesting spelling of his name: “Fucker advenit” (Fugger has arrived). His family established a local textile-trading family business, and even managed to get a coat of arms (despite their peasant origins) by making clothes for a nobleman and forgiving his debt.
As the 7th of 7 sons, Jakob Fugger was given the least important trading post in the area by his older brothers; Salzburg, a tiny mountain town that was about to have a change in fortune when miners hit the most productive vein of silver ever found by Europeans until the Spanish found Potosi (the Silver Mountain) in Peru. He then began his commercial empire by taking a risk that no one else would.
Sigismund, the lord of Salzburg, was sitting on top of a silver mine, but still could not run a profit because he was trying to compete with the decadence of his neighbors. He took out loans to fund huge parties, and then to expand his power, made the strategic error of attacking Venice–the most powerful trading power of the era. This was in the era when sovereigns could void debts, or any contracts, within their realm without major consequences, so lending to nobles was a risky endeavor, especially without backing of a powerful noble to force repayment or address contract breach.
Because of this concern, no other merchant or banker would lend to Sigismund for this venture because sovereigns could so easily default on debts, but where others saw only risk, Fugger saw opportunity. He saw that Sigismund was short-sighted and would constantly need funds; he also saw that Sigismund would sign any contract to get the funds to attack Venice. Fugger fronted the money, collateralized by near-total control of Sigismund’s mines–if only he could enforce the contract.
Thus, the Fugger empire’s first major investment was in securing (1) a long-term, iterated credit arrangement with a sovereign who (2) had access to a rapidly-growing industry and was willing to trade its profits for access to credit (to fund cannons and parties, in his case).
What is notable about Fugger’s supposedly crazy risk is that, while it depended on enforcing a contract against a sovereign who could nullify it with a word, he still set himself up for a consistent, long-term benefit that could be squeezed from Sigismund so long as he continued to offer credit. This way, Sigismund could not nullify earlier contracts but instead recognized them in return for ongoing loan services; thus, Fugger solved this urge toward betrayal by iterating the prisoner’s dilemma of defaulting. He did not demand immediate repayment, but rather set up a consistent revenue stream and establishing Fugger as Sigismund’s crucial creditor. Sigismund kept wanting finer things–and kept borrowing from Fugger to get them, meaning he could not default on the original loan that gave Fugger control of the mines’ income. Fugger countered asymmetrical social relationships with asymmetric terms of the contract, and countered the desire for default with becoming essential.
Eventually, Fugger met Maximilian, a disheveled, religion-and-crown-obsessed nobleman who had been elected Holy Roman Emperor specifically because of his lack of power. The Electors wanted a paper emperor to keep freedom for their principalities; Maximilian was so weak that a small town once arrested and beat him for trying to impose a modest tax. Fugger, unlike others, saw opportunity because he recognized when aligning paper trails (contracts or election outcomes) with power relationships could align interests and set him up as the banker to emperors. When Maximilian came into conflict with Sigismund, Fugger refused any further loans to Sigismund, and Maximilian forced Sigismund to step down. Part of Sigismund’s surrender and Maximilian’s new treaty included recognizing Fugger’s ongoing rights over the Salzburg mines, a sure sign that Fugger had found a better patron and solidified his rights over the mine through his political maneuvering–by denying a loan to Sigismund and offering money instead to Maximilian. Once he had secured this cash cow, Fugger was certainly put in risky scenarios, but didn’t seek out risk, and saw consistent yearly returns of 8% for several decades followed by 16% in the last 15 years of his life.
From this point forward, Fugger was effectively the creditor to the Emperor throughout Maximilian’s life, and built a similar relationship: Maximilian paid for parties, military campaigns, and bought off Electors with Fugger funds. As more of Maximilian’s assets were collateralized, Fugger’s commercial empire grew; he gained not only access to silver but also property ownership. He was granted a range of fiefs, including Arnoldstein, a critical trade juncture where Austria, Italy, and Slovenia border each other; his manufacturing and trade led the town to be renamed, for generations, Fuggerau, or Place of Fugger.
These activities that depended on lending to sovereigns brings up a major question: How did Fugger get the money he lent to the Emperor? Early in his career, he noted that bank deposit services where branches were present in different cities was a huge boon to the rising middle-upper class; property owners and merchants did not have access to reliable deposit services, so Fugger created a network of small branches all offering deposits with low interest rates, but where he could grow his services based on the dependability of moving money and holding money for those near, but not among, society’s elites. This gave him a deep well of dispersed depositors, providing him stable and dependable capital for his lending to sovereigns and funding his expanding mining empire.
Unlike modern financial engineers, who seem to focus on creative ways to go deeper in debt, Fugger’s creativity was mostly in ways that he could offer credit; he was most powerful when he was the only reliable source of credit to a political actor. So long as the relationship was ongoing, default risk was mitigated, and through this Fugger could control the purse strings on a wide range of endeavors. For instance, early in their relationship (after Maximilian deposed Sigismund and as part of the arrangement made Fugger’s interest in the Salzburg mines more permanent), Maximilian wanted to march on Rome as Charlemagne reborn and demand that the pope personally crown him; he was rebuffed dozens of times not by his advisors, but by Fugger’s denial of credit to hire the requisite soldiers.
Fugger also innovated in information exchange. Because he had a broad trading and banking business, he stood to lose a great deal if a region had a sudden shock (like a run on his banks) or gain if new opportunities arose (like a shift in silver prices). He took advantage of the printing press–less than 40 years after Gutenberg, and in a period when most writing was religious–to create the first proto-newspaper, which he used to gather and disseminate investment-relevant news. Thus, while he operated a network of small branches, he vastly improved information flow among these nodes and also standardized and centralized their accounting (including making the first centralized/combined balance sheet).
With this broad base of depositors and a network of informants, Fugger proceeded to change how war was fought and redraw the maps of Europe. Military historians have discussed when the “military revolution” that shifted the weapons, organization, and scale of war for decades, often centering in on Swedish armies in the 1550s as the beginning of the revolution. I would counter-argue that the Swedes simply continued a trend that the continent had begun in the late 1400’s, where:
Knights’ training became irrelevant, gunpowder took over
Logistics and resource planning were professionalized
Early mechanization of ship building and arms manufacturing, as well as mining, shifted war from labor-centric to a mix of labor and capital
Multi-year campaigns were possible due to better information flow, funding, professional organization
Armies, especially mercenary groups, ballooned in size
Continental diplomacy became more centralized and legalistic
Wars were fought by access to creditors more than access to trained men, because credit could multiply the recruitment/production for war far beyond tax receipts
Money mattered in war long before Fugger: Roman usurpers always took over the mints first and army Alexander showed how logistics and supply were more important than pure numbers. However, the 15th century saw a change where armies were about guns, mercenaries, technological development, and investment, and above all credit, and Fugger was the single most influential creditor of European wars. After a trade dispute with the aging Hanseatic League over their monopoly of key trading ports, Fugger manipulated the cities into betraying each other–culminating in a war where those funded by Fugger broke the monopolistic power of the League. Later, because he had a joint venture with a Hungarian copper miner, he pushed Charles V into an invasion of Hungary that resulted in the creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These are but two of the examples of Fugger destroying political entities; every Habsburg war fought from the rise of Maximilian through Fugger’s death in 1527 was funded in part by Fugger, giving him the power of the purse over such seminal conflicts as the Italian Wars, where Charles V fought on the side of the Pope and Henry VIII against Francis I of France and Venice, culminating in a Habsburg victory.
Like the Rothschilds after him, Fugger gained hugely through a reputation for being ‘good for the money’; while other bankers did their best to take advantage of clients, he provided consistency and dependability. Like the Iron Bank of Braavos in Game of Thrones, Fugger was the dependable source for ambitious rulers–but with the constant threat of denying credit or even war against any defaulter. His central role in manipulating political affairs via his banking is well testified during the election of Charles V in 1519. The powerful kings of Europe– Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England, and Frederick III of Saxony all offered huge bribes to the Electors. Because these sums crossed half a million florins, the competition rapidly became one not for the interest of the Electors–but for the access to capital. The Electors actually stipulated that they would not take payment based on a loan from anyone except Fugger; since Fugger chose Charles, so did they.
Fugger also inspired great hatred by populists and religious activists; Martin Luther was a contemporary who called Fugger out by name as part of the problem with the papacy. The reason? Fugger was the personal banker to the Pope, who was pressured into rescinding the church’s previously negative view of usury. He also helped arrange the scheme to fund the construction of the new St. Peter’s basilica; in fact, half of the indulgence money that was putatively for the basilica was in fact to pay off the Pope’s huge existing debts to Fugger. Thus, to Luther, Fugger was greed incarnate, and Fugger’s name became best known to the common man not for his innovations but his connection to papal extravagance and greed. This culminated in the 1525 German Peasant’s War, which saw an even more radical Reformer and modern-day messianic figure lead hordes of hundreds of thousands to Fuggerau and many other fortified towns. Luther himself inveighed against these mobs for their radical demands, and Fugger’s funding brought swift military action that put an end to the war–but not the Reformation or the hatred of bankers, which would explode violently throughout the next 100 years in Germany.
This brings me to my comparison: Fugger against all of the great wealth creators in history. What makes him stand head and shoulders above the rest, to me, is that his contributions cross so many major facets of society: Like Rockefeller, he used accounting and technological innovations to expand the distribution of a commodity (silver or oil), and he was also one of the OG philanthropists. Like the Rothschilds’ development of the government bond market and reputation-driven trust, Fugger’s balance-sheet inventions and trusted name provided infrastructural improvement to the flow of capital, trust in banks, and the literal tracking of transactions. However, no other capitalist had as central of a role in religious change–both as the driving force behind allowing usury and as an anti-Reformation leader. Similarly, few other people had as great a role in the Age of Discovery: Fugger funded Portuguese spice traders in Indonesia, possibly bankrolled Magellan, and funded the expedition that founded Venezuela (named in honor of Venice, where he trained). Lastly, no other banker had as influential of a role in political affairs; from dismantling the Hanseatic League to deciding the election of 1519 to building the Habsburgs from paper emperors to the most powerful monarchs in Europe in two generations, Fugger was the puppeteer of Europe–and such an effective one that you have barely heard of him. Hence, Fugger was not only the greatest wealth creator in history but among the most influential people in the rise of modernity.
Fugger’s legacy can be seen in his balance sheet of 1527; he basically developed the method of using it for central management, its only liabilities were widespread deposits from the upper-middle class (and his asset-to-debt ratio was in the range of 7-to-1, leaving an astonishingly large amount of equity for his family), and every important leader on the continent was literally in his debt. It also showed him to have over 1 million florins in personal wealth, making him one of the world’s first recorded millionaires. The title of this post was adapted from a self-description written by Jakob himself as his epitaph. As my title shows, I think it is fairer to credit his wealth creation than his wealth accumulation, since he revolutionized multiple industries and changed the history of capitalism, trade, European politics, and Christianity, mostly in his contribution to the credit revolution. However, the man himself worked until the day he died and took great pride in being the richest man in history.
If two politicians are equal in every other respect but one was better at basketball… I guess go with that one? I mean, all else equal they’re maybe a better team player or something. But that line of thinking doesn’t mean we should only ever vote for ex-NBA stars.
There are plenty of similar potentially attractive signals: veteran status, success in business and/or being a fake billionaire, academic success, acting, etc. Some signals are stronger, and some imply a smaller pool of candidates. If there are more successful business people in the world we should expect to observe more of them transitioning to politics than, say, world-class bowlers. Likewise, if the signal is more relevant (e.g. law degree vs. paleontology degree), it makes sense to see more of them in the wild.
That 18% of German politicians have PhD’s seems wild to me. Maybe I’m biased because I work in an organization full to the brim with PhD’s. But that many politicians with degrees seems about as reasonable and as likely as having half of Congress be elite athletes.
Folks, as you have probably guessed by now, NOL has a new blogger. His name is Vishnu, and you can read about him right here:
Vishnu Modur is a Ph.D. in molecular biology who works as a cancer biologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. He has diverse passions outside the lab setting. He is deeply interested in Indic cultural anthropology, Indic philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of science. He blogs about his scientific research on Medium and writes about history, politics, and culture on NOL. He quips that as a resident-alien in the United States, he can offer a unique perspective, using his resident and sometimes his ‘alien’ viewpoints on several issues.
Of late, a growing number of Indian-Americans look to assert a South Asian identity for most of their sociopolitical and cultural expressions even though actual residents of ‘South Asia’ don’t claim this identity in any way, home or abroad. I realize that second-generation Indian-Americans embrace ‘South Asian’ forums in reaction to various domestic conditions. However, they ignore the polysemy of the term ‘South Asia’ when they project it internationally, for example, to express ‘South Asian’ pride over Kamala Devi Harris’s historic election for the Vice Presidency, instead of just Indian-American pride. Of course, I’m not talking about African-American pride here; it is beyond the purview of my discussion.
According to my understanding, increasing application of the term ‘South Asia’—just like the Middle East—precludes a nuanced perception of the particular countries that make up the region. It permits Americans to perceive the region like it is a monolith. Although the impression of the United States is striking in the Indian imagination, the image of India, as it turns out, is not very obvious for the average citizen in the United States, not even among second-generation Indian Americans, as I see it. To gauge American curiosity in a particular region, language enrollment in US universities is a decent metric. It turns out, around seven times more American students study Russian than all the Indian languages combined. The study of India compares unfavorably with China in nearly every higher education metric, and surprisingly, it also fares poorly compared to Costa Rica! As an aside, to understand India and her neighborhood, an alternate perspective to CNN or BBC on ‘South Asian’ geopolitics is WION (“World is One” News – a take on the Indic vasudhaiva kutumbakam). I highly recommend the Gravitas section of WION for an international audience.
Back to the central question: ‘South Asia’ and why Indians do not prefer this tag?
For decades, the United States hyphenated its India policy by balancing every action with New Delhi with a counterbalancing activity with Islamabad. So much so that the American focus on Iran and North Korean nuclear proliferation stood out in total contrast to the whitewashing of Pakistan’s private A.Q. Khan network for nuclear proliferation. Furthermore, in a survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that gauges how Americans perceive other countries, India hovered between forty-six and forty-nine on a scale from zero to one hundred since 1978, reflecting its reputation neither as an ally or an adversary. With the civil-nuclear deal, the Bush administration discarded the hyphenation construct and eagerly pursued an independent program between India and the United States. Still, in 2010, only 18 percent of Americans saw India as “very important” to the United States—fewer than those who felt similarly about Pakistan (19%) and Afghanistan (21%), and well below China (54%) and Japan (40%). Even though the Indo-US bilateral relationship has transformed for the better from the Bush era, the increasing use of ‘South Asia’ on various platforms by academics and non-academics alike, while discussing India, represents a new kind of hyphenated view or a bracketed view of India. Many Indian citizens in the US like me find this bracket unnecessary, especially in the present geopolitical context.
What geopolitical context? There are several reasons why South Asian identity pales in comparison to our national identities:
The word ‘South Asia’ emerged exogenously as a category in the United States to study the Asian continent by dividing it. So, it is a matter of post Second World War scholarship of Asia from the Western perspective.
Despite scholarship, ‘South Asia’ has low intelligibility because there is no real consensus over which countries comprise South Asia. SAARC includes Afghanistan among its members; the World Bank leaves it out. Some research centers include Myanmar—a province of British India till 1937, and Tibet, but leave out Afghanistan and the Maldives. For instance, the UK largely accepts the term ‘Asian’ rather than ‘South Asian’ for academic centers. The rest of Europe uses ‘Southeast Asia.’
Besides, geopolitically, India wants to grow out of the South Asian box; it cares a lot more about the ASEAN and BRICS grouping than SAARC.
Under Modi, India has a more significant relationship with Japan than with any South Asian neighbor. With Japan and South Korea, India plans to make Indo-pacific a geopolitical reality.
South Asia symbolizes India’s unique hegemonic fiefdom, which is viewed unfavorably by neighboring Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
According to the World Bank, South Asia remains one of the least economically integrated regions globally.
South Asia is also among the least physically integrated (by road infrastructure) regions of the world and this disconnect directly affects our politics and culture.
Therefore, the abstract nature of ‘South Asia’ is far from a neutral term that embraces multiple cultures. It is, at best, a placeholder for structured geopolitical co-operation in the subcontinent. However, in socio-cultural terms, ‘South Asia’ used interchangeably with India signals India’s dominance over her neighborhood. Contrarily, in India’s eyes, it is a dilution of her rising aspirations on the world stage. These facts widen the gap between the US’s intentions (general public and particularly, second-generation Indian-Americans) and a prouder India’s growing ambitions.
Besides, it is worth mentioning that women leaders have already held the highest public office in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, etc. So as you see in this video, the Indian international actress, Priyanka Chopra, tries her best to be diplomatic about this nebulous ‘South Asian’ pride thingy, but she rejoins with the more solid identity, her Indian identity. The next time, say a Nepalese-American does something incredible in the US, and you want to find out how another Nepali feels about this achievement, as a matter of experiment, refer to the accomplishment as Nepali pride, instead of South Asian pride, and see the delight on the person’s face. Repeat this with another Nepali, but this time use the ‘South Asian’ identity tag and note the contrast in the reaction.
Mr Trump is practically gone and he is not coming back. (For one thing, he will be too old in 2024. For another thing, see below.) The political conditions that got such an un-preposterous candidate elected in 2016 however, those conditions, don’t look like they are going away. (I hope I am wrong.) A large fraction of Americans will continue to be ignored from an economic standpoint, as well as insulted daily by their better. Four years of insults thrown at people like me and the hysterical outpouring of contempt by liberal media elites on the last days of the Trump administration are not making me go away. Instead, they will cement my opposition to their vision of the world and to their caste behavior. I would bet dollars on the penny that a high proportion of the 74 million+ who voted for Mr Trump in 2020 feels the same. (That’s assuming that’s the number who voted for him; I am not sure of it at all. It could be more. Currently, with the information available, I vote 60/40 that the election was not – not – stolen.)
I never liked Trump, the man, for all the obvious reasons although I admired his steadfastness because it’s so rare among politicians. In the past two years, I can’t say I liked any of his policies, though I liked his judicial appointments. It’s just that who else could I vote for in 2016? Hillary? You are kidding, right? And in 2020, after President Trump was subjected to four years (and more) of unceasing gross abuse and of persecution guided by a totalitarian spirit, would it not have been dishonorable to vote for anyone but him? (Libertarians: STFU!)
Believe it or not, if Sen. Sanders and his 1950 ideas had not been eliminated again in 2020, again through the machinations of the Dem. National Committee, I would have had a serious talk with myself. At least, Sanders is not personally corrupt, and with a Republican Senate, we would have had a semi-paralyzed government that would have been OK with me.
One week after the event of 1/6/21, maybe “the breach” of the Capitol, many media figures continue to speak of a “coup.” Even the Wall Street Journal has joined in. That’s downright grotesque. I don’t doubt that entering the Capitol in a disorderly fashion and, for many, (not all; see the videos) uninvited, is illegal as well as unseemly. I am in favor of the suspects being found and prosecuted, for trespassing, or something. This will have the merit of throwing some light on the political affiliation(s) of the window breakers. I still see no reason to abandon the possibility that some, maybe (maybe) in the vanguard, were Antifa or BLM professional revolutionaries. Repeating myself: Trump supporters have never behaved in that manner before. I am guessing the investigations and the prosecutions are going to be less than vigorous precisely because the new administration will not want to know or to have the details be known of the criminals’ identity. If I am wrong, and all the brutal participants were Trump supporters, we will know it very quickly. The media will be supine either way.
It’s absurd and obscenely overwrought to call the breaching of the Capitol on January 6th (by whomever), a “coup” because there was never any chance that it would result in transferring control of the federal government to anyone. Develop the scenario: Both chambers are filled with protesters (of whatever ilk); protesters occupy both presiding chairs, and they hold in their hands both House and Senate gavels. What next? Federal agencies start taking their orders from them; the FBI reports to work as usual but only to those the protesters appoint? Then, perhaps, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs interrupts the sketchy guy who is taking a selfie while sitting in the VP chair. He says he wants to hand him the nuclear controls football. (Ask Nancy Pelosi, herself perpetrator of a coup, though a small one.) If you think any of this is credible, well, think about it, think about yourself, think again. And get a hold!
That the Capitol riot was a political act is true in one way and one way only, a minor way. It derailed the electoral vote counting that had been widely described as “ceremonial.” Happened after (after) the Vice-President had declared loud and clear that he did not have the authority to change the votes. The counting resumed after only a few hours. There is no scenario, zero, under which the riot would have altered the choice of the next president. If there had been, the breach would have been a sort of coup, a weak one.
On 1/9/21, an announcer, I think it was on NPR, I hope it was on NPR, qualified the events as a “deadly” something or other. He, and media in general, including Fox News, I am afraid, forgot to go into the details. In point of fact, five people died during the protest and part-riot of 1/6/21. One was a Capitol policeman who was hit with a fire extinguisher. As I write, there is no official allegation about who did it. There is no information about the political affiliation, if any, of the culprit(s). For sure, protesters caused none of three next deaths which were due to medical emergencies, including a heart attack. The fifth casualty was a protester, who was probably inside the Capitol illegally, and who was shot to death by a policeman. She was definitely a Trump supporter. She was unarmed. Many people who are busy with their lives will think that Trump supporters had massacred five people because of the mendacity of the language used on air. Disgraceful, disgusting reporting; but we are getting used to it.
Today and yesterday, I witnessed a mass movement I think I have not seen in my life though it rings some historical bells. Pundits, lawmakers, and other members of their caste are elbowing one another out of the way to be next to make extremist pronouncements on the 1/6/21 events. Why, a journalist on Fox News, no less, a pretty blond lady wearing a slightly off the shoulder dress referred to a “domestic terror attack.” With a handful of courageous exceptions, all lawmakers I have seen appearing in the media have adopted extreme vocabulary to describe what remained a small riot, if it was a riot at all. I mean that it was a small riot as compared to what happened in several American cities in the past year. The hypocrisy is colossal in people who kept their mouths mostly shut for a hundred nights or more of burning of buildings, of police cars, of at least one police precinct (with people in it), and of massive looting.
It’s hard to explain how the media and the political face of America became unrecognizable in such a short time. Two hypotheses. First, many of the lawmakers who were in the Capitol at the time of the breach came to fear for their personal safety. Four years of describing Trump supporters as Nazis and worse must have left a trace and multiplied their alarm. Except for the handful of Congressmen and women who served in the military and who saw actual combat, our lawmakers have nothing in their lives to prepare them for physical danger. They mostly live cocooned lives; the police forces that protect them have not been disbanded. (What do you know?) I think they converted the abject fear they felt for a short while into righteous indignation. Indignation is more self-respecting than fear for one’s skin.
My second hypothesis to explain the repellent verbal behavior: The shameful noises I heard in the media are the manifestation of a rat race to abandon a sinking ship. Jobs are at stake, careers are at stake, cushy lifestyles are at stake. “After Pres. Trump is gone, as he surely will be soon,” the lawmakers are thinking, “there will be a day of reckoning, and a purge. I have to establish right away a vivid, clear, unforgettable record of my hatred to try and avoid the purge. No language is too strong to achieve this end.” That’s true even for Republican politicians because, they too have careers. Trump cabinet members resigned for the same reason, I think when they could have simply declared, “I don’t approve of…. but I am staying to serve the people to the end.”
Along with an outburst of extremist public language, there came a tsunami of censorship by social media, quite a few cases of people getting fired merely for having been seen at the peaceful demonstration (all legal though repulsive), and even a breach of contract by a major publisher against a US Senator based solely on his political discourse (to be resolved in court). And then, there are the enemy lists aired by the likes of CNN, for the sole purpose of ruining the careers of those who served loyally in the Trump administration.
President-elect Bidden called for “unity.” Well, I have never, ever seen so much unity between a large fraction of the political class – soon an absolute majority in government – the big media, and large corporations. I have never seen it but I have read about it. Such a union constituted the political form called “corporatism.” It was the practical infrastructure of fascism.
As if political correctness had only been its training wheels, the vehicle of political censorship is speeding up. The active policing of political speech can’t be far behind. It won’t even require a revision of the federal constitution so long as private companies such as Twitter and Facebook do the dirty work. Soon, Americans will watch what they are saying in public. I fear that national police agencies will be turned to a new purpose. (The FBI, already proved its faithlessness four years ago, anyway.) Perhaps, there will be little collective cynicism involved. It’s not difficult to adopt liberalism, a self-indulgent creed. And what we understand here (wrongly) to be “socialism” only entails an endless Christmas morning. So, why not? The diabolical Mr Trump will soon be remembered as having incited some misguided, uneducated, unpolished (deplorable) Americans to massacre their legitimately elected representatives.
Incidentally, in spite of a near consensus on the matter, I have not seen or heard anything from Pres. Trump that amounts to incitement to do anything (anything) illegal. There are those who will retort that inviting his angry supporters to protest was tantamount to incitement to violence. The logic of this is clear: Only crowds that are not angry should be invited to protest. Read this again. Does it make any sense? Make a note that the constitutional propriety of Mr Trump’s belief that the election had been stolen is irrelevant here. One does not have to be constitutionally correct to have the right to protest.
Night has fallen over America. We are becoming a totalitarian society with a speed I could not have foreseen. Of course four years of unrelenting plotting to remove the properly elected president under false pretenses paved the way. Those years trained citizens to accept the unacceptable, to be intellectually docile. Suddenly I don’t feel safe. I am going to think over my participation in the social media both because of widespread censorship and because it now seems dangerous. As far as censorship is concerned I tried an alternative to Facebook, “Parler,” but it did not work for me. Besides, it seems that the big corporations, including Amazon and Apple, are ganging up to shut it down. The cloud of totalitarianism gathered so fast over our heads that all my bets are off about the kinds of risks I am now willing to take. I will still consider alternatives to Facebook but they will have to be very user-friendly, and reasonably populated. (If I want to express myself in the wilderness, I can always talk to my wife.) For the foreseeable future, I will still be easy to find in the blogosphere.
Best of luck to all my Facebook friends, including to those who need to learn to think more clearly, including those whose panties are currently in a twist.
STEM topics are important (duh!). Finding the future scientists who will improve my health and quality of living is important to me. I want society to cast a wide net to find all those poor kids, minority kids, and girls we’re currently training to be cute who, in the right setting, could be the ones to save me from the cancer I’m statistically likely to get.
But how much value are we really getting from 12th grade? I’m pulling a bait and switch with the title to this post–I think we should keep the norm of teaching 9th graders basic science. But by 12th grade, are we really getting enough value to warrant the millions of hours per year of effort we demand of 16-18-year olds? I’m skeptical.
There are lots of things that should be taught in school. Ask any group of people and you’ll quickly come up with a long list of sensible sounding ideas (personal finance, computer programming, economics, philosophy, professional communication, home ec., and on and on and on). But adding more content only means we do a worse job at all of it. And that means an increased chance of students simply rejecting those topics wholesale.
Society is filled with science/econ deniers of all persuasions. Anti-intellectuals have been a major constituency for at least the last decade. It’s not like these folks didn’t go to school. Someone tried to teach them. What I want to know is how things have would been different if we’d tried something other than overwhelming these people with authoritatively delivered facts (which seem to have resulted in push-back rather than enlightenment)?
The last 6+ years of trying to teach economics to college kids against their will has convinced me that art (especially literature and drama) affects us much more than dissecting frogs or solving equations. And exposing kids to more literature and drama has the added benefit of (possibly) helping them develop their literacy (which we’ve forgotten is not a binary variable).
Although casting a wide net to find potential scientists is important, ultimately, we only need scientific knowledge in the heads of those who don’t flip through it. But literature can help us develop empathy, and that is a mental skill we need in far more heads. I suspect that replacing a 12th grade physics class 98% of students forget with a literature class where you read a good book would do more to promote an enlightened society.
As we celebrate the approval of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, it is hard to imagine that anyone might take offense at the existence of an inexpensive, transportable solution to the pandemic. Yet this is exactly what I have encountered. A friend who is an arch-Conservative (note the capital C) responded with hostility during a discussion on differences between the Oxford and Pfizer vaccines. The issue was that my friend couldn’t accept the scientific evidence that the Oxford vaccine is superior to the Pfizer one. He fixated on the fifteen-billion-dollar subsidy Pfizer received from the US government to create their vaccine. For the Conservative, it was as if to admit the difference between the vaccines was unpatriotic since one was bought by the US taxpayer. His objections were not based on scientific evidence or ideology but upon identity and background.
During the discussion, my Conservative friend brought up the Oxford team’s continuous publication of their data as if that action somehow lessened their research’s impact or validity. The final paragraph on the Oxford research team’s webpage says:
This is just one of hundreds of vaccine development projects around the world; several successful vaccines offer the best possible results for humanity. Lessons learned from our work on this project are being shared with teams around the world to ensure the best chances of success.
The implication was “well, they’re just wacko do-gooders! They’re not going to make a profit acting like that!” The idea being that legitimate scientific research bodies behave like Scrooge McDuck with their knowledge. On a side note, this type of “Conservative” mentality has greatly damaged public perception of capitalism, a topic I’ll return to at a later point.
Members of the Oxford vaccine team are assumed to be in the running for the Nobel Prize, and for this, odds of winning are proportionate to the speed with which the broader scientific community can check findings. The Conservative could not overcome a mental block over the fifteen billion dollars. The difference is one of vision. To put it bluntly, Oxford is aware as an institution that it has existed for almost nine hundred years before the creation of Pfizer and that it will probably exist nine hundred years after Pfizer is no longer. Oxford wants the Nobel Prize; the long-term benefits – investment, grants, funding awards, etc. – far outweigh any one-time payout. As to the long-term outlook required for Nobel Prize pursuit, the willingness to pass up one benefit in favor of a multitude of others, it is alien to those whose focus is short-sighted, who are enticed by single-time subsidies or quick profits.
In general, it can probably be said that the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. He believes that if government is in the hands of decent men, it ought not to be too much restricted by rigid rules. Since he is essentially opportunist and lacks principles, his main hope must be that the wise and the good will rule—not merely by example, as we all must wish, but by authority given to them and enforced by them. Like the socialist, he is less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people.
In the case of the vaccine, the Conservative I spoke with had the idea that since the government sponsored Pfizer’s version, Americans ought to accept placidly the Pfizer vaccine as their lot in life. Consequently, coercive policies, for instance refusing the AstraZeneca vaccine FDA approval (something which hasn’t occurred – yet), are acceptable. Behind this facile, even lazy, view lies an incomprehension when confronted with behaviors and mindsets calibrated for large scale enterprises. Actions taken to achieve long-term building – in this instance the possibility of winning a Nobel Prize – are branded as suspicious, underhanded. At an even deeper level lies a resentment of AstraZeneca’s partner: Oxford with all of its associations.
Rather than being a malaise of big C “Conservatism,” the response, detailed in this anecdote, to a comparison between the vaccines conforms to Conservative ideas. Narrowness of mind and small scope of vision are prized. As Hayek pointed out in 1960, these traits lead to a socio-cultural and intellectual poverty which is as poisonous as the material and moral poverty of outright socialism. My own recent conclusion is that the poverty of big C “Conservatism” might be even worse than that of socialism because mental and socio-cultural poverty can create circumstances leading to a longer, more subtle slide into material poverty while accompanied by a growing resentment as conformity still leads to failure. When class and ideological dynamics invade matters such that scientific evidence is interpreted through political identities, we face a grave threat to liberty.
One of my favorite classics about why big businesses can’t always innovate is Clayton Christiansen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. It is one of the most misunderstood business books, since its central concept–disruption–has been misquoted, and then popularized. Take the recent post on Investopedia that says in the second sentence that “Disruptive technology sweeps away the systems or habits it replaces because it has attributes that are recognizably superior.” This is the ‘hype’ definition used by non-innovators.
I think part of the misconception comes from thinking of disruption as major, public, technological marvels that are recognizable for their complexity or for even creating entire new industries. Disruptive innovations tend instead to be marginal, demonstrably simpler, worse on conventional scales, and start out by slowly taking over adjacent, small markets.
It recently hit me that you can identify disruption via Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s simple heuristics of recognizing when industry players are fragile. Taleb is my favorite modern philosopher, because he actually brought a new, universally applicable concept to the table, that puts into words what people have been practicing implicitly–but without a term to use. Anti-fragility is the inverse of fragile and actually helps you understand it better. Anti-fragile does not mean ‘resists breaking,’ which is more like ‘robust;’ instead, it means gains from chaos. Ford Pintos are fragile, Nokia phones are robust, but mechanical things are almost never anti-fragile. Bacteria species are anti-fragile to anti-biotics, as trying to kill them makes them stronger. Anti-fragile things are usually organic, and usually made up of fragile things–the death of one bacterium makes the species more resistant.
Taleb has a simple heuristic for finding anti-fragility. I recommend you read his book to get the full picture, but the secret to this concept is a simple thought experiment. Take any concept (or thing), and identify how it works (or fails to work). Now ask, if you subject it to chaos–by that, I mean, if you try to break it–and slowly escalate how hard you try, what happens?
If it gets disproportionately harmed, it is fragile. E.g., traffic: as you add cars, time-to-destination gets worse slowly at first, then all of the sudden increases rapidly, and if you do it enough, cars literally stop.
If it gets proportionately harmed or there is no effect, it is robust. Examples are easy, since most functional mechanical and electric systems are either fragile (such as Ford Pintos) or robust (Honda engines, Nokia phones, the Great Pyramids).
If it gets better, it is anti-fragile. Examples are harder here, since it is easier to destroy than build (and anti-fragility usually occurs based on fragile elements, which gets confusing); bacterial resistance to anti-biotics (or really, the function of evolution itself) is a great one.
The only real way to get anti-fragility outside of evolution is through optionality. Debt (obligation without a choice) is fragile to any extraneous shock, so a ‘free option’–choice without obligation, the opposite, is pure anti-fragility. Not just literal ‘options’ in the market; anti-fragile takes a different form in every case, and though the face is different, the structure is the same. OK, get it? Maybe you do. I recommend coming up with your own example–if you are just free riding on mine, you don’t get it.
Anyway, back to Christiansen. Taleb likes theorizing and leaves example-finding to you, while Christiansen scrupulously documented what happened to hundreds of companies and his concepts arose from his data; think about it like Christiansen is Darwin, carefully measuring beaks, and recognizing natural selection, where Taleb is Wallace, theorizing from his experience and the underlying math of reality. Except in this case, Taleb is not just talking about natural selection, he is also showing how mutation works, and giving a theory of evolution that is not restricted to just biology.
I realized that you can actually figure out whether an innovation is disruptive using this heuristic. It takes some care, because people often look at the technology and ask if it is anti-fragile–which is a mistake. Technologies are inorganic, so usually robust or fragile. Industries are organic, strategies are organic, companies are organic. Many new strategies build on companies’ competencies or existing customer bases, and though they may meet the ‘hype’ definition above, they give upside to incumbents, and are thus not fragilizing. Disruption happens when a company has an exposure to a strategy that it has little to gain from, but that could cannibalize its market if it grows, as anti-fragile things are wont to do.
The questions is: is a given incumbent company fragile with respect to a given strategy? Let’s start with some examples–first Christiansen’s, then my own:
Were 3″ drive makers fragile with respect to using smaller drives in cars?
In my favorite Christiansen anecdote, a 3″ drive-making-CEO, whose company designed a smaller 1.8″ drive but couldn’t sell it to their PC or mainframe customers, complained that he did exactly what Christiansen said, and built smaller drives, and there was no market. Meanwhile, startups were selling 1.8″ drives like crazy–to car companies, for onboard computers.
Christiansen notes that this was a tiny market, which would be an 0.01% change on a big-company income statement, and a low-profit one at that. So, since these companies were big, they were fragile to low-margin, low-volume, fast-growing submarkets. Meanwhile, startups were unbelievably excited about selling small drives at a loss, just so that Honda would buy from them.
So, 3″ drive makers had everything to lose (the general drive market) and a blip to gain, where startups had everything to gain and nothing to lose. Note that disruptive technologies are not those that are hard to invent or that immediately revolutionize the industry. Big companies (as Christiansen proved) are actually better at big changes and at invention. They are worse at recognizing value of small changes and jumps between industries.
Were book retailers fragile with respect to online book sales?
Yes, Amazon is my Christiansen follow-on. Jeff Bezos, as documented in The Everything Store, gets disruption: he invented the ‘two-pizza meeting’, so he ‘gets’ smallness; he intentionally isolates his innovation teams, so he ‘gets’ the excitement of tiny gains and allows cannibalism; he started in a proof-of-concept, narrow, feasible discipline (books) with the knowledge that it would grow into the Everything Store if successful, so he ‘gets’ going from simple beginnings to large-scale, well, disruption.
The Everything Store reads like a manual on how to be disrupted. Barnes & Noble first said “We can do that whenever we want.” Then when Bezos got some traction, B&N said “We can try this out but we need to figure out how to do it using our existing infrastructure.” Then when Bezos started eating their lunch, B&N said “We need to get into online book sales,” but sold the way they did in stores, by telling customers what they want, not by using Bezos’ anti-fragile review system. Then B&N said “We need to start doing whatever Bezos does, and beat him by out-spending,” by which time he was past that and selling CDs and then (eventually) everything.
Book sellers were fragile because they had existing assets that had running costs; they were catering to customers with not just a book, but with an experience; they were in the business of selecting books for customers, not using customers for recommendations; they treasured partnerships with publishers rather than thinking of how to eliminate them.
Now, some rapid-fire. Think carefully, since it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking industry titans were stupid, not fragile, and it is easy to have false positives unless you use Taleb’s heuristic.
Car companies were fragile to electric sports cars, and Elon Musk was anti-fragile. Sure, he was up-market, which doesn’t follow Christiansen’s down-market paradigm, but he found the small market that the Nissan Leaf missed.
NASA was fragile to modern, cheap, off-the-shelf space solutions, and…yet again…Elon Musk was anti-fragile.
Hedge funds were fragile to index funds, currently are fragile to copy trading, and I hope to god they break.
Lastly, some counter-examples, since it is always better to use the via negativa, and assuming you have additive knowledge is dangerous. If you disagree, prove me wrong, found a startup, and make a bajillion dollars by disrupting the big guys who won’t be able to find a market:
There is nothing disruptive about 5G.
Solar and wind are fragile and fragilizing.
What was wrong with WeWork’s business model? Double fragility–fixed contracts with building owners, flexible contracts with customers.
On a more optimistic note, cool tech can still be sustaining (as opposed to disruptive), like RoboAdvisors or induction stoves or 3D printed shoes.
Artificial intelligence or blockchain any use you have heard of (but not in any that you don’t know yet).
So, to summarize, if a company is fragile to a new strategy, the best it can do is try to robustify itself, since it has little upside. Many innovations give upside to incumbents at the marginal cost of R&D, and thus sustain them; disruption happens when the incumbents have little to gain from adopting a strategy, but startups have a high exposure to positive impact from possible adoption of a strategy due to the potential growth from small-market, incremental/simplifying opportunities, which is definitionally anti-fragility to the strategy.
Now, I hope you have a tool for judging whether industrial incumbents are fragile. Rather than trying to predict success or failure of any, you should just use Taleb’s heuristic–that will help you sort things into ‘hyped as disruptive’ vs. ‘actually probably disruptive.’ A last thought: if you found this wildly confusing, just remember, disruptive innovations tend to steal the jobs of incumbents. So, if an incumbent (say, a Goldman Sachs/Morgan Stanley veteran writing the definition of “disruptive” for Investopedia) is talking about a banking or trading technology, it is almost certainly not disruptive, since he would hardly tell you how to render him extraneous. You will find out what is disruptive when he makes an apology video while wearing a nice watch and French cuffs.
Notes On Liberty 