April 2007 – Page 3 – artdiamondblog.com

Rockefeller Clan’s “Tradition of Philanthropy”

Swan Lake is part of the Rockefeller State Park Preserve created and donated by the Rockefellers. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article cited below.

(p. D1) THE tranquil hamlet of Pocantico Hills, N.Y., has been bound up with the Rockefellers for more than a century. The family’s imprint is everywhere: In the thousands of acres of nearby pastures, woodlands and lakes that John D. Rockefeller Sr. began acquiring as he created his family’s estate in the 1890s. In the august stone walls enclosing a collection of even more august mansions. And in the stunning stained-glass windows by Matisse and Chagall that grace a simple stone church.

The Rockefellers are still an active presence — David Rockefeller, who at 91 is the last of the “brothers” from the illustrious third generation, spends weekends at his farm, Hudson Pines, and still rides in his horse-drawn carriage over the graceful carriage roads designed by his father and grandfather. A number of other Rockefellers — including Happy, the widow of David’s brother Nelson, the former governor and vice president — have houses on the family land as well.

Much of the Rockefeller family’s business and pleasure in and around Pocantico Hills is, not surprisingly, out of view. But the tradition of philanthropy that has defined the clan as much as its vast fortune also operates there. The result is a sense of shared bounty.

The public has long been allowed to enjoy the Rockefellers’ 55 miles of carriage roads, which also function as hiking trails, and the opportunity to experience Rockefeller country grew with the creation of the Rockefeller State Park Preserve. Its 1,384 acres are used for hiking, horseback riding and carriage driving. . . .

. . .

(p. D5) A visitor can hike quiet trails evoking the family’s legacy, with names like Peggy’s Way and Brothers’ Path, and then have lunch in a smartly rustic cafe at Stone Barns — or an elegant dinner at Blue Hill. And while tours of Union Church of Pocantico Hills, with its Chagall and Matisse windows, will not resume until early April, anyone can attend Sunday morning services at 9 and 11. (But be discreet: the pastor, the Rev. Dr. F. Paul DeHoff, noted on the phone that services were for worship, not window viewing.)

. . .

The rose window over the altar was dedicated on Mother’s Day 1956 in memory of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, John D. Jr.’s wife. Mrs. Rockefeller, a co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art, collected contemporary art, including works by Matisse. The head of the museum at the time suggested Matisse, then in his 80s, for the memorial window, and approached the artist on the family’s behalf.

Matisse accepted the commission, which turned out to be his last. The paper cutouts he used to design the blue, green and yellow window were in his bedroom when he died.

A much larger window at the rear of the church, by Marc Chagall, celebrates the life of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who died in 1960. The window tells the biblical story of the good Samaritan in brilliant blues and greens, echoing Matisse’s window.

Unlike Matisse, Chagall traveled to Pocantico Hills to see the church. At the dedication, Chagall broached the subject of the lackluster nave windows. He received a commission to redo all eight, including one in memory of Nelson Rockefeller’s son, Michael, who died in New Guinea in 1961.

If the memorial windows represent an extraordinary gift of culture in an unlikely nook of Westchester, the family’s present of the state park preserve was equally significant — a chunk of green space one and a half times the size of Central Park.

A good winter hike in the preserve is along Eagle Hill Trail, a steep ascent that offers panoramic views of the Hudson, farmland and Kykuit. Another scenic walk is on Brothers’ Path, which runs next to Swan Lake near the visitors’ center. Brothers’ Path connects to Brook Trail, which crosses a half-frozen stream: water bubbles beneath thin sheets of ice and the dazzling snow frames dark pools of water.

For the full story, see:

LISA W. FODERARO. "Spending a Day at the Rockefellers’." The New York Times (Fri., February 23, 2007): D1 & D6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Upper left is a carriage road in Rockefeller country; upper right is a Marck Chagall window in Union Church; lower left is a map of Rockefeller country. Source of photos and map: online version of the NYT article cited above.

Leutze Got Right, What Was Important About Washington Crossing the Delaware

Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s 1851 "George Washington Crossing the Delaware." Source of the photo: http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/gw/art_gw/ap97.341.jpg

Besides Fischer’s book, there was a modest, but quite good, movie made by the History Channel a few years ago called "The Crossing" and starring Jeff Daniels as George Washington. From Daniels’ comedy roles, I was surprised that he could portray Washington with such understated intelligence and humanity.

(p. B5) The painting, with its life-size figures, “is one of the most frequently reproduced images in American culture,” said David Hackett Fischer, Warren professor of history at Brandeis University and author of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Washington’s Crossing.” Leutze’s highly romanticized rendition captures a desperate effort, a turning point in American history, when on Christmas night in 1776 George Washington crossed the Delaware River with 2,500 troops in a surprise attack on Hessian soldiers.

“The crossing was a pivot point in a crucial campaign that rescued the revolution from failure,” Professor Fischer said, adding that it burnished not only Washington’s reputation as a leader, but also brought foreign support for the rebels’ cause.

Through the centuries the painting has been criticized aesthetically and for historical shortcomings. (The design of the fluttering American flag, for example, was not yet in use.) “You can add one inaccuracy to another, but Leutze understood the air of desperation, the small scale of the event and the very large meaning,” Professor Fischer said. “He got all of that right.”

For the full story, see:

GLENN COLLINS. "What Surrounds a Legend? A 3,000-Pound Gilt Frame." The New York Times (Mon., February 19, 2007): B1 & B5.

The reference for the Fischer book is:

Fischer, David Hackett. Washington’s Crossing, Pivotal Moments in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Source of book image: http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/10670000/10672110.jpg

Kodak Tries to Survive Creative Destruction

A Kodak digital production printer. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article cited below.

Digital photography replacing film technology is an example of Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction, and maybe also of the gradual growth of a disruptive technology. Leading incumbent firms frequently have trouble prospering, or even surviving, during such a change. Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times had articles on the latest news from Kodak. Here is an excerpt from the New York Times version:

On Tuesday, as the Eastman Kodak Company unveiled its long-anticipated consumer inkjet printer in New York, the mood at the company’s Rochester headquarters could not have been more positive.

“People know we are back on the offensive,” said Frank Sklarsky, Kodak’s chief financial officer. “And that’s making them a lot more charged up about coming to work.”

But yesterday, Kodak gave them reason again to feel depressed. The company said it would cut 3,000 more jobs this year, on top of the 25,000 to 27,000 it had already said would be gone by the end of 2007. At that rate, Kodak will end the year with about 30,000 employees, half the number of just three years ago and a fraction of the 145,000 people it employed in 1988, when its brand was synonymous with photography.

Kodak executives insist that the new cuts do not indicate any snags in the continuing struggle to transform itself from a film-based company into a major competitor in digital imagery. And analysts, too, say the cuts are inevitable, and probably healthy.

For the full NYT story, see:

CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH. "Shrinking Pains at Kodak." The New York Times (Fri., February 9, 2007): C1 & C4.

For the related WSJ story, see:

WILLIAM M. BULKELEY and ANGELA PRUITT. "Kodak Sees More Job Cuts, Higher Restructuring Costs." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., February 9, 2007): B4.

Source of the first and third graphic: the WSJ article cited above. Source of the second graphic: the NYT article cited above.

Woodrow Wilson: The Automobile is “a Picture of the Arrogance of Wealth”

It is the common characteristic of new products from creative destruction that new products are first so expensive that only the rich can afford them, but then fairly soon, usually within a few years at most, the price falls to the level that ordinary people can afford. At that point, what the rich gets are added features, at a high premium, but the basic product is widely available. Consider the automobile:

(p. 193) The autos of the time were a luxurious novelty. One model even offered electric curlers in the back seat for on-the-go primping. They were unreliable and expensive, costing around $1,500, twice the average annual family income. And they were enormously unpopular. Anticar activists tore up roads, ringed parked cars with barbed wire, and organized boycotts of car-driving businessmen and politicians. Public resentment of the automobile was so great that even future president Woodrow Wilson weighed in, saying, "Nothing has spread socialistic feeling more than the automobile . . . a picture of the arrogance of wealth." Literary Digest suggested, "The ordinary ‘horseless carriage’ is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle."

Source:

Kim, W. Chan, and Renée Mauborgne. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005.

(Note: ellipsis in original. Also, the book provides sources for each quote in the passage above.)

Morales Slaughters Snow-White Llama to Celebrate Nationalization of Tin Smelter

A snow-white llama that has not yet been symbolically sacrificed by Bolivian President Evo Morales. Source of the photo: http://www.staff.stir.ac.uk/f.r.wheater/images/25%20Llama%205_8_04.JPG

Picture it, in President Evo Morales’ Bolivia: a peaceful, innocent-looking, snow-white llama slaughtered in homage to a barbaric mystical ritual, and in celebration of the slaughter, through nationalization, of private property and economic growth. And afterwards, one imagines the visitng French brass band played on.

VINTO, Bolivia: The ritual sacrifice of a snow-white llama provided a symbolic completion Friday to President Evo Morales’ nationalization of Bolivia’s lone operating tin smelter.

Swiss mining giant Glencore International AG owned the plant until last week and has threatened to seek compensation through international arbitration. Morales still says his government will not compensate Glencore for the Feb. 9 nationalization of the Vinto plant, located on a high Andean plain 180 kilometers (110 miles) southeast of the capital of La Paz.

. . .

After the ceremony, Morales hosted plant workers, a troupe of Andean pipers and a visiting French brass band to an outdoor supper of fried chicken and chuno, a traditional Bolivian dish of dehydrated potatoes.

While the nationalization retained all but a handful of smelter employees, workers remained divided over the change in management. Some rushed to greet "Companero Evo" as he toured the plant; others hung back and wondered about the future.

"Anywhere in the world they’ll tell you the government can’t be a good administrator," said plant employee Oscar Leyton. "But we’ll just have to wait and see how they do it. If they screw up here, they’ll screw up the whole country."

For the full story, see:

"In Bolivia, llama sacrifice completes Morales’ tin smelter nationalization." International Herald Tribune February 16, 2007.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Jim Collins on How Boeing Leapfrogged McDonnell Douglas

(p. 202) Wisely, through the 1940s, Boeing had stayed away from the commercial sphere, an arena in which McDonnell Douglas had vastly superior abilities in the smaller, propeller-driven planes that composed the commercial fleet. In the early 1950s, however, Boeing saw an opportunity to leapfrog McDonnell Douglas by marrying its experience with large air-(p. 203)craft to its understanding of jet engines.

Source:

Collins, Jim. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap. And Others Don’t. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001.

Preventing Creative Destruction Slows Economic Growth

Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article cited below.

It would be interesting to explore why the gap in growth rates was smaller last year than previously. Was it a statistical fluke? Or did the U.S. labor market become somewhat less flexible? Or maybe the job market in Europe and Japan became somewhat more flexible?

FOR more than a decade, many American economists have pointed to Europe and Japan as prima facie evidence that layoffs in the United States are a good thing. The economies in those countries were not nearly as robust as this country’s. And the reason? Too much job security in Europe and Japan, the economists said.

American employers, in sharp contrast, have operated with much more “flexibility.” Hiring and firing at will, they shift labor from where it is not needed to where it is needed. If Eastman Kodak is struggling to establish itself in digital photography, then Kodak downsizes and labor moves to industries and companies that are thriving — software, for example, or health care, or Wal-Mart Stores or Caterpillar.

This shuffling out of one job and into another shows up in the statistics as nearly full employment. Never mind that the shuffling does not work as efficiently as the description implies or that many of the laid-off workers find themselves earning less in their next jobs, an income roller coaster that is absent in Europe and Japan. A dynamic economy leaves no alternative, or so the reasoning goes among mainstream economists.

“Trying to prevent this creative destruction from happening is a recipe for less economic growth and less productivity,” said Barry Eichengreen, an international economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

For the full commentary, see:

LOUIS UCHITELLE. "ECONOMIC VIEW; Job Security, Too, May Have a Happy Medium." The New York Times, Section 3 (Sun., February 25, 2007): 5.

For Better Jobs, Immigrants Voluntarily Line Up to Learn English

In Mount Vernon, New York, Maria de Oliveira (center) waited three months for an opening in this English class. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

In the United States, other things equal, those who speak English earn more than those who do not. So there is a substantial incentive for immigrants to learn English, even in the absence of the much-debated proposed laws to mandate English in various ways. Consider the evidence in the article excerpted below:

(p. A1) MOUNT VERNON, N.Y. — Two weeks after she moved here from her native Brazil, Maria de Oliveira signed up for free English classes at a squat storefront in this working-class suburb, figuring that with an associate’s degree and three years as an administrative assistant, she could find a good job in America so long as she spoke the language.

The woman who runs the classes at Mount Vernon’s Workforce and Career Preparation Center added Ms. Oliveira’s name to her pink binder, at the bottom of a 90-person waiting list that stretched across seven pages. That was in October. Ms. Oliveira, 26, finally got a seat in the class on Jan. 16.

“I keep wondering how much more I’d know if I hadn’t had to wait so long,” she said in Portuguese.

. . .

Luis Sanchez, 47, a Peruvian truck driver for a beer distributor in New Brunswick, has been in this country (p. C14) 10 years — and on the waiting list for English classes in Perth Amboy five months. “You live from day to day, waiting to get the call that you can come to class,” Mr. Sanchez said in Spanish, explaining that he knew a little English but wanted to improve his writing skills so he could apply for better jobs. “I keep on waiting.”

. . .

In Newburgh, N.Y., an Orange County town where one in five of the 29,000 residents are immigrants, Blanca Saravia has amassed an impressive portfolio of odd jobs since arriving from Honduras in 2004: gas station attendant, office janitor, cook’s helper, and, for the last 14 months, packager at a local nail-polish factory. Speaking in her native Spanish, Ms. Saravia said that she has been able to get by with co-workers’ translating, but that “when the boss gives orders, I don’t understand.”

. . .

. . . Ahmed Al Saidi, 49, who works at a gas station and moved from Yemen in 1994, said in halting English that he wants to learn the language “for better work and to talk to people when I go to the store.”

Ms. Oliveira, the immigrant from Brazil, said she still knows too little English to venture into the marketplace; her husband, who is American born and supports the couple financially, encouraged her to enroll in the classes, held five mornings a week.

“I hope that when I’m speaking a little better, I’ll be able to find a job where I can use the English I learned here and the skills I have from back home,” she said in Portuguese. “When I was on the waiting list, there were times I thought this time would never come.”

For the full story, see:

FERNANDA SANTOS. "Demand for English Lessons Outstrips Supply." The New York Times (Tues., February 27, 2007): A1 & C14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

“You Have to Keep On Trying New Things”

Stewart Brand with his prototype for a computer-clock that he hopes will continue to tell time for 10,000 years. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article cited below.

Decades ago, I really enjoyed the spirit, and sometimes the usefulness, of Stewart Brand’s refreshing, libertarian, over-the-top Whole Earth Catalog. From the article excerpted below, I learned that Brand, and his spirit, are still alive:

(p. D1) Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering.

He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand.

He divides environmentalists into romantics and scientists, the two cultures he’s been straddling and blending since the 1960s. He was with the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead at their famous Trips Festival in San Francisco, directing a multimedia show called “America Needs Indians.” That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of romantic.

But he created the shows drawing on the cybernetic theories of Norbert Wiener, the M.I.T. mathematician who applied principles of machines and electrical networks to social institutions. Mr. Brand imagined replacing the old technocratic hierarchies with horizontal information networks — a scientific vision that seemed quaintly abstract until the Internet came along.

. . .

(p. D3) Mr. Brand’s latest project, undertaken with fellow digerati, is to build the world’s slowest computer, a giant clock designed to run for 10,000 years inside a mountain in the Nevada desert, powered by changes in temperature. The clock is an effort to promote long-term thinking — what Mr. Brand calls the Long Now, a term he borrowed from the musician Brian Eno.

Mr. Brand is the first to admit his own futurism isn’t always prescient. In 1969, he was so worried by population growth that he organized the Hunger Show, a weeklong fast in a parking lot to dramatize the coming global famine predicted by Paul Ehrlich, one of his mentors at Stanford.

The famine never arrived, and Professor Ehrlich’s theories of the coming “age of scarcity” were subsequently challenged by the economist Julian Simon, who bet Mr. Ehrlich that the prices of natural resources would fall during the 1980s despite the growth in population. The prices fell, just as predicted by Professor Simon’s cornucopian theories.

Professor Ehrlich dismissed Professor Simon’s victory as a fluke, but Mr. Brand saw something his mentor didn’t. He considered the bet a useful lesson about the adaptability of humans — and the dangers of apocalyptic thinking.

“It is one of the great revelatory bets,” he now says. “Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they’re wrong, it’s really good for the commonweal. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we’d have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought.”

He now looks at the rapidly growing megacities of the third world not as a crisis but as good news: as villagers move to town, they find new opportunities and leave behind farms that can revert to forests and nature preserves. Instead of worrying about population growth, he’s afraid birth rates are declining too quickly, leaving future societies with a shortage of young people.

Old-fashioned rural simplicity still has great appeal for romantic environmentalists. But when the romantics who disdain frankenfoods choose locally grown heirloom plants and livestock, they’re benefiting from technological advances made by past plant and animal breeders. Are the risks of genetically engineered breeds of wheat or cloned animals so great, or do they just ruin the romance?

Mr. Brand would rather take a few risks.

“I get bored easily — on purpose,” he said, recalling advice from the co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix. “Jim Watson said he looks for young scientists with low thresholds of boredom, because otherwise you get researchers who just keep on gilding their own lilies. You have to keep on trying new things.”

That’s a good strategy, whether you’re trying to build a sustainable career or a sustainable civilization. Ultimately, there’s no safety in clinging to a romanticized past or trying to plan a risk-free future. You have to keep looking for better tools and learning from mistakes. You have to keep on hacking.

For the full story, see:

JOHN TIERNEY. "FINDINGS; An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’." The New York Times (Tues., February 27, 2007): D1 & D3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Better than Socialism, but Not Free Market Enough: More on Why Africa is Poor

Voters in line to vote for President in Senegal on 2/25/07. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

My old Wabash professor Ben Rogge used to say that rulers liked to build pyramids to proclaim their glory. He mentioned the Egyptian pyramids, and he mentioned the whole government-created capital city of "Brasilia" in Brazil.

When rulers in a poor country invest a lot of tax money in infrastructure, such as roads, how much of that is due to their belief in mistaken economic theories, and how much to their wanting to build their own version of the pyramids?

In either case, at least it can be said that the people probably benefit more from their taxes being used to build roads, than from their taxes being used to build pyramids. At least the roads can be complementary to transporting goods, and to the mobility of labor.

But the people would benefit even more if they could keep the tax money to use for their own purposes.

(p. A3) DAKAR, Senegal, Feb. 25 — Moudou Gueye was confident that Senegal’s presidential election on Sunday would turn around his fortunes, at least in the short term.

Seven years ago he voted for Abdoulaye Wade, a rabble-rousing professor who, after decades in opposition to Socialist Party rule, sailed into office buoyed by the votes of frustrated young people like Mr. Gueye, who is now 32. They hoped that Mr. Wade, a free-market liberal, would transform this impoverished nation’s economy, which had been stunted by generations of ineffective central planning.

. . .

. . . Senegal has had relatively robust economic growth that has hovered at around 5 percent over several years (it was lower last year, owing in part to high fuel prices, according to government officials), compared with the 1 percent achieved during much of the Socialist era, and dozens of huge public works projects.

While in some ways the country is better off, economic growth and a building binge have not produced large numbers of jobs in a country struggling to make the transition from an agrarian society based largely on peanut farming to one that harnesses the wealth of a global economy.

. . .

Countering criticism that Mr. Wade is too old to serve another term — his official age is given as 80, but many people suspect he is older — his daughter, Sindiély, who has worked as a special assistant to the president, said he was as sharp and agile as ever.

“It is not a question of age,” Ms. Wade said as she waited to cast her vote in downtown Dakar. “It is a question of dynamism and ideas and what you have planned for your country.”

Along Dakar’s seaside roadway, young men marveled at the cars whizzing below a brand-new overpass, one of Mr. Wade’s long-anticipated public works projects.

Pap Ndiaye, an 18-year-old street vendor who sells baby clothes to people stalled in traffic, said the newly completed road was a sign that the country was moving in the right direction.

“Wade has done a lot for this country,” Mr. Ndiaye said. “Our hope is that he will stay and finish his work.”

Less than a mile away, the road abruptly ends with a bright yellow sign that says “déviation,” or detour. With a hard turn to the right, drivers pour off the broad new highway, and back into the tangled, chaotic streets of one of Dakar’s oldest and poorest neighborhoods.

For the full story, see:

LYDIA POLGREEN. "Senegalese Vote Hinges on Views of Economic Growth." The New York Times (Mon., February 26, 2007): A3.

(Note: ellipses added.)