Success Came Late to Author of Wizard of Oz

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

I remember a conversation with the late labor economist Sherwin Rosen on the substantial decline in research productivity of economists as they age. My memory is that he said the decline usually wasn’t because of inability, but because, at some point, the older economists stop trying.
I think there’s some truth to that. The belief that it is too late to succeed, can lead people to stop trying, and thereby make the prediction self-fulfilling.
Fortunately, L. Frank Baum kept trying:

(p. A15) If L. Frank Baum had been listed on the stock exchange in 1900, his shares would have been trading near historic lows. The soon-to-be famous author of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” had at that point failed at a long series of energetic attempts to find a career. At 44, Baum had already been a chicken farmer, an actor, a seller of machinery lubricants, a purveyor of novelty goods and a newspaper publisher. All his life he’d written lively prose — plays, ads, columns — but most of it seemed to go nowhere.

Then, suddenly, it did. The story of a girl named Dorothy who with her little dog, Toto, travels to the wondrous land of Oz burst from Baum’s pencil, almost taking him by surprise. “The story really seemed to write itself,” he told his publisher. “Then, I couldn’t find any regular paper, so I took anything at all, including a bunch of old envelopes.” Turned into a proper book with defining illustrations by W.W. Denslow, the story most of us know as “The Wizard of Oz” was an immediate sensation in 1900. In a review, the New York Times commended it, saying that it was “ingeniously woven out of commonplace material.” Baum would produce 13 sequels, though none had quite the sparkle of the first.

For the full review, see:
JOHN STEELE GORDON. “Books; Inventing a New World; The men who engineered the astonishing emergence of the modern age.” Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 11, 2009): W8.

The book being reviewed, is:
Schwartz, Evan I. Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

“The Single Most Important Question for the Future of America Is How We Treat Our Entrepreneurs”

(p. 13) The single most important question for the future of America is how we treat our entrepreneurs. If we smear, harass, overtax, and overregulate them, our liberal politicians will be shocked and horrified to discover how swiftly the physical tokens of the means of production collapse into so much corroded wire, eroding concrete, scrap metal, and jungle rot.

Source:
Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.

“The Most Remarkable Period of Practical Inventiveness in World History”

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

(p. W8) There are technologies and then there are technologies. Some are trivial, such as Ziploc plastic bags. They’re handy, to be sure, but they don’t change the world. Some are extraordinarily simple but profound, such as the stirrup, which came along only after men had been riding horses for well over a thousand years. Nothing more than a ring of metal hung from a leather strap, the stirrup made cavalry the dominant force on the European battlefield and therefore made the mounted knight the dominant force in European society for several hundred years.

As Gavin Weightman’s “The Industrial Revolutionaries” reminds us, inventions on the level of the stirrup’s importance seemed to come every other month during the late 18th and 19th centuries — what Mr. Weightman calls “the most remarkable period of practical inventiveness in world history.”
When Thomas Hobbes famously wrote in the 17th century that the great majority of the population led lives that were “nasty, brutish and short,” he was describing an agrarian society that was, in its essence, unchanged since the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years earlier. Ownership of land was the basis of wealth. Hobbes had no reason to think that the situation would change any time soon. But it did: A rapidly accelerating development of world-transforming technologies, subsumed under the rubric of “the Industrial Revolution,” began in Britain and within 100 years had molded the modern world.
. . .

The Industrial Revolution revolutionized more than just the global economy: It transformed politics and society. A world divided between a handful of aristocrats and millions of peasants was transformed into a world dominated by the middle class, where wealth is widely distributed and the franchise universal.

For the full review, see:
JOHN STEELE GORDON. “Books; Inventing a New World; The men who engineered the astonishing emergence of the modern age.” Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 11, 2009): W8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Weightman, Gavin. The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914. New York: Grove Press, 2009.

People Do Not Appreciate the Entrepreneur’s Accomplishment

(p. A17) Bertrand de Jouvenel, writing in 1951 about popular attitudes toward income inequality in “The Ethics of Redistribution”:

The film-star or the crooner is not grudged the income that is grudged to the oil magnate, because the people appreciate the entertainer’s accomplishment and not the entrepreneur’s, and because the former’s personality is liked and the latter’s is not. They feel that consumption of the entertainer’s income is itself an entertainment, while the capitalist’s is not, and somehow think that what the entertainer enjoys is deliberately given by them while the capitalist’s income is somehow filched from them.

Source:
“Notable & Quotable.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., MARCH 5, 2009): A17.
(Note: italics in original.)

Original source of de Jouvenel quote:
Jouvenel, Bertrand de. The Ethics of Redistribution. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Inc., 1990 (originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1951).

“Eminent Domain as an Instrument Against the Weak”

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Source of book image: http://www.dichosbooks.com/images/33353510.jpg

(p. A13) Roughly 70% of Americans own their own homes, a statistic that goes a long way toward explaining why the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2005 in Kelo v. City of New London was so widely reviled. Before Kelo, most Americans probably took it for granted that their home was their castle, protected by the Constitution from arbitrary seizure by government. The Fifth Amendment’s takings clause says: ” . . . nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

In Kelo, a majority of five justices came up with an extremely broad interpretation of “public use.” The high court’s four liberal members, joined by the ever-changeable Anthony Kennedy, ruled that government has the right to seize a private home for virtually any purpose — including handing it over to private developers.
. . .
“Little Pink House” is a modern morality tale. It shows how the politically powerful can use eminent domain as an instrument against the weak. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said it best in her dissent in Kelo: “The fallout from this decision will not be random.” She predicted that “the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more.” The beneficiaries, she wrote, are likely to be those citizens “with disproportionate influence and power in the political process.”
Owning property is one of Americans’ most basic constitutional rights. It’s too bad Susette Kelo didn’t get to exercise hers.

For the full review, see:
MELANIE KIRKPATRICK. “Bookshelf; Evicted, But Not Without a Fight; The government took her home. The Supreme Court approved.” Wall Street Journal (Mon., Jan. 26, 2009): A13.
(Note: ellipsis in first paragraph quote was in original; ellipsis between paragraphs was added.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Benedict, Jeff. Little Pink House. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009.

Leading Entrepreneurs “Are Chosen for Performance Alone”

(p. 5) Far from being greedy, America’s leading entrepreneurs– with some unrepresentative exceptions–display discipline and self-control, hard work and austerity that excel that in any college of social work, Washington think tank, or congregation of bishops. They are a strange riffraff, to be sure, because they are chosen not according to blood, credentials, education, or services rendered to the establishment. They are chosen for performance alone, for service to the people as consumers.

Source:
Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.

Today’s Middle Class Citizens of the U.S. Are Better Off Than Emperor Tiberius, Emperor Napoleon, and Saint Thomas Aquinas

In conversation at the HES meeting in Denver, Pete Boettke mentioned that the opportunity cost of blogging can be very high.
The passage below is from a draft of a key chapter of a long-awaited book authored by Berkeley economist and world-renowned blogger Brad DeLong. (At least in this case, Boettke is right.)

(p. 3) Could the Emperor Tiberius have eaten fresh grapes in January? Could the Emperor Napoleon have crossed the Atlantic in a night, or gotten from Paris to London in two hours? Could Thomas Aquinas have written a 2000-word letter in two hours–and then dispatched it off to 1,000 recipients with the touch of a key, and begun to receive replies within the hour? Computers, automobiles, airplanes, VCR’ s, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, telephones, and other technologies–combined with mass production–give middle-class citizens of the United States today degrees of material wealth–control over commodities, and the ability to consume services–that previous generations could barely imagine.

Source:
DeLong, J. Bradford. “Cornucopia: The Pace of Economic Growth in the Twentieth Century.” NBER Working Paper, w7602, 2000.

“No Amount of Dancing Will Help You Learn More Algebra”

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

(p. A13) . . . , Mr. Willingham shows how experiments support his claims.

The trendy notion that each person has a unique learning style comes under an especially withering assault. “How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?” asks Mr. Willingham’s hypothetical teacher. The disillusioning reply: “No one has found consistent evidence supporting a theory describing such a difference. . . . Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn.”
It turns out that while education gurus were promoting the uplifting vision of all students being equal in ability but unique in “style,” researchers were testing the theory behind it. In one experiment, they presented vocabulary words to students classified as “auditory learners” and “visual learners.” Half the words came in sound form, half in print. According to the learning-styles theory, the auditory learners should remember the words presented in sound better than the words presented in print, and vice-versa for the visual learners.
But this is not what happened: Each type of learner did just as well with each type of presentation. Why? Because what is being taught in most of the curriculum — at all levels of schooling — is information about meaning, and meaning is independent of form. “Specious,” for instance, means “seemingly logical, but actually fallacious” whether you hear it, see it or feel it out in Braille. Mr. Willingham makes a convincing case that the distinction between visual, auditory and kinesthetic learners (who supposedly learn best when body movement is involved) is a specious one. At some point, no amount of dancing will help you learn more algebra.

For the full review, see:
CHRISTOPHER F. CHABRIS. “Bookshelf; How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds
Will the discoveries of neuroscientists help us to think, learn and remember?.” Wall Street Journal (Mon., APRIL 27, 2009): A13.

(Note: the initial ellipsis was added; the ellipsis internal to the first full paragraph, was in the original.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.

Most Entrepreneurial Tycoons “Begin as Rebels and Outsiders”

(p. 8) Because entrepreneurship overthrows establishments rather than undergirds them, the entrepreneurial tycoons mostly begin as rebels and outsiders. Often they live in out-of-the-way places– like Bentonville, Arkansas; Omaha, Nebraska; or Mission Hills, Kansas–mentioned in New York, if at all, as the punch lines of comedy routines. When these entrepreneurs move into high society, they are usually inheritors on the way down.

Source:
Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.

The Epistemological Implications of Wikipedia

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

I think the crucial feature of Wikipedia is in its being quick (what “wiki” means in Hawaiian), rather than in its current open source model. Academic knowledge arises in a slow, vetted process. Publication depends on refereeing and revision. On Wikipedia (and the web more generally) knowledge is posted first, and corrected later.
In the actual fact, Wikipedia’s coverage is vast, and its accuracy is high.
I speculate that Wikipedia provides clues to developing new, faster, more efficient knowledge generating institutions.
(Chris Anderson has a nice discussion of Wikipedia in The Long Tail, starting on p. 65.)

(p. A13) Until just a couple of years ago, the largest reference work ever published was something called the Yongle Encyclopedia. A vast project consisting of thousands of volumes, it brought together the knowledge of some 2,000 scholars and was published, in China, in 1408. Roughly 600 years later, Wikipedia surpassed its size and scope with fewer than 25 employees and no official editor.

In “The Wikipedia Revolution,” Andrew Lih, a new-media academic and former Wikipedia insider, tells the story of how a free, Web-based encyclopedia — edited by its user base and overseen by a small group of dedicated volunteers — came to be so large and so popular, to the point of overshadowing the Encyclopedia Britannica and many other classic reference works. As Mr. Lih makes clear, it wasn’t Wikipedia that finished off print encyclopedias; it was the proliferation of the personal computer itself.
. . .
By 2000, both Britannica and Microsoft had subscription-based online encyclopedias. But by then Jimmy Wales, a former options trader in Chicago, was already at work on what he called “Nupedia” — an “open source, collaborative encyclopedia, using volunteers on the Internet.” Mr. Wales hoped that his project, without subscribers, would generate its revenue by selling advertising. Nupedia was not an immediate success. What turned it around was its conversion from a conventionally edited document into a wiki (Hawaiian for “fast”) — that is, a site that allowed anyone browsing it to edit its pages or contribute to its content. Wikipedia was born.
The site grew quickly. By 2003, according to Mr. Lih, “the English edition had more than 100,000 articles, putting it on par with commercial online encyclopedias. It was clear Wikipedia had joined the big leagues.” Plans to sell advertising, though, fell through: The user community — Wikipedia’s core constituency — objected to the whole idea of the site being used for commercial purposes. Thus Wikipedia came to be run as a not-for-profit foundation, funded through donations.
. . .
It is clear by the end of “The Wikipedia Revolution” that the site, for all its faults, stands as an extraordinary demonstration of the power of the open-source content model and of the supremacy of search traffic. Mr. Lih observes that when “dominant encyclopedias” were still hiding behind “paid fire walls” — and some still are — Wikipedia was freely available and thus easily crawled by search engines. Not surprisingly, more than half of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from Google.

For the full review, see:
JEREMY PHILIPS. “Business Bookshelf; Everybody Knows Everything.” Wall Street Journal (Weds., March 18, 2009): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 2009.