Category: Books

“The Ultimate Resource” Is the Human Mind

(p. A13) Fifty years ago this month, Mr. Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb.” In it he portended global cataclysm–unless the world could be persuaded to stop producing so many . . . well . . . people. The book sketched out possible scenarios of the hell Mr. Ehrlich believed imminent: hundreds of millions dying from starvation, England disappearing by the year 2000, India doomed, the average American’s lifespan falling to 42 by 1980, and so on.
Mr. Ehrlich’s book sold three million copies, and his crabbed worldview became an unquestioned orthodoxy for the technocratic class that seems to welcome such scares as an opportunity to boss everyone else around.
. . .
Enter Julian Lincoln Simon.
Simon was a professor of business and economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1981, when this columnist first met him, Julian would smile and say the doom-and-gloomers had a false understanding of scarcity that led them to believe resources are fixed and limited.
. . .
In 1981 he put his findings together in a book called “The Ultimate Resource.” It took straight aim at Mr. Ehrlich. In contrast to the misanthropic tone of “The Population Bomb” (its opening sentence reads, “The battle to feed all humanity is over”), Julian was optimistic, recognizing that human beings are more than just mouths to be fed. They also come with minds.
. . .
. . . , human beings constantly find new and creative ways to take from the earth, increase the bounty for everyone and expand the number of seats at the table of plenty. Which is one reason Paul Ehrlich is himself better off today than he was when he wrote his awful book–notwithstanding all those hundreds of millions of babies born in places like China and India against his wishes.

For the full commentary, see:
William McGurn. “MAIN STREET; The Population Bomb Was a Dud; Paul Ehrlich got it wrong because he never understood human potential.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, May 1, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipses in first quoted paragraph, in original; ellipses in rest of quotes, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 30, 2018.)

The Julian Simon book, mentioned above, is:
Simon, Julian L. The Ultimate Resource. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Some Brain Traits Ease Music Learning

(p. C2) A study published in Cerebral Cortex in July [2015] shows that unusual activity in specific neural areas can predict how easily musicians learn their chops.
. . .
The data . . . point to a distinct starting advantage in some people–and where that advantage might reside in the brain. A retroactive examination of the first fMRI images predicted who would be the best learners.
Those with a hyperactive Heschl’s gyrus (part of the cerebral cortex that is associated with musical pitch) and with lots of reactivity in their right hippocampus (an area linked to auditory memory) turned out to be more likely to remember tunes they had heard before and, after some practice, play them well.
The “kicker,” said Dr. Zatorre, was finding that neural head start. “That gives you an advantage when you’re learning music, and it’s a completely different system from the parts of the brain that show learning has taken place. It speaks to the idea of 10,000 hours.” In his book “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell called 10,000 hours of practice “the magic number of greatness.” Dr. Zatorre disagrees, saying, “Is it really fair to say that everyone’s brain is structured the same way, and that if you practice, you will accomplish the same thing?”

For the full commentary, see:
Susan Pinker. “Practice Makes Some Perfect, Others Maybe Not.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 29, 2015): C2.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 26, 2015.)

The print version of the Cerebral Cortex article discussed above, is:
Herholz, Sibylle C., Emily B. J. Coffey, Christo Pantev, and Robert J. Zatorre. “Dissociation of Neural Networks for Predisposition and for Training-Related Plasticity in Auditory-Motor Learning.” Cerebral Cortex 26, no. 7 (July 1, 2016): 3125-34.

The Gladwell book mentioned above, is:
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008.

Tusk Helped Startups Enter by Mobilizing Consumers Who Would Benefit

(p. C6) In August [2018], Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a package of bills capping the number of cars driving in New York City for companies like Uber and Lyft and setting minimum pay for drivers. The mayor had long wanted such restrictions, but for years Uber had successfully pushed back, thanks in large part to strategist and venture capitalist Bradley Tusk.
“The problem is not only did this happen in New York, but now it’s going to happen everywhere,” laments Mr. Tusk, who worked as a consultant for Uber Technologies from 2010 to 2015, earning equity that was eventually worth around $100 million. Under his guidance, Uber mobilized its users to lobby against the legislation and made the case that its service provided transportation to people in the outer boroughs and jobs to immigrants and minorities.
. . .
Since working for Uber, Mr. Tusk has helped other tech companies in similar political battles. As he sees it, politicians too often sacrifice their constituents’ economic interests for their own political gain. “What’s good for politician X isn’t necessarily good for the businesses in his or her district,” he says. “Without at least some people like us, innovation gets crushed by politics and corruption and that’s really bad for the economy and for society.”
. . .
After serving as campaign manager of Mr. Bloomberg’s reelection effort, in 2010 Mr. Tusk founded Tusk Strategies with the goal of running campaigns for companies and institutions rather than politicians. At the time, Walmart was looking for a way to enter markets without pushback from powerful unions. Mr. Tusk urged city councils, including New York’s, to stop blocking its entry by polling customers, launching television ads and mobilizing constituents who wanted the choice of shopping at Walmart.
Then one of Mr. Bloomberg’s former deputy mayors called him with a proposition: “There’s this guy with a small transportation startup. He’s having some regulatory problems. Would you mind talking to him?” It was Uber. The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission had sent Uber a cease and desist letter, and its then-CEO Travis Kalanick needed someone who understood New York politics. Mr. Tusk mounted successful campaigns on behalf of the company in New York and other cities, including Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
. . .
Does he see himself as an example of the revolving door between politics and business? “I’m absolutely using the savvy I learned in the political world–just in a different way than most,” he says. But he has no intentions of ever returning to government. “I felt like I could force more change on the system from the outside,” he says. “Not only am I not doing politics, but most of my work is making politicians crazy.”

For the full interview, see:
Alexandra Wolfe, interviewer. “”WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL; Bradley Tusk from Political Insider to ‘Fixer’ for Tech.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 1, 2018): C6.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Aug. 31, 2018, and the title “WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL; How Bradley Tusk Went from Political Insider to ‘Making Politicians Crazy’.”)

The book under discussion above, is:
Tusk, Bradley. The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics. New York: Portfolio, 2018.

New York Critic: “I Simply Don’t Care a Damn What Happens in Nebraska”

(p. C14) ‘I simply don’t care a damn what happens in Nebraska,” ranted a New York critic, “no matter who writes about it.”
Or so Willa Cather claimed. In the long leisure of the grave, the alleged scoffer may ponder how it is that a century after its September 1918 publication, Cather’s “My Ántonia,” its every page rooted in Nebraska, remains very much alive and in print–while he is neither.

For the full review, see:
Robert Garnett. “MASTERPIECE; Rooted in America’s Heartland.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018): C14.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 14, 2018.)

The book mentioned above, is:
Cather, Willa. My Antonia. New York: Collins Classics, 2019 [1st published 1918].

Entrepreneur Carr’s Philanthropy Harmed Mozambique

(p. C6) It is an old, old story. A wealthy man comes to town, promising change and a brighter future. He’s the expert. He knows best. Inevitably, it doesn’t exactly work out that way.
Stephanie Hanes, an American correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, spent three years watching one particular version of that fairy tale unfold in central Mozambique.
The wealthy man was Greg Carr. An Idahoan, Mr. Carr had made millions first by selling voice-mail systems and then by running Prodigy, an early internet service provider. At age 40, he turned to philanthropy . . .
. . .
In “White Man’s Game,” Ms. Hanes outlines, in a nonpolemical way, the long history of Western involvement in Africa’s wilderness.
. . .
Turning to the present day, Ms. Hanes takes World Wildlife Fund, Nature Conservancy and other Western groups–known as Big Green–to task for their conservation colonialism.
. . .
She . . . points out that they are a bit cynical. “The conservation industry mirrors the humanitarian assistance industry,” she writes, “with alarmist pledge drives, heart-stirring photos and admonitions to ‘act now!’–all to be repeated for the next grant cycle.”
. . .
It is clear from Ms. Hanes’s account that a complex interplay of social, political and economic matters affected Gorongosa, not just one man’s ambition. The imported elephants inevitably roamed outside the park and into nearby towns, damaging crops and perhaps killing a villager. Mr. Carr’s tree planting, a laudable goal on the surface, was seen negatively by the people there because, culturally, tree planting was a way of marking one’s territory. When visiting a prominent local leader, Mr. Carr arrived in a red helicopter, oblivious to the fact that, in Gorongosi culture, red is the color of violence. For locals, Mr. Carr was the latest in a long line of outsiders invading their land. He destabilized rather than restored.
In the West, Mr. Carr’s work catalyzed praise: a glossy piece on Gorongosa in National Geographic by the noted biologist E.O. Wilson, a profile in the New Yorker. But the reality on the ground was different. Few tourists came to Gorongosa, and a flare-up of civil-war tensions led to violence. Overall the 150,000 Mozambicans who lived in the district, according to Ms. Hanes, saw little measurable improvement in their lives. Park staff even tortured suspected poachers.
In the most powerful scene in the book Ms. Hanes observes Mr. Carr and his associates staring at a map of Mozambique and contemplating expanding the park borders to incorporate a vast swath of land so that animals could migrate again. They wanted to rewild central Mozambique. It was just another example of the “generations of white man standing around maps,” observes Ms. Hanes. They never mentioned the millions of people who lived in those lands.

For the full review, see:
James Zug. “The Do-Gooders’ Playground.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 5, 2017): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 4, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Hanes, Stephanie. White Man’s Game: Saving Animals, Rebuilding Eden, and Other Myths of Conservation in Africa. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017.

Origin of “Round Up the Usual Suspects!” at End of Casablanca

(p. C5) David Thomson’s “Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio” is the latest in the exemplary Yale Jewish Lives series, which now stretches from Jacob the Patriarch to Jacob Wonskolasor, known to the world as Jack L. Warner (1892-1978).
. . .
Jack told Julie Garfinkle that “people are gonna find out you’re a Jew sooner or later, but better later.” Julie became John Garfield. I can’t resist adding that Jack approached Phil and Julie Epstein with the same advice. After turning him down they snuck into his office and stole a piece of stationery. To the newly arrived Don Taylor, a fellow Nittany Lion, they wrote, “All of us at Warner Bros are looking forward to your great career as an actor and to a long and fruitful relationship with you under your new name of Hyman Rabinowitz. Sincerely, Jack L. Warner.”
. . .
(p. C6) As this fine book progresses, Mr. Thomson turns his attention away from the brothers and their studio and onto individual actors and films. These form a remarkable series of critiques and vignettes–cranky, idiosyncratic, sometimes improbable, but always ingenious, and now and then inspiring.
. . .
Of course he has the most to say about “Casablanca,” much of it insightful and cogent. On the one hand, it’s an “adroit masquerade,” yet also part of what it was, and no less is, to be American: “Wry, fond of sentiment yet hardboiled, as if to say we’re Americans, we can take it and dish it out, we’re the best, tough and soft at the same time.” Thus did the qualities of this film, and others, pass “into the nervous system of the country,” making it what it remains to this day.
I am in a position to point out one of the few outright mistakes, not of judgment but of facts, in this book. Mr. Thomson naively accepts screenwriter Casey Robinson’s claim that he created the ending of “Casablanca.” The truth is that the ending was thought up at a red light on the corner of Sunset and Beverly Glen, when Phil and Julie turned to each other, as identical twins will, and cried out, “Round up the usual suspects!” By the time they reached Doheny they knew Maj. Strasser had to be shot and by the time they reached Burbank they knew who was going to get on the plane with whom.

For the full review, see:
Leslie Epstein. “The House That Jack Built; Warner Bros was the smartest, toughest studio, and Jack L. Warner its smart, tough driving wheel.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 5, 2017): C5-C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 4, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Thomson, David. Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.

Disneyland Opened in “Confusion,” “Disorder,” and “Chaos”

(p. B11) On the mid-July day in 1955 when Disneyland opened in Anaheim, Calif., confusion reigned. More people stormed its grounds than expected, rides broke down, food and beverage supplies ran short, and a plumbers’ strike limited the number of working water fountains.
Out in the park that afternoon, amid the disorder, was Marty Sklar, a 21-year-old college junior who was editing the theme park’s 10-cent newspaper. At one point Fess Parker, in full costume as Disney’s television and big-screen Davy Crockett, complete with coonskin cap, approached him on horseback.
Spotting Mr. Sklar’s name tag, Mr. Parker called out for help.
“Marty,” he said, “get me out of here before this horse hurts someone!”
Disneyland recovered well from the early chaos. And Mr. Sklar went on to spend more than a half-century at the Walt Disney Company, as a close aide to Walt Disney himself and eventually as the principal creative executive of the company’s Imagineering unit, made up of the innovators who blend their imaginations and their technical expertise in devising every element of the company’s theme parks.
. . .
He soon became Mr. Disney’s chief ghostwriter for publicity materials, dedications, souvenir guides, speeches, slogans, presentations and short films, like the one that helped the company win approval to build Walt Disney World and Epcot in central Florida. He also collaborated with Walt and his brother, Roy, on Disney’s annual reports.
“It was pretty heady stuff for someone just closing in on his 30th birthday and only six or seven years out of college,” Mr. Sklar wrote in his autobiography, “Dream It! Do It: My Half-Century Creating Disney’s Magic Kingdoms” (2013).

For the full obituary, see:
Richard Sandomir. “Marty Sklar Dies at 83; Became Trusted Aide And Executive at Disney.” The New York Times (Friday, Aug. 4, 2017): B11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Aug. 3, 2017, and has the title “Marty Sklar, Longtime Disney Aide and Executive, Dies at 83.”)

Sklar’s autobiography, mentioned above, is:
Sklar, Martin. Dream It! Do It!: My Half-Century Creating Disney’s Magic Kingdoms. Glendale, CA: Disney Editions, 2013.

Origin of False Memories

(p. A19) Memories are subject to serious flaws, given the limitations and imperfections of the biological and psychological processes of recording, retaining and recalling them. Memories aren’t computer files with exacting recall and retrieval functions. They are often disassembled and stored in “packets” in multiple brain locations. People don’t store the fine details of all daily experiences, because of neuron capacity limitations. Even important details can be missed or lost.
Hence the brain must be selective in which memories it stores and must condense them so that many details are left out. Many eyewitnesses and even victims of crimes don’t take note of the facial features of gun-toting assailants or the make and color of getaway cars.
. . .
My colleague Elizabeth Loftus was able to “implant” false memories in a significant subset of laboratory subjects by showing them an official-looking poster of Disney characters, including Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. Many subjects later remembered meeting Bugs Bunny on a childhood trip to Disneyland. Some of them even reported that Bugs had touched them inappropriately.
That was impossible. Bugs Bunny isn’t a Disney character.

For the full commentary, see:
Richard B. McKenzie. “A Stumble Down Memory Lane; Like Kavanaugh’s latest accuser, people often have ‘gaps.’ They don’t always fill them with truth..” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, September 25, 2018): A19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 24, 2018.)

The commentary quoted above is partly based on McKenzie’s book:
McKenzie, Richard B. A Brain-Focused Foundation for Economic Science: A Proposed Reconciliation between Neoclassical and Behavioral Economics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018..

Visionary Manifesto for Driverless Cars

(p. A13) Not surprisingly, optimism leaps off the pages of Lawrence D. Burns’s “Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car–and How It Will Reshape Our World,” a combination of memoir and visionary manifesto. In contrast to “the personally owned, gasoline-powered, human-driven vehicles that have dominated the last century,” Mr. Burns writes, “we’re transitioning to mobility services based on electric-powered and driverless vehicles, paid for by trip or through subscriptions.” These services, he says, will get us around “safely and conveniently.” Meanwhile, we will avoid the “hassles of car ownership” and the time lost in parking and pumping gas, not to mention the costs that having a car entails.
. . .
After leaving GM during its 2009 bankruptcy, Mr. Burns became an ever-more emphatic advocate for the reinvention of the automobile, soon teaming up with Mr. Urmson and other technology pioneers at Google. This front-row seat at the project that popularized autonomous cars informs some of the most lively parts of “Autonomy.” At one point, a milestone goal is thought to be needed, with a payout bonus, so when Larry Page (Google’s co-founder) says, “I want this thing on any street in California to drive one hundred percent autonomous,” the Larry1K challenge is launched. The development of Waymo’s “Firefly” low-speed driverless car takes longer than expected and teaches the Silicon Valley team a new respect for Detroit’s skills. In turned out that “designing a vehicle was comparatively easy,” Mr. Burns writes. What was difficult was ” ‘hardening’ the vehicle’s various components”–making every part work under every driving condition. This was “the process at which Detroit engineering talent excelled.” A deal with Ford Motor Co. fails, but an investment banker and analyst, inspired by one of Mr. Burns’s visionary papers, does join Ford on a driverless-car project. As Mr. Burns recounts, personality clashes eventually blew up Google’s dream team and led to a lawsuit over intellectual-property theft against Uber, which had bought a driverless-trucking company founded by a Waymo veteran.

For the full review, see:
Edward Niedermeyer. “BOOKSHELF; Fast-Tracking A Driverless Car.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, August 28, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 27, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Autonomy’ Review: Fast-Tracking a Driverless Car; A period of remarkable progress seems to be giving way to a host of challenges that can’t be solved with engineering talent alone.”)

The book under review, is:
Burns, Lawrence D., and Christopher Shulgan. Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car–and How It Will Reshape Our World. New York: Ecco, 2018.

“I’m Alive and That’s an Extremely Good Thing”

(p. A4) HONG KONG — When Bill Jaynes realized water was rushing into the plane, he started to panic.
Mr. Jaynes, a Micronesian journalist, was aboard a plane set to land on Weno, the tiny Pacific island that is part of the Federated States of Micronesia.
“I thought we landed hard until I looked over and saw a hole in the side of the plane and water was coming in,” he said in a Facebook video, describing the landing of a Boeing 737-800 flown by Air Niugini at Chuuk International Airport on Friday morning [September 28, 2018]. “And I thought, well, this is not, like, the way it’s supposed to happen.”
But then help suddenly arrived — from a flotilla of local boats that rushed to the plane, which landed short of the runway in the Chuuk lagoon, and all 47 passengers aboard the aircraft were evacuated, according to early statement from the airline.
“It’s just surreal,” said Mr. Jaynes, managing editor of The Kaselehlie Press, a newspaper on Pohnpei, another Micronesian island.
Matthew Colson, a Baptist missionary who lives on Weno, recorded the rescue effort and posted his interview with Mr. Jaynes on Facebook. He said the locals who rushed their boats to the scene were fisherman and construction workers, all locals.
. . .
Mr. Jaynes, reflecting on the experience, said, “I’m alive and that’s an extremely good thing.”

For the full story, see:
Austin Ramzy. “When a Plane Crashed in the Pacific, Fishing Boats Came to the Rescue.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 28, 2018): A4.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 27, 2018, and has the title “‘Their Plane Was Set to Land. The Water Rushed In. Then, the Boats Came.”)

The passages quoted above, provide one more example of one of the main messages of:
Ripley, Amanda. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008.