artdiamondblog.com – Page 361 – Art Diamond's web log

Powerful Rail Unions Defend Specious Disability Claims

“LAX REGULATIONS; One examination in 1997 found that 97 percent of workers who applied for disability benefits from the Railroad Retirement Board were approved. Despite decades of efforts to re-evaluate the standards, the rate is as high or higher today.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) After learning that most of her career employees were retiring early and getting disability payments, the Long Island Rail Road’s president, Helena E. Williams, set out in October to learn more about the obscure federal agency in Chicago that was dispensing the money, a quarter of a billion dollars since 2000.

But when Ms. Williams asked to attend the next meeting of the agency — the federal Railroad Retirement Board, rail workers’ version of Social Security — she got a surprise.
The board, with about $34 billion in assets, had not met formally in nearly two years, and no new meeting was scheduled. The three board members, all full-time presidential appointees, rarely met even in private, employees of the agency say.
Operating out of public view, with little scrutiny from Congress and even from its former inspector general, the retirement board has become the agency that cannot say no, last year approving virtually every single disability application it received — almost 98 percent. It did not matter where rail employees lived or where they worked.
An examination of the board by The New York Times, including dozens of interviews and a review of government records, found a disability program plagued by labor-management infighting, weak standards and a failure to use tests that could better weed out specious disability claims.
. . .
(p. A25) More than a half-dozen state and federal agencies are now investigating the retirement board’s disability payments to former L.I.R.R. employees. In September, two days after The Times published the results of an eight-month investigation that documented those disability payments, federal agents raided the board’s Long Island office.
The L.I.R.R.’s disability rate, which since 2000 has ranged between 93 percent and 97 percent for retired career employees, is three to four times that of the average railroad. Workers at other railroads get disabilities just as easily, but they file for them less often because, unlike L.I.R.R. employees, they cannot retire early with a private pension plan to supplement their disability pay.
. . .
The rail unions, which have remained powerful even as the nation’s labor movement has ebbed, have aggressively defended their interests at the retirement board. Management has largely avoided a showdown, choosing to spend its political capital in other areas, including contract issues, according to current and former board officials.
“The unions have been successful not only in getting a separate system, but keeping it,” said Robert S. Kaufman, a former director of retirement claims for the board.

For the full story, see:
WALT BOGDANICH and NICHOLAS PHILLIPS. “The Railroad Disability Board That Couldn’t Say No.” The New York Times (Mon., December 15, 2008): A1 & A25.
(Note: ellipses added; the online version of the title leaves out the word “Railroad.”)

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

Major Advances Seldom Come from Big Incumbent Firms

(p. 109) Most of today’s Fortune 500 were not there fifty years ago. All of the private sector’s net new jobs in the United States during the past twenty years were added by companies not on the Fortune 1000 twenty years ago: two thirds of the net new jobs came from companies with fewer than twenty employees twenty years ago. Ten years ago our automobile giants seemed invincible. Today we wonder whether more than one will survive.

In 1960, Theodore Levitt of Harvard wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Marketing Myopia,” in which he pointed out that every industry was once a growth industry. Perversely, a vicious cycle sets in. After experiencing continued growth for a while, managers in the industry come to believe that continuing growth is assured. They persuade themselves that there is no competitive substitute for their product, and develop too much faith in (p. 110) the benefits of mass production and the inevitable steady cost reduction that results as output rises. Managements become preoccupied with products that lend themselves to carefully controlled improvement and the benefits of manufacturing cost reduction. All of these forces combine to produce an inevitable stagnation or decline.
In Dynamic Economics, the economist Burton Klein puts forward a carefully researched and very similar view: “Assuming that an industry has already reached the stage of slow history, the advances will seldom come from the major firms in the industry. In fact, of some fifty inventions [fifty key twentieth-century breakthrough innovations that he studied] that resulted in new S-shaped curves [major new growth patterns] in relatively static industries, I could find no case in which the advance in question came from a major firm in the industry.” George Gilder elaborates on Klein’s work “The very process by which a firm becomes most productive in an industry tends to render it less flexible and inventive.”
It appears that evolution is continuously at work in the marketplace; that adaptation is crucial; and that few big businesses, if any, pull it off. Many of our excellent companies most probably will not stay buoyant forever. We would merely argue that they’ve had a long run–a much longer and more successful run than most–and are coming much closer than the rest to maintaining adaptability and size at the same time.

Source:
Peters, Thomas J., and Robert H. Waterman. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
(Note: italics and brackets in original.)

Taiwan Government’s Industrial Policy Ruins Economy

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

(p. A8) Taiwan, where for years the government encouraged information technology companies with tax breaks, cheap land, loans and more, is probably the most endangered of the small Asian economies. The result of that government largess is an economy extremely dependent on a single industrial sector that has been devastated by plunging worldwide sales of electronics. “Half of the industries just got a bad cold, they probably can recover quickly — the other 50 percent, they’ve got, not cancer, but close,” said Preston W. Chen, a chemicals tycoon who is also the chairman of Taiwan’s Chinese National Federation of Industries.

For the full article, see:
KEITH BRADSHER. “Memo From Singapore – East Asia’s Small Edens of Trade Wilt as Need for Exports Dries Up.” The New York Times (Thurs., March 5, 2009): A8.

Jewish Immigrant Garment Entrepreneurs “Worked Hard”

(p. 145) “There is no doubt that those Jewish immigrants
arrived at the perfect time, with the perfect skills,” says
the sociologist Stephen Steinberg. “To exploit that opportunity,
you had to have certain virtues, and those immigrants
worked hard. They sacrificed. They scrimped and
saved and invested wisely. But still, you have to remember
that the garment industry in those years was growing
by leaps and bounds. The economy was desperate for the
skills that they possessed.”

Source:
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)

Global Warming Lowers Sea Levels Near Juneau

“Glaciers around Juneau are receding 30 feet or more each year.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) JUNEAU, Alaska — Global warming conjures images of rising seas that threaten coastal areas. But in Juneau, as almost nowhere else in the world, climate change is having the opposite effect: As the glaciers here melt, the land is rising, causing the sea to retreat.

Morgan DeBoer, a property owner, opened a nine-hole golf course at the mouth of Glacier Bay in 1998, on land that was underwater when his family first settled here 50 years ago.
“The highest tides of the year would come into what is now my driving range area,” Mr. DeBoer said.
Now, with the high-tide line receding even farther, he is contemplating adding another nine holes.
“It just keeps rising,” he said.
The geology is complex, but it boils down to this: Relieved of billions of tons of glacial weight, the land has risen much as a cushion regains its shape after someone gets up from a couch. The land is ascending so fast that the rising seas — a ubiquitous byproduct of global warming — cannot keep pace. As a result, the relative sea level is falling, at a rate “among the highest ever recorded,” according to a 2007 report by a panel of experts convened by Mayor Bruce Botelho of Juneau.

For the full article, see:
CORNELIA DEAN. “Higher Seas? As Alaska Glaciers Melt, Land Rises.” The New York Times (Mon., May 18, 2009): A1 & A11.

(Note: the title of the online version of the article is: “As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It’s Land That’s Rising.”)

“Morgan DeBoer opened a nine-hole golf course, above, at the mouth of Glacier Bay in 1998 on land that did not exist when his family settled in the area 50 years ago.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

The Ascent of Science Led to Belief that the World Could Improve

I believe the following paragraph expresses the central message of Steven Johnson’s book The Invention of Air:

(p. 211) In the popular folklore of American History, there is a sense in which the founders’ various achievements in natural philosophy—Franklin’s electrical experiments, Jefferson’s botany—serve as a (p. 212) kind of sanctified extracurricular activity. They were statesmen and political visionaries who just happened to be hobbyists in science, albeit amazingly successful ones. Their great passions were liberty and freedom and democracy; the experiments were a side project. But the Priestley view suggests that the story has it backward. Yes, they were hobbyists and amateurs at natural philosophy, but so were all the great minds of Enlightenment-era science. What they shared was a fundamental belief that the world could change—that it could improve— if the light of reason was allowed to shine upon it. And that believe emanated from the great ascent of science over the past century, the upward trajectory that Priestley had s powerfully conveyed in his History and Present State of Electricity. The political possibilities for change were modeled after the change they had all experience through the advancements in natural philosophy. With Priestley, they grasped the political power of the air pump and the electrical machine.

Source:
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)

China’s Grass-Mud Horse Has “Made Government Censors Look Ridiculous”

“Songs about a mythical alpaca-like creature have taken hold online in China.” Source of screen capture and caption: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) BEIJING — Since its first unheralded appearance in January on a Chinese Web page, the grass-mud horse has become nothing less than a phenomenon.

A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.
Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely the point.
The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.
It has also raised real ques-(p. A12)tions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL WINES. “Mythical Beast (a Dirty Pun) Tweaks China’s Web Censors.” The New York Times (Thurs., March 12, 2009): A1 & A12.
(Note: the online title of the article is: “A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors.”)

“The popularity of the grass-mud horse has raised questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information.” Source of screen capture and caption: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

The Meaningful Work of Immigrant Sweatshop Entrepreneurs

(p. 141) “To me the greatest wonder in this was not the mere
quantity of garments–although that was a miracle in
itself–” Borgenicht would write years later, after he
became a prosperous manufacturer of women’s and children’s
clothing, “but the fact that in America even poor
people could save all the dreary, time-consuming labor of
making their own clothes simply by going into a store and
walking out with what they needed. There was a field to
go into, a field to thrill to.”

Borgenicht took out a small notebook. Everywhere he
went, he wrote down what people were wearing and what
was for sale–mens wear, women’s wear, children’s wear. He
wanted to find a “novel” item, something that people would
wear that was not being sold in the stores. For four more
days he walked the streets. On the evening of the final day
as he walked toward home, he saw a half dozen girls playing
hopscotch. One of the girls was wearing a tiny embroidered
apron over her dress, cut low in the front with a tie in the
back, and it struck him, suddenly, that in his previous days
of relentlessly inventorying the clothing shops of the Lower
East Side, he had never seen one of those aprons for sale.
He came home and told Regina. She had an ancient
sewing machine that they had bought upon their arrival in
America. The next morning, he went to a dry-goods store
on Hester Street and bought a hundred yards of gingham
and fifty yards of white crossbar. He came back to their
tiny apartment and laid the goods out on the dining room
table. Regina began to cut the gingham–small sizes for
toddlers, larger for small children–until she had forty (p. 142)
aprons. She began to sew. At midnight, she went to bed
and Louis took up where she had left off. At dawn, she rose
and began cutting buttonholes and adding buttons. By ten
in the morning, the aprons were finished. Louis gathered
them up over his arm and ventured out onto Hester Street.
“Children’s aprons! Little girls’ aprons! Colored ones,
ten cents. White ones, fifteen cents! Little girls’ aprons!”
By one o’clock, all forty were gone.
“Ma, we’ve got our business,” he shouted out to Regina,
after running all the way home from Hester Street.
He grabbed her by the waist and began swinging her
around and around.
“You’ve got to help me,” he cried out. “We’ll work
together! Ma, this is our business.”

Source:
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)

Medical Care is Much Advanced Since Victorian Era of Mid-1800s

In the final sentences quoted below, note the under-appreciated role of air conditioning, and electric light, in advancing medical education.

(p. W6) “Gray’s Anatomy” is one of the most famous medical books of all time, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, then the man most responsible for the success of the book was its long-forgotten illustrator, Henry Vandyke Carter. In “The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy,” Ruth Richardson shows how Carter and Henry Gray came together to produce a classic that originally bore neither of their names — it was published as “Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical” — but she also affords us a remarkable glimpse of science in the 19th century.
. . .
Not much of a paper record exists regarding Henry Gray’s life. Ms. Richardson speculates that his possessions were burned in the “Victorian terror” stirred by smallpox, the disease that would kill him at age 34. Henry Carter kept a diary, but its contents are not exactly a trove of detail about his life and times. . . .
. . .
Describing their methods, Ms. Richardson reminds us of what we now take for granted in medicine by relating what wasn’t feasible back then. The “dissecting season” was the colder months, January-March, to make the most of the cadavers’ preservation. And the work day had to begin soon after dawn because sunlight was so much better for close observation than any other light source.

For the full review, see:
MARK F. TEAFORD. “Dissecting an Unheralded Alliance; A classic medical text bears one man’s name, but it was the product of a true collaboration.” Wall Street Journal (Fri., MARCH 27, 2009): W6.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The reference to the reviewed book is:
Richardson, Ruth. The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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

Adams, as a Point of Honor, Defended the Innovations of Science

(p. 211) It is no accident that, despite the long litany of injuries Adams felt had been dealt him in Jefferson’s letters to Priestley, he chose to begin his counterassault by denying, as a point of honor, that he had ever publicly taken a position as president that was resistant to the innovations of science. Remember that Jefferson had also insinuated that Adams had betrayed the Constitution with his “libel on legislation.” But Adams lashed out first at the accusation that he was anti-science. That alone tells us something about the gap that separates the current political climate from that of the founders.

Source:
Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.