delanceyplace.com 11/12/09 - the dust bowl

In today's encore excerpt - the American Dust
Bowl, which lasted from 1930 to as late as 1940 in
some areas. Rated the number one weather event of
the twentieth century, the Dust Bowl covered one
hundred million acres in parts of Nebraska, Kansas,
Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, and left
thousands dead, diseased and destitute:

"The rains disappeared - not just for a season but for
years on end. With no sod to hold the earth in place,
the soil calcified and started to blow. Dust clouds
boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and
rolled like moving mountains - a force of their own.
When the dust fell, it penetrated everything: hair, nose,
throat, kitchen, bedroom, water well. A scoop shovel
was needed just to clean the house in the morning.
The eeriest thing was the darkness. People tied
themselves to ropes before going to a barn just a few
hundred feet away, like a walk in space, tethered to
the life support center. Chickens roosted in
mid-afternoon. ...

"Many in the East did not believe the initial accounts of
predatory dust until a storm in May 1934 carried the
windblown shards of the Great Plains over much of
the nation. In Chicago, twelve million tons of dust fell.
New York, Washington - even ships at sea, three
hundred miles off the Atlantic coast - were blanketed
in brown. Cattle went blind and suffocated. When
farmers cut them open, they found stomachs stuffed
with fine sand. Horses ran madly against the storms.
Children coughed and gagged, dying of something
the doctors called 'dust pneumonia.' In desperation,
some families gave away their children. The
instinctive act of hugging a loved one or shaking
someone's hand could knock two people down, for
the static electricity from the dusters was so
strong. ...

"By 1934, the soil was like fine-sifted flour, and the
heat made it a danger to go outside many days. In
Vinita, Oklahoma, the temperature soared above 100
degrees for thirty-five consecutive days. On the thirty-
sixth day, it reached 117. ...

"On the skin, the dust was like a nail file, a grit strong
enough to hurt. People rubbed Vaseline in their
nostrils as a filter. The Red Cross handed out
respiratory masks to schools. Families put wet towels
beneath their doors and covered their windows with
bed sheets, fresh-dampened nightly. ...

"Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, [was the] day of the
worst duster of them all. The storm carried twice as
much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the
Panama Canal. The canal took seven years to dig; the
storm lasted a single afternoon. More than 300,000
tons of Great Plains topsoil was airborne that day. ...
As the black wall approached, car radios clicked off,
overwhelmed by the static. Ignitions shorted out.
Waves of sand, like ocean water rising over a ship's
prow, swept over roads. Cars went into ditches. A train
derailed."

Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time, Mariner,
Copyright 2006 by Timothy Egan, pp. 5-8.

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delanceyplace.com 11/11/09 - nixonomics

In today's excerpt - U.S. Presidents have had a
pronounced tendency to pressure the Federal
Reserve into keeping interest rates low, and Federal
Reserve presidents are often predisposed to please.
But deferring needed rate increases always eventually
backfires, and imposing price controls always
eventually backfires:

"Maintaining the gold value of the dollar [by increasing
interest rates] conflicted with the Kennedy growth
imperative in 1962, although it was finessed by the
foreign security tax ploy. Starting about 1965, Lyndon
Johnson started running big budget deficits to finance
the war in Vietnam and his domestic program [and]
the floods of new money were already generating
inflationary pressures. ...

"And once again, the prescribed medicine - raise
interest rates and reduce borrowing - was not on the
table, for it conflicted with Richard Nixon's desire to
win a second presidential term.

"The first two years of the Nixon administration were
very difficult economic sailing, to the point where the
administration was seriously worried about the 1972
election. During the five years of Johnson's
presidency, despite the uptick in inflation, the real, or
inflation-adjusted, annual rate of growth exceeded 5
percent. But in 1970, growth plunged to near zero,
while inflation was scraping 6 percent - dreadful
numbers for a campaign launch. There was little room
for maneuver. The 1970 federal deficit was already as
big as any Johnson had run, so fiscal stimulation was
likely to spill over into more inflation. ...

"But few politicians had Nixon's gift for the bold stroke.
In August 1971 he helicoptered his entire economics
team to Camp David for a weekend that Herbert Stein,
a member of the Council of Economic Advisers,
predicted 'could be the most important meeting in the
history of economics' since the New Deal. After the
meeting, ... Nixon announced that he would cut taxes,
impose wage and price controls throughout the
economy, impose a tax surcharge on all imports, and
rescind the commitment to redeem dollars in gold. ...

"After the final decisions had been taken, Volcker was
charged with drafting Nixon's and [Treasury Secretary
John ] Connally's speeches announcing the changes.
His draft, he recalled, was 'a typical devaluation
speech' filled with the 'obligatory mea culpas.' None
of it saw the light of day. The Volcker draft was handed
over to uber speechwriter William Safire and emerged
as a proclamation of 'a triumph and a fresh
start.'

"Politically, it was a masterstroke. With price controls
in place Nixon and his Federal Reserve chief, Arthur
Burns, could gun up the money supply without
worrying about price inflation - both the narrow and
broad measures of money jumped by more than 10
percent in 1971, at the time the biggest increase ever.
Economic growth obediently revived, and was back up
over 5 percent by the 1972 election - just what the
political doctors had ordered.

"Consumers were happy with flat prices, while big
business loved the tax breaks, the import surcharges,
and the price controls. All in a single weekend, Nixon
had delivered them from union wage pressures,
supplier price hikes, and foreign competition. ...

"Although Nixon got his landslide, the cracks in the
economy were too big to hide. The 1971
wage-and-price '90-day freeze,' as it was originally
billed, lasted for three years. Controls are always
easier to put on than to take off. The underlying
inflation builds to a point of explosiveness, and the
inevitable thicket of rules offers profitable little crevices
for the lucky or the well-connected. Organized labor
stopped cooperating in 1974, but by then Nixon was
deeply ensnared in the coils of Watergate. Congress
forced the end of all controls in the spring, except for
price controls on domestic oil. Removal of controls
triggered double-digit inflation, the first since the
1940s, and the country suffered a nasty recession in
1974 and 1975."

Charles R. Morris, The Sages, Public Affairs,
Copyright 2009 by Charles R. Morris, pp. 124-127.

delanceyplace.com 11/10/09 - businessman and womanizer

In today's excerpt - Richard Rodgers was a
towering giant among 20th century composers,
but his often sweet, sentimental and
reaffirming music belied the fact that he was
a tough-minded businessman and vulpine
womanizer:

"In the months following the opening of
Oklahoma!, Richard (Dick) and Oscar
Hammerstein began setting up
a series of other business arrangements
through their lawyer, Howard Reinheimer.
Between them they laid the foundation for
what would become within a few short years
one of the most powerful and influential
organizations in the American theater. Their
basic intention was to put themselves in a
position, vis a vis their own work, that would
have turned even [Flo] Ziegfeld green with envy.
...

"In 1951, the magazine Business Week
estimated the income of the team as
around $1,500,000 a year {$12.5 million in
today's dollars]. By the mid-50s, the firm
was grossing well over $15,000,000 a year
[over $120 million in today's dollars], by
which time it had also bought back The
Theatre Guild's investments in the
early Rodgers and Hammerstein triumphs. Dick
and Oscar owned one hundred percent
of everything they wrote, and a good-sized
piece of everything else.

"They set [the] rules and stuck to them.
Anyone wanting motion picture rights to
their work had to pay up 40 percent of the
profits of the movie, and no haggling.
Collaboration with Rodgers and Hammerstein
meant that Rodgers and Hammerstein
got 51 percent of the credit, and 51 percent
of the billing, not to mention the action.
The effect of this was to consolidate the
Rodgers and Hammerstein interests, to make
them into an empire with Rodgers (and, to a
much lesser degree, Hammerstein) at its
head.

"Rodgers was no longer a theatrical
songwriter with business interests, but a
chairman of
the board who happened to write songs. He
supervised every detail - he even signed the
weekly paychecks - spending more and more
time in an office above a bank on
Madison Avenue that had as little charm as a
dentist's waiting room, the only concession
to his craft a Steinway grand he rarely
played. ...

"For all that, throughout his career Rodgers
was unfailingly courteous, endlessly
patient, infinitely available to the hundreds
and hundreds of people who felt they had to
talk with him, offer him ideas, seek his
support. ...

"Nevertheless, everyone seems to agree that
after South Pacific there was a change.
Success seems not to have made him blossom,
but to have soured him. He became more
ruthless, almost dictatorial. He flew off the
handle more often. 'He didn't take criticism
well and he was always getting his feelings
hurt,' actress Billie Worth recalled. And
there were other
more personal problems. His wife Dorothy
underwent a hysterectomy shortly after the
show opened, another internal operation a
year later. He was suffering from a depression
he would not admit to, and drinking heavily.

"If the recent revelations of his daughters
are anything to go by, Rodgers was imprisoned
in a desperately unhappy marriage. Dorothy
Rodgers, beautifully poised and chic
in a Duchess of Windsor sort of way, was also
a neurotic hypochondriac, the kind of
woman whose house was so organized there were
postage stamps on the envelopes in the
guest-room writing desks. Perhaps as a
result, or perhaps anyway, he was a vulpine
womanizer. And he wasn't very subtle about
it, either. Many, many years earlier Larry Hart
had commented that Dick adored chorus girls.
What kind? 'Blonde. And very
innocent-looking. Brains not essential - but
they must be innocent-looking.' ... Josh
Logan probably put it as simply as it
can be said. 'We used to say to him, 'Dick,
for God's sake don't screw the leading lady
till she's signed the contract.' ' "

Frederick Nolan, The Sound of Their
Music, Applause, Copyright 2002 by
Frederick Nolan, pp. 149-150, 216-217.

delanceyplace.com 11/9/09 - murder

In today's excerpt - murder rates in the
United States are the highest among affluent
democracies, and historians and
criminologists have only recently attempted
to construct theories to explain these high
levels:

"The United States
has the highest homicide rate of any affluent
democracy, nearly four times that of
France and the United Kingdom, and six
times that of Germany. Why? Historians
haven't often asked this question. Even
historians who like to try to solve cold
cases usually cede to sociologists and other
social scientists the study of what makes
murder rates rise and fall, or what might
account for why one country is more murderous
than another. Only in the nineteen-seventies
did historians begin studying homicide in any
systematic way. In the
United States, that effort was led by Eric
Monkkonen, who died in 2005, his promising
work unfinished. Monkkonen's research has
been taken up by Randolph
Roth, whose book 'American Homicide' offers a
vast investigation
of murder, in the aggregate, and over time.
...

"In the archives, murders are easier to
count than other crimes. Rapes go
unreported, thefts can be hidden, adultery
isn't necessarily actionable, but murder
will nearly always out. Murders enter the
historical record through coroners' inquests,
court transcripts, parish ledgers,
and even tombstones. ... The number of
uncounted murders, known as the 'dark
figure,' is thought to be quite small. Given
enough
archival research, historians can conceivably
count, with fair accuracy, the frequency with
which people of earlier eras
killed one another, with this caveat: the
farther back you go in time - and the
documentary trail doesn't go back much
farther than 1300 - the more fragmentary
the record and the bigger the dark
figure....

"In
Europe, homicide rates, conventionally
represented as the number of murder
victims per hundred thousand people in the
population per year, have been falling for
centuries. ... In feuding medieval Europe,
the murder rate hovered
around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds.
Duels are more mannered; they also have
a lower body count. By 1500, the murder
rate in Western Europe had fallen to
about twenty. Courts had replaced duels.
By 1700, the murder rate had dropped
to five. Today, that rate is generally well
below two, where it has held steady, with
minor fluctuations, for the past century.

"In the United States, the picture could
hardly be more different. The American
homicide rate has been higher than Europe's
from the start, and higher at just
about every stage since. It has also
fluctuated, sometimes wildly. During the
Colonial period, the homicide rate fell,
but in the nineteenth century, while Europe's
kept sinking, the U.S. rate went up
and up. In the twentieth century, the rate
in the United States dropped to about
five during the years following the Second
World War, but then rose, reaching
about eleven in 1991. It has since fallen
once again, to just above five, a rate that
is, nevertheless, twice that of any other
affluent democracy. ...

"2.3 million people are currently behind bars
in the United States. That works out to
nearly one in every hundred adults, the
highest rate anywhere in the world, and four
times the world average. ...

"[Roth theorizes]
that four factors correlate
with the homicide rate: faith that government
is stable and capable of enforcing
just laws; trust in the integrity of
legitimately elected officials; solidarity among
social groups based on race, religion, or
political affiliation; and confidence that
the social hierarchy allows for respect to
be earned without recourse to violence.
When and where people hold these sentiments,
the homicide rate is low, when
and where they don't, it is high."

Jill Lepore, "Rap Sheet," The New
Yorker, November 9, 2009, pp. 79-81.

delanceyplace.com 11/6/09 - whaling

In today's excerpt - whaling. In the 1800s, the whaling
industry - as immortalized in Moby Dick - was one of
the most important industries in America, powering
both economic growth and America's growing global
stature:

"Consider the whale. Hunted since antiquity, by the
nineteenth century it had become an economic engine
that helped turn the United States into a powerhouse.
Every square inch of it could be turned into something,
so the whale afforded
one-stop shopping for a fast-growing nation: material
for the manufacture of paint and varnish; textiles and
leather; candles and soap; clothing and of course
food (the tongue was a particular delicacy). The whale
was especially beloved by the finer sex, surrendering
its body parts for corsets, collars, parasols, perfume,
hairbrushes, and red fabric dye. (This last product
was derived from, of all things, the whale's
excrement.) Most valuable was whale oil, a lubricant
for all sorts of machinery but most crucially used for
lamp fuel. As the author Eric Jay Dolin declares in
Leviathan, 'American whale oil lit the world.'

"Out of a worldwide fleet of 900 whaling ships, 735 of
them were American, hunting in all four oceans.
Between 1835 and 1872, these ships reaped nearly
300,000 whales, an average of more than 7,700 a
year. In a good year, the total take from oil and baleen
(the whale's bonelike 'teeth') exceeded $10 million,
today's equivalent of roughly $200 million. Whaling
was dangerous and difficult work, but it was the
fifth-largest industry in the United States, employing
70,000 people.

"And then what appeared to be an inexhaustible
resource was - quite suddenly and, in retrospect, quite
obviously - heading toward exhaustion. Too many
ships were hunting for too few whales. A ship that
once took a year at sea to fill its hold with whale oil
now needed four years. Oil prices spiked accordingly,
rocking the economy back home. Today, such an
industry might be considered 'too big to fail,' but the
whaling industry was failing indeed, with grim
repercussions for all America.

"That's when a retired railway man named Edwin L.
Drake, using a steam engine to power a drill through
seventy feet of shale and bedrock, struck oil in
Titusville, Pennsylvania. The future bubbled to the
surface. Why risk life and limb chasing underwater
leviathans around the world, having to catch and carve
them up, when so much energy was just waiting, in
the nation's basement, to be pumped upstairs?

"Oil was not only a cheap and simple fix but, like the
whale, extraordinarily versatile. It could be used as
lamp oil, a lubricant, and as a fuel for automobiles
and home heating; it could be made into plastic and
even nylon stockings. The new oil industry also
provided lots of jobs for unemployed whalers and, as
a bonus, functioned as the original Endangered
Species Act, saving the whale from near-certain
extinction."

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner,
Superfreakonomics, William Morrow, Copyright
2009 by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, pp.
142-143.

delanceyplace.com 11/5/09 - eunuchs

In today's encore excerpt - eunuchs, those
castrated servants who performed a wide variety of
functions for kings in ancient and more recent times.
The special value of eunuchs (literally bed-keepers) to
kings and other high-ranking officials was that they
could be better trusted since they had no desire for the
wives and other women of the court, did not have the
distractions of family life, and were thought to have
less ambition. Here we see eunuchs in the capital of
Constantinople circa the fifth century CE:

"Eunuchs gave the palace at Constantinople a special
atmosphere. They were men who had been sexually
damaged by disease, accident, or deliberate
mutilation. Mutilation, as horrible as it sounds, was
not always or only conscious cruelty, inasmuch as
eunuchry was a path to power and safety for the
marginal or the vulnerable. One source speaks of the
Abasgi outside Roman territory at the eastern end of
the Black Sea (modern Abkhazia retains the name),
whose king sold boys for castration and killed their
parents. If the fatality rate on these castrations was
about ninety-five percent, few cared, and the survivors
might feel themselves lucky in many ways.

"So normal a part of the landscape did the eunuchs
seem, and so easily was their involuntary sexual
isolation compared with religiously approved
abstinence, that in later times when exegetes read of
the service of the prophet Daniel at Nebuchadnezzar's
court, they naturally assumed - meaning it as a
respectful interpretation - that he must have been a
eunuch too. On a higher level, the angels and their
sexlessness gave sexless males below a kind of
respectability. The general Narses, who replaced
Belisarius and finally brought grim peace to Italy for
[the emperor] Justinian, was a eunuch. By the eighth
century, a eunuch could even rise to the patriarchal
throne in Constantinople.

"At the pinnacle of the household was the grand
chamberlain, always a eunuch and thus supposedly
without family interest to corrupt his service,
responsible for every aspect of management and
control. He supervised the silentiaries (court officials)
with their golden wands, who offered discreet
guidance and control to ensure that all would be
orderly and impressive, and whose influence could
thus incidentally mean a great deal. On retirement
they were normally admitted to the senate."

James J. O'Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman
Empire, Harper Collins, Copyright 2008 by James
J. O'Donnell, pp. 200-201.

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delanceyplace.com 11/4/09 - cognitive misers

In today's excerpt - the human brain is a "cognitive
miser"- it can employ several approaches to solving a
given problem, but almost always chooses the one
that requires the least computational power:

"We tend to be cognitive misers. When approaching a
problem, we can choose from any of several cognitive
mechanisms. Some mechanisms have great
computational power, letting us solve many problems
with great accuracy, but they are slow, require much
concentration and can interfere with other cognitive
tasks. Others are comparatively low in computational
power, but they are fast, require little concentration
and do not interfere with other ongoing cognition.
Humans are cognitive misers because our basic
tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms
that require less computational effort, even if they are
less accurate.
Are you a cognitive miser? Consider the following
problem, taken from the work of Hector Levesque, a
computer scientist at the University of Toronto. Try to
answer it yourself before reading the solution.

Problem: Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking
at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a
married person looking at an unmarried person?

A) Yes

B) No

C) Cannot be determined

"More than 80 percent of people choose C. But the
correct answer is A. Here is how to think it through
logically: Anne is the only person whose marital status
is unknown. You need to consider both possibilities,
either married or unmarried, to determine whether you
have enough information to draw a conclusion. If Anne
is married, the answer is A: she would be the married
person who is looking at an unmarried person
(George). If Anne is not married, the answer is still A:
in this case, Jack is the married person, and he is
looking at Anne, the unmarried person. This thought
process is called fully disjunctive reasoning -
reasoning that considers all possibilities. The fact that
the problem does not reveal whether Anne is or is not
married suggests to people that they do not have
enough information, and they make the easiest
inference (C) without thinking through all the
possibilities.
Most people can carry out fully disjunctive reasoning
when they are explicitly told that it is necessary (as
when there is no option like 'cannot be determined'
available). But most do not automatically do so, and
the tendency to do so is only weakly correlated with
intelligence.

"Here is another test of cognitive miserliness, as
described by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel
Kahneman and his colleague Shane Frederick.

"A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs
$1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball
cost?

"Many people give the first response that comes to
mind - 10 cents. But if they thought a little harder, they
would realize that this cannot be right: the bat would
then have to cost $1.10, for a total of $1.20. IQ is no
guarantee against this error. Kahneman and
Frederick found that large numbers of highly select
university students at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Princeton and Harvard were cognitive
misers, just like the rest of us, when given this and
similar problems."

Keith E. Stanovich, "Rational and Irrational Thought:
The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss," Scientific American,
November/December 2009, pp. 35-36.