November 2006

How the highly privileged get that way (Thursday, 11/30/06)
Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are fully aware of their good fortune and the fact that they are conspicuous beneficiaries of a system that allows the building of great wealth. As we've said so many times, it's not what you have but what you do that matters, including what you do with what you have, and they seem to understand all of that better than most people. Still, economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and others believe that the processes that produce great wealth are also exacerbating increasing inequality across the globe. Are millions of people poor because people like Buffet and Gates are rich?

Not so long ago, the principal argument had to do with the relative effectiveness of capitalism vs. socialism, and, as Thomas Friedman has said, capitalism tends to make people unequally rich, while socialism tends to make them equally poor. In an age of globalization, though, the arguments are a bit different. Here's part of what we're referring to from Ana Nicolaci da Costa in London.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Advancing Women in Leadership Journal (Thursday, 11/30/06)
Many Americans are still burdened by traditional uninformed, bigoted attitudes and believe that women and minorities don't have what it takes to excel in college or in top, high-paying work-world positions. If you're a college teacher on a campus with a diverse student population, for instance, have you really ever had a woman or black person, say, who has performed well in college courses?

OF COURSE, you might answer--zillions of them. For instance, on average, females have been outperforming males at nearly all levels in school in recent years, and far more African-American women are attending and succeeding in college now than African-American men.

Certainly, things have changed in American society. Not many decades ago, there were no black athletes in big-time sports and virtually no black role models in public life or in the popular media. Now, of course, a black woman is Secretary of State and her predecessor was a black man. According to surveys, the most admired woman in America is Oprah Winfrey, a self-made billionaire whose skin tone apparently has become largely invisible to her millions of television fans. Men who, in the 1960s, felt it necessary to carry signs in civil rights marches saying "I am a man" couldn't have predicted the changes that have occurred.

Still, both women and minorities remain greatly underrepresented in most professions and in corporate and political leadership positions. Harvard medical students can't be materialized out of thin air, of course. Preparation must begin early. How many Nobel Laureates have we lost because we don't adequately support the development of minorities from their earliest days? We don't know either, but there is every good reason to believe that their number is considerable.

In order to address part of this persistent problem, at least so far as women are concerned, here's the Advancing Women in Leadership online journal, which has been publishing for nearly ten years.

"Smithereening" around the world (Wednesday, 11/29/06)
It is becoming increasingly apparent that President Bush has managed to "pour gasoline into the toaster" in what has been one of the most dangerous parts of the world for decades. For years during the Cold War, experts worried that World War III and a consequent nuclear holocaust could begin in this tortured region. Earth certainly hasn't become less conflicted with the end of the Cold War, and the world still has plenty of nuclear weapons, many of which won't necessarily remain under state control.

It's still an open question whether Iraq--an artificial country cobbled together in 1922 by Winston Churchill and others--will remain as one country, or whether two parts will essentiallly be swallowed up by its neighbors while the third becomes an increasingly independent Kurdistan along with what for many years has been part of Turkey.

Turkey is what was left over after the disintegration of the old Ottoman Empire at about the same time that Iraq was created. Turkey has been a steadfast ally of the United States, but isn't terribly happy that the American Administration seems to have set in motion processes that threaten Turkey's coherence as a nation.

It's more than interesting that this secular democracy, which has long been a friend of the United States, is feeling nervous about its continued existence at the moment. It's also more than interesting that the entire region is in danger of "catching fire" now and what the implications might be for life all over the planet.

Still, the Middle East is not the only region where historic things are happening. We've said numerous times that if we don't pay close attention to what is happening in China and India, we're likely to miss something that is very important.

Moreover, North America isn't static either. For one thing, the boundary separating Mexico from the United States has dissolved to some extent during recent years, and, among other things, Mexicans have been repopulating those regions of the U. S. that once were part of Mexico.

Also, there are increasing indications that Canada may eventually break up, as Quebec's separatist movement seems to be gaining momentum again. Canada's House of Commons voted overwhelmingly the other day to recognize Quebecois as a nation within Canada. As we reported last October, political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset predicted some years ago that the English-speaking Western provinces of Canada might eventually become part of the United States.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Meet Senator Millionaire (Tuesday, 11/28/06)
It appears that Senator John Kerry is the richest member of the U. S. Senate, in that he may have nearly as much money as entrepreneur and developer, Earvin "Magic" Johnson, and maybe nearly half as much as Oprah.

Oh, yes, Mr. Johnson also was a prominent basketball player, wasn't he? Nonetheless, given that he's not yet 50-years-old, he may very well end up being far better remembered as an imaginative entrepreneur who has transformed U. S. urban communities than as an historically significant athlete, even though he was that. He's already made far more money as a businessman than he did as an NBA star, and he's on his way to accumulating his first billion.

Now, about the U. S. Senate. To say that Senator Kerry may be the wealthiest member is not to say that the others are poor. In fact, the Senate continues to be a millionaire's club, and that's not entirely new. Forbes magazine has been looking into the finances of the 100 people who represent the 50 states in the United States Senate, and here is some of what they have found: Meet Senator Millionaire.

What's the major problem with young Americans today? (Saturday, 11/25/06)
That there aren't enough of them, maybe? Immigration is what is keeping the United States from developing the sort of grinding demographic problems that some other mature societies such as Russia and Japan are having. Nonetheless, the U. S. population IS aging, and the number of Americans of working age is in decline. Here's what some American cities are trying to do to attract as many as possible.

Incidentally, is "hipness" what young people really are calling it, or is that a term used by city authorities who are 50 or 60 years old?

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Chance (Saturday, 11/25/06)
The open-source movement appears to be gaining momentum, despite what might seem to be "common sense" anxieties about allowing essentially anybody to make contributions to open-source projects, whether they be software or online encyclopedias. There are plenty of crooks and vandals in society who are willing to spread grief, both in the virtual and real worlds. On the other hand, MOST houses and cars in America are NOT vandalized.

If you're concerned about becoming a victim, you'll probably want to do what insurance company actuaries do--try systematically to assess at least two factors: how LIKELY it is that bad things will happen, and WHAT CONSEQUENCES are likely IF bad things happen.

With respect to open-source projects, the bottom line is what really happens, not what somebody expects to happen. What are the effects of hierarchical structure, authoritarianism, or legalistic controls in the workplace or in relation to immigration or in software or encyclopedia production? These are empirical questions, and we must do WHAT IT TAKES to answer them. Simply making up something isn't good enough. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and consequences frequently are other than what we expect.

Speaking of probabilities and open-source issues, Chance is a site that involves both.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Voices on Genocide Prevention (Thursday, 11/23/06)
It appears that war, as we know it, became frequent more or less with the onset of Civilization, which occurred several thousand years ago, but, then, relatively recently in the long history of humanity and the Earth. Genocide, however, seems to have been fairly common during prehistoric times, so far as we're able to tell from the archeological record. Moreover, it's been common during modern times, including the past century. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum offers a series of Podcasts called Voices on Genocide Prevention.

The indebted generation (Tuesday, 11/21/06)
Far too many young adults are mired in far too much debt. Many will spend the remainder of their adult lives paying it off. Credit cards are part of the problem, but so is college tuition, which has increased much faster than the overall rate of inflation for years.

As evidence that universities must not be able to attract quality persons who are willing to manage institutions of higher learning primarily because of their intrinsic motivation, we reported yesterday that E. Gordon Gee of Vanderbilt University apparently is the first university head to be paid more than a million dollars per year.

Incidentally, if you earn more than a million dollars per year, your chances of being audited by the Internal Revenue Service have gone up. Here's more from Jim Abrams in Washington.

Top university officials may be catching up with football coaches (Monday, 11/20/06)
Who is it who once remarked that people who work sitting down tend to make more money than people who work standing up?

At any rate, with similar logic, M.D.'s tend to make more than Ph.D.s on university campuses, but the football coach may be paid several times as much as any other university employee. In fact, it has been many years since the first university football coach made more than $1 million per year--in fact, at least one coach is paid twice that--but Vanderbilt's Chancellor seems to have broken the million dollar barrier for the first time just this year.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Against All Odds: Inside Statistics (Monday, 11/20/06)
Against All Odds: Inside Statistics is a 26-part video series that you can watch at no charge in order to become familiar with the branch of applied mathematics that should be part of basic education at post-secondary and even secondary levels. In the modern world, we're surrounded by things which are inherently statistical.

Many retirement plans may blow up, which may be why we call them "boomers" (Wednesday, 11/15/06)
Svea Herbst-Bayliss reports from New York that a new survey finds that many members of the enormous "boomer" generation have saved nothing for retirement and so expect to have to keep on working deep into their later years.

For many, those "later years" may last a long time, as life-expectancy increases. It's probably a good thing that aging is being redefined in American society, and that many persons in their seventies are able to continue doing much of what they were doing ten to fifteen years earlier. For instance, Dan Rather, who is starting a new career with a high-definition cable TV network, Larry King, Regis Philbin, and Barbara Walters are all in their mid-70s and seem to be working at the tops of their games.

President Reagan was sworn in as president only weeks before his 70th birthday, and, at the time, many persons were concerned about whether he was too old to be president. John McCain is a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination at the moment, and, if he were elected president in 2008, he would be seven months from his 73rd birthday on Inauguration Day.

On the other hand, many persons in their sixties, seventies, or eighties only THINK they can do things as well as they've always done them. Every nursing home contains many residents who are in these age ranges, and some experts believe that President Reagan was showing some of the precursors of Alzheimer's Disease during his second term.

Annan is concerned about lack of leadership on global warming (Wednesday, 11/15/06)
According to Scientific American, the Secretary-General of the United Nations spoke to a group of environmental ministers in Nairobi where he referred to a "frightening lack of leadership" on the part of the top emitters of greenhouse gasses, including the United States and China.

The United States certainly isn't the exclusive world center of irrationality, but it is among those nations with a high concentration of people who don't understand WHAT IT TAKES to be right about anything empirical, whether having to do with climate change or anything else. As a consequence, many of its leaders share widespread popular attitudes which are wholly out of step with the facts as they can best be known at this point.

The so-called "old media" continue the bind they're in (Wednesday, 11/15/06)
There are stories nearly every week about circulation and ad revenue declines at even the largest and most famous of American newspapers, as well as the management conflicts and layoffs that are resulting from these fundamental changes. The electronic media also are feeling pressures from the Internet as a content-creation and distribution medium. NBC has just announced that their evening news broadcast will be available as a "video podcast" from now on, meaning that viewers won't have to watch it on television anymore. Also, Jacques Steinberg of the New York Times reports that NBC is laying off at least 18 persons who have been involved in the production of the "NBC Nightly News," "Today," and "Dateline NBC."

The new technologies make it possible to leverage human media resources in a way that was never possible until a few years ago, while communicating around the world and impacting greatly on the well-being of far more labor-intensive, capital-intensive "traditional" media organizations.

For instance, we've been telling people for years that our World Headquarters is a Perkins Restaurant in Roseville, Minnesota, and we wear that part of our identity as a badge of honor. Since 1995, when we started as Internet pioneers, many large organizations with large staffs, multi-million-dollar budgets, and large headquarters buildings have come and gone. Nonetheless, we're still here, still influential, and still expecting to serve our "blue chip" audience throughout the world in expanding ways for years to come.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design (Wednesday, 11/15/06)
Remarkable individuals can redirect the course of history, and have done so many times. In our own time, people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have helped create the modern hi-tech world that we see all around us, and persons lesser-known to the general public, such as Warren Buffett and Ray Kurzweil, have made major contributions to changing the world as well.

However, the modern world really had its start with the Italian Renaissance and some of the remarkable individuals of that time. One who stands out as an inventor of modernity is Leonardo da Vinci. The Experience, Experiment and Design site accompanies an exhibit on the great man at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The B. S. secret of happiness (Tuesday, 11/14/06)
"B. S." in this case stands for "Ben Stein," a man who has packed a good deal of success and, we presume, happiness into a bit more than six decades. He has worked as a lawyer and economics professor, as a writer of presidential speeches, and as an actor and comedian. His "secret" of financial security and happiness during old age really isn't much of a secret and won't blow you away because of its boldness. Nonetheless, even though he's probably been wrong about a lot of things over the years, he's probably mostly right about this.

Melinda and Bill Gates are changing approaches to giving (Monday, 11/13/06)
One can give time, energy, or expertise as well as money, but it may be useful to distinguish between charitable giving and philanthropic giving, in any case. People without a lot of money to give can engage in philanthropic activities. For instance, serving food in a homeless shelter might best be called "charitable activity," while serving on a board with the intention of establishing a system of homeless shelters might best be called "philanthropic" activity. More-or-less along these lines, Linda Stern reports on how the Gates Foundation has affected the ideas and strategies of many people who do not have great wealth on how they can most effectively make contributions.

Meanwhile, Stephanie Strom writes in the New York Times that many "philanthropreneurs" are blurring the line between investment and philanthropy.

The dog has caught the car; so, now what? (Friday, 11/10/06)
It's probably important to recognize that American voters didn't vote FOR Democrats the other day so much as AGAINST Republicans, and, more specifically, against President Bush. Only about a quarter of Mr. Bush's presidency remains, and Democrats have the same brief period of time to demonstrate to voters that they should retain control in the Senate and House of Representatives past November 2008, let alone capture the presidency. It is anything but a mandate for Democrats at this point, but it is an opportunity. The election may reflect a fundamental realignment in the dynamics of American politics, but, then again, it may not. We shall see.

The hard-core base of neither party changed its mind; instead, both voted mostly as we might expect consistent with their ideologies. Analysis indicates that the election outcome was largely a consequence of independents and moderates in both parties leaning heavily in the Democrats' direction. Analysis also indicates that the principal issue on voters' minds was the war in Iraq, which soon will have gone on longer than U. S. participation in World War II.

Nonetheless, following the shift of legislative power in Washington, issues in addition to Iraq are on the minds of many people in the United States and around the world. For instance, Roland Jackson in London says that the world's financial markets were shaken by the latest U. S. elections, mostly because of uncertainty about whether "less market-friendly policies" lie ahead. Glenn Somercville doesn't see any major shifts of economic policy as a consequence of the Democratic victory, even though there may be compromise on some sort of minimum wage increase.

Keep in mind that, while the Democrats now control both the Senate and the House of Representatives, there is still a Republican administration. On many issues, one man in the White House can have as much or more power than both houses of Congress put together.

The Washington Post offers multiple analyses of economic issues and how these may be affected by the power shift in Washington. Lori Montgomery and Steven Mufson examine what the new Congress will mean for American business. Other articles deal with implications for the federal minimum wage and trade, the Sarbanes-Oxley law, health care costs, alternative energy sources, housing, and taxes on the middle class.

How to get a message through when people are inclined to attack the messenger or discount anything s/he says (Thursday, 11/9/06)
Jane Lampman of the Christian Science Monitor says that evangelical Christians and their leaders have been inclined to avoid seeing Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," but are being profoundly influenced by another film, "The Great Warming," which says much the same thing.

Part of the reason for the great American polarization in politics and religion during recent years is that most people on all sides of the hot araguments haven't had a clear understanding of WHAT IT TAKES to be sure about anything empirical, or what methods are necessary in order to develop trustworthy answers to empirical questions of any kind.

What's important is not who expresses conclusions or what somebody's ideology, beliefs, or attitudes are at a particular time, but WHAT METHODS HAVE BEEN USED to arrive at conclusions. It's why Ph.D. students in so many scholarly fields spend so much time learning about and become expert in the use of methods of inquiry.

Many people are worrying about their ARMs (Monday, 11/6/06)
No, Venus di Milo is not also called "A Farewell to Arms," and "ARMs" doesn't refer only to those long things that hang on the sides of most people's bodies with very useful devices at their ends. ARMs also is short for "Adjustable Rate Mortgages," and Jeannine Aversa writes from Washington that a new real estate survey finds that about a third of the people who have them are worried that they may not be able to make their mortgage payments as rates increase.

Internet founder worries about what he has wrought (Monday, 11/6/06)
Don't tell Al Gore, but Tim Berners-Lee is often credited as the inventor of the Internet, and he's worried about its future. Berners-Lee, that is, not Gore. Well, maybe Gore too.

At any rate, here's more from David Garrett on Tim's recent interview on the BBC.

We are approaching a time when nearly everything will be connected to nearly everything else, and such a condition tends to cause traditional structure to dissolve, while also making it difficult for stable new structure to develop.

The Internet rapidly is becoming one of the most important elements of the world's infrastructure, but it differs from traditional infrastructure in a number of ways. For instance, most conventional infrastructure--railroad systems, electrical systems, etc.--is clearly visible against its background. However, when nearly everything is connected to nearly everything else, there isn't any background, and the world is still trying to figure out how to cope with these fundamentally new circumstances.

Grove takes on health care and more (Monday, 11/6/06)
Andy Grove may well be the smartest, most sophisticated, most creative and formidable person on the planet. He's cofounder and former CEO of Intel Corporation, which still seems to be the most important digital hardware company in the world.

His personal story is amazing. He spent his first decade living under Nazism in his native Hungary, then his second decade under Communism, before arriving in the United States with little more than his bare hands to work with. Before long, though, he had earned a Berkeley Ph. D. in chemical engineering. Then, along with Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, he founded Intel, which has made the world a different place.

In recent years, Dr. Grove has had his personal battles with illness, first prostate cancer, then Parkinson's disease. Now, he would like to take on the task of revolutionizing the American health care and political systems. Here's more from his recent interview with Business Week magazine.

U. S. unemployment hits five-year low (Friday, 11/3/06)
Somebody can tell Democratic campaign strategist James Carville that it may not be the economy this time, but nobody should call him "stupid." People often do vote in their perceived economic self-interest, but, according to virtually all of the polls, it seems that the war in Iraq will trump all other issues for many voters this time. Nonetheless, the American economy seems to be doing fairly well, at least according to conventional measures. The Labor Department's latest data show U. S. unemployment has hit its lowest point in five years.

Incidentally, while many Americans believe that President Bush certainly isn't the brightest bulb on Broadway, it seems reasonable to assume that he's at least as smart as most of the people who spend so much time talking about how dumb they think he is. In fact, the majority of American presidents have been fairly unexceptional people in many ways (except for managing to become President of the United States, of course!) and nearly all have had unsuccessful second terms.

Warren Harding is on most people's list of the worst presidents in American history. He looked like a movie star, but may not have been fully up to the task. Famously, he once remarked, "My god, this is a hell of a job!" Still, John Kennedy said that he would not be critical of anyone who has ever sat in the Oval Office under the enormous burdens of the American presidency.

Americans like to look back at the first several presidents as remarkable men, and, in many ways, they were, but most also were slave holders who didn't seem to feel all that badly about it. Moreover, they presided over a nation that was not yet a democracy, but an oligarchy. Only white, male landowners could vote. Demagoguery seemed to be less of a problem during those early years than it has been recently, but, nonetheless, as America has become more democratic, it has also become a more successful society. American democracy was not born full-grown, and, in fact, isn't fully mature yet.

Many of President Bush's most outspoken opponents seem to watch TV's "Saturday Night Live," "The Daily Show," or David Letterman's highly selective "Great Moments in Presidential Speeches" a lot, and we suspect that their perceptions of him are shaped, at least in part, by parodies which somebody simply has made up. Communication researchers have demonstrated that people tend to remember messages longer than where they heard them. The opponents of major politicians who are trying to shape their images, as well as the people who create negative campaign commercials for television, seem to be aware of these findings.

At the moment, it appears that the Iraq War has been a debacle for a variety of reasons, but how will President Bush be perceived by most Americans 50 years from now? We believe that it's far too early to tell, and, of course, even then, it will depend on whom you ask.

Historians seem to agree that, despite what he and other leading Democrats were saying at the time, a major reason President Truman chose not to run for re-election in 1952 was that his approval ratings were in the low 20s at one point. Now, though, he's generally regarded as having been a competent and successful president, even among many Republican politicians who invoke his memory in their campaigns.

Moreover, probably the most hated American president so far, even in the North during much of his administration, was Abraham Lincoln. Even the people responsible for the most odious campaign commercials on TV now might blush at some of the things that people were saying about Lincoln.

At this point, Abraham Lincoln is perceived by most Americans as our greatest president. However, he came very close to being seen by posterity as America's worst president, rather than a national icon, and it all depended on events that were largely out of his control. We're not referring simply to Lincoln's martyrdom only days after it was clear that the North had won the war, even though that had a lot to do with turning him into a "saint" in the eyes of many Americans.

If Sheridan, Sherman, and others had not given Lincoln a few victories on the battlefield in the fall of 1864, all indications are that McClellan would have defeated Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election, and that would have changed everything.

McClellan campaigned on the promise that he would end the Civil War by negotiating a treaty with the Confederacy, which would have allowed the Southern states to secede without further resistance from the North. If this had happened, England, which needed Confederate cotton, almost surely would have recognized the Confederacy as a sovereign country, and recognition by other countries would have followed quickly. Then, it's fairly likely that the Confederacy would have annexed troubled and vulnerable Mexico and legalized slavery throughout that entire region.

In the United States of America, pressures to annex English-speaking Canada are likely to have increased, given the reduced size of the U. S. following the Civil War. If that were attempted, a war with England--with a greatly enlarged Confederacy as England's ally--would have been likely.

Life in the Americas and the rest of the world would have been entirely different during the years from 1865 until the present, and Abraham Lincoln would be remembered as the man who "lost" America by presiding over the dissolution of the United States.