Notes From All Over, Part 1 -- September 4, 2019

I think I'm going to take the day off. Will come back to blogging later. Things seem slow, somewhat unsettled. Need to get away from social media for awhile.

One Parthian shot: I posted this story last week suggesting the story had legs, and the story may have been one of the top national non-energy stories of the week -- now, I see, that the story was posted in The New York Post on July 11, 2019. And it's true: our local Starbucks no longer has any newspapers available for sale or otherwise. Except perhaps at Barnes and Noble I am unaware of any location that now sells the WSJ in the north Texas suburbs. Home delivery is incredibly unreliable so we canceled our home delivery WSJ subscription a year or so ago.

Within my lifetime, it may happen that children will grow up having never seen a newspaper just like no one under the age of 20 (?) has ever used a rotary dial phone and the corner pay phone is also a thing of the past.

However, interestingly enough, contrary to all the hyperbole, there is more snow than ever for those who want to ski.

Because of the holiday earlier this week, the weekly EIA petroleum report will be released Thursday September 5, 2019. 

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The Apple Page

Apple set to launch low-cost iPhone early next year. Wow. 

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The Book Review

From "Up, Up, and Away," a book review by Deidre Nansen McCloskey. The book: Alan Greenspan's and Adrian Wooldridge's Capitalism in America: A History, c. 2019. In The Claremont Review of Books, Volume XIX, Number 2, Spring, 2019, p. 99.

It's good to have a cheerful economic history of the United States. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve form 1987 until his retirement in 2006, and Adrian Wooldridge, the political editor of the Economist, set out to tell the "exhilarating story" of America's economic triumph, with a few headwinds towards the end.

We know the story, or at least some comic or tragic version of it picked up form high school, college, the movies, or politics. Even the headwinds, such as the rise of entitlements and the inflexibility of the financial system, are seen as cheerfully overcome-able.

The cheer occasionally grates. Thomas Jefferson is praised, as he should be, for articulating the great idae of liberal equality. but he is not blamed, as he should be, and in the next sentence, for his unusually tight grip on his slaves, some of them perhaps his children. He is praised, as he should be, for intoning that "[t]he mass of mankind had not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred to ready to ride them." But he is not blamed, as he should be, and in the next sentence, for lifting imperfectly the formulation without attribution from Richard Rumbold, the English Leveller, in his speech from the scaffold in 1685.

The book does the Lord's work, though, with verve and statistics and charm. Along with a good dea of what every adult knows there are brilliant and informative riffs, by Wooldridge on Alexander Hamilton versus Jefferson (though his grasp of the Homestead Act is not so good), or Greenspan on what to do about the recent financial system (his grasp of the gold standard is not so good).

Apt quotations sparkle throughout -- a stylistic device that academic histories often overlook. It is very much a trade book, not a textbook, but nonetheless covers the ground. It's a good read, in which American Republicans and British Tories will delight in, and which American leftish Democrats and British Corbynites should read for the cheerful news, but won't.

It's filled, for example, with engaging capsule biographies of clever and avaricious people, mainly to illustrate American innovations from Ben Franklin to Steve Jobs. Yet Greenspan and Wooldridge are judicious in blame, too, pointing for example to Thomas Edison's misunderstanding of direct current, which for decades stopped progress in electricity. It was similar to James Watt's Folly, which for decades stopped progress in steam engines. Both arose, it should be noted, from patents, the temporary but too-long monopolies the government grants to the clever and avaricious. And Greenspan and Wooldridge get right the egalitarian and often unpatentable sources of innovation. It didn't take science to innovate with, say, container ships It took enterprise and liberal institutions letting people like Malcom McLean have a go.