I'll be speaking at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Illinois, on Wednesday and at several locations in Chicago on Thursday and Friday. For information on these events, or to find out where else I'll be over the next few months, check out the book tour page.
Maybe I'm missing something, but aside from Robert Musil's vigorous double-Fisking of the NYT obits, it appears that the Blogosphere took little note of the death last week of Edward Teller. That's unfortunate. Teller was just the sort of unfairly demonized freedom lover bloggers pride themselves on supporting. As this 1987 Scientist review of his book Better a Shield Than a Sword put it:
Teller is one of the great scientists of our time and his scientific contributions as sure him a place in the history of physics. He is also a philosopher and a man who has had a decisive influence on the thinking of America's major political leaders since the end of World War II.
In Better a Shield Than a Sword, Teller deals with many subjects that have held his attention over the years. The nature of freedom has always been uppermost in his mind. He describes his experiences as a teenager in Hungary where, in quick succession, both fascist and communist tyrannies held sway. There is no doubt that these circumstances had a fundamental influence on Teller's life and he recognized early on that whatever the label, tyranny is al ways the same.
Teller has a deep understanding of the nature of freedom and the uncertainty and ambiguity that inevitably accompany it. it is because he understands freedom that he has been one of the staunchest de fenders of free debate and a vigorous opponent of secrecy in politics as well as science. Teller was one of the first to warn against extensive secrecy in government and that secrecy is ultimately self-defeating. Events definitely have proved him right.
Teller believed that a free society draws strength from the free flow of information and hurts its ability to defend itself when the government tries to lock up information, particularly scientific and technical knowledge. The Federation of American Scientists, not known for its ultrahawkish views, marked Teller's passing with a link to the 1970 report of the Defense Science Board's Task Force on Secrecy, of which Teller was an influential member. From the report:
Although the Task Force was composed of individuals whose backgrounds are in science and engineering, the group sought responses to its assignment from a broader viewpoint since it was felt quite strongly that the issue of classification and the way it is handled has a significant effect on the posture of our nation in the international community, particularly in relation to our ability to unite and strengthen the free nations of the world. To emphasize this point, one of the members quoted an opinion expressed by Niels Bohr soon after World War II that, while secrecy is an effective instrument in a closed society, it is much less effective in an open society in the long run; instead, the open society should recognize that openness is one of its strongest weapons, for it accelerates mutual understanding and reduces barriers to rapid development.
We believe that overclassification has contributed to the credibility gap that evidently exists between the government and an influential segment of the population. A democratic society requires knowledge of the facts in order to assess its government's actions. An orderly process of disclosure would contribute to informed discussions of issues.When an otherwise open society attempts to use classification as a protective device, it may in the long run increase the difficulties of communications within its own structure so that commensurate gains are not obtained. Experience shows that, given time, a sophisticated, determined and unscrupulous adversary can usually penetrate the secrecy barriers of an open society. The Soviet Union very rapidly gained knowledge of our wartime work on nuclear weapons in spite of the very high level of classification assigned to it. The barriers are apt to be far more effective against restrained friends or against incompetents, and neither pose serious threats.
Beyond such general matters, the Task Force noted that there are frequent disclosures of classified information by public officials, the news media and quasi-technical journals. While the reliability and credibility of such information frequently may be in doubt, the magnitude of leaks indicates that, at present, our society has limited respect for current practices and laws relating to secrecy. It would be prudent to modify the present system to one that can be both respected and enforced.
An interesting interview with Teller (video available) is here. The Amazon page for his memoirs is here. Check out the review from a 12-year-old who had to read a biography for a book report.
Addendum: Chuck Watson of Shoutin' Across the Pacific posted this item on Teller, which also noted the blogosphere's near-silence on his death.
While sitting in the airport on Friday, I clipped this Walter Shapiro column on the fiscal insanity of adding a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare.
At the end of June, the House and the Senate passed separate versions of a $400 billion plan to provide a prescription-drug benefit under Medicare. A committee of 17 congressional negotiators is now struggling to cobble together a compromise on the drug plan that can win the needed support of House conservatives and Senate moderates. And, by the way, virtually no one in Congress believes that this new benefit would actually ended up costing as little as $400 billion over 10 years.
Voters back home might assume that their legislators in Washington would be embarrassed to be creating a far-reaching new entitlement program at just the moment when the deficit is careening out of control. Such is the innocence of those unacquainted with the peculiar folkways of Congress. The $400 billion for the drug benefit has been already approved as part of the congressional budget plan. So in the bizarre way that Congress does arithmetic, the $400 billion is considered to have been already spent, even though the drug benefit would not take effect until 2006.
In Washington, creating this new entitlement is seen as a test of the president's political strength. Defeating it would be a defeat for the president. But the rest of us would be better off.
In a column for the U.S. News website, style aficionado Michael Barone discusses The Substance of Style and, among other points, explains its connection to The Future and Its Enemies and, hence, to "creativity, enterprise, and progress." The conclusion:
In mid-20th-century culturally uniform America, advocates of different styles struggled for the pre-eminence of their favorites. In early-21st-century culturally diverse America, all kinds of different people can have the styles they want.
The Substance of Style is a celebration of some of the wonders of our country in our time. Postrel points out that demands for aesthetically pleasing goods and services have created jobs by the many thousands for designers, craftsmen, nail salon workers--jobs that probably give their holders greater satisfaction than the grim clerical jobs in giant corporations that mid-20th-century theorists thought we would all be consigned to today. And she also points out that the profusion of aesthetic products has made them cheaper: Women today accumulate much larger wardrobes out of much smaller percentages of their earnings than they did in the conformist 1950s. Here we rub up against one of the limitations of economics: It is hard to estimate, and easy to underestimate, how much better off we are than previous generations. Product improvement and enhancement of aesthetics are not fully measured by our statistical indexes. Just as we get much more computing power for the dollar when we buy a computer than we did in the late 1970s, so also can we get (if we want it) a much more attractive computer than the utilitarian boxes of a quarter century ago. And for some of us, it's worth it. You get choice. This is a book about style--and about substance.
Fellow Dallasite Billy White is reading The Substance of Style and writes on a subject near to his musician's heart:
I'm through chapter three now and one thing keeps running through my mind as I've been going along. It's an example of style vs. functionality that kind of dove tails in with something you mention early on as well as a recent item in your web log. That would be the Les Paul guitar. I don't know if you're familiar with the details of that instrument but since I own about thirty guitars, including four Les Paul's I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable.
Anyway, the Les Paul model guitar (today known as the "standard") was first marketed by Gibson in 1952. The basic design featured a maple top on a mahogany body. From then until 1957 it was basically aesthetically the same. As you can see from the links below, while improvement in functionality included a better tailpiece design and pickups, it still retained the same gold sparkle finish on a light brown body and the same trapezoid inlay pattern on the fingerboard.
In 1958, however, a dramatic change took place. They did away with the gold finish and replaced it with a beautiful three-color sunburst finish that really showed off the lines in the maple top. Some of these guitars have amazingly gorgeous wood in them. The picture on the link doesn't do it real justice. Anyway, at the time, these guitars didn't really sell any better than the gold ones. BTW they retailed for about $250.00. As a result in 1961 Gibson did away with them and came out with a complete redesign without consulting Lester. He didn't really like the new ones, so in 1962 Gibson no longer offered a "Les Paul" model guitar and the new design became known as the "SG" or "Solid Guitar". Gibson would not offer a model by that name again until 1968. I should also note that in 1965 Gibson was purchased by Norlin which contributed to the decline in instrument quality but that's another story.
In the interim, as you well know, a certain musical invasion took place and guitars became very popular again. In the mid to late 60's certain guitar slingers with names like Clapton, Page, Beck, Richards and Jones began seeking out the 1958-60 model Les Paul guitars, which they had probably drooled over as poor kids in England, and playing them onstage, on TV, etc. As a result these guitars began to be sought after by other people as well thus creating what is now called the vintage guitar market. Since Gibson wasn't making anything like them anymore they became more and more rare.
In the early 70's Gibson introduced a "Les Paul Standard" guitar but it wasn't anywhere close to the quality, grade of woods, etc. that the old ones were. It wasn't until the mid 80's that somebody finally wised up and went back to the original specs to produce similar quality instruments. I first began pining for a 1958-60 sunburst in the late 70's. Around 1980 or so I had a shot at buying one for $3000.00 but couldn't get my dad to give me the money. That's right, I said $3000.00 and that was in 1980.
Today original sunburst 59-60 Paul's go for upwards or $75,000.00 to $100,000.00. The interesting thing to note is that the 57 gold top models go for much much less. It is the finish and wood grain that run up the price. Functionally the 1957 and 1958 models are practically the same. If you plug them both into the same amp with the same player it's difficult to tell the difference.
Also, in 1954 Gibson introduced the "Les Paul Custom" model which featured an ebony fretboard, mother of pearl inlay and gold hardware. It also had a black finish which showed no wood grain. This was supposed to be the "top of the line" Les Paul. The old customs, however, don't demand near the prices of the 58-60 sunburst models either. It's still that finish.
Over the years I have read and heard many people criticize this market for being so driven by color and appearance. I can remember a column in Guitar Play Magazine a long time ago in which George Gruhn lamented how people were paying three or four times as much for a 58 as a 57 "just because of the color! How ridiculous!" Granted there's more involved here than just the finish including the quality decline under Norlin, etc. but it's still that color and wood grain that fetch the big bucks.
He includes the following illustrative links:
1952
1954
1956
1957
1958-60
1954 Custom
1958 Custom
1961 SG
In Saturday's NYT, Gina Kolata has a remarkable report on the cavalier way in which older Floridians exploit their Medicare benefits. They're not doing anything wrong, of course, just using the system as it was designed. Give people a valuable good for free, and they'll consume lots of it, especially if they have lots of time on their hands.
Doctor visits have become a social activity in this place of palm trees and gated retirement communities. Many patients have 8, 10 or 12 specialists and visit one or more of them most days of the week. They bring their spouses and plan their days around their appointments, going out to eat or shopping while they are in the area. They know what they want; they choose specialists for every body part. And every visit, every procedure is covered by Medicare, the federal health insurance program for the elderly.
Boca Raton, researchers agree, is a case study of what happens when people are given free rein to have all the medical care they could imagine. It is also a cautionary tale, they say--timely as Medicare's fate is debated in Congress--for it demonstrates that what the program covers and does not cover, and how much or how little it pays, determines what goes on in a doctor's office and why it is so hard to control costs.
South Florida has all the ingredients for lavish use of medical services, health care researchers say, with its large population of affluent, educated older people and the doctors to accommodate them. As a result, Dr. Elliott Fisher, a health services researcher at Dartmouth Medical School, said, patients have more office visits, see more specialists and have more diagnostic tests than almost anywhere else in the country. Medicare spends more per person in South Florida than almost anywhere else--twice as much as in Minneapolis, for example.
But there is no apparent medical benefit, Dr. Fisher said, adding, "In our research, Medicare enrollees in high intensity regions have 2 to 5 percent higher mortality rates than similar patients in the more conservative regions of the country."
Read the whole thing. And remember the "solution" that kicks in when this near-infinite demand for care starts busting the federal budget: price controls on reimbursement rates. While seniors are lining up for specialists, internists and family practitioners are turning away new Medicare patients, because reimbursements are so low they don't cover costs. Because free supplies inevitably pump up demand, a drug entitlement will surely cost many times the current estimate, and then when sticker shock sets in we'll get price controls.
Ten years ago, Steve Hayward and Erik Peterson published this cautionary tale in Reason, describing how Medicare spending grew far beyond expectations:
The two primary lessons of Medicare are the chronic problem of woefully underestimating program costs and the impossibility of genuine cost control. A closer look at Medicare shows why these two problems are certain to plague a government-administered universal health-care plan.
The cost of Medicare is a good place to begin. At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $ 12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was a supposedly "conservative" estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.
Contrary to my confident blog predictions, I did not fly out of Washington on September 11. I got on two different planes. And then I got off. Both flights were canceled because storms across the middle of the country. Unfortunately the Admiral's Club at Reagan National Airport has no Wi-Fi. Instead of surfing the Web and blogging, I was forced to read an actual book.
I am once again in Washington for the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Last year, I spent the day on the Mall, visiting the Smithsonian's exhibit of relics from the attacks and wandering through the nation's monuments. Today, as if to confirm Matt's thesis (see item below), I will be flying from Reagan National Airport to DFW. Life goes on and so, in a continental country, should air travel. (I was on a plane to DC on 9/22/01.) I am, however, wearing slip-off shoes.
In a contrarian and convincing piece at Reason Online, Matt Welch argues that 9/11 didn't particularly change American life--and that that's a good thing.
In honor of my obsession with my book's Amazon ranking, my new NYT column looks at research that uses Amazon and BN.com rankings to gauge how price changes affect the quantities of books sold on each site:
Not surprisingly, the researchers found that higher prices mean fewer sales. But the effects are notably different at the two sites. Both sites lose customers when prices rise, but Barnes & Noble loses a lot more.
A 1 percent price increase at BN.com pushes sales down 4 percent, making price rises a bad idea. By contrast, the same increase at Amazon reduces sales by only 0.5 percent--a net revenue gain.
Lots of interesting info for those in the book business, with implications for how all sorts of businesses might be affected by online competition.