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The Destruction of the 1 Percent

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Chrystia Freeland pens a brilliant essay on the destruction of the 1 percent. She begins with the rise of Venice during the Renaissance and its subsequent decline:

In the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages.

Venice’s elites were the chief beneficiaries. Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing. But if you are on top, mobility also means competition. In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.

The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, Venice’s population was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city continued to shrink.

She then makes a compelling argument that such a decline will happen in America. The only thing I found at fault with the essay is an unsympathetic jibe toward Apple and its Maps app in the latest iOS.

On Medical Errors in Hospitals

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This is a terrifying read from Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in The Wall Street Journal. Medical errors kill enough people to fill four jumbo jets a week:

I encountered the disturbing closed-door culture of American medicine on my very first day as a student at one of Harvard Medical School’s prestigious affiliated teaching hospitals. Wearing a new white medical coat that was still creased from its packaging, I walked the halls marveling at the portraits of doctors past and present. On rounds that day, members of my resident team repeatedly referred to one well-known surgeon as “Dr. Hodad.” I hadn’t heard of a surgeon by that name. Finally, I inquired. “Hodad,” it turned out, was a nickname. A fellow student whispered: “It stands for Hands of Death and Destruction.”

He then offers five suggestions for improvements, including the use of video recording of surgeries:

Cameras are already being used in health care, but usually no video is made. Reviewing tapes of cardiac catheterizations, arthroscopic surgery and other procedures could be used for peer-based quality improvement. Video would also serve as a more substantive record for future doctors. The notes in a patient’s chart are often short, and they can’t capture a procedure the way a video can.

Reddit’s Mind Blowing Sentences

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This is a great thread on Reddit: “What is the most mind-blowing sentence you can think of?”

To start things off:

No one is going to remember your memories.

This one is my favorite:

The difference between billion and trillion is equivalent to the difference between your lifetime and the entirety of human history.

This rings close to home:

“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”

On exploration:

We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the ocean floor.

I like this explanation of pi:

Pi is an infinite, nonrepeating decimal – meaning that every possible number combination exists somewhere in pi. Converted into ASCII text, somewhere in that infinite string of digits is thename of every person you will ever love, the date, time, and manner of your death, and the answers to all the great questions of the universe.

What would be your mind-blowing sentence?

###

(via SciencePopularis)

Los Angeles, Ideal City of Transit?

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Matt Yglesis recently visited Southern California. And he was impressed by the public transportation system he witnessed, calling the public transport in Los Angeles a revolution:

But the city that’s defined in the public imagination as the great auto-centric counterpoint to the traditional cities of the Northeast has quietly emerged as a serious mass transit contender. It’s no New York and never will be—Los Angeles was constructed in the era of mass automobile ownership, and its landscape will always reflect that—but it’s turning into something more interesting, a 21st-century city that moves the idea of alternative transportation beyond nostalgia or Europhilia.

 

Perhaps most importantly of all, the city is acting to transform the built environment to match the new infrastructure. A controversial plan to rezone the Hollywood area for more density has passed. The city has also moved to reduce the number of parking spaces developers need to provide with new projects, following the lead of the smaller adjacent cities of Santa Monica and West Hollywood. A project to reconfigure Figueroa Boulevard running south from downtowntoward Exposition Park as a bike-and-pedestrian friendly byway is in the works, and pending the outcome of a November ballot initiative, a streetcar may be added to the mix. At the northern end is the massive L.A. Live complex of movie theaters, restaurants, arenas, hotels, condos, and apartments—the biggest downtown investment the city had seen in decades, constructed between 2005 and 2010. At the southern end of the corridor is the University of Southern California, which is planning to redevelop its own backyard to look a bit more like a traditional urban university village.

I lived in Pasadena for 1.5 years while I went to Caltech. I didn’t need a car while there as most everything I needed was within walking distance. However, I never fully ventured to explore the public transportation system. Perhaps the system is growing in Los Angeles, but I doubt it will ever reach the scope of New York or Boston. 

New York Times Staffers Read Every Last Word of Magazines

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I am enjoying this series titled “Every Last Word” in The New York Times where staffers are reading different magazines from cover to cover. Here’s the summary from the series’ beginning:

Edith Zimmerman learned that if you have something sexy or otherwise interesting to whisper, deliver it into the recipient’s left ear in Cosmopolitan.

Hugo Lindgren discovered the cost of a Maserati in Tehran in The Economist.

Greg Veis became aware of a dude in Chile with 83 tattoos of Julia Roberts in Vice.

Sheila Glaser learned what it means to be “young blood” in the art world in New York.

Adam Sternbergh was schooled in the art of proper egg-cracking in Real Simple.

Ilena Silverman found out that wealth inequality in China has become so inflammatory that the country stopped releasing numbers on it in The New Yorker.

Dean Robinson learned that there is more to learn about LeBron James in Sports Illustrated.

Wm. Ferguson gained insight on Spin’s new bimonthly format since his days as a hapless intern there.

Lauren Kern learned that private equity is kinder and gentler in real life than in the movies in Bloomberg Businessweek.

Samantha Henig discovered the true origins of lemon curd in Bon Appétit.

Jon Kelly was informed that fox hunts not longer involve hunting foxes in Vogue.

Vera Titunik identified her own behavior “type” in Psychology Today.

Joel Lovell discovered the controversy behind recreating a surfer’s wipeout for a film in Surfer.

Maya Lau learned that mice can swagger in Scientific American.

Yuri Chong realized the importance of true gilt in House Beautiful.

What was the last magazine you’ve read cover to cover?

The Most Ruthless Takedown of the TED Ecosystem

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Evgeny Morozov has a scathing piece in The New Republic claiming that TED is no longer a responsible curator of ideas “worth spreading.” Instead it has become something ludicrous, and a little sinister. His takedown is ruthless, and begins with a recent book published by TED:

Khanna’s contempt for democracy and human rights aside, he is simply an intellectual impostor, emitting such lethal doses of banalities, inanities, and generalizations that his books ought to carry advisory notices. Take this precious piece of advice from his previous book—the modestly titledHow to Run the World—which is quite representative of his work: “The world needs very few if any new global organizations. What it needs is far more fresh combinations of existing actors whocoordinate better with one another.” How this A-list networking would stop climate change, cyber-crime, or trade in exotic animals is never specified. Khanna does not really care about the details of policy. He is a manufacturer of abstract, meaningless slogans. He is, indeed, the most talented bullshit artist of his generation.

Morozov is a brilliant tactician with words, and dishes out paragraph after paragraph like the following:

As is typical of today’s anxiety-peddling futurology, the Khannas’ favorite word is “increasingly,” which is their way of saying that our unstable world is always changing and that only advanced thinkers such as themselves can guide us through this turbulence. In Hybrid Reality, everything is increasingly something else: gadgets are increasingly miraculous, technology is increasingly making its way into the human body, quiet moments are increasingly rare. This is a world in which pundits are increasingly using the word “increasingly” whenever they feel too lazy to look up the actual statistics, which, in the Khannas’ case, increasingly means all the time.

The main argument against TED made by Morozov:

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how “ideas worth spreading” become “ideas no footnotes can support.”

I don’t agree with a lot of Morozov writes, but he makes some great points about “techno babble” and how we can be easily swayed by some ideas that are fairly obvious.

The Reach of Cosmopolitan Magazine

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I’ve never read anything in Cosmpolitan Magazine, but I did appreciate Edith Zimmerman’s piece “99 Ways to Be Naughty in Kazakhstan” in The New York Times profiling the breadth and reach of the magazine:

The repetition can be a little numbing, but it may help explain how Cosmo, which is the best-selling monthly magazine in the United States, has morphed into such a global juggernaut. (“If all the Cosmo readers from around the world came together,” read a recent piece in Cosmo South Africa, “this group would form the 16th-largest country in the world.”) Through those 64 editions, the magazine now spreads wild sex stories to 100 million teens and young women (making it closer to the 12th-largest country, actually) in more than 100 nations — including quite a few where any discussion of sex is taboo. And plenty of others where reading a glossy magazine still carries cachet. (“Many girls consider a hard copy of Cosmo to be an important accessory,” says Maya Akisheva, the editor of Cosmo Kazakhstan.) As the brand proudly points out, in 2011 alone, these readers spent $1.4 billion on shoes, $400 million on cars, $2.5 billion on beauty products and $1.5 billion on fragrance and bought 24 million pairs of jeans.

Who knew Cosmo Kazakhstan was a thing?! Read the entire article here.

Stocks Perform Better If Women Are On Company Boards

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Heather Perlberg  for Bloomberg reports:

Shares of companies with a market capitalization of more than $10 billion and with women board members outperformed comparable businesses with all-male boards by 26 percent worldwide over a period of six years, according to a report by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, created in 2008 to analyze trends expected to affect global markets.

Net income growth for companies with women on their boards has averaged 14 percent over the past six years, compared with 10 percent for those with no female director, according to the Credit Suisse study, which examined all the companies in the MSCI ACWI Index.

The analysis doesn’t apply to IPOs, as evidenced by Facebook’s decline. Facebook appointed Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as its first female director about a month after its May initial public offering; the stock is down nearly 50% since the $38 initial public offering in May.

Which Countries Invented the Various Olympic Events?

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The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article “Why Are You So Bad At the Sport You Invented?” profiling the respective countries which lay the claim to have invented the various Olympic sports.

You probably knew that the marathon has its roots in Greece. But did you know that Iraq invented boxing, Egypt invented archery and fencing, Mongolia invented field hockey, France invented the triathlon, Great Britain invented the shot put and water polo, Japan invented swimming, and Germany invented diving? I didn’t.

Here’s how the WSJ referenced the invention of the various Olympic sports:

The countries were assigned case-by-case based on the circumstance which meant most to the development of the modern sport. Some countries were designated due to that place having created the modern version of the sport, like Germany’s claim of diving—something they originally liked to call “fancy diving.” Others were assigned because countries created a device that essentially birthed a sport, like Canada and the canoe. Some were awarded for having created an earlier version of a modern sport, like China’s claim to soccer or Mongolia’s claim of field hockey. And other sports were awarded to countries who were the first to hold documented competitions, like Japan and swimming.

And as for the results:

By this simple methodology, the most inexcusably horrible country at a sport they claim is Iraq. An Iraqi has never won one of the 841 total Olympic boxing medals despite their claim of boxing as the Ancient Sumerians created carvings depicting boxers in 3000 BC. Egypt and Ireland have similar calamities based on ineptitude in sports they devised in ancient times. Greece has managed to medal at least once in every sport they claim via the Ancient Games, eight in total. If you’re Greek flaunt your heritage in the discus. Don’t watch freestyle wrestling.

This interactive graphic provides the summary and is a must-see.

Stop Waiting

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From one of my favourite photographers (and writers), David duChemin writes a superb post titled “Stop Waiting”:

My own soul is so sick of this culture of pragmatism that has people locked into their fears and their anxieties as though staying safe will guarantee them immortality. Live forever, but live in fear without ever reaching higher than the cookie jar; that doesn’t sound like a life to me, even if it were possible. There will always be reasons we think we can’t do what we long to do. Few of them, if any, are good. Amputees climb Everest. People with children travel the world. And talentless hacks make a decent living selling kitsch they call art. If they can do it, so can you. So can I. Not easily. Not cheaply. Not quickly. It might take a lifetime and cost us more than we imagined. But we can do it. It’ll be a little easier if we stop being so damn patient, if we stop waiting, get up and try, risk, fail, and repeat.

A must-read in entirety.

David’s book, Within the Frame, is the best $25 investment you can make if you’re into photography. It’s one of the best books I’ve read on the subject of photography. As David says: “Gear is good; vision is better.”