Although the NYTBR has become considerably less blinkered since my friend Sam Tanenhaus became its editor, it is still the NYTBR.
But the Review has punctured my cynicism. True, David Leonhardt's fairly short review of Radicals repeated the old canard about Milton Friedman advising Pinochet. But at least the book got attention.
And Brink's Age of Abundance, a book more in line with my own inclinations than Brian's, receives a long review by George Will in this Sunday's section. As you can imagine, the Tory Will is not enamored with all that the Age of Abundance has wrought, or with Brink's happy acceptance of abundant choice. (He even uses the word "Piffle" in response to one argument.) But the conclusion is positive:
Lindsey rightly says that "today's typical red-state conservative is considerably bluer on race relations, the role of women and sexual morality than his predecessor of a generation ago." And "the typical blue-state liberal is considerably redder than his predecessor when it comes to the importance of markets to economic growth, the virtues of the two-parent family and the morality of American geopolitical power." In "the bell curve of ideological allegiance," the large bulging center has settled, for now, on an "implicit libertarian synthesis, one which reaffirms the core disciplines that underlie and sustain the modern lifestyle while making much greater allowances for variations within that lifestyle." If so, material abundance has been, on balance, good for us, and Lindsey's measured cheerfulness is, like his scintillating book, reasonable.
A peculiar fact about business schools (at least in the USA) is that project management is not part of the regular MBA curriculum. Why is this peculiar? Only because a huge percentage of the work managers do is organized into projects, the success or failure of strategies often rests on the quality of execution of projects, and many of the principles and techniques of good project management are not immediately obvious. But hey, if anyone needs to know about this trivial stuff they can always go to a two-day workshop and get a certificate (probably from an engineering department). Or learn it on the job, which in this context often means screwing things up and trying to guess what you did wrong.
No need to dirty our students' hands with all that icky planning and critical-path stuff--the organization faculty can stick to motivational theory, the operations faculty to stochastic modeing, and the strategy faculty to the resource-based view. Then we can all feel elegant. And our students can elegantly screw up product development, new process installation, quality-improvement initiatives, marketing campaigns, and all the other project-based activities where they are supposed to add value to the firm.
Lamps in catalogs usually don't have cords. They glow without the messy details of electrical connections: wireless glamour.
Now researchers at MIT have figured out a way to transmit electricity wirelessly. They demonstrated the idea by lighting a 60 watt bulb 7 feet away--not revolutionary (yet), but one step closer to truth in lamp advertising.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 08, 2007 • Comments
It turns out that the Dutch "reality" show about kidney donation wasn't so real after all. It was just a publicity stunt by the production company, designed to call attention to the kidney shortage. Tom Simon has info, as well as a link to a (serious) radio show he and his kidney recipient did for Dutch radio. Sally Satel's comment on the hoax (in an email): "BRILLIANT. They did it to get attention...It worked!"
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 01, 2007 • Comments
As you may have read, a Dutch network is about to premiere a new reality show in which contestants vie for a kidney from an otherwise dying woman. (How she qualifies medically as a kidney donor is beyond me.) Writing at HuffPo, Sally Satel weighs in:
It's crazy alright. And, yes, sick and shocking. But despite my discomfort, I'm for it. Sensationalism is a powerful way to call attention to the desperate shortage of kidneys and to the tens of thousands of needless deaths each year that occur all over the world because not enough altruistic donors step forward.
Indeed, the very idea behind the De Grote Donorshow (The Big Donor Show) is to shine a spotlight on the plight of patients who need a kidney. The show is intended as a tribute to the founder of the network -- Bart de Graaff --who died in 2002 at age 35 because he could not survive the years-long wait for a new kidney.
"We think that is disastrous," said the BNN chairman Laurens Drillach to the BBC, "so we are acting in a shocking way to bring attention to the problem."
It's about time somebody with some clout got angry about this egregious situation. Kidney patients need ACT-UP. Instead, they've got the way-too-complacent National Kidney Foundation, an organization more for doctors than patients.
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Lisa Cunningham has died. She's the woman Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center told it would refuse to transplant if she found a kidney donor through local press coverage. After nasty press, some of it from me, the hospital changed its policy. Rob Haneisen of the Metro West Daily News, who first covered her story, reported on her death:
Cunningham died because she was very sick, and in the end the right donor with the correct tissue match did not come forward to save her.
"Some patients can be on dialysis for many years and do well and others have a more malignant course in a sense," said Spiegel, Cunningham's nephrologist. "She just never did well on dialysis. Every aspect of her care on dialysis was difficult, which is why we were hoping a transplant would come her way."
Lisa Cunningham was 40 years old. She left a 10-year-old son.
UPDATE: Tim Worstall is "entirely disgusted" by The Big Donor Show, but not for the usual reasons.
UPDATE 2: Kidney donor Tom Simon adds his take at KidneyChronicles, making this very good point: "I don't understand why it is part of the story-line that the donor is dying of a brain tumor. It creates the incorrect impression that living with one kidney is a risky or dangerous proposition, and only someone who is going to die anyway should even consider it."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 29, 2007 • Comments
There's much buzz about Michael Arrington's post provocatively titled "Silicon Valley Could Use a Downturn Right About Now. I don't interpret it as a literal call for a downturn but as a signal that a well-established pattern is reappearing and that, as is always the case, something feels lost when the people who care most about money start to dominate the people who care most about art (great companies, great technologies). The post is fine, but the comments are the must-reads, for both wisdom and foolishness. One of the best is this one from Brendan. It's long, but here's an excerpt:
[U]p until the late 90s, the Valley toiled in relative obscurity building tech giants. Now that the world knows about it, like the world knows about Hollywood, this is the place to "make it" in technology. So people flock here, capital flows here and ideas flourish here. It is an ecosystem, highly evolved over 30+ years - to producing technology giants. It is not an accident that Intel, Oracle, Sun (former paradigm-changing, at least), Yahoo, Cisco and Google all emerged from the technology primordial soup that is the Valley.
From time to time, one of the precedent conditions gets out of whack and upsets the balance. This is almost always $$ - too many VC $$ flowing into the system. These VC $$ are provided by state pensions, endowments and other institutional investors chasing the out-sized returns that VC promises. (mostly untrue for all but the very best VCs) With so much money the VCs become indiscriminate in their funding choices - supporting too many "me-too" concepts for too long. In order to rise above the noise, these start-ups hire PR agencies and throw launch parties, creating more noise. This escalates for awhile and then it goes off a cliff. We'll be back to no VC $$ for even excellent ideas. entrepreuneurs - real entrepreneurs will bootstrap themselves again. Good ideas will rise to the top on their own merits and VCs will again begin to notice, starting the whole cycle over again. In the meantime, until the next crash, restaurateurs, PR hacks, event planners, coffee chains, commercial landlords, Porsche dealers and real-estate agents will live fat and happy. Then they won't. And they'll cry poverty. We've seen this movie before. Does no one remember?
Ah yes, no one does because the Valley has no institutional memory. That is why this will happen again, and again. And - pay attention here - this is the magic of the Valley.
My least favorite comment? Probably the naif in Australia who quotes Tom Friedman to "prove" that since the World Is Flat, Silicon Valley is irrelevant. That argument from authority is not only wrong but self-refuting. If Tom Friedman didn't work for The New York Times and name-drop like crazy, nobody would read his books. His success proves that the world is not flat, whatever that means. (Ed Leamer's Journal of Economic Literature review is the definitive word on Friedman's book, combining entertaining metaphorical parsing and serious economic analysis.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 22, 2007 • Comments
The NYT's Damon Darlin reports on Hewlett-Packard's remarkable success with a business strategy straight out of The Substance of Style:
Hewlett-Packard's effort to transform its personal computers from low-margin commodities into more stylish devices has started to pay off.
As shown by the company's fiscal second-quarter earnings, announced Wednesday afternoon, a new PC strategy has become a major driver of growth. Revenue increased 12.7 percent from the period a year earlier, to $25.5 billion, and the PC division was an important factor.
Revenue from notebook PCs rose 45 percent, and the company was able to increase sales of desktop computers, which have been flat for the industry, by 9 percent.
Furthermore, H.P. is also making more money on each PC it sells. The division's operating profit margin increased to 4.8 percent last quarter from 3.6 percent in the period last year, and is more than double what it was two years ago....
Samir Bhavnani, research director of Current Analysis West, a market research firm based in San Diego, said Hewlett-Packard "was very wise in understanding that as the market shifts from desktops to notebooks, that style mattered."
He faulted Dell's thicker, chunkier notebooks for its weak sales. "H.P. is like the plain girl from high school that you see three years later and she is a bombshell, while Dell is the hot girl from high school who has gained 30 pounds," Mr. Bhavnani said.
Hewlett-Packard's design-focused strategy had a heightened impact at a time when corporate PC sales were flagging. Its efforts weakened Dell when Dell seemed ill prepared to react in any fashion other than by cutting prices. While PC prices continue to decline, H.P.'s average selling price--about $967, according to Current Analysis--is more than 17 percent above the industry average price of $822. It used to be at or slightly below the average. (Apple and Sony have much higher prices, and it is no coincidence that those two companies also emphasize design.)
As I always tell business audiences, there's no guarantee that better style will deliver higher profits. That depends on the competition. But these days, ignoring aesthetics is a good way to lose business.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 17, 2007 • Comments
and Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement
Lamps in catalogs usually don't have cords. They glow without the messy details of electrical connections: 
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Lisa Cunningham has died. She's the woman Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center told it would refuse to transplant if she found a kidney donor through local press coverage. After nasty press, 