Category: Our travel

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Walls

The train from Rome to Florence is fast and passes through some very beautiful country. You see lots of old cities on hilltops, obviously with defensive purpose. Florence too has an old defensive wall and so did Rome, AFTER the Empire declined.

Walls, towers and castles today are picturesque, but consider their purpose. You went through the expense and inconvenience of having walls and living densely on defensible high ground only because the alternative was dangerous. A well-ordered world does not need such things as high walls. Rome proudly did not have a wall until its power declined.

In earlier times people also often avoided living close to the seashore. It was too easy for Vikings or Saracens to sail up, break your stuff and kill or enslave your kids. Of course, you had to be careful if you lived in-land, since Huns, Magyar, Mongols or just ordinary brigands could quickly ride up, break your stuff and …

Yeah, your best bet was a wall and commanding high ground. My first picture is a remnant of Florence’s wall. Next is a picture of the city from high ground, called Michelangelo’s Piazzale. It is a long steep walk to the top, but worth the effort. The wimpier folks can drive or take the bus.

The last photo is Ponte Vecchio, a famous bridge over the Arno River, today flanked by shops selling expensive jewelry. It started off as a place where blacksmiths and butchers plied their trade, conveniently disposing of their rancid wastes by tossing them off the bridge into the river. City authorities eventually got sick of the stink and pollution and moved them off.

The bridge is featured in Puccini’s opera piece “O mio babbino caro,” where a girl threatens to jump off the Ponte Vecchio if her father refuses to let he marry the man she loves. I always liked the music and will include it in the comments. Use it as a soundtrack when looking at the photos.

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Gettysburg

Stopped off at Gettysburg on the way home. I have been here a few times before, the first time in 1985 with my colleague Rick Roberts, who knew the facts of the battle very well and gave a great commentary. But each time it is moving. So many brave men and each shot or shell that killed or maimed, killed or maimed an American, since we were on both sides. (None of my ancestors was in American during the Civil War, but one of Chrissy’s fought with the Wisconsin regiments.)

My first picture is the “high water mark”. Some Confederates got just about to where the sign shows and then were turned back. This was the culmination of Pickett’s charge. (It should more properly be called Longstreet’s advance, since General James Longstreet was in overall command and Pickett’s division was only one of three participating.) Confederate Brig. Gen. Lewis A. Armistead leading the troops was killed on that spot. Ironically, Armistead’s’ best friend Winfield Scott Hancock, commanded the Union troops. Many of the officers knew each other and had been friends before the war. The end of the charge was effectively the end of the battle, the bloodiest on American soil. Although the war would drag on until April 1865, this battle and the fall of Vicksburg the next day sealed the fate of the South.

12,500 men set off across that field. Only a few successfully covered the 3/4 miles to the high water mark. When they finally retreated only about half were left.

The next picture shows Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee at the Virginia monument. This is the place where the the attack commenced. The next picture shows the field looking the other direction. The trees at the edge are the clump of trees that Lee told James Longstreet to use as his objective in the attack.

The fourth picture shows Chrissy sitting with a statue of Abraham Lincoln. The battle is famous for its size and consequences, but it is even better known as the place where Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address. It is a beautiful and short speech that many of us memorized in HS. It consists of only 272 words and Lincoln wrote it himself. Would that today’s politicians could be so concise and thoughtful.

I had to add the last picture, which shows the monument to the First Minnesota Volunteers. On the second day of the battle, they were ordered to charge oncoming Confederate troops who outnumbered them 5 to 1. The Minnesota volunteers succeeded in blunting the advance but at the cost of an 82% casualty rate. The 47 survivors found themselves in the middle of the battle the next day and were ordered to charge again, this time to blunt Pickett’s charge. They again showed their heroism.

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Edison and Menlo Park

Edison set up his research laboratory in Menlo Park, now part of Edison Township, New Jersey. This is where he invented the phonograph and the light bulb. He later moved his home and factories to West Orange, NJ. Nothing is left of his Menlo Park facility. It was already in ruins when Henry Ford bought what was left and moved it to Michigan to be part of the Henry Ford Museum.

On the site today is a tower and a light bulb model you see in the pictures below.
The light bulb is the image of invention. Edison’s inventions in general changed the way we live. Chrissy and I have been visiting Newport, RI and the houses of the rich and famous. They were early adopters of electric lighting. Before that, in a world lit only by sunlight and fire, interior spaces were dark most of the time. You could use candles or kerosene, but it was still pretty dim and you faced the problems of smoke and dangers of fire.

The light bulb was not Edison’s first invention. His first invention was a machine that recorded Morse code. It allowed the much more rapid transmission of telegraph messages. When Edison played it back, he noticed that it made sound and got the idea that he could record other sounds.

The first picture below is the iconic light bulb. Next is the tower that marks the spot of the old Menlo Park laboratory. The third picture is Edison’s chair. Henry Ford bought it, nailed it to the floor and had the chair and the surrounding floor shipped to his collection in Michigan. The last picture is Greenfield Village, part of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. It is a collect of buildings typical of America in the turn of the century. The last two picture are from an earlier trip.  Link to that is here.

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Edison and West Orange

We went to West Orange, NJ to look into innovation and Thomas Edison. Edison invented a practical light bulb, the phonograph & the motion picture camera. At least that is what I learned in school. Since then, I have come to understand that invention or discovery are rarely that simple. No one individual is responsible. Rather, many factors come together that enable the leap.

Progress comes as punctuated equilibrium. We certainly credit Edison with amazing creativity, but he sprung from the same fertile soil that produced the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone & George Westinghouse among many others. We call them inventors, but maybe a better term is innovators, since they bring together lots of ideas and people and put them together in different ways. That is where the “fertile soil” comes in. When you get a bunch of innovators together, they innovate as the ideas bounce around, mutate, evolve and improve. That is why giving credit to a single inventor is so hard.
All that aside, Edison was a great inventor and a great innovator as an individual. If he depended on the ecology of innovation, he was a big part of that ecological system. He understood this better than most. He knew great innovations often come in a flash of innovation … followed by years of hard work to make them practical. Edison was practical. He organized a team for innovation. He invented a system for invention just as Henry Ford invented a process for mass production. You could say that those ideas were “out there” but it took someone to make them work.

Historians today mostly reject and even disparage the “great man theory” and they are right to do so. For some of the reasons I mentioned above, the great man theory does not work to explain history. However, the “shit happens” theory is also unsatisfying. Innovation can happen only when conditions are ripe, but ripe conditions do not guarantee innovation and the innovators set the direction, the path of progress. To the extent that innovations are path dependent, after a few steps the great individuals have indeed made history different than it would otherwise have been. So the great man theory is not wrong, just incomplete. Edison was one of those great men who changed the direction of history.
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
My pictures show Edison’s factory in West Orange. Next is the workshop floor. Notice the belts. The machines did not have their own power, but rather ran off the mechanical power overhead transmitted by the belts. The third picture is Edison’s music room. He recorded music there, but lost market share because he refused to hire big names. He was more concerned with technical quality than with star quality. The last photo is an Edison phonograph. The picture is one I took a while back at the Henry Ford Museum. I will include a link to that trip in the comments section and say a little more about Edison in a new post.

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Road through Conn., NY & NJ

It took longer than I thought to drive through Connecticut and New York to get to New Jersey. It was good most of the way. Who knew there could be traffic in the middle of the day in and around NYC? My problem getting stuck in traffic is not that I need to be anywhere in particular but rather that I drink lots of Coke-Zero and have to be somewhere with a bathroom. We finally got an opening just inside New Jersey. I found out that you are not allowed pump your own gas in NJ. There is evidently a law against it.

I noticed that the sound walls along the highway in Connecticut were made of wood. This is a good idea. Wood is easy to work, 100% renewable and it tends to absorb sound better than a hard concrete or steel wall. Wood is good.

Everything we know about New Jersey culture comes from watching TV, so it must be 100% accurate and we wanted to have the authentic experience. We found an authentic looking pizza place (see the picture). I know that Brooklyn is in New York, not New Jersey, but I figured close enough. They had a special on calzone and both of us ordered that. They were very big, each one enough for two. I boldly finished mine (Anyone can eat when he is hungry, but it takes a real man to continue after he is full.) Chrissy left half of hers.

We are staying at Fairfield Inn in Edison, NJ. I like Fairfield Inn. They are nice but still inexpensive. I particularly like the mini-suites. If I build a house of my own, I would build a mini-suite like this for one of the rooms.

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Being rich in the gilded age

Still in Newport looking at the mansions of the formerly rich and famous. Among the places we visited was “The Breakers” one of the Vanderbilt homes. I know it is fashionable to criticize these fat cats, but they did built fortunes and patronize the arts. Alfred Vanderbilt was aboard the Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-Boat in 1915. After helping other passengers get into lifeboats, he gave his own life preserver and place in the boat to a young mother. I could not picture many of today’s rich celebrities doing something similar.

Anyway, I do not think it really was so much fun to be rich in the Gilded Age. Forget about the office work, parties were hard work. Keeping up with social engagements must have been deadly.

I met an ambitious young man a few years ago whose goal in life was to get rich. He was a smart guy and an extremely hard worker. He was on his way to success in his life venture when he died of a heart attack at the age of 42. Sic transit gloria mundi is only one lesson from his short life and not the one I thought most important.

“Why do you want to be rich?” I asked him, “What do you want so much?” He explained that the joy of being rich is that you would need to own almost nothing. It makes sense when you think about it. If you are really rich you can rent whatever you want, exactly what you want when you want it. Owning anything is a problem. When you are really rich you just use stuff.

My pictures show some of the opulence. The last picture is the bathroom. Consider, this is the home of one of the richest men in the world, but he still has a bathroom most of us would find inadequate. Progress is great. An ordinary guy today can live better overall than the rich guys of the past. Sure, you don’t have the opulent house, but you have TVs, computers and much better health care … and a better bathroom.

Next day

We are still in Newport, RI visiting mansions of the Gilded Age. Their palaces remind me a lot of hotels. There is lot of lobby there. No doubt these rich guys had it made, but if you compare their actual lifestyles – absent the status – with my lifestyle, I am much better off. I can travel faster and more freely. My medical care is way better. I have access to many more books than their libraries could hold. My entertainment options are much expanded. My bathrooms are nicer, my water cleaner and my clothes of higher quality. The last one, I know, will be surprising, but consider the no-iron cotton I can have among other things. Technological progress helps the poor much more than the rich, as the luxuries they had have become common to us today.

Consider the armies of servants these guys employed. What did they do? Most of them did stuff now done by machines or not needed. I mentioned the iron-free cotton. They had to employ lots of people to keep their clothes ironed.They had ice boxes stocked by servants. e have refrigerators that just work.

We are stayed at Marriott in Newport, pictured below. I have access to much greater luxury than Vanderbilt. My room is smaller than his, but more pleasant. I have better heat and air conditioning. My lights are brighter. I have TV and Internet and the materials are higher quality. When we drive away in our ordinary Toyota, it will be a much better vehicle than Vanderbilt could have owned. My car just works. Vanderbilt needed a team of servants to keep his carriages and car running. I will be able to drive over paved roads, instead of those bumpy trails he had to use. The technology I enjoy are worth dozens of his servants.
Before 1800, the whole world was poor. The Great Enrichment created lots of possibilities. The 20th Century was one of even greater material progress, more for the poor than the rich. I live better than Vanderbilt, but his lifestyle was not that much worse than mine. The poor of those days, however, were miserable. Lucky to be born in the 20th Century and in the USA. Everything else is just background.

My pictures show the Marriott lobby and the Vanderbilt mansion foyer (lobby). Vanderbilt’s is certainly more opulent. Marriott’s is more functional and, IMO, nicer.

Next Day

We went to a three more mansions today. I learned that Victorian homes were/are dark and that my camera does not take pictures well in low light, no matter how hard I try to hold still.
If you can cut through the envy, you realize that some of these fat cats were admirable. The one I liked is George Peabody Wetmore. His home was Chateau Sur Mer. His father made a fortune in the China trade, so George inherited the business and we cannot credit him with building wealth. He did maintain it and use it wisely. He was well educated and actively studied many subjects. He served in the Senate and as Governor of Rhode Island; he worked on the design committees of many of the monuments in Washington and on a variety of charitable causes. Recall that he did not NEED to do anything. He took his wealth and position seriously and worked to be a good man and a useful citizen, but often declined recognition and honors. Consider today’s rich and famous in contrast. Can we imagine Kanye or the Kardashians being useful and modest? Anyway, I enjoyed visiting his house and the grounds. He was a tree lover and the ground still feature a variety of fine trees. My pictures show some of them. First is an English oak. Next is a grove of Japanese cedars. Third are fern leaf beech and last is an English elm.

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Think Tanks: What Are They Good For

Think tanks, what are they good for?  This was the theme of the discussion I attended at Wilson Center yesterday (January 27).  Their title was a bit longer than mine above, “Why Think Tanks Matter to Policy Makers and the Public in the US: Research with Rigor, Relevance and Reach.”   Jane Harman, Director, President and CEO, introduced the program and then turned it over to James McGann, Director, Tank and Civil Societies Program, University of Pennsylvania, Editor, Global Go To Index.   The event featured a panel of think tank representative to explain how they work and what they do.

McGann explained the birth of the think tank global index and its evolution since 2006.   He said that he just saw a need and filled it.  At first the index was just in alphabetical order, but the think tanks and customers found that unsatisfying.  People like ratings.  It gives the impression of some sort of competition and implies that think tanks are accountable and can improve their position.  Some of this is true, McGann said, but with such a diversity of think tanks and myriad missions, reducing them to a ranking is not entirely appropriate.  Rankings, nevertheless, will persist driven by popular demand and because it gets lots of people interested in involved.  4,677 journalists, policy makers, think tanks and public and private donors from 143 countries participated in this year’s ranking process and there are now 47,000 individuals that follow the annual ranking process.   It is the Oscars for think tanks. The main use of the index, however, remains that it lists and briefly describes think tanks.  Last year’s edition of the Global Go To Think Tank Index Report was downloaded over 175,000 times.  He didn’t give figures on how many just search or refer online.

I have written in other places about what think tanks should do and here will just report some of the comments.   In general, as they talked about the marketplace of ideas, I thought about how apt the analogy with other markets.  It is easy to criticize individual think tanks or scholars, since they are often wrong in details but rarely in doubt.  But as in market, the individual is not the most useful focus of attention.  Rather it is the relationship and flow of information among them that makes a difference.   It is hard to determine where an idea originates since ideas mutate and recombine when passing through various minds (the “virus” theory of ideas) and people addressing similar situations often come up with similar ideas independently.    This is like the market in that ordinary people like us can ride the wave w/o having to know the details of the debates.  Put another way, we get to eat the sausage w/o having to watch it being made.  It is like buying an index fund to represent the stock market.   Anyway, back to my story.

The panel included:  Heather Conley, Senior Vice President for Europe, Eurasia, and the Arctic, and Director, Europe Program;  Ivo Daalder, President, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, former US Permanent Representative to NATO;  Ted Gayer, Vice President of Economic Studies, Brookings Institution;  Spencer Overton, President, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies;  Erika Poethig, Institute Fellow and Director of Urban Policy Initiatives, Urban Institute;  and Kenneth Weinstein, President and Chief Executive Officer, Hudson Institute.

Heather Conley started off.  She said that think tanks are important because they contribute ideas to policy makers.   Drawing on her own experience at State (DAS in the Bureau for European and Eurasian Affairs) she averred that people actually in government are too busy with the urgent aspect of their jobs to come up with new ideas.  It is time pressure, not lack of desire or intelligence, but no matter the cause, ideas almost always have to come from the outside.   I didn’t get the exact quote, but it went something like, bureaucracies take old ideas and complicate them with process.

Ivo Daalder was next.   He said it is hard to explain what think tanks do because much of it is thinking and meeting which produces nothing you can see.  His kids, he said, “Don’t know what I do and when they think they do know they disagree.”  This sums up the world of think tanks, and probably applies to most of us at State too.  He also referred to think tanks as participants and creators in the marketplace of ideas and added the important roles think tanks play as conveners and educators.  We may ridicule the endless conferences in Washington and elsewhere, but this is where people meet and hash through ideas.   If we did not have them, we would have to invent them.

Mr. Daalder represents the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and he commented on the challenge to be heard faced non-Washington-based think tanks.   Outside the beltway ideas are important, but it is hard to get them into the discussion.  One strategy is to discuss topics perhaps more appropriate outside the capital.   A specialty of the Chicago Council is international connections beyond the central governments.   For example, much political and economic decision-making goes on in large cities and there are increasing connections at the subnational level.  States have their own sort of foreign policies and agreements and cities are members of leagues and commissions.  Washington is a bit narcissistic and may not pay sufficient attention to these connections.

Kenneth Weinstein explained the importance of think tanks in term of framing questions as much as supplying information.   “The answers you get depend on the questions you ask,” he said.  He went on to characterize the think tank environment as a dynamic mix of competition and cooperation.   Think tanks are often vying for the finite attention of decision-makers and competing for the limited pecuniary largess of donors, funders and foundations.

It is not a zero-sum game, however.   Think tanks often cooperation and benefit from the complementary strengths of others. Sometimes this complementary nature is political.  It is good to pair mostly liberal think tanks with mostly conservative ones, giving them greater credibility and presumably creating synergy and greater useful truth from their dynamic tension.  Brookings has been working with AEI for a long time, for example.
I start to feel a little sorry for panel members who come later in the lineup, as all the good lines and ideas are taken.  You can only repeat “marketplace of ideas” or “convener of conferences” so many times before it gets a little old.   Besides the marketplace of ideas meme, everyone agreed on the importance of relationships.   Successful think tanks devote considerable time and energy to cultivating officials and leaders.   You may have the most wonderful and sublime research, but if it does not get into the right hands, it may go nowhere.

Spencer Overton, President, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, took us in a little different direction, since his think tank has a mission a little different from the others.   The Joint Center is more of an advocacy group than the other think tanks earlier discussed.   It was founded in 1970 to help and advise black political leaders at all levels.   Although most black elected leaders tend to be Democrats, the Joint Center is non-partisan.  For example, Mr. Overton mentioned a recent study that found little diversity among Senate staffers.   They reported no significant difference between Democrats and Republicans; in fact they found that Democrats did a little worse.

After appropriate genuflection before the marketplace of ideas idol, Ted Gayer from Brookings talked about where think tanks like his could have specific impact.   He said, for example, they can study the impact and effect of regulations.   It is easy to talk about the benefits if you don’t consider the null hypothesis, i.e. would you achieve similar or greater benefits by doing nothing.  It is hard to assess counterfactuals, but think tanks can at least make the attempt that most proponents of programs prefer to avoid.

(NB – I didn’t get a chance to ask and nobody brought it up, but an exciting new area of inquiry is policy issues is the “random controlled trial” (RCT).  These are revealing information about the results or lack of them in very popular programs by taking into account the null hypothesis in ways previously ignored.)

Erika Poethig from urban institute has the misfortune of coming last and there was little left to say that could be said in a few minutes, so she mostly talked about Urban Institute.   It was founded in 1968 to “understand the problems facing America’s cities and assess the programs of the War on Poverty.”

There was time for only one question from the audience and that provoked a discussion about how to package products.  Mr. Weinstein lamented that the day of the think tank book is over; you really cannot get people to sit down and read a long exposition on policy.   Besides that, the research takes too long. By the time the book comes out it is often overtaken by events.   Everyone agreed that they are going with shorter pieces that can be produced and read quicker.  Mr. Gayer spoke to the need to reach wider audiences who may not even read the few page reports.   There is increasing reliance on blogs and even twitter.  The blog need not be inferior to the book, although it often is.   The key to judgment is to know the author.   W/o peer review, there is a kind of crowd review.  People will comment and critique and some of those discussions can be useful.  Twitter is great for the one liner, but almost nothing a think tank does can be summed up in 140 characters.  Twitter is good as a sign post to something more.

There was a brief reception after the talk, but participants disperse quickly.  McGann and his acolytes had to catch the train back to Philadelphia.   They praised Washington’s snow removal success.  Evidently it was worse in Philadelphia.

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Land ethic &sky islands

A big fire in 2002 destroyed large areas of forest on the upper slopes of Mount Lemmon. Looking at the results more than ten years later makes you think about how/if/why to help nature.

Mountains in places like southern Arizona are sometimes called “sky islands.” The forest systems on the mountains are different from the surrounding deserts. They are often remnant communities, left over from times thousands of years ago when the climate was much cooler. These island are fragile, both because of their limited extant, which makes it harder to regenerate from remnants, but even more because they are no longer really well adapted to the new climate conditions.

An established ecological community can create and maintain conditions that allow it to continue. That means that an established forest may be able to maintain itself, but would not regenerate on the same place if removed. This is the dilemma of restoration.

The idea that we should “let nature decide” is a little silly. We should seek sustainable systems, not strictly natural ones. When I looked out at the results of the fire I noticed the differences. Nature was not deciding; it was random chance. In some places forests had survived, maybe through a lucky change in wind direction. Here the sky island would remain. In other places the holes were too big. They would change. The forest biome would likely be replaced by a more scrub desert environment. Should we let that happen?

Human action could “restore” the forests to the conditions they had been in before the fire. This would not be the natural result, but it could be a sustainable one. It is more a value choice than a scientific one. Science delineates the boundaries of what CAN be done. We decide what should be done within that. I would advocate restoration.

A land ethic tells us that what improves the biotic community is a good thing. It dictates that we act responsibly and with caution. It implies an iterative process, doing, learning, changing doing better. But it does imply doing something beyond “letting nature decide.”

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Barrio Brewery in Tucson

Chrissy and I had a couple beers at the Barrio Brewery in Tucson. The beer and the atmosphere was good. I like it that small breweries are popping up all over. They often do it in the old industrial areas, hard to find. But GPS makes them accessible.