EclecticLip

(originally written Nov 2; posted Nov 16) 

It looks like the Democrats are going to get clobbered in next week’s tomorrow’s today’s US elections.  Economic malaise tends to do this to governing parties, which is one reason currency devaluation is the policy-du-jour: if country A can make its currency cheaper, it becomes more competitive and can export goods (and unemployment!) to countries B, C and D, whose currencies remain more expensive.  It’s this kind of race to the bottom which has given gold aficionados their current decade in the sun.  Of course, though Hemingway never lived to write about it, the sun also sets… 

The Tea Party’s emergence has been an interesting but predictable phenomenon.  The stagnation in American incomes for the past generation has finally hit a boiling point (what took so long?).  Increased prosperity has largely been confined to the top 1% — and even then mainly the top 0.1% — of income earners in the population; those nice folks whose job titles begin with “Chief” and end with “Officer”. 

In many cases, union-busting concessions levied in the name of improving competitiveness went straight into C-suite compensation: “trickle-up economics”, as it were.  I don’t have the American numbers handy, but here are some Canadian ones.  Perhaps one day, left-leaning parties will realize that they’ll get more support if they confine talk of tax increases to the very, very topmost folks.  Noblesse oblige, and all that.

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(posted Oct 9) 

As this article (a longer preview is available here) from the Boston Globe points out, urban planners in some American cities are trying to figure out how to retrench – often because a declining population and economic hardship have shrunk the tax base. 

This WSJ article here — subtitled “asphalt is replaced by cheaper grave; back to the stone age” (my emphasis) — describes how some states have deliberately moved back to gravel roads. 

To my knowledge, the same hasn’t happened in Canada, perhaps because severe income inequality hasn’t spurred a generation of plutocrat-friendly legislation… yet.  (Income inequality tends to make the impoverished vote conservative — perhaps out of a sense that an “other” is keeping them from breaking into the “haves” class?) 

This seems vaguely analogous to the Byzantine Empire’s decision during the Macedonian Revival, to keep its borders manageable and not overextend itself.  It must’ve been tempting for the Emperors to keep more modest borders than were achieved under the dynamic duo of Justinian and Belisarius, but they were ultimately better off for it. 

Right now, cities and states are having to retrench their infrastructure — a more realistic scenario under their current constraints, which must nevertheless be gnashingly frustrating for all parties involved.  Just as it must’ve been for the Macedonian Emperors…

(originally written Sept 14, posted Oct 9)

Despite cruise ships being the ‘tar sands’ of tourism, we’ll be heading to San Diego next week on one of them.  I remember something about us having visited both Whitehorse and Yellowknife, a travel deal, and “quid pro quo”, but it’s a bit of a blur really. 

The boat ride will, however, give me a chance to do battle with Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a second time.  Back in my university summer-job days — lackey to a post-doc lackey of a tenured professor — I started the book, figuring my encyclopedic ignorance of Roman history would be an overcomeable hurdle.  After all, that’s why I was going to read the book, right?  To learn history!

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To a classical studies aficionado, one-time richest man in the world Bill Gates triggers thoughts of Alexander the Great.  Both men straddled the world with then-unparalleled might.  And both are arguably less accomplished than their parents.

Philip of Macedon came out of nowhere to make Macedon the leading power of Greece.  Sure, Alexander took things to the next level — but he had the advantage of all the legwork dad Philip had done, to put his son in such an enviable position.

Bill Gates III, software baron, was the son of Bill Gates*, corporate lawyer, whose hard work made it possible for Bill III to attend an exclusive prep school which was privileged enough to have a chunk of time on a GE computer.  He was able to capitalize on that head start in life, to great effect — and good for him.  But his accomplishment might pale in comparison to what his father (and other forebears) made of less-privileged beginnings.
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* in one of those stranger than fiction scenarios, Bill Gates (the lawyer) was the son of Bill Gates II.  But since the lawyer didn’t use the affectation “III”, this passed to his son (the software baron).  As such, Bill Gates III is the son of Bill Gates, the son of Bill Gates II.  So weird, it could come out of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy…

In The Responsibility Virus (volume 20 of the book club reading list) Roger Martin discusses the tendency of Boards of Directors to become powerless yes-men, when faced with a domineering CEO.  This is in contrast to their intended role as wise greybeards, advisors or even coaches who keep the Chief Executive on the sraight and narrow.

This seems vaguely analogous to what happened to the Roman Senate as their Empire declined; instead of keeping the Emperor in check, they had to curry favour for fear of their personal safety (and probably family fortune, too: I imagine more than one Senator got his possessions confiscated).

It would be interesting to know whether the advisory influence of large corporations’ Boards of Directors tends to be weaker at firms where the CEO is paid more.  The Wall St. Journal recently carried an article reaffirming that power corrupts; in their context, as people gain power, they act more like jerks.  Transposing this lesson historically, maybe if Marc Antony had won, Caligula would’ve ended up as a very polite cobbler…

We read The Human Side of Enterprise recently, wherein Douglas McGregor (that’s McGregor, not MacArthur!) contained the wisdom nugget that:

“management gets the labour relations it deserves”.

I doubt McGregor coined the expression — it’s the kind of pithy phrase that floats around for years before being credited to a famous person — but it rings no less true. 

The general theme is a karmic one: if management mistreats labour, labour will eventually form a feisty union.  And contrarily, if management treats its employees well, union relations will tend to be amicable (if there even is a union).  Furthermore, while trust and respect grow slowly over time (like pearls!), bad memories have a way of lingering for a very. long. time.

In that context, I wonder if management in the West is still paying for the bad karma it earned during the Industrial Revolution.  If the explosion of industrial wealth was shared more equitably, or barons weren’t so slow to improve working conditions / recognize workers’ rights, perhaps labour unions wouldn’t've become so militantly anti-management.  Heck, maybe Marx and Engels wouldn’t've even been inspired to write their little pamphlet!

I’m perfectly unfamiliar with labour relations / extent of union militancy in other countries, but it would shock me if the Nordic economies (or Japan, with its fairly egalitarian corporate pay scales) have similarly confrontative labour relations.  After all, it’s difficult to have a class struggle if the different “classes” of employees (management, labour) enjoy reasonably equitable pay, and decent working conditions.  And I’d expect that economies with a heritage in the British Industrial Revolution tradition (US, UK, Canada, Australia) would have more confrontative unions.  After all, those union traditions would’ve been born in a desperate context of obscene wealth and even-more-obscene squalor.

So it would seem reasonable to consider militant unions a form of karma — a carryover from the bad ol’ days (correction: the very bad old days) of the Anglo economic tradition, when owners really should’ve cared more about their employees.  And given how long it can take for bad karma to dissipate, I imagine confrontational labour relations will be a feature of industry in these cultures, for a long time to come.

Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider was the ninth book club selection.  It was selected based on a desire to learn about decentralized team structures.  A positive review on military analyst John Robb’s blog Global Guerrillas, also helped.

As of June 2010, it has proven to be one of the most cross-referenced texts in subsequent book summaries and discussion.

As always, if you consider the review useful, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing the book. 

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The Starfish and the Spider - summary

(Aug 2010 update - relinked to PDF, which didn’t seem to be working)

May 29, 2010 marks the 557th year since the fall of Constantinople, and with it the final vestiges of the Roman Empire (or “Byzantine Empire”, for you Philistines out there     ).

Tradition has it that Rome was founded on April 21, 753 BC by Romulus and Remus, a pair of half-divine twin brothers.  It seems that father Mars started off as an agricultural god but became something of a God-of-War, when the Roman Republic started on its multi-century project of conquering the known world… and then defending those conquests.

While the Rome in the West enjoyed 12 centuries of existence (ending on September 4, 476 when Romulus Augustulus abdicated to Odoacer) Rome in the East lasted another millenium.  As such, if one dates the magnificent Roman civil experiment to 753 BC, it survived in a myriad of evolving forms for well over two millenia!  And even then, Muslim conqueror Mehmed II declared himself Caesar of Rome upon his conquest!

Rome/Constantinople, April 21 753 BC - May 29 1453.  Passed away from invasion after a 2,206 year run.  RIP.

(Originally written Dec 2009; posted April 2010)

I ran into one of my old Classical Studies professors at a Starbucks recently.  It was fun catching up; it was sobering to think those days were about twenty years ago.  Back then, Brian Mulroney (!) was Prime Minister and the ground-breaking, subversive, edgy cartoon TV show was The Simpsons.

Smalltalk aside, we discussed the recent Landmark Edition of Herodotus, the Greek historian known variously as “the father of history” and “the father of lies”.  This is because he’s generally reliable (for an ancient historian) on Greek matters — and hilariously unreliable for anything outside of Greece (being, the other 99% of the world).  To his credit, he does tell his readers that he’s just reporting what all these foreign sailors have told him.  Which begs the question of why he spent so much time with foreign sailors. 

Though one line in his Histories suggests that Pheonicians circumnavigated Africa millenia before Europeans, Herodotus is most famous for telling Greek audiences that in India, fox-sized ants would get covered in gold dust while digging their burrows, which the locals would collect with whatever passed for the “Swiffer” of that era.*  But they’d have to be careful, because these ants were so fierce, they would eat camels.  The more mundane reality is that folks in a part of Pakistan have harvested gold dust from the coats of marmots for centuries.  And there is a type of scorpion in that region dumb enough to chase camels.  Ah, the miracle of mistranslation! 

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* this is separate from the Golden Fleece legend.  If the latter has historical roots, it would most likely be the ancient practise of using sheepskin to collect gold dust floating down rivers in the Black Sea area.  (The sheepskin was cheap, available, and renewable, and had lots of surface area with which to catch the particles.)

Seems Men’s Health spoke too soon in impugning Outback Steakhouse’s Aussie Fries (see earlier post here).

Armour brand pork brains in milk gravy contain more than 1000% of your daily recommended intake of cholesterol.  On the other hand, it is brain food.

(Hat tip consumerist.)

(more under the fold)

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