Archimedes’ Hot Tub

I was fascinated to read about Mark Hostetter, who runs a large hedge fund and is also a working Presbyterian minister. Here’s a Q&A I did with him that ran in Sunday’s Boston Globe Ideas section.

The Internet would give Karl Marx pause. On the one hand, it obliterates profits by commoditizing any part of the economy we can digitize (music, advertising, newspapers, software development…). Yet as it brings economic justice down upon the bourgeois, it numbs the proletariat mind in ways Marx thought only religion could.

Literary critic and Granta editor John Freeman wrote The Tyranny of E-mail to help us understand — and escape — enslavement by this new machine. My review in the Boston Globe.

My piece Satan, the Great Motivator was in Sunday’s Boston Globe, where it caught some eyeballs (probably fans of the 1943 version of Heaven Can Wait). The Arts & Letters Daily put it up as the top left item, ahead even of this New York Times essay on the evolution of the God gene(sic).Among the sites that linked to the piece:

hell is good for capitalism (interesting discussion in comments).

the economic effects of religion and religious liberty

The economic utility of religion (part of an essay on the Wendell Berry book “Life is A Miracle.”)

Economic development’s surprising secret weapon: applied religion?

The devil made me prosperous

the hell effect (includes some pointed reader comments)
It was a fun thing to write. I got to work with the Globe’s Steve Heuser, and I respect and like him even more after working with him than I did before.

My piece on passwords and how to remember them is up on Inc. magazines Web site.

See Are Your Passwords Too Weak?

Ken Auletta’s new book “Googled” defines the present of the company and its impact on media and other things. But it cannot define the future, though Auletta seems to fear for us all. My review, Google’s Earth, tells why.

On a personal note, I found much of this book pleasurable, a rare thing for a business book. The one answer I personally didn’t get about Google was whether its venture capitalist backers tried to sell it when it was a very young company. A prominent VC in Silicon Valley once told me this, and I can see from his book that the VCs got so frustrated with the company one can imagine them shopping it around. But Auletta doesn’t mention it.

In Security versus the Mob, I examine how organized criminals find easy pickings in corporations. Organized crime rings attack companies both in the physical world, where retail theft offers lucrative rewards and lax punishment, and in the cyber world, where enforcing the law often becomes next to impossible. Derek Slater, my editor, added this fun Mafia quiz.
The bust of superhacker Albert Gonzalez took place after this story was on its way to readers. He’s a fascinating case all on his own, and somebody, may it be me, will center a great story on him.

Most of my summer was dedicated to working on three pieces. The first to come out, Chicago Schooled, looks at what the global recession might mean for the Chicago School of economics.

I think the Chicago School being blamed in some corners for the recession no longer exists, and may never have existed (though that line was cut from this story, with my agreement). I was thus a little surprised by Paul Krugman’s attack on the Chicago School in How Did Economists Get It so Wrong?, in part because his depiction of Milton Friedman shows that “Chicago School” has become a rhetorical device, not a reflection of the actual school of thought. It was odd to see Krugman make John Cochrane the face of the Chicago School; even Cochrane says his views are not in the mainstream at Chicago (here’s Cochrane’s response).

It also provoked headscratching on my part that Krugman didn’t mention this year’s Dahlem Report (a good discussion and a link to the PDF of the report are here), in which eight economists accused economic scholars of being (gasp) out of touch with the real world and the entire profession in need of significant reform. Perhaps when you’re Paul Krugman, you don’t need someone else’s validation for your views.

I knew Paul Roberts only virtually until we met at Wagamama’s for noodle soup and a chat about the state of the security market. I can now report it is more secure than the journalism market. I also learned that Paul in his spare time runs a citizen journalism blog, Blogging Belmont. It turns out he had blogged about whether Belmont should adopt some of the ideas in my urban retrofits piece in the Boston Globe, but he hadn’t realized I was the Michael Fitzgerald who wrote it.
I poked around a blog search engine and found a couple of other good posts on articles I’ve written recently. The I’ve Been Mugged blog used my CIO piece on changing privacy expectations as starting off point for a consumer privacy manifesto. The Knockoff Report looked at my virtual goods charticle in Fast Company and warned of the coming of counterfeit virtual goods.

Most Sundays over the last couple of months, I spent my evenings with narrative guru Mark Kramer. He presides over a narrative salon involving radio and print journalists and writers established and aspiring. We talk about narrative writing and what makes it good, and shared pieces of our own.

Kramer offers brilliant observations about prose off the cuff. Give him a little more time and he becomes a jeweler making precise cuts in stone.

He makes writing and reporting vital acts. I approach my work now in ways I only dreamt of in the last 20 years.

I have to take a few Sundays off and I’m missing it already.

New York in June was the perfect place for the invitation-only Meeting of the Minds in June. The location underscored the need for change in urban living, a theme of Meeting of the Minds, an organization that brings people together to tackle urban problems.

Street traffic in New York moved like mud, overwhelmed by cars despite its excellent public transit. The host building, the JP Morgan Chase building in lower Manhattan, has a thick core that defeats wireless communications, including cellular phones. It was astonishing to be at a meeting like this and not have wireless networks (though perhaps I paid more attention than I would have otherwise).

Highlights for me were a panel discussion on urban retrofitting, which became a starting point for this six ways to retrofit your city piece in the Boston Globe. The panel featured Jack Hidary, Skytran’s Earl Gales Jr., Susan Zielinski of the University of Michigan, Paul Pelosi Jr. and Ron Dembo of Zerofootprint, which combines three organizations, a energy management software firm, a consultancy and a nonprofit.

One city with an impressive number of efforts underway to develop a more sustainable future seems to be Berlin. Hella Dunger-loper, permanent secretary for building and  housing in Berlin’s senate department for urban development, spoke on a different panel at the event. But one would expect European cities to look more organized, given the government-managed approach to capitalism Europeans tend to take.

I also liked the talk by Bill Reinert of Toyota, which sponsored the meeting. It’s oddly charming to hear a guy say things like “the new Prius does really get 50 miles a gallon. We said that last time but we were lying to you,” and that its solar-powered roof option “kind of works,” said in a rural West Virginia ‘whattayaknow, the company didn’t completely do the wrong thing’ tone.

Reinert, a kind of auto industry rejoinder to Al Gore, has a slide deck full of discouraging data on trends in cars. One notes that hybrid sales fell at a greater rate when oil prices dropped than SUV sales fell when they rose. Another points out that anyone who drives a Prius but goes less than 15,000 miles a year probably saves perhaps 50 gallons of gas over a regular car.

He also talked about why Toyota thinks lithium ion batteries are not yet the way to go, at least unless you’re willing to spend $10,000 to replace the battery pack in your car after five years. Self-serving for Toyota? Absolutely. But a good question to tuck away and ask battery companies.

His bet for the near-term future: Hybrid vehicles that run on 2nd generation low carbon fuels (something like taking municipal solid waste and converting it to biogasoline).

I got invited to this via Zipcar, and Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith was on my second-favorite panel.

Griffith ran through some numbers on Zipcar: after $40 million in private capital and $80 million in debt, Zipcar should be profitable this year, on about $100 million in revenues. It has 300,000 users in 13 major cities and 120 university operations in the US, Canada and UK.

Griffith released a Zipcar study saying that Zipcar users save about $7,000 a year over car owners, and have taken about 100,000 cars off the road.

Then he extrapolated. Zipcar believes that when it reaches the point of being in the 100 largest metropolitan areas, it could have 37 million members and more than $10 billion dollars a year in revenue. That would potentially return $260 billion into local economies (good, since something has to replace the lost tax dollars from car sales). It would also represent 92 billion fewer miles traveled, remove 22 million cars from the road and prevent 40 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Griffiths offered no timetable for achieving this, but at least the company doesn’t need to get that big to be profitable.
Also speaking on the panel was Nicholas You – senior advisor, policy and strategic planning, office of the exec. director of UN-Habitat, Nairobi. His remarks on the shift in assumptions at the UN and elsewhere about the informal economy were interesting, as were his comments about the turn-around of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the Tennessee River once caught on fire (Perhaps if I were a southerner, I would know this story. Instead, I know about the same event occurring on the Cuyahoga River in  Cleveland). He also told a turn-around story in Chengdu, China, and looked at how Vancouver, British Columbia has reduced passenger miles driven over the last decade.

One should beware government officials telling success stories. I was surprised during the Q&A when You talked about how banks were a centerpiece of a UN strategy to work with the poor. He called this “thinking out of the box.” I made a face. African banks have lousy reputations, especially among the poor, one reason cited for the rise of cell phone banking. In Kenya, where You is based, Safaricomm is the biggest bank, its Mpesa mobile currency a staple.

But it turns out You knew his stuff. After the panel I talked with You and he said “Mpesa has a glass ceiling” when it comes to things like mortages. One problem: mortgages take too long to repay to make them viable for cell phone banks. I pointed out that Entelisat, an Egyptian-based cellular carrier, was offering loans via cell phone, and You countered with “Egypt gives massive guarantees for those home loans.” Then I noted that ICICI in India has both regular banking operations and microfinance, and You said that ICICI is blending the models and it might become a viable way to scale the two.  Decoupling land from houses might be another way to make it easier to let poor people buy homes, as well.

The final speaker on this panel was Mario Gandelsonas, director of the Center for Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure at Princeton University.

Gandelsonas has worked out some brilliant thoughts about the nature of 20th century ‘hard’ infrastructure and how to bring it forward and merge it into the 21st century’s ’soft’ infrastructure. For instance, he says all of us are now potential terminals (welcome to Port Michael Fitzgerald!). There still has to be physical infrastructure, but how to deal with the new digital infrastructure is an obvious challenge for urban planners. It’s hard to imagine they are thinking about Port Michael Fitzgerald, or Port Beloved Reader.

Had there been wireless of any sort, I would’ve tweeted these comments, none of which I’d heard before:

“texting and cell phones are the first cause of teenager’s death at this point. (in the u.s.)”

“they [teens] prefer to be driven by parents so they can keep texting with friends. and they prefer texting to talking so they can’t be overheard.”

“The number of licensed 16-year-old drivers has dropped 30 percent in 8 years. They’re not interested in driving. They want to be driven so they can text.”

Yes, Gandelsonas argues that texting and other communications technologies will kill, or at least diminish, the automobile. He has a multipronged experiment to help New Jersey respond to this. It’s very early on, in its first year, but he’s started something in South Amboy, N.J. We’ll see if visionary thinking translates into effective, scalable action.