Archimedes’ Hot Tub

As a college student, I was interested in writing and in business.  Being at Chicago, an economics major seemed to make sense.  Only I was not good at economics, to the chagrin of my mother, who feared I would follow in her English-major footsteps and become a ne’er-do-well (she was not much happier with my actual major, history, even when I noted that it wasn’t considered humanities, but social science. It didn’t help when I told her she wasn’t a ne’er-do-well, either). I did well in things like sociology classes, so when I interviewed the brilliant and much-lauded Chicago economist Gary Becker, I was quite surprised that he thought sociology was harder than economics.

I interviewed Becker for Diamond Weekly last August,  though the magazine didn’t run the interview until late January of ‘07.  We sat in the bar at Boston’s Copley Fairmont, sipping bottled water and talking about his recent interests, like the economics of suicide, which he is researching along with Richard Posner.

My vision of economics is not just talking about dollars and cents.  It’s much broader.  It’s a method of sort of interpreting what goes on in the world, the social world, the political world, the market world. So when we talk about the economics of suicide, we mean, can we say anything about and under what conditions it would be better to not live than living? Can you give any components of that that you can understand?  Like, they lose their job or they get divorced or they get a disease. That’s what we’re trying to analyze.

Our interview interested the waiter, who after a certain point became quite deferential to “Mr. Becker.” Later, the waiter told me he’d heard enough to find Becker through Google at a computer behind the bar.

At the end, I asked Becker what advice he gave his grandkids about school. Study the liberal arts, he said.

World Voice: Gary Becker

While in Chicago in July 2006 I also went up to the top of the Dirksen Building, where Judge Richard Posner has his chambers. He was crisp and funny and displayed a voluminous memory for facts, which must be part of the reason why he can write so prolifically.  One thing he didn’t know much about was Japanese manga.  A book based on the blog he shares with Gary Becker had just come out in Japan, and it ran his picture in manga style, which he hadn’t heard of.  I was amused by the idea of this serious jurist, whom I’d been interviewing about deficiencies in U.S. intelligence gathering, being turned into a manga character.

World Voice: Richard Posner

In July 2006, I attended an excellent writer’s conference in Chicago, Writers and Editors One-on-One. After it wrapped up, I spent a day interviewing some thinkers in the area for Diamond Weekly. One of them was John Mearsheimer, who was immersed in crafting a response to criticisms of the paper he and Stephen Walt had co-authored, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” I was more interested in his perspective on world politics five years after his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, which was published just before the September 11th attacks.

Mearsheimer started teaching at Chicago in my first year at the school, but I never took a class with him. His framework for offensive realism is well-developed and it seems clear to me that U.S. foreign policy since World War II hews closely to it. The question is whether we as a nation might be in a better spot in places like the Middle East if we hadn’t. But then, Mearsheimer didn’t put tragedy in his title for nothing.

World Voice: John Mearsheimer

After the Bank of Japan moved from a zero percent interest rate, I spoke with Anil Kashyap, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. His sharp and skeptical comments about the Bank of Japan created a stir when Diamond published them.

Kashyap World Voice

In May 2006, I interviewed Mike Ryan, founder of the Creative and Innovative Economy Center. He argues that countries with developing economies should adopt strong intellectual property laws, or they’ll be left behind in the world economy. This didn’t run in Diamond Weekly until the fall.

World Voice: Mike Ryan

Andrew Lo, an MIT economist, thinks that markets don’t behave efficiently, but rather adapt, meaning they should be viewed using a Darwinian model. I interviewed him for Diamond Weekly back in April 2006. A sample:

It may well be the case that natural selection will occur in the next 100 years not through biological means but through financial means. Just imagine it’s possible for us to create a cure for cancer and the cost of such as cure becomes prohibitive. It really will be literally survival of the richest.

World Voice: Andrew Lo

In April 2006 I interviewed Clyde Prestowitz for Shukan Daiyamondo. The Japanese hold Prestowitz in high regard, though I’m not sure his ideas of integrating the Japanese and U.S. economies, right down to merging the currencies, are any more mainstream there than they are here. Certainly his gloomy outlook on our economy and our society don’t fit in with the mainstream.
Prestowitz Q&A

My latest Prototype column in the NYT. It looks at the social networks of bacteria, which is fascinating to think about. But it also provides an excellent example of how long it can take an idea to become commonplace.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/business/yourmoney/25proto.html

(registration required, and after a certain period, it’s no longer free to access).

Mudge, a security researcher who was the most visible member of the old hacker thinktank the L0pht, invited me to a reception for former cybersecurity czar and White House national security advisor Richard Clarke. Clarke was at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge tonight, shaking hands and signing his new thriller, “Breakpoint.” Clarke, who grew up in the area in Dorchester, drew an eclectic crowd that looked like people who knew him when, people who’ve known him since, people who’ve taken the course he teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a few security types.

He got laughs when he noted that this is his third book and his second work of fiction, unless you ask the Bush Administration, which would say it’s his third work of fiction. In fact, Breakpoint is not so much fiction as a policy brief for 2012, when Ray Kurzweil’s techno utopian vision for the future smacks headlong into Bill Joy’s dystopian counter-vision. Joy is a character in the novel (he’s called William Gaudium); most of the heroes, meanwhile, buy into Kurzweil’s techno-utopian vision. Thinly disguised versions of Microsoft and Cisco are in it, as well. Clarke got knowing laughs for his disclaimer that the book was pure fiction and not based on real people or companies, after which he introduced Mudge as someone who is not the character Soxster from the novel.

The most important pages in the book are his appendix, which discuss about a dozen technologies under development, largely for military purposes. If Clarke is correct, the U.S. will have significantly boosted its technological lead over the rest of the world in five years, and its only real threat will come from within, as the rate of technological progress sparks serious social unrest. We’ll check back with Clarke in 2012.

The evidence is that companies don’t rely on (patent laws) much. The basic underlying principle is that you shouldn’t be given a monopoly unless you get something for it, in other words if an innovator would innovate anyway, you shouldn’t give them a monopoly. In lots of areas basically 30 years of studies say they’ll innovate anyway.

So said Eric von Hippel, a prophet of user-driven innovation (what Wired cleverly called ‘Crowdsourcing’ in its June 2006 issue). I interviewed him in March 2006 for Diamond Weekly. The full interview as I submitted it is

von hippel Q&A