Books Archives - Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

False Dawn: FDR and the Great Depression

March 19, 2026March 19, 2026 by philg

False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 is an academic economist’s look at all of the academic economists’ explanations for the Great Depression and how, with muscular government intervention led by a now-revered FDR, it could have lasted so much longer than economic downturns that happened in the U.S.’s free market period (1630-1930). (I introduced this book a few months ago with Philip’s Book Club: False Dawn.)

One popular theory is that World War II brought the U.S. out of the Depression after about a decade of failed federal government interventions. The book points out that calculating GNP during World War II is somewhat arbitrary:

But there is a deeper sense in which the wartime recovery, however and whenever it started, was no recovery at all. “In the crucial respect of waste of economic resources,” Broadus Mitchell (1947, 396) observes, “the war was, particularly for the United States, a deepening of the depression.” Tens of millions who had been either unemployed or employed in peacetime activities now took part in activities that, however crucial, continued to reduce instead of enhancing their own and the world’s living standards. To label such a state of affairs “full employment” was, Mitchell says, but “a flattering unction”: the employment thus generated was “for purposes which, by very definition, could have no place in a normal economy.” In short, the war was but a temporary solution to the problem of economic depression, and the more temporary the better. The point may seem trite. But it’s a necessary response to those—and there are many—who declare that World War II ended the Depression and just leave it at that.

… the most serious shortcoming of wartime output measures, namely, their tendency to overstate, perhaps dramatically, both the nominal value of war matériel and the extent to which it should be considered part of national output at all. As Higgs (1992, 45–47) reports, Kuznets, whose wartime and postwar deflators are among those that have been called into question by Friedman and Schwartz and others, had his own grave misgivings about the Commerce Department’s valuation of wartime output. “A major war,” he observed, “magnifies” the usual challenges involved in estimating national income, because war matériel isn’t sold at anything resembling “market” prices and also because wars blur “the distinction between intermediate and final products” (45).

Such considerations persuaded Kuznets to come up with several alternative measures of wartime and postwar GNP, all of which imply a less impressive wartime boom, or no boom at all, and no postwar slump. For example, according to Higgs (1992, 46), “whereas the Commerce Department’s latest estimate of real GNP drops precipitously in 1946 and remains at that low level for the rest of the decade,” Kuznets’s “wartime” estimate “increases in 1946 by about 8 percent, then rises slightly higher during the next three years.” Another Kuznets GNP estimate—what he called “peacetime” GNP—revises the record still further by valuing goods produced for military use at their nonmilitary surplus values only. According to that estimate, between 1945 and 1947 real output rose by almost 18 percent!

The above quote illustrates the principal flaw of the book for a non-academic reader. The author spends most of his ink summarizing and referencing the work of other academics. He’ll lay out four or five theories and deal with each one in turn, forcing the reader to tease out the author’s personal point of view. The book is more accurately characterized as a survey of 100 years of academic thought regarding the Great Depression than as an explanation of the Great Depression and subsequent recovery.

Another popular theory is that the New Deal was an example of Macro Economics 101 Keynesian deficit spending during a downturn. Two chapters are devoted to “The Keynesian Myth”. The author points out that Roosevelt was committed to a balanced budget and that Keynes himself wrote critically of American economic policy. The New Deal was a project to increase the power of the federal government in regulating business, not a deficit spending plan. Some of this project was abandoned when the federal government needed private industry to be its partner for World War II weapons production, but the effect was to stifle business investment and reduce personal consumption.

“Conventional wisdom has it,” Gary Best (1991, 222) observes, “that the massive government spending of World War II finally brought a Keynesian recovery from the depression.” However, Best continues, the fact that the government was no longer at war with business, as it had been during the original New Deal, deserves more credit. “That,” Best says, “and not the emphasis on spending alone, is the lesson that needs to be learned.”

On the extent to which there was any Keynesian borrowing:

New Deal deficits were less impressive than New Deal spending because the Roosevelt administration went to considerable lengths to boost tax revenues and did so even when it meant relying heavily on taxes that mostly burdened low-income Americans. For that reason, the administration chose not only to retain and then repeatedly extend most of the excise taxes imposed as part of Hoover’s 1932 budget—taxes Herbert Stein (1966, 210) considers “the purest act of pre-revolutionary fiscal policy”—but also to increase taxes on gasoline and tobacco, revive the liquor tax upon the repeal of Prohibition, and introduce its AAA tax on food processors. Because they fell on consumers, either directly or indirectly, excise taxes, which eventually funded 60 percent of the government’s “ordinary” revenues (Leff 1984, 147), tended to be deflationary even when fully offset by government spending. Such taxes therefore had little to recommend them from a countercyclical fiscal policy perspective (Brown 1956, 868; Leff 1984, 39). But because excise taxes were revenue workhorses, to an administration not much less determined to limit deficits than Hoover’s had been, they made perfect sense. At the height of the New Deal, Mark Leff (1984, 38) points out, the tax on food processors alone “accounted for one-eighth of total tax revenues,” which was more than the yield from either the personal income tax or the corporate income tax. For this reason, after the tax on food processors was struck down, Roosevelt “continued to suggest processing taxes to balance the budget and to fund farm subsidies” (Leff 1984, 44). What was true of excise taxes was truer still of the Social Security payroll tax that the government began collecting in January 1937. According to Leff (1984, 45), when Roosevelt first came up with his plan for funding Social Security, his advisers warned that because it would draw purchasing power from consumers for the purpose of establishing a $47 billion reserve fund without making any like disbursements from that fund for many years, the plan would be dangerously deflationary. Still, Roosevelt insisted on it, saying that it would assist in balancing the budget while projecting “an image of fiscal responsibility” (47). According to Sherwood Fine (1944, 114), the regressive Social Security tax diverted “more than a billion dollars of purchasing power . . . away from an industrial establishment sensitively attuned to consumer demand” in the midst of a severe economic downturn. “Running along, as we are, on a low level,” Alvin Hansen (1939b, 283) wrote afterward, when various amendments to the Social Security Act were under consideration, “we cannot afford . . . the luxury of a Social Security Program which turns out in effect to be essentially a compulsory savings program, and which thereby seriously curtails the volume of consumption expenditures.”

France was the only significant (imagine that there was a time when France was significant!) foreign nation inspired to follow our example:

France was one of the few countries and the only major one to take longer to recover from the Great Depression than the United States. France was also the only country that resorted to policies closely resembling—indeed inspired by—the New Deal, including NRA-style codes. And it was the only country that did not experience a substantial improvement in output after devaluing its currency. As Barry Eichengreen (1992a, 349) observes, France’s example shows, even more clearly than that of the United States, that “devaluation was necessary but not sufficient for economic recovery.” France’s first stab at New Deal–style industrial planning consisted of the so-called Flandrin experiment, an attempt by the conservative ministry of Pierre-Etienne Flandrin (November 1934–May 1935), directly inspired by the NRA, to cartelize French industries and reduce workers’ working hours. Flandrin’s experiment went no further, and his government fell after six months. But several weeks after decisively winning France’s May 3, 1936, parliamentary election, the Popular Front—an alliance of French radicals, socialists, and communists—implemented an NRA-inspired plan of its own. That plan was so aggressive that recent scholars have dubbed it “a sort of NIRA on steroids” (Cohen-Setton, Hausman, and Wieland 2017). As Barry Eichengreen (1992a, 375–76) explains, “Employers were compelled to sign the Accord de Matignon granting trade union recognition, collective bargaining privileges, and wage increases. . . . [T]he work week was shortened again, but this time without any corresponding reduction in pay. The government legislated an annual paid vacation and a 40-hour week. Wages were raised by 7 percent for high-paid workers and by up to 15 percent for the lower paid. . . . Other elements of the French ‘New Deal’ raised the school-leaving age and nationalized the armaments industry.” The Matignon Agreements’ mandatory wage rate increases went into effect at once, raising nominal labor costs by between 7 and 15 percent (Cohen-Setton, Hausman, and Wieland 2017, 279). The rest of the Popular Front’s plan, including its forty-hour week provision, was phased in industry by industry between then and the end of the year.

Noting how after 1936 France’s industrial output was persistently 30 percent below its long-run trend, Paul Beaudry and Franck Portier (2002) consider various possible explanations, including technological stagnation, only to conclude that the best is the simplest: French output fell 30 percent because between them the Blum government’s labor market legislation and strikes caused total hours worked to fall 25 percent. A decline in the ratio of investment to output, itself traceable to France’s New Deal legislation, accounts for the remaining five percentage points by which output fell.

What did cause the early-1930s collapse, then? The author points to an agriculture boom during World War I that led inevitably to a bust after WWI that dragged down most of America’s banks.

Bank lending to farmers itself doubled between the start of the war and 1920. After the war, both crop prices and US farm exports fell as sharply as they’d risen during it, triggering a farm crisis that was to ruin many farmers over the course of the next decade, often bringing their banks down with them (Belongia and Gilbert 1985). In 1921 alone more than 500 banks failed, topping the previous record established during the Panic of 1893. The 1921 failures coincided with the general economic depression of that year. But while most other industries recovered quickly from the downturn, and did so with little help from either the Federal Reserve or the Treasury, agriculture and banking didn’t. Instead, bank failures mounted.

Although thousands of US banks managed to survive the 1920s, many were in no condition to withstand any further shocks. So when commodity and security prices sagged after the onset of the Depression, bank failures became even more frequent. Rural banks were still the main casualties, although now instead of being concentrated in the western grain-growing states, bank failures were especially frequent in the South and the Midwest, where collapsing cotton, tobacco, and livestock prices combined with reduced cotton and wheat yields—a result of what the Weather Bureau described as “the most severe drought in the climatological history of the United States”—proved to be the last straw (Hamilton 1985, 602).

How much can we rely on expert analysis and wisdom? The author points out that all of the best minds of economics were in agreement that there would be a depression following World War II due to soldiers returning and finding themselves unemployed and the government ceasing purchases of weapons. Business

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Book about the Edmund Fitzgerald

March 13, 2026March 7, 2026 by philg

It’s Friday the 13th, a notorious day for bad luck. Speaking of bad luck, let’s look at the 29 men who died on the Edmund Fitzgerald on November 10, 1975. They’re the subject of an interesting new book: Gales of November by John Bacon. Not exactly a spoiler: everyone dies, just as Gordon Lightfoot explained in his enduring hit song (from the book I learned that Lightfoot was an experienced recreational Great Lakes sailor).

Some things that I didn’t know:

it was the last trip of what was going to be the retirement year for the captain and many of his long-time partners amongst the crew
the captain was considered the best on the Great Lakes and had 45 years of experience
the weather was a 50-year event, perhaps, and not merely an ordinary “gale of November”

Perspective on the suffering of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims

Since almost everything in the news these days must be referenced to the Epstein Files…

The sinking was preventable, as we’ll see below, and quite a few mistakes were made.

Columbia offered some of the families the victims’ last paycheck ($568.25 for a deckhand) and $750 for the victim’s lost personal effects, an amount determined by their labor contract, but other families didn’t receive even those checks. When Columbia offered nothing else, the families had little recourse but to file wrongful death lawsuits, for which Columbia paid whatever the families’ individual attorneys could negotiate. Some families received about $35,000, or a little more than a year’s wages for a deckhand making overtime, and others marginally more.

The typical woman who alleged that she suffered by receiving cash, Gulfstream rides, free rent in Manhattan, luxury vacations, etc., in exchange for sex 10, 20, or 30 years earlier, was paid about $3.5 million from Epstein’s estate, a JP Morgan settlement fund, and a Deutsche Bank settlement fund. That’s 100X what an Edmund Fitzgerald crewmember’s survivors were paid. Thus, we can conclude that having sex on Jeffrey Epstein’s island was 100X worse than riding through 30-50′ waves for hours and ultimately being drowned in 42-degree water.

The bargain all the crewmen on the Fitzgerald had signed up for was a hard one, but straightforward: The work will be taxing, and you will miss most of your family’s best moments, but you will retire relatively young, with a good pension and nothing to do but hunt, fish, and play cards, pool, and golf. Best of all, you’ll have plenty of time and energy to spend with your grandchildren. The Fitzgerald’s twenty-nine crewmen and their families had all paid their deposits up front, but never got to enjoy the sweet side of the deal.

The Special Hazards of the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes can be more treacherous than the oceans. One reason is the distinct structure and frequency of the Great Lakes’ freshwater waves. In the oceans, salt weighs down the water, squashing the waves and spreading them out, so they typically form larger but smoother swells, similar to a roller coaster. On the Great Lakes there’s no salt to hold down the waves, so they rise more sharply and travel closer together, like jagged mountains of water coming at you in rapid succession. These waves don’t roll; they peak, crest, then crash down on whatever is unlucky enough to lie below them.

That’s another reason why Great Lakes waves are so steep and ragged and travel so fast. On the ocean the waves are usually about ten to sixteen seconds apart, so even a large container ship can fit between them. On Lake Superior the waves run four to eight seconds apart, which means that a seven-hundred-foot lake freighter can be riding atop two waves at once.

That problem produces more problems. On the Great Lakes a ship that long can impale its bow in one wave, which can lift it up thirty feet or more, while the ship’s stern can be simultaneously stuck in the wave coming right behind it, raising the ship’s back end in the air another thirty feet. That leaves its midsection, which could be loaded with 58 million pounds of iron ore—the equivalent of 4,200 adult elephants—suspended between the two waves, with nothing supporting it. That creates a phenomenon naval architects call “sagging,” in which the unsupported middle of the ship sags toward the water below it, exerting a tremendous strain on the hull.

After sagging between two waves, just seconds later the ship might face another threat: riding over the peak of a single colossal wave. This creates a condition known as “hogging,” the opposite of sagging, where the vessel drapes over the wave’s crest, with both the bow and stern drooping downward, again placing immense pressure on the center of the ship’s hull.

[Michigan Tech’s Guy] Meadows’s research shows that Lake Superior’s biggest storms occur every thirty years or so, but even in milder storms the waves on the Great Lakes can be alarming. In a pretty unremarkable 2020 storm, for example, two of their buoys anchored off Lake Superior’s southern shore, far from the path of Superior’s biggest waves, measured waves reaching 28.5 feet, almost as high as a three-story building.

If the biggest waves within a few minutes are at 30′, according to Guy Meadows, and they stay there for 24 hours, a ship should experience at least one 60′ wave (1 in 10,000).

Another bad feature of the Great Lakes is that it is easier for freshwater to freeze above the waterline on a ship than it is for saltwater to freeze, thus adding weight to a ship that is already in peril. A typical modern iron boat’s cargo of taconite also creates a hazard:

Because it’s two-thirds clay, a porous material, it can absorb up to 7 percent of its weight in water, and four times that can get trapped between the pellets when it’s piled high.

(i.e., the cargo hold can hold a lot of water weight that isn’t possible to pump out; separately, if you thought that math professors were useless, the book notes that U. Minnesota math prof Edward W. Davis is the person who figured out how to work with taconite, a low-grade iron ore)

Overloading as a Factor

Prior to the wreck of the Fitz, Great Lakes captains prided themselves on moving maximum tonnage per trip and per season. Everyone loaded up the ships to the painted Plimsoll line at which point the freeboard is the minimum required for safety. The Fitz was operated with far less freeboard than her original designers had intended:

Given how such incredibly small margins on the Plimsoll line could produce such prodigious gains, especially when multiplied by forty to fifty round trips each shipping season, the executives at Columbia Transportation must have been thrilled when the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), working with the Coast Guard, reduced everyone’s required freeboard in 1969, and again in 1971, and again in 1973. For the Fitzgerald, that meant the original requirement of 14 feet, 9.25 inches of freeboard when sailing in November had been reduced to 11 feet, 6 inches—a total drop of 39.25 inches, or more than a yard, in just a few years.

Captains would then use various techniques to add a few inches of cargo beyond even this reduced freeboard, described in a chapter titled “Cheating the Plimsoll Line”.

The Edmund Fitzgerald was loaded to the absolute maximum, and a little beyond, on what was supposed to be her last voyage of the season:

The loading speed was all the more impressive because the dockworkers had filled the Fitzgerald’s belly with 26,112 long tons of taconite—far from the staggering amounts the new thousand—footers were carrying, but a fitting finale to McSorley’s celebrated career. The load that day was almost 4,000 long tons more than the 22,509 the Fitzgerald needed to set the Great Lakes record on its very first run just seventeen years earlier, a testament to the extra 39.25 inches the Coast Guard had allowed the Fitzgerald to sink in the water since 1973—plus the crew’s ability to cheat a few more inches on the Plimsoll line. This was such a common practice it would have been more remarkable if the crew had not cheated on the Plimsoll Line. Even the crew’s families knew about it. “They were overweight because they wanted to break their own record,” says Blaine Wilhelm’s daughter, Heidi Brabon. “So they cheated.” But what was unusual, according to former Fitzgerald deckhand Terry Sullivan, was that she was carrying a full load so late in the season, when even the USCG rules start scaling back the limits. While the Fitzgerald might not have been cheating by much, on the grand scale, when you combine those extra inches, plus the 39.25 inches the Coast Guard had already granted the Fitzgerald two years earlier, and the fact that all ships were supposed to scale back their loads for the rougher fall weather, any reasonable analysis can draw only one conclusion: The Fitzgerald had loaded thousands of tons more than what her architects had designed her to carry.

Primitive weather forecasts and distributions of forecasts

One of the blessings of the semiconductor revolution kicked off by William Shockley and carried forward by Jack Kilby is that computers have gotten vastly more powerful, thus enabling weather forecasts to become more reliable even without any advances in our understanding of meteorology. The National Weather Service was consistently late and consistently underestimating the strength of the storm that would sink the Fitz.

That afternoon [Sunday, November 9, 1975] the National Weather Service had posted a “gale warning,” a level of caution the NWS had created after the 1913 Storm of the Century showed it needed intermediary warnings, not just hurricane alerts. A gale warning predicts winds blowing thirty-nine to fifty-four miles per hour. But the NWS projected the wind would barely reach the gale range, which meant about forty miles per hour.

By 7 p.m. the National Weather Service noticed the storm system that started out of California had reached Iowa, and was gaining speed. It issued a gale warning for all of Lake Superior, correcting its earlier prediction that the storm would slip just below the big lake. Now, the NWS meteorologists said, the storm would cut diagonally across Lake Superior, producing waves from five to ten feet. That might not sound like much, but because the Fitzgerald had only 11.5 feet of freeboard, ten-foot waves wouldn’t give the ship much margin for error.

Late Sunday night the National Weather Service revised its forecast again, now predicting that waves Monday morning would reach ten to fifteen feet high. At 2 a.m. the NWS escalated its gale warning to a storm warning, reserved for winds expected to reach fifty-five to seventy-three miles per hour—strong enough to tear off roofs, uproot large trees, and knock over people attempting to walk outside. But the reality on the water was already starting to outpace the NWS’s forecasts. Winds on Lake Superior had already surged past fifty-eight miles per hour, and were still accelerating. The storm was gaining power like a boulder thundering down a steep hill.

[at 4 pm on Monday, November 10] Captain Cooper, now running an hour behind the Fitzgerald, later reported waves “up to twenty-five feet” when the Anderson neared Caribou Island. Since the Fitzgerald was now about twenty-five miles and an hour and forty minutes beyond the coordinates whence the Anderson had made that report—that much closer to the safety of Whitefish Bay, but also the storm’s epicenter—the waves the Fitzgerald was now experiencing were probably worse than the twenty-five-footers the Anderson had reported. Because the Fitzgerald had only 11.5 feet of freeboard, and probably less by the hour due to its compounding problems, those waves would be more than enough to wash green water—entire waves, not just the spray—over the Fitzgerald’s deck.

The Fitz sank at about 7:10 pm.

Get-there-itis

Some captains put in at Thunder Bay after realizing that the storm was

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Wartime reading: The Last Days of Budapest

February 28, 2026February 28, 2026 by philg

I recently finished listening to The Last Days of Budapest: The Destruction of Europe’s Most Cosmopolitan Capital in World War II by Adam LeBor. It covers the history of Hungary starting after World War I. From Wikipedia:

The Communist Party of Hungary, led by Béla Kun was a newly formed party aligned with the Bolsheviks of Soviet Russia. The Social Democrats were split in their relation to them, but on 21 March [1919], the radical faction won out, and the two parties officially merged. They declared the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In terms of domestic policy, the communist government nationalized industrial and commercial enterprises, socialized housing, transport, banking, medicine, cultural institutions, and all large landholdings. Land was collectivized, which alienated most of the peasantry who still demanded redistribution. The Communists also introduced prohibition of alcohol, which was very unpopular.

That last sentence saddens me because, of course, I think that if COVID-19 justified lockdowns and school closures then alcohol prohibition is trivial to justify under the banner of public health. (See Use testing and tracing infrastructure to enforce alcohol Prohibition? and The CDC supports my neo-prohibitionist philosophy)

Eventually a right-wing government takes over and unifies Hungarian under the ideas of (1) regaining territory lost after a post-WWI Treaty of Trianon, (2) restricting the influence of Jewish Hungarians (about 5 percent of the population), e.g., with race-based university admissions programs. Hungary ended up as an ally of Germany in WWII primarily because it wanted to regain territories lost in WWI. The majority of the population supported various anti-Jewish laws, but not necessarily the killing of all their Jewish neighbors. A minority of Hungarians did work with the Germans to kill Jews while the majority, including the police and the army, much more powerful than the militias, stood by watching (in most other European countries, the Jews were first moved out of public sight and killed in more private settings).

Zionists, with the assistance of foreign diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg, worked to create papers that would ultimately protect about half of Budapest’s Jews, many of whom ultimately made it to the British mandatory Palestine and fought against the invading Arab armies in 1948 to establish the modern State of Israel that is currently in the news for her role in attacking entirely peaceful Iranians who enjoy building nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles while chanting “Death to America”. (The New York Times says that Trump and Netanyahu had no reason to attack because it would be “it would be a decade before Iran could get past the technological and production hurdles to produce a significant arsenal [of nuclear bombs mounted on ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S.]” (maybe a good reason to move from NYC to West Palm Beach, Florida? If they have only a dozen nuclear bombs to deploy, the Iranians might not bother targeting Florida!).)

The tenacity of the Germans and Hungarians was impressive. They knew that they couldn’t hold out against a Russian siege, but fought almost to the last man (killing about 80,000 Russians in the process, but the Russians weren’t discouraged by casualties). Unfortunately for the Jews, the Hungarians, notably members of the Arrow Cross, were equally tenacious when it came to killing Jews. Even as they knew that their city and country were falling to the Red Army, Hungarians spent a lot of time, energy, and ammunition killing their Jewish neighbors. Perhaps there is a modern analogy. Europe is currently experiencing economic stagnation and irrelevance to the modern world economy (ChatGPT: “EU imports would generally be easier to replace than Taiwan imports … Taiwan imports are strategically critical; Substitution is slow and difficult; Some products currently have no near-term substitute”). Legacy Europeans are being replaced by new and improved migrants. What do a lot of legacy Europeans do with their time and energy? Protest against whatever the State of Israel is doing.

An email from New Yorker just now says that there is no upside, but only risk, in attacking Iran. I don’t subscribe so I can’t read their paywalled content, but presumably the Iranians who were previously chanting “Death to America” could start chanting “Double Secret Death to America”.

Let’s close with my favorite headline about the attack on Iran, from the Wall Street Journal. Breaking new ground in the Department of Projecting Strength, the Commander in Chief of the U.S. military is relaxing in Palm Beach rather than nervously drinking coffee in an underground war room in D.C.:

(The Israeli and U.S. militaries also projected strength by sleeping late and attacking Iran at 10 a.m. local time. The bombing of Tehran was scheduled for the same time of day as a student pilot lesson.)

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How does a no-fault divorce culture play out over two generations?

February 4, 2026January 25, 2026 by philg

I’m reading Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden (wife) and co-starring “James” (a pseudonym for the husband). It’s a good illustration of how the American no-fault divorce culture plays out over two generations.

Generation 0: Both spouses had married grandparents. Divorce was obtainable, but in the typical case only if the parties cooperated and came to an agreement.

Generation 1: Both spouses had divorced parents.

Generation 2: the book.

TL;DR version: The author/wife says that she was 50 when the husband decided to avail himself of our unilateral divorce system. His new sweetheart was “was thirty-five but looked twenty“. She was happy to leave her own husband, breaking up her own kids’ home, and, in the magical world of no-fault, there was no way for the husband to obstruct her plan (in fact, he would likely have had to pay her to execute the plan).

One area of agreement between the parties is on the appropriate level of coronapanic. They abandon NYC for Martha’s Vineyard, but the husband returns to NYC to spend more time with his new sex partner.

By late April, I knew I could not keep hiding the truth from the kids. I texted James that it was time to tell them and that we needed to do it together. We hadn’t spoken in several weeks. He said he thought it would be better if I told them alone. Initially, I agreed with him. I was afraid that he would expose us to COVID. He was not in quarantine; he was having an affair in the middle of New York City. We decided we would do a family Zoom call to break the news. James’s boss texted me the next day. He was a kind man, and a friend to both of us. He wrote that he understood why I was angry, but I needed to allow James to be there to tell our kids. He spoke from experience, having been divorced, having broken the news to children himself. He wrote that he was giving James his seaplane and pilot to fly to the Vineyard.

James landed on the Vineyard just before 2 p.m. He drove down our driveway in a Jeep our caretaker had left for him at the airport, a model similar to the one he’d driven onto the ferry a month earlier. He walked up the brick path to our door. He wore a mask, so I couldn’t see his whole face, but my first thought was that he seemed happy, his step brisk and optimistic. He was carrying an empty duffel bag over his shoulder.

He said, “Mom and I are separated and we’re going to divorce. I haven’t been happy.”

James turned to me and said, “I’m starving, can you make me a sandwich?”

A lot to unpack here. If there truly was a “seaplane” why did James go to Connecticut to start his journey (a seaplane can pull up to a dock on E. 23rd St.) and then why was there a landing at the MVY airport? The principal fear 8 weeks into coronapanic is not that the children will be harmed by separation and divorce litigation, but of some tweenage kids getting infected by a virus that was killing Maskachusetts residents at a median age of 82.

One question is why the U.S. still has wedding ceremonies with vows exchanged. If, by cultural and legal design, the marriage lasts only until one partner thinks that a better deal is available, why do friends and family have to gather and sit through the charade of a wedding? If James can say to a judge “I discovered that I preferred banging 35-year-old women to sleeping with a 50-year-old woman” and get what he asks for (a divorce), what stops people from laughing when they hear the vows?

(Note that even if New York family courts are aggressively biased against men, James could still come out ahead financially by swapping out the 50-year-old wife to marry the 35-year-old. He just needs the courts to be consistent, for his girlfriend to divorce her husband, and for the husband she’s divorcing to earn more money than James. In that case, everything that James loses to his ex-wife will be made up for in child support revenue paid to the new 35-year-old wife by her former husband.)

Loosely related, I’m proud to have been interviewed by the New York Times: “I Let My Wife Have an Affair. Do I Have to Console Her Now That It’s Over?”

(The answer turns out to be Yes: “it may be worth your both talking this all through with a counselor” (i.e., “Yes, and also you will have to pay for assistance in consoling her”))

Admission: While the NYT story is genuine, I ripped off the above introduction from this X parody account.

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Somali day care background book: Mississippi Swindle

January 16, 2026January 16, 2026 by philg

Mississippi Swindle: Brett Favre and the Welfare Scandal that Shocked America turns out to answer some background questions on how American taxpayers ended up funding fake day cares. The author, Shad White, is the State Auditor of Mississippi. Phil Bryant, the governor at the time, received a insider’s tip that prompted an investigation by White’s team.

The root cause of the Mississippi fraud seems to be the same as the root cause of the Minnesota fraud: state officials allowed to make decisions about how to spend federal money. The author says that Clinton administration technocrats in D.C. were concerned that they’d destroyed the Black American family. Children born to “single mothers” went from roughly the same percentage as in the white population to over 60 percent (current data: 25 percent for whites; 65 percent to Blacks) in response to the Great Society “marry the government” programs introduced under Presidents FDR and Johnson, e.g., Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The Clinton geniuses implemented Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (“TANF”) in which states would get block grants and then could do whatever they wanted to with the money. They could, for example, give cash directly to “families” that didn’t work, but could also give money to nonprofit organizations that purported to assist those who didn’t work, e.g., by helping them write resumes or delivering other nebulous services.

The Mississippi DHS folks decided to give roughly 10 percent of the TANF funds to poor people and then 90 percent to friends’ nonprofit orgs whose executives spent the money on new houses, luxury vacations, kickbacks to state bureaucrats, etc. Only about $100 million was stolen from federal taxpayers, but the mechanism seems to be the same as in the much larger Minnesota fraud. The core prerequisites are (1) letting state officials decide how to spend federal money, and (2) the ability of officials to hand over taxpayer funds to nonprofit orgs.

There are some other good insights into the bureaucratic lifestyle. Some families in Mississippi living in $1 million houses and with six-figure incomes were enjoying Medicaid (an angel/VC-investor friend in a $2 million (pre-Biden dollars) house Maskachusetts was doing this about 15 years ago; he answered all of the questions on the Mass Health Connector accurately and the system kicked out that he was entitled to superlative MassHealth (Medicaid) coverage at $3/month). When the auditors pointed this out to the Medicaid bureaucrats their response was to push back rather than admit any bureaucratic errors or shortcomings. Even the people in the welfare bureaucracies who were corrupt or personally benefitting had a powerful desire to obstruct auditing and to preserve business as usual.

I’m almost done with the book and so far there isn’t a single example of a person who lost his or her job as a consequence for incompetence. A handful of people suffered criminal convictions, but nobody lost a day of wages as punishment for taxpayers losing $100 million.

If you don’t want to read the book, Wikipedia offers a summary.

Loosely related, a thoughtful perspective from U.S. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana:

If you’re one of the crooks in Minnesota who took a giant Great Dane whiz down the leg of every taxpayer, you ought to be in JAIL. pic.twitter.com/kXAGwUXiWC
— John Kennedy (@SenJohnKennedy) January 13, 2026

Also, pronouns and goats in Minneapolis:

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History of Huawei (II)

January 8, 2026December 24, 2025 by philg

A second post about the core topic within House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company …

How does hiring and firing work in a company that isn’t passionate about DEI?

On January 28, 1996, Ren Zhengfei held Huawei’s first “mass-resignation ceremony.” Each head of a regional sales office was told to prepare two reports: a work summary and a written resignation. “I will only sign one of the reports,” Ren said. “Dear Chairman,” the resignation letter said, “I have fought for the company’s sales development and sacrificed my youth. But in the few years that I’ve worked on the sales front lines, my technical and business ability may not have kept up…. If through the process of examination and selection, the company identifies a more suitable person for sales work, I will sincerely resign from my current position.” Huawei had started out in rural markets, and many of its early sales managers were provincial in their experience and network of contacts. As Ren sought to go national and international, he decided to make the entire sales staff resign and reapply for their jobs. “The mountain goat must outrun the lion to not be eaten,” he had told them ahead of the event. “All departments and sections must optimize and eat the lazy goats, the goats that do not learn or progress, and the goats with no sense of responsibility.” Now Ren took the podium. “Being an executive at Huawei should be understood as a responsibility, a choice to sacrifice personal happiness,” he said. The resigning sales managers were allowed to speak in turn, some choking back tears. “As a Huawei person, I’m willing to be a paving stone,” one said. “If I can’t keep up with the pace of the company’s development, I’m willing to let new people, and higher-level people, take over my job,” another offered. “My youth and ability are limited, and Huawei’s future is long,” a third said. “I can’t hold back the company because of me.”

Maybe sales will be one of the few jobs left to humans after Elon Musk gets Optimus to do everything?

Ren had grown up in the Mao years, when there was no such thing as private-sector sales. Now he presented sales to his young followers in rousing terms, almost as a mystical vocation. “Sales work is special, complex, and noble,” he told them. “You need the intelligence of a scientist, the insight of a philosopher, the eloquence of an orator, the ambition of a social reformer, and the optimism and persistent spirit of a religious man.”

Polite protocol for a business dinner involved breaking out the baijiu, a clear sorghum spirit that has an eye-watering 120-proof kick, and pouring out round after round of shots over a rotating parade of exquisite dishes. The protocol also involved getting drunker than your clients to show your respect for them. One early Huawei executive wrote about having to excuse himself for a vomit break while entertaining customers—not an uncommon occurrence. Others developed stomach or liver ailments. This seemed to happen particularly often in the far northeast, which had a reputation for heavy drinking. “The key staffer for this account is currently suffering hepatitis but refuses to come back to Shenzhen for medical treatment and insists on fighting on the front line through the ice and snow,” Ren said in 1995 about a Huawei salesperson based in Yichun, close to the northeastern border with Russia.

The story of Huawei is definitely not as simple as “it was a planned economy and the planners picked Huawei”:

Despite the interest that Huawei had received from government officials, it was only one among many contenders, and not even the most favored one. In 1995, officials had set up a state-owned switchmaking champion called China Great Dragon Telecommunication in an effort to combat the foreign switchmakers. Great Dragon was built around the military engineer Wu Jiangxing’s breakthrough 04 switch and had been formed by merging eight smaller telecom companies. The government was pouring some $2.2 billion a year into the venture. Also in 1995, the Xi’an Datang Telephone Co.—a venture set up by a state-run research institute and several Chinese graduates from US universities—began mass production of its new switch, the SP30. And across town in Shenzhen, the Zhongxing Telecommunications Equipment Company—which would later be known as ZTE—had developed its ZXJ10 switch. People called them the Big Four of China’s domestic switchmaking, and they made quick work of eating into the foreign vendors’ market share. Within a few years, the price of telephone switches in China had dropped from $300 per line to $70 per line. With so many contenders, and such thin margins, companies were always flaming out. In early 1996, a dozen of Great Dragon’s 04 switches abruptly failed due to a software problem. The company never recovered.

Huawei had started out as an underdog compared with its state-owned rivals. Now it was emerging as the frontrunner, so much so that the state-owned companies were crying foul. “They sell cheaply to get market share,” an executive at Datang complained. Great Dragon’s Wu Jiangxing griped to Shenzhen’s Science and Technology Bureau that the local government shouldn’t just support privately owned companies.

Despite the shortage of PhDs in DEI in China and overt sexist sentiments, women are able to rise to top executive positions.

The executive who rose the highest was Sun Yafang, who was elevated from marketing and sales president to Huawei’s vice-chairwoman in 1994. She was an intense woman of around forty, with a hawkish nose and a stately bearing. She had overseen Huawei’s “marriage” to the state through the joint ventures with provincial telecom bureaus and had led the mass resignation of the sales managers. People whispered that Madam Sun had worked for the Ministry of State Security, or the MSS, China’s powerful civilian intelligence agency, before joining the company. Perhaps that had something to do with her rapid rise through Huawei’s ranks, or perhaps not.

Sun ran a tight ship, cracking down on excessive golfing among the managers. “Huawei’s sales staffers all know that if Madam Sun sees you without a tie on a convention floor, your fate will be a miserable one,” a member of her team wrote about her. “Not to mention her fiery temper. The hurricane of her criticism will leave you with no possible hope to find an escape.”

Ren had proved willing to promote capable female executives, even as he sometimes expressed old-fashioned views on women in the workplace. “Many companies don’t like hiring female employees, because female employees are inefficient and can’t achieve the goals when they do things,” Ren said in a speech to Huawei’s secretaries around this time. “Female employees have a big shortcoming, which is they like to gossip and nag, which undermines unity. Originally, the purpose of hiring female employees was to add a lubricant to the management team. The main characteristic of male employees is their rigidity, and they are prone to producing sparks when they collide. With a layer of elastic sponge in between, there won’t be sparks.”

A lot of Huawei’s management and corporate practices were modeled on IBM’s and with IBM consultants’ help:

IBM’s consultants started arriving at Huawei’s headquarters in August 1998. They would remain in residence for a decade. Gary Garner, one of the early IBM consultants, recalled that his first impression of Huawei was that it was a vibrant but undisciplined company where things were sometimes just scrawled on sticky notes instead of being filed properly. “President Ren had a whole bunch of bright young PhDs,” he said, “but it was disorganized. It wasn’t ready to go to the international market.” Some of Huawei’s managers protested the new systems, which they found burdensome. Ren insisted they follow the IBM way. If the shoes didn’t fit, Ren told them, they had to “cut their feet to fit the shoes.” IBM’s output was fifty-five times Huawei’s that first year, 1998. Ren set a goal of shrinking the difference to thirty-five to forty times greater by 1999. “We are making big strides forward,” he told his staff. “We’re narrowing the gap.”

One place that Huawei didn’t follow IBM was onto a public stock exchange. The company remains privately owned, mostly by employees, to this day.

Imagine if U.S. politicians would follow Ren’s example of voluntary semi-retirement at age 67:

In December 2011, Ren, sixty-seven, announced he was stepping back to allow younger hands to steer the company. “I increasingly don’t understand the technology, increasingly don’t understand finance, and only half understand management,” he told his staff. “If I can’t treat our group kindly and democratically, and fully unleash the talents of all our heroes, I will have achieved nothing.”

Much of the rest of the book is about Huawei’s entries into various foreign markets and tussles with the U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies that either (1) wanted a back door to tap into communications, or (2) were worried that their Chinese counterparts had a back door into Huawei’s gear. I won’t cover that here because it is too involved, but I will have another post about this House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company.

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History of Huawei book

January 4, 2026December 24, 2025 by philg

I promised more about House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company (see Unprovoked genocide against the Uyghurs) and here it is…

The book covers the modern history of China as well as the history of Huawei. The book should be inspiring to us older folks because the founder of Huawei was born in 1944 and, at age 81, is still involved in corporate management:

In Guizhou, Ren Moxun met a seventeen-year-old named Cheng Yuanzhao. With big brown eyes,[15] round cheeks, and a broad smile, she was also bright and good with numbers. They married, and Cheng Yuanzhao soon became pregnant. Their son was born in October 1944, and they named him Ren Zhengfei. It was an ambiguous name. Zheng meant “correct,” and fei meant “not.” “Right or wrong” would be a fair translation.

We are reminded that China is a multi-ethnic empire:

Mao’s officials believed they were extending a civilizing influence to the nation’s frontiers—Guizhou in the south, Inner Mongolia in the north, Tibet and Xinjiang in the west. The residents didn’t necessarily see it that way. They had lived for centuries with their own languages and customs, and they were now being compelled to assimilate. There were those who did not like Ren Moxun and his school either. After someone threatened to kill him with a hand grenade—the precise reasons are unclear—the school was issued four rifles to protect the staff and students. One of Ren Moxun’s objectives was to inculcate his students with the right beliefs. “Principal Ren, your guiding ideology must be clear,” a visiting official instructed him. “You must make clear who the enemies are, who we are, who are our friends.” Ren Moxun organized rallies for the students to denounce their enemies. The enemies at home were the oppressive landlords. The enemies abroad were the Americans, who were waging war against North Korea, one of China’s allies. Ren Moxun reported that the “scoundrels” hidden among the teachers were successfully caught through these criticism sessions, which were often intense, with students bursting into tears. In the anti-America sessions, students offered up secondhand accounts of atrocities committed by US troops in the area, presumably when they had passed through during World War II. One student said a US soldier had shot a farmer for sport near the Yellow Fruit Waterfall. Another said a classmate’s sister had been dragged into a jeep and raped. It was hard to say what, exactly, had happened years ago with US soldiers, but the resentment against America was certainly real.

and that the Cultural Revolution wasn’t a great time to be an educator or a student who wanted to learn

Ren Moxun was hauled onto a platform in the school cafeteria, his hands tied, his face smeared with black ink, the tall hat of shame denoting a counterrevolutionary placed on his head. “Studying is useless!” people shouted. “The more knowledge you possess, the more reactionary you are!”

One of Ren Moxun’s students demanded the principal admit that he’d instilled feudalist thinking in the students, such as by quoting Confucius. According to a recollective essay by Feng Jugao, a different student, when Ren Moxun tried to deny the accusation, the accuser rushed forward with a wooden stick and beat him until the stick broke.[53] “I can’t say if the wooden stick was weak, or if Principal Ren’s backbone was strong,” Feng wrote. “But the wooden stick broke in two across Principal Ren’s back.” Feng recalled his mother being aghast, saying that the students who beat the principal would get their karmic punishment.

Universities nationwide were banned from matriculating any new students between 1966 and 1976. Ren Zhengfei’s younger siblings were shut out, but through the random luck of his birth year, he’d been able to eke out a college education. In 1968, Ren graduated with a major in heating, gas supply, and ventilation engineering.

At age 42, Ren started Huawei:

Shenzhen legalized the establishment of “minjian” (unofficial or, more literally, “among the people”) private technology companies in February 1987 under a pilot program. Applicants poured in from across the country—professors and engineers from Beijing to Kunming. The idea of running your own company in the SEZ was exciting—and risky. Seventy-five percent of the first batch of entrepreneurs asked their state employers for temporary unpaid leave, with the option of reprising their old jobs if their startups didn’t work out. Ren founded Huawei as a minjian company on September 15, 1987, with twenty-one thousand yuan pooled between himself and five investors.

Wuhan was the source for more than SARS-CoV-2 and coronapanic:

Ren arrived in the inland city of Wuhan in the spring of 1988 in search of engineers. Dubbed “the Chicago of China,” Wuhan was a bustling industrial city on the Yangtze River. The Huazhong Institute of Technology had been founded here in the 1950s, and three decades later, conditions at the university were still spare: Students bunked six to a room in the dorms and took cold-water showers.[38] There was no air-conditioning or heat. But there was a professor who was knowledgeable about telephone switching, and Ren hoped he could help Huawei build a switch.

The book covers the 1989 protests and power struggles, then returns to the early days of Huawei:

Ren’s team had been making simple analog switches that could handle forty, eighty, or, at most, a couple hundred phone calls at once. Their early attempt at a more complex one-thousand-line switch was a failure, suffering from serious cross talk, dropped calls, and a tendency to catch fire from lightning strikes. Now, in 1993, they were trying to build a digital switch that could handle ten thousand telephone calls at once. This would catapult them into the big leagues. They would no longer be selling to hotels and small offices; they would be selling directly to the telephone switching centers for entire cities.

Ren had rented the third floor of an industrial building on Shenzhen’s outskirts for his fledgling R&D team. There was no air-conditioning, only electric fans, and they took cold showers to try to keep cool. They rigged up nets to try to escape the ferocious mosquitoes. A dozen cots lined the wall. The engineers worked day and night, flopping down on mattresses to sleep for a few hours when they reached exhaustion, which led to the saying that Huawei had a “mattress culture.”[9] One engineer worked so hard that his cornea detached, requiring emergency surgery.

It wasn’t as simple as going to the state’s web site and forming a corporation or LLC:

By 1991, Huawei had ten million yuan in fixed assets and was churning out eighty million yuan worth of switches a year. It had 105 employees, the majority of whom were shareholders. That year, Huawei’s shareholders did something curious: after proudly launching themselves in 1987 as one of Shenzhen’s first wave of “minjian” private tech companies, they voted unanimously to stop being one. From 1992 to 1997, Huawei would be a jitisuoyouzhi, or a “collectively owned enterprise,” something that was neither “private” nor “state-owned” in the modern senses of the words. Indeed, such companies were most similar in spirit to the Mao-era communes: Beijing defined them as “socialist economic organizations whose property is collectively owned by the working people, who practice joint labor, and whose distribution method is based on distribution according to labor.” While collectively owned businesses had been used in the countryside to mixed success, China’s national government had, in 1991, just formalized guidelines for urban collective companies. Putting on the “red hat” of a collective was popular among startups then as a way to obtain political protection. The Stone Group—hailed as “China’s IBM” in the 1980s—had been a trailblazer in this regard, successfully switching to a “collectively owned enterprise” in 1986. The 1991 national guidelines stipulated that collectively owned enterprises could enjoy preferential treatment in national policies and apply for loans from specialized banks. The guidelines also ordered government authorities nationwide to incorporate the companies into their economic plans in order to ensure the success of the urban collective economy. It remains unclear why Ren and his team decided to switch to a jitisuoyouzhi, though it’s likely that the broader financing opportunities were attractive.

Like Jeff Bezos, who married a secretary at D.E. Shaw while he was a VP (Wokipedia says that MacKenzie Scott had “an administrative role” at D.E. Shaw, implying that she might have been a top manager; the New York Times says that she held the job of “administrative assistant” (i.e., secretary)), Ren might have married his secretary:

While the precise timeline is unclear, Ren Zhengfei had remarried at some point and was building a new family in Shenzhen. This second marriage may have taken place around 1994, according to a speech Ren gave in January 2009, in which he praised his second wife, Yao Ling, for “fifteen years of silent devotion to the family.” Yao Ling was a petite and graceful young woman, much younger than Ren, with almond-shaped eyes and a winsome smile. Some news reports referred to her as Ren’s former secretary, though this has not been confirmed by the company. Ren had called Meng Jun “very tough”; he called Yao Ling “gentle and capable.”

The company prospers partly because the Chinese government imposed a “Buy Chinese” mandate similar to the U.S.’s “Buy American” mandates:

Since Ren’s meeting with Jiang in 1994, much more government support had been pledged. At the end of 1994, Zhang told Ren that in the next five-year economic plan, half of telecom operators’ switch purchases would be reserved for purely domestic companies like Huawei. “The way I look at it,” Zhang said, “it’s not that important what type of ownership structure a company has. The important thing is if it’s Chinese. So we at the Electronics Ministry want to support a business like yours.” China would have 84 million telephone lines’ worth of switches in operation by 1995, and officials planned to more than double that to 174 million lines’ worth by 2000.

I’ll close here and pick up in another post. Meanwhile, if you’re interested, read House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company.

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Philip’s Book Club: False Dawn

December 23, 2025December 12, 2025 by philg

Maybe some of you will join me in reading False Dawn: The Mirage of Recovery, an economist’s book about the Great Depression, which is when Americans came to accept the idea that every problem should be met by a larger federal government. FDR is almost a god for today’s Democrats (in a debate Ayatollah Mamdani identified FDR as the best modern-day U.S. President and then Florida Realtor of the Year 2020/2021 Andrew Cuomo said FDR would be his pick as well if FDR could be considered “modern”). If nothing else, False Dawn would make an awesome last-minute Christmas gift for anyone with insomnia (384-page work by an economist).

The Wall Street Journal selected this book as one of 2025’s ten best. Some excerpts from their review:

In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the promise to restore prosperity. But he and his advisers had no clear explanation for the collapse and his subsequent New Deal would amount to a series of experiments. FDR admitted to the nation that some of his proposals took the nation down “a new and untrod path.” If they failed to “produce the hoped-for results, I shall be the first to acknowledge it.”

George Selgin’s “False Dawn” asks if the New Deal’s varied experiments produced the promised recovery. In dispassionate, careful and finally devastating detail, “False Dawn” shows that, with a few exceptions, FDR’s experiments did not work. And he did not acknowledge it.

Based simply on raw numbers, the case for the New Deal is not strong. Although the economy did recover from its nadir when FDR took office in 1933, by 1939 the unemployment rate was still 17%. After six years of supposed recovery, the economy was in worse shape than in any other recession of that century or the following one.

Some might suppose that FDR used deficits rather than the Fed to juice the economy. But deficits as a percent of the economy were hardly different during Roosevelt’s time in office than they had been at the end of Herbert Hoover’s. While the New Deal spent more, it also imposed new taxes on food and payrolls. The result was a bigger federal government, but not one that relied on deficits as stimulus.

If not by increasing the amount of money or deficit spending, how did Roosevelt and his advisors hope to create recovery? The earliest solution they hit on—odd considering the rampant shortages—was to restrict production and thus raise prices. The National Industrial Recovery Act that passed in mid-1933 turned much of the American economy over to giant cartels. Industries colluded to raise prices and unions colluded to raise wages. The result was fewer goods on the market and an immediate economic collapse that would still be remembered today if it hadn’t been surrounded by so many others.

This could be an interesting update to The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes, a Wall Street Journal reporter. I wrote a lot about that book shortly after its 2007 publication (what awesome timing by Schlaes and her publisher, given that the U.S. economy collapsed just a year later):

Parallels between our current economic times and the Great Depression (July 2008)
U.S. economy may not be tough enough to survive incompetent government (July 2008; given how rich the receptionists at NVIDIA have become, it seems as though either our economy was very tough indeed or our government has been competent, but Gemini says “When adjusted for inflation, using a constant dollar base (e.g., 1982-84 dollars), the median wage shows a much smaller increase. The real median weekly earnings were about $368 in Q4 2007 and grew to only $376 by Q3 2025. This highlights that much of the nominal wage growth has been offset by inflation.” (i.e., the economy is much bigger, but inflation and the larger population are responsible for most of the growth))
The Forgotten Man, Ted Kennedy, and Warren Buffett

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Fat Leonard

October 27, 2025October 9, 2025 by philg

Happy U.S. Navy Day for those who celebrate.

A related book for American minorities, i.e., the minority of Americans who pay federal income tax… Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy (Craig Whitlock 2024). The book is a great argument for replacing the entire U.S. Navy with sea drones, which won’t be vulnerable to attack (nobody will cry if a drone is lost), bribery, etc. The case of Fat Leonard, and the book, expose a fundamental incompatibility between modern Americans and life aboard ships. Prior to no-fault no-shame divorce, the man on the ship and the woman back home were both coerced to be at least reasonably faithful to each other. Even in the rare cases where he didn’t fear God, the man would be shamed if he had too many girlfriends and prostitutes in foreign ports. The woman wouldn’t harvest substantial alimony and child support if she had sex with 10 different boyfriends while the husband was at sea defending our nation. The book describes what happens when all of this social infrastructure is torn down, but ship schedules that keep spouses separated for months at a time are preserved. The females left at home eventually realize that the local family court will give them whatever they want. The males at sea are thus reduced to poverty and can’t afford girlfriends, prostitutes, or new wives on whatever is left to them after paying alimony and child support. Far Leonard figured out that a man who has lost his kids, home, and wife back in the U.S. and who now has only one third of his paycheck to spend is a man who is easy to bribe.

Who was this pioneer of social psychology? Leonard Glenn Francis ran a “husbanding” business to supply ships, ideally expensive U.S. Navy warships whose officers weren’t likely to quibble about prices, with whatever they needed when in various Asian port. Much of his financial success was attributable to jihad:

The USS Cole arrived mid-morning on October 12 in Aden, an ancient Arabian port, and anchored at the mouth of the harbor. The guided-missile destroyer had transited the Suez Canal and the Red Sea and needed to stop for several hours so it could take on 220,000 gallons of fuel before continuing north into the Persian Gulf. As the crew started to eat lunch, a small red-and-white motorboat approached. The two men aboard smiled and waved as they drew close to the hulking warship. Unsuspecting sailors on the Cole waved back, thinking the skiff had come to collect trash. In fact, the two men were suicide bombers recruited by al-Qaeda and the motorboat was packed with explosives. The terrorists detonated their cargo and blew a gaping hole in the side of the Cole that almost sank the $1 billion vessel. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed and forty-two were wounded, making it the deadliest assault on a U.S. Navy vessel in thirteen years. The attack presaged the far bigger one that al-Qaeda would inflict eleven months later with hijacked airliners. Just as the United States was unprepared for 9/11, the Navy had not foreseen that a common motorboat could torpedo one of its powerful warships. The Cole disaster instantly upended the Navy’s risk calculations for foreign port calls. Unsure of the extent of the maritime threat posed by al-Qaeda, the Navy curtailed ship visits to Yemen and other Muslim countries and upgraded force protection requirements elsewhere.

Francis devised a solution: a floating barrier that encircled a ship to prevent waterborne intruders from getting too close. The primitive contraption was merely a makeshift fence of heavy barges and pontoons linked by steel cables. But in a deft stroke of marketing, he branded it as the “Ring of Steel.” The Ring of Steel sounded impregnable and looked plausible when he showed it to Navy force protection officers. “It was impressive,” said Jim Maus, the supply officer from the USS Independence. “No little boat is going through that. Bounce off it, maybe.” The Ring of Steel was also portable. Glenn Marine could move the components from harbor to harbor and customize the perimeter to suit any ship. Shaken by the Cole bombing, the Navy grabbed the Ring of Steel as a lifeline. It didn’t have better ideas to protect its ships in Southeast Asia. Nor did it trust commercial ports or revenue-starved foreign navies to provide adequate security. The only other option was to park ships at well-guarded U.S. bases in Japan and Hawaii. With the Ring of Steel, Francis not only saved his company, but found a way to expand it. After the Cole attack, Glenn Marine became one of a handful of contractors that could meet the Navy’s enhanced force protection requirements. Most competitors in the husbanding industry were mom-and-pop operators who couldn’t or wouldn’t invest in their own floating barriers. That meant more business for Francis. “The Navy went crazy and paranoid over the Cole,” recalled Commander David Kapaun, an operations officer based in Singapore at the time. “Leonard jumped on that like you wouldn’t believe.”

There was also a virtuous interaction between Navy tradition and jihad:

He knew if he wined and dined the Americans, they were unlikely to question his exorbitant fees, including for the Ring of Steel, which cost between $50,000 to $100,000 per day. “Everybody had to use the Ring of Steel,” he recalled. “So literally, the military’s force protection became the golden goose for me.” For ship captains, no price was too high to protect their crews, not to mention their careers. The Navy held them accountable for everything that happened on their watch, regardless of whether they were personally responsible. If a low-ranking seaman screwed up a task that led to a serious accident, the Navy disciplined the commanding officer on the grounds that he or she had failed to ensure the sailor was properly trained and supervised. The Navy upheld that unforgiving standard after the attack on the Cole. A high-level investigation concluded the Cole was “a well-trained, well-led and highly capable ship” and that the skipper, Commander Kirk Lippold, was not at fault. Intelligence reporting had also failed to detect any threats in advance of the visit to Aden. But the Navy nonetheless blocked Lippold from promotion and forced him to retire—Pentagon officials and members of Congress decided someone needed to be held accountable for the disaster. Many commanding officers thought the Navy and Congress treated Lippold unfairly, but the message resonated: Take every precaution. As a result, few ship captains were willing to risk a port visit without the Ring of Steel, no matter the expense—particularly after 9/11 demonstrated that al-Qaeda’s attack on the Cole was not an isolated event. Terrorist threats spread to Southeast Asia. In October 2002, an al-Qaeda affiliate bombed Bali’s tourist districts, killing 202 people. Seven Americans died and the U.S. consulate was damaged. The Navy reduced its visits to Indonesia, but demand for the Ring of Steel soared in other ports. Glenn Defense’s bottom line soared with it.

An officer would be demoted or fired if something bad happened to the ship, but there were no consequences for wasting taxpayer funds.

The book has some inspiration for upgrading your next party:

With his shirt untucked and his stomach hanging out, an inebriated Leonard Francis lay atop a banquet table at one of the most exclusive restaurants in Singapore. A prostitute hand-fed him leftover morsels from the $30,000 feast he was hosting. Around the table, his American guests—about two dozen U.S. Navy and Marine Corps personnel—puffed Cohiba cigars from Cuba and swilled Dom Pérignon while a gaggle of young women massaged their necks. One Navy officer present said the scene resembled a “Roman orgy.” For the five-hour party with his American customers, Francis had rented Jaan, a Michelin-starred restaurant on the seventieth floor of a luxury hotel. Through plate-glass windows, the private dining room boasted spectacular views of the Singapore skyline and, in the distance, the twinkling lights of ships on the South China Sea. But the sights inside the restaurant that evening made an even more indelible impression. One prostitute flashed her breasts at Rear Admiral Robert Conway Jr., the commanding officer of the USS Peleliu expeditionary strike group. Colonel Michael Regner, the normally rigid commander of the strike group’s 2,200 Marines, mouthed the words to “Y.M.C.A” while a band played the disco hit. One Navy captain was spotted French-kissing a prostitute. As the spectacle unfolded, a few officers watched slack-jawed, unsure how to respond to their superiors’ conduct. The rest had the time of their lives.

U.S. Navy officers weren’t supposed to accept bribes, whether cash or fancy dinners/fancy women, but the service came up with a workaround whereby captains and admirals would pay $50 to Fat Leonard’s company as their share of a meal that cost far more (remember that all of the numbers in the book are in pre-Biden dollars):

The “Valentine’s Cheer” celebration unfolded the next night in a balloon-decorated banquet room at Petrus, the Michelin-starred restaurant on the top floor of the Shangri-La Hotel. About twenty people attended, including a half-dozen Navy spouses who received floral bouquets and fancy chocolates from Glenn Defense. The avant-garde menu showcased elements of molecular gastronomy, including champagne espuma and coral powder made from dehydrated lobster roe. The Americans and their genial host also ate Oscietra caviar, gobbled slices of bread topped with foie gras and Wagyu beef, and savored Périgord black truffle, a rare French fungus that is to be served within three days of harvesting. A different wine accompanied each of the eight courses. “It was one of the most extravagant things I’ve ever seen,” recalled Lieutenant Commander Edmond Aruffo, an officer on the Blue Ridge. “I didn’t know people lived like that.”

Some officers and civilian Navy employees took cash instead of or in addition to fine living:

The senior civilian supervisor at the Naval Regional Contracting Center in Singapore was Paul Simpkins, a fifty-one-year-old South Carolinian who had specialized in the fine print of defense contracts since he was a teenager. He served more than two decades as a uniformed contracting officer in the Air Force and attained the rank of master sergeant before retiring from active duty in 1994. He then filled a variety of civilian contracting jobs for the Marines and Navy before arriving in Singapore in 2005 for a two-year assignment. In his new job, he held the power to award millions of dollars in federal contracts. The child of a single mother, Simpkins grew up poor in the South. The military provided him with a steady career, if not riches, and opportunities to live all over the world. A slim, fastidious man, he was an introvert who rarely socialized with coworkers or discussed his personal life. Few knew that he had been married five times or that his current wife had cancer and was living in Japan. Even fewer knew he was cheating on her with a Chinese girlfriend who would eventually become spouse number six.

After several conversations, Simpkins cut to the chase: What was in it for him? Francis was pleased. This was a man he could do business with. Ordinarily, he devoted months or years to grooming Navy contacts, but occasionally he got lucky and found someone who was unabashedly greedy. During a subsequent visit to the hotel bar, Francis said he handed over an envelope containing a stack of $100 bills—$50,000 worth. Simpkins smiled, allegedly taking the bribe and sliding it into his jacket pocket.

… Reagan—he bribed Simpkins with an additional $350,000 by wiring the money to a Japanese bank account in the name of his cancer-stricken wife. As an added sweetener, he said, he provided Simpkins with prostitutes on more than ten occasions.

Here’s the government worker and Fat Leonard:

The money paid to Simpkins and others was a great investment:

David Schaus, the lieutenant in the Ship Support Office who had feuded with Francis over the Reagan’s wastewater bill, devised a

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Reengineering science education to concentrate on the unknown

October 8, 2025October 9, 2025 by philg

I recently finished Into the Impossible Volume 2: Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: Lessons from Laureates to Concentrate Your Creativity and Ignite Your Career by Brian Keating. One of my favorite quotes from these interviews with Nobel laureates:

Donna Strickland: I think the biggest mistake we make in teaching, all the way up through undergrad, is teaching what science we already know. Science is not about knowing; it’s about figuring out how to ask the question why. It’s not about learning how everything else has already been done. That’s not to say we don’t need that, but we should instruct them to ask the right questions as opposed to knowing the answers. … As students, you’re always taught that you’re not going to succeed unless you know all the answers. The higher you go in science, the fewer answers there are. The goal is not to have the answers but, first, to be able to ask the right questions.

Especially now that Grok and ChatGPT know all of the answers, why not reengineer education around trying to answer new questions? Young people would still have to do the drudgery of learning the answers to old questions, of course, but they’d be doing that in the context of trying to make some progress on an unanswered question. The same thinking would enliven our nation’s science museums, most of which explicitly say “the Science is settled”.

I’m not sure that the book lives up to the “ignite your career” promise from the title, unless the strategy to “ignite your career in Science” is to quit and do medicine instead. Donna Strickland echoes what I wrote in “Women in Science” (2006; “This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.”):

Keating: What are your feelings on how the status of women has changed over your career, and where do you see it going?

Strickland: Well, it’s changed, but I don’t think that’s the point. The point is that physics itself is not appreciated highly by society. All these other issues, why they say women don’t want to do physics, would have been true in medicine as well—and yet now more women go into medicine than men. Parents still tell children that are good in science to become doctors. If you get paid well, society says, “We value this.” Physics is not one of those valued things; it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman…

Many of the interviewees point out that there is a huge overproduction of PhDs relative to the number of sought-after academic jobs and that the chance of career success is low. A book like this, in which Nobel laureates are interviewed, is almost the definition of sample bias. Undergrads at a Queers for Palestine League university fall prey to this as well. The freshman at MIT or Yale subconsciously absorbs that being a tenured biology professor at MIT or Yale is a typical outcome for someone with a biology PhD because tenured biology professors are the only PhD biologists that the freshman has encountered.

The book contains some information that is misleading, e.g.,

For example, even with a doubling of salary, you’re not likely to register a doubling in well-being. In fact, the effect of wealth has been shown to be nonlinear. Beyond a certain income threshold, happiness saturates, leading to a diminishment in returns beyond, according to Nobel Prize–winner Daniel Kahneman.

See “Money Buys Happiness, Even if You’re Already Rich” (Wall Street Journal 2024):

A 10% raise delivers a similar boost in satisfaction across income levels, research finds

A big raise provides significant boosts in happiness even at household incomes of $500,000, according to a new research report.

A wealth of research has long shown that more money makes a big difference to people with low pay, moving them from insecurity to stability. Above that level, the effect is often assumed to be much smaller.

But according to a paper by Matt Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the bonuses and leaps in income high earners reap are so large that they keep adding to well-being in the same way that smaller pay bumps do at lower tiers of earnings.

So it’s true that a $1 raise doesn’t make a Wall Street hero significantly happier, but there isn’t a diminishing return to a 10 percent raise.

The book reminds us that academics all around the world love to see elites locking down the peasants. Tim Palmer, a senior citizen physicist in the UK, celebrates the fact that eventually the rulers of the UK locked down their young healthy subjects in an attempt to slow the spread of a disease that kills 80-year-olds:

Palmer: It’s a tough problem. As a scientist, we can’t make decisions. All I can do is lay out the signs as clearly as possible and hope the politicians get it. At least in the UK, politicians did get it eventually with COVID. They were slow on the uptake—and the science, of course, was pretty uncertain in the initial phase, largely because a lot of people were asymptomatic—but they did get it eventually.

Of course, the UK had a higher COVID-tagged death rate than do-almost-nothing Sweden and a higher rate of excess deaths compared to do-almost-nothing Sweden. The lockdowns in the UK were spectacular failures, in other words, by the advertised standards of the Covidcrats (minimize Covid-tagged deaths even if it drives up long-term deaths from other causes, such as unemployment, sedentary lockdown lifestyle, alcohol consumption, deferred health care, and lack of education) and yet the Nobel-winning genius considers the muscular Science-informed public policy to have been a success.

Let’s circle back to the issue of victimization by gender ID. Donna Strickland again:

The problem in the seventies, in my time, is that women were told we could do anything, but the men weren’t told you also have to do your share. When Maria Goeppert Mayer won her Nobel Prize [in 1963], the newspaper wrote, “San Diego housewife wins Nobel Prize.” Everybody said it’s OK that she’s doing science because she’s also doing all her women’s jobs too. Well, this is not possible. It’s not possible for us to be twice as much. We will have around-the-world gender equity when we also let men look after children and the elderly. It bothered me during COVID-19 that it was like, “Well, all the women have to lose their jobs because they’re the ones who look after kids and the elderly.” I don’t think women are more caring than men. That’s just as offensive as saying women aren’t as smart as men. If everybody did their share, then everybody could have an equal shot at it.

She doesn’t want “everybody to do their share” on construction sites, on Florida roofs in July, or on oil rigs, but rather wants men to relieve women of some onerous household chores, such as putting shirts into electric washing machines and dishes into automatic dishwashers. She is echoing Bill Burr on the subject of a job that can be done in one’s pajamas being the hardest job in the world:

Let’s close with a Nobel nerd’s prediction of where we end up relative to our AI overlords:

Geradus ’t Hooft: I expect there will be an intelligence so smart that Einstein, Feynman, and ’t Hooft would all look like primitive gorillas. The point is that all abilities of biological life forms can be copied by human engineers: we make houses taller than trees, dig holes deeper than moles can, we can fly faster and higher than birds, with much heavier machines, and so on. So why can we not produce brains that work better than the human brain? Well, biology took millions of years to create us; our machines are only a few centuries old, and we’ll get there and beyond. I do not quite follow the ideas AI engineers are using. I think it could be done better, but comparing the previously mentioned examples, people will make many different AI machines, each for their own particular purposes.

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