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Things have calmed down in Boston with the arrest of a 19-year-old. The city’s residents spent nearly a week glued to the news. Our flight school was effectively shut down on Thursday when President Obama came to visit. Nearly all businesses were then shut down on Friday while literally thousands of police and other armed government agents, equipped with armored cars and helicopters, searched for this teenager.

The events that started with the attack on Boston Marathon spectators and runners got me thinking about how the 21st Century seems to be the age of the individual. For most of human history the power of the individual has been limited. Unless the individual inherited, seized, was elected to, or appointed to a position of power, e.g., head of an army, state, or church, there was not much that an individual could do to disrupt society. Our century, however, started with 19 visitors to the U.S. whose actions on 9/11/2001 transformed American society to a much larger extent than any politician within memory. So far in 2013 the trend of individual power seems to have continued. A student wearing a white blanket, mistaken for a Ku Klux Klansman, managed to shut down Oberlin College for a day. And now we have two young brothers from the Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, not notably distinguished from their classmates, who managed to shut down a city of 3 million.

I’m wondering to what we can attribute this shift in power. It does not seem to me that guns or bombs have changed during my lifetime (I was born in 1963). Governments have become stronger rather than weaker. The typical police force in 1963 could not rely on security camera footage from thousands of sources, nor did it have a SWAT team, bulletproof vests, armored cars, or military-style rifles. If the police needed a helicopter they would have to ask the nearest Army unit to provide assistance and the Army pilots would not have night vision goggles or an infrared camera. The Internet did not exist in 1963 but nearly every American family had access to a television or radio and dramatic news was broadcast over these media.

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A couple of images from the D.C. Metro. Given the cultural prominence of “Big Brother is Watching You” from Orwell’s 1984 I was surprised to see these posters reading “Our cameras, undercover police and passengers are watching you.”

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One thing that seems to be absent from the public debates concerning restricting gun ownership in the U.S. is the fact that so many Americans just love guns (see my December 2012 posting on the subject). I was at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday and a group of U.S. Navy (?) sailors was performing some sort of drill/demonstration involving throwing rifles back and forth and twirling them. After the demo, they were mingling with the tourists:

Check out the big smiles on these folks of all ages and sexes. Apparently there is very little that they enjoy more than playing with rifles on a sunny day.

[Personally I was horrified by the demonstration. One thing that I definitely do not want to see is a rifle being twirled or tossed, especially next to a huge crowd of people. I was pretty confident that the rifles weren’t loaded, of course, and that the bayonets were not sharp, but this did not strike me as a good way to teach firearms safety!]

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Here’s a traveler at Reagan National Airport wearing a T-shirt reading “You are the CSS to my HTML”:

(It seems to be available at amazon.)

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My connection with the Boston Marathon was slight. I have donated money over the years to friends who were running for the benefit of one hospital or another, their 4-hour times not sufficient to qualify under the standard rules. I have seen a few friends run fast enough (3 hours?) that they actually qualified. I photographed the 100th anniversary event back in 1996 for Hearst Magazines (see my 100th anniversary Boston Marathon photos). I’ve flown aerial photographers over the event in an East Coast Aero Club helicopter.

Security has not been a primary concern for most Bostonians. We’re not a center of commerce like New York. We’re not a center of power like Washington, D.C. or many of the other cities that have suffered attacks like this. The massive changes in U.S. society since 9/11 touched us mostly when we dealt with TSA at Logan Airport , when we need to visit a high-rise office building tenant for a meeting (ID checks now required in the lobby), or when someone wants to take a helicopter tour during a Red Sox game (a 3-mile, 3000′ “no fly” zone is established over Major League Baseball stadiums, ostensibly to improve security but primarily as a means of excluding advertising competition from banner-towing planes (the typical terrorist would not be worried about violating a regulatory flight restriction such as this one)). We don’t have so many government buildings that our sidewalks are now littered with concrete blocks for protection against truck bombs. It is rare for hundreds of police and Secret Service to shut down large parts of our city for a politician’s visit (Massachusetts is virtually guaranteed to vote for a Democrat so Obama did not campaign here, though he sometimes shows up for fundraising events, thus shutting down the city for all but the donors; Obama’s annual vacations on Martha’s Vineyard have a huge impact on life and commerce there but most Bostonians aren’t rich enough to go to the Vineyard).

People seem to be in shock right now, unsure what to do differently going forward and trying to figure out what happened yesterday. In a metro area of about three million there were not so many who need any kind of direct help as a result of this attack. Therefore the majority of us are left to feel helpless and watch the news.

[I have fielded about 100 emails, text messages, and phone calls from friends and family. It turned out that I spent yesterday practicing 6 instrument approaches in a Cirrus SR20. I flew the eight-year-old four-seat airplane while wearing a hood that obscured my view of the natural horizon. Two pilot friends watched from additional seats to make sure that we did not conflict with other aircraft (the one friend in front is designated the “safety pilot”). We flew from Hanscom Field to Danbury, Connecticut and back for lunch with my cousin and her four-year-old son. Personal aviation is not typically regarded as safer than being a sports spectator but yesterday was an exception. None of my friends were injured, but friends of friends were.]

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At 1700 K Street in Washington, D.C., American diet trends can be observed in one photo:

(Mixt Greens “eco-gourmet” salad restaurant being replaced by a Dunkin’ Donuts.)

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I spent Saturday giving a tour of Washington, D.C. to a woman who retired from a career spent as a Soviet comrade and currently lives in Moscow. She loved the streets-paved-with-gold look of the city and the museums and provided some unique reactions, e.g., after seeing the Lincoln Memorial she noted “This is much larger and more grand than Lenin’s Tomb.” Comrade Tourist was particularly awestruck by the size of the buildings housing federal agencies, especially when I explained to her that all of them had long outgrown their D.C. headquarters and now had much larger facilities in the suburbs or in other cities.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

• What’s that huge building?
• The Department of Energy. They have a budget of about $30 billion.
• Energy? They are responsible for generating all of the electric power in the U.S.?
• Uh, no. They don’t run any powerplants. They run a couple of research labs and… well I’m not sure what they do with the rest of the money.
• What’s that huge building?
• The Department of Education. They have a budget of about $90 billion.
• So they run the schools here in America?
• No. They don’t run any schools, develop any textbooks, or teach anyone.
• Wow. What about this building?
• Department of Agriculture. They also have the building across Independence Avenue, connected by the bridge. Their budget is about $150 billion per year.
• Such a big building! They work to make farmers more efficient so that food prices will be lower?
• Actually, no, they pay farmers to leave fields idle, restrict imports, and enforce cartels so that food prices stay higher than they would in a free market.
• How can poorer Americans afford the high food prices then?
• The same agency runs a program to give food stamps to about 50 million Americans.

By the end of the afternoon Comrade Tourist, whose conversational English is not great but who has been reading our news magazines, said “Everyone in this city is a taker. There are no makers.”

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New York’s Museum of Modern Art gives us some insight into the financial health of America’s not-for-profit organizations. The New York Times says that they are buying a 12-year-old building, constructed at a cost of $32 million in 2001 ($42 million in 2013 “mini-dollars”) and demolishing it. Why can’t they reuse the former American Folk Art Museum’s home? Is it that hard to take down a quilt and replace it with a Brice Marden? “MoMA officials said the building’s design did not fit their plans because the opaque facade is not in keeping with the glass aesthetic of the rest of the museum.”

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My first helicopter instructor, who became a friend, died yesterday. Joris Naiman was a gentle soul, aged 61, and succumbed to liver cancer, to which I lost my dog George back in 1991. I went to visit Joris last week at his home on the dammed-up portion of the Charles River known as the “Lakes District” in Waltham. We watched a pair of mute swans taking off and landing. Joris and his wife Lesya explained to me that the swans had reared seven children to adulthood in the previous season. Joris shared all that he knew about their feeding and breeding habits and explained the legal status of these visitors from Russia. Joris and Lesya had converted part of their living room into a greenhouse overlooking the river and thus Joris was able to indulge his love of nature from a recliner chair. We talked about plans for the summer and certainly nobody in the room thought that there would be a chance of Joris being gone this week.

Joris worked hard on behalf of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service despite a realistic appreciation for the limits of what government regulation could accomplish. I would often phone him at work at 9:00 pm. He could recognize that the politically connected or simply savvy could work around most regulations while simultaneously not being cynical. Joris enjoyed aviation for most of his adult life. He and his wife would fly a four-seat Piper on sunny days to various corners of New England and then get out to hike in the woods. He was very eloquent on the joys of helicopter flight, explaining that it was only with a helicopter that we could feel as though we’d escaped from the laws of gravity and our Earthbound natures.

Joris and Lesya were great dog-spoilers. My Samoyed Alex would stay with them while I went away for a long weekend and he would come back with a treat-stuffed smile and a new fluency in Lesya’s Ukrainian. Although he did not have children, Joris was a favorite of my daughter Greta.

Joris was a moderating influence in nearly every conversation. If you were talking about how the future was incredibly bright Joris might remind you that things tended not to work out as planned. If you were suffering a misfortune Joris would remind you that things probably wouldn’t be as bad as you feared. He kept an even emotional keel right through my last two visits (in March and April), mentioning the irony of the nurses at the Lahey Clinic waking him up at 4:00 am to ask whether he was sleeping well in his hospital bed.

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/milestones shows that Joris and I had known each other for 10 years. I will miss him.

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Lecture 4 within “Modern Economic Issues”, by Robert Whaples, is about productivity, increases in which are what drive improved per-capita living conditions. One of the big questions that occupied economists is why Europe has lagged in labor productivity (output per worker-hour) compared to the U.S. The consensus seems to be that formation of new companies is important but that the destruction of big inefficient companies is equally important. The Europeans have been comparatively reluctant to let their dinosaurs go extinct, which means that a lot of resources (capable people, production facilities, capital) are tied up by inefficient management and structures. Aside from direct subsidies to the big and struggling, the Europeans have kept dinosaurs alive by making regulations so complex that small companies can’t afford the time and effort to get required permits, etc.

The lecture made me wonder if the sluggish U.S. recovery since the 2008 collapse might be partly due to the fact that the American government has done so much to favor the big. The biggest banks got the most cash. Chrysler and GM were preserved in the form that had led them to insolvency, rather than being allowed to have their parts folded into new enterprises. States handed out all kinds of subsidies for establishing or maintaining facilities but these subsidies were available only to big and established companies. Regulations have become more complex to the point that competition from small or new companies is further discouraged.

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