I’ve just spent a week digging into Capital in the 21st Century, and I’m taking away a few points:

• Piketty seems less “kneejerk-Leftish” than I had thought. He has been pretty much misrepresented. He is no lover of Marxism in any case, but his data are pretty nuanced.
• Above all, he has attempted, and sort of delivered, an attempt to really quantify the changes in national income, national wealth, and national distribution of income between capital and labor over a long historical period. He has numerous caveats about the potential inaccuracies in his sources, and is careful to draw attention to only the most salient takeaways.
• Probably the most salient takeaway is that the 20th Century was a disaster for capital. The 21st century has capital’s share of things returning to pre-20th-century levels.
• I’m satisfied — this third time around trying to read him — that he is a worthwhile source. Whatever role the argument about income inequality plays in 7 Hard Problems, Piketty is a good choice for one of the sources. I’m not sure which others I’ll want to use.

I was interested in how good my outline would be for supporting a vomitout.  My hope was that it would be satisfactory, but in fact it’s turning out not so good.

Looking back, I padded the outline with bullet points that were not fleshed out enough to be real guidelines to the drafting.

For example, I had a bullet called “Tragedy of the Commons”.  Not a bad idea, but I needed more detail on just how I would move that theme forward in the draft, and, when I got to that part today, I didn’t have a clue.

What I’ve ended up doing is falling back on more reading and research instead of using the time today for drafting.  Not the most terrible outcome in the world, but I’ll know better the next time I do an outline for a book :-).

Another thing that’s emerging: I’m not treating the subject matter as if it were self-help.  Having a self-help orientation to this book has always been a touch problematic.  All of the 7 problems could be treated as observations about society as well as self-help, and my kneejerk reaction in this draft so far has been to treat the material as “current events”.

In part I set myself up for it because of the way I kicked off the chapter.

My scheme was to kick off each chapter with a master anecdote that sets the theme for the chapter and frames the big issues in a vivid way.

I started off this chapter, on Individual Wealth and Commonwealth, with a depiction of the Trump election in 2016.  Vivid enough, certainly, but hardly the master anecdote for a chapter in a self-help book.  Starting with such an anecdote cried out for a more social or political treatment, and that’s the way the draft has skewed.

I’m getting good stuff out, and I think there’s a lot I can use, but I’m a little nervous about reasserting the self-help focus of the book.

All of the 7 problems are big social problems — in one way or another — with a “social” aspect and a “self-improvement” aspect.  I think I’m going to have to balance them somehow, since I don’t want to leave all the social observations out.

Well, work in progress…

One bit of good news as well: I’m finding an interesting thread in the Tragedy of the Commons stuff.  It turns out that the Tragedy of the Commons is closely related to the game-theory game called Prisoner’s Dilemma.  There’s an very interesting thread of stuff from game theory on both PD and TofC.  Herb Gintis’ book Game Theory Evolving has a terrific chapter on the topics and what they say about individual wealth and commonwealth.  So that’s all goodness.  Gintis’ book is from 2000, and he’s gone on with the topics of cooperation and competition, so there’s grist for the research mill there.

Onward and upward.

In Show Your Work, his terrific book on online presence,  Austin Kleon suggests, among many many other things, that a blogger might write about something from his or her “Cabinet of Curiosities” every once in a while.

I want to do a CofC entry every Monday if I can (because I won’t yet have much to say about my work for the week but I probably will have yet another curiosity to unfold).  So here goes CofC #1

I’m reading Claude Levi-Strauss for reasons having to do with 7 Hard Problems.  He is a very important “structuralist” thinker from the mid-20th century, and structuralism was very important in forming my views.  Louis Althusser, whom I’ll be writing more about this week, was also a structuralist, although, as he would point out, a “materialist” one instead of an “idealist” one like Levi-Strauss.

What’s the difference between a materialist and an idealist, you say?  Materialists believe that objective reality is more important than our minds.  Idealists believe that our minds are more important than objective reality.  Extreme idealists believe that external reality is a figment of our imaginations.

Levi-Strauss wasn’t that bad, but he did believe that he could figure out universal laws of thought.  And his scheme for doing so was to investigate the myths of “primitive” peoples, mostly from South America (where he had done fieldwork as an anthropologist).

What I’m doing is slogging through “The Raw and the Cooked”, a Levi-Strauss production containing things like this (his opening sentence):

The aim of this book is to show how empirical categories — such as the categories of the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, the moistened and the burned, etc., which can only be accurately defined by ethnographic observation and, in each instance, by adopting the standpoint of a particular culture — can nonetheless be used as conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them in the form of propositions.

Aside from soliciting your sympathy for what a tough job I have, I’m pointing this out because of this grand objective: to illuminate universal laws of thought.

Another Levi-Strauss work, “Tristes Tropiques” (shown above) is much more accessible, and is essentially like Darwin’s “Voyage of the Beagle”, an aid to understanding the man and his quest behind the work.

Could you live a long and happy life without reading either of these Levi-Strauss books?  For sure.

But hopefully I’ve aroused your curiosity enough to go to the Levi-Strauss Wikipedia page and have a gander.

(BTW, not certain if he has any connection to the Levi Strauss of jeans fame whom we know a bit better…)

Recap for March:

Here were the March themes.

1. Team Formation in startups.  What’s a good team, how do founders pick teams, and how might they do so more effectively.
2. “Purpose” and startups.  I believe that startups have to stand for something more than making money (although they should also make money!), for practical as well as idealistic reasons.  I want to review the literature and evidence for this point of view.  I guess I’ll start here with “Built to Last”.
3. “Know-how” and startups.  I want to review the literature on better outcomes for startups where the founder(s) know something special about the domain where they are working, something that gives them an unfair advantage.

Progress:

• To begin with, I was kind of whistling in the breeze that these were my themes.  What I found out was that I needed to learn how to research these topics rather than simply opine on them.
• Which I did do (learn how to research them).  I used my adjunct affiliations to access a boatload of online catalogs, databases, and other resources, and essentially search through the scholarly work on entrepreneurship to begin to characterize what makes a successful entrepreneur.
• I myself have strong feelings about what makes for a successful entrepreneur, which colored my selection of the three themes above.  But what I did was to set myself the goal of finding out what the scholars in the field thought, as opposed to what I thought.

I was particularly drawn to the work at Saras Sarasvarthy at the UVA Business School.  A major theme running through all of her work is the existence among entrepreneurs of a different kind of thinking.

Instead of reasoning about possible causes in order to bring about a certain effect (which she calls “causal thinking”), entrepreneurs deploy much more of what she calls “effectual thinking”, which reasons from means forward to ends.

A causal thinker, interested in blockchain, will ask: “What is the most attractive market I can enter that could use blockchain as an enabling technology?”

An effectual thinker, working on the same problem, would ask: “What steps can I take with my network, my know-how, and my insight into blockchain, in order to understand the next step to a successful business?”

(I hope I haven’t done (too much) violence to the concepts!)

Dr. Sarasvarthy did her graduate work with Herbert Simon, a man I knew as a pioneer in AI.  Some of his work informed her interest in effectual reasoning.

I’m not sure how effectual thinking plays into my project, but I believe at this point that it’s a fundamental element in the entrepreneur’s toolkit.

So my project for April is to fan out from here and see what research can tell us (me) about the “success factors” for entrepreneurs.

At least some of them are:

1. Effectual thinking and opportunities
2. Purpose and greed
3. Always replace yourself at every step of the enterprise

I think I’ll stop here.

As usual, please let me know your thoughts.

Gus Hurwitz had a thoughtful post about the Equifax breach on the American Enterprise Institute blog.

(Full disclosure: Like most techies, I flirt with Libertarianism but basically don’t think much of it.  Living in Washington DC, which effectively has no government, has taught me a lot about the limitations of the philosophy)

Instead of piling on to Equifax, and pummeling them for not having had better security practices, he instead points out that breaches are quite mundane, and that the vectors whereby breaches occur are quite mundane.  In this case, it sounds as if yet another contractor allowed yet another intrusion because of yet another failure to apply known patches.

What Hurwitz points out, in essence is that the occurrence of these “outlying” events is almost certain in systems of enough size and complexity.  Your one server will almost never go down.  Your 10,000-server farm is certain to have numerous servers down at any point in time.

To put it another way, the attackers on a system like Equifax’ don’t have to coordinate.  They can all try at various times and in various ways, and eventually they will succeed.

The defenders, on the other hand, being a centralized group with a castle and a moat, have to be perfect in their defense or the enemy will get in.  Centralized systems have a very hard time fighting decentralized systems.

So Hurwitz asks an interesting question: how can we make the defense of a system like Equifax’ be more decentralized?

One answer is: notify a consumer when their credit data gets pinged, and require the consumer to affirm that the ping was genuine.

I just signed up, in the wake of the breach, for a service that does just that.  Unfortunately, the service is only alive for 90 days and doesn’t auto-renew.  So I have to remember to do so.  Yet another attack surface.  But better than nothing.

Why not have such a service be the default?

The wave of Brexit/nationalism/white supremacy/anti-immigrant/isolationalism/jingoism  call-it-what-you-will seems to be very real.

I wonder many things about where President Trump will play in all this, but one persistent question I have is: will he actually be effective at stuff he does?

If not, the big winner internationally could be Putin.  He has nothing to lose, he seems light-years more capable of doing what he says he is going to do, and, unlike the Chinese, is not hostage to the rich West (they are tied to us as surely as we are tied to them).

This article in the Times today highlights how the world alt-right looks to Putin as a, if you’ll pardon the expression, “white knight.”

Creepy thing to wonder about, but just because it’s creepy doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

The acquisition reminds me of what Napoleon is said to have said: “when two people bet, one of them is a crook and the other a fool.”

I’ve been puzzling over his motivations since the massacre, and suddenly realized something today: he’s the lone wolf that security agencies have been warning us about for a while.

He clearly had a mixed-up history and “broke bad” at some point.  But he didn’t really have a way to give shape to his badness until, really until ISIS burst on the scene.

Watching the other massacres, he realized he could affiliate himself with ISIS — no need for a pesky trip to Syria or even much contact with them — and then carry out an attack.

He did impinge on the FBI and other radars several times, but, because there was nothing further to his plotting — no connections, no ties, no infrastructure — there was no way to escalate our interest in him, no way to pick him out from millions of mixed-up bad-breaking people who might look to ISIS for some kind of justification for their bad feeling.

I sympathize with our security guys: lone wolves are probably the “long tail” of their job, and very very hard to know how to triage the severity of the threat posed by a lone wolf.

But that’s what it looks like he was.  An ISIS wannabe.

I was born the year Adlai Stevenson first lost to Eisenhower for President.  Eisenhower, like Trump, had never held public office (although it could be argued that his D-Day invasion at least didn’t go bankrupt).  Stevenson was a clever, intellectual, and even witty Governor, so he had run a state (something that voters think well of historically in the U.S., better, say, than being in the House or Senate).

Yet Stevenson lost to Ike, lost badly.  Ike’s slogan: “I Like Ike.”  No rocket science.  No “fitness for office”.  No “I’m way more qualified than he is.”

Democrats for my entire life seem to have not gotten the message from this: smart doesn’t pay in politics.  Quals don’t pay in politics.  Experience doesn’t pay in politics.

Likeable pays in politics.  “Good guy” (or good gal) pays in politics.  “I get where he/she’s coming from” pays in politics.

It looks like this Democratic idiocy is going to play out again this election season (or I guess I’m worried it will; hope it won’t).

Hilary will emphasize her brains, her experience, her fitness for office.  She’ll get no more likable than she is now.  And guess what?  I’m worried she’ll lose.

Trump is a master of the Homeric epithet.  “Lyin’ Ted”.  “Little Marco.”  “Crooked Hillary.”  He coins them, and then he works them over and over, until his audience absorbs them.  In the era of the sound byte, the byte has to be repeated over and over until it sinks in.

The Clinton campaign needs a Homeric epithet against Trump, one that doesn’t have to do with fitness for office, or intelligence, or capabilities, and one that will sink in.  “Nasty Trump”?  “Tiny Trump”? (hands, other parts, smallness of personality and vision.)

I just finished my friend David Black‘s book “Software Business and Product Strategy”.  A thoughtful book and, thanks to the stories, a good read.

David’s thesis is that software businesses are somewhat different from other businesses in that:

1. Software is intangible
2. All meaningful software projects are really building something for the first time
3. A software spec is almost the same thing as the software itself (try that for an injection-molded plastic part!)
4. The substrate for software — computer hardware — is still doubling in power something like every 18 months

He then draws out the implications of these differences.  He says that the principles for building a successful software business are well-understood and even simple, but, like many simple things, are quite hard to execute.

There are a lot of riches in this book.  He talks about “positioning” and “execution” as the two major sources of sofware-business woe, and says some great things about both.

And he talks about sources of failure in software executive teams, the main one being a kind of noble hubris that makes tech innovators want to solve the biggest, most complex, most general problems first when the game is to solve the simplest, most pressing specific problems first.

This is “noble” hubris because wanting to solve big problems is a great and lofty aim.  But in order to solve them one has to build up a track record of solving specific problems first, and that requires — see it coming — attention to “positioning” and “execution”.

The richness of the book is in the scads of stories.  David has lived through more software businesses than most of us and has thought deeply about what went right and wrong with them.

Check it out.