Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
'My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world'' ~George Bernard Shaw'.
Some li(n)es end with something like a fish hook—a “question mark” refers to a question. MEdia Dragon?
Two kinds of creative people work in advertising, the hero of John Kenney’s first novel observes: “Those who think they’re smarter than the client and those who are successful.” It’s an old joke, but Kenney puts spring its step in this romantic comedy about a lovelorn copywriter at a high-flying New York agency.
Today, ICJI speak with the Australian Tax Office
head Chris Jordan to discuss how his office responded to ICIJ’s Paradise Papers and Panama Papers projects. He offers a fascinating insight
into how tax advisers use complex diagrams and arguments to justify their
actions.
Our reporter, Simon Bowers, also takes a look at
Apple's announcement it will bring $38 million back to the United States. He
unpacks the decision and examines wether the decision is actually good value for ordinary
Americans.
And,
four Republican senators in the United States are using our Paradise Papers coverage to push for Uzbek-Russian
billionaire Alisher Usmanov to be included in the upcoming list of oligarchs. The list is due by the end of
the month and those who are listed may be subject to sanctions.
I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think. —attributed to Socrates
Law
is a science, and … all the available materials of that science are
contained in printed books… —Christopher C. Langdell, Speech at Harvard
University, Cambridge, Mass., 1887
Does This Man Know More Than Robert Mueller? New York Magazine Re Silc: “will be a better movie than the post.” Moi: Faux friendly, But then again, not terrible given NYMag’s priors.
It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen. — George MacDonald, born in 1824 quoted by Vaclav Havel in 1990
Lessons learned by Angela Czech out No Ordinary Woman, and the author is Angela Penrose, daughter-in-law of Edith. Here is one sentence:
Pen also wrote to Edith of his deepening love for her and how he wished she had remained in Virginia with him.
What a dramatic and eventful book. Edith Penrose (1914-1996) is a not so well-known but highly underrated economist, with her major contributions coming in the theory of the firm and industrial organization. As a girl, she survived only because her father shot a rattlesnake about to kill her. Later, her first husband was murdered, right before their first child was born. She and her second husband, working in Switzerland, helped Jews escape from Germany, and she later did food planning during the war in England. In 1948 the couple lost one of their three children, right before his third birthday. Later she received a doctorate in economics from Johns Hopkins, studying under Fritz Machlup. Machlup at one point wrote a ten-page letter to her, with the top proclaiming: “I implore you to shut off your hypersensitivity and to overlook it if I sound condescending, arrogant or otherwise unpleasant. I just want to be helpful.”
She headed the Owen Lattimore Defense Fund. Later, she did not feel entirely comfortable teaching at Johns Hopkins (she was treated badly and not tenured) and so she ended up teaching in Baghdad and Beirut and was also an important early faculty member at INSEAD, perhaps their first world class hire. She became an expert on energy economics and multinationals, traveling and advising around the world more or less without stopping. Drawing on her doctoral work, she also published on IP problems for developing economies, an area where she was well ahead of her time.
She enjoyed writing poems and limericks for her own pleasure. She also was known for her “direct questions” and her “disconcerting remarks.”
I would describe her work as halfway between economics and the business school tradition, broadly in the Austrian school but more descriptive and without the political slant of Mises and Hayek. Her contributions include:
1. She insisted that models ought to consider where firms were in the midst of a disequilibrium process, rather than assuming perfect competition or some other smoothly honed end-state. History matters.
2. She was the founding thinker behind “resource-based” theories of the firm, whereby firms are best understood in terms of what resources they have access to, rather than their products. This was a dominant approach from the 1980s onward, though she received only marginal credit for her seminal role. She also focused on which were the slack resources of a firm or not, as a means of ascertaining where the firm was headed, and ran all this analysis through a lens of expectations and perceptions, reflecting her studies with Machlup. She thought in terms of what a firm’s “moat” might be, as you might expect from a contemporary Silicon Valley analyst.
3. She developed a theory of how some firms would grow very large, but based on “economies of growth” rather than economies of scale per se. She tried to explain how there was a lumpiness to the growth process itself. Difficulties of coordination serve as the ultimate limit on firm size.
4. In her theories knowledge creation drives economic growth, and that occurs largely within firms. The cohesive shell of the firm helps to integrate knowledge.
I would describe her style as “every sentence tries to have some insight,” rather than “forcing you to come away with definite conclusions.” Those of you who are used to models or data may find it frustrating to read her, though every sentences reeks of intelligence.
It does not seem she marketed her work very hard, but rather she was content to work out puzzles and pointers for her own satisfaction. I read her work as an undergraduate, as it was recommended to me by some of the Austrian economists, and my recent rediscovery of it has been a pleasant surprise.
When Navy Lt. William Conway
is piecing together clues about a new Taliban or Islamic State
terrorist cell in Afghanistan, he often falls back on skills he learned
hauling crooks, swindlers and embezzlers into court in Chicago.
Lieutenant
Conway is not your typical military intelligence analyst. A former
state prosecutor in Chicago, he comes armed for his sleuthing duties
with a law degree from Georgetown University and an M.B.A. from the
University of Chicago. Not to mention an undergraduate degree in
accounting from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
During WWI, artist Norman Wilkinson devised “dazzle” paint on ships to confuse enemy submarines.↩︎ Atlas Obscura
