SCRATCHPAD: 2024-06-26 We: Naughty, Naughty, Eric Hobsbawm; Dan Davies on Companies Managed by Their Investor Relations Departments; & MOAR
A scratchpad…
Economic History: Naughty, Naughty, Eric Hobsbawm!
He wrote:
Eric Hobsbawm: The Machine Breakers: ‘Mr Darvall has done well to remind us that the 12,000 troops deployed against the Luddites [in 1811-13] greatly exceeded in size the army which Wellington took into the Peninsula in 1808… <https://archive.org/details/labouringmenstud0000hobs_u8i6>
In 1808 Arthur Wellesley was still plain Mr. Arthur Wellesley. (He would not be ennobled as Viscount Wellington of Talavera and of Wellington, and Baron Douro of Wellesley until August 26, 1809). He was then the junior one of four generals sent to Portugal and Spain.
He was sent in in command of the first 9,000 troops, yes.
But 6,000 more rapidly followed. And then in October David Baird arrived with 13,000 more and the overall commander, John Moore, brought an additional 15,000. The total was 43,000 committed in the year 1808—plus more later.
No, the British government did not commit more soldiers to suppress the Luddites than to fight Napoleon.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1952 [1964]. “The Machine Breakers.” Reprinted in Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Pp. 7-26. <https://archive.org/details/labouringmenstud0000hobs_u8i6>.
Management Cybernetics: As a supplement to Dan Davies’s recounting of Stafford Beer’s management-consultant view of things, here we have the programmer’s-eye view:
David Guarino: ‘GetCalFresh.org… was a simplified online application…. California had one of the worst SNAP participation rates…. Only 65% or so of people who were eligible were enrolled. And getting enrolled meant… $200 per person per month…. I was the first engineer and then later director of GetCalFresh.org, which is at one level a simplified online application for SNAP. But on another level… it is… a machine… to eat every barrier that stood between someone… and actually having an EBT card in their hand that they were spending…. The end result was [the] lowest-burden application form that actually gets a caseworker what they need to efficiently and effectively process it…. Much knowledge of systems is gained from acting in them, rather than trying to study them. We had better data on why people were denied benefits than perhaps anyone in the world—but it came from running a benefits application service at scale…. One of the things I think would be very powerful in terms of feedback loops is if we could operationalize the problem of people not being able to get through the system into metrics that are legible to government… <https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/how-to-make-a-great-government-website>
Public Reason: This piece by Dan Drezner leads to a piece by Harvard Social Science Dean Bobo that I cannot believe he published, but he must have gotten full by-in from Harvard’s leadership. After all, if professors have no free-speech rights to publish their thoughts about the university that denounce “students and present leadership”, deans have much less right to undertake “conscious action that would seriously harm the University”—as Bobo’s op-ed has.
That Bobo’s op-ed appears on the surface to be a straightforward call on “Raj Chetty ’00, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jill Lepore… [and] Steven A. Pinker” to shut up and soldier makes me think that we do not understand what is going on here. There is no reason for Bobo to act right now to aggressively try muzzle those four. And if I were any of those four, I would be yelling to the provost and president that I simply cannot work with a guy who disses me like that.
Thus I suspect it is no more about those four than Wu Han’s 1965 play “Hai Rui Dismissed from Office” was about the Ming Dynasty official Hai Rui and Emperor Jiajing.
But who is it about? There are references to “prominent affiliates, including one former University president” and also to “encourag[ing] civil disobedience… in violation of student conduct rules… after students have received official notification of a potential serious infraction”. But no names are named.
I do think that Bobo’s op-ed “directly impedes the University’s function” by drawing a line between the university and outsiders that places “alumni, donors” among the “external actors”; university presidents are going to be spending a long time trying to repair the damage by repeating to donors and alumni “no, Bobo was wrong: you are part of us, you are not an outside *them**.
I do see one and only one good point in this op-ed. But it was put far better by Lois McMaster Bujold in one of her novels, where Castellar dy Ferrej admonishes a princess for leading her less protected underlings into trouble: “His brow twitched, and he gave her a little bow. ‘Then you might meditate, Royesse, on what honor a captain can claim, who drags his followers into an error when he knows he will himself escape the punishment.’ The amber-haired girl’s wide lips twisted at this. After a long glance up under her lashes, she, too, dropped him a fraction of a curtsey…”
Dan Drezner: College Deans Need Better Training: ‘What a really, really dumb op-ed reveals about (some) college administrators…. Lawrence Bobo’s op-ed in the Harvard Crimson…. Dean of Social Science…. It is difficult to believe that Bobo wrote… with a straight face. His sentiments flatly contradict how universities and professors have thought about academic freedom for, well, decades…. Folks at Bobo’s level are in desperate need…. They need to know the best techniques of managing difficult people that by and large cannot be fired… the myriad cantankerous stakeholders that comprise a university. They need to learn to think deeper thoughts before publishing galactically stupid op-eds… <
Management Cybernetics: Roadshows and such for existing companies should focus not on those who currently hold the stock, but on those who might hold the stock in the future, if managements realistic plans succeed. As Daniel Davies says, current investors in a company doing badly have almost surely lost money in it, and have corresponding views of what is now going on. opening up the bandwidth of the communication between a company and people who have lost money investing in it is not likely to bring useful signals at all:
Dan Davies: The Tail That Wags the Dog: ‘In a couple of book promotion interviews, I’ve been referring to the phenomenon of “companies which are run by their investor relations department”…. Companies which were doing badly seemed to develop this amazing cringe, and start holding more and more roadshows and meetings where they promised that they were listening to investors’ concerns. Which was problematic, because investors’ concerns are always “give us more dividends, reduce investment, divest businesses, shrink assets, dividends, we want them”… partly because of the short term financial capitalism… but more importantly… the investors fundamentally disliked the thing and thought it was a bad business—of course they didn’t want to allocate more capital to it…. This was the death spiral that came pretty close to extinguishing the industry…. Presentation by needy presentation, our bosses kept tearfully promising to do better, to cut costs and not waste money. And in doing so, ensured that money would be wasted, in the pointless exercise of trying to get stable revenues out of a cyclical business. I’ve noticed something similar happening in several other industry sectors… <
