The Precision Revolution.

            I just returned home from a two week trip through New England, a part of the U.S. that  I had never visited before.   Most of the  trip was a tour sponsored by Road Scholar.   The focus of this tour was mainly the development of the first railroads in New England, and the effect of this on the economic development of the region.    The "take away"  message was that after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1813,   New York Harbor had a direct connection to American interior markets, putting all other East Coast ports at a disadvantage.     Baltimore responded by building the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.  Investors in Boston,  still the busiest East Coast port, responded with a flurry of efforts aimed at building  a rail link from Boston to the St. Lawrence River.  These  efforts eventually  connected rural New England to the rest of the world.

            But the most interesting part of the tour and lecture series was a visit to the American Precision Museum in Windsor, Vermont.    This National Historic Landmark is built around the old Robbins and Lawrence Armory,  an 1846  gun factory, originally water powered, built along the upper Connecticut Valley.    At first glance, it looks like a typical musket factory,  with the interior walls lined with display cases filled with old guns bearing labels such as:   "The first Sharps Rifle",  or "The first Enfield Rifle."     (Wait a minute.  Wasn't the Enfield a British weapon?   It was, but the tooling to produce it was made in Vermont, as were the first few hundred rifles.   Then these rifles were shipped to England, along with the tooling, where they were made thereafter.)   In fact, that was the business plan:   To work with the customer to design a rifle;  design and build the tooling to make the product;  make a few hundred to assure that the tooling worked;  and then turn the whole operation over to the customer or some third party for actual production,  so that they could concentrate of the more highly skilled and lucrative activity of just designing and building tooling. 

            After a few minutes in this place, the historical significance of this enterprise began to sink in.   This is the place where mass production began.   You see, Robbins and Lawrence were making rifles with interchangeable parts, and were one of the first, if not the first, to do so successfully.  Eli Whitney had had the idea to do this in the War of 1812,  but due to the exigencies of war he was not allowed time to first build the tooling, and then build the muskets.  Nor could he explain to the customer just what he was trying to do, and why it took time to do it.  And even if his persecutors in Congress had understood the issue, they could not have given him the time anyway, since we were at war and time was not to be had.   But in 1849, The Army gave Robbins and Lawrence a contract for 10,000 rifles, and three years to fulfill it.  In the first year they just designed the tooling.  In the second year, they built the tooling.  And in the third year, they made all 10,000 rifles, with interchangeable parts.   The era of mass production had arrived. 

            But for this revolution in production to occur, there first needed to be a revolution in precision.   (Hence the name,  American Precision Museum. )  As long as things were made one at a time, there was very little attention paid to precision, except that each part had to be the right size to fit to its mating  part.  But exactly what size that was arbitrary.  I used to own a small machine shop, and I still have a few old lathes, mills, and drill presses.  If I am making some one-of-a-kind object for my own use,   and someone asks me, "What size is that shaft?"  I might reply, "Whatever size will fit that bushing."    So they ask, "So what size is the bushing?" and I reply, "Whatever will fit that shaft."    

            It the 18th century, some Englishman built a watch so perfect that it could be used for navigation.   Surely, this had to be a precision device.   Yet it was precision only in the sense that each part had to fit its mating part.   As long as it did that, its actual size was unimportant.  But to have the advantage of mass production, where each worker is set up to make only one part,  and will make thousands of them before he has to stop to change set-ups to make a different part, then you need parts that conform precisely to some pre-determined standard.  And you need measuring instruments,  (gauges) to check them all to make sure that they do.   And these gauges have to have an even higher standard of precision.  These challenges required a whole new way of thinking, and new techniques and methods, before the benefits of mass production could be realized.  And these methods were first worked out, not in England, but in New England,  in the upper Connecticut Valley, in the 1840s.   If you ever have a chance to visit that part of the U.S. ,   take the time to visit this museum.   They still have some of the old machinery,  as well as docents who can tell you about it.  Probably the prize of their collection in a machine which Robbins and Lawrence built in 1853 for cutting rifling groves.  With the pull of a single lever, you can cut a rifling,  index the barrel 1/5th of a turn to cut the next one, and after all 5 cuts, advance the tool bit for the next pass.  And a single adjustment will give you any desired rifling pitch in twists per foot.   They also have a machine, (shown below) which is an early form of profile mill which allows a milling cutter to duplicate a pattern.

            I once visited the Museum of Science and Industry in London,  and I saw James Watt's workshop,  and some of his steam engines.  And in a sense, this is where the industrial revolution started.  But before the modern world could be built, we also needed mass production, and this needed interchangeable parts.  And for this to happen, the industrial revolution had to advance to the second stage---the precision revolution,  which happened in a large room in a mill on the Connecticut  river.   And I have been there.

Lawrence in Arabia, a book review

                        This book by Scott Anderson, (copy write 2013 by Random House) is one of the most  fascinating biographies you could ever hope to read.  It is a commonplace today that most of the messy state of affairs in the Middle East today owes to the absurd political arrangements  drawn up by the European powers at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI.  Those of us who've seen David lean's classic movie, "Lawrence of Arabia"  were given some idea what these disastrous decisions were.  But we were left in limbo as to why France and England made the decisions they did, and what alternatives might have been available. 

            But  Anderson's meticulously researched book goes into a little more detail.  This biography also corrects some misapprehensions in other parts of the saga of T.E. Lawrence.  In the movie, we are given the impression that Lawrence arrives in Egypt as a complete newcomer to the desert.    Actually, by the outbreak of war, Lawrence had already spent a couple years in the Arabian desert as an archaeologist.  And in the last few months before the war, he was working for British intelligence,  using his archaeology wanderings as a cover while making military maps of the region.  By the time the war started, he probably knew the desert and its people and their languages better than any Englishman.  In fact,  at the war's outset, he was ordered by Lord Kitchener himself not to enlist in the Army----because they would need him as a civilian analyst in the Egypt office of British Intelligence.  Later, for reasons of protocol, it was decided that he should be an officer, so he was given a uniform and told that commission papers would be drawn up.  

            But T. E. Lawrence was not the only young foreigner  wandering around the Syrian and  Arabian desserts before the war.   There was Wm. Yale, an American oil man working for Standard Oil.  And there was Curt Prufer, a German language expert attached to the German embassy in Cairo, who would later become a spy.   And there was Aaron Aaronsohn,  an agriculture expert at a Zionist settlement in Palestine.   All of these outsiders had met before the war, and their paths would cross and re-cross several times  over the next several years.  Anderson's book not only gives a detailed biography for Lawrence's own career throughout the war,  but follows the trajectory of each one of these four young men for several years, and in so doing, allows us to see the war from multiple perspectives.  This allows us to see what happened and why, and see it in ways that would not have been obvious to any one of the players at the time.  

            T.E. Lawrence was a unique figure in history;  there is really no one quite like him.  And Anderson begins his bio with a couple chapters on Lawrence's childhood to give us an idea as to how became what he was.   Beside the insights we gain about Lawrence himself, Anderson shows us the British WWI General Staff in all its breathtaking incompetence.  (The events at Gallipoli beggar the imagination.) The movie let us know that besides fighting the Turks and quelling the squabbles of rival Arab tribes, Lawrence had to continually battle his own military

high command and even the British Diplomatic Corp----a task he did not enjoy at all.   But Anderson  shows that  although he did not at all enjoy this activity---he was pretty good at it.

Confessions of an Iowa Caucus Participant

Well, the caucuses are over and the mainstream media are calling it a tie.  Both sides are claiming victory, but Bernie's claim has more credibility.  When Bernie came to Iowa, Hillary was 50 points ahead, had more money than God, and had the public backing of every establishment Democrat.  To come from behind and force a tie is quite a victory.  And when you consider that Hillary's stock has gone nowhere but down since October, while Bernie's has only gone up, it's clear that if the caucuses had come a few week later he would have won decisively. The mood is quite jubilant among Bernie supporters.   Keep in mind that although many of Hillary's supporters, (mostly middle-aged women)  are supporting her just because she is female, I don't think any Democrats oppose her for that reason.

  Every Bernie Sanders Democrat I know, (myself included) was an Elizabeth Warren supporter before becoming a Sanders supporter. We only signed onto Bernie's campaign when we failed to persuade Elizabeth to run. Gender has nothing to do with it. And, unlike our Republican friends, we do not actually dislike Hillary. Actually, she is a cool headed, intelligent woman, who shows considerable grace under fire. ( I remember during the Bill Clinton sex scandal she was on TV, and asked how she felt about it. She said, "Bill was always a hard dog to keep on the porch. I knew that when I married him." ) Hey, that is a cool lady. But many of us feel that Clinton is so totally entangled with the present corrupt system that she couldn't really change the things that urgently need to be changed. The fact that she gets almost all her funding from billionaires illustrates this point. But Bernie comes to the game free of all these strings. He refuses pac money, and is financed by small contributions from over 2 million individual voters. Nobody owns Bernie. Young people are particularly attracted to Bernie, because they agree with him on two points: 1. Wall street is completely out of control, and this is wrecking our economy. 2. Congress is completely dysfunctional, because of the influence of the tons of money flooding into the campaign finance system, and this is wrecking our democracy. If you are over 50, you may assume that as bad as it is, the final collapse probably won't  happen in your lifetime. If you're under 40, you may not be so optimistic. But here is the real news from the Iowa Democratic Caucuses last night: To participate, you have to be a registered Democrat. If you're not, you have to fill out a form that registers you as such. Guess what? We ran out of forms. And so did all of the other caucus sites. The state party, in its wildest optimism, failed to anticipate the surge of interest from young people entering the process. Bernie said he wants a revolution and he's getting one. My wife  and I had a strange experience at the caucuses last night.  There were two Democratic precincts caucusing in the same room last night.  Our group moved out into the hallway to get away from the noise and confusion of the other group.  The other group, a more populous region, had 200 members, to award 7 delegates. We had only 5 people show up to elect one delegate.  (Last time we had 24).     One of our problems is that our area has no young people.  They have all fledged and flown, just like our daughter.   We had no young people----just me and my wife and two middle aged women who backed Hillary and a middle aged man who also did.  So our one delegate went to Hillary.   Interestingly, when it came to elect the actual delegate,  one of the women works for the county election office and can't become a party official.  And the other two Hillary supporters both work Saturday.  The county convention is on Saturday.   So my wife and I had to accept the job of going to the convention as Hillary supporters.  One of us will be the delegate and one will be the alternate  We will be honor bound to support Hillary for the first two ballots.  This is weird, but not unusual.   I don't think this would work in New Jersey, but it works in Iowa.  ("I could not love Bernie half so much, loved I not honor more.")   

An Evening With Bernie Sanders

     Well, hearing Bernie is not like hearing a typical political speech. He talks for over an hour. And he tells you in advance that he's going to bore you with a lot of numbers. But nobody gets bored. What numbers?
      First, on the exponential growth of inequality: The top one tenth of one percent now has more wealth than the bottom 90%. That's right.  Not the top 1% but the top one tenth of one percent.  The wealthiest one family, the Waltons, have more wealth than the bottom 40%.  And since the recession ended, 90% of all income growth has accrued to the top 1%.  (By the way, these are credible numbers. I was reading these same numbers in several publications before Bernie even started to run for this office.  And I think Bernie was reading them too----that's probably what made him decide to run.) 
     Second: On political corruption: Both parties now receive more campaign funding from Wall Street firms than from all other sources combined. So all new legislation stacks the deck to warp the economy so as to funnel even more money to the top. The economy is rigged, and that's how it got that way.
     Third: Education funding: Young people have been crushed under a load of student debt for a whole generation now. Some people who are now paying on their kids student loans still haven't paid off their own, and owe more now than they did when they left college, even though they have already paid back way more than they ever borrowed. 
     Forth: Unemployment: Youth unemployment is over 25%  for Whites and much higher for Latinos and Blacks.  And if a young college graduate with a $60,000 student loan to pay off does get a job, it will probably pay the minimum wage.
       Fifth: Minimum wage: The minimum wage is a starvation wage. (If the mininum wage had been indexed for inflation since the '60s, it would be over $15.00 per hour.)
       Sixth: Criminal justice: We lock up a higher percentage of our young people than any country on earth, which costs us 80 billion bucks per year.  We could start fixing this by de-criminalizing cannabis.
      Seventh:  Our greatest national security threat is climate change. We have to convert to carbon free energy sources as soon as we can.  (Several of our top generals are saying the same thing.)
    Eighth:   Every other industrialized country on earth has universal health coverage, and they pay about half what we pay.
    Ninth:   Most other countries have equal pay for women, paid maternity leave, and subsidized child care.
     After having told you this stuff, Bernie tells you what we have to do to fix these things, what it will cost, and who will have to pay for it.     This is just a brief summary.  To hear his whole presentation takes 78 minutes.  If you could hear the rest of the story, it gets even scarier.

Do Dreams Have a Meaning?

People have wondered since ancient times whether dreams have a meaning.  I never thought about it much because I rarely have dreams that I remember.  But last night's crisp Fall air was perfect for sleeping, and also for dreaming. I dreamed that I was wandering about a vast public plaza, and under my coat I was carrying a large leather pouch or purse, which seemed to contain a few tiny, cheap cameras, some old cassette tapes, and small fragments of scrap lead. I wanted to get rid of the bag, and I thought of throwing it in a trash can or in the river, but it dawned on me that it could possibly be traced back to me, and for some reason, this did not seem like a good idea. I was tired, and there was an alcove adjoining the plaza where they re-upolstered old furniture. It was nearly deserted, so I went in and sat down in an old overstuffed chair that was awaiting reupholstering. Other weary travelers, mostly hobos and derelicts I guess, were doing the same thing. I re-examined the leather pouch, and it now contained two small marionettes---the small gaudy, paper mache kind they make in Mexico to sell to tourists. Upon discovering the marionettes, I said, "Hmmm. Interesting." So that's as much of the dream as I remember. So, my friends---what do it mean?

Too Little Government Debt?

            There was a fascinating little article by Justin Lahart  in the July 2 issue of Wall Street Journal, entitled "Federal Reserve Faces Newfangled Problem:  Too Little Debt."   Let me quote you a couple lines:

            "With the election year approaching,  politicians will be ramping up the rhetoric about America's looming debt problem.   The Federal Reserve, on the other hand, may soon have  a different  worry:   that there is too little government debt to go around for long-term rates to rise meaningfully."

            Right now,  real interest rates, after inflation, are near zero, and have been so for a long time.  While this helps crank up the economy and helps buoy up stock prices,  it can be dangerous if it persists too long, in that it can trigger an asset bubble of some kind.   The housing bubble was mainly caused by keeping interest rates too low for too long.  And we may now be in a stock price bubble.    So the Fed would really like to get off the zero interest rate.  When the newspapers  speculate about when the Fed will begin to raise interest rates,  the  rate in question is the Prime Rate---the rate at which the Federal Reserve loans money to banks.   But, as a practical matter, this rate can never get too far from the rate at which the government borrows money---- the rate commanded by treasury bills.  So for the prime rate to go up very much, the rate paid on Treasury bills would have to rise also, and that's the problem.  These rates are not set by executive fiat---they are set by public auction.   When T-bills are auctioned off, the discount from face value at which they trade determines the actual interest rate.   And right now, buyers are bidding for them so aggressively that they have bid the interest rate to zero.

            Debt is a commodity-- especially safe, secure sovereign debt like U.S. T-Bills.    From time to time,  investors need a safe place to park their money---and T-Bills provide such a place.  But the supply of U.S. T-Bills has been shrinking.  Under the Obama administration,  the economy has improved, so tax collections are rising.  At the same time, the administration  has cut back on spending, so the amount of new debt being issued is shrinking.   And most of the new debt is issued simply to redeem existing notes.   So the net new supply of U.S. sovereign debt is only about 50 billion dollars per month,  which falls way short of demand.    And to make matters worse,  western European central banks have finally decided to do a little quantitive easing, so they are printing money and buying their own sovereign debt.  This means that European investors who would normally be buying their own government debt are now buying ours, which makes the bidding even more aggressive.   The only solution would be to persuade the Obama administration to do more borrowing and spending, but Democrats have become such deficit hawks that this is not likely to happen.

Frontline Ukraine

            I am about halfway through Richard Sakwa's book,   FRONTLINE UKRAINE, Crisis in the Borderlands.    This is an excellent book,  and the first one I've found printed in English that seems to give an evenhanded  account of the problem.   I will not attempt to post a review of this book---I just recommend that you read it  yourself.   The problem he describes is complex enough that the 255 pages he writes is in itself a brief summary.   Parts are densely written but no more so than necessary to describe the complex historical, economic, and geopolitical forces in play here.  I can't summarize it, but I'll  give you a metaphor.  [This is my metaphor---not the author's]

            Imagine a large hockey arena,  with two goals;  one at the east, and one at the west.  There are seven or eight teams on the ice,  representing two different leagues.   None of the teams have decided for sure which league they want to belong to---some would like to belong to both,  but that isn't allowed.  There is internal dissention within the teams over this issue, with violent quarrels breaking out, and some members switching allegiance to other teams.  All the players on the ice  have known each other for a very long time, and carry old grudges that go back as far as anyone can remember.  Meanwhile, a dozen pucks are in play, bloody fights on the ice break out from time to time,  and there are no referees.   Everyone accuses  everyone else of bad faith----usually for good reason.   Occasionally, someone  makes a good faith effort to stop the madness, but the old wounds and old grudges are too old and too deep.  

            The drunken fans are not sure who they are cheering for--or why. They quarrel among themselves noisily,  and eventually,  some of them will probably set fire to the arena.