Traeger is about the only person on earth I could still consider a friend.

Maybe.

We have known each other forever, so he gots no mercy here and expects none.

I now quote what he says and my replies are marked by ***********

TRAGER SAYS:

Something much more basic is going on:

Computers make for more refined accounting.

More refined accounting means a better ability to find out which parts of a business are making or losing money.

Computers also mean that engineers can incorporate costs into their design and not have to send designs to top management, which will then get cost from accounting, buyer preferences from marketing, and so on. Top management alone has the information. (Engineers design cars that make them happy, but they cost too much and the public won’t buy them.) All this means that middle-management ranks, those who pass informatation from bottom to top and back down again, are getting delayered.

****** While I am the senile one, you seem to have forgotten that all this was the explanation of why, in the Carter years, everybody thought that business cycles were a thing of the past.

***** Nobody noticed that Europe had computers and one long cycle: Down

*********I do love the irony that Yuppie middle management, back in the 90s where you seem to be stuck, said automation was OK and the low-life working class would have to face losing jobs.

****** Those are the guys who are now asking, “Would you like fries with that?”

Computers also mean that it has become easier to buy outside the firm than make it yourself.

Transactions costs are lowered. Did you ever hear of Ronald Coase and a paper he wrote in 1937, “The Economics of the Firm”? Of course *you* have.

****** You know Ronald Coase was a professor of mine.

All this means more and more creative destruction, shorter product cycles, more jobs in design and marketing, fewer semi-skilled and unskilled jobs (code for IQ, mostly), smaller sized plants and firms both.

*********** What is this “unskilled” nonsense? Anybody who can paint a house can get a job. A super specialist in computers can’t.

*************** Where have you been the last couple of decades?

This means a general increase in the tempo of change. Who now plans ten years ahead?

********** I can’t believe you are parroting this “Inevitable incread in the tempo of change” bit.

********** In political strategy, and I mean REAL politics, you plant ideas. I deal in decades routinely.

It means a greater premium on raw IQ. You’re OLD Bob and not as smart as you used to be and are living on you accumulated wisdom. There’s not much of a demand for “experience.” Peak earning years will go down.

******** Lord, man you are really stuck in the nineties!

******** I can’t get it straight whether you are somehow competing with me or making a point.

******** I am very unhappy that I have to keep saying things that are obvious and neitehr young nor old people can see. You yourself said my big contribution was, and I quote:

******** “Things jump out at you that other people don’t even notice.” It is a very uncomfortable talent, because I keep wondering why the obvious never occurs to anybody lese.

********* In fact, it is very much like the old movie about the pod people, where nobody seemed to notice that people with human brains and emotions were being replaced by pods.

************ I want to be frozen and wake in a world where I will be given lotes of extra frontal lobe and taught by people who have already thought of what I agonizingly try to teach people now.

********** I do NOT like being the only sane one around.

Not as much as it should, since our Stone Age brains tell us that with age comes wisdom. It did, when the oldsters were all of thirty.
It all adds up to no more careers, just jobs in the old sense that you get a very specific task.
Tell me, Bob, what are the last three bits of wisdom you’ve acquired.

********** You seem obsessed with me.

******** If you read the blog, you would know that I am Odinistic. The word “Wisdom” is for charlatans.

********* You know I never let anybody get away with the sort of crap you just asked me. What is this “Wisdom” fertilizer?

********** There are things that work and things that don’t work. There are thoughts one comes up with and insights one finds or learns.

********** But “Wisdom?” In all seriousness, what in the HELL is that?

Peter is still ragging me about finding a book.

This could be useful.

The problem is that most of the time when I tell people first steps in finding things they think I am making fun of them, because what I do is so simple.

That’s not true. Finding an obscure fact in zoology is fairly easy. You just call a zoology department.

But finding something that “everybody knows” can be very tricky.

I was known for finding things when I got to the Reagan Admininistration, so, like all my bosses, my new boss decided to try me out. He wanted to know a quote from Shakespeare.

I called three or four local library reference services, told them who I was, and they went to work hard. They did not find the quote. What they found out was something MUCH harder:

There was no such quote.

Here’s the kicker: Nobody else would have been able to find that out without days of work. My boss was, as they all were, very impressed. It also reenforced my practical Ben Franklin image.

BUT remember that I DID this myself. If someone had come to me and asked me how to do it and I had told a major appointee of the Reagan Administration he should call the local library, he would have been grossly insulted.

In the internet age, our problem is telling the damned machine that we want something very simple. We do NOT want to buy pimple removers.

The advantage of having an institutional memory like me around is that I spent decades finding HUMANS with information.

Peter wants to know if a book exists. He needs to call several bookstores and ask if they have a book search.

You do NOT have to promise to buy a book to get a full search done. Most of these searches are for out-of-print and hard-to-find books.

Your library will also do it for you

It takes a while.

Most book searches also have a list of actual books, books that exist or existed, on hand. When you are dealing with a fake book this is very useful.

Peter’s question touches on an interesting sidelight: Almost everything under the sun, and a lot that the sun never saw, is discussed somewhere in the Congressional Record. Finding it is an art in itself. If your local library doesn’t have the CR, your local college will. But the library can find out where one is.

Never forget the interlibrary loan service. Your library can get you almost any book that still exists. Even if it doesn’t exist, the microfilm archives, world-wide, to which your library can get access, are awesome.

Be very pleasant and as unbending as a California redwood.

Elizabeth, do you have any more hints?

It is funny people think my hints are insulting because they are so “simple.”

I remember one of the top political fundraisers of all time whom I knew well, Richard Viguerie, addressed a group explaining the basics of direct mail. Richard was a poor Texas cajun who came up in the world, so when he discovered how “simple” direct mail was, he honestly didn’t think it took a genius to do what he did.

He said he had more business than he could handle, so he would just tell his conservative audience how to do it.

I know he meant it, because I think the same way. But I have learned that simple is not simple.

So Viguerie went on for about an hour with short hints he had learned by statistical analysis of responses to direct mail:

Long letters with short sentences.

How YOU can help.

Specify how much money you are trying to raise.

How to get a list of uninvolved sponsors with big names.

And on and on and on for a full hour.

Willis Carto could give you days of this.

He thinks it’s simple, too.

Then Viguerie finished with, “So as you see it’s not some kind of science. It’s all very simple.”

When he came down from the podium I said, “Richard, you don’t know it but what you just told people was, ‘Look, it’s very simple. Here’s Volume One.’”

Everything that works is based on something that seems simple once you grasp it.

But with nanotechnology, if we could grasp molecules, making ANYTHING would be simple.

“Once you grasp it” is a hell of a modifier.

It is the charlatan and the priesthood that seeks complication and arcane theories. As I cannot point out too often:

“If you babble in English you are a fool. If you babble in Latin you are a scholar.”