One Light Second

What can you do in a light second? Our 2005 Honda Civic turned 186,282 miles today. (I did not get the moment for a snapshot: I was on the freeway.)  Since 2005, we closed out Laurel's parents' estate, moved to Ann Arbor, completed our degrees, and moved to Austin. 

For seven years (2004-2010), I wrote the "Internet Connections" column of the ANA Numismatist magazine. ANA President William Horton presented me with a special Presidential Award for my work in the hobby.  I also served until 2011 as the webmaster of the Michigan State Numismatic Society. For a few years (2004-2007), I was the magazine editor, also. I was appointed to the Board once and elected to the Board once.

My associate's and bachelor's degrees are in criminology because when work as a technical writer got hard to find, I picked up a job as a security guard in 2002. When we moved to Ann Arbor, I was hired by campus safety at Washtenaw Community College and served there for a year (August 2005 - September 2006). I then worked for Securitas (2006-2007) and Allied Barton (2007-2008). That was actually the same job: when the client changed contractors, we just changed uniforms.

The Washtenaw County Commission appointed me to the city-county community corrections advisory board, 2005-2008. I joined Infragard and ASIS: the American Society for Industrial Security.  Not finding work as a security supervisor, I returned to graduate school and earned a master's in social science. I chose that for the opportunity to plan my electives. I concentrated on transnational white collar crime.

Moving to Austin in 2011, I was hired by Securitas. I worked several of the downtown high rises.  I like being a business serving businesses.

I also found work as a technical writer. Project clients have included Dell, the Texas Department of Information Resources, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Texas Military Department, and the Texas Education Agency. I am currently with Prologic Technology Systems, whose TEAMS software serves independent school districts and charter schools.

In November 2014, I joined the Texas State Guard. As a petty officer third class in the maritime regiment, I work in Future Operations as a trainer and technical writer for WebEOC, the virtual emergency operations center. I also completed a certification with CERT, the city's Community Emergency Response Team.

Also in November 2014, my wife and daughter bought me a telescope. I joined the Austin Astronomical Society and earned a certificate in telescope operations for their Eagle Eye Observatory outside of Austin.

On the downside, since 2005, we lost four cats. BA ("Badass Little Cat") was struck by a car in Kingsley, Michigan. Madonna died of old age in Ann Arbor while we were out of town. The pet sitter claimed not to have seen her, but the evidence at the scene was clear: she died in my office.  Isis had been my brother's cat. We had her only for a couple of years.  She died here of natural causes at about ten. Losing Goofy was the hardest. He had been with us the longest, 19 years.

I started this blog on January 2, 2011. Over 136,000 visitors have read the 391 posts. The most popular article (1957 views) has been "What (if Anything) Did Dorothy Learn?" You never know what other people will find interesting.

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City Air Makes You Free

The city is literally civilization.  Cities - not nations or American “states” - are the engines of creation and progress. Geniuses can be born anywhere; but they come to the city. Farming is everyone’s bread and butter, but cities buy their foods from all the farms in the world. Agriculture was invented in the first cities as a consequence of division of labor in an industrial society. While dressed as a federal union of disparate states, the American republic is culturally a very large city. 

• The City by Max Weber (Translated and edited by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth), Collier Books, 1962.
• The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs, Random House, 1969.

Chase Tower left and Comerica right in Austin

Max Weber investigated the fundamental sociology of the city, given that cities have different origins. Some began as armed camps, others as markets, production centers, consumption centers, or extensions of the household of the strongest local warlord.  However established, the essential function of the successful city is to be a marketplace.

Today, we accept the plurality of cultures in a modern city, but it was a radical idea that you could disassociate from your family and form new bonds with co-workers and customers in guilds and the fraternities, regardless of their own ethnic origins.  Cities always have attracted distant people.  Athens prospered because of the metics, free Greeks from other cities, but forever non-citizens within Athens. 

In the Middle Ages, if you could evade your manor lord for a year within the city walls, you were free.  On the other hand, everyone was expected to contribute to the defense of the city.  Men who work for a living have no time for training, so the city depended on firearms for protection: easy to use and devastating against an attacker.

Also in the ancient city and paradigmatic to the medieval city, political power rested within an elected council.  Democracy and urbanism are intimately related.  Also in the medieval city, women were enfranchised. The city erased previous classes, patrician and plebian, granted that it created new statuses. While some of them were heritable, most were not.

Reading Weber through modern eyes, it is easy to find all of those elements and many others within the society of the United States of America.  We are literally a bourgeois (burgher) society, a nation of cities. That is also the underlying thesis in Jane Jacobs’s The Economy of Cities. 

Frost Tower

Her major premise is that groups of hunters came together at fixed sites which became permanent trading settlements. Division of labor was an inevitable consequence.  From that, agriculture and herding became distinct occupations. This created the crossbred hybrids that we associate with the agricultural revolution.  Gardening requires land and soon farmers moved outside the cities.  Jacobs marshals her evidence and concludes the first chapter with an easy challenge.  Today, electricity is critical to the city and the largest electrical production factories are found in rural areas. In some distant future wrong-thinking archaeologists might conclude that electricity was invented on farms and exported as surplus to cities.  In fact we know that plows, tractors, fertilizers, everything that a farms needs is produced in cities. Jacobs argues that this has always been true.

Moving forward, she explains how complex divisions of labor come from new work invented to supplement existing products and services. She discusses the industries of Birmingham, England, contrasting them with Manchester.  To frame her presentation, she begins with the brassiere.  Invented by Ida Rosenthal, it epitomized the commerce of the city. First, it was a secondary product: as a dressmaker, Rosenthal was searching for a specific solution. Then, it became an independent product according to division of labor; and it spawned subsidiary industries in metal fasteners needed for production. Most subtly, the Maidenform Bra did not meet the needs of Ida Rosenthal’s clients: they would have preferred to keep their dressmaker, rather than have her abandon them for a new enterprise. 

Multiplied by hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions, that is the story of the city.

Cities enjoy explosive growth when many different kinds of enterprises come together in one place. Some succeed; many fail.  The creation of new work is the engine that pumps life into the city. Let its economy become dependent on a single industry and contraction, recession, and depression cannot be avoided.  Any city that enjoys and encourages an uncontrolled riot of many disparate economic activities will survive and thrive.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Stadtluft Macht Frei

Debt: the Seed of Civilization

The Cure for a Failing Empire

Cities

Venture Capital

Open Secrets

A popular TED Talks from Johanna Blakley (view here), showed that revenues in the fashion industry where intellectual property rights are weak are three orders of magnitude greater than in sectors with strong intellectual property rights.  In "Bourgeois Virtue (link here)" Deirdre McCloskey cited Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice as one of many examples of the importance of discourse to commerce: "I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following...  What news on the Rialto?"  Modern insurance and modern banking both have origins in the coffeehouses of London. The great value in urban culture is that communication is profitable.  

Openness brings risk.  We all take the keys from the car and lock the doors when we leave it parked. But for 100 years collectivists right and left declared that our open society would be easy to infiltrate and destroy. We're here. The Nazis and Communists are gone. Today, the open society, the agora, is attacked by new enemies who fear knowledge.  While the need to secure our infrastructure is clear, it is more important to maintain, reward and enhance the creation and  transmission of information, money, goods, services, and people.

In Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics Jane Jacobs identified the dichotomy between the commercial ethos and the guardian way. Secrecy is important to police forces, armies, charities, and socialist economies.  On the other hand, scientists, farmers, and merchants depend on open communication.

Your computer is the result of a completely open and unregulated market in cybernetics.  No government agency defines what a computer is, who can build one, who can own a computer or who is qualified to program one.   The USSR excelled in theoretical mathematics and chess because the people of the mind, the initiators, the doers, the contrarians had no other outlet.  Politics was forbidden and economics did not exist. Meanwhile, in America, personal enterprise continued to blossom and bear fruit.

In 1991, I was a delegate from the Michigan patron community to the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services (WHCLIS-2).  Among the guest speakers was Newt Gingrich.  As a result of that, I sent a check to GOPAC and benefited from being on their mailing list for audio tapes.  At some $100-a-plate dinner Dr. Gingrich said that at a previous dinner, someone asked him if he did not think that it was horrible that welfare recipients sell their food stamps for 75 cents on the dollar to buy booze and cigarettes.  The professor said, "Of course not."  These people are Americans, he said.  "You cannot give an American a negotiable instrument and then complain when they negotiate it for something they want."

In April 2009, I attended a presentation by former KGB agent Boris Yuzhin. (See New York Times story "Graying Double Agent" here.  Visit his Wikipedia biography here. Read the ZoomInfo sketch here.)

As he told it, trained in computer architecture, he was recruited by the KGB to come to American and find others to work for the USSR. The KGB heard that there were a lot of "communists" at Berkeley, so they sent him there. Not only did none of the comrades want to talk to him, when they did, it was a debate -- and he lost. He could not win a debate on Marxism because in the USSR they could not read all of the theoretical works which we in the USA can. So, he got a carrel at the library and began studying Marxism in the USA.  That convinced him of the strength of an open society. He defected to our side.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Engines of Creation
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Venture Capital
Entrepreneurship

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security

 Private security is fundamentally a business service. If the sign says “No Smoking” I do not care what you are smoking, just, please take it over there. This is different from public policing. Still, the intersecting set of guardian duties continues to drag into private security a large army of “cop wannabes” – those who never could be police officers because they cannot make the metrics; and those who having been police officers do not want to retire from work. Both groups are problematic. The permanent solution is to build a rational model based on empirical evidence that brings private security completely into the markets of business services and out of the public arena.

 Jane Jacobs delineated two modes of human action in Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (Random House, 1992). The commercial mode of the merchant and trader shares some intentions of the political mode of the guardian and warrior. Honesty and honor are easy analogues, as are the sanctity of contract and the duty of loyalty. Other standards are diametrically opposed. Merchants are open to strangers; guardians are closed. Traders seek voluntary agreements; warriors use force.

According to Jacobs, the political mode is common to the police and army, to charities, as well as to the Mafia, and socialist political systems. Alternately, scientists and farmers share the moral code of the merchant. When the modes cross or mix, then corruption results, as when police officers accept bribes or when businesses get laws passed for themselves.

In her book, Jacobs developed the two lists from their inherent hierarchies. To the trader collaboration with strangers is most important. For the guardian, loyalty is the primary virtue. The list can be re-arranged by similes and opposites. Some have no direct corollaries.

Consider the array of comparative virtues:

From Systems of Survival: by Jane Jacobs.

What could be changed in private security to make it more entrepreneurial and less political without risking the fundamental responsibility for the safety and security of our clients and their property? 

As businesses whose profits come from the difference between the cost of production and the market price of our services, the commercial virtues of thrift, efficiency, and productive investment speak against the rich use of leisure, distribution of largess, and ostentatious displays.

Vengeance is not appropriate to private guard companies. Although warriors and guardians engage in it, the ultimate value is putative, at best. Vengeance is not justice; it is not even retribution. It certainly has no place in the business world where competitors become partners.

Jacobs stressed the innovative and inventive nature of enterprise. The guardian virtues of obedience, hierarchy, and tradition are less salient in business. A certain level of expected obedience defines some of the relationship between the CEO and the Board, as between the line worker and the manager. But those are defined by contract. In warrior groups, any implied “contract” is secondary to the need for obedience. Military units are sacrificed and cowardice is punished. Troops are expected to fight without pay and even without food.

Choose Your Virtues

Virtue is contextual. It is easy to claim that honesty is the best policy.  That would contradict the fact that no dress ever made any woman look fat.  

Jane Jacobs compared and contrasted the Commercial and Guardian modes of survival.  The Guardian is the traditional one, common also to animal packs.  The Commercial was invented with cities.  Both, however, ignore the moral context.  Guardians may be good guys or bad.  Commerical enterprises can be benefactors or swindlers.  For Jacobs, the key consideration was that these arrays were syndromes. Literally, they run together to define a complex system. 

Deirdre McCloskey contrasted bourgeois virtues against those of the aristocrat and peasant.  But it can be a challenge to cull wit from jocularity from humor.  McCloskey's goal was not to elevate the middle class merchant above the aristocrat and peasant.  Rather, she sought only an open dialectic space in which trustworthiness, thrift, and integrity are recognized as being hallmarks of the entrepreneur and the sales clerk.  It is who we are today.

TWO CATALOGS OF VIRTUES
From Jane Jacobs' Systems of Survival: Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

From "The Bourgeois Virtues" (1994) by Deirdre McCloskey.

















"The point is not to elevate bourgeois virtue over the others in some universal sense. The point is to sidestep universal senses. In some personal and social circumstances, courage is a virtue. ... So is humility.....  But when the class left out by the virtue-talk is half the population, on its way to all the population, the vocabulary of the virtues is not doing its job." -- McCloskey

Private Security in the 21st Century

In J. Neil Schulman’s libertarian utopia Alongside Night, our hero, the son of a free market Nobel laureate economist, is on the run when he falls in love with the daughter of the director of the FBI.  He discovers an underground, both literal and figurative, and as the stormtroopers attack, the Boy and the Girl are separated.  He needs to find her, but the private security guards are directing people to safety.  He wants to argue, but they will have none of that. Rather than ordering him to obey the klaxon call to evacuate – which is what he expects – the guard asks him to stand aside for a moment until they can help him find his girlfriend. So it is with private security: we are not cops… at least, not ideally. 

Today, supervisors in private security generally come from the world of public policing.  They follow the Guardian ethos.  However, as security services are increasingly for-profit enterprises, the future of market-driven security will evolve along a different line. 

In Systems of Survival, (see here on this blog) Jane Jacobs outlined two moral syndromes: the Guardian, and the Trader.  They are often different expressions of the same virtues, but, also, often contrary in motives or opposite in goals.  The future of private security lies with eliminating as many of the "power" modes as possible and replacing them with "market" modes.

It is true that Guardians should not trade favors.  That way lies corruption.  However, many of the elements of the warrior path can be replaced with the merchant's course – and to the benefit and profit of the security provider, as well as to their clients and to their clients' communities of customers, who in retail are known as the ultimate consumers.  

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security
Employee Theft
Locksporting
Redshirts

AVAILABLE ON SLIDESHARE:
Physical Security for Data Centers

The Roots of Poverty

In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote: “To seek 'causes' of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.”

As a card-carrying criminologist I study the sociology of crime.  Some claim that poverty causes crime.  It may.  But, others claim, also rightfully, that crime causes poverty.  More cogently, in many instances, the criminal mind-set is the mentality of poverty: criminals are creatures of convenience and habit.  At least, some of them are.  (In a paper on criminological metatheory on my website here, I list the 30 or more theories that explain the 30 or more causes of 30 or more kinds of criminal actions.) 

Overfilled dumpster at my apartment complex.

In Goethe's Faust Part 1, Mephistopheles says: "Ich bin der Geist der verneint."  (I am the spirit that negates.)  The devil cannot create, only destroy.  Criminals are creatures of convenience and habit. Entrepreneurs seek new solutions to previously unknown problems.  They find and reduce inefficiencies.  An entrepreneur will invest all the resources available to make a dream come true.  A manager will not go over budget.  A criminal will not make the effort.  (In the Bible, this is the Parable of the Talents.) 

An empty dumpster was only 30 meters away.

I walked the short path between buildings to the next parking lot and found the dumpster there empty. Anyone who threw the next bag of garbage (or left that dead sofa) could have made the same small effort.  But it was too much work.  In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand painted Starnesville, the town abandoned by its productive citizens.  Those who remained had no time, no energy, no interest in effort. 

The distance is maybe 100 feet, 30 meters.

In fact, there were four or five available dumpters, all within a few hundred feet. 

Sociologists claim that when rich people commit crimes, it is because rich people are crooks; and when poor people commit crimes, it is because rich people are crooks.  The easy claim is that crime among the poor is a response to their oppression.  They retaliate against the ruling class by victimizing each other. At least, that is what I was taught in four years of university education in sociology, 2006-2010.  Myself, as an advocate of laissez faire capitalism, and a defender of so-called robber barons, I can see the landlord as the seamy underbelly of property.  Edison invented.  The landlord only holds.  And yet, the owners of this property invest a lot of money in maintenance.  And it is too little appreciated by the poor criminals who live here.


Maintenance worker picks up around the site.

Every day, the grounds crew picks up trash.  They reload the dumpsters, breaking down discarded furniture.  Contractors come in once a week to sweep the grounds, collecting leaves, mowing the lawn - not much of that with central Texas's drought.... but still they come...

The complex is perhaps 30 years old.  The property management firm owns a range of real estate investments in California, Texas, and other places.  The shrubs are trimmed decoratively.  When we moved in, my wife said, "We have real holly!" And, indeed, we do.  But be that as it may ....


Someone works pretty hard to do this.

No matter how much work the owner invests in the property, those who have no ownership stake take no ownership care.  Look closely under that bush in the foregound and you may notice the beer can.  They are all over the place every morning.  In a previous post, I spoke of the scavengers who come for the aluminum.  In a fascinating display of inherent respect, they do not actually walk the grounds.  I wish they would.  They only come to the dumpsters.  They do not want to intrude on the grounds.  If only all the residents here showed the same sense of propriety and respect and self-respect.



Under the round bush in the foreground,
a Modelo beer can
which someone made an effort to crush
but not to discard.

And yet, the problem is complicated and nuanced.  It has texture.  Today, a woman from an apartment along my walkway was vacuuming out her SUV.  I am fairly confident that she did not toss the beer can under the bush.  This morning, I met my neighbor below.  He has a lunch wagon, a converted pickup.  Every day, he gets up, cooks, loads his truck and goes off to construction sites.  I doubt that the beer cans are his.

BudLite can tossed on the ground, not in a dumpster.

Lacking an objective basis for morality, earlier advocates of capitalism only could say that the millionnaire has as much right to his wealth as the laborer to his hundreds. In the 20th century Ayn Rand delineated productive workers at any income from the looters and moochers.  Common laborers or uncommon inventors alike are to be contrasted against those those who look to Washington or to heaven because they cannot look within themselves to find their motivation.

Like poverty, crime has no 'cause.'  It is the ground state, the default, the lack-of-something.  In metaphysics, we say that "nothing is not a special kind of something."  So, too, in ethics, is poverty not a different kind of productivity. 

Modes of Survival

Jane Jacobs was a brilliant, self-educated advocate for community.  Although she considered herself a socialist, she was a deep thinker.  She is best known for her urbanist books: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations.  She also created a cogent and provocative analysis of the ways that we organize: Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.  She perceived politics and commerce as adhering to two mutually exclusive codes of ethics. 

Systems of Survival was in the form of the Dialogues of Plato: guests at dinner parties discussed the topic at hand.  The leader of the chat presented current newspaper clippings to illustrate her points.  As they argued the pros and cons, the symposiasts created two tallies: the Guardian Syndrome and the Commercial Syndrome.  As the treatise developed these were presented as hierarchies. 

The Guardian Moral Syndrome

A.                 Be loyal

B.                 Be obedient and disciplined

C.                 Treasure honor

D.                 Adhere to tradition

E.                 Respect hierarchy

F.                 Show fortitude

G.                 Exert prowess

H.                 Be exclusive

I.                   Take vengeance

J.                  Make rich use of leisure

K.                 Be ostentatious

L.                 Dispense largess

M.               Deceive for the sake of the task

N.                Shun trading

O.                Be fatalistic

Loyalty is the primary virtue of the guardian.  A thousand years ago, when I was a Cub Scout, the pledge was to “obey the law of the pack” and to “follow Aquila.”  The United States Armed Forces offer a grown-up version: “I, [Your Name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.” 

The Merchant or Trader follows a different ethos.  Nominally, the virtues often seem analogous, but at root, the Commercial ethic involves different values.  For the trader, meeting strangers is the essence of their calling.  The Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa by dumb barter. They dropped off goods.  The natives took the stuff, and left other items in exchange.  If what was offered was not enough, the traders waited, visible but distant, until more was brought.

The Commercial Moral Syndrome

1. Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens
2. Be honest
3. Shun force
4. Come to voluntary agreements
5. Respect contracts
6. Use initiative and enterprise
7. Be open to inventiveness and novelty
8. Be efficient
9. Invest for productive purposes
10. Be industrious
11. Be thrifty
12. Promote comfort and convenience
13. Dissent for the sake of the task
14. Compete
15. Be optimistic

Honesty for the Merchant is analogous to Honor for the Warrior… but not quite the same thing.  The Guardian will deceive for the sake of the task.  (Cops lie to suspects in interrogations as a matter of routine.)  On the other hand, the Merchant will dissent to achieve the task at hand.  In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, all the capitalists run away to avoid coercion.  Ragnar Danneskjold becomes a pirate, saying, in effect, “Sorry, guys, but I have to do this for the higher good.”  If that is too mythic, consider the formation of dozens to hundreds of Silicon Valley firms by “traitors” who left one firm to create another.  The “task” was always to create the better system: if your employer would not, then form your own firm to serve the needs of the customers. 

Jacobs pointed out that we get corruption and moral failures when the two modes are confused and intermingled.  Cops must not sell favors.  Businesses must not start wars. 

The Commercial versus The Guardian

• Shun force versus Shun trading 
• Come to voluntary agreements versus Exert prowess
• Be honest versus Be obedient and disciplined
•  Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens versus Be exclusive
•  Compete versus Respect hierarchy
•  Respect contracts versus Be loyal
•  Use initiative and enterprise versus Take vengeance
•  Be open to inventiveness and novelty versus Adhere to tradition
•  Be efficient versus Make rich use of leisure
•  Promote comfort and convenience versus Treasure honor
•  Dissent for the sake of the task versus Deceive for the sake of the task
•  Invest for productive purposes versus Dispense largess
•  Be industrious versus Show fortitude
•  Be thrifty versus Be ostentatious 

• Be optimistic versus Be fatalistic

Some of these express similar virtues: “Be honest” and “Be obedient and disciplined”’ and “Respect contracts” and “Be loyal.”  But others are clearly opposites or contraries: “Use initiative and enterprise” versus “Take vengeance” and “Be efficient” versus “Make rich use of leisure.”

The harsh truth is that the Guardian syndrome is the animal mode; and the Trader syndrome is the human mode.  The Cub Scouts (and the Marines) are modeled on a wolf pack.  Since at least the last Ice Age – if not the one before that – we humans invented a different way to get along.  Trade and commerce evolved from ritual gift exchange.  Now we harness lightning and enjoy flying carpets.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Open Secrets
Money As Speech and Peacemaking
Texas State Guard Basic Non-Commissioned Officer Training
Who Guards the Guardians?
Counter-Insurgency

Capitalist Culture

Instead of vilifying him for being an idiot, we should be praising Michael Moore for being a millionaire.

 The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times (Princeton University Press, 2010) is an anthology that gives an high level view of the broad history of trade and commerce.  (My full review published by Libertarian Papers here.)  In separate chapters, David Landes and Michael Hudson identify the difference between creative and corrosive capitalism. The latter dominates in societies that deny the former.  The editors generally point out that in any society, some people will take the best advantage of whatever modes are offered for personal advancement.

In Rome, glory came from looting provinces.  Making money was not honorable.  So the wealthy left the management of their businesses to their freemen and slaves.  In America today, we allow both the marketing of technology and gaining government subsidies.  It is not just that both are legal, but that culturally, we do not distinguish between them.  Instead of vilifying him for being an idiot, we should be praising Michael Moore for being a millionaire.  He should get a hero's medal for selling large volumes of what people want to buy voluntarily.  

Instead of praising clever children who memorize the Presidents in order, we should be teaching them that "LinkedIn started out in the living room of co-founder Reid Hoffman in the fall of 2002. The five original founders were Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Jean-Luc Vaillant, Eric Ly, and Konstantin Guericke." (Company "About" here. )  I am not sure how to commemorate the chic restaurants in Rep. Nancy Pelosi's district that won exemptions to opt out of Obamacare.  The avoidance of regulation should not be taken lightly. 

BOURGEOIS VIRTUE

Deirdre McCloskey developed her theories on "Bourgeois Virtue" over the past two decades.  She now has two books out, with a third on the way.  She investigates the topic from many standpoints.  Generally, she finds that the things we are taught to dislike about being middle class include the social graces that benefit and profit us all. 

A potent source of bourgeois virtue and a check on bourgeois vice is the premium that a bourgeois society puts on discourse. The bourgeois must talk. The aristocrat gives a speech, the peasant tells a tale. But the bourgeois must in the bulk of his transactions talk to an equal. It is wrong to imagine, as modern economics does, that the market is a field of silence. "I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following. . . . What news on the Rialto?"
For one thing, talk defines business reputation, as at the Iowa City cocktail party. A market economy looks forward and therefore depends on trust. The persuasive talk that establishes trust is necessary for doing much business.  "Bourgeois Virtue" by Deirdre McCloskey, American Scholar vol. 63, no. 2, Spring 1994, page 249,  here.

Today we have social media. Corporations hire people or not, and fire them, based on what is revealed on Facebook and Twitter.  Reputational gossip has become all the more intense.  In a global culture, other people in other places grew up with different expectations entirely.  Rather than forcing conformity and avoiding risk, hiring managers who want their firms to profit should have the mechanisms in place analogous to those engaged by entrepreneurs. 
Market theorist Henry Girard Manne suggests that insider trading is one of those. 

In the anthology cited above, the chapter on the Middle East by Timur Kuran pointed to a biography of a Cairo merchant.  Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma'il Ibn Taqiyya by Nellie Hanna is a detailed account of one merchant in one place.  It so happened that he had his choice of courts, four of them, from different schools of law, in which he could register contracts.  Abu Taqiyya flexibly extended his trade network by crafting the clauses in his agreements.  Benjamin Franklin would have called it "prudence."

A MAN'S HOME IS HIS MARKET

We see the "castle" as a paradigm, not just because we are at war with our neighbors - Hobbes' war of all against all being the reason for government. For us, the home is primary protection against the elements. In a society of open courtyards, verandas (a Hindi word, likely borrowed from Portuguese), decks, roofs with hanging gardens, patios, arcades and colonades, concepts of safety, security, and ultimately, property rights, must have other paradigms. As he became wealthy, Isma'il Abu Taqiyya extended and expanded his personal space until his large home dominated his street.  He shared that street with a partner who made the same arrangements. They also did this with their warehouses (wikalat), which served as storage, emporia, and guest lodgings.  Public life was gradually excluded from private contexts as the visitor moved inward from the business into the home.

The piazza is a public space, but among urban Americans in the 19th century, it came to be a somewhat pretentious word for the front porch.  For Americans, the front porch became the margin between the public street and the privacy of the interior home.  Adults could sit and rock while children played games.  Friends and neighbors could stroll pass and bid hello and good day.  An industry arose to create special furniture for this special space.  Europeans assigned to work in Detroit visit  Ann Arbor because our restaurants extend to the street, using the sidewalks for table spaces.  The margins between public and private spaces are blurred.  It would be difficult to discuss anything illegal or immoral in such a context.  Business and social life become transparent when conducted on the street.  In such a context, you grant privacy by minding your own business.

Therefore, rather than the castle which holds against the storm, a commercial society of productive traders, offering values in voluntary exchange, is better served by a theoretical model of ready communication.  Jane Jacobs made the same point in Systems of Survival.  It is the Trader's Ethic to be open and available to deals with strangers.  Thus, capitalism is inherently globalist and democratic. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
A Man's Home is His Market
Thank-you Notes
City Air Makes You Free
Knowledge Maps

Cities

 It is an easy claim commonly found in school books that cities evolved from agrarian communities that themselves were formed when pastoralists pursuing herds narrowed their ranges, domesticated animals and plants, and settled down.  In truth, cities evolved from the camps of successful hunter/gatherers who met to exchange their supluses.  Jane Jacobs suggested this in The Economy of Cities.  Her theory was validated by the excavations at Çatal Höyük in Turkey.   

First, Jacobs was an urbanist.  An immigrant from Scanton, Pennsylvania, to New York City and an activist in Brooklyn, she fought against the so-called "urban renewal" of the 1960s; and she was largely successfully at least in forestalling what was really urban removal.   She advocated for old mixed-use buildings in diversified neighborhoods, which was the opposite of intentions from planners such as Robert Moses who intended large new single-use structures for uniform neighborhoods. 

Also, Jacobs was self-educated.  Working as a secretary and freelance reporter, she attended on her own Columbia University's open college or extension school (now the School of General Studies).  She studied what interested her, and at one point was almost forced into a degree program which she successfully resisted.

Her other books include: 

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 1961.
• Cities and the Wealth of Nations, New York: Random House, 1984.
• Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, New York: Random House, 1992. 

 Her theories on the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age were validated after the excavations at Çatal Höyük were resumed.  She suggested that the first commonly accepted trade commodity was not wheat - and certainly not useless silver or gold - but obsidian.  Obsidian for points (arrowheads; spear tips) was broadly desirable by hunters.  However,