Remote Work Before Covid

Going through some boxes from the garage, I found this. You can tell from the PDA (personal digital assistant) in his hand, from the fax machine at his foot, the monitor and the camera that this is from 1995-2000. 

Ahead of the 237th conference of the American Astronomical Society this past January, they brought in a coach to deliver a presentation on how to work a virtual conference. In some ways, it is easier and better than a live conference. One basic reminder: Wear your half suit.

Even earlier, back before 1985, I got from IBM a directory of software developers. Many of the firms were small, one or two employees, with annual declared incomes of $100,000 (probably the minimum checkbox on a survey), and remote, in places like Idaho and Oregon. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Engines of Creation 

Goofing to a Meltdown? 

One Light Second 

The Pretense of Sociology 

Jerry Emanuelson's Algebraic Proof of Ricardo's Law of Association 

VETERANS DAY 2018

“Why My Brick” by Michael E. Marotta on behalf of SFC Edward M. Marotta 

I was drafted. They called it the peacetime Army, but the Korean armistice had just been signed and the Russians occupied Eastern Europe. They say that conscripts do not make good soldiers but I served nine years active duty and 15 years in the reserves. I was an average soldier. My medals were for good conduct and component readiness. My only war story is how a non-judicial punishment led to a promotion and assignment to be a colonel’s driver. In my off-duty time on base, I trained Soldiers in hand-to-hand combat and sent two to the Olympics to compete in boxing. My longest billet was to be a trainer in race relations and equal opportunity. For me, a trade school graduate, with no special purpose or direction, the Army was my equal opportunity to earn maturity, learn teamwork, and help to build the next generation of Soldiers. -- For the "Buy a Brick" campaign of the National Museum of the Army (here) of the Army Historical Foundation (here).

(The photograph is the only artifact of Dad in uniform in the possession of his second family. His DD-214 cites the second rocker for Sergeant First Class, not shown here. After his first re-enlistment expired in 1958, Dad's 15 years in the Ohio National Guard came only after the second set of boys was grown up and mostly gone. We all support our men in uniform; we do not all encourage them to join. "Why did you go, Michael? It was not your fight," said Don Corleone.)

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Syriaphobia 
Soldiers of Peace 
Wooden Ships 
Leaders are Readers 

Irene Louise Babos Marotta Joseph

Today would have been her 86^th birthday. My mother left me with two enduring learning points.

• Good music is cheap and cheap music is expensive.
• It does not matter how much money you have as long as you are educated. 

5th Grade Buhrer School
Miss McGovern, 1941

There were many others. She was given to maxims, glittering generalities, and statements of opinion as fact. From my point of view, she had about 12 or 13 good years, and then slid downhill for about 25, though she enjoyed a couple of counter-trend peaks. After she died, we cleaned out her apartment and two salient facts gave me pause:

• She had no mirrors (except for the one that is standard in the bathroom). When we were kids, we used to make Transylvania jokes about being Hungarian; maybe it was not so funny. 
• We found a candle that had been burned at both ends.

 

c. 1964

Mom played the piano and owned a couple of them over the years. She taught my brother, Paul, and me to play, though I soon stopped because he eclipsed me. Nonetheless, I learned to read music, and later did not learn to play the coronet and French horn. We had classical (mostly Romantic) music on high fidelity 33-1/3 rpm records. Interestingly enough, Mom was supportive of rock ’n’ roll. Mindful that good music is cheap and cheap music is expensive, she still paid for 45s of hit songs from Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, mostly at my brother’s request. I was not much for pop music until 1966, when I had my own favorites.

Cleveland Dental Manufacturing 
is now a residential loft space

Her best years started in 1956 to 1961 working for Walter S. Smith’s Cleveland Dental Manufacturing Company. Cleveland Dental did some overseas business, and Mom brought home envelopes with foreign stamps. She tried to get us interested in stamp collecting, but neither of us had much passion for it.

When Mr. Smith retired she worked a year or so more for the new president, but after the sale to Cavitron, she found another job. She then went to work for Dr. Robert Morgan Stecher who had offices at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital from its days as City Hospital. He was not a practicing physician, but an academic researcher whose passions included early horses and the genetics of arthritis. He was independently wealthy. His father, Fred W. Stecher, was a pharmacist who invented Pompeian Massage Cream  and built his home in Lakewood on a natural gas well that brought lease income.

 

No longer interested in politics.
City Hall Chambers 1998.

Working for Dr. Stecher broadened her horizons. She took us to the Cleveland Health Museum, bought me memberships in the Natural Science Museum, and split season tickets to Severance Hall with neighborhood doctors. (Our home was two blocks from City Hospital. Some of the rentals, ours and others, went to interns and residents. I benefited from a lot of extra-curricular education and exposure to the research labs at the hospital.)  She wrote Dr. Stecher’s international correspondence and prepared his journal manuscripts. Their office was next to the hospital library; and I bought some discards for a dime each.

After Dr. Stecher retired, she worked as an office temporary until she met her second disastrous husband. That marriage lasted no longer than the first, but the comparison is between the harsh voyage of the Mayflower and the gaiety of the Titanic.

When it became clear that neither Paul nor I was going to graduate from college, she took over management of our sister’s education and got Kelly through Baldwin-Wallace with a major in English and a minor in Biology, including a field trip to the Galapagos Islands. Mom did not live to see Paul and me go back to graduate with honors.

However, she did participate from the audience in the Cleveland punk music scene hanging out with Paul’s band, and billing herself as “Irene Styrene.”  

Her last job was as a full time administrative assistant at Cleveland City Hall. By then, she had lost her passion for politics. Forty years earlier, she had sent me to school with a Nixon-Lodge pin and the next time around, it was AuH2O in 64, which is how I ended up in Young Americans for Freedom in 1965, and ultimately wrote a blog.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

World Peace Through Massive Retaliation

Happy Birthday, Paul

The First Dagny

Dagny Two Point Oh

Tarzan, the Amazons, and My Mother

Corporations and Capitalism

Many libertarians are opposed to corporations, calling them creations of the state.  They certainly are creations of law. Corporations are an improvement over traditional modes such as Shariah law; and they have ancient roots of their own in Roman law. 

Before corporations as we understand them today were invented, unrelated people could only come together for business as partnerships. By law, if one partner died, the partnership was dissolved. No one can speak for a dead person. Limiting businesses to partnerships would make modern enterprise impossible. 

The family business is a different matter. Under traditional law, left over from agrarian times, the family business is a kind of farm, owned by the pater familias, and ownership passed by inheritance. In order to avoid the limitations of partnership, every co-owner would have to be adopted into the family. In that case, the head of the family decides your shares and your profits. That is what privilege is, literally, private law. The pater familias can do whatever on the farm. In Roman times, he could sell family members into slavery.

However, Roman law also recognized the collective entity: the herd. The herd exists independent of any one animal. If you buy or sell the herd, some die and others are born along the way. It is the same herd. Roman emperors granted charters to groups of individuals: burial societies and fire fighters were among the first. Some people claim that the Benedictine Order, chartered in 579, is the oldest continuing corporation. Wikipedia has other ideas here.  But note that many of those are family businesses. 

The modern corporation was the steam engine of commerce. It allowed the creation and management of capital on the scale demanded by the industrial revolution, and wholly beyond the needs of simpler, land-based societies. Shariah Law recognizes partnerships, not corporations. Also, it forbids the payment of interest. Anyone who lends money becomes a partner and shares in the profits. It worked well enough for simpler times and places. However, even Shariah recognizes something called a waqf. A waqf is like a foundation. It was created first over wells: everyone needs it; no one can own it; it must be managed for the common good. Sometime later - I know only about Cairo 1600 - the waqf was used to create family

Trustees of Dartmouth College
v. Woodward,
17 U.S. 518 (1819) was
the landmark case
in U.S. law for
corporations.

foundations that let merchants aggregate their wealth without it being redivided by inheritances. 

In the West, universities were chartered as corporations to allow them to survive their founders. They also could make their own laws for their own communities: Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, Padua, Heidelberg, ... When Cambridge discovered its original charter to be unhelpful, they went to Parliament for one -- and got a seat in Parliament as a result. Even Sir Isaac Newton served a term.

As for the modern corporation, you could not own most of your comforts without them. To condemn the entirety because of the actions of a few individuals is collectivism.

In the future, the corporation may be the legal structure by which a software earns its legal rights. We already have electronic filing. There is no way to know who the original actor is. She might be a program.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Capitalist Culture
Venture Capital
Money as Press and Speech
Numismatics: The Standard of Proof in Economics

The Family Business

The classic entities of businesses, households, and governments might be useful constructs for conceptualizing market operations, but, really, like planets, meteors, and stars, they all must obey the same same general laws – and distinctions among them can be blurred easily. In fact, every family is a business. The most successful family businesses are those that perceive themselves as such.  Academic economics - even from "free market" professors - teaches from false assumptions.

"Households produce goods and services for their own consumption and not for the market."
Firms have internal accountants, rather than hiring accounting firms – which they also do. Shipping and receiving, sales, etc., all could be contracted but are produced internally. If nothing else, households export labor – and capital goods such as the lawn mower and dishwasher enable that. Hans Rosling's TED Talk, "The Magic Washing Machine" (here) praises the liberating power of this capital good. We just moved from Ann Arbor to Austin. I have no idea how many fractional horsepower motors I packed – drills, sander, saber saws; mixer, blender. We have several computers networked here. I did not count the obsolete 5.25-inch diskettes I dumped. (My Carmen Sandiego and SimAnt were still pretty fresh.) The tax laws that allow businesses to write off obsolete capital do not apply to households, but they should.

"Households do not exist in an environment that could meaningfully be called competitive."
The Capulets and Montagues would disagree, as would the Rothschilds and Warburgs. They competed against each other and cooperated in joint ventures. Even the families that do not understand this at least must export labor. In that, they compete. 

The two axioms in bold come from a paper by Steven Horwitz and Peter Lewin, "Heterogeneous human capital, uncertainty, and the structure of plans: A market process approach to marriage and divorce," in The Review of Austrian Economics (2008; 21:1-21; available here.) The paper offers much to consider. It nonetheless repeated many of the basic flaws of academic economics, and did so from a middle American point of view. 

 It is true that the institution of marriage in modern America has changed over the past 100 years. However, the authors over-reached by ignoring the many folkways that define "family" and "family business" in other cultures. Dowery and bride price are real and functional economic considerations. In ancient China, a woman’s production of silk cloth was the creation of household savings – and she knew it. In rural America of the 19th-20th centuries, cash income from the sale of butter and eggs was the wife's own.

Feminists rightly pointed out that "women's work" i.e., housework is undervalued: washing, cooking, shopping, caring for children, cleaning, gardening, and all the other tasks are not income; and their costs of production are not tallied. Neither is "man's work." Mowing the lawn, cleaning the gutters, and the other chores are invisible to economists.

This reflects another error in academic economics: confusion about consumer goods and capital goods. Easily, capital goods are tools that are employed to create other goods or services. Of consumables, food is perhaps the paradigm. But food is also the primary capital good.

Capital goods such as machineries wear out; they are abandoned when obsolete.  Also, they can be reconfigured, recombined, or redeployed to other ends. A factory worker may require protective clothing, a capital good. But an office worker also requires special clothing. Yet, the prints and patterns, styles, fads, and fashions are not recognized for their productive power.

We all produce... and consume... The laws of economics are not to be ignored, no matter what convenient labels allow us to isolate actors and their actions.  Governments, businesses, and families are helpful concepts when considering markets, but they are not essentially different from each other in any economic sense.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

A Man's Home is His Market 

Capitalist Culture 

The Success of the WEIRD People 

Engines of Creation 

Entrepreneurship