- Swanson, Gerald.
The Hyperinflation Survival Guide.
Lake Oswego, OR: Eric Englund, 1989.
ISBN 978-0-9741180-1-7.
-
In the 1980s, Harry E. Figgie, founder of Figgie International,
became concerned that the then-unprecedented deficits, national
debt, and trade imbalance might lead to recurrence of inflation,
eventual spiralling into catastrophic hyperinflation (defined in 1956
by economist Phillip Cagan as a 50% or more average rise in prices
per month, equivalent to an annual inflation rate of
12,875% or above). While there are a number of books on
how individuals and investors can best protect themselves
during an inflationary episode, Figgie found almost no guidance
for business owners and managers for strategies to enable their
enterprises to survive and make the best of the chaotic situation
which hyperinflation creates.
To remedy this lacuna, Figgie assembled a three person team
headed by the author, an economist at the University of
Arizona, and dispatched them to South America, where on
four visits over two years, they interviewed eighty business
leaders and managers, bankers, and accounting professionals
in Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil, all of which were in
the grip of calamitous inflation at the time, to discover
how they managed to survive and cope with the challenge of
prices which changed on a daily or even more frequent basis.
This short book (or long pamphlet—it's less than 100
pages all-up) is the result.
The inflation which Figgie feared for the 1990s did not come
to pass, but the wisdom Swanson and his colleagues collect
here is applicable to any epoch of runaway inflation, wherever
in the world and whenever it may eventuate. With money
creation and debt today surpassing anything in the human
experience, and the world's reserve currency being supported
only by the willingness of other nations to lend to the
United States, one certainly cannot rule out hyperinflation as
a possible consequence when all of this paper money works its
way through the economy and starts to bid up prices. Consequently,
any business owner would be well advised to invest the modest
time it takes to read this book and ponder how the advice herein,
not based upon academic theorising but rather the actual experience
of managers in countries suffering hyperinflation and whose
enterprises managed to survive it, could be applied to the
circumstances of their own business.
If you didn't live through, or have forgotten, the relatively
mild (by these standards) inflation of the 1970s, this book
drives home how fundamentally corrupting inflation is.
Inflation is, after all, nothing other than the corruption by
a national government of the currency it issues, and this
corruption sullies everybody who transacts in
that currency. Long term business planning goes out the
window: “long term” comes to mean a week or two
and “short term” today. Sound business practices
such as minimising inventory and just in time manufacturing
become suicidal when inventory appreciates more rapidly
than money placed at interest. Management controls and the
chain of command evaporate as purchasing managers must be
delegated the authority to make verbal deals on the spot, paid
in cash, to obtain the supplies the company needs at prices
that won't bankrupt it. If wage and price controls are imposed
by the government (as they always are, despite
forty centuries of evidence they
never work), more and more management resources must be
diverted to gaming the system to retain workforce and
sell products at a profitable price. Previously mundane
areas of the business: purchasing and treasury, become central
to the firm's survival, and speculation in raw materials and
financial assets may become more profitable than the actual
operations of the company. Finally (and the book dances around
this a bit without ever saying it quite so baldly as I shall
here), there's the flat-out corruption when the only option a
business has to keep its doors open and its workers employed
may be to buy or sell on the black market, evade wage and price
controls by off-the-books transactions, and greasing the skids of
government agencies with bulging envelopes of rapidly depreciating
currency passed under the table to their functionaries.
Any senior manager, from the owner of a small business to
the CEO of a multinational, who deems hyperinflation a possible
outcome of the current financial turbulence, would be well advised
to read this book. Although published twenty years ago, the
pathology of inflation is perennial, and none of the advice is
dated in any way. Indeed, as businesses have downsized, outsourced,
and become more dependent upon suppliers around the globe, they
are increasingly vulnerable to inflation of their home country currency.
I'll wager almost every CEO who spends the time
to read this book will spend the money to buy copies for all of
his direct reports.
When this book was originally published by Figgie International,
permission to republish any part or the entire book was granted
to anybody as long as the original attribution was retained.
If you look around on the Web, you'll find several copies of
this book in various formats, none of which I'd consider ideal,
but which at least permit you to sample the contents before ordering
a print edition.
- Keegan. John.
The Face of Battle.
New York: Penguin, 1976.
ISBN 978-0-14-004897-1.
-
As the author, a distinguished military historian, observes
in the extended introduction, the topic of much of military
history is battles, but only rarely do historians delve into
the experience of battle itself—instead they treat
the chaotic and sanguinary events on the battlefield as
a kind of choreography or chess game, with commanders
moving pieces on a board. But what do those pieces, living
human beings in the killing zone, actually endure in battle?
What motivates them to advance in the face of the enemy or,
on the other hand, turn and run away? What do they see
and hear? What wounds do they suffer, and what are their
most common cause, and how are the wounded treated during
and after the battle? How do the various military specialities:
infantry, cavalry, artillery, and armour, combat one another, and
how can they be used together to achieve victory?
To answer these questions, the author examines three epic
battles of their respective ages:
Agincourt,
Waterloo,
and the first day of the
Somme
Offensive. Each battle is described in painstaking detail,
not from that of the commanders, but the combatants on the
field. Modern analysis of the weapons employed and the injuries
they inflict is used to reconstruct the casualties suffered and
their consequences for the victims. Although spanning almost five
centuries, all of these battles took place in northwest Europe
between European armies, and allow holding cultural influences
constant (although, of course, evolving over time) as expansion
of state authority and technology increased the size and
lethality of the battlefield by orders of magnitude. (Henry's
entire army at Agincourt numbered less than 6,000 and suffered
112 deaths during the battle, while on the first day of the Somme,
British forces alone lost 57,470 men, with 19,240 killed.)
The experiences of some combatants in these set piece battles
are so alien to normal human life that it is difficult to imagine
how they were endured. Consider the Inniskilling Regiment,
which arrived at Waterloo after the battle was already underway.
Ordered by Wellington to occupy a position in the line, they
stood there in static formation for four hours,
while receiving cannon fire from French artillery several hundred
yards away. During those hours, 450 of the regiment's 750 officers
and men were killed and wounded, including 17 of the 18 officers.
The same regiment, a century later, suffered devastating losses
in a futile assault on the first day of the Somme.
Battles are decided when the intolerable becomes truly
unendurable, and armies dissolve into the crowds from which
they were formed. The author examines this threshold in
various circumstances, and what happens when it is crossed
and cohesion is lost. In a concluding chapter he explores
how modern mechanised warfare (recall that when this book
was published the threat of a Soviet thrust into Western
Europe with tanks and tactical nuclear weapons was taken
with deadly seriousness by NATO strategists) may have so
isolated the combatants from one another and subjected
them to such a level of lethality that armies might
disintegrate within days of the outbreak of hostilities.
Fortunately, we never got to see whether this was correct,
and hopefully we never will.
I read the Kindle edition using the
iPhone Kindle
application.
It appears to have been created by OCR scanning a printed copy of the book
and passing it through a spelling checker, but with no further
editing. Unsurprisingly, the errors one is accustomed to in scanned
documents abound. The word “modern”, for example, appears
more than dozen times as “modem”. Now I suppose
cybercommand does engage in “modem warfare”, but this is
not what the author means to say. The Kindle edition costs only a
dollar less than the paperback print edition, and such slapdash
production values are unworthy of a publisher with the reputation of
Penguin.
- O'Rourke, P. J.
Driving Like Crazy.
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-8021-1883-7.
-
Sex, drugs, fast cars, crazed drivers, vehicular mayhem spanning the
globe from Manhattan to Kyrgyzstan, and vehicles to die for (or in)
ranging from Fangio's 1939 Chevrolet racer to a six-wheel-drive Soviet
Zil truck—what's not to like! Humorist and eternally young
speed demon P. J. O'Rourke recounts the adventures of his reckless
youth and (mostly) wreckless present from the perspective of
someone who once owned a 1960 MGA (disclaimer: I once owned a 1966 MGB
I named “Crunderthush”—Keith Laumer fans will
understand why) and, decades later, actually, seriously contemplated
buying a minivan (got better).
This collection of O'Rourke's automotive journalism has been
extensively edited to remove irrelevant details and place each
piece in context. His retrospective on the classic
National Lampoon piece (included here) whose title
is a bit too edgy for our family audience is worth the price of
purchase all by itself. Ever wanted to drive across the Indian
subcontinent flat-out? The account here will help you avoid
that particular resolution of your mid-life crisis. (Hint: think
“end of life crisis”—Whoa!)
You don't need to be a gearhead to enjoy this book. O'Rourke
isn't remotely a gearhead himself: he just likes to drive fast on
insane roads in marvellous machinery, and even if your own
preference is to experience such joys vicariously, there are
plenty of white knuckle road trips and great flatbeds full of
laughs in this delightful read.
A podcast
interview with the author is available.
- Maymin, Zak.
Publicani.
Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2008.
ISBN 978-1-4382-2123-6.
-
I bought this book based on its being mentioned on a weblog as
being a mix of
Atlas Shrugged
and
“Harrison Bergeron”,
and the mostly positive reviews on Amazon. Since both of those very different
stories contributed powerfully to my present worldview, I was intrigued
at what a synthesis of them might be like, so I decided to give this very
short (just 218 pages in the print edition) novel a read.
Jerry Pournelle has written
that aspiring novelists need to
write at
least a million words and
throw them away before truly mastering their craft. I know nothing of
the present author, but I suspect he hasn't yet reached that megaword
milestone. There is promise here, and some compelling scenes and
dialogue, but there is also the tendency to try to do too much in too
few pages, and a chaotic sense of timing where you're never sure
how much time has elapsed between events and how so much could occur
on one timeline while another seems barely to have advanced. This
is a story which could have been much better with
the attention of an experienced editor, but in our outsourced, just-in-time,
disintermediated economy, evidently didn't receive it, and hence the
result is ultimately disappointing.
The potential of this story is great: a metaphorical exploration of the
modern redistributive coercive state through a dystopia in which
the “excess intelligence” of those favoured by birth
is redistributed to the government elites most in need of it
for “the good of society”. (Because, as has always been
the case, politicians tend to be underendowed when it comes to
intelligence.) Those subjected to the “redistribution”
of their intelligence rebel, claiming “I own myself”—the
single most liberating statement a free human can hurl against the
enslaving state. And the acute reader comes to see how any
redistribution is ultimately a forced taking of the mind, body, or labour of
one person for the benefit of another who did not earn it: compassion at
the point of a gun—the signature of the the modern state.
Unfortunately, this crystal clear message is largely lost among
all of the other stuff the author tries to cram in. There's
Jewish mysticism,
the Kabbalah,
an
Essene
secret society, the
Russian Mafia,
parapsychology,
miraculous intervention, and guns with something called a
“safety clip”, which I've never encountered
on any of the myriad of guns I've discharged downrange.
The basic premise of intelligence being some kind of neural
energy fluid one can suck from one brain and transfer to another
is kind of silly, but I'd have been willing to accept it as
a metaphor for sucking out the life of the mind from the
creators to benefit not the consumers (it's never that way),
but rather the rulers and looters. And if this book had done
that, I'd have considered it a worthy addition to the literature
of liberty. But, puh–leez, don't drop in a
paragraph like:
Suddenly, a fiery chariot drawn by fiery horses
descended from the sky. Sarah was driving. Urim and Thummim
were shining on her breastplate of judgment.
Look, I've been backed into corners in stories myself on many occasions,
and every time the fiery chariot option appears the best way out,
I've found it best to get a good night's sleep and have another go at
it on the morrow. Perhaps you have to write and discard a million words
before achieving that perspective.
- MacKenzie, Andrew.
Adventures in Time.
London: Athlone Press, 1997.
ISBN 978-0-485-82001-0.
-
You are taking a pleasant walk when
suddenly and without apparent reason an oppressive feeling of
depression grips you. Everything seems unnaturally silent, and even
the vegetation seems to have taken on different colours. You observe a
house you've never noticed before when walking in the area and, a
few minutes later, as you proceed, the depression lifts and everything
seems as before. Later you mention what you've seen to a friend, who
says she is absolutely certain nothing like the building you saw
exists in the vicinity. Later, you retrace your path, and although
you're sure you came the same way as before, you can find no trace
of the house you so vividly remember having seen. Initially you
just put it down as “just one of those things”, and not
wishing to be deemed one of those people who “sees things”,
make no mention of it. But still, it itches in the back of your mind,
and one day, at the library, you look up historical records (which
you've never consulted before) and discover that two hundred years ago
on the site stood a house matching the one you saw, of which no trace
remains today.
What's going on here? Well, nobody really has any idea, but experiences
like that just described (loosely based upon the case described on
pp. 35–38), although among the rarest of those phenomena
we throw into the grab-bag called “paranormal”, have been
reported sufficiently frequently to have been given a name:
“retrocognition”. This small (143 page) book collects
a number of accounts of apparent retrocognition from the obscure to
the celebrated “adventure” of Misses Moberly and Jourdain
at
Versailles in 1901
(to which all of chapter 4 is devoted), and
reports on detailed investigations of several cases, some of which
were found to be simple misperception. All of these cases are based
solely upon the reports of those who experienced them (in some cases
with multiple observers confirming one another's perceptions) so,
as with much of anecdotal psychical research, there is no way to rule
out fraud, malice, mental illness, or false memories (the latter a
concern because many of these reports concern events which occurred
many years earlier). Still, the credentials, reputation, and social
position of the people making these reports, and the straightforward
and articulate way they describe what they experienced inclines one to
take them seriously, at least as to what those making the reports
perceived.
The author, at the time a Vice President of the
Society for Psychical Research,
considers several possible explanations, normal and paranormal,
for these extraordinary experiences. He quotes a number of
physicists on the enigma of time and causation in physics, but
never really crosses the threshold from the usual domain of
ESP, hauntings, and “psychic ether” (p. 126) to
consider the even weirder possibility that these observers were
accurately describing (within the well-known limits of eyewitness testimony)
what they actually saw. My incompletely baked
general theory of paranormal phenomena (GTPP)
provides (once you accept its outlandish [to some] premises) a
perfectly straightforward mechanism for retrocognition. Recall
that in GTPP consciousness is thought of as a “browser”
which perceives spacetime as unfolding through one path in the multiverse
which embodies all possibilities. GTPP posits that consciousness
has a very small (probably linked to Planck's constant in some way)
ability to navigate along its path in spacetime: we call
people who are good at this “lucky”. But let's look
at the past half-space of what I call the “life cone”.
The quantum potentialities of the future, branching in all their myriad ways,
are frozen in the crystalline classical
block
universe as they are squeezed through the throat of the light
cone—as Dyson said, the future is quantum mechanical; the past
is classical. But this isn't “eternalism” in the sense that the
future is forever fixed and that we have an illusion of free will; it's that
the future contains all possibilities, and that we have a small
ability to navigate into the future branch we wish to explore. Our past is,
however, fixed once it's moved into our past light and life cones.
But who's to say that consciousness, this magnificent instrument of perception
we use to browse spacetime events in our immediate vicinity and at the
moment of the present of our life cone, cannot also, on rare occasions,
triggered by who knows what, also browse events in our past, or even on
other branches of the multiverse which our own individual past did
not traverse? (The latter, perhaps, explaining vivid reports of observations
which subsequent investigation conclusively determined never existed
in the past—on our timeline.
Friar Ockham would
probably put this down to hallucination or, in the argot, “seein' things”,
and I don't disagree with this interpretation; it's the historically confirmed
cases that make you wonder.)
This book sat on my shelf for more than a decade before I got around
to reading it from cover to cover. It is now out of print, and
used copies are absurdly expensive; if you're interested in such
matters, the present volume is interesting, but I cannot recommend
it at the price at which it's currently selling unless you've
experienced such a singular event yourself and seek validation that
you're not the only one who “sees things”
where your consciousness seems to browse the
crystalline past or paths not taken by you in the multiverse.