Betts Macrae

[chris macrae]

Norman Macrae

16 results back to index

pages: 253 words: 80,074

The Man Who Invented the Computer by Jane Smiley

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Ents..., Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Bletchley Park, British Empire, c2.com, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, IBM and the Holocaust, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, machine translation, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Pierre-Simon Laplace, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

But in other ways, their lives could not have been more different. Von Neumann’s boyhood had been ferociously urban and cosmopolitan. In the Jewish community in Budapest, von Neumann had grown up in a period and in a place remarkable for prosperity, education, talent, and exposure to a world of ideas and sophistication. Norman Macrae, von Neumann’s biographer, relates that in the late nineteenth century, enterprising Jews from all over Russia and eastern Europe flocked to Budapest, where changes in the culture meant that they could get ahead in the professions, if not in government, faster than they could in other, more conservative parts of Europe.

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His specific task was to calculate at what elevation the detonation should take place in order to achieve the greatest possible destruction. Other Manhattan Project physicists, notably Leo Szilard, von Neumann’s slightly older compatriot, preferred an intimidating demonstration of the weapon, but von Neumann was willing to make a list of good targets—according to Norman Macrae, he was instrumental in steering the air force away from the Imperial Palace, but, according to Kati Marton, he thought the Japanese holy city of Kyoto was a good target (of course, the final targets were Hiroshima, a shipping center and supply depot, and Nagasaki, a ship-building center). Physicist Stanley Frankel, who performed many of the Manhattan Project calculations that predicted whether or not an atom bomb could be made to explode, and what would happen then, later said that von Neumann was aware of “On Computable Numbers” by 1942 or 1943 and made sure that Frankel studied it (Frankel went on to be a computer consultant after the war).

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Goldstine went up to the famous mathematician (whose lectures he had once attended) and introduced himself, but von Neumann got friendly only when Goldstine began to chat about his (highly classified) work on a computer. A month later, in August, von Neumann visited ENIAC in Philadelphia for the first time. Von Neumann may have been a famous genius, but according to Norman Macrae, Pres Eckert, then twenty-five, viewed von Neumann’s visit as a test—for von Neumann. Eckert said to Goldstine that he would find out if von Neumann was really the genius he was supposed to be “by his first question. If this was about the logical structure of the machine, he would believe in von Neumann.

pages: 476 words: 121,460

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Ents..., Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

Von Neumann’s interest in computing can be traced back to the 1930s.3 During his early work for the Army, he concluded that the calculations required to model explosions would quickly swell beyond the number-crunching abilities of contemporary desk calculators. Von Neumann predicted that ‘There was going to be an advance in computing machines that would have to work partly as the brain did,’ according to journalist Norman Macrae, and ‘such machines would become attached to all large systems such as telecommunication systems, electricity grids and big factories’. The Internet was conceived many times over before computers were linked together in the 1960s and ’70s to form the ARPANET. Had von Neumann’s interest in computing been catalysed by Turing during the war?

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Leonard, Robert, 2010, Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science, 1900–1960, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Levy, Steven, 1993, Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology, Vintage, New York. Lukacs, John, 1998, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture, Grove Press, New York. Macrae, Norman, 1992, John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence and Much More, Pantheon Books, New York. McDonald, John, 1950, Strategy in Poker, Business and War, W. W. Norton, New York. Musil, Robert, 1931–3, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Rowohlt Verlag, Berlin, English edition: 1997, The Man without Qualities, trans.

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Jammer, The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics. 54. Andrew Szanton, 1992, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner: As Told to Andrew Szanton, Springer, Berlin. 55. Accounts differ on this. Wigner says the von Neumanns arrived a day after him. Von Neumann’s biographer claims they arrived a week later (Norman Macrae, 1992, John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence and Much More, Pantheon Books, New York). 56. David N. Mermin, ‘Hidden Variables and the Two Theorems of John Bell’, Reviews of Modern Physics, 65 (1993), pp. 803–15. 57. This and much of what follows is from Elise Crull and Guido Bacciagaluppi (eds.), 2016, Grete Hermann: Between Physics and Philosophy, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York. 58.

pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

From the start therefore ‘Butskellism’ was also about the limits of consensus, and carried a tinge of political cowardice – putting off the raising of bank rate, large spending cuts, suppression of wage demands, or the floating of the pound. 172.He postulated that these high growth, high-tech industries had ‘very significantly higher marginal productivity per factor employed than the average of other industries’ so that it had become, in current conditions, ‘economically profitable to inflate marginal demand up to a distinctly higher point than it used to be’. Norman Macrae, Sunshades in October, London 1963, pp. 17, 25. 173.Ibid., p. 28. 174.‘Tyerman, Donald (1908–1981)’, Norman Macrae in ODNB. In governing, Labour might also abandon antiquated ideas about planning and nationalization: ‘The Domestic Choice’, 3 October 1964; ‘A Vote of No Confidence’, 10 October 1964. 175.Memorandum by Geoffrey Crowther, July 1964, Layton Papers, TCC. 176.Donald Tyerman, ‘Crowther and the Great Issues’, Encounter, May 1972. 177.Donald Tyerman, ‘As We Move: 1956–65,’ Economist, 17 April 1965. 7.

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Brian Beedham, ‘Islam and the West’, 6 August 1994; ‘Letters’, 3 September 1994. 138.‘1989, and All That’, 23 December 1989. 139.Ibid. 140.Brian Beedham, ‘As the Tanks Rumble Away’, 1 September 1990. 141.Brian Beedham, ‘A Better Way to Vote’, 11 September 1993. 142.Norman Macrae, ‘The Next Ages of Man’, 24 December 1988. 143.Norman Macrae, ‘Future Privatisations’, 21 December 1991. 144.Ibid., p. 19. 145.‘Future Privatisations’, 21 December 1991. 146.‘Mrs Thatcher’s Place in History’, 29 April, 1989. 147.‘Banks in Trouble: Sweaty Brows, Slippery Fingers’, 8 September 1990. 148.‘Time to Choose’, 31 October 1992; ‘Getting His Way’, 7 November 1992. 8.

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Not because the Minister of War and Russia’s naval attaché were having an affair with the same lady – ‘its rationalist and nonconformist tradition’ disbarred it from looking into these ‘salacious details’ – but because ‘a Prime Minister of Britain [was] about to be overthrown by a 21-year old trollop’.170 The choice of Scottish aristocrat Sir Alec Douglas-Home to succeed Macmillan did little to reverse the Conservatives’ slide. Finally, that year Norman Macrae, the paper’s economics editor, published Sunshades in October, an indictment of ‘stop-go economics’ under the Tories that joined a growing body of statistical research, political pamphlets, business and trade-union reports on the same theme. The thinking behind ‘stop-go’ began as a perfectly sane reaction to Labour’s disastrous record from 1945 to 1951, he argued, as excessive demand became a grave economic crisis.

pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

Like it or not, the corporate world will look more like the Googleplex than the Shell Center. 7 Entrepreneurs Unbound The greatest of the journo-gurus, by some distance, was a man of whom few readers will have heard. He was in his disheveled pomp when today’s journo-gurus were holding forth in their playpens. He also worked for a publication that cherishes its tradition of anonymity. Norman Macrae was a stalwart of The Economist for half a century: he joined the paper in 1946 and worked as deputy editor for twenty-three years, starting in 1965. Macrae kept the flame of freemarket thinking burning during the long night of collectivism. He constantly enlivened editorial meetings with proposals to allow Disneyworld to run Paris or move the British government from London to New York.

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., xv, 76, 258, 322 Bushnell, Candace, 129 Business Objects, 176 Business Week, xii, 29–30 Byrne, John, 306 Cadbury, Adrian, Sir, 297–298 California Management Review, 52 California Public Employees Retirement System (Calpers), 297 Calpers. See California Public Employees Retirement System Camden Property Trust, 163 Cameron, David, 329, 331 Capgemini, 52, 173 Capitalism, 41–42, 170, 292–298, 349. See also Macrae, Norman; Sloanism managerial, 337–339 model of, 32 shareholder, 292 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Schumpeter), 170, 245 Capital One, 377 Carnegie, Andrew, 174 Carruba, Frank, 258 Casnocha, Ben, 195 Castells, Manuel, 387 CBI. See Confederation of British Industry CEIBS. See Chinese European Business School CEO.

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See also Chief executive officer platform versus product, 264 Leading Minds (Gardner), 132 Leading the Revolution (Hamel), 11, 261 Leahy, Terry, 310 Leamer, Edward, 384–385 Leavitt, Harold, 166 Lecerf, Olivier, 258 Leeson, Nick, 165 Legislation Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, 280 Sarbanes-Oxley, 166, 297 Lehman Brothers, xv, 2, 11, 134, 149 Lennon, John, 195 Lessig, Lawrence, 156–157 Lev, Baruch, 366 Levine, Mark, 156 Levi Straus, 216 Levitt, Theodore, 88, 271 Lewis, John, 329 Lewis, Michael, 299 The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Friedman), 116 Li, Robin, 184–185 Liberation Management (Peters), 97 Life expectancy, 341 LifeSpring, 224 Li & Fung, 213, 224, 265 Light, Dean, 3 The Limited, 172 Limited Brands, 36 LinkedIn, 359 Linkner, Josh, 235, 239, 353 Linus, 157 Linux, 247 Lishui Economic Development Zone, 220–221 Litan, Robert, 173, 192 Live Life in Crescendo (Covey), 391 Local Motors, 242 Locked in the Cabinet (Reich), 128 Logos, 216, 244 London Business School, 11, 56, 61 The Long Tail (Anderson), 67–68, 121–122 Long-Term Capital Management, 364 Los Angeles Times, 76, 396 Lublin, Nancy, 48 M&A. See Mergers and acquisitions Ma, Jack, 185 MacArthur, Douglas, General, 4 Machiavelli, Niccoló, 146 Mackey, John, 262 Macrae, Norman, 169–171. See also Capitalism Macrowikinomics, 67 Macrowikinomics (Tapscott and Williams), 326–327 Madigan, Charles, xiii Mahindra, Anand, 230 Mahindra & Mahindra, 229 Make a Wish, 48 The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy (Stewart), xiii Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (Drucker), xi–xii Management theory boardroom and, 291–311 commitment, 21 contradictions and, 18–22 corporate-bashing films, 35 criticisms of, 16–17 culture and, 161–164 decentralization, 157–158 empowerment, 157–158 evolution of, 225–226 fads and, 14–15 humanistic, 20–21 importance of, 63–68 industry, 49–72 instincts and, 6–7 management by objectives, 85–86 “management by objectives,” 76 modern, 12–13 networking and, 161 niche markets and, 122 paradox, 8–9 planning, 251–268 pseudotheories, 16 reengineering, 29–48 renewal, 160–161 scientific, 20 site visits, 409–410 social responsibility and, 38 strategies, 251–268 success of, 111–139, 413 writing and, 15 Management Today, 70 Mangapati, Mallipudi Raju Pallam, 53 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 310 The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC), 65 Markides, Costas, 67 Marks & Spencer, 155, 264 Marlboro, 272 Marshall, Alfred, 22, 198, 278 Martin, Roger, 293–294 Martin Prosperity Institute, 130 Marx, Karl, 91, 92, 342–343, 347 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 175 Mattel, 274 Maxwell, Robert, 189 Mayo, Elton, 79 McCallum, Eden, 361 McCartney, Paul, 195 McDonald’s, 34, 66, 158, 272, 275, 283, 376, 404 McGill University, 13 McGregor, Douglas, 107 McKinsey, James O., 49–50 McKinsey & Company, 4, 10, 50, 253, 364 McKinsey Global Institute, 63, 265–266 McKinsey Quarterly, 10–11, 63–64 McNamara, Robert, 106, 253, 402–403 McNerney, James, 53, 299 Mead, Walter Russell, 136 Meckling, William, 292 Medtronic, 198 Memeorandum, 188 Mercedes-Benz, 209 Merck, 66 Mergers and acquisitions (M&A), 221 Meritocracy, 386–390 Merrill Lynch, 2, 11, 299 Messier, Jean-Marie, 298 Metro Cash and Carry, 217 Michaels, Ed, 365 Micklethwait, John, xviii, 17, 386, 413 Microsoft, 151, 172, 195, 205, 244, 383 Milken, Michael, 153–154 Mill, James, 376 Mill, John Stuart, 262, 376 Mindray, 213 Minnow, Nell, 297–298, 300 Mintzberg, Henry, 9, 13–14, 60, 253, 266, 307, 323, 332–333 MIT.Actually Making Us Smarter (Riverhead, 2006).

pages: 524 words: 120,182

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Ents..., Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

This group also included Leo Szilard, whom we heard about in chapter 3, the physicists Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Denis Gabor, and the mathematicians Paul Erdös, John Kemeny, and Peter Lax. Many people have speculated on the causes of this improbable cluster of incredible talent. But as related by von Neumann biographer Norman MacRae, “Five of Hungary’s six Nobel Prize winners were Jews born between 1875 and 1905, and one was asked why Hungary in his generation had brought forth so many geniuses. Nobel laureate Wigner replied that he did not understand the question. Hungary in that time had produced only one genius, Johnny von Neumann.”

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See linearity Lipson, Hod, 124 Lloyd, Seth, 95–96, 100–101 Locke, John, 3 logical depth, 100–101 Logic of Computers group, 127 logistic map, 27–33 bifurcation diagram for, 34 as example of idea model, 211 logistic model, 25–27 as example of idea model, 211 log-log plot, 261 Lohn, Jason, 142 Long Term Capital Management, 256–257 Lorenz, Edward, 22 Lovelock, James, 113 Lyell, Charles, 76–78 lymphocytes, 8–9, 172–176, 180–183. See also B cells; T cells MacRae, Norman, 125 macrophage, 9 macrostate, 49–51, 54, 101, 307 Macy foundation meetings, 295–297 majority classification task, 160–161 cellular automaton evolved for, 162–164, 171 Malthus, Thomas, 76 Mandelbrot, Benoit, 103, 271–272 master genes, 278–281 Mathematica, 154, 158 Matthew, Patrick, 78 Maturana, Humberto, 298 Maxwell, James Clerk, 20, 43–47 Maxwell’s demon, 43–47, 169 as example of idea model, 211 Maxwell’s equations, 43, 210 May, Robert, 28, 33, 219–220, 223 Mayr, Ernst, 87 McCulloch, Warren, 296–297 McShea, Daniel, 110, 288 Mead, Margaret, 296–297 meaning (in complex systems), 171, 184, 208 mechanics, classical, 19, 48 meiosis, 88–89 Mendel, Gregor, 79–81 ideas considered as opposed to Darwin’s, 81–82 Mendelian inheritance, 79–81, 89, 276 messenger RNA, 90–93, 122, 275 metabolic pathways, 178–179, 249 feedback in, 181–182 metabolic networks, 110, 229, 249–250, 254 metabolic rate, 258–262, 265–267 scaling of (see metabolic scaling theory) metabolic scaling theory, 264–266 controversy about, 267–269 as example of common principles in complex systems, 294–295 scope of, 266–267 metabolism, 79, 110, 116, 178–184, 249, information processing (or computation) in, 178–185 rate of, 258–262, 265–267 as requisite for life, 116 scaling of (see metabolic scaling theory) metanorms model, 219, 222–224 Metropolis, Nicholas, 28, 35–36 Michelson, Albert, ix microstate, 49–51, 54, 307 microworld, 191 letter-string, 191–193 Milgram, Stanley, 227–229 Millay, Edna St.

pages: 405 words: 121,531

Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini

Albert Einstein, attribution theory, bank run, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, desegregation, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Norman Macrae, Ralph Waldo Emerson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds

With further developments in telecommunications and computer technology, access to such staggering amounts of information is falling within the reach of individual citizens. Extensive cable and satellite systems provide one route for that information into the average home. The other major route is the personal computer. In 1972, Norman Macrae, an editor of The Economist, speculated prophetically about a time in the future: The prospect is, after all, that we are going to enter an age when any duffer sitting at a computer terminal in his laboratory or office or public library or home can delve through unimaginable increased mountains of information in mass-assembly data banks with mechanical powers of concentration and calculation that will be greater by a factor of tens of thousands than was ever available to the human brain of even an Einstein.

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Gordon, 41, 42 Liking cautions regarding, 170–172 compliments and, 149–151 conditioning for, 160–163 eating situations and, 164–165 familiarity and, 151–159 physical attractiveness and, 146–148 rule, 142–146 similarity and, 148–149 Lippmann, Walter, 97 Logrolling, 26 Louden, Robert, 229 Louie, Diane, 30 Low-ball technique, 84–85 research on, 85–86 socially beneficial uses of, 86–88 Luncheon technique, 164–165 Lussen, Frederick, 110 MacKenzie, Bob, 220 Macrae, Norman, 230, 231 Magruder, Jeb Stuart, 41, 42 Mars, Franklin, 163 Mauss, Marcel, 31 McGovern, George, 41 Medical profession and blind obedience, 181–182 reciprocity in, 28 status in, 186–188 Mexico, relations with Ethiopia, 20 Mihaly, Orestes, 206 Milgram, Stanley, 175 Milgram Experiment, 175–180 Mill, John Stuart, 230 Miller, John, 85 Millerites, 103 Mills, Judson, 78 Mimicry, 10–11 Mitchell, John, 41, 42 Modern automaticity, 230 as convenience, 231–232 information overload and, 230–231 overreliance on, 232 Montanists, 103 Morrow, Lance, 216 Muskie, Edmund, 41 Netherlands, relief efforts by, 21 Newcomb, Theodore, 53 Nicklaus, Jack, 93, 94 Nixon, Richard, 41 Obedience allures and dangers of, 180–184 connotation in, 184–191 defenses against, 191–195 experiments on, 175–176 power of, 176–180 O’Brien, Lawrence, 41 O’Connor, Robert, 101 Odors, emotional associations of, 165 Official censorship, 212 Packard, Vance, 28 Pain, social proof principle and, 100 Paralysis of analysis, 232 as convenience, 231–232 Patton, 219 Pavlov, Ivan, 163, 165 People’s Temple, 30 128–131 Perceptual contrast, 12–16, 40–41 and rejection-thenretreat, 42–43 Perestroika, 215 Personal computer, effects of, 230–231 Phillips, David, 122 Phobias, treatment of, 100–101 Physical attractiveness, influence of, 146–148 Player, Gary, 93 Pluralistic ignorance, 110 Politics, reciprocity in, 26–28 The Poseidon Adventure, 219 Pratkanis, Anthony, 94 Primitive automaticity, 2–3, 99, 228–229 in humans, 229–230 and perceptual and decisional narrowing, 229 Procter & Gamble, 217 Psychological reactance theory, 204 and adolescence, 206–207, 208 and adults, 207–210 and censorship, 210–213 and child development, 205–206 Public commitment, 71–73 Pyne, Joe, 228 Quayle, Dan, 182 Race relations desegregation and, 152–154 jigsaw classroom and, 156–157 scarcity principle and, 214–215 Razran, Gregory, 164 Real estate market perceptual contrast in, 14–16 scarcity principle and, 218 Reciprocity rule, 19–20 defenses against, 45–49 examples of, 20–21, 142, 164 free samples in, 28–31 function of, 22–23 to gain concessions, 35–37 obligations of, 31–33 in politics, 26–28 power of, 23–26 rejection of, 45–47 unequal exchange in, 33–35 violation of, 34 Regan, Dennis, 22 Rejection-then-retreat, 37–39 effectiveness of, 43–44 emotional effects of, 44–45 mutual satisfaction after, 45 and perceptual contrast, 42–43 Religion on obedience, 180–181 social proof principle and, 102–109 Restaurant waiters, tactics of, 193–195 Revolution, political, conditions for, 214 Revolutionary War, 214 Reynolds, Joshua, 54 Riecken, Henry, 103–107 Roberts, Cavett, 100 Romeo and Juliet effect, 207–208 Rosenthal, A.

Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Ents..., Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

From Alex Magoun at RCA to Willis Ware at RAND, and many other keepers of institutional memory in between—including the Annals of the History of Computing and the Charles Babbage Institute’s oral history collection—I am indebted to those who saved records that otherwise might not have been preserved. To a long list of historians and biographers—including William Aspray, Armand Borel, Alice Burks, Flo Conway, Jack Copeland, James Cortada, Martin Davis, Peter Galison, David Alan Grier, Rolf Herken, Andrew Hodges, Norman Macrae, Brian Randell, and Jim Siegelman—I owe more than is acknowledged here. All books owe their existence to previous books, but among the antecedents of this one should be singled out (in chronological order) Beatrice Stern’s History of the Institute for Advanced Study, 1930–1950 (1964), Herman Goldstine’s The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (1972), Nicholas Metropolis’s History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (1980), Andrew Hodges’s Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), Rolf Herken’s The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey (1988), and William Aspray’s John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (1990).

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Strauss, December 21, 1956, SUAPS. 30. Julian Bigelow to Jule Charney, January 18, 1957, JHB; Klára von Neumann, Johnny. 31. Memo on Funeral Arrangements for John von Neumann, February 11, 1957, IAS; Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician, p. 242. 32. Marston Morse to John von Neumann, n.d., quoted in Norman MacRae, John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence and Much More (New York: Pantheon, 1992), p. 379; Morris Rubinoff, interview with Richard Mertz. 33. Martin Davis, interview with author, October 4, 2005, GBD. 34. Julian Bigelow, interview with Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, October 30, 1999 (courtesy Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman). 35.

[chris macrae]

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The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond m..., junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

The three great pillars of postwar Britain—the Education Act, the National Insurance Act, and the National Health Service Act—bore the names of a Conservative (Butler), a Liberal (Beveridge), and a socialist (Bevan). When the Conservative Party returned to power in October 1951, it did nothing to roll back the welfare state, even though it was led by the supposedly reactionary Winston Churchill. The Economist’s Norman Macrae invented the word “Butskellism,” from the names of R. A. Butler and Hugh Gaitskell, to describe the consensus policies of the next thirty years. And so it was everywhere in Western Europe, as the idea of building a New Jerusalem blew across the channel. Between 1950 and 1973 government spending rose from 27.6 percent to 38.8 percent of GDP in France, from 30.4 percent to 42.0 percent in West Germany, from 26.8 percent to 45.0 percent in Britain, and from 34.2 percent to 41.5 percent in the Netherlands—all at a time when the domestic product was itself growing faster than ever before or since.10 The state lubricated the wheels of European life in every way imaginable.

…

., 120 Kristol, Irving, 87 Kroc, Ray, 185 Labour Party, British, 68, 69, 70, 77, 93, 94–95, 114 laissez-faire economics, 56, 57, 61, 65–66, 70, 71 Laski, Harold, 68, 134 Latin America: economies of, 8 entitlement reform in, 17, 206, 244 Lazzarini, Sergio, 153 Lee Hsien Loong, 135, 138 Lee Kuan Yew, 4, 17, 53, 133–34, 137, 139–41, 143, 144, 145, 147, 156, 170, 183, 244 authoritarianism of, 137, 138 small-government ideology of, 140, 165 Left, 62, 73, 88, 183 government bloat and, 10–11, 98 government efficiency and, 20, 187, 213 and growth of big government, 10, 98, 131, 175, 185, 228, 230, 231 subsidy-cutting and, 234, 237–38 Lehman Brothers, 14 Lenovo, 150 Le Pen, Marine, 259 Le Roy, Louis, 276 Leviathan, 10 Leviathan (Hobbes), 29, 32, 33, 34, 42 Leviathan, Monumenta 2011 (Kapoor), 34 Liberal Party, British, 68, 70 liberals, liberalism: and debate over size of government, 48, 49, 232 freedom as core tenet of, 69, 223–26, 232 right to happiness as tenet of, 48, 49 role of state as seen by, 21–22, 222–23, 226, 232 see also Left; liberal state liberal state, 6–7, 8, 220, 221 capitalism and, 50–54 competition and, 247 education in, 7, 48, 58–59 equality and, 69 expanded role of government in, 56–62 Founding Fathers and, 44–45, 222 freedom as ideological basis of, 69, 223–26, 232, 268 industrial revolution and, 246–47 meritocracy as principle of, 50, 52–53 protection of rights as primary role of, 45 rights of citizens expanded by, 7, 9, 48, 49, 51 rise of, 27–28, 269 small government as principle of, 48, 49, 51–52, 61, 232 libertarian Right, 82 liberty, see freedom Libya, 253 LifeSpring Hospitals, 202–3 Lincoln, Abraham, 62, 92 Lindahl, Mikael, 176 Lindgren, Astrid, 170 Lisbon, Treaty of (2007), 258 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 50 Liu Xiaobo, 166 Livingston, Ken, 217 Lloyd George, David, 62 lobbies, Congress and, 238–40, 257 Locke, John, 42, 43, 45 social contract and, 42, 222 Logic of Collective Action, The (Olson), 111 London School of Economics, 67, 74 Louis XIV, King of France, 38 Lowe, Robert, 58–59 L. V. Prasad Eye Institute, 204–5 Mac 400, 205 Macartney, George, 41 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 222, 224–26 McConnell, Mitch, 256 McDonald’s, 157, 185 McGregor, Richard, 151, 157 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 29, 33 McKinsey, 194–95, 204 Macmillan, Harold, 69 Macrae, Norman, 75 Madison, James, 265 Ma Hong, 158–59 majority, tyranny of, 226, 250, 255 management, reinvention of, 189–92 Mandela, Nelson, 252 Mandelson, Peter, 95 Manhattan Institute, 82 Mann, Thomas, 125–26, 227 Manning, Bradley, 230 Manor, Tex., 210 Man Versus the State, The (Spencer), 59 Mao Zedong, 151 Marshall, Alfred, 233 Marshall, T.H., 74 Martineau, Harriet, 54 Marx, Karl, 45, 62–63, 70 state as seen by, 63–64 Marxism, see Communists, communism Mary II, Queen of England, 43 Mary Barton (Gaskell), 57 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 54 means testing, 243, 245 Meat Inspection Act (U.S., 1906), 72 Medicaid, 242 Medicare, 120, 123, 242 Medisave, 243 mercantilism, 40 Merkel, Angela, 12, 16, 230, 231 Mettler, Suzanne, 121 micro-powers, 260, 266 middle class, 124 entitlements and, 11, 17 government spending and, 11 as primary beneficiary of welfare state, 122 welfare state and, 17, 88 Middle East: China and, 152 failure of democracy in, 253 local government in, 217 Miliband, Ed, 114, 153 Milken, Michael, 129 Mill, James, 47, 48–49, 53, 140 Mill, John Stuart, 7, 9, 21, 27–28, 69, 80, 85, 135, 136, 219, 251, 255 background of, 47 expanded role of government embraced by, 56–57 freedom as overriding concern of, 47–48, 55, 222, 224, 226, 228, 250, 256, 268 free trade promoted by, 55 intellectual freedom as tenet of, 55 meritocracy promoted by, 53, 237 as public intellectual, 47 Mindlab, 220 Mises, Ludwig von, 83 Mississippi, 111 Modi, Narendra, 218 Moïsi, Dominique, 166 money politics, 256–58 Montefiore Medical Center, 209 Monti, Mario, 259 Mont Pelerin Society, 83, 85 Moody’s, 119 Morrill Act (U.S., 1862), 62 Morsi, Mohamed, 253 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 89 Mubarak, Hosni, 144, 253 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 67 Mughal Empire, 36 Mulgan, Geoff, 132 Musacchio, Aldo, 153 Muslim Brotherhood, 144, 253 Mussolini, Benito, 252 Myrdal, Alva, 169, 170 Myrdal, Gunnar, 37, 169, 170 Naím, Moisés, 186, 260, 266 Nanjing, 35 Napoléon I, Emperor of the French, 46 Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital, Bangalore, 201 National Audit Office, British, 199 National Education Association, 114 National Front, French, 259 National Health Service, British, 62, 82, 109, 183, 199, 205 spending on, 130–31 National Health Service Act (British, 1948), 75 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), 243 National Insurance Act (British, 1946), 75 National Journal, 256 National Labor Relations Board, 73 national minimum, 68, 69 National Statistics Office, British, 19, 177 nation-state, 6, 8, 221 commerce and, 33 democracy and, 259, 262 globalization and, 259–60, 262 government efficiency in, 37 innovation and, 37, 39 legitimacy of, 33 local-government resistance to, 260 minimal welfare vote of, 33 representative institutions in, 38 rights of citizens in, 30, 43–44 rule of law in, 37–38 security as primary duty of, 29, 30, 32, 37, 39, 181, 222, 268 Navigation Acts, 50 Nazis, 71, 232 neoconservatives, 89 Netherlands, government spending in, 75 New Brutalism, 89 New Deal, 72, 82, 192, 236 New Digital Age, The (Schmidt and Cohen), 210–11 New Labourites, 94–95, 99 Newnham College, 58 New Republic, 71 New Statesman, 67 Newsweek, 86 New York Daily News, 227 New Zealand, 239 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 265 Nigeria, 234 night-watchman state, 7, 9, 48, 61, 80, 86, 101, 136, 140, 181, 232 1984 (Orwell), 71 Nixon, Richard, 77 Nobel Prize, 82, 86, 91 Nock, Albert Jay, 177 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), Chinese, 158 Northcote, Stafford, 52–53 Norway, 1990s financial crisis in, 176 Novey, Don, 112–13, 181 Nye, Joseph, 3, 198 Obama, Barack, 100, 126, 192, 236, 241, 255, 256 big-government ideology of, 98 health-care reforms of, 20, 98, 117, 199, 208, 217 pragmatism of, 98, 220 Obama administration, 220, 231 regulation and, 117 occupational legislation, 117–18 O’Donnell, Christine, 227–28 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), 186 Office of Social Innovation and Participation, U.S., 220 “Old Corruption,” 6, 49, 51, 58, 149, 185, 227, 256, 268, 269 Oldham, John, 195 Olivares, Count-Duke, 37 Olson, Mancur, 109–10, 111 Olson’s law, 111–15, 117, 124, 237 On Liberty (Mill), 55, 59, 69 Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper), 83 Open University, 180 opinion, freedom of, 224 Orban, Viktor, 254 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 186 Ornstein, Norman, 125–26, 227 Orwell, George, 71 Ottoman Empire, 35 Our Enemy, the State (Nock), 177 Packard, David, 105 Paine, Thomas, 21, 43–44 Pall, Niti, 206 Palme, Olof, 170, 175 Palo Alto, Calif., 105, 106 Papademos, Lucas, 259 Parag, Khanna, 218 Parliament, British, 31, 43 Party, The (McGregor), 151 Party for Freedom, Dutch, 259 patronage, 50, 52–53, 222, 237, 240 Paul, Ron, 34 payroll withholding tax, 82 Peace Corps, 216 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 38 Pearson, Karl, 68 Peel, Robert, 51, 54 pensions, 16, 267 Asian expansion of, 141–42 in Brazil, 18 in California, 113, 115, 119–20, 130 in China, 156, 183 defined-benefit vs. defined-contribution systems of, 184 as entitlements, 79, 184, 243 in Scandinavia, 171, 173, 184 spiking of, 184 as unfunded liabilities, 14, 119 People’s Action Party, Singapore, 134, 137–38 Peterson, Pete, 131 Peterson Foundation, 255 Peterson Institute for International Economics, 154 PetroChina, 152, 154, 155 Philippines, health insurance in, 141 Philippon, Thomas, 239 philosophical radicals, 48, 49, 85, 181 physician’s assistants, 204 Plato, 250, 255, 260, 264 pluralism, 211–14 police, technology and, 181–82 Political Economy (Mill), 57 political parties, declining membership in, 11, 261 politics: government bloat and, 10–11 money in, 256–58 polarization of, 11–13, 100, 124–27, 164, 255, 256 talent flight from, 127 Pomperipossa effect, 170 poor, poverty: failure of welfare state programs for, 87–89 public spending as biased against, 122–24 welfare state and, 68 Popper, Karl, 83 population: aging of, 15, 122–23, 124, 165, 174, 178, 183–84, 232, 241–42 urban shift of, 149, 218 Porter, Michael, 131 Portugal, public spending in, 99–100 Potter, Laurencina, 65–66 Potter, Richard, 65 Principles of Political Economy (Mill), 55 Pritchett, Lant, 147 private life, freedom of, 224 privatization, 8, 94, 96, 234–37 Procter & Gamble, 190 productivity, 178 Baumol’s disease and, 110 in public vs. private sectors, 18–20, 177, 285 state capitalism and, 154 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 148, 206–7 Progressive Party, 72 progressivism, 240 as self-defeating, 229–30 property rights, 40, 43, 224 Proposition 13, 91, 92, 107 Protestants, 38 public sector, 76, 89, 115, 177, 180 technology and, 180 Pudong, China, 1–5, 8 Pune, India, 218–19 Pure Food and Drug Act (U.S., 1906), 72 Putin, Vladimir, 144, 153, 253 Pythagorean theorem, 31 Qianlong, Emperor of China, 41 racism, 88 Rauch, Jonathan, 231 Reagan, Ronald, 8, 28, 88, 91–92, 97, 198 Friedman and, 86 small-government ideology of, 95 see also Thatcher-Reagan revolution reason, religion as opponent of, 48 Reform, 203 Reformation, 48–49 Reinfeldt, Fredrik, 184 religion: freedom of, 224 reason as opponent of, 48 rent control, 82 rent seeking, 239 “Report on Manufacturers” (Hamilton), 150 Republic, The (Plato), 250 Republican Party, U.S., 123, 236–37 increased taxes opposed by, 100, 255 tax rises approved by, 12 Reshef, Ariell, 239 retirement age, 184–85, 242 Reykjavik City Council, 261 Ricardo, David, 49 Richelieu, Cardinal, 37 Right, 82, 93 government bloat and, 10–11, 98 government efficiency and, 187 and growth of big government, 10, 95, 98, 228, 230–31 privatization and, 234, 236–37 welfare services opposed by, 88, 185 rights: Fourth Revolution and, 270 liberal state’s expansion of, 7, 48, 49, 51 in nation-state, 30, 43–44 of property, 40, 43, 224 protection of, as primary role of liberal state, 45 see also freedom Rights of Man, The (Paine), 44 Ripley, Amanda, 206–7 road pricing, 217 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 10, 83, 86 Rodrik, Dani, 262 Romney, Mitt, 217 “Roofs or Ceilings” (Friedman), 82 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 72–73, 252 Roosevelt, Theodore, 71–72, 258 rotten boroughs, 51, 125, 227, 251, 257, 269 see also gerrymandering Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 44, 45 Rousseff, Dilma, 153 Royal Society, 42 Rumsfeld, Donald, 77, 253 Russia, 71 China and, 152 corruption in, 186 failure of democracy in, 253, 262 privatization in, 96 Singapore model admired by, 144 state capitalism in, 153, 154 Russian Revolution, 45 Rwanda, 144 Sacramento, Calif., 105, 106, 127 Sahni, Nikhil, 200 St.