Tag: world war ii

• Learning from the Spanish Flu

  

  “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” -Georg Hegel

  Back in March, I was reading everything I could find about COVID-19 and about pandemics. Eventually that tapered off. But this week I decided that it was time to go back and learn a lot more about the 1918 Spanish Flu.

  I’ve just ordered John M. Barry’s 2004 book called The Great Influenza. Bill Gates wrote about it over the summer — after he reread it — and said that it will teach you almost everything you need to know about the influenza. He also said that it’s never been more relevant.

  Despite happening over 100 years ago, there are no doubt lessons that we can learn from this great influenza. The most important being that leadership and honesty, of course, matter a great deal during a time of crisis.

  Barry also argues that the 1918 influenza was responsible for altering the flow of history. He makes the claim (convincingly according to Bill) that it was a contributing factor in the rise of Hitler and the start of World War II.

  So I’m looking forward to receiving my copy later this week. If you’d like to purchase your own, you can do that over here. And if you’ve already read it, please let me know what you thought in the comment section below.

  2020.11.03

• Tokyo’s kitchen cars (or food trucks)

  

  Click here for a short video (by Monocle) about Tokyo’s nascent “kitchen car”, or food truck, scene. (The soundtrack is fun.) Historically, street food stands, or “yatai,” have had a questionable reputation in Japan. They proliferated across the country following World War II when times were tough and food was being rationed. But as Tokyo prepared to host the 1964 Olympics, local governments began to clamp down on yatai. They were seen as unhygienic and a place for drunks to hang out. There may have also been a sense of shame around the country’s post-war struggles. Whatever the case may be, these new food trucks have — aided by technology — changed the way people eat on the street.

  2019.06.15

• Timeline of tall buildings completed in New York since 1908

  The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat recently published an interesting report called, New York: The Ultimate Skyscraper Laboratory.

  The money shot is this image here:

  

  It is a timeline of all tall buildings (over 100 meters) completed in New York since 1908 when the Singer Building was completed. At the time, but only for a year, that was the tallest building in the world.

  The gray bars represent the total number of buildings completed each year. And the colored dots represent specific completed buildings and their asset class (office, residential, mixed-use, hotel, and so on). It’s interesting to see the dips. During World War II, high-rise construction basically stopped.

  Check out the full report if you’d like to see a bigger version of the graph.

  2015.11.09

• The middle class myth — a conversation with Marc Andreessen

  New York Magazine recently published a really great conversation between Marc Andreessen and Kevin Rose. Marc cofounded Netscape way back when, and now runs a venture capital firm.

  In addition to technology, the conversation touches on a bunch of different topics such as why it’s beneficial to be an optimist and why change can be difficult for people to accept.

  But they also hit on a number of broader economic shifts, such as the replacement of labor by machines, and the rise and decline of industrial production in the US. Here’s a snippet on that latter point:

  You’ve described the middle class of the 20th century as a myth.

  There are two middle classes. There’s the historical middle class—which is the bourgeoisie—starting in the, like, 1600s. This was the businesspeople and the traders, the merchants, the butcher, the baker, the general-store manager, the guy who was going off to China to go get silk and bring it back. Businesspeople.

  But in the 1940s something really significant happened, which is we bombed the rest of the industrialized world. And so the industrial base of Germany was obliterated. Japan was reduced to rubble. The rest of Continental Europe was bombed. England was bombed. The industrial base of the world was bombed. The one major industrial country that wasn’t bombed was the United States. So the United States became the monopoly producer of industrial goods.

  The army bombed the American middle class into existence?

  It was an accident of history. We had a window of opportunity which we took full advantage of. We had this window from basically 1945 to 1966, 1968, in which we were basically running unopposed. In that window, all kinds of wonderful things happened. One of the things that happened was the rise of this new idea of the middle class, which there was no historical precedent for, which was college-level wages for high-school-level education. As long as there’s no competition, it’s all well and good. The minute the Japanese show up, the minute the Germans show up, it just all falls apart.

  Click here for the full conversation. It’s an interesting read.

  2014.10.23

• What are Boomers going to do with their suburban homes?

  The following chart represents births in the United States per 1,000 people. The segment in red demarcates the birth years between 1946 and 1964, which is generally considered to represent the Post-World War II population spike known as the Baby Boom. Besides this jump, we have for the most part been seeing declining birth rates.

  “US Birth Rates” by Saiarcot895. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.

  Given the magnitude of this population segment, demographers and others love to talk about the impact that this generation has had and will continue to have on society, particularly as many Baby Boomers now start to enter retirement.

  But arguably one of the most significant areas of impact could be the housing market. Today, I stumbled upon an interesting CityLab article from last year talking about “The Great Senior Sell-Off.” And it raises an important question: As Baby Boomers begin to sell off their large single-family homes in the suburbs, will there be enough people to buy them?

  For the most part, the next generation seems to still want a nice detached house in order to raise a family. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the numbers will match up. Because if you factor in generation size, buying power, and even small shifts in consumer preference (towards, say, urban centers), the equation may not balance.

  If this ends up being the case, I don’t think it’ll impact large, growing cities as much. I mean, most are operating today with severe supply deficits. Instead it’ll probably be the smaller, perhaps already declining cities, that feel it the most. And this will ultimately serve to reinforce the “spiky” world that we’re already seeing today.

  At least that’s my hunch.

  2014.09.03