Unreasonable nature

At the entrance to the Franklin Park Zoo, in Boston. For decades it was a terrible place for animals but has been much improved in the last quarter century.

“The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner. The psalmist did not distinguish himself as an acute observer when he wrote: ‘I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.’ The tyranny of what seems reasonable often impedes science. Who before Einstein would have believed that the mass and aging of an object could be affected by its velocity near the speed of light?’’

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, historian of science and Harvard professor, in The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History.

Giant Panda.

Looking at the Hub

“The Zakim {Bridge, across the Charles River}, a grand crossing” (photo), by Newton-based photographer and printer Vicki McKenna, in the group show organized by Fountain Street Gallery (Boston) entitled“Regarding Boston,’’ at Boston City Hall through June 26.

The gallery says:

“‘Regarding Boston’ features seven Fountain Street Gallery artists and multiple meanings of the word ‘regarding’ – to look at, to be about, to hold in high esteem. Curated by Melissa Shaak, the exhibition highlights Bostonians and Boston cityscapes, locations of note, and iconic sculptural details. The work assembled here portrays a vibrant and multi-faceted view of this beloved city.”

Sam Pizzigati: Keeping workers poor is bad for business

1917 caricature

Via OtherWords.org

BOSTON

CEOs at America’s biggest low-wage employers now take home, on average, 670 times what their typical workers make.

But we don’t just get unfairness when a boss can grab more in a year than a worker could make in over six centuries. We get bungling and inefficient businesses.

Management science has been clear on this point for generations, ever since the days of the late Peter Drucker.

Management theorists credit Drucker, a refugee from Nazism in the 1930s, for laying down “the foundations of management as a scientific discipline.” Drucker’s classic 1946 study of General Motors established him as the nation’s foremost authority on corporate effectiveness.

That effectiveness, Drucker believed, had to rest on fairness.

Corporations that compensate their CEOs at rates far outpacing average worker pay create cultures where organizational excellence can never take root. These corporations create ever bigger bureaucracies, with endless layers of management that serve only to prop up huge paychecks at the top.

Drucker argued that no executive should make more than 25 times what their workers earn. And, in the two decades after World War II, America’s leading corporate chiefs by and large accepted Drucker’s perspective.

Their companies shared the wealth when they bargained with the strong unions of the postwar years. In fact, notes the Economic Policy Institute, major U.S. corporate CEOs in 1965 were only realizing 21 times the pay their workers were pocketing.

Drucker died in 2005 at 95. He lived long enough to see Corporate America make a mockery of his 25-to-1 standard. But research since his death has consistently reaffirmed his take on the negative impact of wide CEO-worker pay differentials.

The just-released 28th annual edition of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Executive Excess report explores these wide differentials in eye-opening detail. The report zeroes in on the 300 major U.S. corporations that pay their median workers the least.

At these 300 firms, average CEO pay last year jumped to $10.6 million, some 670 times their $24,000 median worker pay.

At over 100 of these firms, worker pay didn’t even keep with inflation. And at most of those companies, executives wasted millions buying back their own stock instead of giving workers a raise.

Just as Drucker predicted, this unfairness has led directly to performance issues. Many of our nation’s most unequal companies, from Amazon to federal call-center contractor Maximus, have seen repeated walkouts and protests from justifiably aggrieved workers.

Lawmakers in Congress, the Institute for Policy Studies points out, could be taking concrete steps to rein in extreme pay disparities. They could, for instance, raise taxes on corporations with outrageously wide pay gaps.

But with this Congress unlikely to act, the new Institute for Policy Studies report also highlights a promising move the Biden administration could take on its own. The administration could start using executive action “to give corporations with narrow pay ratios preferential treatment in government contracting.”

That would amount to a major step forward, since 40 percent of our largest low-wage employers hold federal contracts. If the Biden administration denied lucrative government contracts to companies with pay gaps over 100 to 1, those low-wage firms would have a powerful incentive to pay workers more fairly.

Various federal programs already offer a leg up in contracting to targeted groups, typically small businesses owned by women, disabled veterans, and minorities.

“Using public procurement to address extreme disparities within large corporations,” the IPS report adds, “would be a step towards the same general objective.”

And a step in that direction, as Peter Drucker told Wall Street Journal readers back in 1977, would honor the great achievement of American business in the middle of the 20th Century: “the steady narrowing of the income gap between the ‘big boss’ and the ‘working man.

Sam Pizzigati, based in Boston, co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.

Toss the cigarette and tee off

The Country Club in 1913.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The men’s U.S. Open golf tournament will be held June 16-June 19 at The Country Club, in Brookline, Mass. -- the first golf club in America to be called a “country club’’ (and for a long time known for its bigotry against some ethnic and religious groups and the dominance of Boston Brahmins).

The club was founded in 1882 but the golf course was not built until 1893.

I well remember being taken there by my father for the U.S. Open on June 20-23,1963, won by Julius Boros, who beat  Jacky Cupit and Arnold Palmer in an 18-hole playoff. (No, we were not members!) The drama was delightful but it sure was hot. Watching Palmer, who was funny and charming, was great fun. (I had dinner with him and a couple of other folks at the opening of Walt Disney World in 1971.) I remember Palmer teeing off after throwing his cigarette on the ground. A more relaxed time.

Although golf courses can be environmental disasters – most are laden with chemical fertilizers and pesticides --  they can be very beautiful, which for me was more of a lure than the sport of chasing a tiny and very hard ball around 18 holes. I sometimes wish I had taken some more lessons from my father, with whom I played a few times. But I was off at school and then working in cities most of the time, and it’s a very expensive sport.

My father was a fine player, and won some tournaments, the last on the Massachusetts North Shore shortly before he dropped dead of a heart attack. After his memorial service, one of his friends said with a sigh: “He had a sweet swing.’’

The world goes its own way

Thetford, Vt., in 1912.

“Most people believe ….that any problem in the world can be solved if you know enough; Vermonters know better.’’

— John Gardner (1933-1982) in his novel October Light, set in rural Vermont.

Mid-century motifs

Susan Morrison-Dyke: “Blue Tent” (oil collage on museum board), by Boston-based Susan Morrison-Dyke, in her show “Modern Artifacts,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, through June 26.

The gallery says her paintings are “inspired by mid-century modern design, inflected with Americana such as game boards and amusement parks’’.

At Riverside Park (1912-1995) Agawam, Mass., in the ‘40’s. It’s now part of Six Flags New England.

Video: Girding for big impacts from global warming in and along the Gulf of Maine

Lobster boat in Portland Harbor marina. The Maine lobster industry is threatened by the warming of the Gulf of Maine.

— Photo by Bd2media

Hit this for video about the Maine Coast facing big changes because of climate change. And hit this link about the expansion of aquaculture in Maine.

“The Maine Coast’’ (1896), by Winslow Homer.

Boston won’t pause for an audit

Part of Boston skyline from Cambridge.

“Yet Boston has never lost her universal supremacy for being independent in character, original in enterprise, unwilling to follow whenever she is reasonably equipped to lead. If she has surrendered any of her intellectual heritage, she is still too occupied in serving the humanities and human beings to pause for an audit.”

—David McCord, poet and education fundraiser (1897-1997)

The main Boston Public Library building, on Copley Square. Designed by Charles McKim, it was opened in 1895.

— Photo by Daniel Schwen

Reading Room in 1871 at the library’s first building, on Boylston Street, its location between 1858 and 1895.

David Warsh: Putin, Czar Peter and RealLifeLore

Portrait of Peter the Great, possibly by J.M. Nattier, in the Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, named, of course, after that czar.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.
It is becoming clear to dispassionate observers that, after surprising successes in its defense of Kyiv, Ukraine is losing hope that its troops can reverse gains that Russia has made in the east of the nation. A three-correspondent team yesterday put it this way in The Washington Post:

“[T]he overall trajectory of the war has unmistakably shifted away from one of unexpectedly dismal Russian failures and tilted in favor of Russia as the demonstrably stronger force.’’

In a speech June 9 to Russian entrepreneurs in St, Petersburg, marking the 350th anniversary of the birth of Czar Peter the Great, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared his invasion of Ukraine to Peter’s Great Northern War. That twenty-one-year-long series of campaigns, little remembered outside the Baltic nations, Russia, and Ukraine, began when Peter recruited Denmark and Norway as allies to test the newly crowned fifteen-year-old King of Sweden, Charles XII (sometimes called Karl XII).

Charles’s army defeated Russian forces three times its size at Narva, in 1700, and for a time Peter retreated, and began construction of St. Petersburg in 1703.  But in 1709, as the over-confident Swedish king marched his army towards Moscow, via Ukraine, Peter’s forces crushed the Swedes in the battle of Poltava, effectively ending the short-lived Swedish Empire, and, as Peter the Great declared, laying the final stone in the foundations of St Petersburg and the Russian Empire. In the decade to come, Peter took possession of much of Finland and the northeastern shores of the Baltic.

“What was [Peter] doing?” Putin asked his audience Thursday, according to the Associated Press. “Taking back and reinforcing. That’s what he did. And it looks like it fell on us to take back and reinforce as well.”

Peter’s war in the Baltic was about gaining access to Europe. Putin’s war in Ukraine is about retaining access to European energy markets. It has been clear all along that the Russian invasion was about the possession of oil and gas resources and their transport.  But the details are hard to explain.

My own path to the story followed the work of Marshal Goldman, of Wellesley College and Harvard Russian Research Center, who narrated Russian history after 1972 in a series of lucid books, culminating in Petrostate: Putin, Power and the New Russia (2008). But Goldman died in 2017. That left the field to Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, both of the Brookings Institution, authors of The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, and Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. Hill became well-known as an adviser to President Trump at the end of his term. Last week Gideon Rachman, chief foreign-affairs commentator for the Financial Times, interviewed historian Daniel Yergin to good effect in an FT podcast (s subscription may be required) .

But it turns out that the best forty minutes you can spend on the war, that is, if you have forty minutes to spend, is Russia’s Catastrophic Oil & Gas Problem, a new episode of a strange new independently produced series called RealLifeLore. Production values are striking. So is the relative lack of spin. Only the narrator’s forceful delivery wears thin, though his pronunciation of place names seems impeccable. . .

The provenance of the program itself is somewhat unclear. The YouTube link came to me from a trusted old friend; she got it from Illinois Rep. Bill Foster, the only nuclear physicist currently serving in Congress.

CuriosityStream, which carries the RealLifeLore series, is an American media company and subscription video streaming service that offers documentary programming including films, series, and TV shows. It was launched in 2015 by the founder of the Discovery Channel, John S. Hendricks. RealLifeLores’s producer, Sam Denby, is an entrepreneur best known for creating,via Wendover Productions, several edutainment YouTube channels, including Half as Interesting; Extremities; and Jet Lag, The Game. I look forward to learning more about Denby as Wikipedia goes to work and streaming networks and newspapers tune in.

I don’t know what more to say except to recommend that you watch it. It skews slightly optimistic towards the end. The Great Northern War doesn’t come into it.  That’s my department, as is the is the opportunity to occasionally marvel at  the yeastiness of the  enterprise economy of the West, not “free” exactly, but far less clumsily guided than the system that Vladimir Putin is trying to control.

The moral of the story: Putin’s war aims are grimly realistic. Those of NATO in support of Ukraine are not. The invasion was wrong, and probably a colossal mistake, even if Russia winds up taking possession of some or all of its neighbor.  Putin’s “special military operation” in the 21st Century is the opposite of Peter’s Great Northern War in the early 18th Century. Russia will suffer for decades for his folly.

                                           xxx

Dale W. Jorgenson, of Harvard University, died June 8 in Cambridge, Mass., of complications arising from long-lasting Corona virus infection.  He was 89. An excellent Wall Street Journal obituary is here.

Awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 1971, Jorgenson was among the founders of modern growth accounting, a major force in the rejuvenation of Harvard’s Department of Economics, and, as John Fernald put it in a recently-prepared intellectual biography, attentive, supportive, warm, and kind, beneath an unfailing veneer of formality.

A memorial service is planned for the autumn.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column originated.

At least in your memory

“About a White House” (oil on panel), by Tracy Everly, at Edgewater Gallery, Middlebury, Vt.

Insurrection art

“Capitol Offense” (acylic and charcoal on blackout fabric), by Barnstable (Mass.) Village-based Jackie Reeves at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass.

Myles Standish Monument, in Duxbury.

In Barnstable Village, on Cape Cod’s “Quiet Side’’

Clicking syllables

Lafayette Street in Salem, Mass. An example of the '‘high-tunneled effects’' of the American elm (Ulmus americana) once common in New England towns and cities (colorized postcard, 1910) before Dutch elm disease ravaged these beautiful trees.

— Photo by Mlane78212

“Your grandfather and I rode bikes through
an alley of trees and called their names
to each other, Latin spindling into the wind—
            Acer saccharum
                        Betula populifolia
            Pinus strobus
Syllables clicked from our mouths
like baseball cards clothes-pinned
to the bikes’ bright spokes….’’

— From “On the Day Before You Were Born,’’ by New Hampshire poet and teacher Lin Illingworth

Overcoming nature

Bullough's Pond, in Newton, Mass.

— Photo by John Phelan

“Yankee wealth is the creation of human hands, not of nature. Our soil is thin, our weather cold, and the mineral resources that lie under our mountains are negligible. Yet the people who live here are and have long been prosperous….Over and over again people in this small corner of the planet have faced disaster in the forms of economic collapse or resource dearth and overcome the odds.”

— Diana Muir in her book Reflections in Bullough’s Pond, a mill pond in Newton, Mass.

Lunar exploration

“A Different Dawn” (encaustic) by Boston-based painter Deniz Ozan George, in her show “Wax and Wane…Ebb and Flow,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, July 1-31.

She says:

"‘Wax and Wane... Ebb and Flow’ is a personal exploration of the magical and enduring presence of the moon through its many phases, its pull on the oceans' tides and its effect on the life cycles of all living things.

“These mysteries are expressed through the medium of encaustic wax painting and Japanese nihonga-inspired mineral pigment distemper painting.’’

The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world.

The Maria Mitchell Observatory on Nantucket was founded in 1908 and named in honor of Maria Mitchell, the first American woman astronomer. The observatory consists of two observatories - the main Maria Mitchell Observatory near downtown Nantucket and the Loines Observatory (in photo), west of downtown.

Milestones to headstones

James Russell Lowell’s gravestone in Mount Auburn Cemetery, on the Cambridge-Watertown line.

As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new, and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
'Neath every one a friend.

"Sixty-Eighth Birthday,’’ by James Russell Lowell (1819-1991)

Lowell, of a famous Boston Brahmin family, was a Romantic poet, critic, editor and diplomat. He is associated with the “Fireside Poets,’’ a group of New England writers who were among the first American poets whose popularity rivaled that of British poets.

Chris Powell: On gun control, considerTrump’s attempted ‘coup’ and Ukraine; vacuous school prayers

Colt’s Armory, in Hartford, in 1896. Connecticut has long been a major firearms maker.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Eighteen months later the political left is still stewing about and running a congressional investigation into what it calls a "coup attempt" and "insurrection" instigated by President Trump and supported by many Republicans to steal the 2020 presidential election under the pretext that it was stolen from Trump because of widespread vote fraud.

"Coup" or "insurrection" or not, Trump's attempt to interfere with the normal counting of the electoral votes in the Senate was reprehensible, even if four years earlier many leading Democrats had claimed, also without much evidence, that the presidential election had been stolen from them.

But amid the agitation about the recent mass shootings, the left has failed to learn a lesson of the "coup" or "insurrection." That is -- to borrow from the old cautionary slogan of supporters of the Second Amendment -- if guns had been outlawed on Jan. 6, 2021, only Trump would have had guns, at least if the military continued to take orders from him.

Trump isn't the first president to have provoked fears of a coup. As he resisted impeachment in 1974, President Richard Nixon so frightened his defense secretary, James Schlesinger, that Schlesinger issued instructions to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that no force-deployment order from the White House was to be obeyed if it did not come through his office. That is, Nixon's own defense secretary thought him capable of trying to overthrow the Constitution to remain in office.

But even as much of the political left remains obsessed with Trump's "coup," it also proposes to disarm the population by outlawing and confiscating semiautomatic rifles. Meanwhile the government of embattled Ukraine is distributing such rifles to civilians to combat the Russian invasion and coup attempt in the country's east.

Of course this irony does not diminish this country's catastrophic problem with gun violence. While mass shootings with scary-looking rifles like the recent ones in Buffalo and Uvalde work people up, on average more than 40 people are murdered with handguns in the country every day without generating much concern.

Handgun violence in Chicago has become overwhelming but it is a rare day when there aren't shootings in Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven -- all accepted as routine events of city life in Connecticut.

Tighter regulation of gun sales and possession -- comprehensive background checks, waiting periods, "red flag" procedures, increased screening for young people seeking guns, including a higher age of eligibility for purchases -- along with long sentences for repeat offenders, probably could reduce gun crime generally.

Soft targets such as schools can be protected better. Maybe someday government and society will be willing to examine even the epidemic of child neglect that produces so many disturbed teenagers and young men.

But a disarmed population will always be more susceptible to coups and totalitarianism. President Biden is so awful that Trump well may become president again, and there always could be another Nixon, a president corrupted by power into lawbreaking. The people getting hysterical about guns might do well to keep this in mind.

Former Connecticut U.S. Rep. Gary Franks notes that reducing gun violence requires healing "hearts, minds, and souls." But his prescription is silly: Bring prayer back to public schools, from which it supposedly was banished by the Supreme Court in 1962.

Actually the court found unconstitutional only government-sponsored prayer in public schools. Students always have been and remain free to pray in school without being disruptive. But it is fundamental to liberty that government cannot compel expression of religious or political belief.

This principle was affirmed by the court in 1943, in the middle of World War II, when the court exempted schoolchildren from being required to salute the flag. "Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self-interest," Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas wrote.

This precious liberty is exactly what makes the country worth supporting and the flag worth saluting.

Besides, the prayers of old in public schools were usually so superficial and designed only for appearances as to be meaningless and even mocking of the very exercise.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

It must have SOME use!

“A man was cleaning the attic of an old house in New England and he found a box that was full of tiny pieces of string. On the lid of the box there was an inscription in an old hand: ‘String too short to be saved.’’’

— Wilmot, N.H.-based poet and essayist Donald Hall (1928-2018) in String Too Short To Be Saved

Godine, the book’s publisher, notes:

“Donald Hall’s memoir of boyhood summers on his grandparents’ small New Hampshire farm has joined the pantheon of New England classics.

“Hall’s prose brims with limitless affection for the land and its people, but String Too Short to Be Saved it isn’t mere nostalgia. These are honest accounts about the passing of an agrarian culture, about how Hall’s grandparents aged and their farm became marginal until, finally, the cows were sold and the barn abandoned.

“But the story of Eagle Pond Farm continued when Hall returned in 1975 to live out the rest of his life in the house of memories and love and string too short to be saved.’’

Blackwater River in Wilmot, N.H., in 1910.

Visuals of ‘Black humanity’

“Equestrian Portrait of the Count Duke Olivares” (oil on canvas), by Kehinde Wiley, in the show “30 Americans,’’ at the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art, June 17-Oct. 30.

The museum says:

“Drawn from the acclaimed Rubell Museum, in Miami, 30 Americans tells the story of Black humanity through the gaze of some of the most significant artists of the last four decades, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, Hank Willis Thomas and Kehinde Wiley’’.

Llewellyn King: Prepare for blackouts this summer in the heartland

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Just when it didn’t seem things couldn’t get worse -- gasoline at $5 to $8 a gallon, supply shortages in everything from baby formula to new cars -- comes the devastating news that many of us will endure electricity blackouts this summer.

The alarm was sounded by the nonprofit North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last month.

The North American electric grid is the largest machine on earth and the most complex, incorporating everything from the wonky pole you see at the roadside with a bird’s nest of wires, to some of the most sophisticated engineering ever devised. It runs in real time, even more so than the air traffic control system: All the airplanes in the sky don’t have to land at the same time, but electricity must be there at the flick of every switch.

Except it may not always be there this summer. Rod Kuckro, a respected energy journalist, says it depends on Mother Nature, but the prognosis isn’t good.

Speaking on White House Chronicle, the weekly news and public affairs program on PBS which I host and produce, Kuckro said, “There is a confluence of factors that could affect energy supply across the majority of the [lower] 48 states. These are continued, reduced hydroelectric production in the West and the continued drought in the Southwest.” 

The biggest threat to power supply, according to the NERC and the FERC, is in the huge central region, reaching from Manitoba in Canada all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. It is served by the regional transmission organization, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO).

These operational entities are nonprofit companies that organize and distribute the bulk power for utilities in their regions. In California, it is the California Independent System Operator, in the Mid-Atlantic it is PJM, and in the Northeast, it is the New England System Independent Operator. They generate no power, but they control power flows, and could initiate brownouts and blackouts.

With record storm activity and high temperatures predicted this summer, blackouts are likely to be deadly. The old, the young and the sick are all vulnerable. If the electric supply fails with it goes everything, from air conditioning to refrigeration to lights, and even the ability to pump gas or access money from ATMs.

The United States, along with other modern nations, runs on electricity and when that falls short, it is catastrophic. It is chaos writ large, especially if the failure lasts more than a few hours.

On the same episode of White House Chronicle, Daniel Brooks, vice president of integrated grid and energy systems at the Electric Power Research Institute, also referred to a “confluence of factors” contributing to the impending electricity crisis. Brooks said, “We’re going through a significant change in terms of the energy mix and resources, and the way those resources behave under certain weather conditions.”

If power supply is stressed this summer, change in the generating mix will get a lot of political attention: at heart is the switch from fossil-fuel generation to renewables. If there are power outages, a political storm will ensue. The Biden administration will be accused of speeding the switch to renewables, although the utilities don’t say that.

The fact is the weather is deteriorating, and the grid is stretched in dealing with new realities as well as coping with old bugaboos, like the extreme difficulty in building new transmission lines. Better transmission would relieve a lot of grid stress.

Peter Londa, president of Tantalus Systems, which helps its 260 utility customers digitize and cope with the new realities, explained some of the difficulties facing the utilities not only in the shifting sources of generation, but also in the new shape of the electric demand. For example, he said, electric vehicles, particularly the much-awaited Ford F-150 Lightning pickup, could be an asset both to homeowners and utilities. During a blackout, their EVs could be used to power their homes for days. They could be a source of storage if thousands of owners signed up with their utilities in a storage program.

So utilities are facing three major shifts: in generation to wind and solar, in customer demand, and especially in weather. Mother Nature is on a rampage and we all must adjust to that.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Along with everything else

Stereoscopic view of Long Wharf in Boston in the19th Century

“Wharves with their warehouses sagging
on wooden slats, windows steamed up
and beaded with rain—it's a wonder

weather doesn't wash them away. In time,

they seem to say, you’ll be gone too….’’

— From “Here,’’ by Betsy Sholl (born 1945), former Maine poet laureate