Captains Of Industry Research Articles

Should Law Subsidize Driving?

A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology, the private automobile. Decades of investment in this shift have created a car-centric landscape with Dickensian consequences. In the United States, motor vehicles are now the leading killer of children and the top producer of greenhouse gases. Each year, they rack up trillions of dollars in direct and indirect costs and claim nearly 100,000 American lives via crashes and pollution, with the most vulnerable paying a disproportionate price. The appeal of the car’s convenience and the failure to effectively manage it has created a public health catastrophe. Many of the automobile’s social costs originate in individual preferences, but an overlooked amount is encouraged—indeed enforced—by law. Yes, the United States is car-dependent by choice. But it is also car-dependent by law. This Article conceptualizes this problem and offers a way out. It begins by identifying a submerged, disconnected system of rules that furnish indirect yet extravagant subsidies to driving. These subsidies lower the price of driving by comprehensively reassigning its costs to non-drivers and society at large. They are found in every field of law, from traffic law to land use regulation to tax, tort, and environmental law. Law’s role is not primary, and at times it is even constructive. But where it is destructive, it is uniquely so: Law not only inflames a public health crisis but legitimizes it, ensuring the continuing dominance of the car. The Article urges a reorientation of law away from this system of automobile supremacy in favor of consensus social priorities, such as health, prosperity, and equity.

The Influence of Thomas Carlyle among Economists in Britain, c. 1880–1920

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) is commonly remembered as the archnemesis of economics, which he notoriously dubbed “the dismal science.” This article, however, suggests that Carlyle’s ideas in fact had a considerable influence among economists during the decades following his death. Indeed, an array of economists cited Carlyle in criticizing self-interest, laissez-faire, and materialism, in suggesting that economic science ought to accord greater importance to moral and ethical factors, and in urging the “Captains of Industry” and the state to exercise paternal guidance over the working classes. In short, Carlyle’s writings shaped these economists’ understanding, portrayal, and critique of the previous generation of so-called “old” economists, as well as their self-understanding as self-professed “new” economists.

Slavery, Capitalism, and the Interpretations of the Antebellum United States: The Problem of Definition

Slavery, Capitalism, and the Interpretations of the Antebellum United StatesThe Problem of Definition James L. Huston (bio) In the space of three years, from 2013 to 2016, a flurry of books crowded the reading lists of historians of pre–Civil War America, all of which emphasized the ties between Southern slavery, capitalism, and modern economic development: Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton, Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860, and Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery's Capitalism. Besides insisting that the rise of Western wealth was rooted in the enslavement of Africans who were brutally treated and, in the nineteenth-century American case, forced into mass migration to supply cotton to the new industrial powerhouses of the world, they all explicitly insist that slavery was not only a capitalist endeavor but virtually the starting point of capitalism.1 They reject the idea that in the American South plantation slavery was [End Page 119] a pre-bourgeois system that enabled its elite to voice and believe in anti-capitalist values and engage in anti-capitalist behaviors; the new historians of slavery discard, with vehemence, the interpretation that some measure of paternalism operated in the social relations between slaves and slaveowners. A few of the new historians of slavery declare themselves Marxists (the only sure way to know of such affiliation is by an author's self-identification), but the more relevant aspect of their presentations is their determination to reject the Marxist definition of capitalism as the appearance of the wage-earning proletarian. However, most of the writers who posit that slavery was a capitalist endeavor draw on certain Marxist ideas, but that raises a stark problem, because slavery and capitalism in Marxist theory are distinctly separate economic systems.2 These works have a shared oddity: they do not employ definitions. Baptist seems to equate capitalism with the rise of machines and industrialization. Beckert declares that the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries were centuries of "war capitalism" but offers no definition, thereby making it impossible to decide whether Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great were the first captains of capitalist industry.3 Schermerhorn does not explain when capitalism in the United States began. Seth Rockman even celebrates current writers' "disavowal of theoretical definitions" and "recalibrated chronologies." Rather, these authors seem to decide [End Page 120] that since slavery, market growth, and industrialism were coincident in time, they had to be part of a single process, that process being called capitalism. Only Walter Johnson openly confronts the definition problem. He explains that in Marxist theory capitalism required the commodification of labor power, the appearance of the wage-worker, and the establishment of contractual obligations—and in this sense slavery was not capitalist. In particular, the new historians of slavery throw out the old Marxist determination that the arrival of capitalism in an economic system was confirmed when the proletarian (the wage-earner, the free laborer) appeared. They frequently employ the quasi-definition of capitalism that comes from transnational studies or a world-systems approach that stresses interdependencies between a core society and peripheral ones, stitched together by international trade, and that does not rely on the experience of one country (Great Britain) to be the model for the arrival of capitalism. Johnson opts for the world-systems definition.4 Several frustrated reviewers have noted this failure to provide definitions of both capitalism and modernity.5 [End Page 121] Sometimes quarrels over definitions have few practical consequences for accurate interpretations, but such is not the case in this instance. Mathematician Daniel Solow explains how vital the role of definitions can be: "A definition in mathematics is an agreement, by all parties concerned, as to the meaning of a particular term. … Nothing says that you must accept this definition as being correct. If you choose not to, then we will be unable to communicate regarding this particular idea." Or, to quote Peter Kolchin, "Clearly, definitions matter, and the comparative historian needs to pay careful attention to how words are used."6 The stakes involved in this struggle over the definition of...

Introduction to the second issue of JALT

While history tells us that it is nothing new when both leaders of nations and captains of industry blatantly lie, one would have thought that the Internet makes fact-checking easier for all. However, in an era of data inflation, many appear to miss the forest for the trees, with populist backlashes across continents and conspiracy theories abounding. Amongst much other pseudoscience, perhaps most unbelievably and a quintessential sign of the times, there are substantial ‘flat Earth’ societies – as if we would not have the ability to photograph our blue planet from outer space and as if there had never been a Galileo Galilei some 400 years ago!

Volume 24 Issue 2 Introduction

People tend to have a fixed mindset about who “librarians” are and how library staff should act, represent their profession, and lead. When I say “people,” I am envisioning every public official, captain of industry and Lyft driver who has ever asked me how many people I shush in a day, and then I am envisioning a rain of cartoon anvils. To be fair, I’m also thinking of a younger version of myself, picking out the dowdiest clothes in my wardrobe for my first day as a circulation clerk at my college library.

The battle for oil in the Dutch East Indies: Pladjoe, the pearl in the crown of the Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij (Shell), in the turmoil of the 1940s

Oilfields can easily turn into battlefields. This happened more than once in the colony of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) in the 1940s, where Japanese, Dutch, Allied and Indonesian forces fought fierce battles over the control of the local oil facilities. With good reasons, because in those days the Netherlands East Indies was one of the world’s biggest oil exporters. It all started in Telaga Said I, in northern Sumatra, in the Mid-1880s, where the first oil was discovered in the thick jungle. Shortly afterwards, in the Mid-1890s, in the swampy south of Sumatra oil of a better quality was found. As a result, nearby Palembang, an ancient city with harbour facilities, quickly mushroomed into a vibrant oil industry city, and the small kampoeng Pladjoei (Plaju), about eight kilometers further along the River Moesi (Musi), became a spider in an enormous petroleum infrastructure. The Koninklijke Nederlandsche Maatschappij tot Exploitatie van Petroleumbronnen in Nederlands-Indie (1890) formed in 1907 a subsidiary named the Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij (BPM/Shell) and built at Pladjoe the largest, most productive and modern refinery of Southeast Asia of its time. The scale of operations grew over time and the BPM planned a comprehensive company town with administration buildings, refineries and jetties for mooring tankers, pipelines, (rail) roads, and designed living quarters for its employees along a rectangular grid, including modern bungalows with shady gardens, shops, schools, sports fields and a church etc. Eventually, the BPM and the municipality of Palembang as the main oil actors created together a petroleumscapeii: a coherent network of spaces around the psychical and financial flows and interests of petroleum in the urban environment. These times of prosperity and peace all suddenly came to an end when war and revolution broke out in the colony of the Dutch East Indies in the 1940s. As a result, the oil empire of the BPM was at risk. Based on both archival research and secondary sources, this paper elaborates on how the BPM spatially and economically planned its huge industrial oil-footprint at Pladjoe and safeguarded these oil facilities against all kinds of brutal intrusions and destructions during the Pacific War (1942-1945) and Indonesia’s struggle for independence (1945-1949). Remarkably, in reaching this goal and in their effort to restore the pre-war situation of peace and prosperity, the BPM’s captains of industry, Dutch Army commanders and politicians in the government seats of both Batavia and The Hague worked closely together. Constantly using oil as an economical weapon.

A Literature Review of Women Empowerment and Development in Zimbabwe: A look at New Insights and Perspectives

The concept of “Women empowerment” has received much attention from researchers, government and captains of industry. There are several meanings attached to the concept of women empowerment. This literature review explores the origin of the term women empowerment as it is related to gender and equality. This literature review looks at four power perspectives that are used to explain the increasing need for women empowerment today. The related concepts of power, agency, resources and achievements are used to explain and describe the problems associated with women empowerment globally. The theoretical underpinnings of this literature review are important for policy-makers and government the world over. Finally, the models that can be adopted to empower women, socially, economically and politically are identified and explained.

Thinking about the Twentieth Century

The presence of essays on Hans Pfitzner and on Béla Bartók’s collaboration with Benny Goodman in this issue of MQ once again raises the question of how we choose to construct the history of classical and concert music in the twentieth century. Few eras in the history of music have bequeathed to historians such intense controversy over competing contemporaneous trends as the first four decades of the last century. Writing and reading about music were thriving enterprises between the mid-1890s and 1939, the decades during which the nineteenth century came to a close. Disparate trends in art emerged, each overtly committed to charting a new direction adequate to a self-consciously modern age, one seemingly discontinuous with the past in an unprecedented way. Spurred on in part by highly visible contemporary departures from nineteenth-century practices in painting, sculpture, and architecture, composers wrote music surrounded by intense debates over ideas of continuity, evolutionary change, revolution, and their counterparts: ideologies of restoration and reaction to perceived radical threats to hallowed traditions, including the discovery of ethnic and national authenticities in rural premodern folk music. The role of jazz in concert and classical music in the twentieth century was shaped by debates about whether art could or should be progressive and aligned with history, or whether it was properly governed by normative philosophical claims about beauty. The new century, with its spread of literacy, brought concerns about for whom one might be writing music for in an age of mass communication. The scale of the potential audience eclipsed the significance of the patronage of a landed aristocracy and captains of industry.

Proposing a new mathematical model and a meta-heuristic algorithm for scheduling and allocating automated guided vehicle

One of the substantial things, which has been perceived more than ever by captains of industry in recent years, is the necessity of earning competitive value. As a result, mechanisation and enhancing the level of automation of the process has become one of the most fascinating issues to researchers. In this regard one of the most appealing systems to industries is flexible manufacturing systems which contribute to achievement of higher levels of automation in business environments. Since transportation plays an essential role in flexible production systems, automated guided vehicles (AVGs) have been utilised to carry material in these systems in order to maintain the flexibility, and increase the efficiency of production and distribution throughout the system. In this paper, a mathematical model for scheduling and allocating AVGs in the manufacturing process of a specific project is proposed and in the end, a heuristic algorithm is proposed and used to solve the model problem.

Proposing a new mathematical model and a meta-heuristic algorithm for scheduling and allocating automated guided vehicle

One of the substantial things, which has been perceived more than ever by captains of industry in recent years, is the necessity of earning competitive value. As a result, mechanisation and enhancing the level of automation of the process has become one of the most fascinating issues to researchers. In this regard one of the most appealing systems to industries is flexible manufacturing systems which contribute to achievement of higher levels of automation in business environments. Since transportation plays an essential role in flexible production systems, automated guided vehicles (AVGs) have been utilised to carry material in these systems in order to maintain the flexibility, and increase the efficiency of production and distribution throughout the system. In this paper, a mathematical model for scheduling and allocating AVGs in the manufacturing process of a specific project is proposed and in the end, a heuristic algorithm is proposed and used to solve the model problem.

Private sector’s role in implementing SDGs - Interview: Lise Kingo, Executive Director of the United Nations Global Compact at the UN Global Compact Board Meeting in New York, USA.

The UN Private Sector Forum 2017, to be held in New York this September, will bring together corporate CEOs, captains of industry, heads of state and government, UN officials and civil society to explore partnerships and other ways the private sector can finance SDGs. Africa Renewal reached out to Lise Kingo, the executive director of the UN Global Compact (which is mobilizing a global movement of sustainable companies) to discuss the role of public-private partnerships in Africa.

Tow-Objective Model of Green Supply Chain with the Cost Evaluation

In recent years, the supply chain has become a subject of interest for the managers and captains of industry and the life and death of the business organizations and corporation depend on the activity of intertwined chains. Beyond this definition, by adding the term Green, chain management refers to green procurement, green production, green distribution, green supply and inverse logistic. The main approach of this paper is designing and offering a mathematical model for designing the green supply chain networks, which three-level planning is developed, which is aimed in optimizing two contradictory goals and has problem conflicts including 1- minimization of costs, and 2- minimization of environmental pollutants. The problem is expressed as the longitudinal programming of integer numbers. Results show applicability and practicality of this model.

1896: A Populist Insurgency in America’s First Gilded Age

1896: A Populist Insurgency in America’s First Gilded Age Katherine Unterman (bio) The last time I taught the class “America in the Gilded Age,” I read my students two quotes. One came from a newspaper editorial in the 1890s. The other came from Bernie Sanders in 2015. When guessing which was which, about half of the students got it wrong. The first quote read: “Ninety nine percent of the people of the United States feel that they have a standing grievance against the other one percent because of the excessive inequality in the distribution of wealth [. . .] As this inequality is continually growing greater [. . .] we are drifting toward a revolution.” While this statement could have come straight out of Sanders’ mouth, it is actually from 1891, in the midst of the period that historians call the Gilded Age. Some commentators have called the contemporary era a “Second Gilded Age” because of the similarly growing gap between the richest and the poorest members of society. The term “Gilded Age” comes from a book co-authored by Mark Twain, and the name says a lot about the 1880s and 1890s. It was not the golden age; it was the gilded age. Something that is gilded is gold on the surface, but worthless or rotten underneath. Likewise, the last two decades of the 19th century saw famous “captains of industry” like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie accumulating vast fortunes and living in opulent mansions. These were the country’s first billionaires; they were some of the richest men not just of their day, but in modern history. However, underneath the shiny surface, the workers in the steel mills and oil refineries were living in poverty. They resided in crowded tenements and worked long hours, in dangerous conditions, for low pay. The average income for 11 million of the nation’s 12 million families was $380 annually. In 1896, the country was in the third year of a major economic depression. Unemployment nationally was around 15%, even higher in major cities. Farmers were struggling just as much. Throughout the 1890s, they faced falling crop prices, exorbitant railroad rates, high interest on their debts, and costly charges to store their crops. Farmers were barely hanging on before the economic depression, and by 1896, many were on the brink of starvation. Thousands went bankrupt and had to auction off their farms to pay their debts. [End Page 26] Meanwhile, the government was staunchly opposed to the idea of doing anything to help the disadvantaged. President Grover Cleveland, upon vetoing a bill to provide aid to drought-stricken farmers in Texas, said, “I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and the duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering.” Later he stated, more succinctly, that government functions “do not include the support of the people.” This was the era of Social Darwinism, and the economic counterpoint to “survival of the fittest” was “laissez faire.” In other words, leave capitalism unregulated and let the free market reign. Government action to help struggling workers and farmers was considered counterproductive and morally wrong. However, an insurgency was brewing from below. Calling themselves “Populists,” impoverished wheat farmers from the West and cotton farmers from the South banded together in their opposition to Wall Street and economic elites. The Populists had a novel demand: that when the people were suffering, the government should step in and help. “Man over money” was their refrain. In 1891, they formally organized a third party, the People’s Party. At the top of their program, called the Omaha Platform: abandoning the gold standard and adding silver as “legal tender.” At this point in time, all currency was redeemable in gold, so the amount of money in circulation was dependent upon the amount of gold in the treasury. By making bills also redeemable in silver (with 16 ounces of silver worth 1 ounce of gold), this would increase the money supply. Farmers wanted this because they believed that, with more money in circulation, they would earn more for their crops and would be able to...

Profile of Harris A. Lewin

Immunogeneticist Harris A. Lewin has balanced years of research with work as an administrator, including the past five years as the vice chancellor of research at the University of California, Davis. In 2016, Lewin will expand on his newest passion in the Department of Evolution and Ecology and the University of California, Davis Genome Center: genome evolution. Lewin’s work aims to reconstruct how the chromosomes of the earliest mammalian ancestors evolved into the chromosomes found in mammals that exist today. The publication of his Inaugural Article (1) is a culmination of a line of research that set out to explain why the cloning of mammals is so inefficient and unpredictable. The answer lies in the links between the cloned embryo and the endometrial lining of the mother’s uterus, says Lewin, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Harris A. Lewin. Photograph by Karin Higgins and image courtesy of University of California, Davis. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957, Lewin’s career path was influenced by his family. He developed a passion for invention and investigation from his paternal grandfather, an inventor, jeweler, and tinkerer who, despite a lack of formal education, was a Captain of Industry during World War II. However, Lewin’s father was a naturalist at heart. He and his mother often took Lewin and his older sister to the American Museum of Natural History and to upstate New York every summer to spend time in nature. By the time Lewin graduated from high school, his sister had emigrated to Israel, where she lived on a Kibbutz. He visited her for the summer before starting a two-year degree at the State University of New York at Delhi, and again before transferring to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York to finish his bachelor’s degree. “Before I went to Israel …

The UGEMA generation of Algeria’s civilian leadership

ABSTRACTBased on the published interviews of a sample of 33 former student leaders and members of the Union Générale des Etudiants Musulmans Algériens (UGEMA, 1955–1963), along with private interviews or other data collected about an additional 30, this article traces the brief history of the Algerian Revolution’s only autonomous NGO and the consequent patterns of cooperation and competition over subsequent years. The sample represents a broad political spectrum of Algeria’s recently retired civilian elite. It is biased towards students who eventually achieved high office. Elected leadership positions in UGEMA seem to have anticipated subsequent promotions and co-optation by Boumedienne’s regime (1965–1978) more than by Ben Bella’s (1962–1965). But unwilling or unable in the course of their careers to act in concert, this French-educated elite never acquired real authority. Its representative organ, UGEMA, was effectively ‘suicided’ in 1961, the summer before external military forces outgunned those of Algeria’s Provisional Government and seized power. For better or worse, UGEMA’s potential civilian leadership remained hostage to competing military factions. It was also seriously divided, its captains of industry opposed to Arabizing educators. Shutting down its only autonomous intermediary left independent Algeria with a weak, politically impoverished state.

CAPTAIN OF CONSCIENCE

He's hailed as a star investor and Britain's answer to Warren Buffett, but Neil Woodford resists the description ‘captain of industry’

Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America

Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America

MY DAY

From cadets to colleagues and captains of industry, Paul Kahn engineers a lot into one working day as President of Airbus Group UK

The Rise of Abraham Cahan

The Rise of Abraham Cahan

When Ants Move Mountains: Uncovering a Media Theory of Human Agency

Just as Smythe argued communication was the blindspot of western Marxism, western communication and media theorizing itself suffers a blind spot, when it places media power in the hands of dictators and captains of industry as if no others might put pen to paper and change history. Meanwhile, theoretical explorations of how media praxis might be understood and employed for emancipation - not subjugation - emerged through the experiences of people in the Global South and Indigenous communities. This article examines and contrasts the theoretical silos, seeking moments of cross-over and synergy between static, top-down conceptualizations of Western mass media theory, and the more people-powered media praxis of colonized people seeking liberation. Building on the literature of differing experiences, the author draws a framework to encompass the full spectrum of media power. Here scholars, policy planners, and media practitioners alike may find common ground from which to recognize and support grassroots media producers as agents of meaningful social change.