cursing in ancient and modern competition

While today cursing tends to be associated with expressive use of obscene words, in the ancient world cursing was one dimension of competition.  These ancient curses typically declared a constraint other than death on a rival.  The curses were usually written on lead and buried in a location associated with underworld gods.  For instances, about 2450 years ago someone buried in a necropolis in Sicily a lead tablet on which was written: “These people are written down for a downturn in profits.”  Another written about two hundred years later declared: “I bind the workshops of these men … so that they may not be productive, but be idle and without luck.”[1]  Because literacy was rare, writing curses was a service business in itself.  Collections of standard-form curse tablets, probably used in a cursing business, have been discovered.[2]

Hesiod’s Works and Days, written on the Greek peninsula about 2700 years ago, condemns war and praises commercial competition.  Hesiod describes commercial competition thus:

She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbour vies with is neighbour as he hurries after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men. And potter is angry with potter, and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar is jealous of beggar, and minstrel of minstrel.[3]

A potter angry with another potter may well have directed obscene words at the other.  The potter may have also buried a curse against the rival.

Shouting matches are a form of competition.  Patent fights are a form of competition.  Political lobbying is a form of competition.  So too is better satisfying customers with better designed, more capable, cheaper products.  Getting competition is easy.  Getting competition to please customers is difficult.  If you merely advocate competition, than you’re just an ideologue.

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Notes:

[1] Quoted in Faraone (1991) p. 11.  In ancient ritual services markets, curses or spells directed at the financial interests of business rivals are relatively rare.  Curses or spells more typically concern rivalry in love, oratory, and sport.

[2] Id. p. 4 describes these artifacts, which are from the Roman period or later.  Plato described cursing as a service business:

Beggar priests and diviners go to the doors of the rich man and persuade him that the gods have provided them with a power based on sacrifices and incantations.  If he himself, or his ancestors, has committed some injustice, they can heal it with pleasures and feasts; and if he wishes to ruin some enemies at small expense, he will injure just and unjust alike with certain evocations and spells.

Plato, Republic, 364b-c, trans. Bloom (1968) p. 41. The Psalms in the Hebrew Bible probably were originally written as re-usable texts for temple visitors.

[3] Works and Days, ll. 11-24, translation from the Online Medieval and Classical Library.

References:

Plato, and Allan David Bloom. 1968. The Republic. New York: Basic Books.

Christopher A. Faraone.  1991. “The Agonistic Context of Early Greek Binding Spells” in Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (eds.) Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion.  Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, pp. 3-32.

describing statistics

Verbally describing statistics accurately and succinctly is often difficult.  Needle and Thread offers a better way.  In a recent paper on Thread, Glenn McDonald, the Thread designer, stated:

The Thread query describes a path through the data … we believe that it is more expressive, easier to map to the shapes of human inquiry, and far more compact and data-focused. These may be enough to give the query language a qualitatively different role: a tool not just for people to talk to machines about data, but for people to talk to themselves and each other about data in such a way that machines can participate in, and inform, the discussions.

With Needle and Thread, you can understand statistics by seeing how they’re calculated and experimenting with alternatives.

book prices in England about 1670

Price differentiation among books in England about the year 1670 was considerable.  Among 1090 titles priced in a catalog of books printed in England from 1666 to 1672, the median price was 2 shillings.[1]  The lower quartile was 1 shilling, and the upper quartile, 3.5 shillings.  Hence the interquartile range amounted to 125% of the median price. Among bound books of large-octavo size, the interquartile range amounted to 60% of the median price.

Book prices increased sharply with book size for volumes octavo size and larger.  The median “price bound” for a small octavo was 1 shilling, while the median price bound for a quarto was 4 shillings. The median price for a folio-sized bound book was 12 shillings.

Binding costs account for a significant share of the bound price.  Octavo was the most frequent title size. For a large octavo, a binding in calf skin would have cost about 30% of the price bound.  A binding in sheep skin would have cost 15% of the price bound. Hence even these common binding variations significantly affected the retail book price.

Book prices also varied with book subject.  Law books and books in Latin had median bound prices of 4.5 shillings and 3.5 shillings, respectively, while poetry and school-books had median bound prices of 1.5 shillings.  The relatively high median price for architecture books (8 shillings) probably reflects more illustrations in these books.  Relatively high prices for law books and books in Latin may reflect higher page counts in those books.

The reduction of the per book material cost to zero with ebooks continues a much longer trend of falling book material costs.  In England before about 1670, nearly all paper was imported from mainland Europe.  Paper was the single most expensive capital outlay for producing books.[2]  Today, paper cost is only a small share of book production costs.  Book production has become a service business, not a materials business.

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Data and statistics: book prices in England about 1670 (Excel version)

Data source: Robert Clavell (1673). A Catalogue of all the Books printed in England since the dreadful fire of London, in 1666, to the end of Michaelmas Term, 1672.

General information on term catalogues and their limitations

Read more:

Notes:

[1] The median (middle) price is less sensitive to outliers than the mean (average) price.  Titles would need to be weighted by exemplars purchased to measure median or mean price for book purchases.

[2] James Raven (2007).  The business of books: booksellers and the English book trade, 1450-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press) p. 308.

COB-61: bureaucratic tranquility

waterfall

Big, immobile stones in a shady, moist atmosphere support a beautiful matrix of moss, lichen, ferns, and other greens. The same is true for organizations and bureaucracy.  Even with the sound of a tremendous waterfall nearby, bureaucrats remain as placid as moss on stone.  There are no better models of peace and tranquility than moss and bureaucracy.

Among key bureaucratic issues this month, Research in Motion (RIM) Senior Management recently had to deal with a panicky open letter from a RIM employee warning of dire dangers for the company.  RIM Senior Management responded:

RIM recently confirmed that it is nearing the end of a major business and technology transition. … it has become necessary for the company to streamline its operations in order to allow it to grow its business profitably while pursuing newer strategic opportunities. Again, RIM’s management team takes these challenges seriously and is actively addressing the situation.

This response is a model for bureaucratic excellence. The “it has become necessary” phrase has a tranquility that surpasses that of many passive constructions.  Moreover, its referenceless “it” encompasses the cosmos.  Note also that the above text would remain just as effective if RIM were replaced with another organization’s name.  Responses that foster easy re-use make bureaucratic organizations more efficient.

Additional open letters from RIM employees have subsequently appeared.  These letters indicate serious weaknesses in bureaucratic swimming skills:

Whenever something goes wrong (incident, problems, even non-customer impacting) a lengthy and involved process of finger pointing starts, and without fail, a new process is born. And, sadly, since the announcement came out about the financial problems and layoffs, it’s become worse. Many of the managers are saying we need to rely more heavily now than ever on process. To those of us who need to deal with this process, which consumes days of work generating documents that no one will read, it’s an obvious case of CYA on the managers part. If they say ‘but we followed the process!’, they seem to hope their heads won’t be on the line. We are no longer a company that is innovative and energetic, we are drowning in paperwork.

Employees well-trained in bureaucratic swimming will not drown in paperwork.  A good start for such training would be careful study of RIM Senior Management’s model bureaucratic response.

JoelBlog documents an intricately and exquisitely engineered registration process for AT&T DSL.  A commenter explained the secret to this work:

What is called AT&T now is actually SBC, a Baby Bell with a penchant for out-sourcing. SBC bought Cingular, AT&T, Pacific Bell, lots of other companies. … SBC brought with them metric tons of bureaucracy, all running in IE {Internet Explorer}.

If you want to build web forms that fully exploit the special powers of IE, you need to develop massive bureaucratic muscle.

Feral farting camels produce a lot of methane.  Australia’s Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (DCCEE) has proposed to cull the camels.  Culling farting camels is a common-sense approach to reducing emissions.  A more excellent bureaucracy would have developed attachable bags and a network of collection centers to put that natural gas to use.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here.  Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.