In general, I don’t like the French way of thinking, but this is one of the few things that I actually like about French. Kids should learn how to cope with boredom on his own. Give less immediate attention to your kid and he will learn patient.

By PAMELA DRUCKERMAN, Feb 4 2012, The Wall Street Journal
While Americans fret over modern parenthood, the French are raising happy, well-behaved children without all the anxiety. Pamela Druckerman on the Gallic secrets for avoiding tantrums, teaching patience and saying ‘non’ with authority.

Pamela Druckerman’s new book “Bringing Up Bebe,” catalogs her observations about why French children seem so much better behaved than their American counterparts. She talks with WSJ’s Gary Rosen about the lessons of French parenting techniques.

When my daughter was 18 months old, my husband and I decided to take her on a little summer holiday. We picked a coastal town that’s a few hours by train from Paris, where we were living (I’m American, he’s British), and booked a hotel room with a crib. Bean, as we call her, was our only child at this point, so forgive us for thinking: How hard could it be?

We ate breakfast at the hotel, but we had to eat lunch and dinner at the little seafood restaurants around the old port. We quickly discovered that having two restaurant meals a day with a toddler deserved to be its own circle of hell.

Bean would take a brief interest in the food, but within a few minutes she was spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets. Then she demanded to be sprung from her high chair so she could dash around the restaurant and bolt dangerously toward the docks.
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Our strategy was to finish the meal quickly. We ordered while being seated, then begged the server to rush out some bread and bring us our appetizers and main courses at the same time. While my husband took a few bites of fish, I made sure that Bean didn’t get kicked by a waiter or lost at sea. Then we switched. We left enormous, apologetic tips to compensate for the arc of torn napkins and calamari around our table.

After a few more harrowing restaurant visits, I started noticing that the French families around us didn’t look like they were sharing our mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation. French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.

Though by that time I’d lived in France for a few years, I couldn’t explain this. And once I started thinking about French parenting, I realized it wasn’t just mealtime that was different. I suddenly had lots of questions. Why was it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I’d clocked at French playgrounds, I’d never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn’t my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding something? Why hadn’t their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours had?
French Lessons

Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids’ spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves.

By the end of our ruined beach holiday, I decided to figure out what French parents were doing differently. Why didn’t French children throw food? And why weren’t their parents shouting? Could I change my wiring and get the same results with my own offspring?

Driven partly by maternal desperation, I have spent the last several years investigating French parenting. And now, with Bean 6 years old and twins who are 3, I can tell you this: The French aren’t perfect, but they have some parenting secrets that really do work.

I first realized I was on to something when I discovered a 2009 study, led by economists at Princeton, comparing the child-care experiences of similarly situated mothers in Columbus, Ohio, and Rennes, France. The researchers found that American moms considered it more than twice as unpleasant to deal with their kids. In a different study by the same economists, working mothers in Texas said that even housework was more pleasant than child care.
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Rest assured, I certainly don’t suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I’m not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don’t want my kids growing up to become sniffy Parisians.

But for all its problems, France is the perfect foil for the current problems in American parenting. Middle-class French parents (I didn’t follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.

Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. “For me, the evenings are for the parents,” one Parisian mother told me. “My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it’s adult time.” French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.

I’m hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. This problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, and my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. Nobody seems to like the relentless, unhappy pace of American parenting, least of all parents themselves.
[BEBEjump] Nicolas Héron for The Wall Street Journal

Delphine Porcher with daughter Pauline. The family’s daily rituals are an apprenticeship in learning to wait.

Of course, the French have all kinds of public services that help to make having kids more appealing and less stressful. Parents don’t have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.

But these public services don’t explain all of the differences. The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. “Ah, you mean how do we educate them?” they asked. “Discipline,” I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas “educating” (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.

One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don’t pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.)

One Saturday I visited Delphine Porcher, a pretty labor lawyer in her mid-30s who lives with her family in the suburbs east of Paris. When I arrived, her husband was working on his laptop in the living room, while 1-year-old Aubane napped nearby. Pauline, their 3-year-old, was sitting at the kitchen table, completely absorbed in the task of plopping cupcake batter into little wrappers. She somehow resisted the temptation to eat the batter.

Delphine said that she never set out specifically to teach her kids patience. But her family’s daily rituals are an ongoing apprenticeship in how to delay gratification. Delphine said that she sometimes bought Pauline candy. (Bonbons are on display in most bakeries.) But Pauline wasn’t allowed to eat the candy until that day’s snack, even if it meant waiting many hours.
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When Pauline tried to interrupt our conversation, Delphine said, “Just wait two minutes, my little one. I’m in the middle of talking.” It was both very polite and very firm. I was struck both by how sweetly Delphine said it and by how certain she seemed that Pauline would obey her. Delphine was also teaching her kids a related skill: learning to play by themselves. “The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself,” she said of her son, Aubane.

It’s a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. In a 2004 study on the parenting beliefs of college-educated mothers in the U.S. and France, the American moms said that encouraging one’s child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.

Later, I emailed Walter Mischel, the world’s leading expert on how children learn to delay gratification. As it happened, Mr. Mischel, 80 years old and a professor of psychology at Columbia University, was in Paris, staying at his longtime girlfriend’s apartment. He agreed to meet me for coffee.

Mr. Mischel is most famous for devising the “marshmallow test” in the late 1960s when he was at Stanford. In it, an experimenter leads a 4- or 5-year-old into a room where there is a marshmallow on a table. The experimenter tells the child he’s going to leave the room for a little while, and that if the child doesn’t eat the marshmallow until he comes back, he’ll be rewarded with two marshmallows. If he eats the marshmallow, he’ll get only that one.

Most kids could only wait about 30 seconds. Only one in three resisted for the full 15 minutes that the experimenter was away. The trick, the researchers found, was that the good delayers were able to distract themselves.

Following up in the mid-1980s, Mr. Mischel and his colleagues found that the good delayers were better at concentrating and reasoning, and didn’t “tend to go to pieces under stress,” as their report said.

Could it be that teaching children how to delay gratification—as middle-class French parents do—actually makes them calmer and more resilient? Might this partly explain why middle-class American kids, who are in general more used to getting what they want right away, so often fall apart under stress?

Mr. Mischel, who is originally from Vienna, hasn’t performed the marshmallow test on French children. But as a longtime observer of France, he said that he was struck by the difference between French and American kids. In the U.S., he said, “certainly the impression one has is that self-control has gotten increasingly difficult for kids.”

American parents want their kids to be patient, of course. We encourage our kids to share, to wait their turn, to set the table and to practice the piano. But patience isn’t a skill that we hone quite as assiduously as French parents do. We tend to view whether kids are good at waiting as a matter of temperament. In our view, parents either luck out and get a child who waits well or they don’t.

French parents and caregivers find it hard to believe that we are so laissez-faire about this crucial ability. When I mentioned the topic at a dinner party in Paris, my French host launched into a story about the year he lived in Southern California.

He and his wife had befriended an American couple and decided to spend a weekend away with them in Santa Barbara. It was the first time they’d met each other’s kids, who ranged in age from about 7 to 15. Years later, they still remember how the American kids frequently interrupted the adults in midsentence. And there were no fixed mealtimes; the American kids just went to the refrigerator and took food whenever they wanted. To the French couple, it seemed like the American kids were in charge.

“What struck us, and bothered us, was that the parents never said ‘no,’ ” the husband said. The children did “n’importe quoi,” his wife added.

After a while, it struck me that most French descriptions of American kids include this phrase “n’importe quoi,” meaning “whatever” or “anything they like.” It suggests that the American kids don’t have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It’s the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame, that French parents often talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits about certain things—that’s the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce these. But inside the cadre, French parents entrust their kids with quite a lot of freedom and autonomy.

Authority is one of the most impressive parts of French parenting—and perhaps the toughest one to master. Many French parents I meet have an easy, calm authority with their children that I can only envy. Their kids actually listen to them. French children aren’t constantly dashing off, talking back, or engaging in prolonged negotiations.

One Sunday morning at the park, my neighbor Frédérique witnessed me trying to cope with my son Leo, who was then 2 years old. Leo did everything quickly, and when I went to the park with him, I was in constant motion, too. He seemed to regard the gates around play areas as merely an invitation to exit.

Frédérique had recently adopted a beautiful redheaded 3-year-old from a Russian orphanage. At the time of our outing, she had been a mother for all of three months. Yet just by virtue of being French, she already had a whole different vision of authority than I did—what was possible and pas possible.

Frédérique and I were sitting at the perimeter of the sandbox, trying to talk. But Leo kept dashing outside the gate surrounding the sandbox. Each time, I got up to chase him, scold him, and drag him back while he screamed. At first, Frédérique watched this little ritual in silence. Then, without any condescension, she said that if I was running after Leo all the time, we wouldn’t be able to indulge in the small pleasure of sitting and chatting for a few minutes.

“That’s true,” I said. “But what can I do?” Frédérique said I should be sterner with Leo. In my mind, spending the afternoon chasing Leo was inevitable. In her mind, it was pas possible.

I pointed out that I’d been scolding Leo for the last 20 minutes. Frédérique smiled. She said that I needed to make my “no” stronger and to really believe in it. The next time Leo tried to run outside the gate, I said “no” more sharply than usual. He left anyway. I followed and dragged him back. “You see?” I said. “It’s not possible.”

Frédérique smiled again and told me not to shout but rather to speak with more conviction. I was scared that I would terrify him. “Don’t worry,” Frederique said, urging me on.

Leo didn’t listen the next time either. But I gradually felt my “nos” coming from a more convincing place. They weren’t louder, but they were more self-assured. By the fourth try, when I was finally brimming with conviction, Leo approached the gate but—miraculously—didn’t open it. He looked back and eyed me warily. I widened my eyes and tried to look disapproving.

After about 10 minutes, Leo stopped trying to leave altogether. He seemed to forget about the gate and just played in the sandbox with the other kids. Soon Frédérique and I were chatting, with our legs stretched out in front of us. I was shocked that Leo suddenly viewed me as an authority figure.

“See that,” Frédérique said, not gloating. “It was your tone of voice.” She pointed out that Leo didn’t appear to be traumatized. For the moment—and possibly for the first time ever—he actually seemed like a French child.

Who said history is boring? This is a very interesting history of the world’s most important operating system.

The classic operating system turns 40, and its progeny abound
By Warren Toomey, IEEE Spectrum, December 2011

They say that when one door closes on you, another opens. People generally offer this bit of wisdom just to lend some solace after a misfortune. But sometimes it’s actually true. It certainly was for Ken Thompson and the late Dennis Ritchie, two of the greats of 20th-century information technology, when they created the Unix operating system, now considered one of the most inspiring and influential pieces of software ever written.

A door had slammed shut for Thompson and Ritchie in March of 1969, when their employer, the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., withdrew from a collaborative project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Electric to create an interactive time-sharing system called Multics, which stood for “Multiplexed Information and Computing Service.” Time-sharing, a technique that lets multiple people use a single computer simultaneously, had been invented only a decade earlier. Multics was to combine time-sharing with other technological advances of the era, allowing users to phone a computer from remote terminals and then read e-mail, edit documents, run calculations, and so forth. It was to be a great leap forward from the way computers were mostly being used, with people tediously preparing and submitting batch jobs on punch cards to be run one by one.

Over five years, AT&T invested millions in the Multics project, purchasing a GE-645 mainframe computer and dedicating to the effort many of the top researchers at the company’s renowned Bell Telephone Laboratories—­including Thompson and Ritchie, Joseph F. Ossanna, Stuart Feldman, M. Douglas McIlroy, and the late Robert Morris. But the new system was too ambitious, and it fell troublingly behind schedule. In the end, AT&T’s corporate leaders decided to pull the plug.

After AT&T’s departure from the Multics project, managers at Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, N.J., became reluctant to allow any further work on computer operating systems, leaving some researchers there very frustrated. Although Multics hadn’t met many of its objectives, it had, as Ritchie later recalled, provided them with a “convenient interactive computing service, a good environment in which to do programming, [and] a system around which a fellowship could form.” Suddenly, it was gone.

With heavy hearts, the researchers returned to using their old batch system. At such an inauspicious moment, with management dead set against the idea, it surely would have seemed foolhardy to continue designing computer operating systems. But that’s exactly what Thompson, Ritchie, and many of their Bell Labs colleagues did. Now, some 40 years later, we should be thankful that these programmers ignored their bosses and continued their labor of love, which gave the world Unix, one of the greatest computer operating systems of all time.
Man men: Thompson (ken) and Ritchie (dmr) authored the first Unix manual or “man” pages, one of which is shown here. The first edition of the manual was released in November 1971.
Man men: Thompson (ken) and Ritchie (dmr) authored the first Unix manual or “man” pages, one of which is shown here. The first edition of the manual was released in November 1971. Click to enlarge.

The rogue project began in earnest when Thompson, Ritchie, and a third Bell Labs colleague, Rudd Canaday, began to sketch out on paper the design for a file system. Thompson then wrote the basics of a new operating system for the lab’s GE-645 mainframe. But with the Multics project ended, so too was the need for the GE-645. Thompson realized that any further programming he did on it was likely to go nowhere, so he dropped the effort.

Thompson had passed some of his time after the demise of Multics writing a computer game called Space Travel, which simulated all the major bodies in the solar system along with a spaceship that could fly around them. Written for the GE-645, Space Travel was clunky to play—and expensive: roughly US $75 a game for the CPU time. Hunting around, Thompson came across a dusty PDP-7, a minicomputer built by Digital Equipment Corp. that some of his Bell Labs colleagues had purchased earlier for a circuit-analysis project. Thompson rewrote Space Travel to run on it.

And with that little programming exercise, a second door cracked ajar. It was to swing wide open during the summer of 1969 when Thompson’s wife, Bonnie, spent a month visiting his parents to show off their newborn son. Thompson took advantage of his temporary bachelor existence to write a good chunk of what would become the Unix operating system for the discarded PDP‑7. The name Unix stems from a joke one of Thompson’s colleagues made: Because the new operating system supported only one user (Thompson), he saw it as an emasculated version of Multics and dubbed it “Un-multiplexed Information and Computing Service,” or Unics. The name later morphed into Unix.

Initially, Thompson used the GE-645 to compose and compile the software, which he then downloaded to the PDP‑7. But he soon weaned himself from the mainframe, and by the end of 1969 he was able to write operating-system code on the PDP-7 itself. That was a step in the right direction. But Thompson and the others helping him knew that the PDP‑7, which was already obsolete, would not be able to sustain their skunkworks for long. They also knew that the lab’s management wasn’t about to allow any more research on operating systems.

So Thompson and Ritchie got crea­tive. They formulated a proposal to their bosses to buy one of DEC’s newer minicomputers, a PDP-11, but couched the request in especially palatable terms. They said they were aiming to create tools for editing and formatting text, what you might call a word-processing system today. The fact that they would also have to write an operating system for the new machine to support the editor and text formatter was almost a footnote.

Management took the bait, and an order for a PDP-11 was placed in May 1970. The machine itself arrived soon after, although the disk drives for it took more than six months to appear. During the interim, Thompson, Ritchie, and others continued to develop Unix on the PDP-7. After the PDP-11′s disks were installed, the researchers moved their increasingly complex operating system over to the new machine. Next they brought over the roff text formatter written by Ossanna and derived from the runoff program, which had been used in an earlier time-sharing system.

Unix was put to its first real-world test within Bell Labs when three typists from AT&T’s patents department began using it to write, edit, and format patent applications. It was a hit. The patent department adopted the system wholeheartedly, which gave the researchers enough credibility to convince management to purchase another machine—a newer and more powerful PDP-11 model—allowing their stealth work on Unix to continue.

During its earliest days, Unix evolved constantly, so the idea of issuing named versions or releases seemed inappropriate. But the researchers did issue new editions of the programmer’s manual periodically, and the early Unix systems were named after each such edition. The first edition of the manual was completed in November 1971.

So what did the first edition of Unix offer that made it so great? For one thing, the system provided a hierarchical file system, which allowed something we all now take for granted: Files could be placed in directories—or equivalently, folders—that in turn could be put within other directories. Each file could contain no more than 64 kilobytes, and its name could be no more than six characters long. These restrictions seem awkwardly limiting now, but at the time they appeared perfectly adequate.

Although Unix was ostensibly created for word processing, the only editor available in 1971 was the line-oriented ed. Today, ed is still the only editor guaranteed to be present on all Unix systems. Apart from the text-processing and general system applications, the first edition of Unix included games such as blackjack, chess, and tic-tac-toe. For the system administrator, there were tools to dump and restore disk images to magnetic tape, to read and write paper tapes, and to create, check, mount, and unmount removable disk packs.

Most important, the system offered an interactive environment that by this time allowed time-sharing, so several people could use a single machine at once. Various programming languages were available to them, including BASIC, Fortran, the scripting of Unix commands, assembly language, and B. The last of these, a descendant of a BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language), ultimately evolved into the immensely popular C language, which Ritchie created while also working on Unix.

The first edition of Unix let programmers call 34 different low-level routines built into the operating system. It’s a testament to the system’s enduring nature that nearly all of these system calls are still available—and still heavily used—on modern Unix and Linux systems four decades on. For its time, first-­edition Unix provided a remarkably powerful environment for software development. Yet it contained just 4200 lines of code at its heart and occupied a measly 16 KB of main memory when it ran.

Unix’s great influence can be traced in part to its elegant design, simplicity, portability, and serendipitous timing. But perhaps even more important was the devoted user community that soon grew up around it. And that came about only by an accident of its unique history.

The story goes like this: For years Unix remained nothing more than a Bell Labs research project, but by 1973 its authors felt the system was mature enough for them to present a paper on its design and implementation at a symposium of the Association for Computing Machinery. That paper was published in 1974 in the Communications of the ACM. Its appearance brought a flurry of requests for copies of the software.

This put AT&T in a bind. In 1956, AT&T had agreed to a U.S government consent decree that prevented the company from selling products not directly related to telephones and telecommunications, in return for its legal monopoly status in running the country’s long-distance phone service. So Unix could not be sold as a product. Instead, AT&T released the Unix source code under license to anyone who asked, charging only a nominal fee. The critical wrinkle here was that the consent decree prevented AT&T from supporting Unix. Indeed, for many years Bell Labs researchers proudly displayed their Unix policy at conferences with a slide that read, “No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.”

With no other channels of support available to them, early Unix adopters banded together for mutual assistance, forming a loose network of user groups all over the world. They had the source code, which helped. And they didn’t view Unix as a standard software product, because nobody seemed to be looking after it. So these early Unix users themselves set about fixing bugs, writing new tools, and generally improving the system as they saw fit.

The Usenix user group acted as a clearinghouse for the exchange of Unix software in the United States. People could send in magnetic tapes with new software or fixes to the system and get back tapes with the software and fixes that Usenix had received from others. In Australia, the University of Sydney produced a more robust version of Unix, the Australian Unix Share Accounting Method, which could cope with larger numbers of concurrent users and offered better performance.

By the mid-1970s, the environment of sharing that had sprung up around Unix resembled the open-source movement so prevalent today. Users far and wide were enthusiastically enhancing the system, and many of their improvements were being fed back to Bell Labs for incorporation in future releases. But as Unix became more popular, AT&T’s lawyers began looking harder at what various licensees were doing with their systems.

One person who caught their eye was John Lions, a computer scientist then teaching at the University of New South Wales, in Australia. In 1977, he published what was probably the most famous computing book of the time, A Commentary on the Unix Operating System, which contained an annotated listing of the central source code for Unix.

Unix’s licensing conditions allowed for the exchange of source code, and initially, Lions’s book was sold to licensees. But by 1979, AT&T’s lawyers had clamped down on the book’s distribution and use in academic classes. The anti­authoritarian Unix community reacted as you might expect, and samizdat copies of the book spread like wildfire. Many of us have nearly unreadable nth-­generation photocopies of the original book.

End runs around AT&T’s lawyers indeed became the norm—even at Bell Labs. For example, between the release of the sixth edition of Unix in 1975 and the seventh edition in 1979, Thompson collected dozens of important bug fixes to the system, coming both from within and outside of Bell Labs. He wanted these to filter out to the existing Unix user base, but the company’s lawyers felt that this would constitute a form of support and balked at their release. Nevertheless, those bug fixes soon became widely distributed through unofficial channels. For instance, Lou Katz, the founding president of Usenix, received a phone call one day telling him that if he went down to a certain spot on Mountain Avenue (where Bell Labs was located) at 2 p.m., he would find something of interest. Sure enough, Katz found a magnetic tape with the bug fixes, which were rapidly in the hands of countless users.

By the end of the 1970s, Unix, which had started a decade earlier as a reaction against the loss of a comfortable programming environment, was growing like a weed throughout academia and the IT industry. Unix would flower in the early 1980s before reaching the height of its popularity in the early 1990s.

For many reasons, Unix has since given way to other commercial and noncommercial systems. But its legacy, that of an elegant, well-designed, comfortable environment for software development, lives on. In recognition of their accomplishment, Thompson and Ritchie were given the Japan Prize earlier this year, adding to a collection of honors that includes the United States’ National Medal of Technology and Innovation and the Association of Computing Machinery’s Turing Award. Many other, often very personal, tributes to Ritchie and his enormous influence on computing were widely shared after his death this past October.

Unix is indeed one of the most influential operating systems ever invented. Its direct descendants now number in the hundreds. On one side of the family tree are various versions of Unix proper, which began to be commercialized in the 1980s after the Bell System monopoly was broken up, freeing AT&T from the stipulations of the 1956 consent decree. On the other side are various Unix-like operating systems derived from the version of Unix developed at the University of California, Berkeley, including the one Apple uses today on its computers, OS X. I say “Unix-like” because the developers of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix on which these systems were based worked hard to remove all the original AT&T code so that their software and its descendants would be freely distributable.

The effectiveness of those efforts were, however, called into question when the AT&T subsidiary Unix System Laboratories filed suit against Berkeley Software Design and the Regents of the University of California in 1992 over intellectual property rights to this software. The university in turn filed a counterclaim against AT&T for breaches to the license it provided AT&T for the use of code developed at Berkeley. The ensuing legal quagmire slowed the development of free Unix-like clones, including 386BSD, which was designed for the Intel 386 chip, the CPU then found in many IBM PCs.

Had this operating system been available at the time, Linus Torvalds says he probably wouldn’t have created Linux, an open-source Unix-like operating system he developed from scratch for PCs in the early 1990s. Linux has carried the Unix baton forward into the 21st century, powering a wide range of digital gadgets including wireless routers, televisions, desktop PCs, and Android smartphones. It even runs some supercomputers.

Although AT&T quickly settled its legal disputes with Berkeley Software Design and the University of California, legal wrangling over intellectual property claims to various parts of Unix and Linux have continued over the years, often involving byzantine corporate relations. By 2004, no fewer than five major lawsuits had been filed. Just this past August, a software company called the TSG Group (formerly known as the SCO Group), lost a bid in court to claim ownership of Unix copyrights that Novell had acquired when it purchased the Unix System Laboratories from AT&T in 1993.

As a programmer and Unix historian, I can’t help but find all this legal sparring a bit sad. From the very start, the authors and users of Unix worked as best they could to build and share, even if that meant defying authority. That outpouring of selflessness stands in sharp contrast to the greed that has driven subsequent legal battles over the ownership of Unix.

The world of computer hardware and software moves forward startlingly fast. For IT professionals, the rapid pace of change is typically a wonderful thing. But it makes us susceptible to the loss of our own history, including important lessons from the past. To address this issue in a small way, in 1995 I started a mailing list of old-time Unix ­aficionados. That effort morphed into the Unix Heritage Society. Our goal is not only to save the history of Unix but also to collect and curate these old systems and, where possible, bring them back to life. With help from many talented members of this society, I was able to restore much of the old Unix software to working order, including Ritchie’s first C compiler from 1972 and the first Unix system to be written in C, dating from 1973.

One holy grail that eluded us for a long time was the first edition of Unix in any form, electronic or otherwise. Then, in 2006, Al Kossow from the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, Calif., unearthed a printed study of Unix dated 1972, which not only covered the internal workings of Unix but also included a complete assembly listing of the kernel, the main component of this operating system. This was an amazing find—like discovering an old Ford Model T collecting dust in a corner of a barn. But we didn’t just want to admire the chrome work from afar. We wanted to see the thing run again.

In 2008, Tim Newsham, an independent programmer in Hawaii, and I assembled a team of like-minded Unix enthusiasts and set out to bring this ancient system back from the dead. The work was technically arduous and often frustrating, but in the end, we had a copy of the first edition of Unix running on an emulated PDP-11/20. We sent out messages announcing our success to all those we thought would be interested. Thompson, always succinct, simply replied, “Amazing.” Indeed, his brainchild was amazing, and I’ve been happy to do what I can to make it, and the story behind it, better known.

Why do we have so many intellectuals in the first place? They do not seem to be very productive in modern society. Maybe we need a few as keepers for our knowledge, but educating most of them are just wasting resources of the society.

Robert Nozick is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and the author of Anarchy, State, and Utopia and other books. This article is excerpted from his essay “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” which originally appeared in The Future of Private Enterprise, ed. Craig Aronoff et al. (Georgia State University Business Press, 1986) and is reprinted in Robert Nozick, Socratic Puzzles (Harvard University Press, 1997).

It is surprising that intellectuals oppose capitalism so. Other groups of comparable socio-economic status do not show the same degree of opposition in the same proportions. Statistically, then, intellectuals are an anomaly.

Not all intellectuals are on the “left.” Like other groups, their opinions are spread along a curve. But in their case, the curve is shifted and skewed to the political left.

By intellectuals, I do not mean all people of intelligence or of a certain level of education, but those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors. It does not include those who primarily produce and transmit quantitatively or mathematically formulated information (the numbersmiths) or those working in visual media, painters, sculptors, cameramen. Unlike the wordsmiths, people in these occupations do not disproportionately oppose capitalism. The wordsmiths are concentrated in certain occupational sites: academia, the media, government bureaucracy.

Wordsmith intellectuals fare well in capitalist society; there they have great freedom to formulate, encounter, and propagate new ideas, to read and discuss them. Their occupational skills are in demand, their income much above average. Why then do they disproportionately oppose capitalism? Indeed, some data suggest that the more prosperous and successful the intellectual, the more likely he is to oppose capitalism. This opposition to capitalism is mainly “from the left” but not solely so. Yeats, Eliot, and Pound opposed market society from the right.

The opposition of wordsmith intellectuals to capitalism is a fact of social significance. They shape our ideas and images of society; they state the policy alternatives bureaucracies consider. From treatises to slogans, they give us the sentences to express ourselves. Their opposition matters, especially in a society that depends increasingly upon the explicit formulation and dissemination of information.

We can distinguish two types of explanation for the relatively high proportion of intellectuals in opposition to capitalism. One type finds a factor unique to the anti-capitalist intellectuals. The second type of explanation identifies a factor applying to all intellectuals, a force propelling them toward anti-capitalist views. Whether it pushes any particular intellectual over into anti-capitalism will depend upon the other forces acting upon him. In the aggregate, though, since it makes anti-capitalism more likely for each intellectual, such a factor will produce a larger proportion of anti-capitalist intellectuals. Our explanation will be of this second type. We will identify a factor which tilts intellectuals toward anti-capitalist attitudes but does not guarantee it in any particular case.

The Value of Intellectuals

Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals. Ludwig von Mises explains the special resentment of intellectuals, in contrast to workers, by saying they mix socially with successful capitalists and so have them as a salient comparison group and are humiliated by their lesser status. However, even those intellectuals who do not mix socially are similarly resentful, while merely mixing is not enough–the sports and dancing instructors who cater to the rich and have affairs with them are not noticeably anti-capitalist.

Why then do contemporary intellectuals feel entitled to the highest rewards their society has to offer and resentful when they do not receive this? Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution “to each according to his merit or value.” Apart from the gifts, inheritances, and gambling winnings that occur in a free society, the market distributes to those who satisfy the perceived market-expressed demands of others, and how much it so distributes depends on how much is demanded and how great the alternative supply is. Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.

Why do wordsmith intellectuals think they are most valuable, and why do they think distribution should be in accordance with value? Note that this latter principle is not a necessary one. Other distributional patterns have been proposed, including equal distribution, distribution according to moral merit, distribution according to need. Indeed, there need not be any pattern of distribution a society is aiming to achieve, even a society concerned with justice. The justice of a distribution may reside in its arising from a just process of voluntary exchange of justly acquired property and services. Whatever outcome is produced by that process will be just, but there is no particular pattern the outcome must fit. Why, then, do wordsmiths view themselves as most valuable and accept the principle of distribution in accordance with value?

From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. Those who valued other things more than thinking things through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best.

The Schooling of Intellectuals

What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools. As book knowledge became increasingly important, schooling–the education together in classes of young people in reading and book knowledge–spread. Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher’s favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better.

The schools, too, exhibited and thereby taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit. To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher’s smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.

The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority “entitled” them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

In saying that intellectuals feel entitled to the highest rewards the general society can offer (wealth, status, etc.), I do not mean that intellectuals hold these rewards to be the highest goods. Perhaps they value more the intrinsic rewards of intellectual activity or the esteem of the ages. Nevertheless, they also feel entitled to the highest appreciation from the general society, to the most and best it has to offer, paltry though that may be. I don’t mean to emphasize especially the rewards that find their way into the intellectuals’ pockets or even reach them personally. Identifying themselves as intellectuals, they can resent the fact that intellectual activity is not most highly valued and rewarded.

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals. Rather, it produces anti-capitalist feeling among verbal intellectuals. Why do the numbersmiths not develop the same attitudes as these wordsmiths? I conjecture that these quantitatively bright children, although they get good grades on the relevant examinations, do not receive the same face-to-face attention and approval from the teachers as do the verbally bright children. It is the verbal skills that bring these personal rewards from the teacher, and apparently it is these rewards that especially shape the sense of entitlement.

Central Planning in the Classroom

There is a further point to be added. The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well.

It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the “anarchy and chaos” of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.

Our explanation does not postulate that (future) intellectuals constitute a majority even of the academic upper class of the school. This group may consist mostly of those with substantial (but not overwhelming) bookish skills along with social grace, strong motivation to please, friendliness, winning ways, and an ability to play by (and to seem to be following) the rules. Such pupils, too, will be highly regarded and rewarded by the teacher, and they will do extremely well in the wider society, as well. (And do well within the informal social system of the school. So they will not especially accept the norms of the school’s formal system.) Our explanation hypothesizes that (future) intellectuals are disproportionately represented in that portion of the schools’ (official) upper class that will experience relative downward mobility. Or, rather, in the group that predicts for itself a declining future. The animus will arise before the move into the wider world and the experience of an actual decline in status, at the point when the clever pupil realizes he (probably) will fare less well in the wider society than in his current school situation. This unintended consequence of the school system, the anti-capitalist animus of intellectuals, is, of course, reinforced when pupils read or are taught by intellectuals who present those very anti-capitalist attitudes.

No doubt, some wordsmith intellectuals were cantankerous and questioning pupils and so were disapproved of by their teachers. Did they too learn the lesson that the best should get the highest rewards and think, despite their teachers, that they themselves were best and so start with an early resentment against the school system’s distribution? Clearly, on this and the other issues discussed here, we need data on the school experiences of future wordsmith intellectuals to refine and test our hypotheses.

Stated as a general point, it is hardly contestable that the norms within schools will affect the normative beliefs of people after they leave the schools. The schools, after all, are the major non-familial society that children learn to operate in, and hence schooling constitutes their preparation for the larger non-familial society. It is not surprising that those successful by the norms of a school system should resent a society, adhering to different norms, which does not grant them the same success. Nor, when those are the very ones who go on to shape a society’s self-image, its evaluation of itself, is it surprising when the society’s verbally responsive portion turns against it. If you were designing a society, you would not seek to design it so that the wordsmiths, with all their influence, were schooled into animus against the norms of the society.

Our explanation of the disproportionate anti-capitalism of intellectuals is based upon a very plausible sociological generalization.

In a society where one extra-familial system or institution, the first young people enter, distributes rewards, those who do the very best therein will tend to internalize the norms of this institution and expect the wider society to operate in accordance with these norms; they will feel entitled to distributive shares in accordance with these norms or (at least) to a relative position equal to the one these norms would yield. Moreover, those constituting the upper class within the hierarchy of this first extra-familial institution who then experience (or foresee experiencing) movement to a lower relative position in the wider society will, because of their feeling of frustrated entitlement, tend to oppose the wider social system and feel animus toward its norms.

Notice that this is not a deterministic law. Not all those who experience downward social mobility will turn against the system. Such downward mobility, though, is a factor which tends to produce effects in that direction, and so will show itself in differing proportions at the aggregate level. We might distinguish ways an upper class can move down: it can get less than another group or (while no group moves above it) it can tie, failing to get more than those previously deemed lower. It is the first type of downward mobility which especially rankles and outrages; the second type is far more tolerable. Many intellectuals (say they) favor equality while only a small number call for an aristocracy of intellectuals. Our hypothesis speaks of the first type of downward mobility as especially productive of resentment and animus.

The school system imparts and rewards only some skills relevant to later success (it is, after all, a specialized institution) so its reward system will differ from that of the wider society. This guarantees that some, in moving to the wider society, will experience downward social mobility and its attendant consequences. Earlier I said that intellectuals want the society to be the schools writ large. Now we see that the resentment due to a frustrated sense of entitlement stems from the fact that the schools (as a specialized first extra-familial social system) are not the society writ small.

Our explanation now seems to predict the (disproportionate) resentment of schooled intellectuals against their society whatever its nature, whether capitalist or communist. (Intellectuals are disproportionately opposed to capitalism as compared with other groups of similar socioeconomic status within capitalist society. It is another question whether they are disproportionately opposed as compared with the degree of opposition of intellectuals in other societies to those societies.) Clearly, then, data about the attitudes of intellectuals within communist countries toward apparatchiks would be relevant; will those intellectuals feel animus toward that system?

Our hypothesis needs to be refined so that it does not apply (or apply as strongly) to every society. Must the school systems in every society inevitably produce anti-societal animus in the intellectuals who do not receive that society’s highest rewards? Probably not. A capitalist society is peculiar in that it seems to announce that it is open and responsive only to talent, individual initiative, personal merit. Growing up in an inherited caste or feudal society creates no expectation that reward will or should be in accordance with personal value. Despite the created expectation, a capitalist society rewards people only insofar as they serve the market-expressed desires of others; it rewards in accordance with economic contribution, not in accordance with personal value. However, it comes close enough to rewarding in accordance with value–value and contribution will very often be intermingled–so as to nurture the expectation produced by the schools. The ethos of the wider society is close enough to that of the schools so that the nearness creates resentment. Capitalist societies reward individual accomplishment or announce they do, and so they leave the intellectual, who considers himself most accomplished, particularly bitter.

Another factor, I think, plays a role. Schools will tend to produce such anti-capitalist attitudes the more they are attended together by a diversity of people. When almost all of those who will be economically successful are attending separate schools, the intellectuals will not have acquired that attitude of being superior to them. But even if many children of the upper class attend separate schools, an open society will have other schools that also include many who will become economically successful as entrepreneurs, and the intellectuals later will resentfully remember how superior they were academically to their peers who advanced more richly and powerfully. The openness of the society has another consequence, as well. The pupils, future wordsmiths and others, will not know how they will fare in the future. They can hope for anything. A society closed to advancement destroys those hopes early. In an open capitalist society, the pupils are not resigned early to limits on their advancement and social mobility, the society seems to announce that the most capable and valuable will rise to the very top, their schools have already given the academically most gifted the message that they are most valuable and deserving of the greatest rewards, and later these very pupils with the highest encouragement and hopes see others of their peers, whom they know and saw to be less meritorious, rising higher than they themselves, taking the foremost rewards to which they themselves felt themselves entitled. Is it any wonder they bear that society an animus?

Some Further Hypotheses

We have refined the hypothesis somewhat. It is not simply formal schools but formal schooling in a specified social context that produces anti-capitalist animus in (wordsmith) intellectuals. No doubt, the hypothesis requires further refining. But enough. It is time to turn the hypothesis over to the social scientists, to take it from armchair speculations in the study and give it to those who will immerse themselves in more particular facts and data. We can point, however, to some areas where our hypothesis might yield testable consequences and predictions. First, one might predict that the more meritocratic a country’s school system, the more likely its intellectuals are to be on the left. (Consider France.) Second, those intellectuals who were “late bloomers” in school would not have developed the same sense of entitlement to the very highest rewards; therefore, a lower percentage of the late-bloomer intellectuals will be anti-capitalist than of the early bloomers. Third, we limited our hypothesis to those societies (unlike Indian caste society) where the successful student plausibly could expect further comparable success in the wider society. In Western society, women have not heretofore plausibly held such expectations, so we would not expect the female students who constituted part of the academic upper class yet later underwent downward mobility to show the same anti-capitalist animus as male intellectuals. We might predict, then, that the more a society is known to move toward equality in occupational opportunity between women and men, the more its female intellectuals will exhibit the same disproportionate anti-capitalism its male intellectuals show.

Some readers may doubt this explanation of the anti-capitalism of intellectuals. Be this as it may, I think that an important phenomenon has been identified. The sociological generalization we have stated is intuitively compelling; something like it must be true. Some important effect therefore must be produced in that portion of the school’s upper class that experiences downward social mobility, some antagonism to the wider society must get generated. If that effect is not the disproportionate opposition of the intellectuals, then what is it? We started with a puzzling phenomenon in need of an explanation. We have found, I think, an explanatory factor that (once stated) is so obvious that we must believe it explains some real phenomenon.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 1998 edition of Cato Policy Report.

知識分子為何拒斥資本主義
羅伯特‧諾齊克　著　秋風　譯

知識分子如此地反感資本主義實在是怪事一樁。與之社會經濟地位相當的其它社會群體卻並沒有顯示出同樣強烈的反感。因此，從統計學上講，知識分子真的是太不同尋常了。

並不是所有知識分子站在“左翼”一邊。跟別的社會集團一樣，知識分子的觀點也是各種各樣的，但這個群體對于資本主義的看法卻是明顯地倒向政治上的左翼。

此處所謂的知識分子，並不是指所有受過某種程度教育或具有某種智力水准的人，而是指一批人文知識分子，他們的職業是處理用詞語表達的觀念、塑造詞語流給其他人接受，這包括詩人、小說家、文學批評者，報刊記者編輯及很多教授。這里不包括那些主要是制造和傳播數字或用數學公式表示的信息（從事數字工作的人士）的人士，也不包括從事視覺媒體、繪畫、雕塑、攝影的人士。在后面這些行業中，對資本主義的拒斥並不如從事文字工作的人士那麼強烈。這類人文知識分子主要集中在某些行業：人文學術界、媒體及政府官僚機構。

人文知識分子在資本主義社會中生活得很好，在這個社會，他們擁有生產、接觸和傳播新觀念的充分自由，也能夠自由地閱讀和討論這些思想觀念。他們的職業才能頗有銷路，他們的收入高于社會平均水平。那麼他們為什麼如此強烈地拒斥資本主義？實際上，有數據顯示，知識分子越富有、越成功，反倒越堅定地反對資本主義。他們對于資本主義的看法經常地是從左翼立場得出的，但也並不總是如此，葉芝、艾略特、龐德就是從右翼立場出發反對資本主義的。

人文知識分子對資本主義的拒斥，具有相當大的社會影響力。他們塑造著我們的觀念和我們對社會的認識，他們在某種程度上左右著官僚機構內部的政策選擇。通過論文、小冊子、口號等形式，他們提供了我們表達自己思想感情的詞語工具。特別是在社會越來越依賴于直接淺白的表述和信息傳播的時代，他們的反對立場尤其顯示出重要性。

對于何以有如此高比例的知識分子對資本主義持反對立場，我們應該區別兩種不同類型的解釋。在第一種解釋中，某個單一因素導致知識分子反對資本主義。在第二個解釋中，我們確定，有某個因素作用于所有知識分子，它有可能促使知識分子得出反對資本主義的觀點，但這種力量是否導致某些知識分子轉到抵拒資本主義的立場，卻還需取決于其他一些因素的影響。總體上，它有可能使每個知識分子拒斥資本主義，但有某一個因素導致很高比例的知識分子反對資本主義。我所作的就是第二種解釋。我將找出這一使某些知識分子傾向于反對資本主義，但並不是對任何知識分子都同樣有效的因素。

知識分子的價值

如今的知識分子無不期望成為社會上最受尊敬的人，最有聲望和權勢，獲得最高的收入。知識分子覺得他們配得上如此榮寵。然而大體說來，資本主義社會並不能如此禮遇知識分子。米塞斯曾經解釋過相對于工人階層，知識分子有一種特別的怨恨情緒，他們的社會交際對象常常是最成功的資本家，與這個集團比較，他們常常為自己低下的地位而覺得屈辱。不過那些並無這類社會交際的知識分子，也同樣具有怨恨情緒，所以僅從社會交際角度解釋是不夠的，體育和舞蹈教練也想變成富翁，但他們未能如願時，卻並沒有強烈地反對資本主義。

那麼為什麼當代的知識分子覺得社會應該給予他們最高的待遇，而不能如願時就心懷怨恨？知識分子覺得他們是最有價值的人，也具有最高貴的美德，社會理應根據他們的價值和美德給予相應的待遇。但是資本主義社會不是實行“按照美德或價值分配”的原則。在一個自由社會中，除了個人才能，祖上的傳承、運氣都能使一個人成功，市場只會青睞那些能捕捉到並滿足他人需求的人，至于獲利有多少，則取決于需求有多大，競爭的供應者有多少。所以失敗了的商人和工人並不會像人文知識分子那樣怨恨資本主義。唯有優越感不被社會接受，特殊的權利不被社會承認，才會在知識分子心中產生憤恨。

為什麼人文知識分子認為他們是最有價值的，為什麼他們認為應該根據價值進行分配？請注意，他們並不是非要后一種分配原，他們也曾提出過其他的分配原則，比如平均分配，按照美德進行分配，或按需分配。分配的公平。一個社會盡管很關注公平正義，並不表示它實行了某種分配模式就可以得到這種公平正義。分配的正義應該是存在于對公正地獲得的財產和服務，完全公平地自願交換的過程中，交換的結果不管是什麼樣的，都是公平正義的，而某一特定的分配模式並不一定會產生這樣的結果。那麼，為什麼人文知識分子認為自認為最有價值，並接受按價值進行分配的原則？

知識分子告訴我們，自有文字記錄的歷史以來，他們的活動是最有價值的。柏拉圖就說理性思考能力比勇敢和欲望更高級，並認定了哲學家應該成為統治者。亞里士多德則主張，知識分子的沉思是最高級的活動。這也就難怪，現在保存下來的文字對這些知識分子的活動都給予了很高的評價。畢竟，進行這類智力活動、運用理智並將其記錄下來的，不正是知識分子嘛。他們無異于是王婆賣瓜。那些可能把別的活動，比如打獵、比力氣、或沉溺于肉欲享樂，看得比知識思考活動更有價值的人，卻根本沒有心思留下文字記錄。只有知識分子能搞出某種理論，論証誰是最棒的。

知識分子的學校教育

何種因素使一部分知識分子產生了高人一等的想法？我將從學校教育這種制度談起。由于書本知識越來越重要，學校教育這種教育方式普及開來，大群年輕人聚集在教室里念書，學習書本知識。在型塑年輕人的觀念過程中，學校教育的影響大概僅次于家庭，而后來成了知識分子的家伙也都進過學校，並且都是那里的佼佼者。跟別人一比，他們覺得自己是優勝者。他們總是受到贊揚，獲得獎賞，他們是老師的寵兒。他們怎能不把自己視為高人一等？他們每天都體驗觀念上的日新月異，他們則可以輕而易舉地對付。學校教育告訴他們，並讓他們得出結論，他們是優秀的人。

學校教育也展示從而也教給他們按（智力上的）美德獲得獎賞的原則。從智力上的勝利所獲得的報酬是贊揚、老師的笑臉和高分數。在學校的社會分層中，最聰明的學生構成校園中的上層階級。盡管從來沒人給他們上過這一課，但從學校教育中知識分子得出結論，與社會其他階層相比，他們更有價值，也堅信靠這種更高價值，他們理應獲得更多報酬。

然而，外界的市場社會，給他們的卻是別一樣的體驗。最大的獎賞並不是給那些最能言善辯的家伙。在這里，知識分子所掌握的技能，便並不是最有價值的了。在學校中，他們總覺得自己最有價值，最配得上獎賞，最有理由獲得獎賞，而資本主義社會剝奪了他們自己覺得理應獲得的獎賞，那麼他們怎能不怨氣衝天呢？這也就難怪學，校教育培養出來的知識分子對資本主義社會抱著一種深深的敵意，當然，具體表現出來卻會有種種冠冕堂皇的其它理由，直接以上述理由總是有點不合適吧。

說知識分子自以為應得到社會給予的最高獎賞（財富、地位等），我的意思當然並不是說，知識分子認為這種種獎賞就是他們最看重的東西。他們也許更看重智力活動本身固有的價值或時間的考驗。盡管如此，他們仍然覺得自己應從社會得到最高的獎賞，他們完全能配得上最多和最好的獎賞，即使他們自己根本就瞧不起這些東西。我並不想特別強調說，這些獎賞非得進知識分子自己的腰包，甚至不一定非得由他本人獲得。只要具有知識分子身份，他們就為知識活動並沒有得到最高尊重和獎賞而怨恨。

知識分子期望整個社會就始終像學校一樣，期望著在這個環境中他們照樣最出色，也照樣得到賞識。學校里的獎賞標准與社會上的標准如此不同，則從學校出來的拔尖者未來進入社會后通常都要經歷一種心理挫折感。那些在校園等級制度中處于頂端的學生，會覺得他們不僅在校園這樣的小社會中，也在更大範圍社會中有資格也處于頂端，然而進入了社會，他們如果得不到如他們所期待的地位，他們就心生怨恨。因此，是學校教育制度在知識分子中間制造出了反資本主義的情緒，當然更多的是在人文知識分子中間制造出了反資本主義情緒。為什麼從事跟數碼打交道的知識分子沒有產生同樣的情緒呢？我推想是這樣的：這些在數字方面有天賦的的孩子，雖也能在他感興趣的科目中考得高分，也能得到老師的賞識，但與在人文學科方面有天賦的孩子相比，卻較少獲得老師面對面的關注和稱贊。能說會道的技巧，使這些具有人文天賦的孩子能得到老師本人的關愛，而正是這種格外的關愛，使他們覺得，他們是理所當然應始終受到關注。

教室中的中央計劃制度

還要進一步補充說明一點。（未來）從事文字工作的知識分子作為正式的、官方的校園社會中的成功者，獎賞則是由作為中心權威的老師分配的。而在教室、在走廊、在學校操場上還有另一個非正式的社會群體，在這些場合，獎賞則不是由某個指導中心分配的，而是由同學們一時興致和好惡進行分配，而恰在此處，知識分子表現得卻並不怎麼樣。

因此，毫不奇怪，那種由一個中央控制的分配機制分配物品和酬勞的制度，會令知識分子砰然心動，相反，對市場的“無政府和混亂”卻是避之惟恐不及。實行中央計劃體制的社會主義社會之與資本主義社會的對立，恰相當于由教師主導的分配與操場上和走廊內的分配之對立。

我的解釋並不是說，學校中學業優秀者的大多數都會變成（未來的）反資本主義的知識分子。校園中絕大部分出類拔萃之輩都是精通書本知識，善于交際，強烈地追求快樂、友情、制勝之道，並能按規則游戲（或者看起來是遵守規則），這樣的學生，必然會得到老師的格外關注和獎賞，進入社會后，他們通常也會幹得非常出色。（在校園的非正式社會中也表現很棒，所以他們並不會全然接受學校正規制度的規範）這樣的學生並不會滋生出反資本主義情緒。我們的解釋所涉及的的是那部分在校園（官方體制）中居于上層，而在進入社會中卻將經歷相當挫折的群體，或者更進一步明確地說，是指那預料到自己可能會走下坡路的群體。在進入社會，經歷社會地位之下降以前，有些聰明的學生就意識到，在進入社會后，他的地位將不如他現在在校園中，那他就將滋生出對資本主義的敵意，如果學生閱讀到反映此一情緒的作品或碰上具有這種情緒的知識分子教學，學校教育不經意間播下的種子，即知識分子的這種反資本主義的情緒，則必然會進一步強化。

毫無疑問，某些人文知識分子在學校時就脾氣很壞，喜歡提問，並不為他們的老師所喜歡。那麼他們是否會想，表現最好的應該得到最高獎賞，而他們就是最好的，卻僅僅由于老師不喜歡他們卻得不到這種獎賞，並由此而對學校制度產生憤恨情緒？顯然，我們需要更多材料來驗証我們的假說。

但是一般而言，無可爭辯的是，人們離開校園后所秉持的規範性信仰必然要受學校規範的影響。畢竟除了家庭之外，學校是孩子們學習行為方式的主要場所，因此學校教育也就是他們為進入家庭之外社會的最重要的准備。因此，一點也不奇怪，那些在學校的規範體系中如魚得水的人會對社會不滿，而沒有在學校中出人頭地的人則堅持另一套規範體系。如果繼續由這些人塑造社會的自我形象和自我評價，則我們所看到的在語言文學方面社會總是自己反對自己，就並不令人奇怪。讓你設計社會，你可能並不會刻意去設計他，而人文知識分子則會運用他們的一切勢力，把他們對社會各種規範的敵意灌輸在教育體系中。

我們對知識分子非同尋常的反資本主義心態的解釋，是立基于有點似是而非的社會學概括上的。

在某一社會中，年輕人在走出家庭所進入的人生第一個團體或制度中，如果表現很出色，就會把這一制度的規範內化為自己的行為規範，並且期望外面的世界也是按這些規範運轉的。他們會覺得自己有資格獲得按這些規範所應得的好處，或者至少達到在這些規範下所能達到的地位。而在他們人生第一個團體或制度的等級體系中處于上層地位的人，如果在進入外面世界后經歷了（或預料到會經歷）社會地位的下降，則會在失落感的驅使下，傾向于反對這一社會制度，對其規範心懷敵意。

請注意，這一點並不是確定性的定律。並不是所有經歷過社會地位下滑過程的人都會對社會制度產生敵意。這種地位下降只是促使人們敵視社會的一個因素，此一因素作用的大小在不同人那兒也是大不相同的。對上層階層的地位下降，我們可以區分出不同的類型：一種是他比別的社會集團得到的少（此處並沒有某一集團地位上升）或者是沒有增加，跟理應在自己之下的集團相比，得到的一點也不多。這是第一類地位下降情況，這會使他憤怒，覺得受了侮辱。第二類則比較更能容忍，很多知識分子按還是頗（據他們說）關注平等，只有很少一部分鼓吹知識分子實行精英統治（，所以他們不大會為了社會沒有讓他們進行統治產生挫折感，而生氣）。我們的結論是第一類地位下降，特別容易招致怨恨和敵意。

學校教育體系很少傳授和獎勵那些在進入社會后能獲得成功（畢竟學校只是一種專門化的制度）的技能，因而它的獎勵制度與一般社會截然不同。這必然導致一些人在進入社會后，要經歷社會地位下降及其所帶來的痛苦和憤怒。早些時候我說過，知識分子期望社會只是學校的同質放大。現在我們看到了，由失落感而生出的怨恨敵意，乃是因為一個簡單的事實：學校（作為進入社會的第一個非家庭的專門化的社會組織）並不是社會的縮影。

現在我們似乎可以解釋，受過學校教育的知識分子，為什麼會有那麼高比例的人反對他們的社會，而不問其社會性質，不管它是資本主義社會還是共產主義社會。（跟資本主義社會中，與知識分子處于同等社會經濟地位的階層相比，知識分子中反對資本主義的比例高得異乎尋常。另一個問題則是，與別的社會中，反對其所在社會的知識分子的比例相比，是不是也高得異乎尋常。）共產主義社會中的知識分子對其制度的態度恐怕大致相當；那兒的知識分子恐怕也對那一制度表示敵意。

所以，我們的假設需要再細化一下，以使它不會對隨便一個什麼社會都可以套用。每一社會的學校教育體系，不可避免地都會在其不能得到社會最高獎賞的知識分子中間，制造出反社會的心態。資本主義社會的特別之處在于，它宣稱它的獎賞只針對個人才能、個人創造性和個人特長。在種姓制度或封建社會成長起來的人，則決不希望、或認為根本就不應該按個人價值分配財富地位。但不管你怎麼想，資本主義社會給予個人的回報，所依據的唯一的標准，是其滿足市場所揭示的他人的欲望的程度，它只問你的經濟上的貢獻，而不管你的個人價值。不過它非常接近于按價值獲得獎賞──價值與貢獻基本上可以通用──因而資本主義社會培育出的期望跟在學校中得到的觀念差異不大。一般社會的的風氣跟學校里的風氣非常接近，而正是此種相似，導致了怨恨。而資本主義社會只獎賞個人成就，或宣稱如此，因而是冷落了知識分子，他們覺得他們才是最有成就的，因而也就特別痛苦。

我想還有一個因素起了作用。學校教育培養出如此強烈、廣泛的反資本主義心態，另一個重要因素是人的多樣性。很多未來在經濟上會大獲成功的的人，都上了別的學校，知識分子就沒有養成一種心態，就是其實有很多人比他們更優秀。當然，盡管很多上層階級的孩子進了別的學校，不過在一個開放的社會，也有一些學校包容了各種各樣的學生，其中有些未來會掙大錢，比如企業家，而未來成為知識分子的人，則滿懷怨恨地回憶起，當年自己在學術上是如何地出類拔萃，而現在有錢有勢的家伙，當初有什麼了不起。社會的開放導致了另一結果：學生們，不管未來是做了人文知識分子，還是別的職業，都不清楚他們未來的人生路是什麼樣的。他們充滿希望。而一個開放社會則令那些早年的期望破滅了。在一個開放的資本主義社會，社會似乎宣稱，那些最有才能和最有價值的人有望爬到社會最高層，在學校，他們依靠學術上的出眾之處而獲得最高地位，于是他們得到的看法就是，他們自己正是最有價值的，最有資格得到最高的獎賞，然而，到了最后，這些最有信心、最滿懷希望的學生卻看到，那些在學校中他們根本不放在眼里的家伙，卻爬得比他們還高，搶走了他們覺得本應屬于自己的獎賞。由此而對社會心懷怨懟，有應何奇怪之處呢？

假說的進一步細化

我們已經讓我們的假說更精確了。導致（人文）知識分子反資本主義的，並不是隨便一種什麼學校教育，而是某一特定社會中的學校教育。毫無疑問，這個假設尚需進一步細化，不過也差不多能說明問題了。現在該把這一假設應用于社會科學家，離開書房中的沉思冥想，用更廣泛的事實和數據來進行驗証。不過，我們尚不能肯定，在哪些領域，我們的假說會得到同樣的可以驗証的結論。首先，我們可以料想，國家的教育體系越具有精英化傾向，那兒的知識分子就越容易倒向左傾（想想法國吧）。第二，在學校里屬于“大器晚成”的學生，一般不會產生那種自以為應獲得最高地位的想法，因而，大器晚成的知識分子與成名較早的知識分子相比，只有較少比例的人會產生反資本主義的心態。第三，我們假說適用于在這樣的社會（不像印度那樣的種姓社會）：學校中出眾的學生可以指望在進入社會后更上一層樓。迄今為止，西方社會的婦女並不抱有這種期望，那麼我們可以推想，女學生中，在課業上表現突出，但在進入社會后地位下降的，並不會產生如男學生那樣強烈的反資本主義的心態。我們進一步可以預料，如果一個社會，男女在職業機會方面趨于平等，知識女性中表現出反資本主義心態的比例，將與男性知識分子中一樣非同尋常地高。

有些讀者可能懷疑上述對知識分子的反資本主義心態的解釋。隨你的便，反正我覺得我已經指出了一個重要的現象。我們上邊所做的社會學的概括，確乎具有直覺的性質，不過應該八九不離十吧。校園上層階級中，某些經歷了社會地位下降的人總要作出某種重要的反應，必會產生對于一般社會的敵視。知識分子的這種反應如果不是強烈地、普遍地拒斥資本主義，還能是什麼？我們從一個令人迷惑、需要解釋的現象入手，我想我們已找到了明顯擺在那兒的（如上所述）解釋性因素，因而，我們相信，我們的假說說明了某些現實的現象。（2000，2，29譯完）

As long as transistor continue to shrink for the next 30 years, I won’t be out of work before I retire. Somehow I have a feeling that I won’t see the end of Moore’s law in my life time, since there is always some new innovation around the corner.

Rival architectures face off in a bid to keep Moore’s Law alive
By Khaled Ahmed, Klaus Schuegraf, IEEE Spectrum, November 2011

In May, Intel announced the most dramatic change to the architecture of the transistor since the device was invented. The company will henceforth build its transistors in three dimensions, a shift that—if all goes well—should add at least a half dozen years to the life of Moore’s Law, the biennial doubling in transistor density that has driven the chip industry for decades.

But Intel’s big announcement was notable for another reason: It signaled the start of a growing schism among chipmakers. Despite all the great advantages of going 3-D, a simpler alternative design is also nearing production. Although it’s not yet clear which device architecture will win out, what is certain is that the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) field-effect transistor (FET)—the centerpiece of computer processors since the 1980s—will get an entirely new look. And the change is more than cosmetic; these designs will help open up a new world of low-power mobile electronics with fantastic capabilities.

There’s a simple reason everyone’s contemplating a redesign: The smaller you make a CMOS transistor, the more current it leaks when it’s switched off. This leakage arises from the device’s geometry. A standard CMOS transistor has four parts: a source, a drain, a channel that connects the two, and a gate on top to control the channel. When the gate is turned on, it creates a conductive path that allows electrons or holes to move from the source to the drain. When the gate is switched off, this conductive path is supposed to disappear. But as engineers have shrunk the distance between the source and drain, the gate’s control over the transistor channel has gotten weaker. Current sneaks through the part of the channel that’s farthest from the gate and also through the underlying silicon substrate. The only way to cut down on leaks is to find a way to remove all that excess silicon.

Over the past few decades, two very different solutions to this problem have emerged. One approach is to make the silicon channel of the traditional planar transistor as thin as possible, by eliminating the silicon substrate and instead building the channel on top of insulating material. The other scheme is to turn this channel on its side, popping it out of the transistor plane to create a 3-D device. Each approach comes with its own set of merits and manufacturing challenges, and chipmakers are now working out the best way to catch up with Intel’s leap forward. The next few years will see dramatic upheaval in an already fast-moving industry.

Change is nothing new to CMOS transistors, but the pace has been accelerating. When the first CMOS devices entered mass production in the 1980s, the path to further miniaturization seemed straightforward. Back in 1974, engineers at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., led by Robert Dennard, had already sketched out the ideal progression. The team described how steadily reducing gate length, gate insulator thickness, and other feature dimensions could simultaneously improve switching speed, power consumption, and transistor density.

But this set of rules, known as Dennard’s scaling law, hasn’t been followed for some time. During the 1990s boom in personal computing, the demand for faster microprocessors drove down transistor gate length faster than Dennard’s law called for. Shrinking transistors boosted speeds, but engineers found that as they did so, they couldn’t reduce the voltage across the devices to improve power consumption. So much current was being lost when the transistor was off that a strong voltage—applied on the drain to pull charge carriers through the channel—was needed to make sure the device switched as quickly as possible to avoid losing power in the switching process.

By 2001, the leakage power was fast approaching the amount of power needed to switch a transistor out of its “off” state. This was a warning sign for the industry. The trend promised chips that would consume the same amount of energy regardless of whether they were in use or not. Chipmakers needed to find new ways to boost transistor density. In 2003, as the length of transistor channels dropped to 45 nanometers, Intel debuted chips bearing devices made with strain engineering. These transistors boasted silicon channels that had been physically squeezed or pulled to boost speed and reduce the power lost due to resistance. By the next “node”—industry lingo for a transistor density milestone—companies had stopped shrinking transistor dimensions and instead began just squeezing transistors closer together. And in 2007, Intel bought Moore’s Law a few more years by introducing the first big materials change, replacing the ever-thinning silicon oxide insulator that sits between a transistor’s gate and channel with hafnium oxide.

This better-insulating material helped stanch a main source of leakage current—the tunneling of electrons between the gate and the channel. But leakage from the source to the drain was still a huge problem. As companies faced the prospect of creating even denser chips with features approaching 20 nm, it became increasingly clear that squeezing together traditional planar transistors or shrinking them even further would be impossible with existing technology. Swapping in a new insulator or adding more strain wouldn’t cut it. Driving down power consumption and saving Moore’s Law would require a fundamental change to transistor structure—a new design that could maximize the gate’s control over the channel.

Fortunately, over the course of more than 20 years of research, transistor designers have found two very powerful ways to boost the effectiveness of the transistor gate. As the gate itself can’t get much stronger, these schemes focus on making the channel easier to control. One approach replaces the bulk silicon of a normal transistor with a thin layer of silicon built on an insulating layer, creating a device that is often called an ultrathin body silicon-on-insulator, or UTB SOI, also known as a fully depleted SOI.

A second strategy turns the thin silicon channel by 90 degrees, creating a “fin” that juts out of the plane of the device. The transistor gate is then draped over the top of the channel like an upside-down U, bracketing it on three sides and giving the gate almost complete control of the channel. While conventional CMOS devices are largely flat, save for a thin insulating layer and the gate, these FinFETs—or Tri-Gate transistors, as Intel has named its three-sided devices—are decidedly 3-D. All the main components of the transistor—source, drain, channel, and gate—sit on top of the device’s substrate.

Both schemes offer the same basic advantage: By thinning the channel, they bring the gate closer to the drain. When a transistor is off, the drain’s electric field can take one of two paths inside the channel to zero-voltage destinations. It can propagate all the way across the channel to the source, or it can terminate at the transistor’s gate. If the field gets to the source, it can lower the energy barrier that keeps charge carriers in the source from entering the channel. But if the gate is close enough to the drain, it can act as a lightning rod, diverting field lines away from the source. This cuts down on leakage, and it also means that field lines don’t penetrate very far into the channel, dissipating even more energy by tugging on any stray carriers.

The first 3-D transistor was sketched out by Digh Hisamoto and others at Hitachi, who presented the design for a device dubbed a Delta at a conference in 1989. The UTB SOI’s roots extend even further back; they are a natural extension of early SOI channel research, which began in the 1980s when researchers started experimenting with transistors built with 200-nm thick, undoped silicon channels on insulating material.

But the promise of both of these thin-channel approaches wasn’t fully appreciated until 1996, when Chenming Hu and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, began an ambitious study, funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to see how far these designs could go. At the time, the industry was producing 250-nm transistors, and no one knew whether the devices could be scaled below 100 nm. Hu’s team showed that the two alternate architectures could solve the power consumption problems of planar CMOS transistors and that they could operate with gate lengths of 20 nm—and later, even less.

The FinFET and the UTB SOI both offer big gains in power consumption. Logic chip designs typically require that a transistor in its on state draw at least 10 000 times as much current as the device leaks in its off state. For 30-nm transistors—about the size that most chipmakers are currently aiming for—this design spec means devices should leak no more than a few nanoamperes of current when they’re off. While 30-nm planar CMOS devices leak about 50 times that amount, both thin-channel designs hit the target quite easily.

But the two architectures aren’t entirely equal. To get the best performance, the channel of a UTB SOI should be no more than about one-fourth as thick as the length of the gate. Because a FinFET’s gate brackets the channel on three sides, the 3-D transistors can achieve the same level of control with a channel—or fin—that’s as much as half as thick as the length of the transistor gate.

This bigger channel volume gives FinFETs a distinct advantage when it comes to current-carrying capacity. The best R&D results suggest that a 25-nm FinFET can carry about 25 percent more current than a UTB SOI. This current boost doesn’t matter much if you have only a single transistor, but in an IC, it means you can charge capacitors 25 percent faster, making for much speedier chips. Faster chips obviously mean a lot to a microprocessor manufacturer like Intel. The question is whether other chipmakers will find the faster speeds meaningful enough to switch to FinFETs, a prospect that requires a big up-front investment and an entirely new set of manufacturing challenges.

The single biggest hurdle in making FinFETs is manufacturing the fins so that they’re both narrow and uniform. For a 20-nm transistor—roughly the same size as the one that Intel is putting into production—the fin must be about 10 nm wide and 25 nm high; it must also deviate by no more than half a nanometer—just a few atomic layers—in any given direction. Over the course of production, manufacturers must control all sources of variation, limiting it to no more than 1 nm in a 300-millimeter-wide wafer.

This precision is needed not only to manufacture the fin; it must also be maintained for the rest of the manufacturing process, including thermal treatment, doping, and the multiple film deposition and removal steps needed to build the transistor’s gate insulator and gate. As an added complication, the gate oxide and the gate must be deposited so that they follow the contours of the fin. Any process that damages the fin could affect how the device performs. The resultant variation in device quality would force engineers to operate circuits at a higher power than they’re designed for, eliminating any gains in power efficiency.

The unusual geometry of the FinFET also poses challenges for doping, which isn’t required but can help cut down on leakage current. FinFET channels need two kinds of dopants: One is deposited underneath the gate and the other into the parts of the channel that extend on either side of the gate, helping mate the channel to the source and drain. Manufacturers currently dope channels by shooting ions straight down into the material. But that approach won’t work for FinFETs. The devices need dopants to be distributed evenly through the top of the fin and the side walls; any unevenness in concentration will cause a pileup of charges, boosting the device’s resistance and wasting power.

Doping will get only more difficult in the future. As FinFETs shrink, they’ll get so close together that they will cast “shadows” on one another, preventing dopants from permeating every part of every fin. At Applied Materials’ Silicon Systems Group, we’ve been working on one possible fix: immersing fins in plasma so that dopants can migrate directly into the material, no matter what its shape is.

Because UTB SOI devices are quite similar to conventional planar CMOS transistors, they are easier to manufacture than FinFETs. Most existing designs and manufacturing techniques will work just as well with the new thin-silicon transistors as they do with the traditional variety. And in some ways, UTB SOIs are easier to produce than present-day transistors. The devices don’t need doped channels, a simplification that can save planar CMOS manufacturers some 20 to 30 steps out of roughly 400 in the wafer production process.

But the UTB SOI comes with its own challenges, chiefly the thin channel. The requirement that UTB SOI channels be half as thick as comparable FinFET fins makes any variations in thickness even more critical for these devices. A firm called Soitec, headquartered in Bernin, France, which has been leading the charge in manufacturing ultrathin silicon-on-insulator wafers, is currently demonstrating 10-nm-thick silicon layers that vary by just 0.5 nm in thickness. That’s an impressive achievement for wafers that measure 300 mm across, but it will need to be improved as transistors shrink. And it’s not clear how precise Soitec’s technique—which involves splitting a wafer to create an ultrathin silicon layer—can ultimately be made.

Another key stumbling block for UTB SOI adoption is the supply chain. At the moment, there are few potential providers of ultrathin SOI wafers, which could ultimately make manufacturers of UTB SOI chips dependent on a handful of sources. Intel’s Mark Bohr says the hard-to-find wafers could add 10 percent to the cost of a finished wafer, compared to 2 to 3 percent for wafers bearing 3-D transistors (an estimate from the SOI Industry Consortium suggests that finished UTB SOI wafers will actually be less expensive).

Going forward, we expect that chipmakers will split into two camps. Those interested in the speediest transistors will move toward FinFETs. Others who don’t want to invest as much in a switch will find UTB SOIs more attractive.

UTB SOI transistors have an additional feature that makes them particularly appealing for low-power applications: A small voltage can easily be applied to the very bottom of a chip full of UTB SOI devices. This small bias voltage alters the channel properties, reducing the electrical barrier that stops current flowing from the source to the drain. As a result, less voltage needs to be applied to the transistor gates to turn the devices on. When the transistors aren’t needed, this bias voltage can be removed, which restores the electrical barrier, reducing the amount of current that leaks through the device when it’s off. As Thomas Skotnicki of STMicroelectronics has long argued, this sort of dynamic switching saves power, making the devices particularly attractive for chips in smartphones and other mobile gadgets. Skotnicki says the company expects to release its first UTB SOI chip, which will use 28-nm transistors to power a mobile multimedia processor, by the end of 2012.

That said, few companies have committed to one technology or the other. STMicroelectronics—as well as firms such as GlobalFoundries and Samsung—is part of the International Semiconductor Development Alliance, which supports and benefits from device research at IBM and is investing in both FinFETs and UTB SOIs. Exactly how the industry will split up and which design will come to dominate will depend on decisions made by the biggest foundries and how quickly standards are developed. Reports suggest that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which dominates bespoke manufacturing in the chip industry, will begin making 14-nm FinFETs in 2015, but it’s not clear whether the company will also support UTB SOI production. Switching to FinFET production requires a substantial investment, and whichever way TSMC swings, it will put pressure on other manufacturers, such as GlobalFoundries, United Microelectronics Corp., and newcomers to the foundry business such as Samsung, to choose a direction.

Also still unclear is how far each technology can be extended. Right now it looks like both FinFETs and UTB SOIs should be able to cover the next three generations of transistors. But UTB SOI transistors may not evolve much below 7 nm, because at that point, their gate oxide would need an effective thickness of 0.7 nm, which would require significant materials innovation. FinFETs may have a similar limit. In 2006, a team at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology used electron-beam lithography to build 3-nm FinFETs. But crafting a single device isn’t quite the same as packing millions together to make a microprocessor; when transistors are that close to each other, parasitic capacitances and resistances will draw current away from each switch. Some projections suggest that when FinFETs are scaled down to 7 nm or so, they will perform no better than planar devices.

Meanwhile, researchers are already trying to figure out what devices might succeed FinFETs and UTB SOIs, to continue Moore’s Law scaling. One possibility is to extrapolate the FinFET concept by using a nanowire device that is completely surrounded by a cylindrical gate. Another idea is to exploit quantum tunneling to create switches that can’t leak current when they’re not switched on. We don’t know what will come next. The emergence of FinFETs and UTB SOIs clearly shows that the days of simple transistor scaling are long behind us. But the switch to these new designs also offers a clear demonstration of how creative thinking and a good amount of competition can help us push Moore’s Law to its ultimate limit—whatever that might be.

When the world is mourning with the death of Steve Jobs, the world lost another tech pioneer Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C and UNIX. To many geeks, Dennis’ role in the computer revolution is way more important than Steve.

Dennis Ritchie, the Bell Labs computer scientist who created the immensely popular C programming language and who was instrumental in the construction the well-known Unix operating system, died last weekend after a protracted illness. Ritchie was 70 years old.

Ritchie, who was born in a suburb of New York City, graduated from Harvard and later went on to earn a doctorate from the same institution while working at Bell Labs, which then belonged to AT&T (and is now part of the Alcatel-Lucent). There he joined forces with Ken Thompson and other Bell Labs colleagues to create the Unix operating system. Although early Unix evolved without the naming of progressively advanced versions, the birth of this operating system can be marked by the first edition of the Unix programmers’ manual, which was issued in November of 1971, almost 40 years ago.

Although AT&T had been engaged in the development of an advanced computer operating system called Multics in the late 1960s, corporate managers abandoned those efforts, making Thomson and Ritchie’s work on Unix that much more impressive. These researchers threw themselves into the development of Unix despite, rather than in response to, their employer’s leanings at the time. We should be thankful that Ritchie and his colleagues took such initiative and that they had the foresight and talent to build a system that was so simple, elegant, and portable that is survives today. Indeed, Unix has spawned dozens if not hundreds of direct derivatives and Unix-like operating systems, including Linux, which can now be found running everything from smartphones to supercomputers. Unix also underlies the current Macintosh operating system, OS X.

Ritchie’s work creating the C programming language took place at the same time and is closely tied to the early development of Unix. By 1973, Ritchie was able to rewrite the core of Unix, which had been programmed in assembly language, using C. In 1978, Brian Kernighan (another Bell Labs colleague) and Ritchie published The C Programming Language, which essentially defined the language (“K&R C”) and remains a classic on the C language and on good programming practice in general. For example, The C Programming Language established the widespread tradition of beginning instruction with an illustrative program that displays the words, “Hello, world.”

For their seminal work on Unix, Ritchie and Thompson received in 1983 the Association of Computing Machinery’s Turing Award. In 1990, the IEEE awarded Ritchie and Thompson the Richard W. Hamming Medal. Ritchie and Thompson’s work on Unix and C was also recognized at the highest level when President Bill Clinton awarded them the 1998 National Medal of Technology. And in May of this year, Ritchie and Thompson received the 2011 Japan Prize (which was also awarded to Tadamitsu Kishimoto and Toshio Hirano, who were honored for the discovery of interleukin-6).

Spectrum attended the Japan Prize awards ceremony and had an opportunity to ask Ritchie to reflect on some of the high points of his impressive career. During that interview, Ritchie admitted that Unix is far from being without flaws, although he didn’t attempt to enumerate them. “There are lots of little things—I don’t even want to think about going down the list,” he quipped. In December, Spectrum will be publishing a feature-length history of the development of the Unix operating system.

Rob Pike, a former member of the Unix team at Bell labs, informed the world of Ritchie’s death last night on Google+. There he wrote, “He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind.” A charming illustration of some of those qualities comes from David Madeo, who responded to Pike’s message by sharing this story:

I met Dennis Ritchie at a Usenix without knowing it. He had traded nametags with someone so I spent 30 minutes thinking “this guy really knows what he’s talking about.” Eventually, the other guy walked up and said, “I’m tired of dealing with your groupies” and switched the nametags back. I looked back down to realize who he was, the guy who not only wrote the book I used to learn C in freshman year, but invented the language in the first place. He apologized and said something along the lines that it was easier for him to have good conversations that way.

Neutrino is faster than light! If there is no experimental error, it will be the biggest discovery since Einstein’s relativity theory. In fact, this result prove that Einstein is wrong. If something can be faster than light, then time travel may be possible.

By Rachel Courtland, IEEE Spectrum, Fri, September 23, 2011

The photon should never lose a race. But on Thursday, stories started trickling in of a baffling result: neutrinos that move faster than light. News of this potential violation of special relativity is everywhere now. But despite a flurry of media coverage, it’s still hard to know what to make of the result.

As far as particle physics results go, the finding itself is fairly easy to convey. OPERA, a 1300-metric-ton detector that sits in Italy’s underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory, detected neutrinos that seem to move faster than the speed of light. The nearly massless particles made the 2.43-millisecond, 730-kilometer trip from CERN, where they were created, to OPERA’s detectors about 60 nanoseconds faster than a photon would.

The OPERA team hasn’t released the results lightly. But after three years work, OPERA spokesperson Antonio Ereditato told Science, it was time to spread the news and put the question to the community. “We are forced to say something,” Ereditato said. “We could not sweep it under the carpet because that would be dishonest.” And the experiment seems carefully done. The OPERA team estimates they have measured the 60 nanosecond delay with a precision of about 10 nanoseconds. Yesterday, Nature News reported the team’s result has a certainty of about six sigma, “the physicists’ way of saying it is certainly correct”.

But as straightforward as you can imagine a particle footrace to be, interpreting the result and dealing with the implications is another matter. Words like “flabbergasted” and “extraordinary” are circulating, but often with a strong note of caution. Physicist Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey was so convinced the finding is the result of measurement error, he told the BBC’s Jason Palmer that “if the CERN experiment proves to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV.” Others say it’s just too early to call. When approached by Reuters, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking declined to comment on the result. “It is premature to comment on this,” he said. “Further experiments and clarifications are needed.”

For now, no one’s speculating too wildly about what the result might mean if it holds up: there has been some talk of time travel and extra dimensions. And on the whole, the coverage of the OPERA findings, especially given the fast-breaking nature of the news cycle (the team’s preprint posted last night) has been pretty careful. But there is one key question few have tackled head on: the conflict with long-standing astrophysical results.

One of the key neutrino speed measurements comes from observations of supernova 1987A. Photons and neutrinos from this explosion reached Earth just hours apart in February 1987. But as Nature News and other outlets noted, if OPERA’s measurement of neutrino speed is correct, neutrinos created in the explosion should have arrived at Earth years before the light from the supernova was finally picked up by astronomers.

New Scientist’s Lisa Grossman found a few potential explanations for the conflicting results. She quotes theorist Mark Sher of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, who speculates that maybe – just maybe – the speed difference between the OPERA and supernova results could be chalked up to differences in the energy or type of neutrinos.

That said, no one is arguing that the OPERA results are in immediate need of a theoretical explanation, because there could be errors the team hasn’t accounted for. The experiment relies on very precise timing and careful measurement of the distance between the neutrino source at CERN and the detector. John Timmer of Ars Technica does a good job of explaining how the OPERA team used fastidious accounting, GPS signals, and atomic clocks to reduce the uncertainty. But he notes that there are other potential sources of error that could add up, not to mention those pesky “unknown unknowns”.

Many physicists seem to be looking forward to independent tests using two other neutrino experiments – the MINOS experiment in Minnesota, which captures neutrinos created at Fermilab, and another neutrino beam experiment in Japan called T2K.

But for now, we can only wait. And, perhaps, come up with explanations of our own.

If romance reduce girls’ pursuit in engineering, probably the reverse is also true that girls choose engineering have less interest in romance as well. They should do a follow up research and survey a large sample of engineering girls, see how many of them had a boyfriend in high school.

Now, someone should come up with a research showing male engineers are not romantic, so Pat cannot complain I am not romantic.

BY Steven Cherry, IEEE Spectrum, Fri, August 26, 2011
A new study suggests thoughts of romance can reduce college women’s interest in science and engineering

In the 1960s, when women first began enrolling at universities in record numbers, many people wondered: “Why weren’t more of them studying engineering?” Fifty years later, we’re still wondering. Only one in seven U.S. engineers is a woman. The so-called “engineering gender gap” is still a chasm.

And that’s not likely to change very quickly. The average college graduate nowadays is a woman—57 percent to 43—but when it comes to the so-called STEM fields, that’s science, technology, engineering, and math, women account for only 35 percent. And most of those are for life and physical sciences, not engineering or computer science.

It’s a problem perhaps best examined by psychologists, and examining it they are. And a new series of studies argues that—as clichéd as it sounds—maybe love really does have something to do with it.

An article based on the studies, will be published next month in the peer-reviewed journal, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

My guest today is the paper’s lead author. Lora Park is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo, in New York, and principal investigator at the Self and Motivation Lab there. She joins us by phone.A new study suggests thoughts of romance can reduce college women’s interest in science and engineering

Effects of Everyday Romantic Goal Pursuit on Women’s Attitudes Toward Math and Science

Abstract:
The present research examined the impact of everyday romantic goal strivings on women’s attitudes toward science, technology,engineering, and math (STEM). It was hypothesized that women may distance themselves from STEM when the goal to be romantically desirable is activated because pursuing intelligence goals in masculine domains (i.e., STEM) conflicts with pursuing romantic goals associated with traditional romantic scripts and gender norms. Consistent with hypotheses, women, but not men, who viewed images (Study 1) or overheard conversations (Studies 2a-2b) related to romantic goals reported less positive attitudes toward STEM and less preference for majoring in math/science compared to other disciplines. On days when women pursued romantic goals, the more romantic activities they engaged in and the more desirable they felt, but the fewer math activities they engaged in. Furthermore, women’s previous day romantic goal strivings predicted feeling more desirable but being less invested in math on the following day (Study 3).

Link to the paper: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/pdf/August11/ParkRomanticAttitudes.pdf

I like Plato’s idea that wisdom is directly proportion the amount of leisure time a person has. To Plato, leisure does not mean indulge yourself in brainless entertainment, it means time for thinking and exercise of the mind. When my week is too busy for me to think and reflect, I can feel the rotting of my mind.

In the hi-tech age, Plato’s work ethic comes back with a slight twist. Manual labor of the slaves are replaced robots and computers. Repetitive manual labor has no intrinsic value, thinking as work brings meaning to the educated. Just like in protestant work ethic, idleness is still a deadly sin, but work without using your mind is equally bad.

Historical Context of the Work Ethic
by, Roger B. Hill, Ph.D., the Work Ethic Site

From a historical perspective, the cultural norm placing a positive moral value on doing a good job because work has intrinsic value for its own sake was a relatively recent development (Lipset, 1990). Work, for much of the ancient history of the human race, has been hard and degrading. Working hard–in the absence of compulsion–was not the norm for Hebrew, classical, or medieval cultures (Rose, 1985). It was not until the Protestant Reformation that physical labor became culturally acceptable for all persons, even the wealthy.

1.Attitudes Toward Work During the Classical Period

One of the significant influences on the culture of the western world has been the Judeo-Christian belief system. Growing awareness of the multicultural dimensions of contemporary society has moved educators to consider alternative viewpoints and perspectives, but an understanding of western thought is an important element in the understanding of the history of the United States.

Traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs state that sometime after the dawn of creation, man was placed in the Garden of Eden “to work it and take care of it” (NIV, 1973, Genesis 2:15). What was likely an ideal work situation was disrupted when sin entered the world and humans were ejected from the Garden. Genesis 3:19 described the human plight from that time on. “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (NIV, 1973). Rose stated that the Hebrew belief system viewed work as a “curse devised by God explicitly to punish the disobedience and ingratitude of Adam and Eve” (1985, p. 28). Numerous scriptures from the Old Testament in fact supported work, not from the stance that there was any joy in it, but from the premise that it was necessary to prevent poverty and destitution (NIV; 1973; Proverbs 10:14, Proverbs 13:4, Proverbs 14:23, Proverbs 20:13, Ecclesiastes 9:10).

The Greeks, like the Hebrews, also regarded work as a curse (Maywood, 1982). According to Tilgher (1930), the Greek word for work was ponos, taken from the Latin poena, which meant sorrow. Manual labor was for slaves. The cultural norms allowed free men to pursue warfare, large-scale commerce, and the arts, especially architecture or sculpture (Rose, 1985).

Mental labor was also considered to be work and was denounced by the Greeks. The mechanical arts were deplored because they required a person to use practical thinking, “brutalizing the mind till it was unfit for thinking of truth” (Tilgher, 1930, p. 4). Skilled crafts were accepted and recognized as having some social value, but were not regarded as much better than work appropriate for slaves. Hard work, whether due to economic need or under the orders of a master, was disdained.

It was recognized that work was necessary for the satisfaction of material needs, but philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle made it clear that the purpose for which the majority of men labored was “in order that the minority, the élite, might engage in pure exercises of the mind–art, philosophy, and politics” (Tilgher, 1930, p. 5). Plato recognized the notion of a division of labor, separating them first into categories of rich and poor, and then into categories by different kinds of work, and he argued that such an arrangement could only be avoided by abolition of private property (Anthony, 1977). Aristotle supported the ownership of private property and wealth. He viewed work as a corrupt waste of time that would make a citizen’s pursuit of virtue more difficult (Anthony, 1977).

Braude (1975) described the Greek belief that a person’s prudence, morality, and wisdom was directly proportional to the amount of leisure time that person had. A person who worked, when there was no need to do so, would run the risk of obliterating the distinction between slave and master. Leadership, in the Greek state and culture, was based on the work a person didn’t have to do, and any person who broke this cultural norm was acting to subvert the state itself.

The Romans adopted much of their belief system from the culture of the Greeks and they also held manual labor in low regard (Lipset, 1990). The Romans were industrious, however, and demonstrated competence in organization, administration, building, and warfare. Through the empire that they established, the Roman culture was spread through much of the civilized world during the period from c500 BC until c117 AD (Webster Encyclopedia, 1985). The Roman empire spanned most of Europe, the Middle East, Egypt, and North Africa and greatly influenced the Western culture in which the theoretical constructs underlying this study were developed.

Slavery had been an integral part of the ancient world prior to the Roman empire, but the employment of slaves was much more widely utilized by the Romans than by the Greeks before them (Anthony, 1977). Early on in the Roman system, moderate numbers of slaves were held and they were treated relatively well. As the size of landholdings grew, however, thousands of slaves were required for large-scale grain production on some estates, and their treatment grew worse. Slaves came to be viewed as cattle, with no rights as human beings and with little hope of ever being freed. In fact, in some instances cattle received greater care than slaves, since cattle were not as capable of caring for themselves as were slaves (Anthony, 1977).

For the Romans, work was to be done by slaves, and only two occupations were suitable for a free man–agriculture and big business (Maywood, 1982). A goal of these endeavors, as defined by the Roman culture, was to achieve an “honorable retirement into rural peace as a country gentleman” (Tilgher, 1930, p. 8). Any pursuit of handicrafts or the hiring out of a person’s arms was considered to be vulgar, dishonoring, and beneath the dignity of a Roman citizen.

Philosophically, both the Greeks and the Romans viewed the work that slaves performed and the wealth that free men possessed as a means to achieve the supreme ideal of life–man’s independence of external things, self-sufficiency, and satisfaction with one’s self (Tilgher, 1930). Although work was something that would degrade virtue, wealth was not directly related to virtue except in the matter of how it was used. The view of Antisthenes that wealth and virtue were incompatible and the view of the Stoics that wealth should be pursued for the purpose of generosity and social good represented extremes of philosophical thought. The most accepted view was that pursuit of gain to meet normal needs was appropriate.

From the perspective of a contemporary culture, respect for workers upon whom the economic structure of a nation and a society rested would have been logical for the Greeks and the Romans, but no such respect was evident. Even free men, who were not privileged to be wealthy and were obliged to work along side slaves, were not treated with any sense of gratitude, but were held in contempt. The cultural norms of the classical era regarding work were in stark contrast to the work ethic of the latter day.

3.Attitudes Toward Work During the Medieval Period

The fall of the Roman empire marked the beginning of a period generally known as the Middle Ages. During this time, from c400 AD until c1400 AD, Christian thought dominated the culture of Europe (Braude, 1975). Woven into the Christian conceptions about work, however, were Hebrew, Greek, and Roman themes. Work was still perceived as punishment by God for man’s original sin, but to this purely negative view was added the positive aspect of earnings which prevented one from being reliant on the charity of others for the physical needs of life (Tilgher, 1930). Wealth was recognized as an opportunity to share with those who might be less fortunate and work which produced wealth therefore became acceptable.

Early Christian thought placed an emphasis on the shortness of time until the second coming of Christ and the end of the world. Any attachment to physical things of the world or striving to accumulate excessive wealth was frowned upon. As time passed and the world did not end, the Christian church began to turn its attention to social structure and the organization of the believers on earth. Monasteries were formed where monks performed the religious and intellectual work of the church (reading, copying manuscripts, etc.), but lay people tended to the manual labor needed to supply the needs of the community. People who were wealthy were expected to meet their own needs, but to give the excess of their riches to charity. Handicraft, farming, and small scale commerce were acceptable for people of moderate means, but receiving interest for money loaned, charging more than a “just” price, and big business were not acceptable (Tilgher, 1930).

As was the case for the Greeks and the Romans, social status within the medieval culture was related to the work a person did. Aristotelianism was also evident in the system of divine law taught by the Catholic church during this time (Anthony, 1977). A hierarchy of professions and trades was developed by St. Thomas Aquinas as part of his encyclopedic consideration of all things human and divine (Tilgher, 1930). Agriculture was ranked first, followed by the handicrafts and then commerce. These were considered to be the work of the world, however, and the work of the church was in a higher category (Rose, 1985). The ideal occupation was the monastic life of prayer and contemplation of God (Braude, 1975; Tilgher, 1930). Whether as a cleric or in some worldly occupation, each person embarked on a particular work course as a result of the calling of God, and it was the duty of a worker to remain in his class, passing on his family work from father to son.

In the culture of the medieval period, work still held no intrinsic value. The function of work was to meet the physical needs of one’s family and community, and to avoid idleness which would lead to sin (Tilgher, 1930). Work was a part of the economic structure of human society which, like all other things, was ordered by God.

4.Protestantism and the Protestant Ethic

With the Reformation, a period of religious and political upheaval in western Europe during the sixteenth century, came a new perspective on work. Two key religious leaders who influenced the development of western culture during this period were Martin Luther and John Calvin. Luther was an Augustinian friar who became discontent with the Catholic church and was a leader within the Protestant movement. He believed that people could serve God through their work, that the professions were useful, that work was the universal base of society and the cause of differing social classes, and that a person should work diligently in their own occupation and should not try to change from the profession to which he was born. To do so would be to go against God’s laws since God assigned each person to his own place in the social hierarchy (Lipset, 1990; Tilgher, 1930).

The major point at which Luther differed from the medieval concept of work was regarding the superiority of one form of work over another. Luther regarded the monastic and contemplative life, held up as the ideal during the middle ages, as an egotistic and unaffectionate exercise on the part of the monks, and he accused them of evading their duty to their neighbors (Tilgher, 1930). For Luther, a person’s vocation was equated as his calling, but all calling’s were of equal spiritual dignity. This tenant was significant because it affirmed manual labor.

Luther still did not pave the way for a profit-oriented economic system because he disapproved of commerce as an occupation (Lipset, 1990; Tilgher, 1930). From his perspective, commerce did not involve any real work. Luther also believed that each person should earn an income which would meet his basic needs, but to accumulate or horde wealth was sinful.

According to Weber (1904, 1905), it was John Calvin who introduced the theological doctrines which combined with those of Martin Luther to form a significant new attitude toward work. Calvin was a French theologian whose concept of predestination was revolutionary. Central to Calvinist belief was the Elect, those persons chosen by God to inherit eternal life. All other people were damned and nothing could change that since God was unchanging. While it was impossible to know for certain whether a person was one of the Elect, one could have a sense of it based on his own personal encounters with God. Outwardly the only evidence was in the person’s daily life and deeds, and success in one’s worldly endeavors was a sign of possible inclusion as one of the Elect. A person who was indifferent and displayed idleness was most certainly one of the damned, but a person who was active, austere, and hard-working gave evidence to himself and to others that he was one of God’s chosen ones (Tilgher, 1930).

Calvin taught that all men must work, even the rich, because to work was the will of God. It was the duty of men to serve as God’s instruments here on earth, to reshape the world in the fashion of the Kingdom of God, and to become a part of the continuing process of His creation (Braude, 1975). Men were not to lust after wealth, possessions, or easy living, but were to reinvest the profits of their labor into financing further ventures. Earnings were thus to be reinvested over and over again, ad infinitum, or to the end of time (Lipset, 1990). Using profits to help others rise from a lessor level of subsistence violated God’s will since persons could only demonstrate that they were among the Elect through their own labor (Lipset, 1990).

Selection of an occupation and pursuing it to achieve the greatest profit possible was considered by Calvinists to be a religious duty. Not only condoning, but encouraging the pursuit of unlimited profit was a radical departure from the Christian beliefs of the middle ages. In addition, unlike Luther, Calvin considered it appropriate to seek an occupation which would provide the greatest earnings possible. If that meant abandoning the family trade or profession, the change was not only allowed, but it was considered to be one’s religious duty (Tilgher, 1930).

The norms regarding work which developed out of the Protestant Reformation, based on the combined theological teachings of Luther and Calvin, encouraged work in a chosen occupation with an attitude of service to God, viewed work as a calling and avoided placing greater spiritual dignity on one job than another, approved of working diligently to achieve maximum profits, required reinvestment of profits back into one’s business, allowed a person to change from the craft or profession of his father, and associated success in one’s work with the likelihood of being one of God’s Elect.

5.Two Perspectives of the Protestant Ethic

The attitudes toward work which became a part of the culture during the sixteenth century, and the economic value system which they nurtured, represented a significant change from medieval and classical ways of thinking about work (Anthony, 1977). Max Weber, the German economic sociologist, coined a term for the new beliefs about work calling it the “Protestant ethic.” The key elements of the Protestant ethic were diligence, punctuality, deferment of gratification, and primacy of the work domain (Rose, 1985). Two distinct perspectives were evident in the literature with regard to the development of the Protestant ethic.

One perspective was the materialist viewpoint which stated that the belief system, called the Protestant ethic, grew out of changes in the economic structure and the need for values to support new ways of behavior. Anthony (1977) attributes this view to Karl Marx. The other perspective, delineated by Max Weber (1904, 1905), viewed changes in the economic structure as an outgrowth of shifts in theological beliefs. Regardless of the viewpoint, it is evident that a rapid expansion in commerce and the rise of industrialism coincided with the Protestant Reformation (Rose, 1985).

Bernstein (1988), in an argument supporting the materialist viewpoint, enumerated three sixteenth century trends which probably contributed to the support by Luther and Calvin of diligence: (1) a rapid population increase of Germany and Western Europe, (2) inflation, and (3) a high unemployment rate. Probably the most serious of these was the rapid expansion in population. Between 1500 and 1600, the population of Germany increased by 25% and the British population increased by 40% (Bernstein, 1988). In the cities, the increases were even greater as people from rural areas were displaced by enclosure of large tracts of land for sheep farming. In addition, the import of large quantities of silver and gold from Mexico and Peru contributed to inflation in general price levels of between 300% and 400%, and even higher inflation in food prices (Bernstein, 1988). Along with the growth in population and the inflation problems, unemployment was estimated at 20% in some cities (Bernstein, 1988). People without jobs became commonplace on the streets of cities, begging and struggling to survive.

European cities acted to alleviate the problems of unemployment and begging on the streets by passing laws which prohibited begging. The general perception of the time was that work was available for those who wanted to work, and that beggars and vagrants were just lazy. The reality was that the movement of people into the cities far exceeded the capacity of the urban areas to provide jobs. The theological premise that work was a necessary penance for original sin caused increased prejudice toward those without work. Bernstein (1988) suggested that a fundamental misunderstanding of the economic realities facing the poor contributed to the theological development of the Protestant ethic.

From a marxist view, what actually occurred was the development of a religious base of support for a new industrial system which required workers who would accept long hours and poor working conditions (Anthony, 1977; Berenstein, 1988). Berenstein did not accuse the theological leaders of the Protestant Reformation of deliberately constructing a belief system which would support the new economic order, but proposed that they did misconstrue the realities of the poor and the unemployed of their day.

From the perspective of Max Weber (1904, 1905), the theological beliefs came first and change in the economic system resulted. Motivation of persons to work hard and to reinvest profits in new business ventures was perceived as an outcome primarily of Calvinism. Weber further concluded that countries with belief systems which were predominantly Protestant prospered more under capitalism than did those which were predominantly Catholic (Rose, 1985).

6.The Work Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism

During the medieval period, the feudal system became the dominant economic structure in Europe. This was a social, economic, and political system under which landowners provided governance and protection to those who lived and worked on their property. Centralization of government, the growth of trade, and the establishment of economically powerful towns, during the fifteenth century, provided alternative choices for subsistence, and the feudal system died out (Webster Encyclopedia, 1985). One of the factors that made the feudal system work was the predominant religious belief that it was sinful for people to seek work other than within the God ordained occupations fathers passed on to their sons. With the Protestant Reformation, and the spread of a theology which ordained the divine dignity of all occupations as well as the right of choosing one’s work, the underpinnings of an emerging capitalist economic system were established.

Anthony (1977) described the significance of an ideology advocating regular systematic work as essential to the transformation from the feudal system to the modern society. In the emerging capitalist system, work was good. It satisfied the economic interests of an increasing number of small businessmen and it became a social duty–a norm. Hard work brought respect and contributed to the social order and well being of the community. The dignity with which society viewed work brought dignity for workers as well, and contempt for those who were idle or lazy.

The Protestant ethic, which gave “moral sanction to profit making through hard work, organization, and rational calculation” (Yankelovich, 1981, p. 247), spread throughout Europe and to America through the Protestant sects. In particular, the English Puritans, the French Huguenots, and the Swiss and Dutch Reformed subscribed to Calvinist theology that was especially conducive to productivity and capital growth (Lipset, 1990). As time passed, attitudes and beliefs which supported hard work became secularized, and were woven into the norms of Western culture (Lipset, 1990; Rodgers, 1978; Rose, 1985; Super, 1982). Weber (1904, 1905) especially emphasized the popular writings of Benjamin Franklin as an example of how, by the eighteenth century, diligence in work, scrupulous use of time, and deferment of pleasure had become a part of the popular philosophy of work in the Western world.

7.The Work Ethic in America

Although the Protestant ethic became a significant factor in shaping the culture and society of Europe after the sixteenth century, its impact did not eliminate the social hierarchy which gave status to those whose wealth allowed exemption from toil and made gentility synonymous with leisure (Rodgers, 1978). The early adventurers who first found America were searching, not for a place to work and build a new land, but for a new Eden where abundance and riches would allow them to follow Aristotle’s instruction that leisure was the only life fitting for a free man. The New England Puritans, the Pennsylvania Quakers, and others of the Protestant sects, who eventually settled in America, however, came with no hopes or illusions of a life of ease.

The early settlers referred to America as a wilderness, in part because they sought the spiritual growth associated with coming through the wilderness in the Bible (Rodgers, 1978). From their viewpoint, the moral life was one of hard work and determination, and they approached the task of building a new world in the wilderness as an opportunity to prove their own moral worth. What resulted was a land preoccupied with toil.

When significant numbers of Europeans began to visit the new world in the early 1800′s, they were amazed with the extent of the transformation (Rodgers, 1978). Visitors to the northern states were particularly impressed by the industrious pace. They often complained about the lack of opportunities for amusement, and they were perplexed by the lack of a social strata dedicated to a life of leisure.

Work in preindustrial America was not incessant, however. The work of agriculture was seasonal, hectic during planting and harvesting but more relaxed during the winter months. Even in workshops and stores, the pace was not constant. Changing demands due to the seasons, varied availability of materials, and poor transportation and communication contributed to interruptions in the steadiness of work. The work ethic of this era did not demand the ceaseless regularity which came with the age of machines, but supported sincere dedication to accomplish those tasks a person might have before them. The work ethic “was not a certain rate of business but a way of thinking” (Rodgers, 1978, p. 19).

8.The Work Ethic and the Industrial Revolution

As work in America was being dramatically affected by the industrial revolution in the mid-nineteenth century, the work ethic had become secularized in a number of ways. The idea of work as a calling had been replaced by the concept of public usefulness. Economists warned of the poverty and decay that would befall the country if people failed to work hard, and moralists stressed the social duty of each person to be productive (Rodgers, 1978). Schools taught, along with the alphabet and the spelling book, that idleness was a disgrace. The work ethic also provided a sociological as well as an ideological explanation for the origins of social hierarchy through the corollary that effort expended in work would be rewarded (Gilbert, 1977).

Some elements of the work ethic, however, did not bode well with the industrial age. One of the central themes of the work ethic was that an individual could be the master of his own fate through hard work. Within the context of the craft and agricultural society this was true. A person could advance his position in life through manual labor and the economic benefits it would produce. Manual labor, however, began to be replaced by machine manufacture and intensive division of labor came with the industrial age. As a result, individual control over the quantity and methods of personal production began to be removed (Gilbert, 1977).

The impact of industrialization and the speed with which it spread during the second half of the nineteenth century was notable. Rodgers (1978) reported that as late as 1850 most American manufacturing was still being done in homes and workshops. This pattern was not confined to rural areas, but was found in cities also where all varieties of craftsmen plied their trades. Some division of labor was utilized, but most work was performed using time-honored hand methods. A certain measure of independence and creativity could be taken for granted in the workplace. No one directly supervised home workers or farmers, and in the small shops and mills, supervision was mostly unstructured. The cotton textile industry of New England was the major exception.

Rodgers (1978) described the founding, in the early 1820′s, of Lowell, Massachusetts as the real beginning of the industrial age in America. By the end of the decade, nineteen textile mills were in operation in the city, and 5,000 workers were employed in the mills. During the years that followed, factories were built in other towns as competition in the industry grew. These cotton mills were distinguished from other factories of the day by their size, the discipline demanded of their workers, and the paternalistic regulations imposed on employees (Rodgers, 1978). Gradually the patterns of employment and management initiated in the cotton mills spread to other industries, and during the later half of the nineteenth century, the home and workshop trades were essentially replaced by the mass production of factories.

In the factories, skill and craftsmanship were replaced by discipline and anonymity. A host of carefully preserved hand trades–tailoring, barrel making, glass blowing, felt-hat making, pottery making, and shoe making–disappeared as they were replaced by new inventions and specialization of labor (Rodgers, 1978). Although new skills were needed in some factories, the trend was toward a semiskilled labor force, typically operating one machine to perform one small piece of a manufacturing process. The sense of control over one’s destiny was missing in the new workplace, and the emptiness and lack of intellectual stimulation in work threatened the work ethic (Gilbert, 1977). In the secularized attitudes which comprised the work ethic up until that time, a central component was the promise of psychological reward for efforts in one’s work, but the factory system did little to support a sense of purpose or self-fulfillment for those who were on the assembly lines.

The factory system also threatened the promise of economic reward–another key premise of the work ethic. The output of products manufactured by factories was so great that by the 1880′s industrial capacity exceeded that which the economy could absorb (Rodgers, 1978). Under the system of home and workshop industries, production had been a virtue, and excess goods were not a problem. Now that factories could produce more than the nation could use, hard work and production no longer always provided assurance of prosperity.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the industrial system continued to dominate work in America and much of the rest of the world. Technology continued to advance, but innovation tended to be focused on those areas of manufacture which had not yet been mastered by machines. Little was done to change the routine tasks of feeding materials into automated equipment or other forms of semiskilled labor which were more economically done by low wage workers (Rodgers, 1978).

9.The Work Ethic and Industrial Management

Management of industries became more stematic and structured as increased competition forced factory owners to hold costs down. The model of management which developed, the traditional model, was characterized by a very authoritarian style which did not acknowledge the work ethic. To the contrary, Daft and Steers (1986) described this model as holding “that the average worker was basically lazy and was motivated almost entirely by money (p. 93).” Workers were assumed to neither desire nor be capable of autonomous or self-directed work. As a result, the scientific management concept was developed, predicated on specialization and division of jobs into simple tasks. Scientific management was claimed to increase worker production and result in increased pay. It was therefore seen as beneficial to workers, as well as to the company, since monetary gain was viewed as the primary motivating factor for both.

As use of scientific management became more widespread in the early 1900′s, it became apparent that factors other than pay were significant to worker motivation. Some workers were self-starters and didn’t respond well to close supervision and others became distrustful of management when pay increases failed to keep pace with improved productivity (Daft and Steers, 1986). Although unacknowledged in management practice, these were indicators of continued viability of the work ethic in employees.

By the end of World War II scientific management was considered inadequate and outdated to deal with the needs of industry (Jaggi, 1988). At this point the behaviorist school of thought emerged to provide alternative theories for guiding the management of workers. Contrary to the principles of scientific management, the behaviorists argued that workers were not intrinsically lazy. They were adaptive. If the environment failed to provide a challenge, workers became lazy, but if appropriate opportunities were provided, workers would become creative and motivated.

In response to the new theories, managers turned their attention to finding various ways to make jobs more fulfilling for workers. Human relations became an important issue and efforts were made to make people feel useful and important at work. Company newspapers, employee awards, and company social events were among the tools used by management to enhance the job environment (Daft and Steers, 1986), but the basic nature of the workplace remained unchanged. The adversarial relationship between employee and employer persisted.

In the late 1950′s job enrichment theories began to provide the basis for fundamental changes in employer-employee relationships. Herzberg, Mausner, and Snyderman (1959) identified factors such as achievement, recognition, responsibility, advancement, and personal growth which, when provided as an intrinsic component of a job, tended to motivate workers to perform better. Factors such as salary, company policies, supervisory style, working conditions, and relations with fellow workers tended to impair worker performance if inadequately provided for, but did not particularly improve worker motivation when present.

In 1960, when the concepts of theory “X” and theory “Y” were introduced by McGregor, the basis for a management style conducive to achieving job enrichment for workers was provided (Jaggi, 1988). Theory “X” referred to the authoritarian management style characteristic of scientific management but theory “Y” supported a participatory style of management.

Jaggi (1988) defined participatory management as “a cooperative process in which management and workers work together to accomplish a common goal (p. 446).” Unlike authoritarian styles of management, which provided top-down, directive control over workers assumed to be unmotivated and in need of guidance, participatory management asserted that worker involvement in decisionmaking provided valuable input and enhanced employee satisfaction and morale. Yankelovich and Immerwahr (1984) described participatory management as a system which would open the way for the work ethic to be a powerful resource in the workplace. They stated, however, that the persistence of the traditional model in American management discouraged workers, even though many wanted to work hard and do good work for its own sake.

10.The Work Ethic in the Information Age

Just as the people of the mid-nineteenth century encountered tremendous cultural and social change with the dawn of the industrial age, the people of the late twentieth century experienced tremendous cultural and social shifts with the advent of the information age. Toffler (1980) likened these times of change to waves washing over the culture, bringing with it changes in norms and expectations, as well as uncertainty about the future.

Since 1956 (Naisbitt, 1984) white-collar workers in technical, managerial, and clerical positions have outnumbered workers in blue-collar jobs. Porat (1977), in a study for the U.S. Department of Commerce, examined over 400 occupations in 201 industries. He determined that in 1967, the economic contribution of jobs primarily dealing with production of information, as compared with goods-producing jobs, accounted for 46% of the GNP and more than 53% of the income earned. Some jobs in manufacturing and industry also became more technical and necessitated a higher level of thinking on the job as machines were interfaced with computers and control systems became more complex.

Yankelovich and Immerwahr (1984) contrasted the work required of most people during the industrial age with the work of the information age. Industrial age jobs were typically low-discretion, required little decisionmaking, and were analyzed and broken into simple tasks which required very little thinking or judgement on the part of workers. Information age jobs, in contrast, were high-discretion and required considerable thinking and decisionmaking on the part of workers (Miller, 1986). In the workplace characterized by high-discretion, the work ethic became a much more important construct than it was during the manipulative era of machines. Maccoby (1988) emphasized the importance, in this setting, of giving employees authority to make decisions which would meet the needs of customers as well as support the goals of their own companies.

As high-discretion, information age jobs provided opportunities for greater self-expression by workers, people began to find more self-fulfillment in their work. Yankelovich and Harmon (1988) reported that a significant transformation in the meaning of the work ethic resulted. Throughout history, work had been associated with pain, sacrifice, and drudgery. The previously mentioned Greek word for work, ponos, also meant “pain.” For the Hebrews as well as for the medieval Christians, the unpleasantness of work was associated with Divine punishment for man’s sin. The Protestant ethic maintained that work was a sacrifice that demonstrated moral worthiness, and it stressed the importance of postponed gratification. With the information age, however, came work which was perceived as good and rewarding in itself. Most workers were satisfied with their work and wanted to be successful in it (Wattenberg, 1984).

According the Yankelovich and Harmon (1988), the work ethic of the 1980′s stressed skill, challenge, autonomy, recognition, and the quality of work produced. Autonomy was identified as a particularly important factor in worker satisfaction with their jobs. Motivation to work involved trust, caring, meaning, self-knowledge, challenge, opportunity for personal growth, and dignity (Maccoby, 1988; Walton, 1974). Workers were seeking control over their work and a sense of empowerment and many information age jobs were conducive to meeting these needs. As a result, the work ethic was not abandoned during the information age, but was transformed to a state of relevance not found in most industrial age occupations.

Even though the information age was well established by the 1980′s and 1990′s, not all jobs were high-discretion. Some occupations continued to consist primarily of manual labor and allowed minimal opportunity for worker involvement in decisionmaking. In addition, authoritarian forms of management continued to be utilized and the potential of the work ethic was wasted. Statistics reported by Yankelovich and Immerwahr (1984) indicated that by the early 1980′s, 43% of the workforce perceived their jobs as high-discretion and 21% of the workforce perceived their jobs as low-discretion. The high-discretion workers were likely to be better educated, to be in white-collar or service jobs, and to have experienced technological changes in their work. The low-discretion workers were more likely to be union members, to be in blue-collar jobs, and to be working in positions characterized by dirt, noise, and pollution.

11.The Work Ethic and Empowerment

As a result of the rapid changes associated with the Information Age workplace, codified and systematized knowledge not limited to a specific organizational context was important during the 1980′s and 1990′s (Maccoby, 1983). Higher levels of education became necessary along with skills at solving problems, managing people, and applying the latest information to the tasks at hand. With increased education, higher expectations and aspirations for careers emerged.

Young people, in particular, entering the workforce with high school and college educations, expected opportunities for advancement (Maccoby, 1983; Sheehy, 1990). They anticipated that talent and hard work would be the basis for success rather than chance or luck. In essence, information age workers expected application of a positive work ethic to result in rewards, and they sometimes became impatient if progress was not experienced in a relatively short period of time (Sheehy, 1990).

For workers who acquired positions of supervision or ownership, motivation to accomplish personal goals through success in the organization enhanced the expression of work ethic attributes. Barnard (1938) identified the process of persons in an organization coordinating their activities to attain common goals as important to the well-being of the organization. One of the essential elements for this process was the creation and allocation of satisfaction among individuals (Barnard, 1938).

Further explanation for organizational behavior was provided by a model developed by Getzels and Guba (Getzels, 1968). The major elements of the model were institution, role, and expectation which formed the normative dimension of activity in a social system; and individual, personality, and need-disposition which constituted the personal dimension of activity in a social system (Getzels, 1968). To the extent that a person’s work ethic beliefs influenced personality and need-disposition, the observed behavior of that individual within the context of the workplace would be affected. Particularly in the high-discretion workplace of the information age, role and expectations found within the workplace would tend to be reinforced by a strong work ethic.

12. Other Changes in the Workplace

Besides changes in the jobs people performed, changes in the levels of education required for those jobs, and changes in the extent to which people were given control or empowerment in their work, the workforce of the 1980′s and 1990′s reflected a larger number of women and a reduced number of workers older than 65. Changes in gender and age of workers had a significant impact on the culture of the later twentieth century and influenced the pattern of work related norms such as the work ethic.

Rodgers (1978) told of the growing restlessness of women in the late 1800′s and the early 1900′s. As the economic center of society was moved out of the home or workshop and into the factory, women were left behind. Some women became operatives in textile mills, office workers, or salesclerks, and increased numbers were employed as teachers (Sawhill, 1974). Women comprised a relatively small percentage of the workforce, however, and their wages were about half that of men. Those who labored at housework and child-rearing received no pay at all and often were afforded little respect or appreciation for what they did.

It was not until World War II and the years following that women began to enter the workplace in great numbers. In 1900 women made up 18% of the nation’s workforce, but by 1947 they comprised 28% of the workforce (Levitan & Johnson, 1983). By 1980 42.5% of the nation’s workers were women (Stencel, 1981). In 1990 the number of women workers was approaching 50% of the workforce, and Naisbitt and Aburdene (1990) reported that women held 39.3% of all executive, administrative, and management jobs. Due to the increase in the number of women working outside the home, their attitudes about work have become a significant influence on the work ethic in the contemporary workplace.

Comparisons of attitudes of men and women in the workplace have shown that men tended to be more concerned with earning a good income, having freedom from close supervision, having leadership opportunities, and having a job that enhanced their social status. Women were inclined to seek job characteristics which allowed them to help others, to be original and creative, to progress steadily in their work, and to work with people rather than things (Lyson, 1984). Women, more than men, also tended to seek personal benefits such as enjoyment, pride, fulfillment, and personal challenge (Bridges, 1989).

Another trend which shaped the workforce of the later twentieth century was an increase in the number of older workers who retired from their jobs. Statistics reported by Quinn (1983) showed that in 1950, persons 65 years old and older comprised 45.8% of the workforce as compared to 18.4% in 1981. Part of this trend can be explained by the continued shift away from agriculture and self-employment–occupations which traditionally had high older worker participation rates. In addition, increased provision for retirement income, as a result of pensions or other retirement plans, has removed the financial burden which necessitated work for many older adults in the past.

Deans (1972) noted a trend on the part of younger workers to view work differently than older workers. He found less acceptance, among young people entering the workforce, of the concept that hard work was a virtue and a duty and less upward striving by young workers compared to that of their parents and grandparents. Yankelovich (1981) reported findings which contradicted the view that younger workers were less committed to the work ethic, but he did find a decline in belief that hard work would pay off. This was a significant shift because pay and “getting ahead” were the primary incentives management used to encourage productivity during the industrial age. If economic reward had lost its ability to motivate workers, then productivity could be expected to decline,
in the absence of some other reason for working hard (Yankelovich, 1981). Within this context, the work ethic, and a management style which unfettered it, was a significant factor for maintaining and increasing performance.

13. Influences Shaping the Contemporary Work Ethic

The work ethic is a cultural norm that places a positive moral value on doing a good job and is based on a belief that work has intrinsic value for its own sake (Cherrington, 1980; Quinn, 1983; Yankelovich & Immerwahr, 1984). Like other cultural norms, a person’s adherence to or belief in the work ethic is principally influenced by socialization experiences during childhood and adolescence. Through interaction with family, peers, and significant adults, a person “learns to place a value on work behavior as others approach him in situations demanding increasing responsibility for productivity” (Braude, 1975, p. 134). Based on praise or blame and affection or anger, a child appraises his or her performance in household chores, or later in part-time jobs, but this appraisal is based on the perspective of others. As a child matures, these attitudes toward work become internalized, and work performance is less dependent on the reactions of others.

Children are also influenced by the attitudes of others toward work (Braude, 1975). If a parent demonstrates a dislike for a job or a fear of unemployment, children will tend to assimilate these attitudes. Parents who demonstrate a strong work ethic tend to impart a strong work ethic to their children.

Another significant factor shaping the work attitudes of people is the socialization which occurs in the workplace. As a person enters the workplace, the perceptions and reactions of others tend to confirm or contradict the work attitudes shaped in childhood (Braude, 1975). The occupational culture, especially the influence of an “inner fraternity” of colleagues, has a significant impact on the attitudes toward work and the work ethic which form part of each person’s belief system.

Among the mechanisms provided by society to transfer the culture to young people is the public school. One of the functions of schools is to foster student understanding of cultural norms, and in some cases to recognize the merits of accepting them. Vocational education,
for example, has as a stated goal that it will promote the work ethic (Gregson, 1991; Miller, 1985). Reubens (1974) listed “inculcation of good work attitudes” as one of the highest priorities for high school education. In the absence of early socialization which supports good work attitudes, schools should not be expected to completely transform a young person’s work ethic orientation, but enlightening students about what the work ethic is, and why it is important to success in the contemporary workplace, should be a component of secondary education.

I totally agree with the problem of outsourcing. Only simple, repetitive tasks that are easy to QA are suitable to outsource. For complex tasks, it takes more time to write the contracts and specifications for outsourcing than actually doing the tasks yourself.

By Jul 30th 2011, The Economist
Outsourcing is sometimes more hassle than it is worth

WHEN Ford’s River Rouge Plant was completed in 1928 it boasted everything it needed to turn raw materials into finished cars: 100,000 workers, 16m square feet of factory floor, 100 miles of railway track and its own docks and furnaces. Today it is still Ford’s largest plant, but only a shadow of its former glory. Most of the parts are made by sub-contractors and merely fitted together by the plant’s 6,000 workers. The local steel mill is run by a Russian company, Severstal.

Outsourcing has transformed global business. Over the past few decades companies have contracted out everything from mopping the floors to spotting the flaws in their internet security. TPI, a company that specialises in the sector, estimates that $100 billion-worth of new contracts are signed every year. Oxford Economics reckons that in Britain, one of the world’s most mature economies, 10% of workers toil away in “outsourced” jobs and companies spend $200 billion a year on outsourcing. Even war is being outsourced: America employs more contract workers in Afghanistan than regular troops.

Can the outsourcing boom go on indefinitely? And is the practice as useful as its advocates claim, or is the popular suspicion that it leads to cut corners and dismal service correct? There are signs that outsourcing often goes wrong, and that companies are rethinking their approach to it.

The latest TPI quarterly index of outsourcing (which measures commercial contracts of $25m or more) suggests that the total value of such contracts for the second quarter of 2011 fell by 18% compared with the second quarter of 2010. Dismal figures in the Americas (ie, mostly the United States) dragged down the average: the value of contracts there was 50% lower in the second quarter of 2011 than in the first half of 2010. This is partly explained by America’s gloomy economy, but even more by the maturity of the market: TPI suspects that much of what can sensibly be outsourced already has been.

Miles Robinson of Mayer Brown, a law firm, notes that there has also been an uptick in legal disputes over outsourcing. In one case EDS, an IT company, had to pay BSkyB, a media company, £318m ($469m) in damages. The two firms spent an estimated £70m on legal fees and were tied up in court for five months. Such nightmares are worse in India, where the courts move with Dickensian speed, or in China, where the legal system is patchy. And since many disputes stay out of court, the well of discontent with outsourcing is surely deeper than the legal record shows.

Some of the worst business disasters of recent years have been caused or aggravated by outsourcing. Eight years ago Boeing, America’s biggest aeroplane-maker, decided to follow the example of car firms and hire contractors to do most of the grunt work on its new 787 Dreamliner. The result was a nightmare. Some of the parts did not fit together. Some of the dozens of sub-contractors failed to deliver their components on time, despite having sub-contracted their work to sub-sub-contractors. Boeing had to take over some of the sub-contractors to prevent them from collapsing. If the Dreamliner starts rolling off the production line towards the end of this year, as Boeing promises, it will be billions over budget and three years behind schedule.

Outsourcing can go wrong in a colourful variety of ways. Sometimes companies squeeze their contractors so hard that they are forced to cut corners. (This is a big problem in the car industry, where a handful of global firms can bully the 80,000 parts-makers.) Sometimes vendors overpromise in order to win a contract and then fail to deliver. Sometimes both parties write sloppy contracts. And some companies undermine their overall strategies with injudicious outsourcing. Service companies, for example, contract out customer complaints to foreign call centres and then wonder why their customers hate them.

When outsourcing goes wrong, it is the devil to put right. When companies outsource a job, they typically eliminate the department that used to do it. They become entwined with their contractors, handing over sensitive material and inviting contractors to work alongside their own staff. Extricating themselves from this tangle can be tough. It is much easier to close a department than to rebuild it. Sacking a contractor can mean that factories grind to a halt, bills languish unpaid and chaos mounts.

None of this means that companies are going to re-embrace the River Rouge model any time soon. Some companies, such as Boeing, are bringing more work back in-house, in the jargon. But the business logic behind outsourcing remains compelling, so long as it is done right. Many tasks are peripheral to a firm’s core business and can be done better and more cheaply by specialists. Cleaning is an obvious example; many back-office jobs also fit the bill. Outsourcing firms offer labour arbitrage, using cheap Indians to enter data rather than expensive Swedes. They can offer economies of scale, too. TPI points out that, for all the problems in America, outsourcing is continuing to grow in emerging markets and, more surprisingly, in Europe, where Germany and France are late converts to the idea.

Companies are rethinking outsourcing, rather than jettisoning it. They are dumping huge long-term deals in favour of smaller, less rigid ones. The annualised value of “mega-relationships” worth $100m or more a year fell by 62% this year compared with last. Companies are forming relationships with several outsourcers, rather than putting all their eggs in few baskets. They are signing shorter contracts, too. But still, they need to think harder about what is their core business, and what is peripheral. And above all, newspaper editors need to say no to the temptation to outsource business columns to cheaper, hungrier writers.

It would be nice to work in an environment like Xerox PARC, total freedom to let your research and build with no budget limitation. Unfortunately, in ASIC world we always squeezed by schedule and resources constraint and don’t get much room to innovate. I share the same feeling as the inventor of laser printer, the management are often short sighted, so I have to develop many of my work behind the curtain. I can only unveil it when there is a working prototype with clear benefit over the previous work.

by Gladwell, Malcolm. The New Yorker87. 13 (May 16, 2011):
Xerox PARC was the innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation. Apple was already one of the hottest technology firms in the country. Steve Jobs’ involvement with Xerox PARC is discussed.

In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox PARC. He was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino. His name was Steve Jobs.

Xerox PARC was the innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation. It was, and remains, on Coyote Hill Road, in Palo Alto, nestled in the foothills on the edge of town, in a long, low concrete building, with enormous terraces looking out over the jewels of  Silicon Valley. To the northwest was Stanford University’s Hoover Tower. To the north was Hewlett-Packard’s sprawling campus. All around were scores of the other chip designers, software firms, venture capitalists, and hardware-makers. A visitor to PARC, taking in that view, could easily imagine that it was the computer world’s castle, lording over the valley below–and, at the time, this wasn’t far from the truth. In 1970, Xerox had assembled the world’s greatest computer engineers and programmers, and for the next ten years they had an unparalleled run of innovation and invention. If you were obsessed with the future in the seventies, you were obsessed with Xerox PARC–which was why the young Steve Jobs had driven to Coyote Hill Road.

Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars–its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away–if PARC would “open its kimono.” A lot of haggling ensued. Jobs was the fox, after all, and PARC was the henhouse. What would he be allowed to see? What wouldn’t he be allowed to see? Some at PARC thought that the whole idea was lunacy, but, in the end, Xerox went ahead with it. One PARC scientist recalls Jobs as “rambunctious”–a fresh-cheeked, caffeinated version of today’s austere digital emperor. He was given a couple of tours, and he ended up standing in front of a Xerox Alto, PARC’s prized personal computer.

An engineer named Larry Tesler conducted the demonstration. He moved the cursor across the screen with the aid of a “mouse.” Directing a conventional computer, in those days, meant typing in a command on the keyboard. Tesler just clicked on one of the icons on the screen. He opened and closed “windows,” deftly moving from one task to another. He wrote on an elegant word-processing program, and exchanged e-mails with other people at PARC, on the world’s first Ethernet network. Jobs had come with one of his software engineers, Bill Atkinson, and Atkinson moved in as close as he could, his nose almost touching the screen. “Jobs was pacing around the room, acting up the whole time,” Tesler recalled. “He was very excited. Then, when he began seeing the things I could do onscreen, he watched for about a minute and started jumping around the room, shouting, ‘Why aren’t you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing. This is revolutionary!’ ”

Xerox began selling a successor to the Alto in 1981. It was slow and underpowered–and Xerox ultimately withdrew from personal computers altogether. Jobs, meanwhile, raced back to Apple, and demanded that the team working on the company’s next generation of personal computers change course. He wanted menus on the screen. He wanted windows. He wanted a mouse. The result was the Macintosh, perhaps the most famous product in the history of Silicon Valley.

“If Xerox had known what it had and had taken advantage of its real opportunities,” Jobs said, years later, “it could have been as big as I.B.M. plus Microsoft plus Xerox combined–and the largest high-technology company in the world.”

This is the legend of Xerox PARC. Jobs is the Biblical Jacob and Xerox is Esau, squandering his birthright for a pittance. In the past thirty years, the legend has been vindicated by history. Xerox, once the darling of the American high-technology community, slipped from its former dominance. Apple is now ascendant, and the demonstration in that room in Palo Alto has come to symbolize the vision and ruthlessness that separate true innovators from also-rans. As with all legends, however, the truth is a bit more complicated. After Jobs returned from PARC, he met with a man named Dean Hovey, who was one of the founders of the industrial-design firm that would become known as IDEO. “Jobs went to Xerox PARC on a Wednesday or a Thursday, and I saw him on the Friday afternoon,” Hovey recalled. “I had a series of ideas that I wanted to bounce off him, and I barely got two words out of my mouth when he said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to do a mouse.’ I was, like, ‘What’s a mouse?’ I didn’t have a clue. So he explains it, and he says, ‘You know, [the Xerox mouse] is a mouse that cost three hundred dollars to build and it breaks within two weeks. Here’s your design spec: Our mouse needs to be manufacturable for less than fifteen bucks. It needs to not fail for a couple of years, and I want to be able to use it on Formica and my bluejeans.’ From that meeting, I went to Walgreens, which is still there, at the corner of Grant and El Camino in Mountain View, and I wandered around and bought all the underarm deodorants that I could find, because they had that ball in them. I bought a butter dish. That was the beginnings of the mouse.”

I spoke with Hovey in a ramshackle building in downtown Palo Alto, where his firm had started out. He had asked the current tenant if he could borrow his old office for the morning, just for the fun of telling the story of the Apple mouse in the place where it was invented. The room was the size of someone’s bedroom. It looked as if it had last been painted in the Coolidge Administration. Hovey, who is lean and healthy in a Northern California yoga-and-yogurt sort of way, sat uncomfortably at a rickety desk in a corner of the room. “Our first machine shop was literally out on the roof,” he said, pointing out the window to a little narrow strip of rooftop, covered in green outdoor carpeting. “We didn’t tell the planning commission. We went and got that clear corrugated stuff and put it across the top for a roof. We got out through the window.” He had brought a big plastic bag full of the artifacts of that moment: diagrams scribbled on lined paper, dozens of differently sized plastic mouse shells, a spool of guitar wire, a tiny set of wheels from a toy train set, and the metal lid from a jar of Ralph’s preserves. He turned the lid over. It was filled with a waxlike substance, the middle of which had a round indentation, in the shape of a small ball. “It’s epoxy casting resin,” he said. “You pour it, and then I put Vaseline on a smooth steel ball, and set it in the resin, and it hardens around it.” He tucked the steel ball underneath the lid and rolled it around the tabletop. “It’s a kind of mouse.” The hard part was that the roller ball needed to be connected to the housing of the mouse, so that it didn’t fall out, and so that it could transmit information about its movements to the cursor on the screen. But if the friction created by those connections was greater than the friction between the tabletop and the roller ball, the mouse would skip. And the more the mouse was used the more dust it would pick up off the tabletop, and the more it would skip. The Xerox PARC mouse was an elaborate affair, with an array of ball bearings supporting the roller ball. But there was too much friction on the top of the ball, and it couldn’t deal with dust and grime. At first, Hovey set to work with various arrangements of ball bearings, but nothing quite worked. “This was the ‘aha’ moment,” Hovey said, placing his fingers loosely around the sides of the ball, so that they barely touched its surface. “So the ball’s sitting here. And it rolls. I attribute that not to the table but to the oldness of the building. The floor’s not level. So I started playing with it, and that’s when I realized: I want it to roll. I don’t want it to be supported by all kinds of ball bearings. I want to just barely touch it.”

The trick was to connect the ball to the rest of the mouse at the two points where there was the least friction– right where his fingertips had been, dead center on either side of the ball. “If it’s right at midpoint, there’s no force causing it to rotate. So it rolls.”

Hovey estimated their consulting fee at thirty-five dollars an hour; the whole project cost perhaps a hundred thousand dollars. “I originally pitched Apple on doing this mostly for royalties, as opposed to a consulting job,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I’m thinking fifty cents apiece,’ because I was thinking that they’d sell fifty thousand, maybe a hundred thousand of them.” He burst out laughing, because of how far off his estimates ended up being. “Steve’s pretty savvy. He said no. Maybe if I’d asked for a nickel, I would have been fine.” Here is the first complicating fact about the Jobs visit. In the legend of Xerox PARC, Jobs stole the personal computer from Xerox. But the striking thing about Jobs’s instructions to Hovey is that he didn’t want to reproduce what he saw at PARC. “You know, there were disputes around the number of buttons–three buttons, two buttons, one-button mouse,” Hovey went on. “The mouse at Xerox had three buttons. But we came around to the fact that learning to mouse is a feat in and of itself, and to make it as simple as possible, with just one button, was pretty important.”

So was what Jobs took from Xerox the idea of the mouse? Not quite, because Xerox never owned the idea of the mouse. The PARC researchers got it from the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute, fifteen minutes away on the other side of the university campus. Engelbart dreamed up the idea of moving the cursor around the screen with a stand-alone mechanical “animal” back in the mid- nineteen-sixties. His mouse was a bulky, rectangular affair, with what looked like steel roller-skate wheels. If you lined up Engelbart’s mouse, Xerox’s mouse, and Apple’s mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept.

The same is true of the graphical user interface that so captured Jobs’s imagination. Xerox PARC’s innovation had been to replace the traditional computer command line with onscreen icons. But when you clicked on an icon you got a pop-up menu: this was the intermediary between the user’s intention and the computer’s response. Jobs’s software team took the graphical interface a giant step further. It emphasized “direct manipulation.” If you wanted to make a window bigger, you just pulled on its corner and made it bigger; if you wanted to move a window across the screen, you just grabbed it and moved it. The Apple designers also invented the menu bar, the pull-down menu, and the trash can–all features that radically simplified the original Xerox PARC idea.

The difference between direct and indirect manipulation–between three buttons and one button, three hundred dollars and fifteen dollars, and a roller ball supported by ball bearings and a free-rolling ball–is not trivial. It is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what Xerox PARC had in mind, and something that’s appropriate for a mass audience, which is what Apple had in mind. PARC was building a personal computer. Apple wanted to build a popular computer.

In a recent study, “The Culture of Military Innovation,” the military scholar Dima Adamsky makes a similar argument about the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs. R.M.A. refers to the way armies have transformed themselves with the tools of the digital age–such as precision-guided missiles, surveillance drones, and real-time command, control, and communications technologies–and Adamsky begins with the simple observation that it is impossible to determine who invented R.M.A. The first people to imagine how digital technology would transform warfare were a cadre of senior military intellectuals in the Soviet Union, during the nineteen-seventies. The first country to come up with these high-tech systems was the United States. And the first country to use them was Israel, in its 1982 clash with the Syrian Air Force in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a battle commonly referred to as “the Bekaa Valley turkey shoot.” Israel coordinated all the major innovations of R.M.A. in a manner so devastating that it destroyed nineteen surface-to-air batteries and eighty-seven Syrian aircraft while losing only a handful of its own planes.

That’s three revolutions, not one, and Adamsky’s point is that each of these strands is necessarily distinct, drawing on separate skills and circumstances. The Soviets had a strong, centralized military bureaucracy, with a long tradition of theoretical analysis. It made sense that they were the first to understand the military implications of new information systems. But they didn’t do anything with it, because centralized military bureaucracies with strong intellectual traditions aren’t very good at connecting word and deed. The United States, by contrast, has a decentralized, bottom-up entrepreneurial culture, which has historically had a strong orientation toward technological solutions. The military’s close ties to the country’ high-tech community made it unsurprising that the U.S. would be the first to invent precision-guidance and next-generation command-and-control communications. But those assets also meant that Soviet-style systemic analysis wasn’t going to be a priority. As for the Israelis, their military culture grew out of a background of resource constraint and constant threat. In response, they became brilliantly improvisational and creative. But, as Adamsky points out, a military built around urgent, short-term “fire extinguishing” is not going to be distinguished by reflective theory. No one stole the revolution. Each party viewed the problem from a different perspective, and carved off a different piece of the puzzle.

In the history of the mouse, Engelbart was the Soviet Union. He was the visionary, who saw the mouse before anyone else did. But visionaries are limited by their visions. “Engelbart’s self-defined mission was not to produce a product, or even a prototype; it was an open-ended search for knowledge,” Matthew Hiltzik writes, in “Dealers of Lightning” (1999), his wonderful history of Xerox PARC. “Consequently, no project in his lab ever seemed to come to an end.” Xerox PARC was the United States: it was a place where things got made. “Xerox created this perfect environment,” recalled Bob Metcalfe, who worked there through much of the nineteen-seventies, before leaving to found the networking company 3Com. “There wasn’t any hierarchy. We built out our own tools. When we needed to publish papers, we built a printer. When we needed to edit the papers, we built a computer. When we needed to connect computers, we figured out how to connect them. We had big budgets. Unlike many of our brethren, we didn’t have to teach. We could just research. It was heaven.” But heaven is not a good place to commercialize a product. “We built a computer and it was a beautiful thing,” Metcalfe went on. “We developed our computer language, our own display, our own language. It was a gold-plated product. But it cost sixteen thousand dollars, and it needed to cost three thousand dollars.” For an actual product, you need threat and constraint–and the improvisation and creativity necessary to turn a gold-plated three-hundred-dollar mouse into something that works on Formica and costs fifteen dollars. Apple was Israel. Xerox couldn’t have been I.B.M. and Microsoft combined, in other words. “You can be one of the most successful makers of enterprise technology products the world has ever known, but that doesn’t mean your instincts will carry over to the consumer market,” the tech writer Harry McCracken recently wrote. “They’re really different, and few companies have ever been successful in both.” He was talking about the decision by the networking giant Cisco System, this spring, to shut down its Flip camera business, at a cost of many hundreds of millions of dollars. But he could just as easily have been talking about the Xerox of forty years ago, which was one of the most successful makers of enterprise technology the world has ever known. The fair question is whether Xerox, through its research arm in Palo Alto, found a better way to be Xerox–and the answer is that it did, although that story doesn’t get told nearly as often.

One of the people at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited was an optical engineer named Gary Starkweather. He is a solid and irrepressibly cheerful man, with large, practical hands and the engineer’s gift of pretending that what is impossibly difficult is actually pretty easy, once you shave off a bit here, and remember some of your high-school calculus, and realize that the thing that you thought should go in left to right should actually go in right to left. Once, before the palatial Coyote Hill Road building was constructed, a group that Starkweather had to be connected to was moved to another building, across the Foothill Expressway, half a mile away. There was no way to run a cable under the highway. So Starkweather fired a laser through the air between the two buildings, an improvised communications system that meant that, if you were driving down the Foothill Expressway on a foggy night and happened to look up, you might see a mysterious red beam streaking across the sky. When a motorist drove into the median ditch, “we had to turn it down,” Starkweather recalled, with a mischievous smile.

Lasers were Starkweather’s specialty. He started at Xerox’s East Coast research facility in Webster, New York, outside Rochester. Xerox built machines that scanned a printed page of type using a photographic lens, and then printed a duplicate. Starkweather’s idea was to skip the first step–to run a document from a computer directly into a photocopier, by means of a laser, and turn the Xerox machine into a printer. It was a radical idea. The printer, since Gutenberg, had been limited to the function of re-creation: if you wanted to print a specific image or letter, you had to have a physical character or mark corresponding to that image or letter. What Starkweather wanted to do was take the array of bits and bytes, ones and zeros that constitute digital images, and transfer them straight into the guts of a copier. That meant, at least in theory, that he could print anything.

“One morning, I woke up and I thought, Why don’t we just print something out directly?” Starkweather said. “But when I flew that past my boss he thought it was the most brain-dead idea he had ever heard. He basically told me to find something else to do. The feeling was that lasers were too expensive. They didn’t work that well. Nobody wants to do this, computers aren’t powerful enough. And I guess, in my naivete, I kept thinking, He’s just not right–there’s something about this I really like. It got to be a frustrating situation. He and I came to loggerheads over the thing, about late 1969, early 1970. I was running my experiments in the back room behind a black curtain. I played with them when I could. He threatened to lay off my people if I didn’t stop. I was having to make a decision: do I abandon this, or do I try and go up the ladder with it?” Then Starkweather heard that Xerox was opening a research center in Palo Alto, three thousand miles away from its New York headquarters. He went to a senior vice-president of Xerox, threatening to leave for I.B.M. if he didn’t get a transfer. In January of 1971, his wish was granted, and, within ten months, he had a prototype up and running.

Starkweather is retired now, and lives in a gated community just north of Orlando, Florida. When we spoke, he was sitting at a picnic table, inside a screened-in porch in his back yard. Behind him, golfers whirred by in carts. He was wearing white chinos and a shiny black short-sleeved shirt, decorated with fluorescent images of vintage hot rods. He had brought out two large plastic bins filled with the artifacts of his research, and he spread the contents on the table: a metal octagonal disk, sketches on lab paper, a black plastic laser housing that served as the innards for one of his printers.

“There was still a tremendous amount of opposition from the Webster group, who saw no future in computer printing,” he went on. “They said, ‘I.B.M. is doing that. Why do we need to do that?’ and so forth. Also, there were two or three competing projects, which I guess I have the luxury of calling ridiculous. One group had fifty people and another had twenty. I had two.” Starkweather picked up a picture of one of his in-house competitors, something called an “optical carriage printer.” It was the size of one of those modular Italian kitchen units that you see advertised in fancy design magazines. “It was an unbelievable device,” he said, with a rueful chuckle. “It had a ten-inch drum, which turned at five thousand r.p.m., like a super washing machine. It had characters printed on its surface. I think they only ever sold ten of them. The problem was that it was spinning so fast that the drum would blow out and the characters would fly off. And there was only this one lady in Troy, New York, who knew how to put the characters on so that they would stay.

“So we finally decided to have what I called a fly-off. There was a full page of text–where some of them were non-serif characters, Helvetica, stuff like that–and then a page of graph paper with grid lines, and pages with pictures and some other complex stuff–and everybody had to print all six pages. Well, once we decided on those six pages, I knew I’d won, because I knew there wasn’t anything I couldn’t print. Are you kidding? If you can translate it into bits, I can print it. Some of these other machines had to go through hoops just to print a curve. A week after the fly-off, they folded those other projects. I was the only game in town.” The project turned into the Xerox 9700, the first high-speed, cut-paper laser printer in the world.

In one sense, the Starkweather story is of a piece with the Steve Jobs visit. It is an example of the imaginative poverty of Xerox management. Starkweather had to hide his laser behind a curtain. He had to fight for his transfer to PARC. He had to endure the indignity of the fly-off, and even then Xerox management remained skeptical. The founder of PARC, Jack Goldman, had to bring in a team from Rochester for a personal demonstration. After that, Starkweather and Goldman had an idea for getting the laser printer to market quickly: graft a laser onto a Xerox copier called the 7000. The 7000 was an older model, and Xerox had lots of 7000s sitting around that had just come off lease. Goldman even had a customer ready: the Lawrence Livermore laboratory was prepared to buy a whole slate of the machines. Xerox said no. Then Starkweather wanted to make what he called a photo-typesetter, which produced camera-ready copy right on your desk. Xerox said no. “I wanted to work on higher-performance scanners,” Starkweather continued. “In other words, what if we print something other than documents? For example, I made a high-resolution scanner and you could print on glass plates.” He rummaged in one of the boxes on the picnic table and came out with a sheet of glass, roughly six inches square, on which a photograph of a child’s face appeared. The same idea, he said, could have been used to make “masks” for the semiconductor industry–the densely patterned screens used to etch the designs on computer chips. “No one would ever follow through, because Xerox said, ‘Now you’re in Intel’s market, what are you doing that for?’ They just could not seem to see that they were in the information business. This”–he lifted up the plate with the little girl’s face on it–”is a copy. It’s just not a copy of an office document.” But he got nowhere. “Xerox had been infested by a bunch of spreadsheet experts who thought you could decide every product based on metrics. Unfortunately, creativity wasn’t on a metric.”

A few days after that afternoon in his back yard, however, Starkweather e-mailed an addendum to his discussion of his experiences at PARC. “Despite all the hassles and risks that happened in getting the laser printer going, in retrospect the journey was that much more exciting,” he wrote. “Often difficulties are just opportunities in disguise.” Perhaps he felt that he had painted too negative a picture of his time at Xerox, or suffered a pang of guilt about what it must have been like to be one of those Xerox executives on the other side of the table. The truth is that Starkweather was a difficult employee. It went hand in hand with what made him such an extraordinary innovator. When his boss told him to quit working on lasers, he continued in secret. He was disruptive and stubborn and independent-minded–and he had a thousand ideas, and sorting out the good ideas from the bad wasn’t always easy. Should Xerox have put out a special order of laser printers for Lawrence Livermore, based on the old 7000 copier? In “Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer” (1988)–a book dedicated to the idea that Xerox was run by the blind–Douglas Smith and Robert Alexander admit that the proposal was hopelessly impractical: “The scanty Livermore proposal could not justify the investment required to start a laser printing business. . . . How and where would Xerox manufacture the laser printers? Who would sell and service them? Who would buy them and why?” Starkweather, and his compatriots at Xerox PARC, weren’t the source of disciplined strategic insights. They were wild geysers of creative energy.

The psychologist Dean Simonton argues that this fecundity is often at the heart of what distinguishes the truly gifted. The difference between Bach and his forgotten peers isn’t necessarily that he had a better ratio of hits to misses. The difference is that the mediocre might have a dozen ideas, while Bach, in his lifetime, created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions. A genius is a genius, Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. “Quality,” Simonton writes, is “a probabilistic function of quantity.”

Simonton’s point is that there is nothing neat and efficient about creativity. “The more successes there are,” he says, “the more failures there are as well”–meaning that the person who had far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too. This is why managing the creative process is so difficult. The making of the classic Rolling Stones album “Exile on Main Street” was an ordeal, Keith Richards writes in his new memoir, because the band had too many ideas. It had to fight from under an avalanche of mediocrity: “Head in the Toilet Blues,” “Leather Jackets,” “Windmill,” “I Was Just a Country Boy,” “Bent Green Needles,” “Labour Pains,” and “Pommes de Terre”–the last of which Richards explains with the apologetic, “Well, we were in France at the time.”

At one point, Richards quotes a friend, Jim Dickinson, remembering the origins of the song “Brown Sugar”: I watched Mick write the lyrics. . . . He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand. I’d never seen anything like it. He had one of those yellow legal pads, and he’d write a verse a page, just write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it. It was amazing. Richards goes on to marvel, “It’s unbelievable how prolific he was.” Then he writes, “Sometimes you’d wonder how to turn the fucking tap off. The odd times he would come out with so many lyrics, you’re crowding the airwaves, boy.” Richards clearly saw himself as the creative steward of the Rolling Stones (only in a rock-and-roll band, by the way, can someone like Keith Richards perceive himself as the responsible one), and he came to understand that one of the hardest and most crucial parts of his job was to “turn the fucking tap off,” to rein in Mick Jagger’s incredible creative energy.

The more Starkweather talked, the more apparent it became that his entire career had been a version of this problem. Someone was always trying to turn his tap off. But someone had to turn his tap off: the interests of the innovator aren’t perfectly aligned with the interests of the corporation. Starkweather saw ideas on their own merits. Xerox was a multinational corporation, with shareholders, a huge sales force, and a vast corporate customer base, and it needed to consider every new idea within the context of what it already had. Xerox’s managers didn’t always make the right decisions when they said no to Starkweather. But he got to PARC, didn’t he? And Xerox, to its great credit, had a PARC–a place where, a continent away from the top managers, an engineer could sit and dream, and get every purchase order approved, and fire a laser across the Foothill Expressway if he was so inclined. Yes, he had to pit his laser printer against lesser ideas in the contest. But he won the contest. And, the instant he did, Xerox cancelled the competing projects and gave him the green light.

“I flew out there and gave a presentation to them on what I was looking at,” Starkweather said of his first visit to PARC. “They really liked it, because at the time they were building a personal computer, and they were beside themselves figuring out how they were going to get whatever was on the screen onto a sheet of paper. And when I showed them how I was going to put prints on a sheet of paper it was a marriage made in heaven.” The reason Xerox invented the laser printer, in other words, is that it invented the personal computer. Without the big idea, it would never have seen the value of the small idea. If you consider innovation to be efficient and ideas precious, that is a tragedy: you give the crown jewels away to Steve Jobs, and all you’re left with is a printer. But in the real, messy world of creativity, giving away the thing you don’t really understand for the thing that you do is an inevitable tradeoff.

“When you have a bunch of smart people with a broad enough charter, you will always get something good out of it,” Nathan Myhrvold, formerly a senior executive at Microsoft, argues. “It’s one of the best investments you could possibly make–but only if you chose to value it in terms of successes. If you chose to evaluate it in terms of how many times you failed, or times you could have succeeded and didn’t, then you are bound to be unhappy. Innovation is an unruly thing. There will be some ideas that don’t get caught in your cup. But that’s not what the game is about. The game is what you catch, not what you spill.”

In the nineteen-nineties, Myhrvold created a research laboratory at Microsoft modelled in part on what Xerox had done in Palo Alto in the nineteen-seventies, because he considered PARC a triumph, not a failure. “Xerox did research outside their business model, and when you do that you should not be surprised that you have a hard time dealing with it–any more than if some bright guy at Pfizer wrote a word processor. Good luck to Pfizer getting into the word-processing business. Meanwhile, the thing that they invented that was similar to their own business–a really big machine that spit paper out–they made a lot of money on it.” And so they did. Gary Starkweather’s laser printer made billions for Xerox. It paid for every other single project at Xerox PARC, many times over.

In 1988, Starkweather got a call from the head of one of Xerox’s competitors, trying to lure him away. It was someone whom he had met years ago. “The decision was painful,” he said. “I was a year from being a twenty-five-year veteran of the company. I mean, I’d done enough for Xerox that unless I burned the building down they would never fire me. But that wasn’t the issue. It’s about having ideas that are constantly squashed. So I said, ‘Enough of this,’ and I left.”

He had a good many years at his new company, he said. It was an extraordinarily creative place. He was part of decision-making at the highest level. “Every employee from technician to manager was hot for the new, exciting stuff,” he went on. “So, as far as buzz and daily environment, it was far and away the most fun I’ve ever had.” But it wasn’t perfect. “I remember I called in the head marketing guy and I said, ‘I want you to give me all the information you can come up with on when people buy one of our products–what software do they buy, what business are they in–so I can see the model of how people are using the machines.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I have no idea about that.’ ” Where was the rigor? Then Starkweather had a scheme for hooking up a high-resolution display to one of his new company’s computers. “I got it running and brought it into management and said, ‘Why don’t we show this at the tech expo in San Francisco? You’ll be able to rule the world.’ They said, ‘I don’t know. We don’t have room for it.’ It was that sort of thing. It was like me saying I’ve discovered a gold mine and you saying we can’t afford a shovel.”

He shrugged a little wearily. It was ever thus. The innovator says go. The company says stop–and maybe the only lesson of the legend of Xerox PARC is that what happened there happens, in one way or another, everywhere. By the way, the man who hired Gary Starkweather away to the company that couldn’t afford a shovel? His name was Steve Jobs.

Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation.