Reading and rehab
Looking ahead to 2023!
Friends - as year-ends go, this one’s been a little different. For one, I’m typing this in a sling (at the set-up below), roughly one week past rotator cuff surgery (with said typing blessed by the surgeon), and a few weeks past catching and shedding covid, finally, for the first time. So health and wellness and recovery have been ongoing themes.
Split keyboard now especially handy
With help from Angie Nguyen, reader for undergrad competitive strategy, and Drew Silverman, class rep for Clusters class, both classes came to a successful close. (Given my circumstances, the term “soft landing”, usually used in a Jay Powell / Federal Reserve context, comes to mind.) I particularly enjoyed the sense of scaffolding and community in both classes, and the thoughtful sets of final projects and presentations.
I end 2022 full of ideas on where I want to take Clusters class - in particular, ways to calibrate and visualize the vector a given metro is on.
One week post-surgery, I can now fully appreciate the road ahead will be slow going. And also why I tried the PRP+PT route before ultimately going with surgery, nearly 18 months after the original injury.
On the bright side, I’ve gotten some precious Lego time with my daughter. (Not just any Lego - Harry Potter Lego.)
Name that Harry Potter structure-in-progress
The past few years have been great for reading and discovery - one of the joys of instruction is that instructors get to learn too, and, as is literally carved into the faculty building at Haas, be Students Always.
My Clusters class preparation page (basically, a pre-class readme.txt file) describes this. The first list of texts (screen cap below) gives influences for the 2021 launch edition, such as Saxenian’s Regional Advantage and Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs. The second list shows off-season reading and influences on the 2022 edition, such as
co-author of Our Towns, and Juan Du’s The Shenzhen Experiment.
Two threads I tried to explore in particular during the off-season between 2021 and 2022 classes were (1) remote work and regionality of work; and (2) how cities can start the cycle of investment *before* anchor companies show up, and/or pay for enhancements to improve a cluster. This got into areas of real estate finance, such as municipal bonds, and some of the themes former mayor and current city council member Brian Colbert talked about when talking about San Anselmo’s finances. A scenario I described in class: how would Reno pay for an off-ramp, or to flatten a lot, *before* Tesla moves in? Where does that money come from? Austin’s many bond issuances to pay for transit enhancements are an example of this; San Diego’s TransNet consumption tax is another.
Which gets us to reading this holiday season. As mentioned in my Yountville / San Anselmo post, I have just finished Chris Miller’s very readable and well-researched Chip War, which just won the FT’s Book of the Year award. That will definitely see use in Clusters, and Strategy for the Networked Economy in 2023. I’m now wrapping up Arriving Today, by the WSJ's Christopher Mims (
on Substack) on the journey a USB charger takes from assembly to "same day" delivery, as context on advances in fulfillment and logistics, i.e., the stitching between and around cities. Mims referenced The Box, on the history of the standardized container, so that is next in the queue.In between Chip War and Arriving Today, I binge-read Bono's autobiography. As a 50-year-old with an arm in a sling, whose U2 fandom was most intense during their War to Unforgettable Fire period, reading the self-aware chronicle of the now-62-year-old voice of U2 somehow seemed appropriate. (Unforgettable Fire remains my favorite album of theirs, by far.) While the book, like U2, has a few eye-roll inducing moments, he is self-aware about…being Bono and it’s a chronicle of the power of not looking down. (As I’ve been known to say to motivate myself, it’s not why me, it’s why not me?) I’d forgotten about his odd couple travels with Paul O’Neill and time spent cajoling Condoleeza Rice and George W Bush. The juxtaposition between the Dublin of his youth (also that described by Irish colleagues in Japan in the early 1990s) and the Dublin (Silicon Docks) a few of my Clusters students wrote about this fall is striking.
Which brings me to the end of my last post of 2022. I have really enjoyed
and the sense of community. It kind of feels like the blogroll (I guess TypePad?) era, but...better.Onward and upward in 2023!