Cornelius Vanderbilt

The First Tycoon by T.J. Stiles

book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Edward Glaeser, gentleman farmer, informal economy, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, public intellectual, risk free rate, short selling, Snow Crash, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, working poor

Cornelius Vanderbilt and Daniel Drew, May 4, 1854, file LJ-1854-V-131, Supreme Court Law Judgments Cornelius Vanderbilt v. William C Moon, June 7, 1854, file L J-1854-M-398, Supreme Court Judgments Cornelius Vanderbilt v. Reuben C. Stone, September 12, 1854, file L J-1854-S-19, Supreme Court Judgments Cornelius Vanderbilt v. John C Thompson and Minthorne Tompkins, September 26, 1854, file J L-1854-T-172, Supreme Court Judgments James H Quimby v. Cornelius Vanderbilt, November 13, 1854, file 1854-#1242, Court of Common Pleas Cornelius Vanderbilt v. Spring Valley Shot & Lead Manufacturing Company, April 21, 1855, file L J-1855-S-206, Supreme Court Judgments Cornelius Vanderbilt v. Spring Valley Shot & Lead Manufacturing Company, July 26, 1855, file L J-1855-S-208 Cornelius Vanderbilt v.

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Naval Officers, March 1778–July 1908, Record Group 45 Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General (Army), Record Group 153 National Archives, New York, New York New York Tax Assessment Lists, 1867–1873, Record Group 58 Old Records Division, New York County Clerk's Office, New York, New York John De Forest and Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. vs. Daniel Morgan, April 5, 1817, file 1817-#337, Court of Common Pleas Cornelius Vanderbilt and Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. vs. Phineas Carman and Cornelius P. Wyckoff, May 26, 1817, file 1817-#1201, Court of Common Pleas Aaron Ogden v. Thomas Gibbons, December 4, 1819, file O-109, Court of Chancery Fitz G. Halleck v. Daniel Drew, March 15, 1820, file 1820-#479, Court of Common Pleas John R. Livingston v. Cornelius Vanderbilt, December 28, 1822, file L J-1822-V-18, Supreme Court Judgments John Adams, Treasurer of New York Hospital, v. Cornelius Vanderbilt, June 27, 1826, file 1820-#20, Court of Common Pleas Cornelius Vanderbilt v.

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John's Park Freight Depot The Vanderbilt statue Stock watering (cartoon) Racing Fisk (cartoon) Grand Central Depot under construction Grand Central Depot Grand Central Depot car house, exterior view Grand Central Depot car house, interior view Fast train to Chicago New York Central & Hudson River Railroad Fast trotters on Harlem Lane Mountain Boy Congress Hall veranda, Saratoga Springs Cornelius Vanderbilt Tennessee Claflin Victoria Woodhull Horace Greeley Frank Crawford Vanderbilt Ethelinda Vanderbilt Allen Sophia Vanderbilt Torrance Mary Vanderbilt La Bau Going to the Opera The run on the Union Trust Vanderbilt at rest Death of Cornelius Vanderbilt Funeral of Cornelius Vanderbilt Burial of Cornelius Vanderbilt Dr. Jared Linsly at the will trial New York, 1880 Maps New York Bay Southern New England New York Gold Rush Steamship Lines Nicaragua The Trunk Lines Chapter One THE ISLANDER They came to learn his secrets.

pages: 641 words: 182,927

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

Now popular magazines like McClure’s and Outlook ran fawning portraits of industrialists like Cornelius Vanderbilt and Philip Armour, and Harper’s Bazaar and Century published reverential descriptions of the New York Produce Exchange, the Chamber of Commerce, and the New York Stock Exchange. This journalism echoed the famous defense of great wealth and business competition as a source of social progress that Andrew Carnegie made in his 1889 essay The Gospel of Wealth.20 In 1899, for instance, Outlook informed its readers that Cornelius Vanderbilt II was not just a millionaire railroad king: no, he was “a Christian philanthropist who gave liberally of his wealth and of what was more valuable, his time and energy, to a great variety of philanthropic and Christian enterprises.”21 Outlook extolled Vanderbilt as “a man of great simplicity of character, easily approached, but strong, even to sternness, when necessary, and yet withal as gentle as a woman.”22 The magazine emphasized that Vanderbilt possessed his money not for himself but for others: he regarded his wealth “not simply as something personal, but as a great and sacred trust, which it was his duty to administer…with a wise and discriminating conscientiousness, for the benefit of his fellow-man.”23 Now the Wall Street Journal could respect even the reptilian Jay Gould for having built railroads, telegraphs, and elevated railways that had improved the country, even as it acknowledged his unethical business conduct and indifference to charity.24 New York City exemplified (and drove) many of the changes in economic productivity and the status hierarchy that James Bryce spoke of in his article.

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It was largely built by craftsmen brought over from Europe and was decorated with stone and wood carvings, stained glass, and embroidered textiles imported from the Continent. This mansion featured a ballroom that could hold more than 1,200 people, while the 130-room palace of Cornelius Vanderbilt II at Fifth Avenue and West Fifty-Ninth Street (figure 6.2) was the largest single-family private home ever built in New York City.15 One scholar has remarked that these “aristocratic houses were more than just large; they were presentation stages for the spectacular trappings of the ruling class.”16 FIGURE 6.2 A postcard of the residence of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt, at Fifth Avenue and West Fifty-Ninth Street, postmarked 1912. (Author’s collection.)

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Their prevalent theme of family deterioration is encapsulated by one book title–Dead End Gene Pool (2010).69 Its author is Wendy Burden, the great-great-great-great granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Rather than celebrating a privileged lifestyle, Burden exposes ugly truths that she believes lay concealed beneath the elegant and refined surface of the upper class. In particular, she describes episodes of “rich people behaving badly” because they had the money and influence to indulge their vices without having to worry about the consequences.70 Ultimately, their extravagance did have costs: the death of Cornelius Vanderbilt from syphilis and the nervous breakdown and premature demise of her great-great-grandfather.

Great American Railroad Journeys by Michael Portillo

Alistair Cooke, California gold rush, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, invention of the telephone, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, railway mania, short selling, the High Line, transcontinental railway, union organizing

As a consequence, the members of this elite group were branded ‘robber barons’, a term that put their public conduct on a par with detested feudal lords from the medieval era who likewise knew no boundaries when it came to achieving their goals. Even railroad bosses who weren’t tainted by allegations of corruption operated in ways that would not be tolerated today. CORNELIUS VANDERBILT One of the first to be elevated to the ranks of the super-rich was Cornelius Vanderbilt. Although initially poor and ill-educated, he refused to allow these two issues to define him and, following his success, he came to characterize the self-made man so beloved by American folk lore. During an extraordinarily long and busy life Vanderbilt displayed fruitful acumen that underpinned his golden touch.

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Opponents were crushed, often with a brinkmanship more appropriate to a game of poker than a nationally significant industry. For anyone who crossed him, he had these sinister words: ‘I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you.’ In 1854, when this portrait was commissioned, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s business activities were restricted to steamships. STEAMSHIP KING At his death, Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877) was worth $100 million. One estimate says that by then he possessed one-ninth of all US currency in circulation. His name is indelibly associated with railroads, and he was the first to be dubbed a ‘robber baron’ for his unsavoury business practices.

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CONTENTS FOREWORD BY MICHAEL PORTILLO INTRODUCTION SECTION ONE THE EARLY YEARS Dreams & reality The pioneers Marvels & machinations in the mid-century SECTION TWO THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR Modern warfare Railroads in the south Railroads in the north Engine exploits Abraham Lincoln SECTION THREE ROBBER BARONS Cornelius Vanderbilt Jay Gould A rogues’ gallery Credit Mobilier SECTION FOUR RECONSTRUCTION & THE GILDED AGE The Transcontinental Railroad Regulation & railroads The Pennsylvania Railroad empire Comfort & safety Bridges & tunnels TIMELINE CONCLUSION PICTURE CREDITS INDEX FOREWORD Throughout the years of making rail journeys for BBC television, first in the United Kingdom and then on the continent of Europe, I had dreamed of carrying the programme’s concept to the United States.

pages: 219 words: 67,173

Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America by Sam Roberts

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bear Stearns, City Beautiful movement, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, New Urbanism, the High Line, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, Y2K

No railroad officials were charged, however. Wisker was indicted for second-degree manslaughter because he “unmistakably violated the well-known rule which, under the conditions surrounding him, required him to stop his train.” THE CRASH OCCURRED AT 56TH STREET, not far from the Vanderbilt mansion on Fifth Avenue. Cornelius Vanderbilt III and Alfred Vanderbilt, great-grandsons of the Commodore, rushed to the scene in time to learn that Wisker had been arrested by the New York City police pending a coroner’s inquest. Almost on the spot, they joined other railroad officials, including William J. Wilgus, the New York Central’s chief engineer, in a decision that would change the face of New York.

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“It was not enough that the New York Central Railroad had been maintaining for many years a defective signal system and that any day a serious accident might happen as a result of the maintenance of such a system,” said William Travers Jerome, the district attorney (he was a nephew of Leonard Jerome, who had been Cornelius Vanderbilt’s stockbroker), “but it must have been found affirmatively, and beyond reasonable doubt, that this particular accident, with the ensuing deaths, occurred as the direct result of its defective system.” The next time, a grand jury might do just that. Even with the recent renovations, Grand Central Station, which was already outmoded the day it opened a generation earlier, would have to be razed.

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After all, when the 9,000-pound, 13-foot-long DeWitt Clinton was cast at the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, New York, and fitted at the foot of Beach Street in lower Manhattan, it was only the third or fourth steam locomotive built in the United States. But the railroad men weren’t completely crazy. They were shrewd enough to engage in a subterfuge sufficient to forestall a veto of railroad franchises by the state legislature, which the boatmen, including Cornelius Vanderbilt, all but owned. Following experiments by the inventor Peter Cooper of New York on the Baltimore & Ohio and service on the Charleston & Hamburg line in South Carolina, John B. Jervis commissioned the DeWitt Clinton for the newly chartered Mohawk & Hudson Railroad, the first leg of what two decades later would become the New York Central.

pages: 283 words: 81,163

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Indeed, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, this sort of battle marked the development of much of American industry—the steamship industry, the steel industry, and the auto industry, to name just a few. For example, the great steamship entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt competed with government-subsidized political entrepreneurs for much of his career. In fact, he got his start in business by competing—illegally—against a state-sanctioned steamship monopoly operated by Robert Fulton. In 1807, the New York state legislature had granted Fulton a legal, thirty-year monopoly on steamboat traffic in New York—a classic example of mercantilism.37 In 1817, however, a young Cornelius Vanderbilt was hired by New Jersey businessman Thomas Gibbons to defy the monopoly and run steamboats in New York.

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State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government . . . for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence. —Murray N. Rothbard, The Logic of Action (1997) THE LATE nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often referred to as the time of the “robber barons.” It is a staple of history books to attach this derogatory phrase to such figures as John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the great nineteenth-century railroad operators—Grenville Dodge, Leland Stanford, Henry Villard, James J. Hill, and others. To most historians writing on this period, these entrepreneurs committed thinly veiled acts of larceny to enrich themselves at the expense of their customers. Once again we see the image of the greedy, exploitative capitalist, but in many cases this is a distortion of the truth.

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This is a common, ordinary business practice—offering volume discounts to one’s largest customers in order to keep them—but Rockefeller’s less efficient competitors complained bitterly. Nothing was stopping them from cutting their costs and prices and winning similar railroad rebates other than their own inabilities or laziness, but they apparently decided that it was easier to complain about Rockefeller’s “unfair advantage” instead. Cornelius Vanderbilt publicly offered railroad rebates to any oil refiner who could give him the same volume of business that Rockefeller did, but since no one was as efficient as Rockefeller, no one could take him up on his offer.29 All of Rockefeller’s savings benefited the consumer, as his low prices made kerosene readily available to Americans.

pages: 456 words: 123,534

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

I understand that three hundred were navigating the great western rivers some time ago: and the number is probably much increased.25 The eastern seaboard was blessed with a more or less continuous system of tidal waterways linking almost all the major cities. Rivers like the Hudson and the Connecticut were broad, deep, and relatively straight. For a skilled captain with a good boat, sailing upstream was almost as easy as sailing down. As a teenager, Cornelius Vanderbilt ran a Staten Island–to-Manhattan ferry service with a small sailing sloop. By his early twenties he owned a string of twenty- to thirty-ton fast sailing vessels running freight traffic up and down the East Coast. He could sail up the Delaware during shad season, picking up fishermen’s catches to sell in New York City.

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The bill of fare was preserved for posterity: “Chowder, a yoke of oxen barbecued whole, 10 sheep roasted whole, beef a la mode, boiled ham, corned beef, buffalo tongues, bologna sausage, beef tongues (smoked and pickled), 100 roast fowls, hot coffee, etc.” 60 The broad outline of the modern railroad network east of the Mississippi was more or less in place by 1860. There were four large east-west networks. Two originated in New York: the Erie and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central, an 1850s consolidation often connecting roads. Both the Pennsylvania and the B&O offered through service to Pittsburgh and beyond from Philadelphia and the Chesapeake region respectively. The outline of a rail network emanating from Chicago was in place, with multiple connections both with the four east-west lines and to Cincinnati, St.

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By the 1830s and 1840s, the boats were of oceanic proportions, roughly twice the size of Fulton’s Clermont/Steamboat and far heavier and faster. Competing lines raced, and occasionally jostled, each other on the water, rather like NASCAR racers. There was no dominant owner, but the active presence of Cornelius Vanderbilt kept all the lines at a knife-sharp point of tension. His strategy was to move into and out of the trade opportunistically—launching price wars against complacent operators to gain control of their routes, then selling out at a profit. Vanderbilt had become by far the richest of the operators and the only one who could order and pay for major steamboats from his own resources—rich enough even to shrug off the loss of a major new boat, The Atlantic, a 321-foot behemoth.

pages: 523 words: 159,884

The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, accounting loophole / creative accounting, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, California high-speed rail, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cross-subsidies, Ford Model T, high-speed rail, intermodal, James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban sprawl, vertical integration

Despite these many positive developments for the railroads, services remained basic on many lines, adding to the unpopularity of the railroads with some members of the public. The postbellum period was also the age of “bare knuckles,” as the major companies began to slug it out for increased market share. Powerful and unscrupulous railroad magnates—men like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Daniel Drew, and banker Jay Gould— became a feature of the industrial landscape of America’s “Gilded Age,” and they exacerbated the railroads’ unpopularity, as did their response to the increasing labor unrest. The resentment engendered by several railroad strikes would be a significant factor in the birth of labor unions in the United States.

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To give a scale of the enterprise, which was probably around the same size as the Erie, the New York Central could lay claim to 542 miles of line and owned 150 wood-burning locomotives, 1,700 freight cars, and just under 200 passenger coaches. Indeed, it fared so well, easily surviving the panic of 1857, that it attracted the attention of a rapacious shipping magnate, one Cornelius Vanderbilt (see Chapter 8). In the 1850s, the consolidation of smaller lines to create a larger railroad was a new idea in America, but would be adopted widely across the United States, particularly after the Civil War as the Hamiltonian ethos prevailed. Big companies like the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the New York Central were still, in the antebellum period, the exception.

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A train traveling from South Amboy was derailed at Hightstown, New Jersey, when an axle broke, injuring all but one of the twenty-four passengers and killing two. The train was carrying a remarkable contingent of famous people, suggesting perhaps that early travelers were largely the better off. The infamous entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt, who broke a leg in the accident, vowed never to travel by rail again, a promise he failed to keep when he gained control of numerous railroads a quarter of a century later (see Chapter 8). The former president and now congressman John Quincy Adams was the sole passenger to escape unscathed, while Irish actor Tyrone Power, who suffered only minor injuries, later wrote a detailed account of the crash, describing it as “the most dreadful catastrophe that ever my eyes beheld” and recalling how he helped a fellow passenger, a surgeon, tend to the injured.36 As rail lines extended, journeys lasting more than the daylight hours became necessary.

pages: 196 words: 57,974

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

In 1913, there was $11.2 billion worth of railroad bonds, versus $7.2 billion of common stock, and that ignores both the railroads’ enormous bank debts and the fact that half of the common stock was corporate cross-holdings.11 Preference shares were also enormously popular—particularly after they were used to launch the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1871. Such a narrow equity base made bankruptcy a common threat, spurring consolidation. Many of the earliest railway lines did not yet connect to each other. Bullies like Cornelius Vanderbilt and then J. P. Morgan tidied up this fragmented system. Even without their prompting, many railroad tycoons decided that collusion was the only way to ensure a regular flow of traffic and avert ruinous price wars. This consolidation meant that by the 1890s, the railways were bigger than the utility companies that brought light, heat, and water to Chicago and New York, and bigger by far than the armies that defended the United States.

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Duke’s story was repeated in several other industries. George Eastman invented not only a cheap camera but also the idea of the amateur photographer to find a market for his photographic film. But the most distinctive feature of all the integrated firms was a desire to grow as big as possible. That inevitably led to mergers. Cornelius Vanderbilt had already shown the benefits of consolidation in the railway industry. Between 1890 and 1904, huge waves of consolidation left most of the country’s industrial base in the hands of around fifty organizations—usually (if sometimes unfairly) referred to as trusts. The merger era produced some of the most powerful companies of their time, including U.S.

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The robber barons may have kept the big strategic decisions in their own hands, but they couldn’t personally oversee every detail of their gigantic business empires. And they couldn’t find the management skills that they needed among their immediate families, who anyway found more amusing things to do: Digby Baltzell writes acidly about “the divorcing John Jacob Astor III (three wives), Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. (five wives), Tommy Manville (nine wives) or the Topping brothers (ten wives between them).”2 So the company founders turned to a new class of professional managers. The likes of King Gillette, William Wrigley, H. J. Heinz, and John D. Rockefeller hired hordes of black-coated managers to bring order to their chaotic empires.

pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

What had been a nation of isolated farmers turned into a giant continental economy and the world’s leading industrial power. Just as in India, this growth gave birth to a new generation of plutocrats, from oil magnate John Rockefeller and banker John Pierpont Morgan to railroad tycoons Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt. These men sat atop a new “millionaire class” known for its extravagant houses and vulgar displays of wealth. Then they acquired another name: the “robber barons,” for the speed at which they built their fortunes and the lack of conscience they displayed while doing so. From the cliff-top mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, to the splendor of New York’s newly minted millionaires’ row on Fifth Avenue, it was the wealth these tycoons accumulated that defined their era.

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They were also the great philanthropists of the city and are now remembered as city fathers. Mr. Ambani’s efforts are simply the latest example.” Antilia’s excess also carried echoes of an earlier era in America, and another celebrated business dynasty: the Vanderbilts. Like Dhirubhai Ambani, Cornelius Vanderbilt grew up modestly. The son of poor Dutch immigrants, he was born in a wooden house on Staten Island in 1794, working on his father’s boat as a boy and learning to take goods over the bay to New York. In his teens he pestered his mother to lend him $100 to buy a vessel of his own, earning the nickname “Commodore” for his fearlessness on the water.24 He went on to build a small fleet, only to find his expansion plans blocked by local rivals whose businesses were protected by exclusive government licenses and charters, which were controlled in turn by pliant politicians.

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These problems then focus attention on one final critical barrier India faces: government itself. The crony capitalism of America’s Gilded Age ended when rampant nineteenth-century clientelism was curbed by impartial, meritocratic twentieth-century public administration. The kind of concentrated power built up by tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt was undone through the introduction of new antitrust law and competition policy. Improvements in basic public services gradually broke the grip of political patronage, a process that developed over many decades after the Gilded Age itself, culminating only with the New Deal of the 1930s. In India’s case, similar breakthroughs will require a focus on what is often called “state capacity.”15 Ending corruption is part of this battle, but it also involves the more complex objective of building a state machinery able to create and implement wise public policies, while remaining impartial between different social groups.

pages: 485 words: 143,790

The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway by Doug Most

Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, independent contractor, Menlo Park, place-making, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, safety bicycle, streetcar suburb, transcontinental railway

Whitney ignored it all and watched as McKinley, a former Republican governor from Ohio, defeated Nebraskan Democrat William Jennings Bryan. * * * THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, WILLIAM’S SON, Harry Payne Whitney, traded vows with young Gertrude Vanderbilt, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, putting in motion a blending of two of the most important families of the late nineteenth century. Over the years, William Whitney and Cornelius Vanderbilt had been more than neighbors. They had vacationed together in Newport, Rhode Island, at the Vanderbilt mansion, the Breakers; in Bar Harbor, Maine; and upstate New York. They had shared a love of the opera, attending hundreds of performances together.

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She covered the floors with rich oriental rugs and the walls with bright tapestries and works by the French painter François Boucher, whom Whitney had a special affection for. The Whitneys may have left behind the neighborhood of the Morgans, but in their new home, they were trading up to live across the street from Cornelius Vanderbilt II, whose daughter Gertrude would in a few years marry Will Whitney’s oldest son, Harry. It was that marriage that assured the Whitney family’s legacy would thrive into the twentieth century and beyond. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney became a prominent sculptor and art collector, and after she established the Whitney Studio in Greenwich Village in 1914 and accumulated more than five hundred works of art, she offered them with an endowment to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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His son tried college but wasn’t interested, and he dropped out to partner with his father in work. He quickly showed himself to be skilled as both a laborer and a manager. One of his first assignments, which he landed through his father, was a low-level timekeeping job at the Croton Dam. His first railroad job was rebuilding Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad’s Fourth Avenue tracks up around Ninety-sixth Street. It was a job that gained him notoriety and led him on a busy path around North America, from New Jersey to Canada to Western Massachusetts to Buffalo to Philadelphia to Wisconsin to Illinois to West Virginia. He settled for a while in Baltimore to work on a long and complicated tunnel for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and by the time he returned to New York with his wife, son, and daughter, he was no longer a run-of-the-mill contractor.

pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

,” NBER Working Paper No. 24085, November 2017,http://www.nber.org/papers/w24085. Chapter 7: What Trusts and Nazis Had in Common 1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1881/03/the-story-of-a-great-monopoly/306019/. 2. Edward J. Renehan Jr., Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Basic Books, 2019). Kindle Edition. 3. T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). 4. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1881/03/the-story-of-a-great-monopoly/306019/. 5. Ron Chernow, Titan (Vintage Books, 1998). 6. Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (Harcourt, 1934). 7. Theodore Roosevelt: Ultimate Collection (Madison & Adams Press, 2017). 8.

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Chapter Seven What Trusts and Nazis Had in Common Just as we must convince the Germans on the political side of the unsoundness of making an irrevocable grant of power to a dictator … we must also convince them on the economic side of the unsoundness of allowing a private enterprise to acquire dictatorial power over any part of the economy.” —A Year of Potsdam: German Economy Since Surrender United States War Department Cornelius Vanderbilt was the embodiment of the nineteenth century American monopolist. He came to represent the idea of the corporation as a Goliath, yet he started out as a David. In 1808 the State of New York created a monopoly on ferry travel for a term of 20 years. Former New Jersey Governor Aaron Ogden purchased the monopoly rights and entered into partnership with Thomas Gibbons, a wealthy lawyer.

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When their partnership collapsed, the two began competing with each other between New York and New Jersey. The partners ended up suing each other in the New York court. Gibbons decided to take his case against the monopoly all the way to the Supreme Court. As history would have it, Gibbons had hired a boatman in his mid-twenties named Cornelius Vanderbilt to pilot his ferries. Vanderbilt captained the boats, defying jail, cutting prices against the big monopolists. The case Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824 became a legal landmark in favor of free trade. The Supreme Court decided that Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce included the power to regulate transportation.

pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

And everyone who buys one has an economic rationalization—it makes them more productive. You can listen to music with earphones instead of hiring the New York Philharmonic (or AC/DC) to perform live in your kitchen. Or send an e-mail instead of tying a message to a pigeon’s leg. Or click “I’m Feeling Lucky,” instead of pestering librarians to look up the life story of Cornelius Vanderbilt. You get the point. Several trillion dollars of wealth have been created from the Scaling of bits. You can look at the market capitalization of all the tech companies, from Intel to Microsoft to Google to whoever else, and you get a trillion. The other trillion or so is the lower costs that companies like Wal-Mart and Morgan Stanley and Merck have been able to enjoy because computing power gets cheaper each and every year.

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Good luck finding the trolley lines that used to run up and down Broadway in Manhattan. It’s political power versus competition. Over years, politics has the advantage. Over decades, competition triumphs. Cost cutting and innovation can’t be caged. Choose wisely. THIS GUY FIGURED it out—a Free Radical before it became fashionable. Cornelius Vanderbilt was born in 1794 on Staten Island, New York. As they say about Dominicans in Major League Baseball: you don’t walk off the island, you gotta hit your way off. When he was sixteen, Vanderbilt’s mom gave him $100 to clear and plant an eight-acre field. Instead, Vanderbilt bought a two-mast sailboat and started charging for ferrying passengers and goods around New York.

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Until I read a series of articles in Tom Friedman’s very own New York Times titled “A Disability Epidemic Among a Railroad’s Retirees.” Just from reading the first few paragraphs about the Long Island Railroad, you’ll instantly understand why our public infrastructure and mass transit is Flintstonian . . . because someone is stealing the money. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who ran ships around Long Island, must be rolling over in his grave. “Virtually every career employee—as many as 97 percent in one recent year—applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records show, about a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. employees.”

pages: 256 words: 15,765

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

And to get more people to read, the philosophy isn’t ‘misery loves company,’ it’s ‘misery loves voyeurism.’ ’’ In decades past, the decadence sometimes associated with wealth had something of a romance, almost an elegance to it. For example, think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, with Jay Gatsby at play on Long Island; or the ornate parlor cars of railroad magnates such as Cornelius Vanderbilt; or the rich collections of Andrew Carnegie; or John F. Kennedy and his family holding court in the White House. The resentment that some felt toward these 16 The New Elite wealthy lifestyles was often coupled with a paradoxical respect and admiration for the reﬁnement this wealth engendered.

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On an individual level, money shifted to an entirely new breed of wealthy individual, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the largest fortunes were in the range of $200–300 million—ten times what Astor had accumulated in his lifetime just a half century earlier. The names of this new elite are still familiar today: Andrew Carnegie. Henry Ford. J. P. Morgan. Thomas Edison. Indeed, in the minds of many, these names are synonymous with wealth today, particularly two of the wealthiest: John Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt was from a middle-class family, and he dropped out of school to start working when he was just eleven years old, later saying: ‘‘If I had learned education, I would not have had time to The Wealth of the Nation 27 learn anything else.’’ By sixteen, he had started his own ferry service between Staten Island and Manhattan, and over time he expanded to other routes with a ﬂeet of more than a hundred ships.

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Even the esteemed biographer of the American spirit, Alexis de Tocqueville, who marveled at so many aspects of the American passion for equality and democracy, also marveled at American materialism and the resulting tolerance for inequality: ‘‘I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property.’’5 Inequality in the United States has also tended to result from innovations that did have trickle-down effects, even if the ﬁnancial gain from those innovations was concentrated at the top. The average American in 1920 didn’t see his income rise with that of John Rockefeller or Cornelius Vanderbilt, but he certainly saw tangible changes in his own life and that of his family as a result of railroads, electricity, telephones, radio, automobiles, and the like. In the twenty-ﬁrst century, the average American has been left behind in the wealth explosion experienced by the entrepreneurial elite, but certainly has experienced personal beneﬁts from cell phones and the Internet.

pages: 272 words: 83,798

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Veblen certainly seemed to live out his criticism in his own rather modest consumption. His clothes were too big and often looked as if he’d slept in them, and he kept his watch crudely attached to his vest with a safety pin. He suggested doing away with silks and tweeds altogether and making clothes out of paper instead. Modern America’s tribal chiefs were men like Cornelius Vanderbilt, who over the nineteenth century rose from being an uneducated ferry boy to a fabulously wealthy railway owner, leaving an estate worth billions in today’s money. The Vanderbilt family built giant mansions and summer estates. One of them gave his wife for her birthday the Marble House in Rhode Island, a lavish palace made from 500,000 cubic feet of white marble.

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One of them gave his wife for her birthday the Marble House in Rhode Island, a lavish palace made from 500,000 cubic feet of white marble. Underneath the conspicuous consumption of men like Vanderbilt was an instinct that Veblen called ‘predation’. Where barbarian kings attacked each other with spears, the modern leisure class defeated their rivals with financial trickery. Take the battle between Cornelius Vanderbilt and another businessman, Daniel Drew, for control of the railway line that ran between Chicago and New York City. Drew cooked up a scheme to outwit Vanderbilt by influencing the price of the railway company’s shares. To pull it off he needed the price to go sky high. He visited a New York bar frequented by stockbrokers, and while chatting to some of them pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his brow.

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The contrast between old and new also runs through his theory of capitalism, which he set out in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. According to Schumpeter, the fruits of modern capitalism – the vast array of goods on offer and the new technologies used to produce them – are created by heroic figures who are modern-day versions of the swashbuckling knights of old. They’re entrepreneurs, men like the railway owner Cornelius Vanderbilt, or Andrew Carnegie, who amassed a huge fortune through expanding the American steel industry. Thorstein Veblen had seen Vanderbilt and his type as throwbacks to ancient societies of violent barbarians, ‘robber barons’ whose aggression made them rich but didn’t benefit society as a whole. But Schumpeter said that it was because they’d channelled their excess energy into industry instead of battle that they’d become society’s wealth creators.

pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

John Stephenson: “Death of John Stephenson; the Builder of Street Cars Passes Away Suddenly,” The New York Times. George Stephenson: “George Stephenson,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. “owner of large tracts”: Carman, The Street Surface Railway Franchises of New York City, 23. “as well as being”: Carman, 23. Cornelius Vanderbilt: “Cornelius Vanderbilt,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. sold for $270,000: Rohde, “Why Investors Should Consider Chicago’s Real Estate Market in 2021.” Boston was $494,000: Andreevska, “Where Should You Invest in the Boston Real Estate Market?” $985,000 in San Francisco: National Association of Realtors, “Metro Home Prices Rise in 96% of Metro Areas in First Quarter of 2020.”

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“Peter Cooper’s Vision.” https://cooper.edu/about/history/peter-coopers-vision. Cope, Zachary. “Dr. Thomas Percival And Jane Austen.” British Medical Journal 1, no. 5635 (1969): 55–56. Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. The Godfather Part II. Paramount Pictures/Coppola Company/American Zoetrope, 1974. “Cornelius Vanderbilt.” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Accessed January 18, 2021. www.britannica.com/biography/Cornelius-Vanderbilt-1794-1877. “Coronavirus (COVID-19) Deaths—Statistics and Research.” Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths. “Coronavirus: How New Zealand Relied on Science and Empathy.” BBC News, April 20, 2020. www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52344299.

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Historian Harry Carman notes how Samuel Ruggles, the “owner of large tracts of real property between Third and Fourth Avenue, in the vicinity of Irving Place and Lexington Avenue, was untiring in his efforts to obtain public support and approval” for the railroad during the 1830s. He had strong financial incentives to do so, for “as well as being a large landholder, he was also a director and one of the largest stockholders of the New York and Harlem Railroad Company.” Cornelius Vanderbilt was another director of the New York and Harlem. He pushed the construction of the Grand Central Depot that would eventually morph into Grand Central Station. As the railroad stretched north from Grand Central, the city expanded alongside the rails. All cities are both nodes on the vast transportation network that spans the globe and hubs of their own local transportation system that allows travel across their metropolitan region.

pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Knopf, 2009), 43. refused to duel: Herbert A. Johnson, Gibbons v. Ogden: John Marshall, Steamboats, and the Commerce Clause (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 42–43. “strongest I ever knew”: Cornelius Vanderbilt, in Den D. Trumbull et al. v. Gibbons, April 10, 1849, quoted in Stiles, First Tycoon, 37. his young captain: Memorandum of Agreement between Thomas Gibbons and Cornelius Vanderbilt, June 26, 1818, Gibbons Family Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, quoted in Stiles, First Tycoon, 46. advice from Aaron Burr: Aaron Burr, “Of the Validity of the Laws Granting Livingston & Fulton the Exclusive Right of Using Fire and Steam to Propel Boats or Vessels,” Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York Historical Society, quoted in Stiles, First Tycoon, 47.

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He simply began operating his service. But he soon had a labor problem that needed solving. When the captain of the Stoudinger quit suddenly, Gibbons found himself on the wharves of New York, where he learned of the reliability and courage of a twenty-three-year-old ferry operator. Young Cornelius Vanderbilt would become a key participant in the battle to end the monopoly on the Hudson. One day the proudly uneducated Vanderbilt would become the richest man in America. For now, he was looking to make a switch from sail to steam. Born to a working-class family with Dutch roots dating back to 1650, Vanderbilt ran small sailboats between Staten Island and Manhattan.

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To Adam Smith, these emerging industrial artists were “philosophers,” enterprising men whose role in society was “to observe everything” and by so doing become “capable of combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects.” It is unlikely that anyone who knew him would have called Cornelius Vanderbilt a philosopher. By 1840 the unschooled Vanderbilt had bought and sold steamships and routes enough times to amass a fortune, estimated at half a million dollars by some. His waters now extended well beyond the Hudson River and around Manhattan. His new battleground was the waters between Long Island and Connecticut, known as the Long Island Sound.

Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

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pages: 154 words: 47,880

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Most whites were farmers, indentured servants, farmhands, traders, day laborers, and artisans. A fifth of the population was black, almost all of them slaves. A century later a new oligarchy emerged, comprised of men who amassed fortunes through their railroad, steel, oil, and financial empires—men such as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Mellon. They ushered the nation into an industrial revolution that vastly expanded economic output. But they also corrupted government, brutally suppressed wages, generated unprecedented levels of inequality and urban poverty, shut down competitors, and made out like bandits—which is how they earned the sobriquet “robber barons.”

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Recall that this was the era of the robber barons, whose steel mills, oil rigs and refineries, and railroads laid the foundation for America’s industrial might but who also squeezed out rivals who threatened their dominance, ran their own slates for office, and brazenly bribed public officials—even sending lackeys with sacks of money to be placed on the desks of pliant legislators. “What do I care about the law?” railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt famously growled. “Hain’t I got the power?” Forty-eight of the seventy-three men who held cabinet posts between 1868 and 1896 either lobbied for railroads, served railroad clients, sat on railroad boards, or had relatives connected to the railroads. The public was appropriately enraged.

pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The average British working man in 1957, when Harold Macmillan told him he had ‘never had it so good’, was earning less in real terms than his modern equivalent could now get in state benefit if unemployed with three children. Today, of Americans officially designated as ‘poor’, 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these. Even in 1970 only 36 per cent of all Americans had air conditioning: in 2005 79 per cent of poor households did. Even in urban China 90 per cent of people now have electric light, refrigerators and running water. Many of them also have mobile phones, inter net access and satellite television, not to mention all sorts of improved and cheaper versions of everything from cars and toys to vaccines and restaurants.

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In the 1950s it took thirty minutes work to earn the price of a McDonald’s cheeseburger; today it takes three minutes. Healthcare and education are among the few things that cost more in terms of hours worked now than they did in the 1950s. Even the most notorious of capitalists, the robber barons of the late nineteenth century, usually got rich by making things cheaper. Cornelius Vanderbilt is the man for whom the New York Times first used the word ‘robber baron’. He is the very epitome of the phrase. Yet observe what Harper’s Weekly had to say about his railways in 1859: The results in every case of the establishment of opposition lines by Vanderbilt has been the permanent reduction of fares.

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Wherever he ‘laid on’ an opposition line, the fares were instantly reduced, and however the contest terminated, whether he bought out his opponents, as he often did, or they bought him out, the fares were never again raised to the old standard. This great boon – cheap travel – this community owes mainly to Cornelius Vanderbilt. Rail freight charges fell by 90 per cent between 1870 and 1900. There is little doubt that Vanderbilt sometime bribed and bullied his way to success, and that he sometimes paid his workers lower wages than others – I am not trying to make him into a saint – but there is also no doubt that along the way he delivered to consumers an enormous benefit that would otherwise have eluded them – affordable transport.

pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Because capitalism created unparalleled freedom of action in the economy, its history is studded with stories of personal endeavors. Major accomplishments in science and engineering gave direction to nineteenth-century entrepreneurs who scoured these advances for their commercial potential. As the scope of enterprise grew larger and larger, a few individuals carved out large economic domains of their own. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller in the United States and August Thyssen, Carl Zeiss, and Siemens in Germany were the giants who carried their nations to economic preeminence in the nineteenth century. They founded the companies of Carl Zeiss, Thyssen, Krupp, and Siemens in Germany and the New York Central Railroad, U.S.

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The German industrialist Alfred Krupp took over the management of his father’s ironworks firm. Thyssen’s was a family of successful entrepreneurs. In our own time, Bill Gates got a boost from a wealthy father. Yet other industrial giants sprang de novo into the world of trade with little in their backgrounds to suggest a future fabulous success. The perfect example, Cornelius Vanderbilt, began his ascent from a modest waterside farm on Staten Island. Carnegie came from a poor immigrant family, and Rockefeller started at the bottom of the business hierarchy. Siemens got his start through service in the German Army, and Zeiss grew up in a family of toymakers. Vanderbilt’s talents unfolded with the country’s revolution in transportation as he moved from running ferries to transatlantic steamships to railroads.

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Matthew Gardner, The Autobiography of Elder Matthew Gardner, Dayton, 1874), 69; Christopher Clark, “The Agrarian Context of American Capitalist Development” and Jonathan Levy, “The Mortgage Worked the Hardest’: The Nineteenth-Century Mortgage Market and the Law of Usury,” in Michael Zakim and Gary Kornbluth, eds., For Purposes of Profit: Essays on Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2009). 16. John C. Pease and John M. Niles, A Gazetteer…of Connecticut and Rhode Island (Hartford, 1819), 6. 17. T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York, 2009), 90–95. 18. Thomas P. Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (Chicago, 2004), 35. 19. Henry L. Ellsworth, A Digest of Patents Issued by the United States, from 1790 to January 1, 1839 (Washington, 1840); see also Kenneth Sokoloff, “Inventive Activity in Early Industrial America: Evidence from Patent Records, 1790–1846,” Journal of Economic History, 48 (1988): 818–20. 20.

pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The wealthy capitalists of the late nineteenth century understood that this was a formula for high profit. Titans of industry like Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J. P. Morgan all piled into the railroad business, earning themselves reputations as schemers and connivers at the same time that they earned large dividends. The robber barons were railroaders. By universal acclamation, the worst robber baron of all was a man named Jay Gould. Gould had earned notoriety in the late 1860s for his role in the so-called Erie Wars, in which he and his associate Daniel Drew duped Cornelius Vanderbilt into purchasing boatloads of essentially worthless “watered” shares in the Erie Railroad.

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It took some time for Gould’s real strategy to become clear, though.33 Years later, when asked by a World reporter why he had become interested in the Union Pacific, Gould would explain it in the simplest of terms: “There is nothing strange or mysterious about it. I knew it [i.e., the Union Pacific] very intimately when I was a child, and I have merely returned to my first love.” This may well have been true, but there were also other, less romantic reasons for his acquisition. The first was that Horace F. Clark, son-in-law of Cornelius Vanderbilt and a railroad executive himself, had toured the railroad in May 1873 and came back deeply impressed. Clark told Gould about the trip, and Gould, seeing an opportunity, placed an order to buy any Union Pacific shares for sale at less than thirty-five dollars. Clark died shortly thereafter, and Clark’s own sizeable stake in the company was dumped on the market.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

All that’s left to hint that this might once have been more than a down-at-heel gathering of industrial buildings is Colonnade Row, a strip of four 1833 Greek-Revival houses with twelve Corinthian columns, just south of Astor Place. Originally over twice as long, the row was constructed as residences for the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt; it now holds the Astor Place Theater (longtime home to The Blue Man Group; see p.361).The stocky brownstone-and-brick building across Lafayette was once the Astor Library. Built with a bequest from John Jacob Astor between 1853 and 1881 (in a belated gesture of noblesse oblige), it was the first public library in New York.

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Madison Square Garden has moved twice since then, ﬁrst to a site on Eighth Avenue and 50th Street in 1925, and ﬁnally in 1968 to its present location in a hideous drum-shaped eyesore on the corner of 32nd Street and Seventh Avenue (see p.145). 123 H MIDTOW N E AS T Midtown East | Fifth Avenue argely corporate and commercial, and anchored by Grand Central Terminal, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Beaux-Arts transportation hub, the area known as Midtown East rolls north from the 30s through the 50s, and east from Fifth Avenue. Some of the city’s most determinedly modish boutiques, richest Art Deco facades, and most sophisticated Modernist skyscrapers are in this district, primarily scattered along Fifth, Madison, and Park avenues.

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Park Avenue Grand Central Terminal | Park Avenue Park Avenue hits 42nd Street at Pershing Square, where it lifts off the ground to make room for the massive Grand Central Terminal (W www .grandcentralterminal.com). More than just a train station, the terminal is a fullblown destination unto itself. When it was constructed in 1913 at the order of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, the terminal was a masterly piece of urban planning. After the electrification of the railways made it possible to reroute trains underground, the rail lines behind the existing station were sold off to developers and the profits went toward the building of a new terminal – built around a basic iron frame but clothed with a Beaux-Arts skin.

pages: 650 words: 204,878

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre, William J. O'Neil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, British Empire, business process, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, refrigerator car, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, short selling, short squeeze, technology bubble, tontine, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, yellow journalism

There was no more vindictiveness about the process than is felt by a hydraulic press—or no more squeamishness, either. 18.1 Known as the Old Man of the Street, Daniel Drew was born in New York in 1797 to a family of poor farmers and became one of the fiercest stock operators of the mid-1800s. He locked horns with Cornelius Vanderbilt, was alternately friends and enemies with Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, and used his directorship of the Erie Railroad to manipulate its stock. Drew’s intense and hardnosed attitude was on display early in his life. In 1814, he sold himself as a military service stand-in for $100. After a few months, he mustered out and started an illegal “bob veal” business.

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In these early days, before standardized track widths, Erie’s first president, Eleazor Lord, chose a unique six-foot gauge. This, combined with a poorly chosen route through sparsely populated areas, resulted in the railroad’s bankruptcy in 1859. It was then that Drew, Jim Fisk, and Jay Gould took control and battled with Cornelius Vanderbilt by selling him 150,000 counterfeit shares. Before this, in 1852, Drew secured a directorship through underhanded means. First, he started giving the rival New York Central railway preferential rates on his steamboats. Then he took control of the steamers that operated on Lake Erie and served the New York & Erie Railway.

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To make matters worse, the bears were mad with desire for revenge and started raiding Ryan’s other holdings. And bankers were closing in as well. On July 21, 1922, Ryan filed for bankruptcy, listing debts of over $32 million and assets of $643,533. Stutz Motors stock was sold at public auction for $20 a share. The company eventually failed in 1937. Ryan never recovered and died in 1940. 19.7 Cornelius Vanderbilt was born in 1794 into a Staten Island farming family that sailed its produce to market in Manhattan. After earning a small sum from his mother for fieldwork, Vanderbilt bought himself a two-masted, flat-bottomed sail-boat with which he carried passengers and freight across the bay. Two years later, during the War of 1812, Vanderbilt was awarded a U.S.

pages: 601 words: 193,225

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building by Michael Gross

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, it's over 9,000, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, junk bonds, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, short selling, strikebreaker, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

Four years later, William Hale Harkness, scion of another family with ties to Standard Oil, and a friend of George Brewster’s family as well, joined the firm, and in 1929 it merged with Webb, Patterson & Hadley and became Murray, Aldrich & Webb. Harkness, his new partner Morris Hadley, and their partner Vanderbilt Webb’s brother, J. Watson Webb (both of them great-grandsons of Cornelius Vanderbilt), would all buy apartments in 740 Park. So, just a bit later, would Junior. MEANWHILE, WINTHROP ALDRICH WAS AT JUNIOR’S RIGHT HAND WHEN he orchestrated a proxy fight that forced the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana, one of the tent poles of the Rockefeller empire, out of his job after he vexed a Senate committee investigating the oil industry.

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Unsatisfied with the mere duplex penthouse Rosario Candela planned for the building, the Webbs added a third floor—even though there were several triplex Candela penthouses already for sale on Park Avenue. They wanted one built just for them. The Webbs weren’t rich; they were dynastic. Webb’s mother was a granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. His family had been in America for eight generations when the Commodore, as he was known, made his fortune, but despite his colonial roots, he was deemed too vulgar for society. Lila Webb was the youngest daughter of the Commodore’s eldest son, William Henry, who inherited his father’s steamship and railroad fortune—the largest cash stash in the world—and promptly doubled it.

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Peggy was pregnant and bore Charles a son, Pierre-Frédérick Henri Charles Bernard William, that fall, but the court ordered that Muffie remain in New York. A new Cholly Knickerbocker wannabe, calling herself Suzy, reported in the New York Mirror that Peggy wanted it all hushed up, but “when you were once supposed to be the chief aspirant for the New York social throne left vacant by the late Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, when you are one of the world’s best-dressed and most photographed women, when you’re young and rich and blonde and beautiful and married to a very important prince and all,” she wrote to the woman she called Madame la Princesse, that “ain’t exactly realistic.” One of Suzy’s competitors, Nancy Randolph of the Daily News, was scoring regular scoops at Peggy’s expense.

pages: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

One man from New Jersey, Thomas Gibbons, decided to fight both in court and in the marketplace. He owned a steamboat named the Stoudinger (although, because it was very small, it was usually known as the Mouse), which he put on the New York–New Brunswick run, the first leg of the quickest route to Philadelphia. He hired as its captain a young man from Staten Island named Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt, still in his twenties, had already owned a small fleet of sailing ships, but he realized that the future belonged to steam and went to work for Gibbons to gain experience and build up his capital. He soon convinced Gibbons to build a larger boat, designed by Vanderbilt, which Gibbons named Bellona, after the Roman goddess of war.

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The board of the Erie, however, was largely unconcerned with such mundane, long-term matters as profitability or even viability. They were far more interested in short-term trading profits on the Street. This made the Erie the wild card of New York railroading (and caused Charles Francis Adams to dub the line the “Scarlet Woman of Wall Street”). An increasingly powerful figure in that market, Cornelius Vanderbilt, wanted to do something about it. Vanderbilt had left the employ of Thomas Gibbons in 1829 and struck out on his own in the steamboat business. He was soon the greatest shipowner in the country, and in 1837 the Journal of Commerce first used the honorary title by which he has been known to history ever since: Commodore.

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Wherever he ‘laid on’ an opposition line, the fares were instantly reduced, and however the contest terminated, whether he bought out his opponents, as he often did, or they bought him out, the fares were never again raised to the old standard. This great boon—cheap travel—this community owes mainly to Cornelius Vanderbilt.” Even the Times would soon come around to this view of the Commodore. The term robber baron, of course, came to stand for the men, of whom Vanderbilt was one of the first, who built great industrial and transportation empires in the late nineteenth-century American economy. While many of these men were capable of ruthlessness, gross dishonesty, and self-aggrandizement (and others were honest men who scrupulously stayed within what were often inadequate laws), none of them merely transferred wealth to themselves from others by their activities.

pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Carnegie started life as a bobbin boy, endeared himself to the leading businesspeople in Pittsburgh, and by his early thirties had become a millionaire even before investing a dollar in steel. Rockefeller borrowed a thousand dollars from his father at the start of the Civil War, invested it in a food distribution business, emerged from the war with seventy thousand dollars, and purchased a light-fuel factory. Cornelius Vanderbilt started his business career ferrying people in a flat-bottomed boat from New Jersey to New York, traded up to a steamer, and then traded up again to locomotives. “Law, rank, the traditional social bonds—these things meant nothing to him,” T. J. Stiles noted. “Only power earned his respect, and he felt his own strength gathering with every modest investment, every scrap of legal knowledge, every business lesson.”2 Collis Huntington came to California as part of the gold rush but quickly decided that there was more money to be made selling axes and shovels to the miners.

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The railroads produced a breed of speculators, brilliantly satirized in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), who were more interested in gaming railroad stocks to make a quick buck than in actually building railroads. In the so-called Erie War of 1868, Daniel Drew and his allies James Fisk and Jay Gould secretly printed millions of dollars of bonds in the Erie Railway Company in order to stop Cornelius Vanderbilt from taking it over. Speculation was particularly common in the transcontinental railroads, which, as Richard White has demonstrated, were rife with overbuilding, insider dealing, and other sharp corporate practices. This combination of “building well ahead of demand” and endemic speculation meant that the industry was far from the model of rational planning that Alfred Chandler praised.

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In 1867, Crédit Mobilier, a construction company founded by the principals of the Union Pacific Railroad, skimmed off millions from railroad construction, bribing politicians to turn a blind eye in the process. The politicians embroiled in the scandal would eventually include a vice president, Schuyler Colfax, and a vice-presidential nominee, Henry Wilson; the Speaker of the House, James Blaine; and a future president, James Garfield. The 1869 “war” between Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould for control of New York’s Erie Railroad involved hired judges, corrupted legislatures, and under-the-counter payments. The railroads changed the nature of lobbying as well as its scale. They used their lobbies to fight their competitors and to beg favors from the government, blurring the line between economic and political competition.

pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

The best is probably to contrast relative scale, treating earlier fortunes as a percentage of inflation-adjusted GDP and then translating that percentage into contemporary dollars. By this standard34 John D. Rockefeller would today be worth $305.3 billion, Andrew Carnegie $281.2 billion, and Cornelius Vanderbilt $168.4 billion. Today’s big rich are rather modest by comparison: Bill Gates, at $53 billion, would be the thirteenth richest American of all time. * * * All-time richest Americans To compile this list, each individual’s wealth was calculated (in billions) at its peak. The figure was compared to the U.S. gross domestic product at the time and converted to 2006 dollars.

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Josiah Hornblower, heir to the Vanderbilt and Whitney fortunes, tells Johnson he became so depressed at college that he had to take a couple of years off, traveling to Texas where he did manual labor for an oil field services company. S. I. Newhouse IV said fellow pupils at a Quaker school beat him up when they found out how rich he was. * * * Wayward Heirs Huntington Hartford was not the first heir to squander his inheritance. A century after Cornelius Vanderbilt’s death in 1877, not a single one of his more than seven hundred descendants was wealthy enough to be counted among the Forbes 400. Many were the victims of an ever-growing family tree. But others found much more enjoyable ways of lightening their pockets. Commodore Vanderbilt’s son Corneel27 was the first in a line of profligate Vanderbilt heirs.

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The centerpiece is the 175,000-square-foot Biltmore mansion, the largest private home ever built in America. His widow had to sell Biltmore in order to repay his debts. The Commodore’s great-grandson Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt squandered his fortune on women, gambling, and booze. And the Commodore’s great-great-grandson Cornelius Vanderbilt IV went broke during the 1920s launching a newspaper empire that failed. Other heirs have taken a more circuitous route to ignominy. During the 1980s28 E. Newbold Smith and his wife, Margaret Du Pont Smith, were so worried that their son Lewis Du Pont Smith had fallen under the sway of fanatic Lyndon LaRouche that they placed him under the control of a financial guardian to stop him from squandering a $10 million inheritance on the extremist group.

pages: 81 words: 28,090

The Story of the Pony Express by Glenn D. Bradley

Cornelius Vanderbilt, machine readable, transcontinental railway

The steamship company, it appears, thought its remuneration too low and it further protested that the diversion of mail traffic, due to the daily Overland Stage Line and the Pony Express would reduce its revenues still further. Congress finally adjourned without effecting a settlement, and the mail, which was far too heavy for the overland facilities to handle at that time, was piling up by the ton awaiting shipment. Matters were getting serious when Cornelius Vanderbilt came to the Government's relief and agreed to furnish steamer service until Congress assembled in March, 1861, provided the Federal authorities would assure him "a fair and adequate compensation." This agreement was effected and the affair settled as agreed. At the expiration of the period, the war and the growing importance of the overland route made steamship service by way of the Isthmus quite obsolete

pages: 848 words: 240,351

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough

company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, pneumatic tube, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway

The Union Pacific was laying track at a rate of eight miles a day by this time. In Massachusetts a hole was being bored nearly five miles through the solid rock of Hoosac Mountain, just to slice a little time off the railroad run from Boston to Albany. Boston itself was being doubled in size by filling in Back Bay swamp. In New York Cornelius Vanderbilt was erecting a very grand new Grand Central Depot, the train-shed roof of which, an immense vault of glass and iron, would contain the largest interior space in the country. There was a new tunnel under the Chicago River, a first bridge over the Missouri at Kansas City, and at St. Louis a river captain named Eads had begun building a railroad bridge over the Mississippi.

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But nowhere else was quite so much happening every day or was there so much opportunity for the young, the talented, the ambitious, not to mention the lucky or the unscrupulous. Yesterday’s ragpicker or coal heaver was today’s millionaire (a new word). It not only happened in stories, it happened. A. T. Stewart had once been an ordinary shopkeeper, living over a store with his wife in a single room. Cornelius Vanderbilt began penniless, everyone knew. The city was the undisputed center of the new America that had been emerging since the war. It was a place of a thousand and one overnight schemes, some brilliant, some preposterous, some plain evil, and all, it seemed, calling for enormous outlays of capital and pure nerve.

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But there was no easy way to delay the direct question and so the usually amiable Stranahan, who reminded people of an English statesman and who was looking more dignified than ever now that he was in his seventies, had been filled with great righteous indignation, basing his case, as it were, on the excellence of his personal character and past services. The tactic worked. Mayor Grace said he meant no harm and asked no further questions. Stranahan said there was really no reason for the gentlemen from New York to be apprehensive. He told them how ten years earlier he had talked with Cornelius Vanderbilt about linking up with the New York Central and how Colonel Roebling had met with Vanderbilt’s engineer to figure a way to handle the problem. It was thought that a sunken line could be run from Grand Central Depot south to the bridge, then the trains could be raised by hydraulic lifts to cross over the bridge.

Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America by Henry Petroski

Bay Area Rapid Transit, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, independent contractor, intermodal, Loma Prieta earthquake, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, transcontinental railway

One chronicler of bridges has written that “the success of an engineering project may often be measured by the absence of any dramatic history,” but what may appear to be undramatic from one perspective can be very traumatic from another. To build a bridge from Brooklyn to Staten Island across the Narrows that ferryboat services, including one begun by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1810, had plied for centuries required an enormous amount of land for approaches. Robert Moses called the bridge “the most important link in the great highway system stretching from Boston to Washington, or, if you please, Maine to Florida.” However, to close this link, especially on the Brooklyn side, meant disrupting long-established neighborhoods, and this was at least as difficult to accomplish as any engineering aspect of the problem.

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One project that had been shelved during the 1940s was the crossing of the Straits of Mackinac, which had so separated the Upper from the Lower Peninsula of Michigan that the Upper Peninsula was for all practical and economic purposes more a part of Wisconsin than of Michigan. Thousands of cars would wait sometimes almost a full day to get ferry service across the straits during summer-vacation time. At least as far back as 1888, when Cornelius Vanderbilt was attending a directors’ meeting at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island and said, “What this area needs is a bridge across the Straits,” an obvious advantage had been seen in such a structure. In one of his later poems, “The Bridge at Mackinac,” Steinman would not only set the scene but also use rhyme to clarify the pronunciation of the place name.

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Katz, p. 36. 363. “at a thinly disguised”: NYT, Oct. 23, 1964, p. 26. 364. Italy also issued a stamp: NYT, Nov. 29, 1964, sect. II, p. 35. 365. “a brave vagrant”: NYT, Nov. 3, 1964, p. 30. 366. ever-popular numbers: Cohen, p. 739. 367. “the success of”: Joseph Gies, quoted in Talese, p. 38. 368. Cornelius Vanderbilt: Réthi, pp. 8, 10. 369. “the most important link”: ibid., foreword. 370. long-established neighborhoods: see Talese, ch. 2. 371. “essentially the application”: Ammann, in preface to Réthi. 372. upper and lower decks: Talese, p. 45. 373. The opening ceremonies: Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, Verrazano-Narrows Bridge Dedication, Nov. 21, 1964, program. 374.

pages: 441 words: 96,534

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan

autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, megaproject, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, self-driving car, sharing economy, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Car-free streets in dozens of neighborhoods, like this one on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, showed how quickly and easily a street could be transformed into inviting public space, revealing the street’s hidden potential using little more than artificial turf. NYC DOT Removing cars for a few hours revealed the city hidden beneath and within. A statue of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, for decades visible only from cars driving along the viaduct that wraps around Grand Central Terminal, became a surprise attraction. Dozens of people stopped to snap pictures and pose for selfies. Notorious shoe gazers, New Yorkers in these first summer Saturdays started looking up, unafraid that they would block traffic or get hit by a car.

…

All the resources of the agency had been put into creating an opportunity to let New Yorkers experience their streets. I rode along the route with my son, Max, who shot free throws at a basketball clinic sponsored by the New York Knicks and was given pointers on his shooting style. My husband, Mark, Max, and I biked together and hung out by the Cornelius Vanderbilt statue, an opportunity for everyone at the agency to meet my family and for me to meet theirs. Coworkers brought their partners, friends, and family for a special moment when the professional and the personal merged. Seeing streets in Manhattan opened for free-range activities, communities in every borough started clamoring for their own versions of the event.

pages: 139 words: 33,246

Money Moments: Simple Steps to Financial Well-Being by Jason Butler

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, behavioural economics, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, happiness index / gross national happiness, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Steve Jobs, time value of money, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

Interestingly, the average will is made four years and one month prior to the individual’s death. So perhaps if you redo your will every four years you’ll live forever! 39 RULES OF THE ROAD LEGACIES THAT LAST ‘Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.’ William K. Vanderbilt, grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt In 1810 Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, aged sixteen, used $100 borrowed from his mother to set up a passenger boat on Staten Island in New York. By all accounts Cornelius was a hard-driving, rough character. A Vanderbilt descendant described him as ‘illiterate, bad-tempered and foul-mouthed, and inclined, when trapped into a social event, to spit streams of tobacco juice and fondle the maids.’

The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

Both will clue you in on the building’s architecture and history; the latter walk takes you to a few nearby spots outside Grand Central as well. A third option is a self-guided audio tour; pick it up at GCT Tour window on the main concourse (daily 9am–6pm; $9). Brief history When it was constructed in 1913 (on the site of the original station built by Cornelius Vanderbilt), the terminal was a masterly piece of urban planning. After the electrification of the railways made it possible to reroute trains underground, the rail lines behind the existing station were sold off to developers and the profits went towards the building of a new terminal – built around a basic iron frame but clothed with a Beaux Arts skin.

…

Eleanor was born at 56 W 37th St in 1884, but moved into 49 E 65th St with her husband in 1908 (a wedding gift from FDR’s overbearing mother). The couple owned the property until 1941 (it’s now the Roosevelt House at Hunter College); after a spell in the West Village, Eleanor (now a widow) moved to 211 E 62nd St in 1953 and then to 55 E 74th St in 1959 – she died there three years later. The Vanderbilts Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877) made his millions through railways and shipping – he built the first Grand Central station. The family erected huge mansions on Fifth Avenue between 50th and 59th streets in the nineteenth century, with socialite Grace Vanderbilt later moving into 1048 Fifth Ave (now the Neue Galerie).

…

If you don’t have much time, consider buying the “premium admission” tickets online, which guarantee that you’ll jump the queue. The gallery occupies an ornate Georgian-style mansion completed in 1914 by Carrère & Hastings for industrialist William Starr Miller, but became the residence of formidable New York socialite Grace Vanderbilt between 1944 and 1953, after the death of her millionaire husband, Cornelius Vanderbilt III. In 2001, it was transformed into the museum, thanks largely to the work of New York art collectors Serge Sabarsky and Ronald S. Lauder. At the Neue’s Café Sabarsky, you can pause for exquisite Viennese pastries before heading back to Museum Mile. Guggenheim Museum 1071 Fifth Ave, at E 89th St • Mon–Wed, Fri & Sun 10am–5.45pm, Sat 10am–7.45pm • $25, pay what you wish Sat 5.45–7.45pm; multimedia tours free or free apps from iTunes or Google Play via free wi-fi; guided tours daily 2pm (free) • 212 423 3500, guggenheim.org • Subway #4, #5, #6 to 86th St Multistorey car park or upturned beehive?

Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies by Nik Bhatia

Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, central bank independence, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Satoshi Nakamoto, slashdot, smart contracts, time value of money, tulip mania, universal basic income

Chapter 4 Federal Reserve System Gold is money. Everything else is credit. —J.P. Morgan to United States Congress in 1912 At the turn of the twentieth century, the pound remained the world’s reserve currency but was losing ground to the United States dollar. During the Industrial Revolution, corporate barons Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and Henry Ford built companies that attracted demand for American currency. The world needed dollars in order to purchase the goods, services, and shares of these new elite corporate institutions. During this span, the United States did not have a central bank.

pages: 603 words: 186,210

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time by Stephen Fried

Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, disinformation, estate planning, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Ida Tarbell, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, indoor plumbing, Livingstone, I presume, Nelson Mandela, new economy, plutocrats, refrigerator car, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The railroad he worked for, the Northern Missouri, was part of “the Joy System”—a loose conglomeration of regional railroads controlled by Detroit lawyer James F. Joy. While less well-known than the tycoons who were buying up railroads and railroad stock in the East—Jay Cooke, Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan—Joy was the most powerful railroad magnate on the western frontier, starting out with the Michigan Central and eventually controlling major lines in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. Unfortunately, Joy wanted to build his bridge and his hub thirty miles downriver from Leavenworth, in a sparsely populated area called “City of Kansas” on the Missouri side and Wyandotte on the Kansas side.

…

As France and Britain quickly joined the war, Americans abroad could no longer cash personal checks, traveler’s checks, or letters of credit—so even the richest among them were effectively broke. Worse, they had no way of getting home. Of the hundreds of steamships Americans used to cross the Atlantic, only a handful actually flew the American flag. European-owned liners were needed for troops. Cornelius Vanderbilt III and his wife soon figured out how to charter a private yacht—flying Old Glory—and went home to Newport, but ordinary well-to-do people like Dave and his wife were stuck. From the resort town of Rorschach, Switzerland, they headed to Zurich, then Lucerne, then Bern, seeking help at the American and British consulates, as well as at the bank, the telegraph office, and the travel bureau.

…

By year’s end, health officials finally declared an all-out war, but without medicinal weapons they could only resort to increased fines for spitting and, in some cities, a ban on kissing and “all forms of petting.” Many people, including many celebrated patients, survived the illness: among them Charlie Chaplin, Ethel Barrymore, Jackie Coogan, Lon Chaney, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., journalist Ida Tarbell, opera prima donna Ganna Walska, and, at the beginning of baseball season, Babe Ruth. But more than a hundred thousand Americans did not survive. And unlike previous epidemics, which mostly struck in cities, this one killed in even the most remote territories: More than 10 percent of the entire Indian population of the Northwest was wiped out.

pages: 124 words: 39,011

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It by Robert B. Reich

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, benefit corporation, business cycle, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, electricity market, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, job automation, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

It was a time when so-called robber barons—railroad, financial, and oil titans—ran the country; a time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few, when the federal government was small, the Fed and the Internal Revenue Service had yet to be invented, state laws determined worker safety and hours, evolution was still considered contentious, immigrants were almost all European, big corporations and robber barons ran the government, the poor were desperate, and the rich lived like old-world aristocrats. It was an era when the nation was mesmerized by the doctrine of free enterprise but few Americans actually enjoyed much freedom. The financier Jay Gould, the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller controlled much of American industry; the gap between rich and poor had turned into a chasm; urban slums festered; children worked long hours in factories; women couldn’t vote, and black Americans were subject to Jim Crow; and the lackeys of the rich literally deposited sacks of money on desks of pliant legislators.

pages: 416 words: 112,159

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, business cycle, clean water, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, full employment, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, global village, haute couture, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market clearing, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Pareto efficiency, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, working poor

CHAPTER 2 THE LUXURY SPENDING BOOM The economist Thorstein Veblen’s term conspicuous consumption was inspired by the spectacular excesses of America’s Gilded Age—roughly, from 1890 until the beginning of World War I. Among the most visible players of that era were the high-living descendants of railroad tycoon Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. By 1900, the clan had constructed eight lavish mansions between 51st and 59th Streets in Manhattan—including One 57th Street, whose 137 rooms made it the largest house ever built in an American city.1 The Vanderbilts also built 10 major summer estates, including Newport, Rhode Island’s Marble House, an $11 million birthday present from Cornelius Vanderbilt II to his wife Alva in 1892.2 (During the 1890s, a construction foreman earned about $1.25 a day and a common laborer could be hired for as little as 2 cents an hour.)3 To this day, George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, a 250-room Renaissance-style chateau completed in 1895, remains the largest private house ever built in America.4 Of these grandiose expenditures by the superrich, Veblen wrote that “since the consumption of these … excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit.”5 It was Veblen’s view, in other words, that the rich often spent lavishly merely to demonstrate to others that they could afford to do so.

pages: 1,230 words: 357,848

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

banking crisis, book value, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business logic, California gold rush, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, financial independence, flying shuttle, full employment, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of the steam engine, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, Monroe Doctrine, price stability, railway mania, Republic of Letters, strikebreaker, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, work culture , Works Progress Administration

What Carnegie didn’t mention was that in sweetening the deal for the bridge company, Thomson was taking money from the railroad’s stockholders to give it to a privately held company in which he held stock.36 In 1868, Thomson increased his investment in Keystone Bridge and directed his chief engineer to have all remaining wooden bridges on the Pennsylvania replaced by iron ones. Scott also remained a very active, though silent partner in the bridge company. When, in the spring of 1869, Carnegie got word that Cornelius Vanderbilt intended to build a “new bridge across the Hudson at Albany,” he wrote Scott asking for “a letter of introduction—making reference to the Keystone Bridge Co., and its bridges in such terms as the facts may seem to you to warrant.”37 The connection between Keystone and the Pennsylvania was no secret, though few were privy to the fact that Thomson and Scott were investors.

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When, the next morning, he received a return cable approving the changes, he had his deal.2 The young and now successful bond trader spent the rest of the week in London helping Morgan resell the bonds by telling whoever would listen—principally the financial editors of the London papers—that the Erie Railroad scandals of the late 1860s, in which Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Daniel Drew had gambled with the lives and fortunes of investors by driving up, down, and sideways the price of stock in the Erie, had been a once in a lifetime aberration. There was, Carnegie insisted, no connection whatsoever between his rock-solid bridge bonds and the water-soaked railroad stock.

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William Henry Vanderbilt’s twin palaces occupied the entire block front on the west side of Fifth Avenue, from Fifty-first to Fifty-second Streets. Vanderbilt’s son, William Kissam Vanderbilt, had built his own French Renaissance mansion across the street. Farther north on Fifty-seventh and Fifth sat the mansion of William Kissam’s older brother, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, this one also in the style of the French Renaissance—but more restrained and classical. Across Fifty-seventh Street, Collis Huntington, having sold the Fifty-first Street house which Arabella found wanting, constructed a city château that was so oversized, even by New York standards, that it took up five 25-foot lots.

pages: 166 words: 49,639

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think by Luke Johnson

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, false flag, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Grace Hopper, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, James Dyson, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Kickstarter, mass immigration, mittelstand, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, patent troll, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traveling salesman, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators

For Captain Bob had surely sold his soul to the devil many years before. But the Bouncing Czech is not typical of the breed. Most wealth creators retain at least a veneer of civilized behaviour. Nevertheless, when cornered or roused to fury, they can be ruthless. In 1853, the shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt wrote to two former business associates, Morgan and Garrison: ‘You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you.’ He then proceeded to make good on his promise. The modern-day autocrats are surely the Russian oligarchs. They looted their nation’s assets in an orgy of corruption under the drunken President Boris Yeltsin.

St Pancras Station by Simon Bradley

Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, food miles, Frank Gehry, Great Leap Forward, means of production, railway mania, value engineering

But the pointed-arched shape was repeated too, for instance at the later train sheds at Cologne and Berlin Friedrichstrasse. America took to the St Pancras model especially avidly. The 1871 incarnation of New York’s Grand Central, truly the grandest station built in the United States up to that time, was meant to rival the best that Old Europe could show. Its paymaster, the railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, therefore insisted that it be the largest station in the world: five acres in extent rather than the four and a half of St Pancras. The train shed adopted Barlow’s model of soaring arches tied below the tracks, but of segmental form. At Park Square station at Boston (1872) the pointed form prevailed.

pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

We have brains that prefer easy answers without much appetite for nuance. So identifying the traits we should emulate or avoid can be agonizingly hard. Let me tell you another story of someone who, like Bill Gates, was wildly successful, but whose success is hard to pin down as being caused by luck or skill. Cornelius Vanderbilt had just finished a series of business deals to expand his railroad empire. One of his business advisors leaned in to tell Vanderbilt that every transaction he agreed to broke the law. “My God, John,” said Vanderbilt, “You don’t suppose you can run a railroad in accordance with the statutes of the State of New York, do you?”

pages: 650 words: 155,108

A Man and His Ship: America's Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States by Steven Ujifusa

8-hour work day, big-box store, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, interchangeable parts, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Mercator projection, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, trade route

Three of his luxurious ships took the new Blue Riband, making 13 knots and beating the British ships by an average of seven hours.10 But after two of his money-losing ships sank and drowned hundreds of passengers, Congress killed the line’s subsidy. Urging the move was Collin’s unsubsidized rival in the transatlantic steamship business, a brash New Yorker named Cornelius Vanderbilt, known by the public as “the Commodore.” The Collins Line collapsed without the subsidy, but Vanderbilt’s transatlantic line also failed—he sold his ships and purchased the New York Central Railroad. While Washington gave away millions of acres of land out West to the railroads, the American merchant marine got little support.

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During the high summer season, men in straw boaters and women in cloche hats crammed the pier heads, waving handkerchiefs as the giants backed away from their piers into the Hudson, blasting their whistles and belching black smoke from their stacks. The five- or six-day trip was filled with masquerades, passenger talent shows, shuffleboard tournaments, and smoking room bridge games. After dark, the booze flowed and hot jazz bands blared from the ballroom stage. The Prince of Wales and Queen Marie of Romania joined Cornelius Vanderbilt III and Vincent Astor at captain’s tables overflowing with grilled antelope, quail eggs, and caviar. New York’s corrupt mayor, Jimmy Walker, set a new standard for shipboard dandyism: he packed his steamer trunks with forty-four suits, twenty pique vests (to go with his tailcoats), twelve pairs of trousers, and a hundred cravats.

Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Debt was the other side of credit, and credit was as essential (and as ephemeral) as air. Cooke’s high reputation as savior of the Union helped him attract the capital to create the Northern Pacific Railroad. The Northern Pacific purported eventually to connect Chicago with the Pacific Northwest but during its brief paper existence it ran “from nowhere to nowhere,” as Cornelius Vanderbilt acidly observed when Cooke’s venture finally crashed on September 18, 1873. This high-profile disaster could hardly have come at a worse time. Ominous clouds had been gathering over Wall Street for days. The classic pattern of the business cycle was beginning to repeat itself. Banks had overextended credit to reckless borrowers who were unable to meet their obligations to the banks; the banks in turn, having exceeded their reserves, were unable to meet their obligations to their depositors.

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Evans, “The Aesthetic Sense and Religious Sentiment in Animals,” Popular Science Monthly 42 (Feb. 1893), 475. “The terror of the dog”: Ibid., 478. “The adherents of both”: “Chicago! The Great Convention,” Evening Star, June 5, 1880, 9. “new virtual world”: Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011), 68. “from nowhere to nowhere”: Cornelius Vanderbilt, cited in M. John Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, the Sioux, and the Panic of 1873 (2006), 287. “Gradually fevered blood commenced”: A journalist, History of the Terrible Panic of 1873 (1873), 5. “Thus, while men rushed wildly”: Ibid., 14. “life itself is essentially appropriation”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, cited and translated in Frederick Amrine, “‘The Triumph of Life’: Nietzsche’s Verbicide,” in Burwick and Douglass, The Crisis in Modernism, 146.

pages: 188 words: 57,229

Frommer's Memorable Walks in San Francisco by Erika Lenkert

Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, car-free, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Day of the Dead, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, retail therapy, South of Market, San Francisco, three-masted sailing ship

Acquitted by an American jury after attempting (and failing)to conquer Southern California and the Sonora region of Mexico, Walker moved on to bigger things. In 1855, he set out to conquer Nicaragua, which he accomplished after capturing Granada in 1856; he then declared himself president. With the help of Cornelius Vanderbilt (who originally backed Walker’s venture), a Central American alliance defeated Walker the next year, and again he was brought back to the United States for trial. Again, he was acquitted. He made a final attempt to conquer all of Central America in 1860 but was held back by the British navy.

On Power and Ideology by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, land reform, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

Everything was just fine in El Salvador too, in one of the world’s most miserable countries, until 1960-1, when the U.S. sponsored a right-wing military coup to block another potential threat to the Fifth Freedom, in accord with President Kennedy’s doctrine that “governments of the civil-military type of El Salvador are the most effective in containing Communist penetration in Latin America.” We return to the aftermath. In Nicaragua, the first major U.S. military operation took place in 1854, when the U.S. Navy burned down the port town of San Juan del Norte to avenge an alleged insult to American officials and the millionaire entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt. Marines landed in 1909 and again in 1912, establishing a military occupation that lasted (apart from one year) until 1933, leading to the establishment of the Somoza dictatorship after a murderous counterinsurgency campaign and the assassination of Sandino by a ruse. The bloody and corrupt rule of the Somoza dynasty lasted until 1979, with full U.S. support, while Somoza turned his country into a base for the projection of U.S. power in the region.

pages: 184 words: 62,220

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Khartoum Gordon, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, profit motive, sealed-bid auction

What Newport turns out to be, then, is homiletic, a fantastically elaborate stage setting for an American morality play in which money and happiness are presented as antithetical. It is a curious theatrical for these particular men to have conceived, but then we all judge ourselves sometime; it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built “The Breakers” he damned himself. The world must have seemed greener to all of them, out there when they were young and began laying the rails or digging for high-grade ore in the Comstock or daring to think that they might corner copper.

pages: 197 words: 59,946

The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Golden age of television, hiring and firing, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, new economy, pre–internet, Skype, social software, Tony Hsieh

The Time magazine article that accompanied Bezos’s Person of the Year award describes it best: Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. Ferry owner Cornelius Vanderbilt jumped ship when he saw the railroads coming. Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM. Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.

pages: 195 words: 63,455

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

It was akin to plucking Voltaire from his richly intellectual century (aka the Enlightenment) and plunging him into Wall Street on the first day of school. Not that I fancied myself a modern Voltaire, of course, but if I had to pick, the man seemed eminently more worthy of emulation than John Rockefeller or Cornelius Vanderbilt. At the time, my interests were pure and theoretical. I had a vague idea that I would need a profession somewhere down the road but held a quiet hope that that road would be long and winding. I had never worked and was in no hurry to start. Management and business classes seemed tedious; I lived for the electives.

pages: 568 words: 174,089

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, Alan Wolfe

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Asilomar, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, full employment, Ida Tarbell, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, one-China policy, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto

See ‘The Yankee Doodle Salon,’ op. cit. pp. 183, 186. 12. Time, 31 January 1955, p. 57. 13. See Time, 18 January 1954, p. 30. 14. Perhaps it is also revealed by two contrasting stories recently carried in a national news magazine: (1) Upon her death in 1953, no less a Society Lady than Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt is treated as a quaint sort of curiosity (Cf. Time, 19 January 1953, p. 21). (2) About the same time, we read of Prince Mike Romanoff, probably born one Harry F. Cerguson in Brooklyn, of cafe society fame. In the account of his personality, Harry F. Gerguson is treated with due deference and quite some jolly admiration for being such a successful fake.

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It is awakening to the realization that it cannot have horseplay in economics … Charming as politics may be at times on the stage, she is often petulant and petty in the dressing rooms … Nothing is clearer, from the experiences of the last ten years, than the necessity of keeping our economic machinery and especially our finance free from the domination and control of politics.’29 ** Thus Harold Ickes writes concerning a ‘state visit from the heads of one political entity to those of another political entity’: ‘Only a few chosen souls were asked to sit on the porch where the King and Queen spent most of their time, and apparently Jim Farley was the only member of the Cabinet, aside from the Hulls, who was considered worthy of inclusion among the elect. But J. P. Morgan was there and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, etc. The rest of the members of the Cabinet milled about with the common herd down on the lawn, some fifteen hundred of them, and at not too frequent intervals the King and Queen would graciously go down among the herd bowing here and there and being introduced to some of the more select.’30 * In France ‘prestige’ carries an emotional association of fraudulence, of the art of illusion, or at least of something adventitious.

pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

With a powerful, almost musical voice, Conkling peppered his speeches with precise quotations of Shakespeare, Edmund Burke, and the Bible, all from memory. Conkling, it was said, much like Webster, did not merely persuade juries, “he overpowered them and made his will theirs.” As a young lawyer, Conkling once won a startling $18,000 verdict against one of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroads; when the losing lawyer suggested an appeal, Vanderbilt scolded, “Pay it! If Conkling tries this case again, he may get fifty thousand!”10 For most of his adult life, Conkling employed his oratorical skills on behalf of the Republican Party while serving in Congress, first as a congressman from Utica, New York, and then as a senator.

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Called one of “the great lawyers of the city,” Nicoll was ranked by contemporaries alongside Clarence Darrow, the legendary defender of unpopular causes, as masters of the courtroom. Nicoll came from one of the oldest families in New York—Sir Richard Nicoll had arrived in the New World in 1664—and the esteemed lawyer counted among his clients railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt and financier Thomas Ryan. He was, in other words, not the type of lawyer one would expect to represent a plebeian fellow like Edwin Hale. In fact, Nicoll was only at Hale’s side as a service to another, far more important client: the American Tobacco Company, the ringleader of the powerful Tobacco Trust.1 Hale, the secretary and treasurer of MacAndrews & Forbes Licorice Company, walked into the grand-jury room with trepidation.

Lonely Planet Nicaragua (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Greg Benchwick

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Day of the Dead, land reform, liberation theology, Multics, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, traveling salesman

In the 17th and 18th centuries Granada was growing wealthier by the year, which attracted unwanted attention from English, French and Dutch pirates, who sacked the city three times in five years. A series of forts, including one in San Carlos and another in El Castillo, were built along the river and lake to ward them off. When the gold fever took hold in North America in the 1800s, the Río San Juan became part of the fastest route between New York and San Francisco. American Cornelius Vanderbilt’s ships sailed from New York to New Orleans and then steamed down to Greytown before continuing upriver to Lago de Nicaragua, where voyagers traveled overland to an awaiting steamship on the Pacific. After the Panama Canal was built in 1914, dashing hopes for a local version, Greytown (by then reincorporated into Nicaragua as San Juan del Norte) reverted to a sleepy outpost at the end of a rarely transited jungle river.

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About an hour further along from the mouth of the Río Sarapiquí, the San Juan Delta begins to weave through the wetlands, meeting up with the almost-as-enormous Río Colorado. Birding becomes increasingly interesting, and fishing even better – but note that you have officially entered the bull sharks’ territory, so no swimming. When you finally enter the expansive Bahía de San Juan del Norte, you’ll notice the rusted old dredger owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Transit Company, which kept the shipping lanes open for would-be gold prospectors en route to San Francisco. The dilapidated dock to the south marks the entrance to what’s left of Greytown, founded on what was then the mouth of the Río San Juan, now a sandy extension of dry land. After you cross the bay to the mouth of the remarkable Río Indio, you’ll reach San Juan de Nicaragua, where you can explore black-water creeks, hidden lagoons and thick jungle within the wide reach of the Indio-Maíz.

Pocket New York City Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, East Village, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, ghettoisation, machine readable, messenger bag, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, starchitect, the High Line, urban renewal, walking around money

More than 80 years on, Chrysler’s ambitious $15-million statement remains one of New York City’s most poignant symbols. (Lexington Ave at 42nd St; lobby 8am-6pm Mon-Fri; S, 4/5/6, 7 to Grand Central-42nd St) 2 Grand Central Terminal Notable Building Offline map Google map Threatened by the debut of rival Penn Station (the majestic original, not the current eyesore), shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt set to work on transforming his 19th-century Grand Central Depot into a 20th-century showpiece. The fruit of his envy is Grand Central Terminal, New York City’s most breathtaking beaux arts building. More than just a station, Grand Central is an enchanted time machine, its swirl of chandeliers, marble, and historic bars and restaurants a porthole into an era where train travel and romance were not mutually exclusive.

pages: 232 words: 70,361

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

The law mandated a public disclosure of income tax payments, and in 1865 the front page of the New York Times listed the income of New York’s moneyed elite: William B. Astor declared an income of $1.3 million (5,200 times the average income of the time, the equivalent of $400 million today); Cornelius Vanderbilt, $576,551 (the equivalent of $170 million today), and so on.8 The Union also borrowed heavily to fund the war and inflation increased a result, but much less than in the South.9 WHEN THE INCOME TAX WAS UNCONSTITUTIONAL After the abolition of slavery in 1865, wealthy industrialists piggybacked on the slaveholders’ rhetoric to fight the income tax created during the Civil war.

pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The pair has launched The Giving Pledge, a campaign to convince the world’s billionaires to give at least 50 percent of their money away.174 Buffett has promised to give 99 percent of his roughly $46 billion to charity; Gates has made a similar pledge.175 And others are starting to join in, including Michael Bloomberg, who, echoing Carnegie, says: “I am a big believer in giving it all away and have always said that the best financial planning ends with bouncing the check to the undertaker.”176 If The Giving Pledge catches on, Gates and Buffett believe they can generate $600 billion for philanthropic causes.177 At the tail end of the last Gilded Age, the opulently rich—men like Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew W. Mellon—led a nationwide wave of philanthropy. If Buffett and Gates are successful, as our own Gilded Age nears its end, a second great wave of giving is coming. And it couldn’t be more timely. HOPE 2.0 The 2008 election was all about “hope.” But just hoping that our leaders in Washington will somehow miraculously start doing the right thing—especially when they are locked inside a system with overwhelmingly powerful incentives to do the wrong thing—simply won’t cut it.

pages: 240 words: 75,304

Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time by Clark Blaise

British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, Dava Sobel, digital divide, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Silicon Valley, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair

It was a greater undertaking than any one man could master under the conditions imposed by Parliament, especially upon an engineer still involved with the earlier and smaller Intercolonial. He was a civil servant, answerable to elected officials, a chief in name only. Funding came from Parliament. His salary, though generous for the times, was that of a government official—and this in the era of the railroad barons, the Cornelius Vanderbilts and James J. Hills. Canada itself was only nine years old in 1876; the lines of parliamentary authority were still being drawn, and partisan hatreds virtually guaranteed continual chaos. Adding to pressures not of Fleming’s making, Alexander Mackenzie, the Liberal Party leader, had promised the leaders in distant British Columbia a transcontinental Canadian railroad within ten years of confederation—on the threat of their opting out of the agreement and going it alone, or, worse, joining the United States.

pages: 263 words: 79,016

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig

anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversification, Donald Trump, energy transition, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, green new deal, Kickstarter, low interest rates, megaproject, Menlo Park, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, payday loans, precautionary principle, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sidewalk Labs, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing

Newman and the late Pierre Berton made successful literary careers out of celebrating Canadian private enterprise heroes, often portraying them as more swashbuckling and trail-blazing than they really were. In fact, Canada has never had the dynamic, hyperindividualistic tycoons who strode boldly (for good and for bad) across the U.S. stage — Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, John Jacob Astor, and Henry Ford. Our elite have displayed little of that free-enterprise entrepreneurial talent and grit. In French Canada, our elite came from repressive clerical and semi-feudal traditions; in Upper Canada (Ontario), they were a pale version of the British aristocracy, with a clique of powerful men known as the Family Compact ruling the colony and siphoning off profits for themselves along the way.

pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

By the dawn of the twentieth century, noted historians Charles and Mary Beard, masters of great urban wealth formed a “young plutocracy” with riches beyond the dreams of Midas, garnered from mines of the West, the factories of the Midwest, and the forests of the Pacific, and spent it in “the most powerful center of accumulation, New York City.”7 In the nineteenth century, for example, vast wealth gained from cotton, silver, and other commodities helped create the foundation for such investment banking firms as Goldman Sachs, Oppenheimer, and Lehman Brothers, and for such publishing industry giants as the Hearst empire. Many of these people also went into politics, often entering the “millionaire’s club” of the U.S. Senate. Their wealth, in the era before income taxes, was immense; by the 1880s the revenues of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroad empire were greater than those of the federal government.8 Like John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil), J. P. Morgan, and railway mogul Edward Harriman, the tech Oligarchs have taken advantage of the shift in the economic paradigm to garner enormous wealth and power. The information economy’s emergence is allowing them to establish sway over vast sections of the economy, including such areas as advertising, media, entertainment, and, increasingly, the political system as well.

pages: 432 words: 85,707

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

It was the first road built solely for the use of motor cars, the first to be made from concrete and the first to use overpasses and bridges to avoid intersections. The world’s first motorway was 45 miles long and ran from Queens in New York City to Lake Ronkonkoma on Long Island. It was privately financed by the racing enthusiast William Kissam Vanderbilt II, the great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877), founding patriarch of one of America’s wealthiest families. Automobile magazine welcomed it with the headline ‘First of the motorways is opened – an epoch in motor-driven land transportation’. It wasn’t cheap to use – the standard toll was $2 (about $45 today) – and by the mid-1930s it had closed.

pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Silicon Valley’s Dragon Slayer If Margrethe Vestager is the reincarnated Teddy Roosevelt, then in Google she is confronted, in many ways, with the reinvention of the late nineteenth century’s anti-innovation economy. It’s a return to the industrial monopolies of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad, and J. P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel—those “big things” that, Louis Brandeis suggested, “may be very bad and mean.” That’s why antitrust law is so important. Although it can be a rather dry, even arcane subject for nonlawyers, its importance for underwriting both innovation and fairness in our networked future can’t be overstated.

pages: 1,335 words: 336,772

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow

Alan Greenspan, always be closing, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bolshevik threat, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, death from overwork, Dutch auction, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, interest rate swap, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, paper trading, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the payments system, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Yom Kippur War, young professional

At 13 Princes Gate, the London townhouse he inherited from Junius, he hung the painting in the cherished spot over the mantelpiece. In 1879, Pierpont began to emerge from his father’s shadow and take charge of major deals. He was picked to market the largest block of stock ever publicly offered—250,000 shares of New York Central. It was a landmark event for the Vanderbilts, who owned the railroad. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt had died two years before, at eighty-three, leaving a fortune of about $100 million. Though he rejected champagne as too expensive in his last days, he probably ranked as America’s richest man. Crude and tobacco chewing, a white-haired, red-cheeked rogue, he chased pretty maids to the end.

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When they opted for that neighborhood, the “quality” were already moving uptown. Along Fifth Avenue, exhibitionist moguls built gaudy palaces, their styles plundered from European chateaus. From Fifty-first to Fifty-second streets, in elephantine splendor, rose William Henry Vanderbilt’s mansion. Between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth streets, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, son of William Henry, built another palace on the present site of Bergdorf Goodman. Matthew Josephson has offered an unforgettable portrait of Gilded Age vulgarity: At Delmonico’s the Silver, Gold and Diamond dinners of the socially prominent succeeded each other unfailingly. At one, each lady present, opening her napkin, found a gold bracelet with the monogram of the host.

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But it didn’t help the House of Morgan, for it reinforced the old stereotype of the firm’s being in league with the British crown. At a garden party at the British embassy in Washington, the king and queen sat up on the porch in remote splendor with several private citizens—Jack Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. Only two New Dealers, James Farley and Cordell Hull, were allowed to join them. Stranded down on the lawn with other commoners, the saturnine Harold Ickes enviously watched Morgan and the other economic royalists up on the porch and felt demeaned. He wasn’t mollified when the king and queen descended to mingle with the “common herd.”33 In late August 1939, Jack Morgan and King George VI were shooting together at Balmoral in Scotland, complaining about the bird shortage, when Europe suddenly mobilized for war.

pages: 1,106 words: 335,322

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, God and Mammon, Gregor Mendel, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, New Journalism, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, plutocrats, price discrimination, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, yellow journalism

The old New York aristocracy, huddled around Washington Square and Gramercy Park, shuddered at the pretentious uptown mansions, which paid tribute to postwar fortunes in railroads, steel, and oil. Along Fifth Avenue near the Rockefeller home, the palaces of the rich—notably the fantastic, turreted confections of William K. Vanderbilt at Fifty-first Street and Cornelius Vanderbilt II at Fifty-eighth Street—stretched uptown in gaudy profusion. With Standard Oil moving its headquarters to New York, the neighborhood was becoming a colony of company directors. At one point in this corporate relocation, twenty-eight Standard Oil executives arrived in a single Pullman car from Cleveland and were taken straight to the Saint James Hotel, where William presided over their first breakfast and John their first dinner.

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When he agreed to ship the furniture, Bessie imagined he had merely changed his mind to please them.49 When it came time for Junior to dispense with private tutors, he went to the New York School of Languages, followed by a school run by C. N. Douglass, and then the tony Cutler School, whose student body included Albert Milbank, Cornelius N. Bliss, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Junior trudged the pavement to school each morning while he watched poorer classmates rolling by in fine carriages. Though he belittled his own intelligence, this bright, dutiful boy always scored high grades and led a purposeful life that allowed small time for leisure. When not doing homework, he often practiced his violin, and for eight years he took lessons from Richard Arnold, first violinist of the Philharmonic Orchestra.

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To an extent that some observers found unhealthy, Oliver doted on his lovely, gregarious sister Flora; when he arranged for her to meet Whitney in 1868, he already “knew that if they met, they would fall in love with each other,” he later admitted. 25 When they married a year later, he became their self-appointed benefactor, buying them a five-story Park Avenue brownstone. This was a mere curtain-raiser to his next gift, a showy $700,000 mansion, glistening with gorgeous paintings and Gobelin tapestries, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, across from Cornelius Vanderbilt’s residence. One historian said that Oliver insouciantly “presented it to the Whitneys as one might present a poodle,” and with his sublime self-assurance, this lifelong bachelor moved into one of its sumptuous second-floor apartments.26 William C. Whitney was a dashing man with a matchless talent for attracting monied patrons.

pages: 1,150 words: 338,839

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, George Santayana, guns versus butter model, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

“I have become convinced that there is something else in life for me besides school and books,” he told his disapproving father. “I am going to work.” A compact dynamo, he plunged with relish into the cutthroat market of the Robber Baron era. With three thousand dollars borrowed from a wealthy uncle, he bought himself a seat on the Stock Exchange and captured Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould as his mentors and clients. By twenty-six, E. H. had parlayed his own first fortune of $150,000 by selling short in coal-mine stocks when he guessed that a speculator’s attempt to corner the market would fail. Marriage to Mary Williamson Averell in 1879 brought Harriman his first link to railroads.

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But both were quiet and inward in different ways, and they soon drifted apart. Although he was not the sort to expend much energy chasing other women, Harriman gained the reputation as a man with a wandering eye. He and Kitty were divorced in 1929, and the following year he married Marie Norton Whitney, herself recently divorced from Cornelius Vanderbilt (“Sonny”) Whitney. Whereas Kitty had been shy and retiring, Marie was witty and outspoken, brash to the point of abrasiveness. “Oh, come off it, Ave!” she would snort in her husky voice whenever he became too ponderous. They shared an interest in Impressionist and Post-impressionist art, and on their honeymoon in Europe collected dozens of masterpieces by Van Gogh, Degas, Cézanne, Picasso, and Renoir.

…

., 190 Heavenly Twins of, 18, 30, 192–93, 236–37, 337, 734–35 Lovett in, 192–96, 201, 202–9, 291–92, 309, 315 Lovett’s reports to, 184–85 McCloy in, 192–202, 235–38, 244 Wardwell, Allen, 214 War Labor Board, Acheson on, 89 Warnke, Paul, 713, 738 Warsaw uprising (1944), 230–32 Washington, George, 179, 447 Washington Post, 193, 361, 440, 449, 516–17, 681, 715, 736 Webb, Jim, 530–31, 542 Wedemeyer, Albert, 458 Westmoreland, William C., 680, 686–87, 689, 694, 696, 701 Wheeler, Earle, 678, 701–2 Wherry, Kenneth, 475–76, 492, 494, 530–31, 545–46 White, Lincoln, 412 White, Theodore H., 442–43, 585 White, William Allen, 185 Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt, 106 Whitney, Richard, 131 Wilcox, Francis, 450, 467 Willett, Edward, 383 William II, Emperor of Germany, 95 Willkie, Wendell, 186, 188 Willoughby, Charles, 536–37 Wilson, Charles E., 570 Wilson, Earl, 269 Wilson, Hugh, 142 Wilson, Woodrow, 28, 80, 84, 98, 104, 125, 154, 156 Winchell, Walter, 417–18, 469 Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, 696 Wise Men, 20, 28, 30, 122 Johnson and, 644–46, 650–53, 676–81, 696, 698–703 Wisner, Frank, 448, 454 Wister, Owen, 95 Witness to History (Bohlen and Phelps), 720–21 Woodin, William, 134 Wooley, Knight, 110–11 Woollcott, Alexander, 106–7 World Bank, 23, 68, 426, 428–29 Wrubel, Isaac, 52 Wyman, David, 201 X-Article, 383–85, 421–23 Yale Review, 154 Yale Unit, Lovett as pilot in, 90–93, 205 Yale University, 20–22, 80–87, 90, 93, 109 Yalta Conference (1945), 19, 245–47, 291 Yalu River, 535–36, 539–40, 548 Yergin, Daniel, 146, 416, 460 Yost, Charles, 430 Yugoslavia, 666–67 Greek insurgents supported by, 401–2 U.S. planes downed by, 372 Zhukov, Georgi, 305, 317–18 Zinsser, Frederick and Emma Scharman, 122 Zorin, Valerian A., 630, 710 ENDNOTES * The Bohlens were descendants of John Bohlen, who migrated from Germany to Philadelphia with his brother Henry in 1790.

pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

(I have a particular interest, having been a member of the steering group of the British company law review that provided a blueprint for the latest update in the UK: the Companies Act 2006.) While Britain was the pioneer of the company as the dominant organisational form for economic activity, similar corporate development soon followed in continental Europe, and also in the US, which spawned the so-called robber barons – the likes of Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt in rail, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick in steel, John D. Rockefeller in oil and John Pierpont Morgan in banking. As well as indulging in various forms of business malpractice – Henry Frick famously employed armed Pinkerton detectives to break a strike, leaving many workers dead – the robber barons were accused of being monopolists.

pages: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

If, however, any householder should desire to keep the electric girl constantly burning and to employ another servant to answer the bell, there can be no doubt that the electric girl, posing in a picturesque attitude, will add much to the decoration of the house. The Electric Girl Lighting Company was not the only one taking advantage of battery-powered lights. The innovative dancer Loie Fuller incorporated electric lights into her choreography, wiring her dancers with bulbs and batteries to perform on a darkened stage. Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad mogul’s second wife and a grand dame of high society, was known to commission gowns and dresses with electric lights with which to stage tableaus—posed still lifes—to entertain dinner guests. For those of more modest means there was still access to electricity or at least the promise of battery-powered electric miracles for everyday use.

pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Privilege The first steam ship to run through the New York harbor was launched by Robert Fulton in 1807. Fulton went on to secure a guarantee from the New York legislature that no one else would have the liberty to run steamboats through New York waters for thirty years. But ten years later, Fulton’s monopoly was challenged by twenty-three-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt. Working for New Jersey steamboat man Thomas Gibbons, Vanderbilt began running passengers from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to New York City, his ship flying a flag declaring “New Jersey must be free.” New York authorities tried to capture Vanderbilt, but he dodged their efforts for sixty days, to the widespread support of the passengers benefiting from Vanderbilt’s lower fares.

pages: 324 words: 93,175

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely

Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Burning Man, business process, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Demis Hassabis, end world poverty, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, first-price auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, name-letter effect, Peter Singer: altruism, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, search costs, second-price auction, Skinner box, software as a service, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, Upton Sinclair, young professional

When they are ousted from their positions as CEOs or presidents, they make revenge their life’s mission. Sometimes they succeed in either regaining their former position or creating a new and successful competitor to their former company. Near the end of the nineteenth century, for example, Cornelius Vanderbilt owned a steamship company called Accessory Transit Company. Everything was going well for him until he decided to vacation in Europe on his yacht. When he returned from his trip, he found that the two associates he had left in charge had sold his interest in the company to themselves. “Gentlemen, you have undertaken to cheat me.

The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky

clean water, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, East Village, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

They were located throughout the city, as commonplace as hotdog stands today—street carts or dilapidated little shacks with a window through which the M a k i n g Yo u r O w n B e d • 195 Nicolino Calyo’s 1840 watercolor of a New York City oyster stand. c ol l e c t i on of t h e n e w - yor k h i s t or i c a l s o c i e t y oysters were passed. They were particularly common along the East River. Oysters were a penny each and a stew was ten cents. There, longshoremen, cartmen, sailors, and fishermen were the regular clientele. But the oyster stands at the markets were thought to be particularly good. Cornelius Vanderbilt, a native Staten Islander who accrued a fortune from maritime transportation, got his start shipping Staten Island oysters to the Washington Market. While most of the city was quietly sleeping, business at the Washington Market would actually pick up after midnight and reached its 1 9 6 • T h e B i g O y s te r height just before the first purple-and-orange light broke over the East River and the rest of New York started to wake up.

pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Americans, long enamored of the entrepreneurial spirit and technological progress, have been slow to see the tech oligarchy as a threat.38 Leftist historians, alert to the dangers of aristocracy, have tended to focus their ire on financial companies that may be large and powerful but aren’t nearly as wealthy or as influential in shaping the economy as the tech sector, which seeks to capture virtually every other industry, including finance.39 At the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, anticapitalist demonstrators held moments of silence and prayer for the memory of Steve Jobs, a particularly aggressive capitalist.40 Some people still see Bill Gates, a clear monopolist, as one of the “meritorious entrepreneurs,” notes Thomas Piketty.41 One progressive writer, David Callahan, portrays the tech oligarchs, along with their allies in the financial sector, as a kind of “benign plutocracy” in contrast to those who built their fortunes on resource extraction, manufacturing, and material consumption.42 Yet America’s tech titans have attained oligopolistic sway over markets comparable to that of moguls like John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, or Cornelius Vanderbilt.43 They may wear baseball caps rather than top hats, but their economic and cultural power is vast, and likely to become far more so. CHAPTER 5 The Belief System of the New Oligarchy In important ways, the tech moguls are quite different from both the industrialists of the late nineteenth century and the managerial elite of the twentieth.

pages: 332 words: 100,245

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

Passing vast wealth from generation to generation has long been denounced in America as a feudal and aristocratic affront to the country’s civic ethos. Nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, America had drifted far from a country of yeoman farmers. It increasingly resembled the aristocracy and landed estates of old England. The Gilded Age—lorded over by John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and other robber barons—concentrated wealth to an extent that the country had never before seen and that the Founders had labored to prevent. Fears over the political power wielded by this small group of super-wealthy sparked a backlash. Teddy Roosevelt, making full use of his bully pulpit, called for both a progressive income tax and an inheritance tax.

pages: 782 words: 245,875

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

A year later he astounded the public with another invention, which he called the “teleautomaton,” based on wireless motors he had displayed in 1892. It took the form of a boat four feet long and three feet high, exhibited for a special audience of potential investors that included Westinghouse, Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Using several transmitters, Tesla started, stopped, and steered the boat by remote control; he could even turn its lights on and off. From this remarkable model emerged the dawn of radio and remote control, but the investors did not bite. Neither could he interest the government in his vision of a wireless torpedo delivered by a crewless boat even though the nation was at war with Spain at the time.36 In 1898 Tesla moved into the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the social center of the moneyed elite.

…

Maury Klein tells a fascinating, heroic tale peopled by such giants as Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and J. P. Morgan, whose partnerships, subterranean deals, and marketplace battles redefined not just American commerce but the American landscape as well.” —Edward J. Renehan Jr., author of Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt Copyright © 2008 by Maury Klein All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

pages: 891 words: 253,901

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, independent contractor, information retrieval, Internet Archive, land reform, means of production, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ted Sorensen

The class hatred against Roosevelt even resulted in at least two abortive coups against his presidency. In 1934, a group of Wall Street plotters—financed by wealthy Roosevelt enemies (and Dulles clients) like the Du Ponts—tried to recruit Marine war hero General Smedley Butler to lead an armed march on Washington. In 1940, newspaperman and socialite Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.—one of FDR’s few friends in the New York club set—tipped off Eleanor Roosevelt to another anti-Roosevelt plot he had heard being hatched in his Fifth Avenue circles, involving tycoons as well as army officers. The First Lady was among those who wondered about the wisdom of allowing someone like Allen Dulles to set up spy operations in war-torn Europe, where he was certain to open lines of communication to Nazi interests.

…

., 146. 24Roosevelt grew so fond of Douglas: Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—The Home Front in World War II (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 526. 24“You stood me on my head”: Ibid., 257. 25resulted in at least two abortive coups: See David Talbot, Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). 25Vanderbilt . . . tipped off Eleanor Roosevelt: Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., Man of the World: My Life on Five Continents (New York: Crown Publishers, 1959), 264. 25“He was a dangle”: Author interview with John Loftus. 26The secretive BIS became a crucial financial partner: See LeBor, Tower of Basel, 78–85; and first chapter of Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933–1949 (New York: Authors Guild Backprint Edition, 2007). 26“Somebody grabbed me from behind”: McKittrick interview. 27“an American [bank] president doing business with the Germans”: LeBor, Tower of Basel, 122. 27the “nasty crew in the Treasury”: McKittrick interview. 27Project Safehaven that sought to track down: Martin Lorenz-Meyer, Safehaven: The Allied Pursuit of Nazi Assets (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 178; and Donald P.

pages: 314 words: 106,575

Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer--And of the Mysterious Fires That Baptized Gold Rush-Era San Francisco by Robert Graysmith

California gold rush, Cornelius Vanderbilt, profit motive, South of Market, San Francisco, white picket fence

Wakeman lifted his huge hand—bells jangled, wheels stopped and then reversed, churning the water to foam as the Independence docked. On October 4, 1851, when the Independence returned to San Francisco for a second time, Sawyer was on hand to sign aboard as a fireman. At 8:00 A.M., R. J. Vanderwater, the San Francisco agent for Cornelius Vanderbilt, lowered the wages of the crew and the stewards. Refusing to sail under diminished pay, the crew carted their sea chests ashore and dumped them at Vanderwater’s feet. An hour later, Wakeman, who also deemed the agent’s step improper, stepped onto the pier, his huge belly preceding him. Glowering with suppressed rage, “an earthquake without the noise,” he had belted a bowie knife and a brace of pistols outside his jacket.

pages: 273 words: 34,920

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional

However, the profession and industry of public relations originated in the US in the early 20th century when corporations sought to defend themselves in the face of public hostility and worker unrest. Until this time, American business had taken a relatively contemptuous attitude towards public opinion. Typical of the period was the infamous pronouncement attributed to railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt that ‘the public be damned’.4 Similarly, in 1901 when banker JP Morgan told a reporter that he owed ‘the public nothing’, he demonstrated a commonly held business attitude. However, the growth of democracy and the expansion of the voting franchise threatened business power. In the US, between 1880 and 1920, the voting franchise was extended from about 15 per cent of the adult population to around 50 per cent.5 The defence of propertied interests had been easier when the vote was largely restricted to property owners.

pages: 452 words: 110,488

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

As the great sociologist Robert Merton once said, putting his finger on an ugly paradox: "A cardinal American virtue, 'ambition,' promotes a cardinal American vice, 'deviant behavior.'"3 During the Gilded Age in the late 1800s, America's new industrialists waged vicious battles as they built, and fought over, the engines of economic growth: railroads, steel mills, oil refineries, coal mines, and banks. These titans of industry cheated each other, they cheated and destroyed their smaller competitors, and they cheated consumers. The tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt summed up the ethos of the day in a warning delivered to a business adversary who had swindled him: "You have undertaken to cheat me. I will not sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you."4 The political and cultural milieu of the Gilded Age was permissive of the abuses by the new capitalist overclass.

pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

Four: From Colonialism to the Coup 1 ‘In 1910, the richest …’ Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 349. During this period (between 1870 and 1910), aggregate private wealth was six to seven years of national income in Europe (Piketty, p. 26). In the United States, this era saw the rise of powerful industrialists and financiers – John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan – symbols of social inequality and known by their critics as ‘robber barons’ for the extent to which they made their riches through sometimes brutal monopoly power. 2 ‘The following decade became known …’ The accumulation of income and wealth among the rich was aided by tax cuts in their favour.

pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Instead, if Southwest just stuck to what they did best, he believed, if they operated within their means and according to their founding principles, if they stayed in their lane, everything would work out, and major opportunities would present themselves. In short, if they thought small and acted small, the sky would be the limit. This is really where the most valuable lessons and inspiring stories are to be found from the technological and industrial gold rushes that have pockmarked modern business history. They’re not with Cornelius Vanderbilt or Jay Gould or any of the other railroad tycoons from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They’re not with IBM or Apple or any of the giant software companies that rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. And they’re not with Uber or Salesforce or Twitter or any of the other tech companies born out of the internet boom in the early 2000s, whose headquarters line San Francisco’s Mission Street and define one side of the boundary between where we are going and where we have been.

pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The technological advances in transport, finance, and energy led to the formation of oligopolies and monopolies: companies with the most capital and initial resources could best afford to deploy the latest technology at the greatest scale, offer the best services, and in turn win a higher market share, make the most profit, and outcompete or buy up other companies. In the transportation sector, for example, it led to a dominant position for the railroad companies connecting the Midwest to New York, controlled by Cornelius Vanderbilt, a tycoon also active in shipping. In the energy sector, it allowed the astute John D. Rockefeller to come from almost nothing to build the world's largest oil company, Standard Oil, and later also created the first business trust (Standard Oil today lives on in ExxonMobil, still America's largest oil company).

pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

pages: 939 words: 274,289

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H. W. Brands

California gold rush, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, disinformation, industrial cluster, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, retrograde motion, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway

He probably didn’t realize that his fame—or notoriety—would evolve so quickly. “Mr. Corbin is a very shrewd old gentleman,” Jay Gould told a congressional committee just months later. Gould was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street: a principal in the Erie Railroad, which he and partner James Fisk had wrested from transport titan Cornelius Vanderbilt in a series of raids dubbed the “Erie War,” and a speculator whose slightest gestures caused the markets to gyrate. “I used to meet him occasionally,” Gould said of Corbin. “He owned some real estate in Jersey City, where I was building a horse-railroad through some of our own lands and also through his.”

…

., 27.1, 29.1, 29.2, 35.1, 58.1, 58.2, 58.3, 59.1, 59.2, 69.1, 69.2, 76.1 Treaty of Washington of 1871, 67.1, 80.1 Trenton Gazette Trist, Nicholas Troy Press Trumbull, Lyman, 14.1, 65.1 Twain, Mark, see Clemens, Samuel Tweed, William, 67.1, 76.1, 78.1, 87.1 Tyler, John, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1 Uncle Sam (steamer) “Undeserved Stigma, An” (Grant) Union League Club Union Pacific Railroad, 55.1, 67.1, 84.1, 85.1 United States: Alabama claims of as built by conquest Manifest Destiny slogan of Texas annexed by, 2.1, 2.2 Tocqueville’s characterization of, 4.1, 4.2 United States Mail Company Utah Van Buren, Martin, 1.1, 2.1 Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, William Van Dorn, Earl, 27.1, 28.1, 28.2, 28.3, 30.1 Van Duzer (staff officer) Venable, Charles Vicksburg campaign, prl.1, 29.1, 30.1, 35.1 Battle of Champion Hill in Battle of Jackson in Battle of Raymond in Black River fight in Chickasaw Bayou fight in Confederate surrender in drinking episode in geography of Grant’s assumption of leadership in Grant’s initial plan for, 30.1, 30.2 Holly Springs situation in, 30.1, 30.2 hydraulic engineering projects in incountry campaign in Lincoln and onset of Port Gibson fight in Port Huron surrender and running of Confederate batteries in, 30.1, 30.2, 31.1 siege of Vicksburg in, 32.1, 33.1 Victoria, Queen of England Villepigue, John Virginia, 38.1, 56.1, 65.1 new constitution of secession of, 15.1, 15.2, 16.1 Virginia campaign of 1864, 39.1, 87.1 African American prisoners in casualties in Confederate peace feelers in Confederate shortages and desertions in, 39.1, 47.1 crossing of Rapidan in crossing of the James in Dana on, 39.1, 40.1 doubts and criticisms of, 41.1, 42.1, 42.2 drinking issue and Early’s raid in 1864 election and, 42.1, 42.2, 45.1 Grant-Lincoln meeting in Grant’s strategy in Hampton Roads conference in psychological balance in revised strategy in Shenandoah Valley campaign in siege of Petersburg in, see Petersburg, siege of see also specific battles Virginia Central Railroad Virginia Military Institute Virginius, CSS Wade, Benjamin Waite, Morrison, 70.1, 76.1 Walker, John Wallace, Lew, 22.1, 24.1, 24.2, 24.3, 42.1 Wallace, W.

George Marshall: Defender of the Republic by David L. Roll

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, Defenestration of Prague, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fear of failure, invisible hand, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, one-China policy, one-state solution, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

It was an impressive beginning, but it was hardly enough. To sustain a population of more than two million through the winter, it was estimated that an average of about 5,000 tons of food, medicine, coal, gasoline, and other supplies would have to be landed each day. Several top officials in Washington doubted that the airlift would work. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, assistant secretary of the air force, told the NSC on July 17 that “the airlift was doomed to failure.”9 Lovett called it “unsatisfactory” and only a “temporary expedient.”10 Forrestal worried that the airlift would stall in late October when winter weather would cause flights to be canceled.

…

(Wedemeyer), 381 Weizmann, Chaim, 489–90, 493, 500–502, 508, 510 Weizmann, Vera, 502 Welles, Sumner, 142, 176 West Point, 67 Weygand, Maxime, 53 Wherry, Kenneth, 412 White, Theodore, 386 White, Wallace, 447 White, Walter Francis, 148 White Force (1914 Philippines attack simulation), 8–9, 205 Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt, 524 Why We Fight (film series), 302 Wiles, Geoff, 310–11, 474 Wilhelm II (Kaiser), 12, 15, 46–47, 50, 54 Wilkins, Fraser, 483–84, 511 William D. Porter (“Willie Dee”), 282 Williams, Aubrey, 109–10 Willkie, Wendell, 142, 207–08 Willoughby, Charles, 556 Wilson, Henry Maitland (“Jumbo”), 308, 337, 340 Wilson, Rose Page.

pages: 403 words: 119,206

Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market by B. Mark Smith

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, joint-stock company, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, stocks for the long run, the market place, transaction costs

Steel utilities, customer stock purchase plans of valuation based on future earnings growth; Capital Asset Pricing Model for; and crash of 1929; Dividend Discount Model for; interest rates and; of options; security analysis and Value Line Centurion Fund Value Line Investment Survey Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, William K. Vesco, Robert Vickers Associates Volker, Paul Volvo wage and price controls Wall Street Journal Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser (television show) Wallich, Henry Walson & Company War Department, U.S. Washington Post “wash” sales watered stock “waterfall” effect wealth effect Western Electric Wharton School of Business Whelan, Richard J.

pages: 395 words: 118,446

The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Martha Banta

Albert Einstein, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

Published in the American Journal of Sociology between September 1898 and January 1899, this material appeared as separate chapters in the work completed in draft form by 1898 but which had been set aside out of dissatisfaction. By the final decades of the nineteenth century others had begun to question the ethics of ‘plutocrats’ such as John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Collis Huntington. On the heels of the publication in 1873 of The Gilded Age, the satiric novel centred on financial corruption co-authored by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, ‘muckraking’ exposés of the Big Money men began to be featured in newspapers and magazines, even as President Theodore Roosevelt vigorously moved to regulate the Trusts and curtail the Monopolies.

pages: 349 words: 112,333

The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con by Amy Reading

Cornelius Vanderbilt, Frederick Winslow Taylor, glass ceiling, joint-stock company, new economy, scientific management, shareholder value, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, zero-sum game

But most entrepreneurs looking to finance the exploration and extraction of gold or silver formed joint-stock companies, hired promoters, and sent them to New York and Boston to chase down the money where it lived. The promoter would arrive in an eastern city with a prospectus carefully worded to appeal directly to the heart of the second-tier businessman, someone who admired the market manipulations of Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt in the newspapers but could not himself command enough capital to replicate those feats of enterprise and greed. Western mining, the prospectus would implicitly promise, afforded the proper scope for someone of modest capital and outsize daring. In the 1870s and 1880s, the conservative New York Stock Exchange did not list mining stocks.

pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

As always, the best advice is caveat emptor. Never, under any circumstances, should you buy stock recommended by your newfound e-mail friend in Nigeria. Thr ee Hundr ed Years of Stock Market Manipulations 271 Notes 1. Corners and short squeezes, including various railroad manipulations by Cornelius Vanderbilt and others at the turn of the twentieth century, represent another form of manipulation through scarcity as opposed to redirecting people’s beliefs. This chapter focuses on manipulations based on false information of one type or another. 2. The real cost of trading is the difference between the price at the time you decide to trade and the total price at the time you actually trade.

pages: 369 words: 121,161

Alistair Cooke's America by Alistair Cooke

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, Ford Model T, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, interchangeable parts, joint-stock company, Maui Hawaii, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

These first – or second-generation rich built what they always called, by a typical affectation of the day, ‘summer cottages,’ a name that would have been suitable only if they had been flanked by Blenheim or the Taj Mahal. The ‘cottage’ of the Vanderbilts, a massive Renaissance palace, was built by the mentor of the Newport colony, the third generation of a fortune originally assembled by the captain of a ferry boat that plied between New York and New Brunswick. From this humble craft Cornelius Vanderbilt developed a fleet of freighters and then a transatlantic steamship line. In his sixties he went into railroads, and before he died this formidable old codger, who read little and could not write very well, had the satisfaction of founding a university. When he died he left his son $94,000,000, which the son doubled in ten years.

pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

* * * The liberal reaction against big business had been going strong for nearly half a century, having taken a number of different forms, but mainly it had identified its target as a coterie of men who made themselves very rich by building up the kind of business empires that people in the Progressive Era called “trusts”: Cornelius Vanderbilt in railroads, Andrew Carnegie in steel, Thomas Edison in electric power, John D. Rockefeller in oil, J. P. Morgan in finance. Now, in the 1920s, these people were dead or fading. Berle’s legal career on Wall Street, which put him in the middle of a lot of detailed work on stock and bond offerings, proxy votes, and so on, allowed him to come to what became the great insight of his career: the old trusts were being succeeded by corporations that did not have identifiable owners.

pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

Theodore Roosevelt, address at the Pilgrim Memorial Monument, Provincetown, MA, 20 August 1907 The late nineteenth century is described as ‘the gilded age’ of American capitalism. The dominant figures of that era – men such as Henry Clay Frick, Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt – are often called ‘the robber barons’.28 They were both industrialists and financiers, in varying degrees. They built, or helped build, the railroads, oil supply systems and steel mills that made the USA an industrial powerhouse. But their immense personal wealth was as much the product of financial manipulation as of productive activity.

pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

As the train pulled away, leaving us alone in the station, an elaborate bronze plaque on the other side of the tracks was revealed. Between seated damsels bearing the dates 1900 and 1904, it paid homage to “This first municipal rapid transit railroad…. Authorized by the state / Constructed by the city,” and bore the names of Cornelius Vanderbilt and August Belmont. We walked up a broad staircase to a domed mezzanine crowned by a glass oculus, once the spot where “ticket choppers” collected fares from commuters. Anyansi directed his flashlight beam up a staircase sealed by heavy metal doors. Had we been able to open them, we would have emerged next to the statue of Nathan Hale outside City Hall.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

Some go still further and argue that it is morally right for a company to seek out legal subsidies and political favours, on the grounds that its management are under an obligation to maximize profits in the interests of shareholders. Crony capitalism comes in different varieties. Monopoly capitalism flourished in the USA at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time individuals such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller were able to amass enormous wealth by agglomerating new industries such as railroads and oil into ‘trusts’, which exercised monopoly or oligopoly market power within markets, before they were regulated or broken up by Theodore Roosevelt using the Sherman Act. Licence capitalism flourished in India after 1947 under the so-called Licence Raj.

pages: 478 words: 131,657

Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney

Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dematerialisation, fudge factor, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, scientific management, VTOL

Industrialists therefore would be glad to draw upon the foreign talent pool: Tesla, Michael Pupin, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, Batchelor, and Fritz Lowenstein, among others. Yet it was primarily thanks to Edison’s rough-and-ready ingenuity that the lights were flickering on (and off) in New York City. Only the year before, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt had staged the epic ball that signaled peace at last between the feuding Astors and the Vanderbilts, and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt had sailed down the grand staircase of the family mansion dressed as “The Electric Light,” an apparition in white satin and diamonds that few at the ball would ever forget. So glamorous was the new energy source that a manufacturer advertised at Christmas urging fathers to “Surprise the whole family with a double socket.”

pages: 311 words: 130,761

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

Social historian Wecter reported that one well-known journalist told a class of college students, “Only the rich man is interesting.”8 Before the advent of television and other electronic media, newspapers and magazines provided people in the lower 9781442202238.print.indb 23 2/10/11 10:46 AM 24 Chapter 2 classes opportunities to see “magic phantoms,” such as the very wealthy Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, and to gain entry to her residence by way of tabloid reporters who routinely covered her activities and described her lifestyle in intricate detail. For those within the top class, sneaking a peak at the society page afforded an opportunity to keep score of one’s position in relation to other elites.

pages: 598 words: 140,612

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2008, September 2009, Table 4: “People and Families in Poverty by Selected Characteristics: 2007 and 2008,” p. 14. Dennis, Jan. “Gas Prices, Global Warming Renewing Interest in High-Speed Rail.” Associated Press, Sept. 7, 2007. Derbyshire, Wyn. Six Tycoons: The Lives of John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Joseph P. Kennedy. London: Spiramus, 2008. Design for London. “Housing for a Compact City,” June 2003, www.london.gov.uk/archive/mayor/auu/docs/housing_compact_city_1.pdf. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, rev. ed.

pages: 471 words: 127,852

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth, Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Geldof, Bullingdon Club, business intelligence, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Global Witness, income inequality, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, Londongrad, mass immigration, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, paper trading, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, power law, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger

What happened there could be seen as the equivalent of Margaret Thatcher deciding to sell all Britain’s nationalized industries, from British Gas to British Telecom, for a fraction of their real value to a handful of her favourite tycoons who had donated money to the Conservative Party. Some of the beneficiaries liked to defend their activities by comparing themselves to the nineteenth-century industrial and financial tycoons such as John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who built massive fortunes out of oil, finance, and the railroads in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rockefeller, Morgan, and Vanderbilt were dubbed the ‘robber barons’ for their ruthless and exploitative tactics. Khodorkovsky once described his hero, ‘if he had one’, as John D.

pages: 428 words: 138,235

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice by Julian Guthrie

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Benchmark Capital, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, fear of failure, Ford paid five dollars a day, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Benioﬀ, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, pets.com, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, warehouse automation, white picket fence, Yogi Berra

The town once had a strong navy presence, and sailing for fun and commerce had defined the region; a downtown street was named America’s Cup Avenue. Many still called Newport the spiritual home of the Cup, as it had been the location for the high-stakes showdowns for more than half a century, from 1930 to 1983. It was at Marble House, a palatial spread once owned by Mike Vanderbilt, great-grandson of the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, that the trophy had been in Americans’ hands for so long before it was handed over to the Australians. And it was here that, decades earlier, in September 1962, John Kennedy spoke before the start of the America’s Cup about the allure of water and of the Cup, saying, “All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears.

The Hour of Fate by Susan Berfield

bank run, buy and hold, capital controls, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death from overwork, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, new economy, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, the market place, transcontinental railway, wage slave, working poor

Among them was William Clark, a senator and copper magnate from Montana, who was constructing a one hundred and twenty-one room home on Fifth Avenue. It included four art galleries, a swimming pool, and an underground rail line to supply heating coal. When Clark came across a bronze foundry whose work he liked, he bought it. Elsewhere on the avenue, descendants of the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt lived in a row of mansions; they called one the Petit Château. Mrs. Astor’s new residence featured a ballroom big enough for more than a thousand guests. The figures were staggering. But these industrialists accumulated their wealth in ways most Americans could understand. They dug up something.

pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

“Peter attracts these types,” author Ryan Holiday wrote of D’Souza in his book about Thiel and Gawker, referring to “a fit young man of indiscernible origin” who apparently had read Machiavelli’s Prince at age thirteen and was “fascinated by power.” Holiday, who’d been a guest at Thiel’s parties, enjoyed extensive access to Thiel—and came away seeing Thiel in epic terms. At various points in the book he compared the venture capitalist to General Sherman, the Count of Monte Cristo, and Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt combined. D’Souza had come to that dinner meeting—eight courses, followed by several hours at a hotel bar—with a plan for Thiel to get revenge on Gawker. He proposed that Thiel use him as a cutout. D’Souza would set up a secret shell company that would anonymously fund lawsuits against Gawker, overwhelming it with litigation until it shut down.

pages: 526 words: 144,019

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History by Diana B. Henriques

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, web of trust

Another defense industry giant, United Technologies, stepped into the fray and made its own bid for Martin Marietta, but was unsuccessful. The Allied Corporation rescued Bendix from Martin Marietta’s hostile bid by making a friendly takeover offer, which was accepted. the great railroad wars of the nineteenth century: See John Steele Gordon, The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Erie Railway Wars, and the Birth of Wall Street (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988). the smaller postwar corporate raids of the late 1950s: See Diana B. Henriques, The White Sharks of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans and the Original Corporate Raiders (New York: Lisa Drew Books/Scribner, 2000).

pages: 1,169 words: 342,959

New York by Edward Rutherfurd

Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, illegal immigration, margin call, millennium bug, out of africa, place-making, plutocrats, rent control, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, the market place, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban renewal, white picket fence, Y2K, young professional

And if you take my advice you’ll give it up before the commodore comes back. Because when he does, it’s my belief, he’ll skin you alive.” “Won’t be much he can do,” said one of them. “He ain’t so tough,” said the other. “Wrong,” said Master, “on both counts.” There was always something Cornelius Vanderbilt could do. Steam-powered vessels had been in use on the River Hudson for more than thirty years, yet the steamship had taken a surprising time to enter the Atlantic trade. A British rail company had started it off, but it was an enterprising Loyalist family named Cunard, who’d fled to Canada a couple of generations back, who’d first run steamships successfully across the ocean.

…

Put in our own man as president, who’ll give us an exclusive contract to run goods across the place, and leave Vanderbilt out?” “You really think it could be done?” “Yes, and for no great outlay. Do you want in?” “Gentlemen,” said Master with a laugh, “I’m not afraid to topple the government of Nicaragua, but annoying Cornelius Vanderbilt? That frightens me. Please don’t include me in your plans.” He was still chuckling about the two rogues an hour later, when he went uptown to meet his wife. Hetty Master stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fortieth, with the great fortress of the distribution reservoir behind her. Half the world was passing by the place that day, so you might have expected her to be taking some notice of them.

India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, blue-collar work, book value, Bretton Woods, business climate, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, congestion charging, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Induced demand, inflation targeting, invisible hand, land reform, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, obamacare, Pareto efficiency, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban sprawl, vertical integration, working-age population

(Indonesia and Russia are obvious examples.) A close reading of US history also supports this view. The so-called ‘gilded age’ of the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century was a heyday of corruption and crony capitalism. ‘Robber barons’ such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and others, built up huge monopolies in steel, oil, railroads etc., and then used their wealth to manipulate the political system for their own ends. (At one time they ‘owned’ a large majority of US senators.) While the ‘robber barons’ were certainly dynamic entrepreneurs and contributed to the country’s rapid growth, they also initiated an unhealthy trend which, if it had continued, would have made the growth unsustainable.

Turning the Tide by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, failed state, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, land reform, launch on warning, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

In this case as in others, the formidable power and successes of our system of “brainwashing under freedom” are rarely appreciated. 6 Torturing Nicaragua 6.1 Before the Crisis Let us turn now to the US proxy war against Nicaragua, briefly recalling some relevant history. The first major US armed attack against Nicaragua was in 1854, when the US Navy burned down the town of San Juan del Norte to avenge an alleged insult to American officials and the millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt; the press reviewed the town’s history when it was briefly conquered by contras in April1984, omitting this incident.113 A year later, the US recognized the puppet government established by the American adventurer William Walker, though conflict among US business interests (he was strongly opposed by Vanderbilt) led to withdrawal of support.

Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

The manipulation drove the stock price down signiﬁcantly, and Drew proﬁted handsomely. He would take similar actions many times during his tenure on the board, as he admitted proudly in later writings.102 Drew would surely have loved to continue in this capacity of enriching himself at the expense of the company he supposedly served, but Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad magnate, set his sights on the Erie. Vanderbilt was far more adept than Drew at operating railroads, having run several others successfully, and he thought he could apply the same principles and add an attractive asset to his growing holdings. To do this, he started purchasing the stock discreetly and slowly gained enough shares to exercise control over the company.

pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

Led by characters such as Daniel Drew, Jim Fisk, and Jay Gould, the expansion of the American railroads and the related speculation on Wall Street as to the financing for these endeavors created huge opportunities for gain and loss by investors, both in the United States and in Europe. Jim Fisk, for example, made his first fortune as a Civil War profiteer and then in fraud. He swindled no less than Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt to the tune of $8 million and in the process also stole control of the Erie Railroad via a partnership with another Civil War-era profiteer named Jay Gould. Fisk went on to create a vast operation in New York City involving Wall Street speculation, real estate, saloons and opera houses, and many other businesses that served as fronts for his criminal activities.

pages: 490 words: 146,259

New World, Inc. by John Butman

Admiral Zheng, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, currency manipulation / currency intervention, diversified portfolio, Etonian, Francisco Pizarro, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, market design, Skype, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons

Over the years, even as the moralistic storyline prevailed, other analysts worked to fill in the gaps. In 1939, Norman Gras, the first professor of business history at Harvard Business School, compiled a series of essays on great American companies and their leaders. In his Casebook in American Business History, Graf listed the well-known names one might expect: John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J. P. Morgan, among others. But who did he put first on his list? Thomas Smythe of the Virginia Company. Smythe, Gras noted, was “the first business man to have a profound effect upon America.”29 But it is that other, more renowned, Smith—Captain John, of Pocahontas fame, and the man who named New England—who first and best articulated the driving commercial impulse, the spirit of enterprise, that created America.

pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Courts work only after the injury has already happened, and in any case they were notoriously unreliable: judges’ opinions could be bought. One infamous example in 1869 was the battle for control of the Erie Railroad Company. Financier Jay Gould bought the judgements of Judge William Marcy Tweed, watered down stock without intervention and thus temporarily beat off the predator ambitions of Cornelius Vanderbilt. It was the ethics of the Wild West played out in boardrooms, courts, Wall Street and state legislatures. Increasingly, the only effective response was regulatory. As Wilson said, better that the owner of a derrick on top of a building is obliged to secure it properly in the first place, rather than forcing a passer-by to go through the courts for compensation after it has fallen on her head.

pages: 452 words: 150,785

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales From the World of Wall Street by John Brooks

banking crisis, belling the cat, Bretton Woods, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Ford paid five dollars a day, Gunnar Myrdal, invention of the wheel, large denomination, lateral thinking, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, short selling, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, very high income

In the old days of titanic financial death struggles, when Adam Smith’s ghost still smiled on Wall Street, corners were fairly common and were often extremely sanguinary, with hundreds of innocent bystanders, as well as the embattled principals, getting their financial heads lopped off. The most famous cornerer in history was that celebrated old pirate, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who engineered no less than three successful corners during the eighteen-sixties. Probably his classic job was in the stock of the Harlem Railway. By dint of secretly buying up all its available shares while simultaneously circulating a series of untruthful rumors of imminent bankruptcy to lure the short sellers in, he achieved an airtight trap.

pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

For all the brilliance of their work in generating capital, jobs, and new products, these corporate innovators were also ruthless in their pursuit of economic and then political power. Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and fellow “muckraking” journalists were indefatigable in their efforts to expose the unsavory practices of John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and other “robber barons,” laying bare for reading publics these men’s insatiable drives for power and profits, and their single-minded determination to crush all competition. Kitman argued that the titans of the 1990s telecommunications industry had more in common with “Johnny Rockefeller and Andy Carnegie and all the other robber barons of Ida Tarbell’s day” than anyone thought.

Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

From April to mid-October, the Breakers is open from 9am to 5pm and the other mansions from 10am to 5pm. Off-season hours vary – call ahead. Breakers (44 Ochre Point Ave) If you have time for only one Newport mansion, make it this extravagant 70-room, 1895 Italian Renaissance mega-palace built for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, patriarch of America’s then-richest family. Rosecliff (548 Bellevue Ave) A 1902 masterpiece of architect Stanford White, Rosecliff resembles the Grand Trianon at Versailles. Its immense ballroom had a starring role in Robert Redford’s The Great Gatsby. Marble House (596 Bellevue Ave) The Palace of Versailles also inspired this 1892 mansion, posh with Louis XIV–style furnishings.

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Frist Center for the Visual Arts GALLERY (www.fristcenter.org; 919 Broadway; adult/child $10/free; 10am-5:30pm Mon, Tue, Wed & Sat, to 9pm Thu & Fri, 1-5pm Sun) Hosts traveling exhibitions of everything from American folk art to Picasso in the grand, refurbished post office building. MIDTOWN Along West End Ave, starting at 21st Ave, sits prestigious Vanderbilt University, founded in 1883 by railway magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. The 330-acre campus buzzes with some 12,000 students, and student culture influences much of Midtown’s vibe. Parthenon PARK, GALLERY (www.parthenon.org; 2600 West End Ave; adult/child $6/4; 9am-4:30pm Tue-Sat, plus Sun in summer) Yes, that is indeed a reproduction Athenian parthenon sitting in Centennial Park.

pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

Emboldened by their economic success, these men and their companies became increasingly unscrupulous. They were called the Robber Barons because of their hard-nosed business practices aimed at consolidating monopolies and preventing any potential competitor from entering the market or doing business on an equal footing. One of the most notorious of these was Cornelius Vanderbilt, who famously remarked, “What do I care about the Law? Hain’t I got the power?” Another was John D. Rockefeller, who started the Standard Oil Company in 1870. He quickly eliminated rivals in Cleveland and attempted to monopolize the transportation and retailing of oil and oil products. By 1882 he had created a massive monopoly—in the language of the day, a trust.

pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The new industrial America had become a Gilded Age, satirized in the 1873 novel The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.59 The industries of the Second Industrial Revolution had not yet emerged, but steel, steam, railroads, and so on had already created unprecedented wealth. America, it seemed, was turning into a nation of the Old World, far removed from its Jeffersonian ideal and corrupted by an emerging industrial elite. Wealthy industrialists and financiers like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt were frequently labeled robber barons. In 1859, the journalist Henry J. Raymond compared Vanderbilt to a medieval nobleman, writing that he was “like those old German barons who, from their eyries along the Rhine, swooped down on commerce of the noble river and wrung tribute from every passenger that floated by.”60 To be sure, the size of the corporate giants that emerged must have been hard to comprehend.

pages: 877 words: 182,093

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

Although the amount of wealth required to be on the list of the top 400 wealthiest Americans increased severalfold over time, the 2015 study pointed out that Piketty’s claim is invalid because he “naively assumes that it’s the same people getting richer.”32 As with income statistics, the fate of abstract categories of wealth statistics is not the same as the fate of a given set of flesh-and-blood human beings.b The wealthiest people of today are not simply descendants of the wealthiest families of yesterday. Among the heirs of eight historic fortunes of the nineteenth century— including the enormous fortunes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor and Andrew Carnegie— not one made it onto any of the Forbes magazine lists, over the years, of the 400 richest Americans.33 Of the people from families on various other lists of Americans with the largest fortunes in 1918, 1930 and 1957, not one of these families was on the list of the top 30 American fortunes in 2014.34 Implicit in much discussion of “income distribution” statistics or “wealth concentration” statistics is the notion that certain income brackets or wealth brackets receive not only a rising share of total income or wealth in a country, but do so at the expense of lower income brackets or lower wealth brackets.

pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

Most of the rest of the industrial world used the word “cartel,” but the practice spread rapidly everywhere during the hard times after 1873, when large-scale manufacturers maximized production in order to service their debts. On razor-thin margins at best and chronic losses at worst, many were effectively owned by their banks and creditors. In order not to lose their investment, their financial backers seized at the opportunity offered by more powerful competitors, notably such industrial titans as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller, to arrange price agreements, production targets, and trusts and so to be absorbed into existing webs of railroads, steel factories, and oil refineries. No one understood the new order of capitalism more clearly than J. P. Morgan, who used his influence as a banker to set up trusts in railroads, electricity generation, and steel manufacture—his creation, United States Steel, capitalized in 1901 at $1.2 billion, was the first billion-dollar industrial producer in the world, and had two thirds of the market.

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, plutocrats, traveling salesman, union organizing, Works Progress Administration

It struck him the same way. By the time of his arrival in London, his marriage had stalled on a plateau of mutual respect and sexual disinterest. His wife, Marie Norton Whitney, was a dozen years younger and ran an art gallery in New York. They had met in 1928, while she was married to a rich New York playboy, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. She and Harriman married in February 1930, after Harriman divorced his first wife. By now, however, both had begun having affairs. Mrs. Harriman was widely thought to be sleeping with Eddy Duchin, a handsome and trim New York bandleader. Duchin, too, was married. Pamela’s own marriage was in lightning decline, and as it devolved her sense of freedom grew.

pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

By the early 1890s, Standard Oil controlled around 90 percent of oil-refining facilities and pipelines in the country, and it developed a reputation for predatory pricing, questionable side deals—for example, with railways that barred its competitors from shipping their oil—and the intimidation of rivals and workers. The track record of other dominant firms, such as Andrew Carnegie’s steel company, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railway conglomerate, DuPont in chemicals, International Harvester in farm machinery, and J.P. Morgan in banking, was similar. There was a clear sense that the institutional fabric of the United States was ill-suited to contain the heft of these companies. They wielded growing political power, both because several US presidents sided with them, and even more because they had great sway over the US Senate, whose members in that era were not directly elected but selected by state legislatures.

The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, business climate, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, feminist movement, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, land reform, land tenure, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, War on Poverty, zero-sum game, éminence grise

This town was in fact captured for a few days by contras from Costa Rica about a year ago. The press made a big fuss about it, but they failed to note the historical antecedents. Our bombing and destruction of the town was not a capricious act. It was an act of revenge. What had happened in 1854 was that a yacht owned by the American millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt had sailed into the port and an official had attempted to levy port charges on it. So, in revenge, the navy burned the town down to the ground. Well, that was our first military intervention in Nicaragua, and there have been many since. In the first third of this century, we sent military forces into Cuba, Panama, Mexico, and Honduras and occupied Haiti for nineteen years.

pages: 695 words: 194,693

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

Julia Ott’s research in the archives of the exchange turned up a vast amount of material about how the idea of a shareholder democracy was managed—not only through speeches and publicity releases, but also through such populist media as financial cartoons that distilled the complexities of financial operations for ordinary people and appealed to aspirations of family security and self-improvement. In contrast to the popular pre-war notion of a Wall Street dominated by insiders like Daniel Drew, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J. P. Morgan, the New York Stock Exchange in the 1920s emphasized fairness. In the “New Era” of stock market investing, the small American investor was no longer a victim of market manipulation by insiders—the New York Stock Exchange promoted itself as the seal of approval for a square investment deal.

pages: 613 words: 200,826

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles by Michael Gross

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, Donald Trump, estate planning, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, Henry Singleton, Irwin Jacobs, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, passive investing, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

While continuing to work for Hughes—even becoming his hatchet man in corporate intrigues in Texas—McCarthy’s own social star continued to rise, particularly after one of his daughters married into one of California’s oldest families, the Amestoys, who’d owned the rancho that became Encino. His stature was reflected in his latest crop of clients, who included the likes of Helen Vanderbilt, aka Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., and Betsey Cushing Roosevelt, aka Mrs. James Roosevelt, wife of the eldest son of the president; both were seeking divorces. The start of the war did nothing to dim the McCarthys’ social life, and parties continued at the Muirfield Road house, where showers heralded the births of grandchildren and two Great Danes, Posey and Tagus (the McCarthys also bred dogs), kept vigil by the fireplace.

pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioﬀ, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Those paradoxical facts illustrate how difficult it is to assess the careers of unethical business moguls who engage in philanthropic sin-washing. Even more complicated is the assessment of the social contributions made by great inventors and entrepreneurs such as Robert Fulton and John Deere at the turn of the nineteenth century, Thomas Edison and Cornelius Vanderbilt a century later, and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in our day. They each made significant business and technological contributions that improved the lives of ordinary men and women, yet while they were far from being robber barons—their business sins were relatively peccadilloes—none is particularly remembered for his business virtue or enlightened practices.

pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

.; Tea Party in; as vetocracy; voting in urbanization; in Greece; see also industrialization; modernization Uribe, Álvaro Uruguay U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA); see also U.S. Forest Service U.S. Department of the Interior; General Land Office U.S. Forest Service; autonomy lost by values Van Creveld, Martin Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, George Van de Walle, Nicolas Venezuela Venizelos, Eleftherios vetocracy veto players Vienna Vietnam Vietnam War violence; in Latin America; in nation building and political development; in Nigeria; political decay and; see also wars Volcker Commissions voting; African Americans and; in Argentina; in Britain; majority; in Nigeria; property qualifications for; in Prussia; in United States Voting Rights Act Wabash v.

pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

It was an uneven process, often dominated by and benefiting a handful of companies, especially those who knew how to work the system. As a result, the period Mark Twain described as “the Gilded Age,” from the 1870s to the early twentieth century, witnessed the emergence of huge companies that came to dominate their sectors or even the entire economy. Led by railway tycoons such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, industrialists including John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, and financiers such as John Pierpont Morgan, these “robber barons” not only invested massively and drove economic expansion, but also built unparalleled fortunes and routinely abused their economic and political power.

pages: 800 words: 240,175

Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy by Michael Knox Beran

anti-communist, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, fulfillment center, George Santayana, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, old-boy network, phenotype, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, éminence grise

Buckley, Jr., Gore Vidal, H. P. Lovecraft, Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, George Plimpton, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (who began affecting it while at Miss Porter’s School), Louis Auchincloss, C. Z. Guest, Joseph Alsop, Julia Child, and Cornelius Vanderbilt IV. Except for Child, all of these speakers were raised, educated, or both in the Northeastern United States. This includes just over half who were raised in New York (most of them in New York City) and five who were educated at the private boarding school Groton in Massachusetts: Franklin Roosevelt, Harriman, Acheson, Alsop, and Auchincloss.”

pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Over time the profusion of these families turned Newport into America’s regatta capital (see p. 88) and guaranteed a steady flow of “lifestyles of the rich and famous” tourism for decades to come. Today about a dozen of the old “cottages” are open to the public, including The Breakers, a 70-room Italian Renaissance–style palazzo built for Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Completely over-the-top in design and proportion, it has 23 bedrooms, a gilded 2,400-square-foot dining room lit by 12-foot chandeliers, and a great hall designed to resemble an open-air Italian courtyard, with a 45-foot sky blue ceiling. Begun in the fall of 1893 and completed in the summer of 1895, its construction took the work of some 2,000 workers and craftsmen, including a platoon of master artisans brought in from Europe.

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Begun in the fall of 1893 and completed in the summer of 1895, its construction took the work of some 2,000 workers and craftsmen, including a platoon of master artisans brought in from Europe. Though none of the other Newport mansions is as grand as The Breakers, several come close. Marble House, built between 1888 and 1892 for Cornelius Vanderbilt’s younger brother, William, was the precursor of all the other mansions, incorporating $7 million worth of marble into a design inspired by Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon at Versailles. Rosecliff is another favorite, a 40-room manse built in 1902 by architect Stanford White after the Grand Trianon.

pages: 898 words: 266,274

The Irrational Bundle by Dan Ariely

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business process, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, compensation consultant, computer vision, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, end world poverty, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, first-price auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, name-letter effect, new economy, operational security, Pepsi Challenge, Peter Singer: altruism, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, second-price auction, Shai Danziger, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, social contagion, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, young professional

pages: 1,073 words: 302,361

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World by William D. Cohan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyman Minsky, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, tail risk, time value of money, too big to fail, traveling salesman, two and twenty, value at risk, work culture , yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Normally, Friedman said, he tended to be cautious—although “you’re in a risk business so caution doesn’t mean we’ve got to be in a fetal position,” he said—but this was an obvious moneymaking opportunity. “I looked on it as the best trading opportunity I’d ever seen,” he said. Many traders were making a similar bet, including hedge-fund manager George Soros, and winning fortunes. “That’s the time you break up the furniture and throw it in the fire,” Friedman said, recalling how Cornelius Vanderbilt made his fortune by betting on steamships. “Other times you cut back, cut back, cut back. But things were going well for us and we did very, very well in 1992 and 1993.” That was an understatement. Goldman made $2.7 billion in pretax profits in 1993—by far the firm’s most profitable year ever to that point.

pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Rockefeller was a donor to colleges all over the country and helped found the University of Chicago. Huntington, of the Central Pacific, gave money to two Negro colleges, Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute. Carnegie gave money to colleges and to libraries. Johns Hopkins was founded by a millionaire merchant, and millionaires Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke, and Leland Stanford created universities in their own names. The rich, giving part of their enormous earnings in this way, became known as philanthropists. These educational institutions did not encourage dissent; they trained the middlemen in the American system—the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians—those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble.

pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Grudges were held by the small independent producers who had been gobbled up, broken, or marginalized during Rockefeller’s inexorable rise. They could appeal to American values and the image of the virtuous little man struggling against concentrated, corrupt power and great wealth. Rockefeller was by no means the only “Robber Baron”—Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J. P. Morgan were similarly denounced. Nor was Standard Oil the only entity using the trust as a way of controlling markets and rebuffing competition. It was, however, the largest and most notorious. While Rockefeller believed combination to be a better way of guaranteeing efficiency and stability, the practice tended toward monopoly.

USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

From April to mid-October, the Breakers is open from 9am to 5pm and the other mansions from 10am to 5pm. Off-season hours vary – call ahead. Breakers (44 Ochre Point Ave) If you have time for only one Newport mansion, make it this extravagant 70-room, 1895 Italian Renaissance mega-palace built for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, patriarch of America’s then-richest family. Rosecliff (548 Bellevue Ave) A 1902 masterpiece of architect Stanford White, Rosecliff resembles the Grand Trianon at Versailles. Its immense ballroom had a starring role in Robert Redford’s The Great Gatsby . Marble House (596 Bellevue Ave) The Palace of Versailles also inspired this 1892 mansion, posh with Louis XIV–style furnishings.

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Frist Center for the Visual Arts GALLERY Offline map Google map (www.fristcenter.org; 919 Broadway; adult/child $10/free; 10am-5:30pm Mon, Tue, Wed & Sat, to 9pm Thu & Fri, 1-5pm Sun) Hosts traveling exhibitions of everything from American folk art to Picasso in the grand, refurbished post office building. MIDTOWN Along West End Ave, starting at 21st Ave, sits prestigious Vanderbilt University , founded in 1883 by railway magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. The 330-acre campus buzzes with some 12,000 students, and student culture influences much of Midtown’s vibe. Parthenon PARK, GALLERY (www.parthenon.org; 2600 West End Ave; adult/child $6/4; 9am-4:30pm Tue-Sat, plus Sun in summer) Yes, that is indeed a reproduction Athenian parthenon sitting in Centennial Park .

Parks Directory of the United States by Darren L. Smith, Kay Gill

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Asilomar, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donner party, El Camino Real, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hernando de Soto, indoor plumbing, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Southern State Parkway, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

Facilities: Rest rooms, picnic area, visitor center (u), museum/exhibit. Entrance fee required. Activities: Guided tour, hiking. Special Features: This 54-room palatial mansion is a fine example of homes built by 19th-century millionaires. This particular home was constructed by Frederick W. Vanderbilt, a grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt. ★357★ VIRGIN ISLANDS CORAL REEF NATIONAL MONUMENT c/o Virgin Islands National Park 1300 Cruz Bay Creek Saint John, VI 00830 Web: www.nps.gov/vicr/ Phone: 340-776-6201 Size: 13,893 acres. History: January 31, 2001. Location: In the submerged lands within the three-mile belt off the island of St.

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.: PA 188 Continental Congress: GA 2065 Continental Divide: CO 301, 456; MT 153; NM 1215 Continental Divide National Scenic Trail: CO 456, 1055; ID 549; MD 5071; MN 2935; MT 458, 501; WY 464, 558 Conway (James Sevier): AR 1458 Cook Inlet: AK 1123 Cook (James): HI 2133; NE 6 Coolidge Museum Village: VT 4454 Copper history: MI 1188 Copper mining: MI 207 Copper Peak Ski Flying Hill: MI 538 Copper Ridge Dinosaur Trackway: UT 1249 Copper River Delta State Critical Habitat: AK 1318, 1321 Copperas Beds: IA 2381 Coral Pink Sand Dunes: UT 4402 Coral reefs: AS 257; CA 1630; FL 32, 1080, 1972, 2044; HI 793, 938, 1088, 2120, 2122; TX 1081; VI 659 Cordell Bank: CA 1078 Cordell Hull: TN 4239 Cornelius Vanderbilt: NY 354 Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge: NH 1206 Coronado (Francisco Vasquez de): AZ 80, 1126 Cossatot Falls: AR 1459 Coteau des Prairies: SD 4217 Cotton Museum: MS 2953 Coulees: WA 1262 Country music: KY 1177 Coupeville: WA 98 Crabtree Falls: NC 1257 Cradle of Forestry in America: NC 1220 Craig House: NJ 3306 Craighead Caverns: TN 1247 Cranberry Bog: OH 3674 Cranberry Glades Botanical Area: WV 1268 Cranberry Islands: ME 1181 Cranberry Wilderness: WV 1268 Cranbrook Educational Community: MI 1190 Crane and Big Oak Flat: CA 1139 Crane Prairie Reservoir: OR 1230 Crater Lake: OR 82, 572 Craters of the Moon: ID 83 Crazy Horse Monument: SD 1246 Creek Confederacy: GA 271 Creek Nation: OK 3780 Creole Culture: LA 47, 1097 Creole Nature Trail: LA 1180 Crockett (Davy): TN 4243 Crockett (Elizabeth): TX 4286 Crook (George): AZ 1431 Crooked Wild and Scenic River: OR 588 Crosslake Historical Society Museum and Historic Log Village: MN 1197 Crow Creek Indian Reservation: SD 1245 Crow Indians: MT 31, 3069 Crowder (Enoch H.): MO 2990 Crowley (Benjamin): AR 1461 Crown Point: OR 477 Crystal Lake: CO 86 Cultus Lakes: OR 1230 Cumberland Falls: KY 483 Cumberland Gap: KY 1179 Cumberland Island: GA 85 Cumberland Presbyterian Church: TN 4259 Cumberland River: TN 29 Cunningham Falls: MD 2611 Cunot Falls: IN 2333 Custer Battlefield National Cemetery: MT 225 Custer (George A.): MT 225; ND 3638; OK 363 Custis-Lee Mansion: VA 19 Cuyahoga River: OH 87 Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad: OH 1107 Cyclorama: GA 4806 Cypress Park: CA 1134 D Dade (Francis L.): FL 1926 Dalles of the Croix: WI 4735 Daniel Boone: KY 84, 2463, 2464, 2476, 2507 Daniel Chester French: DC 224; MA 242 Daniel Dunklin: MO 3002 Daniel Freeman: NE 181 Daniel M.

pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

Browsing the bookshelf in the back bedroom, he had consumed every issue of the Progressive Grocer and every single copy of the Daily Nebraskan that had been edited by his father, and worked his way like a boll weevil through all fifteen years of the Reader’s Digest that Ernest had accumulated. This bookcase also held a series of small biographies, many of them on business leaders. Since a young age Warren had studied the lives of men like Jay Cooke, Daniel Drew, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. Some of these books he read and reread. One of them was special—not a biography but a paperback written by former salesman Dale Carnegie,8 enticingly titled How to Win Friends and Influence People. He had discovered it at age eight or nine.

pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

The fact that a well-functioning railway now existed through Panama did not dent enthusiasm for a canal taking a completely different route. Nicaragua did seem to make good sense, and on the decision to go for Panama turns not just the future history of Central America but that of the United States as a world power. The wealthy American Cornelius Vanderbilt had it in mind to build a Nicaraguan canal in 1851, but he could not raise sufficient capital. A quarter of a century later the US government received a report that insisted Nicaragua was the only suitable route, and Nicaragua, not Panama, became the agreed way forward.21 This left the Panama route available to interlopers, with the French at the head of the queue, inspired by de Lesseps’s rhetoric and his sense that anything was possible – he even thought it should be possible to flood the Sahara by creating a channel through Tunisia.22 With the Americans still talking of Nicaragua but not actually doing anything, the French were able to send their own explorers into Panama in 1876, led by the youthful Lucien Napoleon Bonaparte Wyse, a relative of the French emperors.