August 24, 2005 – Kismet in the 1970s

August 24, 2005 – Kismet in the 1970s

One of the great perks of working for Xerox Corp. back in the early 1970s was their benefits package, which included compensation for work related college courses. I took advantage of their generosity by enrolling at the University of Santa Clara Master’s Program in Econometrics. Xerox's generosity was most obvious in its funding of the Palo Alto Research Center or Xerox PARC, which would be the source for the graphical user interface, the Ethernet, many innovations in graphics such as BITblt for rapid image manipulation, and the list goes on.

I entered the night school master’s program at U of Santa Clara in the fall of 1975, the class was just over a dozen students in size, several from Africa, a couple for South America, and couple from Asia, the rest of us from high tech companies in Silicon Valley. There were four courses that comprised the heart of the program. Econometrics 1 through 4. I would need to take the Calculus and Analytic Geometry course I had neglected during my undergraduate education. This I began at the San Jose City College, a junior college on Moorpark Avenue above and on the western side of Interstate 280 between Bascom and Leigh Avenues. In the meantime, I would take the reading courses required in the Santa Clara program and plan my attack on the math heavy core courses, once I had mastered the Calculus.

I won’t bore you with the excruciating details of economics but it’s the one discipline that examines the impact of greed and avarice that makes all our money-based and barter-based transactions work. Those practicing the dismal science include Thomas Robert Malthus—who gave it its gloomy epithet, Thosten Veblin—who made "conspicuous consumption" part of our language, John Maynard Keynes—who influenced Franklyn Roosevelt to spend his way out of the Great Depression, and Milton Friedman who brought “laissez-faire” economics back in vogue. These thinkers among many others were attempting to build a model of the economy to help better predict its behavior. The course in Econometrics was the latest attempt at the mathematical model.

The problem that economist have had building an accurate model is a lack of good data. Keynes attempted to collect this data manually, having a group of workers follow the spending pattern of a representative sample of consumers. Governments worldwide have always collected data. In the 20th Century, they began making the data more widely available, the most obvious being the census performed every decade—though how accurate can that be in a highly mobile society, which the U.S. and Europeans were becoming after the Second World War. Then there were the other statistics the government collected and distributed, consumer confidence, new housing starts, automobile production, inflation, unemployment and the list goes on. As we enter the 21st Century, this data is becoming better and more abundant thanks to the Internet. Manufacturers and services providers know more about the demographics of this nation than has ever been known in the past. And the degree of their understanding of individual behavior is becoming frighteningly Orwellian—but that’s another story.

Why was I taking the course considering my position as a marketing guy at a high tech company? I asked myself that question on many occasions and the obvious answers were “to get a better job… But that didn’t wash because I lacked the experience practicing the discipline, that someone my age should have in combination with the degree to qualify for the higher salary. If I were a rocket scientist that experience would be a secondary consideration, but that wasn’t the case. Another answer that better described my motives was that I still longed for the academic life, the discipline of working toward comprehending a foreign concept and in the process better understanding the subject being studied as well as understanding the bounds of my own personal ability.

I pursued my course of study through the fall of 1975 and throughout 1976, taking everything except those four econometric courses. When the fall of 1976 arrived, I had to dive in and begin building that model. I hung in for the better half of the semester but somewhere along the way, I got lost in the advanced math. In the past, I could just pour more time and extra effort into grasping the mathematical concepts, but no amount of extra help or tutoring was going to catch me up to the rest of the class. I dropped the course promising to resume it again in the Spring and in the meantime try to grasp as much of it as I could on my own and with the help of tutors and a tolerant professor who put up with my continuous stream of requests for extra help during his office hours.

I came to realize that my reluctance to grapple with math concepts in high school and in my undergraduate years was now preventing me from grasping something I really wanted to master. I’ve come to realize over time that your choices define whom you are. I had made my choices early in life and there was no way to change them now. I wrestled with the implications of having to give up on a task I’d undertaken. I was spared all the self-inflicted conflict by a completely unexpected turn of events: the offer of a job as West Coast Editor for Computer Design Magazine. At that one fork in the road of my life, I was given the change in an occupation I was seeking in the Master’s program and it would take full advantage of all the experience I had amassed in the Navy and all my previous employers. And it would give me a chance to write for an audience. I felt like the characters in a Greek play when some Olympian god intercedes to change the life of some mere mortal on earth: Kismet.