Hoover believed private capital should take care of itself. It was FDR who supported the banks, launched the FDIC, etc. Homework was not among the more fundamental causes of the suicides, though parents and sometimes students themselves cited the excessive homework.

Of course Hoover made some gestures toward helping the banks but though his attempts were sincere they fell short of what was needed. FDR went much further.

Regarding Palo Alto in general: Like the digital age itself, the positives far outweigh the negatives, which leaves Harris’ book more partisan than informative. Yet the negatives certainly exist. For the digital age: Those born during the age don’t realize what we’ve lost—not everything needs to be digitalized, creating all the hoops and booby traps for online ticket buyers (just print the tickets), long kiosk lines at events in lieu of fast cash transactions, and vastly more important, the damage social media is doing to lives and democracy itself.

"When you say Palo Alto is dealing with its eugenics past and renaming a couple of schools and you go online and you see tech leadership out there talking about all sort of the same kinds of eugenics ideas that we had from Shockley — those people who are absolutely still convinced about natural hierarchy. And if you get two drinks in them and get them off the record, apparently they have a lot of stuff to say about the order of races that still sounds a lot like they did 100 years ago."

Really? Who? Inquiring minds want to know. And why wasn't he asked?

I suggest that people read the review of this book published in the New York Times Book Review (2/14/23). The rather scathing review, written by well known local writer Gary Kamiya, ends with the following line ( in reference to the author) "the intellectual product he rolls out is more like Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos than Apple’s iPhone."

Self-loathing is the worst.

@Wyn there in b the most lowest form of a win or loss system of belief. Whether he (Harris) b calling the kettle black, ma and pa . It’s blackened near non repair. Let me say it again, and again. Run a muck capitalism at the cost of a human life is not a democratic value. It’s slavery at its bassist degree. Back to the future 2 Centuries ago. We trade low wage workers every day every minute on the open market. What has resulted ? Tens of thousands of humans on our streets fighting the grain of gain to remain a part and equal to the wealth force subjecting a personal stock holdings. Just because slavery ended does not equate the end to labor & very low wage ownership. The scale just shifted from human ownership to human wage ownership . Now that data algorithms and robotics are replacing the human &’“missing” bottom does not excuse. Eugenics v robotics — what’s the difference? A: Human existence to jobs and productivity. Seriously: put 172,ooo robots out on the streets of California. See how far the machine withstands a lite sprinkle without a mechanism in place for repair. Human blasphemy!

Let’s get MTV to reboot the “The Real World” as an post techno apocalyptic world where Stanford grads are rooming w robots and social media data driven algorithms. Who’s doing the dirty stacked up dishes? Swishing out the toilet? The lowly desperate SU students trying keep a Palo Alto roof over their head. Hello the new romance:?I have a vaulted ceiling (heat trap) home, do u?? While the robot arms & redirects to uploads, downloads, updates, out of date spyware firewalls...”Warning Will Robinson” have yet to see it all falling down.

@CheesyGuy Like the abolishment of zero period, robotics might be best served as a “zero period”, and reduced to an elective course 4 PAUSD students. Enhance the objective of human existence and not as a value of higher non human replicant replacement. After all, there are required community service hours. Yet, how does such requirement equate for a teen in these times? When in fact the teen feels shell shocked at our Calif state’s ineptitude to home misery and grieved humans. Ill prepared youth are at an utter loss of how to help in as many hours as tge algorithm irrationally, solves in nano seconds. The suspension of different s belief is brief in flux. There it will remain until the adults in the room GIT. In the meantime, Palo Alto has no skateboard shop, or a camera shop or a decent second hand shop or really any place a 15/16/17 year old teen can blow off teen steam in a positive , adult directional way. They spend 6/7 hours at a public school campus keeping up w their desk partner, while patents / guardians at home and work tell tales of grandiose success’. I feel very sad for our youth in this PA environment. What a waste of a great, evolving power of resource. Grand shame. PS Robotic are more highly regarded than a human life. And we are perplexed why our state can’t solve the “homeless” crisis. In WWll few Americans accepted the truth about Europe’s “death” camps until we “won” then saw from ground trooping, the result of our lack of an earlier
Cry for intervention ! So @CheesyGuy. How to connect the dire unhoused need to capitulate greed and make better? Action yes speak louder than dollars, intervention louder than words. Help or 911 are nebulous and just an echo chamber of nothing.

Hard to unravel these rants, but yes wealth disparity is a major problem, though it’s roots go way beyond Silicon Valley (the innovations of which outweigh its role in the ill effects), while climate, the nuclear threat (especially false alarms and its potential for terrorism), the threat of AI (which extends far beyond unemployment), and political polarization (disparity of wealth figuring largely in the latter) loom far larger. With every advance come negative effects. The effects subside and the advances remain. Yet, yes, we may have reached a point where history no longer applies.

I should be clear that the problems listed by “native to the bay” are real, though individual CEOs rather than “Palo Alto” as such are the current culprits.

Re: Gary Kamiya's dismissive closing comment "the intellectual product he (Harris)rolls out is more like Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos than Apple’s iPhone." This assessment lost its steam when a major part of Kamiya's evidence of Harris's supposed lack of credibility drew this NYT correction on Feb. 17: "An earlier version of this review inaccurately assessed the book’s description of California’s ban on people of Japanese heritage. The book’s assertion that artists of Japanese heritage were at one point banned from the state is true."

This book is worth reading. You might not like his Marxist analytical framework, but if you're interested in the history of California, Capitalism and the World (and Palo Alto) you’ll benefit from his careful research as you match it up with your own understanding of the world.

Does he discuss how Hoover was instrumental in organizing and implementing the world's first international food aid programs, such as the Russian Famine Relief Act of late 1921? He helped save millions of people from starvation, and paved the way for people like Bono and Sean Penn to get in on the act.

TimR,

Yes, he gives a lot of information about that part of his life, along with many other details I had not discovered in my own reading about him and the early days of Stanford.

Jerry Underdal, thanks, that's good to know. Because in high school and even college history, basically all I learned about him was "Hoover flags," and how his callous indifference to human suffering made the Great Depression even worse. It wasn't until many years later I learned a little more about the food aid, which is very interesting indeed.

Can’t wait to read it!

I am trying very hard to read this book, but the experience is like being the ball in a pinball machine.

The author will start a thread, find a new butterfly in it, chase that butterfly until he finds a new one, then carom off on that new romp. Characters will abruptly appear out of nowhere, strut and fret their minute on the page, then disappear with the reader having no clue about their relevance.

It sorely needs a complete rework by a ruthless editor. If you must read it before that happens, have Dramamine within easy reach.

On the upside, the grammar is largely OK.