Some tidbits

See A French Sneaker Maker Grapples With How to Bring Production Home: Salomon has built a new shoe factory in France. Now it must also build a footwear supply chain in a country without one. by Trefor Moss of The WSJ. Excerpt:

"The company is banking on the shoe’s local, sustainable back story being a strong selling point"

See Fiction: ‘Trust’ by Hernan Diaz: Who was financier Andrew Bevel, and how did he successfully short the Crash of 1929? by Sam Sacks of The WSJ. He reviews the book Trust by Herman Diaz. Excerpt:

"Money may be a fiction, but it can be used to “bend and align reality”—that is to say, it’s a fiction that those with the right technique can alchemically transform into facts, like base metal into gold."

See ‘Hidden Games’ Review: Secret Equations: How game theory explains conspicuous consumption, royal coronations, rap lyrics, trench warfare—and more. by Matthew Hutson. He reviews the book Hidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior by Moshe Hoffman. Excerpt: 

"Higher-order beliefs also explain indirect speech (“Would you like to come up for coffee?”), which enables plausible deniability. And symbolism. “Symbolic gestures are puzzling,” Messrs. Hoffman and Yoeli write, “because things that don’t matter matter: we put enormous weight on mere words like I’m sorry and I love you and spare no expense on rituals, ceremonies, and elaborate displays that don’t convey any new information.” Public apologies and royal coronations both enable coordination, harmonizing everyone on who’s in debt or service to whom."

See ‘Narrative Economics’ Review: Costly Tales We Tell Ourselves Like songs you can’t get out of your head, familiar story lines about the economy elicit thoughts and emotions; they also impel action. by James Grant. He reviews the book Narrative Economics by Nobel Prize Winning Economist Robert Shiller. Excerpts:

"A Nobel laureate, Yale economics professor and caller-out of the millennial-era bubbles in houses and dot-com equities, Mr. Shiller now entreats his fellow economists to make room for “narratives” in their otherwise quantitatively focused minds. As Mr. Shiller defines them, narratives are contagious stories. Like the songs you can’t get out of your head, they elicit thoughts and emotions. But unlike musical earworms, they also impel action." 

"Mr. Shiller wants not only to identify the stories we live by (or at least spend, hire and invest by) but also to present “the beginnings of a new theory of economic change.” Trying to understand big economic events by studying the data alone, he observes, “is like trying to understand a religious awakening by looking at the cost of printing religious tracts.”"

The Battle of Stalingrad Meets "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"

In the movie "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" people wrongly believed that Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart's) character killed the outlaw Liberty Valance when it was actually John Wayne's character. This propelled a distinguished political career for Stoddard after he started out as a frontier lawyer in the old west.

Near the end of the movie, after Stoddard has told the real story to a reporter named Scott, we get the following exchange:

Ransom Stoddard: You're not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?

Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

I thought of this while reading a review of the book The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Heart of the Greatest Battle of World War II by Iain MacGregor in today's WSJ. The review was by Andrew Nagorski. See Click here to read it. Excerpts: 

"Mr. MacGregor points out that “the mythologizing of the struggle for Stalin’s city can sometimes distort the true history, which in itself is unambiguously heroic.”"

"what actually happened was never enough for Soviet propagandists: they felt compelled to spin an unabashedly heroic narrative that overlooks inconvenient truths. This valuable addition to the body of work about Stalingrad goes a long way toward righting the balance between myth and reality.

Mr. MacGregor vividly describes the frantic Soviet efforts to beat back Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army as it reached the city. House-to-house, factory-to-factory fighting became the order of the day, and Gen. Vasily Chuikov, the commander of the 62nd Army, quickly adopted the tactic of “hugging the enemy,” positioning his troops as close as possible to the Germans, then striking with small mobile groups.

To illustrate his point about the mix of fact and fiction, Mr. MacGregor zeroes in on one of Stalingrad’s most legendary episodes: the Red Army’s push to take control of a strategic building code named “The Lighthouse.” In the official version, Sgt. Yakov Pavlov led a small band of men, representing a symbolic mix of Soviet nationalities, as they charged into the house and wiped out its German occupants. Subsequently, “Pavlov’s House,” as it became known, was hailed by the 62nd Army’s newspaper as “a symbol of the heroic struggle of all defenders of Stalingrad.”

Investigating these events, Mr. MacGregor combed the records and interviewed Pavlov’s son and Chuikov’s grandson. While he does not doubt Pavlov was a fierce combatant, he discovered contradictory evidence about who really took command of the lighthouse—and whether the legend of the battle comes close to matching what really happened. He concludes that “the imagined story line was deemed more important than the actual truth.”"