Obituaries are not a regular part of our newsletter. In fact, this is our very first page highlighting recent obituaries. These three people are very different but they each made unique contributions to our world.
Amnon Weinstein’s father, a Jew, escaped to British-run Palestine just before World War II. The family was lucky but not so were many of their relatives, who didn’t survive. When Weinstein asked his mother about this, she showed him pictures of the Ponary Forest, near Vilnius in then-Poland, where the Nazis killed 100,000 people, mostly Jews.
Amnon followed his father into the business of making and repairing violins. In the 1980s, a man brought in a badly damaged violin which he said his grandfather played walking to and from the gas chambers at Auschwitz alongside those selected to die.
After repairing the instrument Amnon went on to save and repair hundreds of Holocaust era violins. This led to a project, Violins of Hope, where professional musicians using his instruments played concerts across Europe and America. Earlier, the violins had witnessed indefensible death and sadness. Now these restored instruments symbolize a message of victory and hope. Amnon Weinstein lived to 84, dying on March 4, 2024.
Walter Shawlee II, the creator of the website, “The Slide Rule Universe,” was dubbed Mr. Slide Rule by his many followers. He died September 4, 2023.
Walter Shawlee was a college dropout and a tinkerer/engineer who started and ran a small, successful aviation communications firm. Then in the 1990s he rediscovered an old slide rule which, as a teenager, he had saved up all summer to buy. This reignited a passion for everything slide rule and led to a full time career selling, repairing, and reporting on the world of a bygone device. He bought slide rules everywhere and some observers claimed he “cornered” the world market. At his death there were over 1,000 slide rules on his dining room table.
Slide rules were replaced by electronic calculators in the 1970s, but many engineers still feel very nostalgic for the analog calculator. As Joe Pasquale, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of California San Diego notes, with electronic calculators you blindly accept the results on the screen. You lose your number sense. Slide rules require you to be actively involved in every step of your calculation. Mr. Shawlee was 73 years old.
Michael C. Jensen, one of the most influential and divisive economists of his generation, died on April 2. Jensen grew up in Rochester, Minnesota in a family that struggled with finances. After graduating from Macalester College, he completed his PhD at the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of Rochester before becoming a professor at Harvard Business School.
In the 1960s executives were taught that companies should have a social conscience. In 1970 Milton Friedman countered by arguing that the sole mission of a corporation was to produce profits. Professor Jensen, a free market advocate like Friedman, took this one step further, writing that to better align corporate executives with shareholders you needed to add incentives. Chief among these were stock options and the use of golden parachutes, the latter ensured that executives didn’t worry about losing their jobs in a takeover.
Later in his career Jensen, who was one of the most influential professors at Harvard in the 1990s, came to rue many of his proposals. He claimed stock options had become “managerial heroin” and that corporate incentives in general had spiraled out of control. Professor Jensen was 84 years old.
