Fascinating account of a Gilded Age titan much worse known than Carnegie.

His charming but scheming bigamist wandering con-artist father reminds me of my old observation that a lot of very successful people seem to be high but not *too* high on the psychopathy continuum and have had difficult or abusive childhoods; while we tend to think of psychopathy as all negative, aspects of it, like its heritability, are consistent with it being a lifecycle strategy under balancing selection, indicating advantages to the social skills, fearlessness etc. The benign end of psychopathy may give us great leaders and businessmen and heroes like firefighters.

Rockefeller's puritanism and obsession with accounting & ledgers renders his early life unpromising. I suspect Rockefeller may've been a bit influenced by Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. Although the virtues of accounting no longer appeal quite as much - for example, one thing Rockefeller was famous for later on was giving children shiny new dimes and then lecturing them about the virtues of savings and how a dime was the annual interest on a dollar in a savings account, 10%. This is no longer quite as compelling today when your bank's annual CD pays 0.5% or less, which hardly even covers your time in filling out paperwork.

This clerkish fixation on details and pennies makes his subsequent ability, after some modest success in trading & transporting goods, to risk his entire fortune and career going deeply into debt on visionary speculation in the nascent Pennsylvania oil fields all the more extraordinary and inexplicable to me. How did he do it? How did he know that oil wasn't some oddity but would be one of the defining resources of the 1800s-2000s? Rockefeller, in Chernow's telling, keeps his own counsel. I am left to wonder if it is another selection effect and what I've noted elsewhere, like my review of The Media Lab: we often assume millionaires and billionaires must have deep wisdom ("if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"), when they may actually be deeply irrational, risk-seeking, and little more than lottery winners of timing and chance. (Several competitors to Rockefeller could easily have taken his place.)

Having somehow seen the future and figured out that the refineries, sitting squarely in the middle between the raw oil of the Pennsylvania derricks and the end product of refined kerosene sitting in cans in customers' homes after being transported on railroad to their city, were the strategic point, he began buying up the Cleveland refineries to play off and balance the railroads (who otherwise would be propelled into ruinous competition) against his own cashflow needs and pipelines and the oil fields' smalltimers. (It all sounds like it would make a great board game in the German vein where players compete to control geographical routes of railroads/pipelines/refineries and cooperate until the exact right moment to stab another player in the back and take them over. I checked but while there are 2 or 3 existing oil-themed board games, they either are about off-shore drilling or take a much more abstracted macroeconomics point of view.)

Rockefeller's second career as a philanthropist is equally interesting and Chernow gives it plenty of space. it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Rockefeller was one of the first Effective Altruists, in caring deeply that his money was spent as carefully and sustainably as possible. Indeed, some of his favored projects like the deworming of the American South have echoes in modern EA projects - deworming being a particular focus of GiveWell! Rockefeller was a complex man trying to be simple: he knew many of the criticisms of him were true but tried to delude himself to the end; he was a devout Baptist, who was intelligent and worldly enough to see the problems there and how the wicked flourished; he loved homeopathy, but his funding of medical research and the Flexner Report would kill the last shreds of legitimacy it had.

The philanthropy transitions into an account of Rockefeller Junior, as he is entrusted with it, who emerges as diligent and effective, but not the man his father was. Senior attempted to replicate his own upbringing without the abusiveness, but as so often in dynasties, the founder's extreme qualities do not fully carry over to his offspring, who regress to the mean. The lesson I take away from Senior's disappointing offspring (variously mediocre, wastrel, neurotic, or gullible) is that if you want to build a family empire, you must have a lot of offspring so the maximum may be adequate, and also be willing to go outside direct descent or even adopt outsiders (eg the Romans or Japanese); this is the only way to keep a family business going for centuries.