In the official Republican response to tonight's State of the Union address, Representative Paul Ryan stated, "Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness, and wise consumer choices has never worked – and it won't work now."
Actually, the microprocessor and the internet are two technologies that developed specifically because of government sponsorship. In the early 1960s, the US military bought large numbers of nascent microprocessors at prices designed to stimulate further development of the technology, in effect creating an artificial market to prop up the technology until it got a foothold in the broader commercial market. Without that assistance, the US wouldn't have become the center of microprocessor manufacturing that we became: no Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Apple... and the personal computer revolution would have come later and, probably, somewhere else. The PC revolution created countless jobs and became a new infrastructure-level productivity enhancer that increased US competitiveness and, I think, pulled us out of the early '80s recession.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is famously responsible for the development of the internet in the 1970s, which blossomed 20 years later and created another infrastructure-level increase in productivity and competitiveness. Again, I think that technology pulled us out of the recession in the early 1990s.
Today, there's no similar technology emerging from the labs, ready to conquer the world and make us all more productive, create millions of new jobs, etc. If Ronald Reagan hadn't pulled the plug on government-sponsored technology programs, particularly in environmental technologies, we might have such a new technology ready to create jobs and maintain our competitiveness. Lacking such a technology, we're left to compete with few advantages in a world full of lower cost producers, some of whom also have more natural resources. Republican demonizing of industrial policy has basically disarmed us economically.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
Missing the Points
The current national dialog about and coverage of the recent shootings in Tucson has left out some points that I think are important. In no particular order:
1. The controversy over gun control ignores the fact that when guns are readily available, they're readily available to mentally ill people too. A short list of victims besides those in Tucson includes Ronald Reagan and Jim Brady, John Lennon, students at Virginia Tech and Columbine, and Darrell Abbott, one of the best and most underrated (in my view) electric guitar players in the world.
2. Many are expressing hope that the shootings in Tucson will wake people up to the destructive, hyperbolic rhetoric that poisons our political process. But we had a far worse incident, the terrorist attack against the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, that killed 168 people and was directly precipitated by right wing rhetoric about "jack booted government thugs" from J. Gordon Liddy and other talk radio hosts. If that didn't do it, this won't either, particularly since the connection between rhetoric and action is far more tenuous in Tucson than it was in the Oklahoma City incident. Then, as now, those same right wing commentators are slinking away from the scene of the crime with their hands open saying, "It wasn't me." But in the case of Tucson, that's probably accurate, and soon we'll be back to business as usual, if we're not already.
3. Articles and commentary about the Tucson shootings and the toxic, hyperbolic rhetoric in our political discussion usually claim that such rhetoric comes from both sides, that the left is as guilty of inciting violence as the right is. Why doesn't anyone challenge this bromide? Throughout the Clinton and Obama administrations, right wing commentators have made claims of tyranny, socialism, and even murder (completely ignoring that both administrations were moderate by almost any objective measure). These commentators included the religious, political, and thought leaders of the Republican party: Gingrich, Limbaugh, Beck, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Sarah Palin. When did any of the Democratic equivalents of these people ever say anything equivalent about a Republican politician? When did Nancy Pelosi call Bush a Fascist and compare him to Hitler? When did Harry Reid ever mention "second amendment remedies" in reference to a political opponent? When did Jon Stewart, Arianna Huffington, or Bill Maher ever urge violent revolution against the Republican administration? And when did a Democratic member of Congress ever call the President a liar during a State of the Union address? The false equivalence of rhetoric between the left and right shouldn't go unchallenged.
4. Speaking of the right wing vendetta against Obama and the lies that Fox News and others like it continue to manufacture, why doesn't anyone remind all these so-called Christians that one of the Ten Commandments prohibits bearing false witness against your neighbor? Is it because all these so-called Christians don't actually, um, know what the Ten Commandments actually are?
5. In all the controversy over Sarah Palin's use of the phrase "blood libel" in reference to criticism of her own level of rhetoric and her use of gun sights to target swing districts, no one seemed to notice that she recast legitimate criticism of rhetoric that incites violence against liberals as itself a kind of hate speech against conservatives. How can THAT go unchallenged?
6. Speaking of Palin, her video response to that criticism continued the conservative tradition of casting themselves as victims. In fact, several conservative commentators have claimed that they, in fact, were the true victims of this event, because people are starting to (albeit timidly) criticize them. Hasn't anyone noticed a pattern here? Christians are continually persecuted in this country (even though they're by far the majority, every US president has been a practicing Christian, and they control the political agendas at every level of government). Furthermore, the anti-abortion crusade is the equivalent of the equal rights movement, and the taxes that pay for our roads and public services are tyrannical impositions of an oppressive government. How much longer can the dominant US political movement of modern times continue to claim the advantages of oppression and persecution?
1. The controversy over gun control ignores the fact that when guns are readily available, they're readily available to mentally ill people too. A short list of victims besides those in Tucson includes Ronald Reagan and Jim Brady, John Lennon, students at Virginia Tech and Columbine, and Darrell Abbott, one of the best and most underrated (in my view) electric guitar players in the world.
2. Many are expressing hope that the shootings in Tucson will wake people up to the destructive, hyperbolic rhetoric that poisons our political process. But we had a far worse incident, the terrorist attack against the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, that killed 168 people and was directly precipitated by right wing rhetoric about "jack booted government thugs" from J. Gordon Liddy and other talk radio hosts. If that didn't do it, this won't either, particularly since the connection between rhetoric and action is far more tenuous in Tucson than it was in the Oklahoma City incident. Then, as now, those same right wing commentators are slinking away from the scene of the crime with their hands open saying, "It wasn't me." But in the case of Tucson, that's probably accurate, and soon we'll be back to business as usual, if we're not already.
3. Articles and commentary about the Tucson shootings and the toxic, hyperbolic rhetoric in our political discussion usually claim that such rhetoric comes from both sides, that the left is as guilty of inciting violence as the right is. Why doesn't anyone challenge this bromide? Throughout the Clinton and Obama administrations, right wing commentators have made claims of tyranny, socialism, and even murder (completely ignoring that both administrations were moderate by almost any objective measure). These commentators included the religious, political, and thought leaders of the Republican party: Gingrich, Limbaugh, Beck, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Sarah Palin. When did any of the Democratic equivalents of these people ever say anything equivalent about a Republican politician? When did Nancy Pelosi call Bush a Fascist and compare him to Hitler? When did Harry Reid ever mention "second amendment remedies" in reference to a political opponent? When did Jon Stewart, Arianna Huffington, or Bill Maher ever urge violent revolution against the Republican administration? And when did a Democratic member of Congress ever call the President a liar during a State of the Union address? The false equivalence of rhetoric between the left and right shouldn't go unchallenged.
4. Speaking of the right wing vendetta against Obama and the lies that Fox News and others like it continue to manufacture, why doesn't anyone remind all these so-called Christians that one of the Ten Commandments prohibits bearing false witness against your neighbor? Is it because all these so-called Christians don't actually, um, know what the Ten Commandments actually are?
5. In all the controversy over Sarah Palin's use of the phrase "blood libel" in reference to criticism of her own level of rhetoric and her use of gun sights to target swing districts, no one seemed to notice that she recast legitimate criticism of rhetoric that incites violence against liberals as itself a kind of hate speech against conservatives. How can THAT go unchallenged?
6. Speaking of Palin, her video response to that criticism continued the conservative tradition of casting themselves as victims. In fact, several conservative commentators have claimed that they, in fact, were the true victims of this event, because people are starting to (albeit timidly) criticize them. Hasn't anyone noticed a pattern here? Christians are continually persecuted in this country (even though they're by far the majority, every US president has been a practicing Christian, and they control the political agendas at every level of government). Furthermore, the anti-abortion crusade is the equivalent of the equal rights movement, and the taxes that pay for our roads and public services are tyrannical impositions of an oppressive government. How much longer can the dominant US political movement of modern times continue to claim the advantages of oppression and persecution?
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
What's Wrong With America....
...is that the people who are obsessed with the news should listen to some music, and the people who just listen to music should pay some attention to the news.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Christians Behaving Badly
I'm usually not very interested in celebrity news, but Mel Gibson's recent rantings made me wonder about something. Let me illustrate:
- My wife had her rental car damaged in a parking lot in Minnesota by the wife of a professor of religious studies at a Lutheran college there. When the car rental company demanded compensation for the damage from my wife, she referred them to the woman who caused it. She and her husband initially denied they were responsible, then avoided phone calls from both the company and from my wife until my wife finally threatened them with legal action.
- A former neighbor sold a house on our street with a septic system that was on the verge of failing. The symptoms were clear but the former neighbor failed to disclose the problem, leaving the new owners with an unexpected $20,000 bill. The former neighbors claim to be devout Christians.
- Need I mention Catholic priests?
You would think that people who publicly proclaim their faith would feel some responsibility to live up to the values of that faith, but in some cases it seems the opposite is true. Why is that? Do some Christians feel that, because they're essentially good and moral people, anything unethical they do is OK because they're still good people underneath? Or does the weekly trek to church relieve them of their sins so they can pile more on during the week? Does bad behavior in the secular world not count for much in the spiritual world?
Some right wing Christians, including my mom, seem to think that all morality stems from religion, so atheists can't be trusted because they lack a moral foundation. Like many things, I think this notion is supported more by faith than by evidence.
- My wife had her rental car damaged in a parking lot in Minnesota by the wife of a professor of religious studies at a Lutheran college there. When the car rental company demanded compensation for the damage from my wife, she referred them to the woman who caused it. She and her husband initially denied they were responsible, then avoided phone calls from both the company and from my wife until my wife finally threatened them with legal action.
- A former neighbor sold a house on our street with a septic system that was on the verge of failing. The symptoms were clear but the former neighbor failed to disclose the problem, leaving the new owners with an unexpected $20,000 bill. The former neighbors claim to be devout Christians.
- Need I mention Catholic priests?
You would think that people who publicly proclaim their faith would feel some responsibility to live up to the values of that faith, but in some cases it seems the opposite is true. Why is that? Do some Christians feel that, because they're essentially good and moral people, anything unethical they do is OK because they're still good people underneath? Or does the weekly trek to church relieve them of their sins so they can pile more on during the week? Does bad behavior in the secular world not count for much in the spiritual world?
Some right wing Christians, including my mom, seem to think that all morality stems from religion, so atheists can't be trusted because they lack a moral foundation. Like many things, I think this notion is supported more by faith than by evidence.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Dear Facebook:
I recently got an email from a Facebook member who I must know from somewhere, with a bunch of recommendations from you of other people I might know. I was curious about how you knew so many people I've encountered in my life, particularly since there wasn't much in common between them: some personal and some business, some here and some from my previous home... I wondered how you knew. IP addresses? Mining public data bases?
So I did a quick Google search and found several hundred posts on numerous forums from Facebook members who were wondering the same thing: how do you know? How do you dredge up someone that a person met in a bar ten years ago and offer them as a friend recommendation? Or an ex-husband, or a stalker? How do you offer a forty year old guy as a potential friend for a sixteen year old girl?
But here's the thing, Facebook: I'm not on you. I'm not a Facebook member, and I have no interest in becoming one. So while your own members find this, let's generously call it "prescience", somewhat creepy, getting a bunch of eerily accurate recommendations from you without having first opted in to your social network asylum is almost scary.
Based on my quick search, I suspect that what you're doing is suckering new members into uploading their address books so you can mine them for new customers. So let's say that Jay and Nancy both have my email address. As some point, then, I get an invitation email from you suggesting Jay and Nancy as potential friends. It may not matter to you that Jay is a psychotic sociopath who claims to be "electrosensitive", rants about radiation from cell phone towers, and has my email address because I once attended a community meeting about cell coverage. Or that Nancy is a consulting client who likes to keep her professional and personal relationships as separate as possible, and co-mingling them may put my professional relationship with her at risk. As far as you're concerned, if someone has my email address, that person is likely to be a potential friend.
Facebook, this is one of those cases where you can have too much of a good thing. When your marketing efforts start reaching past the fruitful fields of friendship into the murky swamp of indeterminate and potentially damaging connections, it suggests that your business model has run out of steam, that growth is at an end, that your valuation has probably passed its peak. Probably should have gone public a couple of years ago.
Sincerely yours,
You-know-who
So I did a quick Google search and found several hundred posts on numerous forums from Facebook members who were wondering the same thing: how do you know? How do you dredge up someone that a person met in a bar ten years ago and offer them as a friend recommendation? Or an ex-husband, or a stalker? How do you offer a forty year old guy as a potential friend for a sixteen year old girl?
But here's the thing, Facebook: I'm not on you. I'm not a Facebook member, and I have no interest in becoming one. So while your own members find this, let's generously call it "prescience", somewhat creepy, getting a bunch of eerily accurate recommendations from you without having first opted in to your social network asylum is almost scary.
Based on my quick search, I suspect that what you're doing is suckering new members into uploading their address books so you can mine them for new customers. So let's say that Jay and Nancy both have my email address. As some point, then, I get an invitation email from you suggesting Jay and Nancy as potential friends. It may not matter to you that Jay is a psychotic sociopath who claims to be "electrosensitive", rants about radiation from cell phone towers, and has my email address because I once attended a community meeting about cell coverage. Or that Nancy is a consulting client who likes to keep her professional and personal relationships as separate as possible, and co-mingling them may put my professional relationship with her at risk. As far as you're concerned, if someone has my email address, that person is likely to be a potential friend.
Facebook, this is one of those cases where you can have too much of a good thing. When your marketing efforts start reaching past the fruitful fields of friendship into the murky swamp of indeterminate and potentially damaging connections, it suggests that your business model has run out of steam, that growth is at an end, that your valuation has probably passed its peak. Probably should have gone public a couple of years ago.
Sincerely yours,
You-know-who
Sunday, July 4, 2010
How Ronald Reagan Killed America
The June 14/20 issue of Bloomberg Business Week has a summary of why several prominent economists and analysts who have been bearish through the past few decades (in some cases) are still bearish now. At the end is one exception: James Grant, publisher of "Grant's Interest Rate Observer". The article states: "'We observed this in the recessions of 1991 and 2001, which were meek and mild, and so were the corresponding recoveries.' The deep recession of the early 1980s, on the other hand, led to a spectacular recovery. Based on that, Grant believes the rebound from this recession will be job-rich and strong, a position he has stuck to for nine months now."
My intent here is not to pick on Grant, but rather to use this as an opportunity to point out that a lot of economic analysis seems to want to treat the economy like the weather: a complex system that is hard to predict, but that does exhibit historical patterns because it's self directed. This may be true of weather, which has relatively few inputs. But economies are not self-contained forces of nature, but rather complex systems that are tightly coupled to many influences: demographics, technology, politics, and so forth.
So let's take the "spectacular recovery" that followed the recession of the early 1980s. Many people would like to credit Ronald Reagan with that recovery. The analysis quoted above would like to treat it evidence that the deeper the recession, the stronger the rebound. But what else happened in the mid-1980s?
One thing that happened was the personal computer revolution, which kicked off a wave of infrastructure-level capital investment and yielded tremendous operating benefits in almost every industry that continue today. Surely that had something to do with this recovery? And perhaps the subsequent emergence of the internet, another infrastructure-level transition that required, again, tremendous investment as everyone from corporations to grandmothers built web sites, had something to do with the recovery in the 1990s?
I don't think it's merely coincidence that these massive technology advances and infrastructure-level transitions happened at about the same time these recoveries did. So I have to ask, what infrastructure-level technology is on the cusp of maturity today that will lead to a wave of investment and operating benefits over the next ten years?
Frankly, I can't think of one. And without one, I don't think we're going to see a recovery like we did in the 1980s and 1990s.
Where should we be looking for such an opportunity? Well, the government cultivated the nascent semiconductor industry in the 1960s that led to the computing revolution of the 1980s and beyond. The government cultivated the internet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and we started reaping the benefits twenty years later. So to find the maturing technology that will pull us out of the current recession, we should look to the 1980s.
One class of technologies that would fit the bill and was just getting off the ground at that time was renewable energy. At least, it was until Reagan killed government investment in renewable energy programs. Renewable energy is, like computing and the internet, and the national highway system, electrification, water, communications, and railroads before, an infrastructure-level technology that would require massive current investment and reap massive future rewards. Had Reagan not halted government investment in such technologies, we would probably now be on the verge of transitioning from fossil fuels to wind and solar. We might be burning our garbage for energy rather than burying it in landfills. We might not be intimately entangled in the Mideast and a target of terrorism. We might not have a uncontrollable oil well dumping untold amounts of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.
Instead, all of these are happening, and we have no long term strategy for solving these problems. For the foreseeable future, we'll be dependent on a finite and dwindling resource that pollutes our air and water, and that's largely controlled by entities who may not have our best interests at heart. As the world's biggest consumer of oil, we have the most to lose when it gets expensive and rare.
But perhaps more important than all of this is that, without another maturing infrastructure-level technology waiting in the wings to fuel the next wave of economic growth, we may not have a next wave for a long, long time. Without such a wave, there's nothing to stimulate growth except more borrowing. Without such a wave, there's no mechanism for organic job growth. And the one person most responsible for putting us in this position is Ronald Reagan. I predict that in thirty years or so, it will be widely recognized that he was the one who killed America.
My intent here is not to pick on Grant, but rather to use this as an opportunity to point out that a lot of economic analysis seems to want to treat the economy like the weather: a complex system that is hard to predict, but that does exhibit historical patterns because it's self directed. This may be true of weather, which has relatively few inputs. But economies are not self-contained forces of nature, but rather complex systems that are tightly coupled to many influences: demographics, technology, politics, and so forth.
So let's take the "spectacular recovery" that followed the recession of the early 1980s. Many people would like to credit Ronald Reagan with that recovery. The analysis quoted above would like to treat it evidence that the deeper the recession, the stronger the rebound. But what else happened in the mid-1980s?
One thing that happened was the personal computer revolution, which kicked off a wave of infrastructure-level capital investment and yielded tremendous operating benefits in almost every industry that continue today. Surely that had something to do with this recovery? And perhaps the subsequent emergence of the internet, another infrastructure-level transition that required, again, tremendous investment as everyone from corporations to grandmothers built web sites, had something to do with the recovery in the 1990s?
I don't think it's merely coincidence that these massive technology advances and infrastructure-level transitions happened at about the same time these recoveries did. So I have to ask, what infrastructure-level technology is on the cusp of maturity today that will lead to a wave of investment and operating benefits over the next ten years?
Frankly, I can't think of one. And without one, I don't think we're going to see a recovery like we did in the 1980s and 1990s.
Where should we be looking for such an opportunity? Well, the government cultivated the nascent semiconductor industry in the 1960s that led to the computing revolution of the 1980s and beyond. The government cultivated the internet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and we started reaping the benefits twenty years later. So to find the maturing technology that will pull us out of the current recession, we should look to the 1980s.
One class of technologies that would fit the bill and was just getting off the ground at that time was renewable energy. At least, it was until Reagan killed government investment in renewable energy programs. Renewable energy is, like computing and the internet, and the national highway system, electrification, water, communications, and railroads before, an infrastructure-level technology that would require massive current investment and reap massive future rewards. Had Reagan not halted government investment in such technologies, we would probably now be on the verge of transitioning from fossil fuels to wind and solar. We might be burning our garbage for energy rather than burying it in landfills. We might not be intimately entangled in the Mideast and a target of terrorism. We might not have a uncontrollable oil well dumping untold amounts of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.
Instead, all of these are happening, and we have no long term strategy for solving these problems. For the foreseeable future, we'll be dependent on a finite and dwindling resource that pollutes our air and water, and that's largely controlled by entities who may not have our best interests at heart. As the world's biggest consumer of oil, we have the most to lose when it gets expensive and rare.
But perhaps more important than all of this is that, without another maturing infrastructure-level technology waiting in the wings to fuel the next wave of economic growth, we may not have a next wave for a long, long time. Without such a wave, there's nothing to stimulate growth except more borrowing. Without such a wave, there's no mechanism for organic job growth. And the one person most responsible for putting us in this position is Ronald Reagan. I predict that in thirty years or so, it will be widely recognized that he was the one who killed America.
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