A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Folks:
A market research firm wants to understand the light helicopter (R22 and R44, for example) market, as well as why people drop out of private helicopter training (folks whose objective was to be a Private-rated hobbyist, not flying to the oil rigs). They want to pay you about $300 for your time. Interviews would be in early May.
Please email me (philg@mit.edu) if interested.
Full post, including commentsI like to be the last person on the planet to read any given bestseller. I finally got around to reading Unbroken, about Louis Zamperini, a U.S. Olympic athlete-turned-World War II bombardier. He survives 47 days in an inflatable raft and then just barely survives being a prisoner of war in Japanese custody.
Japan had signed the Geneva Convention regarding treatment of prisoners, but hadn’t ratified it. Thus prisoners were beaten and starved and scheduled to be killed as whatever island they were held on was overrun by American forces. According to Unbroken, there were in fact mass executions of prisoners held on islands beyond the Japanese core islands.
What could have saved prisoners? A quick and Big Bang-ish end to the war. Something that wouldn’t give the Japanese sufficient time to carry out their execution plans.
The modern fashion among historians, including in the biography of Eisenhower that I finished recently, is to treat the atomic bombing of Japan as an unnecessary act shading into war crime territory. At best it is something to be regretted. Invading Japan wouldn’t have been that costly or have taken that long.
Unbroken is a good reminder that not everyone would regret the A-bombs dropped on August 6 and 9, 1945. Zamperini was within weeks of dying from malnutrition, dysentery, and beatings even if the Japanese had not planned an August 15, 1945 execution date. He ultimately lived through 2014 (aged 97).
The book is also a good reminder of how much more dangerous accidents were than combat during World War II. Zamperini’s plane went down due to the crew feathering a good engine after one quit (so they could have had three out of four running engines and a dead one with a feathered prop; instead they ended up with two running engines, both on the same wing, and a dead engine with a stopped prop generating a huge amount of drag; this is a classic problem when learning to fly multi-engine piston aircraft and has been mostly addressed by auto-feather props and/or turbojets that don’t need to be feathered after quitting (and they hardly ever quit). Despite auto-feather, TransAsia 235 came to grief in a similar fashion in 2015. A crew of five USAF pilots wrecked a C-5 cargo plane in Dover, Delaware via a similar mistake in 2006. Machines get better, but apparently humans do not.
Lauren Hillenbrand does a better job than 99 percent of America’s journalists and authors in explaining aviation concepts. She thanks her brother, a Private certificate holder, in the acknowledgments.
Some statistics:
Pilot and navigator error, mechanical failure, and bad luck were killing trainees at a stunning rate. In the Army Air Forces, or AAF,* there were 52,651 stateside aircraft accidents over the course of the war, killing 14,903 personnel. Though some of these personnel were probably on coastal patrol and other duties, it can be presumed that the vast majority were trainees, killed without ever seeing a combat theater. In the three months in which Phil’s men trained as a crew, 3,041 AAF planes—more than 33 per day—met with accidents stateside, killing 9 men per day. In subsequent months, death tallies exceeding 500 were common. In August 1943, 590 airmen would die stateside, 19 per day.
These losses, only one due to enemy action, were hardly anomalous. In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and accidents. The surprise of the attrition rate is that only a fraction of the ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.
As planes went, so went men. In the air corps, 35,946 personnel died in nonbattle situations, the vast majority of them in accidental crashes.*1 Even in combat, airmen appear to have been more likely to die from accidents than combat itself. A report issued by the AAF surgeon general suggests that in the Fifteenth Air Force, between November 1, 1943, and May 25, 1945, 70 percent of men listed as killed in action died in operational aircraft accidents, not as a result of enemy action.
The book is also a good reminder of how enthusiastic the U.S. has become regarding imprisoning people. Although some Japanese war criminals were executed, hardly any were imprisoned longer than the Green Card holding woman who tried to vote in Texas. The worst criminal described in the book escapes punishment altogether. He went into hiding after the war and came out after an amnesty was declared.
Then, one day in March 1952, as he read a newspaper, his eyes had paused over a story. The arrest order for suspected war criminals had been lifted. There on the page was his name. The lifting of the apprehension order was the result of an unlikely turn in history. Immediately after the war, there was a worldwide outcry for punishment of the Japanese who had abused POWs, and the war-crimes trials began. But new political realities soon emerged. As American occupiers worked to help Japan transition to democracy and independence, the Cold War was beginning. With communism wicking across the Far East, America’s leaders began to see a future alliance with Japan as critical to national security. The sticking point was the war-crimes issue; the trials were intensely unpopular in Japan, spurring a movement seeking the release of all convicted war criminals. With the pursuit of justice for POWs suddenly in conflict with America’s security goals, something had to give. On December 24, 1948, as the occupation began to wind down, General MacArthur declared a “Christmas amnesty” for the last seventeen men awaiting trial for Class A war crimes, the designation for those who had guided the war. The defendants were released, and some would go on to great success; onetime defendant Nobusuke Kishi, said to be responsible for forcibly conscribing hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans as laborers, would become prime minister in 1957.
Mutsuhiro Watanabe’s flight was over. In his absence, many of his fellow camp guards and officials had been convicted of war crimes. Some had been executed. The others wouldn’t be in prison for long. In keeping with the American effort to reconcile with Japan, all of them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Sueharu Kitamura, “the Quack,” was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every war criminal who had not been executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, all would be granted amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, and the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade from the world’s memory. Watanabe would later admit that in the beginning of his life in exile, he had pondered the question of whether or not he had committed any crime. In the end, he laid the blame not on himself but on “sinful, absurd, insane war.” He saw himself as a victim.
Watanabe married and had two children. He opened an insurance agency in Tokyo, and it reportedly became highly profitable. He lived in a luxury apartment worth a reported $1.5 million and kept a vacation home on Australia’s Gold Coast. Almost everyone who knew of his crimes believed he was dead.
Watanabe died in April 2003.
More: read Unbroken.
Full post, including commentsFacebook and media hysteria regarding the repeal of Obamacare suggests that it will be patients who will be harmed (with death, for example). Medicine will continue to advance and physicians will continue to get paid well.
Facebook and media hysteria regarding the Trump Administration’s proposed funding cuts to various federal agencies suggests that science and scientists will be harmed.
Does this show what a crummy career science is compared to medicine? (see “Women in Science” for a comparison) Nobody says that doctors will be harmed if the federal cash river is interrupted or redirected. But if scientists can’t get their tax dollars they are apparently headed for the unemployment line. According to the hysterical, science is incredibly valuable yet there is apparently no foreign government or corporation that would want to hire a typical U.S. scientist.
Why should young people be encouraged to enter a field that is this vulnerable to the U.S. government not being able to find another $20 trillion to borrow?
Full post, including commentsOn a recent trip to Hawaii (Big Island and Maui) I noticed that (1) nearly everyone drove a gas-powered car, (2) no public charging infrastructure was evident, and (3) all major-brand rental cars were gas-powered. Given that (a) it is challenging and expensive to drag fossil fuels to Hawaii, (b) that the state is ideally situated to harvest wind and solar energy, (c) few areas get cold enough to impair battery performance,(d) there are only a couple of major roads per island and cars can’t stray too far off these roads, and (e) that no state is friendlier to Big and Bigger Government, I wonder if this shows that electric vehicles are impractical in the U.S., other than for showing off one’s virtue on Facebook and within sanctimony cities.
Back in 2008, I wrote about the state’s attempt to build out an electric car system. That didn’t work out, obviously.
It would be seemingly simple to put charging stations every 20 miles along the roads ringing the Hawaiian volcanoes. Gas is more expensive in Hawaii than anywhere else in the U.S. (Motley Fool). Solar panels and wind turbines work better in Hawaii than in most other states. The state is not shy about government management of the economy.
Readers: What do you think? If electric cars can’t make it in Hawaii does that mean they can’t make it anywhere in the U.S.?
Related:
Based on my Facebook feed and live conversations with friends in Sanctimony Cities, I have learned that there is a new passion in America for defending the Jewish people. The enemy, of course, is Donald Trump (see previous posting). During the Obama Administration, the only irredeemably bad country on the planet that these folks could think of was Israel. Trips to the grocery store required thinking about whether it was more important to boycott Sabra Hummus or SodaStream.
What is the evidence that the Trumpenfuhrer is like Hitler and that the U.S. today is like Germany in the 1930s? Hitler talked about the Jews frequently. Donald Trump did not mention Jews following telephoned bomb threats to Jewish schools and community centers (my question of “How do we know that the threats were made by residents of the U.S.? Why couldn’t it be one foreign guy with an autodialer?” seems to have been answered (nytimes))
I pressed the Sincerely Concerned for concrete scenarios. I used a middle-aged guy within our social circle who has some Jewish ancestry as an example. Let’s call him “Abraham”. What specifically could the Trumpenfuhrer do to him? Couldn’t Abraham at least escape to Israel? The answers essentially amounted to a higher wealth or income tax for Jews or suspected Jews. Our government would confiscate his wealth before Abraham boarded his El Al flight.
I pointed out that Abraham’s wife, following a brief marriage, had gone down to the local family court and, under Massachusetts family law, stripped this guy of his two young children, his house, and 80 percent of his income going forward. What more could a government hostile to Jews take from him? “They could confiscate his savings,” was a first answer. I responded that legal fees on both sides of the divorce lawsuit had already consumed what had been the Abraham’s savings from 30+ years of working. “They could put him in an internment camp.” Why would the government want to incur the cost of imprisoning a middle-aged guy, whose health care costs even in prison are likely to be staggering, when they could just dump him off on the Israeli taxpayer? None of the American Defenders of the Jewish People (TM) had an answer for this.
Readers: What have you heard about concrete plans for a Trump-directed pogrom? How would it work against Jews who are U.S. citizens given that Trump has been unable to limit visas and new green cards for citizens of Libya, Somalia, Yemen, etc.? Is the idea that Trump first dispenses with the Federal judiciary and then turns his attention to the Jews?
Related:
Full post, including commentsA group of us enjoyed Disney’s Beauty and the Beast in IMAX 3D.
One of our companions complained that “It wasn’t realistic. He wouldn’t have had any trouble finding a woman with that castle.” What about the beastly appearance? “A lot of women like guys with hair.”
The original story (Wikipedia) was published in 1740. I’m wondering what the required-for-commercial-reasons updates say about our present-day culture. Let’s compare some of the differences:
| original | Disney |
| the dad was rich at one time | the dad was a continuously poor artist |
| Belle is one of six kids | Belle is an only child |
| “The sons ask for weaponry and horses to hunt with, whereas his oldest daughters ask for clothing, jewels, and the finest dresses possible as they think his wealth has returned.” | No glory-hungry brothers or cash-hungry sisters. |
| “The Beast was a prince who lost his father at a young age, and whose mother had to wage war to defend his kingdom. The queen left him in care of an evil fairy, who tried to seduce him when he became an adult; when he refused, she transformed him into a beast.” Moral: Tough to find good child care even when you’re a queen? | Prince’s mom died, not the dad. Prince developed a bad character from spending too much time with his father (also had a bad character). |
Readers: What do the above changes say about our society? What did you think of the movie?
Full post, including commentsInbound email distributed to the entire staff at a fairly large and stodgy Boston-area non-profit organization:
Hi there,
Can you please tell me if there is a person working there who attends Burning Man Festival? Maybe Deborah? Her name at the festival was Bubbles. I met her when she was serving drinks at the bar… If she still works there can you please pass on my email to her?
Many thanks,
Jennifer
My suggested response: “She probably means the Bubbles who works in Accounting.”
Related:
The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen paints a moderately bleak picture of Americans as screen-addicted couch potatoes:
In past generations, people moved through the physical world at ever faster speeds, whereas today traffic gets worse each year and plane travel is, if anything, slower than before.
The big practical questions for the postwar generation were about what we might place in the physical world and how that would exert its effects on us, because the physical world was viewed as a major source of inspiration. Would it be cities reaching into the heavens, underwater platforms, or colonies in outer space? All of these possibilities were embedded with futuristic architectures and also utopian ideologies, such as space travel bringing humankind together in cosmopolitan dreams of peace. Those options seemed like logical next steps for a world that had recently been transformed by railroads, automobiles, urbanization, and many other highly visible shifts in what was built, how we got around, and how things looked. But over the last few decades, the interest in those kinds of transportation-based, landscape-transforming projects largely has faded away.
We’re much more comfortable with the world of information, which is more static, can be controlled at our fingertips, and can be set to our own speed. That’s very good for some people—most of all the privileged class, which is very much at home in this world—and very bad for others. The final form of stasis has to do with how and where we place our individual bodies. Most of all, it seems we like to stay home and remove ourselves altogether from the possible changes of the external physical world.
Americans can literally have almost every possible need cared for without leaving their homes. This is a new form of American passivity, where a significant percentage of the population is happy to sit around and wait for contentment to be delivered.
only about half of the Millennial Generation bothers to get a driver’s license by age eighteen; in 1983, the share of seventeen-year-olds with a license was 69 percent.
In 1965, the most common leisure activity for American kids was outdoor play. Recent surveys suggest that the average American nine-year-old child spends fifty hours a week—by direct comparison, nearly seven hours a day—or more looking at electronic screens, which include televisions, computers, and cell phones.
We’re not doing the awesome stuff that we used to do…
One final way of thinking about progress, sometimes stressed by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, is to ask whether the era of grand projects is mostly over. In the twentieth century, American grand projects included the Manhattan Project, which was highly successful, and cemented an era of Pax Americana. Two other grand projects were winning World War II and, starting in the 1950s, construction of the interstate highway system, both examples of thinking big and changing the world permanently on a large scale. The Apollo moon program was another grand project, and although its usefulness can be questioned, its mechanical success and above all its speed of execution cannot. At its peak it consumed over 2 percent of American GDP.29 “Defeating communism” is perhaps too abstract to qualify as a specific project, but it is another major victory backed by a coordinated effort. Another potential nominee would be “construction of a social welfare state,” although parts of this are politically controversial. In any case, a lot of these grand projects succeeded, often rather spectacularly. If we look at the last twenty-five years or so, what do we have to count as grand projects? Some people might cite the environmental movement, but for all of its virtues, we are still living in a world where biodiversity is plummeting, carbon emissions are rising, and the overall human footprint on the environment, including from the United States, is increasing. So this is a possible contender for the future, but no, it hasn’t happened just yet. Reforestation and cleaner air and water are major triumphs, but those happened much earlier in the twentieth century. The most obvious and most successful grand project today is that virtually every part of the United States is wired to the internet and cell phone system. You can go to almost any inhabited part of the country and immediately access Wikipedia or make a phone call to Africa; sometimes this even works on hiking trails or in other out-of-the-way places, ensuring we are never that far away from communicating with any and all of our friends and relations or maybe business associates.
When we try to do something big, it usually turns out badly
The other potential grand project would have to be … reconstructing Iraq, making Iraq democratic, and bringing peace to the Middle East. On that project we have seen a miserable failure, and with the rise of ISIS and the collapse of Syria, the situation is becoming much worse yet. So the post-1990 era for the United States is scored at one out of two. I don’t, by the way, count Obamacare on this list of grand projects. No matter what you think of it as policy, it provided health insurance to about 10 to 15 million of America’s previously uninsured 40 million–plus population, with the exact number for new coverage still evolving. That helps many of those individuals, but it is hardly a game-changer in terms of a broader social trajectory, especially since many of those people already were receiving partial health care coverage and, furthermore, the Obamacare exchanges are experiencing some serious problems. If anything, Obamacare has locked in the basic features of the previous U.S. health care system rather than revolutionizing them.
But could it be that the world isn’t stagnating, it is just that Americans are terrible at “big systems” thinking and public infrastructure? The Chinese, for example, have built about 14,000 miles of high-speed rail out of what will eventually be a 24,000-mile system (Wikipedia). About 1.5 billion rides occur per year on a system that did not exist a decade ago. The Chinese are building airports at a frantic pace and the transportation options for middle-class Chinese citizens improve dramatically every year. Cowen is a bit of a China fan:
Even with its recent economic troubles, China has a culture of ambition and dynamism and a pace of change that hearken back to a much earlier America. China, even though it is in the midst of some rather serious economic troubles, makes today’s America seem staid and static. For all of its flaws, China is a country where every time you return, you find a different and mostly better version of what you had left the time before. Hundreds or thousands of new buildings will be in place, the old restaurants will be gone, and what were major social and economic problems a few years ago, such as unfinished roads or missing water connections, will have disappeared or been leapfrogged. That is what life is like when a country grows at about 10 percent a year for over thirty years running, as indeed China had been doing up through 2009 or so, with some years of 7 to 8 percent growth thereafter (and an unknown rate of growth today, due to lack of trust in the government’s numbers). When a country’s growth rate is 10 percent, it’s as if a new country is being built every seven years or so, because that is how long it takes for such a nation to double in economic size.
Meanwhile, in the U.S. it is often illegal to work:
Some of the decline in labor mobility may stem from the law itself, specifically the growth of occupational licensure. In the 1950s, only about 5 percent of workers required a government-issued license to do their jobs, but by 2008, that figure had risen to about 29 percent.
The data show that individuals in tightly licensed occupations demonstrate lower levels of cross-state mobility. For instance, men in heavily licensed occupations are less likely to move across state lines than men in less heavily licensed occupations, even after adjusting for demographic variables that might cause the two groups to differ. Those same men, reluctant to cross state lines and lose licensure rights, are not less reluctant to move around within their states, where they keep their licenses.
Or you’ll get sued as a result of hiring someone:
It’s also harder to fire workers than it was several decades ago, in part because of fear of lawsuits over discrimination, as American society has steadily become more litigious. This means that some employers will be less likely to hire in the first place, in order to minimize their lawsuit risks. They look more for the kind of workers they will not need to fire or not need to replace anytime soon, which also slows down the pace of job turnover.
So we sit around reading prissy Jane Austen novels (or, since we’re screen-addicted, watching movie adaptions):
Current philosophies and aesthetics mirror this shift toward the calm. The metaphysics of the big political debates of the 1960s now strike us as absurd. In the 1970s, intellectual, angst-ridden American teenagers noodled over Nietzsche, the meaning of the counterculture, and the classic Russian novels of ideas. Woody Allen satirized these books in his movie Love and Death, and it was assumed that enough of the viewers would catch the references. These days Jane Austen is the canonical classic novelist, with the Wall Street Journal even referring to “the Jane Austen industry.” And a lot of her stories are about … matching. For better or worse, these stories are less concerned with the titanic struggle of good versus evil—can you imagine Mr. Darcy shouting, as would a Dostoyevsky character, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted!”? Instead people are afraid of having their calm disturbed, so the frontier issue in many colleges and universities is whether to put “trigger warnings” on school curricula, out of fear that somebody will be offended or traumatized by what we used to welcome as radical and revisionist texts.
Cowen sounds pessimistic about the 325 million souls here in the U.S. It is tough to argue that he is wrong. A friend points out that regulatory compliance is the true religion of the U.S.: “People used to spend a huge amount of time in the Middle Ages going to church and praying. Now they spend about 40 percent of their time doing regulatory compliance so it has the same place in our society that religion had in theirs.”
But why do we need to be innovative? The Chinese are great at engineering (look at DJI!) and building infrastructure. Let them vacuum the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Singapore and Switzerland are full of rich well-educated hard-working people. They will presumably develop all kinds of new ideas for us. The Iranians and Koreans have already shown that they can make more interesting movies than Americans. The world might be a way better place in 50 years even if no American were to create anything useful between now and 2067. Do you really need Xbox to get through 99 weeks of cashing unemployment checks if you have Nintendo and PlayStation?
Cowen is optimistic about our social freedoms:
Full post, including commentsThis relatively recent emphasis on security pops up in so many forms, many of them extremely beneficial for our lives. For instance, the acceptance of gay marriage has proved a big (and to me pleasant) surprise. As recently as 2008, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton would endorse national gay marriage, and they both openly expressed reservations about the idea.
Even within the community of gay and LGBT intellectuals, the gay marriage movement was not entirely popular. Michael Warner, for instance, a leading “queer theorist,” argued that marriage was too conservative an institution and what the gay community needed instead was a radical liberation from the idea of shame. Warner wanted straights to learn from the sexual practices of gays at
The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen shares some data about the big getting bigger:
A recent Wall Street Journal analysis of data from the University of Southern California found that, by federal antitrust standards, there is a high degree of concentration in nearly a third of all industries, compared to about a quarter of all industries in 1996. Or to cite another metric based on the same data, nearly two-thirds of publicly traded companies were selling in more concentrated markets in 2013 than earlier in 1996. Yet another measure is this: Of the more than 1,700 public companies in existence in both 1996 and 2013, 62 percent saw their share of the market go up over that same period of time.11 What is driving these developments? Most likely, some leading firms have the ability and intent to launch well-known national brands backed by extensive marketing and product development, and other, smaller firms cannot match their pace. The result is that some markets have a greater element of winner-take-all, as is suggested by the data on corporate valuations. If we look at the S&P 500 stock index in 1975, the category of “intangible assets” accounted for about 18 percent of the value of American capital. Most American capital was in physical assets, such as machines and factories, tangible items that can be purchased and replicated if need be. Today, over 80 percent of the value of the S&P 500 is due to intangible assets, including trademarks, patents, brand name reputation, consumer goodwill, and other factors. That’s a big leap upward, from below 20 percent to above 80 percent for the value of corporate intangibles.
And if you’re big you tend to be boring…
Second, many intangibles rest on reputation and image. If Google alienated most Americans with an ongoing series of offensive remarks and behavior, users would jump to Bing or to other search engines, just as many customers have left Chipotle because of its association with E. coli outbreaks. Furthermore, if Google lost its image as a cutting-edge place to work, it could lose its ability to recruit top talent. Once companies have ascended the mountain, they play it safe. They have no interest at that point in “disruption,” and they try to offend as few users, or potential employees, as possible.
In 2014, the Mozilla CEO stepped down, basically for having donated to anti–gay marriage campaigns, even though at the time most Americans did not seem to favor the legality of gay marriage. Whether or not you worry about the constraints on speech brought by such firings, it’s a sign that some kinds of risk-taking are over. We’ve also seen a lot of companies end or postpone expansions into North Carolina due to the 2016 passage in that state of a law perceived as hostile to transgender individuals. Again, the net result is that companies will obsess all the more over legal matters and public relations, sometimes at the expense of growing their business or focusing on the physical product or taking chances. We see corporate cultures stressing the law and also public relations, two inherently conservative corporate departments that are rarely sources of major innovations.12 Still further evidence for growing monopolization, and for that matter the social stasis it feeds, is what is sometimes called “the investment drought.” That is, businesses just aren’t investing as much as they used to. Net capital investment, as a share of gross domestic product, has been declining since the 1980s. An alternative measure of the value of capital services, a ten-year moving average which avoids the “noise” in the data for any single year, has been declining since the start of the millennium. It hit almost 5 percent of GDP around the turn of the millennium, but since then it has fallen steadily and is now hovering at about 2 percent of GDP. This again means that America is not replenishing its future sources of innovation, growth, and ability to pay higher wages because the future capital just won’t be there to the same extent.
If we adjust for increases in the American working-age population, the United States creates 25 percent fewer triadic patents per person than it did in 1999. (A triadic patent is one filed in the United States, Europe, and Japan, and tends to be a relatively serious patent in terms of potential scope.)
The central planners in Washington, D.C. have hugely favored higher education over the past few decades, showering them with tax dollars in the forms of student loan guarantees, grants, etc. State and local governments have been pumping more cash into K-12 education as well. What’s the result?
Two of today’s most rapidly growing sectors seem especially hostile to turnover and business dynamism, and they are not even counted in the standard business statistics. If we look at higher education, the list of top universities is barely different from what it was seventy years or even one hundred years ago, apart from having added some West Coast contenders, such as Stanford and UC Berkeley. The sociologist Kieran Healy made an explicit comparison of today’s best schools using a listing of the best schools from a 1911 report by a Mr. Kendrick Charles Babcock. For the more mature regions of the United States, it’s all a bunch of recognizable first-tier names, including Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and, well … do I need to give you the whole list?8 There has been considerable innovation in what has been taught and how universities are organized, but at the top, America’s higher education sector does not have a whole lot of turnover; nor have innovative unicorn firms or schools taken over. For primary education, of course, most school systems are municipal, and they hardly budge for decades, although there is some dynamism from a recent wave of charter schools. As mentioned, low turnover in this sector isn’t new, but education and higher education are taking on larger and more important roles in the American economy, and that represents an increase in stasis from a business point of view.
Not everyone is getting fat…
when you zero in on male wages, the picture becomes truly disconcerting. The median male wage was higher in 1969 than it is today. That’s a shocking fact, given earlier expectations of ongoing economic progress, and not many economists of that time, of any political stripe, would have predicted that to happen without a major catastrophe or global war. A big chunk of our economic gains have been driven by women getting better educations and working longer hours. That is good news for many women, but if the American economy were more dynamic, we would expect the males to have rising real wages just because so many technological advances have been dumped in their laps.
Even the most recent trends are discouraging. If we take out the gains of the top earners, take-home pay for typical American workers has been falling since the Great Recession ended in 2009, an unusual path for an economic recovery. According to one good estimate, median wages for the American economy as a whole fell 4 percent from 2009 to 2014. There are also wage declines within a lot of occupations. For instance, median pay for restaurant cooks fell by 8.9 percent, and for home health aides, the median wage fell by 6.2 percent, even though the dining and health care sectors have been relatively robust in terms of both revenue and employment.
[As with most academic economists, Cowen attributes the lack of wage growth to stagnation in productivity.]
Can we expect a peasant uprising as these median earners watch the parade of Teslas passing them by? Cowen says no.
Many of the seminal events of the civil rights movement could not happen today, most of all because society is more bureaucratized, more safety obsessed, and also less tolerant of any kind of disturbance or disruption at all. Take the Selma marchers. It would be very difficult for a Selma-style march to happen today, and that is not because all civil rights grievances have been solved. In 1965, the Selma marchers had obtained the legal right, through petition, to conduct a fifty-two-mile, five-day march down an interstate highway. Of course, that blocked the highway, and for the most part such march permissions are impossible to obtain today, no matter how popular the political movement may be. Most motorists and truckers just don’t want the highway shut down. Starting in the 1970s, the federal courts began to assert that public spaces are not automatically “fair game” for marches and demonstrations, and so local governments have sought to please users of such facilities rather than marchers.
The disputes over a neo-Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois, made it clear to local governments that an undisputed de facto right of public assembly could be very costly. In 1977, a neo-Nazi group had petitioned for the right to stage a march in the predominantly Jewish community of Skokie.
local governments felt burned, in this case and in several others. If they could not prohibit undesirable marches, they would regulate them, if not out of existence, then into the less-visible and less-focal parts of their urban and suburban spaces. A new, slow war began, this one to make sure that demonstrators could not use the physical spaces they most desired. If arbitrary or capricious restrictions on demonstrations were not to be allowed, then regular restrictions, applicable to everyone, would take their place.
Washington, DC, is in some ways even more restrictive. The National Park Service controls about 25 percent of the city, including many of the focal protest spots. For those locations, any protest of more than twenty-five people requires a permit. Furthermore, if the event is expected to be of any note, the protest organizers will be required to meet with the Park Police and possibly the Capitol Police to plan it out, accompanied by lawyers in many cases. Still further complications arise if the Secret Service is involved.16 And post 9/11, Washington, DC, protests face yet another problem: They are possible sanctuaries for terror attacks, or at least they are perceived as such. If the City Park Service or some other bureaucracy sees some possibility of a terror attack connected to a protest, or even believes that a facility or public locale may become slightly more vulnerable, it can deny permission for the event, very often with impunity.
It is by no means impossible to receive permission, but you have to work through the bureaucracy. There now exists a mini-industry of “protest planners,” comparable to wedding or convention planners, and they charge fees to boot. They will help you coordinate with the police, set up stages and sound systems in the approved manner, and clean up after the event is over. These days, a DC protest is more of a bureaucratized event than anything else, and typically it is viewed by the media as such, or in other words it is ignored unless it has massive attendance. For better or worse, this whole process is a long way removed from the older custom of shouting and gathering an angry, demanding crowd in the local town square.
[Cowen does not address the question of Donald Trump’s connection to the neo-Nazis in Skokie circa 1977.]
Cowen suggests that ultimately there will be a reckoning here in the U.S. There actually might be a peasant revolt and the election of Donald Trump is a harbinger of that, according to Cowen. But he doesn’t seem to take seriously (or work to refute) the possibility of stagnation. Britain stagnated from the end of World War II until Margaret Thatcher came along. The U.S. is more or less modeled along British lines. Why can’t we stagnate? (in January 2009 I asked the same question and we have bumbled along with sluggish economic growth in the intervening years)
More: read The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
Full post, including commentsReaders: Samsung itself says that the S8 uses the same camera sensor as the S7. Is this where we stop reading about the new phone? Of course, that’s still a better sensor than in the iPhone 7/7S, according to DxOMark (my personal experience is consistent with the DxOMark objective tests; the S7 was a better camera than anything from Apple).
You can dock the phone to use it as a desktop computer, but the result is more like a Chromebook than like my 2005 idea of a “dock” that actually is a PC.
This review says the S8 is the best phone available, but it still might not be exciting enough to get down to the Verizon store.
Journalists who live in urban (and almost all-white!) neighborhoods aren’t going to bother testing phone call performance in the tower-free exurbs (the S7 that I tried was not as good as an iPhone 6 Plus in hanging onto a weak signal). Right now they are writing about new Samsung software bundled into the phone as though that were a good thing rather than a terrifying prospect.
Apparently it is too much to ask for a slightly thicker phone with a bigger camera sensor and corresponding higher image quality. How did we get to the point where the market is cluttered with options and they are all pretty much the same?
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