"The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha...which is to demean oneself."*
The untold story of the financial crisis is the transition from manufacturing to services. This won’t mean the death of the economy – as some skeptics proclaim - and it shouldn’t even come as a surprise.
Historical View
To gain some perspective, the Great Depression had a similar underlying theme as the country transitioned from farming to manufacturing. Agricultural products were considered tangible necessitates; the rugged American farmer was seen as a cornerstone of the economy; and, it was argued, the country’s best interest lay in keeping the farmer alive. Supporting the farmer was considered patriotic – the same sort of pathos which, ironically, we currently see in the manufacturing sector.
The sequence of events was remarkably similar to that of America’s car companies – a former leading industry begins to falter during an economic boom, depression hits, and it suddenly implodes.
Looking back, we can at least feel some comfort that, as useless as our current attempts to bail out the Big 3 have been, they pale in comparison to the damage caused by trying to salvage the farming industry. Leading the way was the Federal Farm Board (FFB), which was setup before the crash.
The FFB began with $500 million dollars dedicated for loans to farmers. After the Great Crash, prices for agricultural products, like most consumer goods, took a nose-dive. Farmers complained that they couldn’t turn a profit. The FFB was then placed in the awkward position of trying to keep farmers alive while raising the prices of their goods. In order to accomplish the latter, they tried to limit farmers’ output by buying and storing huge quantities of agriculture goods, encouraging farmers not to farm, and going so far as to encourage the destruction of farmland. In 1930 it even tried to raise cotton prices by seizing 1.25 million bales of cotton for 1 year; this had no effect on the price.
Tangibility of Services
I imagine that before the Great Depression, one could make the same argument against the foreseeable manufacturing revolution as one can make today against the upcoming service-based economy: Services are non-essential and an economy cannot be built on such intangibles.
On the contrary, the only tangibles in any economy are supply and demand. This holds regardless of how concrete a given product is.
Part of the confusion has to do with what, exactly, we mean by services. At times its distinction from manufacturing is blurry. People are also quick to point to failing service sectors – advertising can be lucrative, but its success is strongly tied to that of the overall economy; journalism, another quintessentially American industry, has received a heavy blow; and IT support is overly prone to outsourcing.
These smaller service sectors may reveal some clues, but the central veins of a service-based economy – as key today as auto making became after the Great Depression – are healthcare and education. As intangible as services may seem, the modern American cannot live without these 2 services. They are the bread-and-butter of a service economy.
Healthcare & Education
The rising cost of healthcare and education is heavily debated. Regardless of where you side, it can be agreed upon that a large portion of the cost resides in systematic inefficiencies linked to public policy. At the same time, the mere fact that Americans continue to pay such high costs for healthcare and education is testament to their growing importance.
The importance of these services is forgotten when pundits speak only of the rising “costs” of healthcare and education, although it is forgotten for a good reason. In the final quarter of 2007, for instance, Apple reported revenues of $3.4 billion from iPod sales; and yet you wouldn’t say that during those 3 months the iPod cost the nation $3.4 billion. Yet by means of contrast, what remains alarming about healthcare and education is that, however you look at it, we haven't found a way to let them thrive. Some sectors do flourish, but on the whole the industries really do “cost” the economy quite a lot of money.
Our current problem is that we haven’t figured out a way to integrate these areas into the economy. The question is not “how do we minimize the costs health care and education upon the economy?”, it’s “how do we make them a part of the economy?” Lots of government regulation and subsidies, I suspect, aren’t the answer. But either way the debate is too focused on minimizing their negative impact.
The success of the automobile industry hinged on not only better cars, but on cheaper cars as well – this was the famous recipe to Ford’s success, that he was able to tap an economy of scale. In contrast, healthcare and education in the US are, by any measure, diseconomies of scale. And yet as national employment continues to decline - with manufacturing taking the biggest hit - service-based employment is growing substantially, and projections suggest that it will continue to accelerate with healthcare and education leading the way. Looking forward, it’s hard to imagine a successful future economy without these 2 industries on board.
“See the trees outside the window,” my high school English teacher once told us. “Aren’t they just so…beautiful? Trees are good for the environment. But I think they’re just pretty to look at. If people cut down trees then our city would look so …dreary.” She went on to tell us that our city had been named Tree City USA for a number of consecutive years. “I feel honored to live in Tree City USA,” she concluded.
I attended public high school in a liberal area. In English class we learned about the virtues of planting trees and recycling. In biology we learned about compost piles. In government we learned how Hoover’s lassiz-faire philosophy worsened the Great Depression, while FDR’s New Deal brought down unemployment through public works programs like the massive Hoover Dam.
It was a secular and tolerant area of the country, so we were never told that evolution was just a theory. But since then the debate over how to teach evolution in public schools has grown exponentially. As evolution becomes more ingrained in mainstream science, there's a stronger push to teach it at lower levels of education. Just recently the Texas education board narrowly decided that teachers of evolution didn’t have to present the theory’s weakness. The debate is cast as a strange hybrid of science versus religion meets separation of church and state. The real problem lies not with science or religion, but with the state. The debate is borne out of the awkward institution of public education.
Public education is argued to be a lofty institution. And as with most lofty endeavors, its proponents use all sorts of arguments to back it: It’s a human right. It leads to social mobility. It’s a foundation of democracy – how are the people supposed to vote on issues when they’re uninformed? The truth afterall will set you free. How can we have a country where people are ignorant of the truth?
These principles might sound good in theory, but they don’t translate into practice. Our government is good at supplying everyone with the same services, but it’s dreadful when it needs to tailor services to individuals with different needs. Nowhere is this more evident than in public education, where you have some parents arguing that they don’t want their children to learn about evolution, others arguing that their children need to know about evolution in order to compete among the world's intellectual elite, while inner-city schools continue to fall apart regardless.
Evolutionists and creationists each think that they can solve the debate by debunking the other side – that the debate is somehow about evolution versus creationism. Personally I strongly suspect that the evolution-side is "right" in every meaningful sense of the word, but that's not what's fueling the debate. It’s not about who’s right and wrong, because neither side should have to pay for the others’ education.
The argument is sometimes made that evolution shouldn't be seen as stepping on religion's toes. But it does. If it didn't, then religious parents wouldn't feel like their values are threatened by it. Creationist parents are then pressured to use scientific arguments against evolution. But since they're not scientists, those arguments always fall flat, and then scientists mock creationists as both wrong and stupid. But scientists fail to see that it's not about science, it's about values. It's one thing for a scientist - after years of higher education - to call someone else with only a bachelor's, or God forbid, just a high school degree, as ignorant of science. But it's another thing for the scientist to then take control over how their children are educated. The scientist might know more about science, but what does he know about raising a child?
The strain, once again, falls on the fact that most of our schools are public. If more areas transitioned to a voucher system, then the debate would cool down; and if all schools were private, it would be a moot point on the national scene. The flaw in the current system is that everyone’s education becomes everyone’s businesses.
The evolution debate continually brings me back to my liberal high school lessons. Of course, being biased is no crime. But the notion that public education is this pure untouchable right which produces well-informed democratic citizens doesn’t match up with reality. Rather, public education leads to national conflicts of interest about how to best mold the minds of our youth. The debate over evolution is just one of many manifestations of the problems inherent in a public school system.
In a sense, no one really knows what’s going on with the economy; and even if they do, they don’t know what to do about it. But academia is partly responsible for the public mystique about the economy. In formalizing learning, academia has the unfortunate result of making some subjects overly complicated. There are no in-built checks to make topics simple; and I’ve come across many egotistical professors, who, in an attempt to exploit their power, relish in making concepts more difficult than necessary.
Yet the following class discussion with a professor, from an undergrad course on corporate finance, demonstrates how people can approach economics without that much formalized knowledge. It was quoted at the start of a book review for The Ethics of Money Production.
It was one of those rare moments when the entire class listens attentively and participates in the discussion. That it occurred with this particular class was even more instructive to me personally. This was a principles-of-finance course, required not only of finance majors, but of all students pursuing either a major or minor offered by the school of business at my institution.
While the typical principles class contains some highly motivated students who aspire to careers in finance, banking, and accounting, it is also filled with a fair number of students who look upon the course as a sort of dreaded, compulsory disruption to their nonfinance curriculum. But on this day, they were unified and engaged. A rare moment indeed!
At this point, the reader might consider this a strange way to begin a book review. The anticipated segue is provided by a voice in the back row of the classroom, where a rather quiet and normally imperceptible student began the following exchange with me:
"You know, we hear all about these bailouts and stimulus packages coming out of Washington."
"Yes, I know."
"Hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars, right?"
"That's right."
"They don't really have the money, though, do they?"
"No, they don't."
"And so they are just going to print it, aren't they?"
"Yes, the banking system is going to print it and loan it to the government."
"Out of nothing, right?"
"That's right."
"But that's not right, is it?"
Just to be clear, the student was not suggesting that the premise was not right, as in not correct. He was asserting that this massive production of money out of thin air was not right, as in not ethical.
Although not everyone might agree with the student, it doesn’t take much background knowledge to follow the discussion. We all know what he’s getting at.
In contrast though, you do need a lot of background knowledge in order to take such an economics course. Specifically, you need strong math skills and you have to be prepared to apply them. One of the first concepts you’re likely to learn is that of the production possibility curve. This is touted as a useful concept early on, because it can be used as a theoretical model to map the economy on both the macro and micro-scales. At the same time, you’re hit with such boring and dry explanations as the following (from Wikipedia)
The move from point A to point B indicates an increase in the number of computers produced, but it also indicates a decrease in the amount of food produced. Assuming that productive resources do not increase, making more computers requires that resources be redirected from making food to making computers. If production is efficient, FA of food and CA of computers could be made (as Point A shows), or FB of food and CB of computers could be made (as Point B shows).
In reference to figures like these
This is just the start of the long and arduous journey that the undergrad takes to complete his intro to economics. Is it any wonder then that the public at large seems to be grossly ignorant about economics? After all, if they didn’t take one of these boring courses, they most likely heard horror stories from peers who did.
The frustrating part is that, as the above dialogue demonstrates, economics doesn’t have to be boring. We all deal with money, prices, and incentives. Add a little guided thought on top of that, and it’s not hard to teach economics in a wholly engaging manner. Thomas Sowell accomplished this in his book, Basic Economics.
Sowell can be divisive and you might disagree with him on points, but all he asks of the reader is a hint of interest into current events and he’ll get you thinking about the wider economic role of actions like banking, risk-taking, measuring the macroeconomy, and investment. He uses everyday news articles, along with common sense, to build upon the reader’s intuitive understanding of economics.
The phrase intuitive understanding economics may seem a little odd. After all, what’s intuitive about the something like the production probably plot? Very little, and that’s why it doesn’t belong at the front of an introductory course. But insofar as everyone engages in the marketplace, intuition - not math - is a rather suitable place to start.
You’ll often hear the argument that education is an integral aspect of a democracy; and without it, our citizens can’t make informed decisions when they go to the polls. Nonetheless, those who subscribe to such notions tend to be more liberal, and it shows in their quality of education. In high school you’re more likely to learn about FDR’s New Deal than the Federal Reserve; and in college, economics is presented as a dismal mathematics model while courses in political science are more welcoming and palatable. Part of this, I suspect, is because universities err on making things overly complicated and verbose. If mathematics can possibly be integrated into a major, then it absolutely will. The university has nothing to lose by erring on too many courses and prerequisites. And when there are a plethora of potentially interested students, this can be a way to weed some of them out.
Insofar as public education has a social obligation to produce informed citizens (and maybe it doesn't, but this is presumably why it exists), it's partly to blame for the public’s current ignorance about the economy. Few citizens can readily grasp the importance of banks and the Federal Reserve to the economy. This has a two-fold effect: It shrouds economics in a veil of unnecessary complexity hidden to the public's scrutiny; and it allows public policy experts take advantage of this ignorance. Such a rapidly growing ignorance can even be considered dangerous in the same sense that many would consider an ignorance of politics dangerous.
The Washington Post, for instance, just had an editorial which urged consumers to spend rather than save their hard-earned money. The author tries to guilt-trip the reader into spending based on the presumption that saving money would cost the economy some 53,000 jobs. It doesn’t take very sophisticated knowledge about economics to see the fallacy in that one – namely, that you can’t have a sound economy when each individual household is living beyond their means. But without such knowledge, what do you say to the family that sympathized with the author’s points, and spent their way into years of debt in order to help the American economy? And then encouraged their neighbors to do the same? Afterall, the author does sound pretty convincing when he writes:
Borrow and spend, borrow and spend is what got us into this mess. Apparently, borrow and spend will get us out of it.
He then goes so far as to encourage individuals to glue together their torn up credit cards. I couldn’t believe what I was reading! Even if you subscribe to the (Keyensian) view that spending on consumer goods fuels the economy, what good would come from spending on increasing interest from credit card debt?
Although I’ve never been a fan of public education, economics is an area in which it has utterly failed. And for this the nation has suffered.
Academia is at an awkward intersection between public and private. It’s partly a product of our wealth and compulsory education. No matter how much education is supplied by the government, there will be private demand for a little more so that some people can purchase and earn an edge over others. At the same time, public education now sets its sights beyond high school. State universities and student loans introduce a public aspect to college education, while graduate student loans reach even further into graduate education. People are spending more and more time in education. In the meanwhile, demand for such highly educated people - particularly in academia - is artificially by bolstered by federal research programs. Intelligence, knowledge, education - these are all virtues. But they're not the equivalent of a graduate or even a college degree. The victim in all this is society’s greatest resource – knowledge.
The Supply of Education
I firmly believe that knowledge will set you free. So do people who believe in public education. Its proponents claim that education is a universal human right. That it fights poverty, informs and empowers, serves as a cornerstone of democracy, and protects against stupidity. But can you have too much? The government’s role in higher education has recently been attacked from a slew of angles. In a December ‘08 article entitled Are Government Investments in Higher Education Worthwhile?, George Leef (of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy) argued that "Having a college degree is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for success in life." Nature magazine’s late October ’08 issue had a piece, Economics Needs a Scientific Revolution, fleshing out the disservices academia (post 1970) has done to economics. Research grants - the lifeblood for most academic research and higher education - were recently criticized in a Science magazineeditorial for causing widespread inefficiency in research. The current post was inspired by an enlightening essay at Blagnet synthesizing the previous two items.
Our current education policy is fueled by misconceptions. Check out this trendy flyer from the Center on Education Policy as a good example. It’s a colorful 16-page document intended to drill the motto higher education = higher earnings into high schoolers’ brains. The flyer has lots of statistical means and full-page attention-grabbing barcharts. Lost in the presentation is the fact that “higher education = higher earnings” is not necessarily a causal relationship. In all likelihood, the relation is at least partly because people with more money can generally afford more education. It's also partly due to people's need to give themselves a competitive advantage over their peers. Meaning that if everyone went to college, then a college education would no longer be as advantageous with regard to income. Raising collegiate education rates in society is like an arms race: You go to a private college; the Jonses attend a state university. You one-up them with a master’s; the Jonses get a graduate education loan from the fed. Like the cold war, the victim isn’t one side or the other, it’s the sheer waste: The years of missed employment, valuable (even as an educational experience) for you, the Jonses, and the whole economy; there's also all the money potentially wasted on education, regardless of whether it was from private or public funds. Education offers diminishing returns as people age, meaning that it's more valuable for you the younger you are. It's a valuable tool overall, but is it so great as to spend a quarter of your life in its pursuit? What about half? Three-quarters? When is too much too much? Higher education will increase students' future income only as long as it's mostly private. Otherwise, arguing that we need more public education because it increases peoples' income is like a dog chasing its tail.
This issue is getting more important with each passing year. As the baby-boomers filter out, we’re going to see the effects of younger over-educated generations (such as my own) on the workforce.
Of course, most arguments for public education aren't economic: Another side of the issue is that education makes society at large smarter. Even if a degree doesn’t increase your paycheck by too much, it has more generalized positive effects. That we’re even debating about whether we have too much education - what a luxury. This, mind you, is where things get interesting. I couldn’t agree more about the widespread import of intelligence. But all the more reason to ensure that our policies aren’t wasteful. And all the more that we have to lose if in fact our policies are wasteful. It’s not self-evident that the solution lies in public schools, state universities, and college loans. It’s quite possible that the problem lies in public schools, state universities, and college loans.
The Demand of Education
Discussion of the supply of education - be it for reasons economic or social - inevitably brings up the demand for education.
The pursuit of basic knowledge is one of mankind’s greatest virtues. But occupation of basic research - which often serves as many fields' ideal end-point following graduate education - is frivolous and wasteful. It’s become fragmented to the point of blindness, but in such a way that the solution is often further fragmentation. Like the government, it’s based more on finding problems than solutions. It’s slow and inefficient.
Basic research is confined to the ethics of publish or perish. Perishing might sound formidable, but the other option isn't that great either. Wrote one academic journal editor on peer review:
There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.
Furthermore, most articles submitted for peer review usually take months before they’re published. (It’s not uncommon to see that an article was originally submitted a year or two before the publication date.) Note that by the publication phase, we’re talking about completed research, which has already had to crawl its way through an internal review board, earn elaborate types of funding, and let's not forget actually carry out the study – each phase can take years in and of itself. A publication delay of a couple months might not sound too bad, but compare that to a private newspaper. A couple months and the story is old news, it's not relevant any more. Compare it to business news, an area that thrives on up-to-date info, just as academia, theoretically, is supposed to thrive on up-to-date info. A month-long news delay in the business world, everything could be different.
One's graduate education doesn't necessarily have to lead to a job in academia, but you can't discuss the one without the other. And like anything in over-supply, graduate education and academia - supposedly these great ends - are inefficient.
Inefficient academic research is not due to any one factor, it’s due to the supply of academic research outstripping its demand. Supply that has been artificially increased through government-funded education, and demand that's been financially backed by the government-funded research. I’m often impressed by comparing public research to that of the private industry (even though some view corporate research as science's enemy). Private businesses would never take on such an inefficient process. Yet private business still depends on its own research, perhaps even moreso than the pursuit of basic knowledge depends on its own research.
Compare 20th century advances in technology to those in medicine. The former has been relegated to the private industry, while almost all medical research is tied to the government – be it through public funding, or through drugs regulated and partly sold through government programs. Sure tech and medicine are completely different fields. Medicine deals more directly with people, which makes medical research infinitely messier. At the same time, research in the technological industry is nothing short of spectacular. The technology industry has taken R&D by the bull-horns and wrestled it to the ground with as much willpower as possible. Consider how the cutthroat competition between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in the 90’s, which was costly and privately-funded, is by itself largely responsible for the modern PC. A month-long publication delay of writing up and internally sharing research results would have driven Intel or AMD out of business. An analogous case in medicine might be found in pharmaceutical research, but that area is still slowed by heavy governmental regulation. The sort of governmental regulation that would have prevented battles like the one bewteen Intel and AMD. Pure academic research, however, severely lacks a sense of urgency - not because it’s not cut-throat enough, but because, yet again, its supply is higher than its demand.
The pursuit of basic knowledge is one of mankind’s greatest virtues, but basic knowledge has been tremendously advanced by applied research. Where would modern basic knowledge be without the personal computer? Looking Forward
The personal computer is the story of the end of the 20th century, just as the car is the story of the beginning of the 20th century. Both of these technologies were blessed by the fact that only a few people were able to predict their huge impact - they were able to develop through private industry rather than public research. We have to ask ourselves what future fields we’re squandering with government intervention. Surely our country’s educational system plays a role here. And surely erring on too much public education isn't necessarily advantageous.
You can determine the health of a country’s economy by looking the at people who are best off: How did they get rich? How do they spend their time? Are they working and innovating? Or is their wealth tied to the government? Many American CEO's fit the stereotype of always working and thinking about ideas. From Henry Ford to even Ken Lay of crooked Enron, they reach a point where ideas are as big a motivator as money (or else they'd stop working entirely). But how do things fare for future generations? More and more, the situation in America favors keeping its brightest (and perhaps wealthiest) in school indefinitely, and then confining many of them to academic research. How many potential Bill Gates or Steve Jobs have been lured into academic research positions? What are we doing with our knowledge? Where is it going?
-KJ _______________ Media (in order of appearance)
I didn’t make up those words, they come from a Josiah Bunting III: "There is an epidemic of economic, political, and historical ignorance in our country.” According to his institution’s new study: Only half of American adults know what all of the branches in US government are. Almost four tenths of them falsely think that the president has the right to declare war. And a whopping %43 percent don’t even know what the electoral college is for. Incredible news - not in terms of its content, but in terms of its broad coverage, its blatant superficiality, and its downright arrogance.
What is civic literacy? If you're asking, clearly you don’t have any.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute conducts annual surveys to gauge our citizens' basic knowledge about America. They’ve been doing this for the past 3 years, and after every survey they emit a minor public outcry about our nation’s growing ignorance.
Before discussing the outcry, a word on the research techniques: The latest survey was a telephone interview with 139 multiple choice questions covering civic knowledge, public philosophy, and household demographics. Even at this point, the logistics of answering factual multiple choice questions over the phone are beyond me: Audible presentation of the multiple choices is a tax on short-term memory, while you’re being asked to retrieve facts from long-term memory, while under the duress of talking to a stranger on the phone, most likely after returning home from work.
2,508 adults were called. Responses were averaged across relatively small demographic groups: Those who’d earned a Ph.D, for instance, scored a C in civic literacy, while baby boomers with a college degree earned a D, and most everyone else failed. Despite reporting group averages, the institute reported no statistical tests for group differences, and we’re given averages which are relatively useless without standard deviations (for instance, it’s possible that a few people who scored extremely low brought down the whole average). But these are minor qualms relative to the overarching message, which is that most people got an F. Shame on us.
The conclusion: We have another cause to be taken up by the American people. After all, isn’t education priceless? And how can you be an American citizen without any civic literacy? There’s poverty, world starvation and warfare, AIDS, plain old illiteracy, and now we can add civic illiteracy. I'm reminded of my old high school civics teacher. Every week we had to memorize 10 new facts about the government. We would then be quizzed with multiple choice questions that were randomly selected from our accumulated bag o' facts. By the end of the end of year, we worked up to some 500 facts. I wince upon the memory of all the time I spent sweating over those useless inane facts, especially as there are so many richer ways to learn about government. Increasing civic literacy is not only a stupid cause, it’s a harmful one.
The face of American education is changing and it’s wonderful. Teachers at both the high school and college level are downplaying rote factual memorization in place for better educational techniques. Each new generation of kids are exponentially smarter than the last. What new generations lack in their ability to recite random facts they gain in fluid thinking, particularly when it comes to technological wizardry. Thanks to society’s plethora of scientific advances, my old high school science classes would be too rudimentary for the kids of today, just as my professors’ old classes would have been too rudimentary for me. These are points for celebration, not scorn.
Society’s ability to respond to causes is limited, and focusing on civic literacy is as arbitrary as lending federal money to banks, bailing out GM, improving health care, fighting drugs, sending a man to the moon, or focusing on any other knowledge base, be it chemistry or grammar. If more teachers were physicists than policymakers, then they'd decry physics illiteracy instead. And with good reason, as our present existence is tied just as much to physics - or maybe even moreso - than it is to civility. If the bulk of teachers happened to be grammar gurus, we might have more attempts to keep the English language pure like French.
Like most proposed causes, focusing on civil literacy is arrogant in its narrowed perspective. Being able to name our government's 3 branches might be basic for your average news-addict, but not everyone follows politics daily; and the truth is unless you're directly tied to the government the number of federal branches is not important in most people's day-to-day preoccupations - an inference that is supported by the result (questionable in and of itself) that not many people know about these facts. Indeed, from a democratic perspective, the importance of such knowledge is measured by how widespread it is rather than by some scholars at an institution.
Arrogance is truly one of America’s greatest problems. I’m not referring selfishness or the like, but to blinding arrogance. It underlies the argument of authority. It’s a core piece of racial tensions when manifested as the inability to tolerate the different. It holds back science, manifested as the inability to question one own’s measurement and line of thought. It’s wasteful, manifested as the inability to consider alternative problem-solutions. And its petty, manifested in the cause of civic literacy.
it's too easy to just be critical & point out what's wrong with the world
but still, it's easier to see when things go wrong than when things go right, & there's a good reason for that, b/c we have more to learn from when things go wrong than when they go right
"negative" news is more useful than "positive" news
specific implications for positive psychology, preventative medicine (if ain't broken...)
broader connections to the economy, evolution by means of natural selection
Eve of Tuesday 2019
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Efficiency has been on my mind lately. I would sincerely like to be more
efficient. Yet, the greatest challenge with this statement may be
determining what...
MH370 - Why Search Teams Ignored Georesonance
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*MH370 - Why Search Teams Ignored Georesonance*
As soon as I read about the claims that Georesonance identified an aircraft
wreck at the bottom of the Bay ...
er was considered patriotic – the same sort of pathos which, ironically, we currently see in the manufacturing sector.
Looking back, we can at least feel some comfort that, as useless as our current attempts to bail out the Big 3 have been, they pale in comparison to the damage caused by trying to salvage the farming industry. Leading the way was the Federal Farm Board (FFB), which was setup before the crash.
ulture goods, encouraging farmers not to farm, and going so far as to encourage the destruction of farmland. In 1930 it even tried to raise cotton prices by seizing 1.25 million bales of cotton for 1 year; this had no effect on the price.
Part of the confusion has to do with what, exactly, we mean by services. At times its distinction from manufacturing is blurry. People are also quick to point to failing service sectors – advertising can be lucrative, but its success is strongly tied to that of the overall economy; journalism, another quintessentially American industry, has received a heavy blow; and IT support is overly prone to outsourcing.
The importance of these services is forgotten when pundits speak only of the rising “costs” of healthcare and education, although it is forgotten for a good reason. In the final quarter of 2007, for instance, Apple reported revenues of $3.4 billion from iPod sales; and yet you wouldn’t say that during those 3 months the iPod cost the nation $3.4 billion. Yet by means of contrast, what remains alarming about healthcare and education is that, however you look at it, we haven't found a way to let them thrive. Some sectors do flou
rish, but on the whole the industries really do “cost” the economy quite a lot of money.
focused on minimizing their negative impact.
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