INNOVATION: America has a Structural Problem
by ilene - September 10th, 2010 1:30 am
This is a terrific article (yellow highlighting mine), courtesy of Gordon T. Long, The Tipping Point - Ilene
America has a Structural Problem
It’s a STRUCTURAL problem not a CYCLICAL problem!
It’s a DEMAND problem not a SUPPLY problem!
I gave President Barrack Obama six months to roll-out his doomed Keynesian policies, twelve months to discover they were flawed and eighteen months to realize that the solution to America’s problems must lie within a different economic framework. I had hoped by the end of twenty-four months to see new policies closer to an Austrian economic philosophy emerge. I was wrong.
Though, even the Wall Street Journal recently featured an article on the re-emergence of the Austrian School of Economic philosophy, it would appear that President Obama’s administration still neither gets it, nor I am afraid ever will. Key defections by his leading economic advisors, talk of the need for QE II and a Stimulus II, and a political collapse in public confidence suggests a growing awareness that Keynesian policies are not working, as many predicted they wouldn’t. Obama’s exciting rhetoric of Hope and Change has left myself and the majority of recent polled Americans disillusioned and disappointed. What I see the administration failing to grasp is twofold:
I-America has a Structural problem, not a cyclical business cycle problem. Though the cyclical business cycle was greatly worsened by the financial crisis, I would argue that the structural problem facing the US is actually a contributor to what caused the financial crisis.
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INNOVATION: What made America great is now Killing her!
by ilene - August 12th, 2010 8:20 pm
INNOVATION: What made America great is now Killing her!
"Creative Destruction is Secular not Cyclical"
Courtesy of Gordon T. Long
What made America great was her unsurpassed ability to innovate. Equally important was also her ability to rapidly adapt to the change that this innovation fostered. For decades the combination has been a self reinforcing growth dynamic with innovation offering a continuously improving standard of living and higher corporate productivity levels, which the US quickly embraced and adapted to.
This in turn financed further innovation. No country in the world could match the American culture that flourished on technology advancements in all areas of human endeavor. However, something serious and major has changed across America. Daily, more and more are becoming acutely aware of this, but few grasp exactly what it is. It is called Creative Destruction.
It turns out that what made America great is now killing her!
Our political leaders are presently addressing what they perceive as an intractable cyclical recovery problem when in fact it is a structural problem that is secular in nature. Like generals fighting the last war with outdated perceptions, we face a new and daunting challenge. A challenge that needs to be addressed with the urgency and scope of a Marshall plan that saved Europe from the ravages of a different type of destruction. We need a modern US centric Marshall plan focused on growth, but orders of magnitude larger than the one in the 1940’s. A plan even more brash than Kennedy’s plan in the 60’s to put a man of the moon by the end of the decade. America needs to again think and act boldly. First however, we need to see the enemy. As the great philosopher Pogo said: “I saw the enemy and it was I”.
THE PROBLEM IS NOT CYCLICAL, IT IS SECULAR.
The dotcom bubble ushered in a change in America that is still reverberating through the nation and around the globe. The Internet unleashed productivity opportunities of unprecedented proportions in addition to new business models, new ways of doing business and completely new and never before realized markets. Ten years ago there was no such position as a Web Master; having a home PC was primarily for doing word processing and creating spreadsheets; Apple made MACs; and ordering on-line was a quaint experiment for…
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An Age of Miracles and Wonders
by ilene - July 10th, 2010 4:42 am
An Age of Miracles and Wonders
Courtesy of Tim at The Psy-Fi Blog
S-t-r-e-t-c-h
Stretch your arms out to either side and imagine you’re looking at the economic growth of the human race over its entire four thousand year documented history. From the fingertip on your right hand to the first wrinkle on its index ftinger more or less covers the first three thousand eight hundred years. From there to the end of the index finger on your left hand represents growth over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
We truly live in an age of miracles and wonders. Medical advances have ensured more people live longer than ever before, scientific achievements have created a world in which we’re surrounded by astonishing labour saving creations and inventions which allow us to waste the time we’ve saved and the extra years of life we’ve been granted. Meanwhile our economic understanding of how this happened has, well, gone nowhere very interesting really. How did we achieve this state of grace?
Science and Medicine
One thing’s perfectly clear – the massive economic growth seen over the last couple of hundred years doesn’t have an awful lot to do with economics. Perhaps the prevalence of capitalist doctrines has prevented excessive government intervention in free markets at too early a stage, but otherwise we’ve veered about wildly while booming and busting our way to a greater level of wealth and health than ever before seen on the planet.
On the other hand this has had a lot to do with medical advances. Medicine has ensured that our useful lives are greatly extended – although a lot of the increase in average lifespans so often discussed is down to vast decreases in infant mortality. Still, we no longer die en-masse of septicaemia. Better, though, improvements in healthcare have extended the useful working lives of people: imagine a world in which most people were dead by 45. Heck, no politicians.
From Third World to First
Along with this we’ve seen incredible advances in science and engineering. In my father’s living memory he recalls the arrival of electricity, sewage disposal and tarmac to his home village. My grandmother was born before the Wright Brothers took flight and outlived – by far – the Apollo program. Yet her grandfather lived in a world virtually unchanged for a millennium: a world of hard…
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Innovation, Risk and the Forest Fire Analogy
by ilene - July 4th, 2010 3:20 am
Innovation, Risk and the Forest Fire Analogy
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds
To clear open space for innovation to take root, sometimes you need a forest fire to destroy all the deadwood. Instead, we are frantically piling up more deadwood.
What was once an inflammatory outlier--that our brand of "capitalism" incentivizes exploitation, fraud, complicity, corruption and plunder--is now commonplace. Even the most mainstream financial media websites now sport commentaries which excoriate our systemic fraud, and books galore gleefully sport titles containing "hot" words like plunder.
That is a remarkable turn of events: that a radical critique of our entire financial system has gone mainstream, and in many circles has been accepted as "obvious." (For more on the tricky nature of what’s "obvious," please see the chapters on the politics of experience in Survival+.)
In Innovation: Financial, Technical and Institutional (June 30, 2010), I attempted to connect the dots between risk and innovation. I believe that the two concepts are intrinsically bound like oxygen and hydrogen in the water molecule, but this deep structural connection between the two is generally ignored or not even recognized.
In essence, innovations which remain inherently unstable and unsafe regardless of hedges, controls and safety features--that is, they embody intrinsic risk-- cannot be placed in the same category as innovations with inherently low risk.
One of the keystones of the Survival+ critique is the realization that the risks of our systemic "financial innovations" are ontological and cannot be massaged away to zero. Indeed, the idea that this was possible underpinned the entire credit bubble and its inevitable implosion.
Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot discredited this notion in depth in his book (highly recommended) The Misbehavior of Markets.
I addressed this last year in The Yellowstone Analogy and The Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism (May 18, 2009):
For decades, the operative theory of forestry management was that limited controlled burns-- mild reductions of dead underbrush and debris--would essentially reduce the possibility of a major fire to near-zero.
But the practice actually allowed a buildup of dead wood which then fueled the devastating forest fire which swept Yellowstone National Park in 1988. Various revisionist views sprouted up later, claiming the fire was not the result of misguided attempts to limit natural forces (Vast Yellowstone Fire Now Seen as Unstoppable Natural Cataclysm (NT Times, 1989)).
Now we’re in a financial conflagration which is widely considered the result of
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Dissonance Overload, Needs and “Innovation”
by ilene - March 8th, 2010 1:38 pm
Dissonance Overload, Needs and "Innovation"
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds
Are "businesses" which aggregate user-provided content in order to serve adverts to those users "innovative?" Are they serving a "need" or attempting to contrive a new "need"?
While I usually present a specific thesis here, today’s topic is more a "work in progress" as I think through the paradoxes and connections between "needs" and contrived needs.
The two beginning data points are the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides, and an article from BusinessWeek on the dozens of Silicon Valley startups founded or funded by Google alumni: And Google Begat…The search giant’s former employees are seeding tech startups— and shaping another wave of innovation.
A friend’s son recently served a Peace Corps stint in a remote Vanuatu village. There is no electricity--illumination is provided by candles--and fresh potable water is a 2 kilometer walk away. The village pursues a generally traditional lifestyle apparently by choice; if you want to own a car and drive around in Western-style petroleum-based affluence, you can do so in the nation’s capital.
In the village, the women reportedly do most of the heavy lifting (agriculture, childcare, etc.) while the men have sufficient free time to brew up some hootch (kava) to enjoy in afternoon conviviality.
This "subsistance" is not poverty in the sense that people have enough to eat, shelter, some basic education, relative security from the predations of the State and/or external marauders (in our era, global Neoliberal Capitalism of the predatory/cartel variety).
This lifestyle is, with modest variations such as kerosene lamps or limited electricity, still lived by hundreds of millions of human beings. It is not to be romanticized or distorted by global-market, post-industrial definitions of "poverty." There are all sorts of poverty once you have enough to eat, a community and shelter, and definitions of a "good life" and a "better life" have to be carefully parsed.
We, on the other hand, are embedded in advanced, post-industrial Neoliberal Capitalism-- post-industrial in the sense that most of the nasty bits are performed elsewhere, so "we" get to live with high standards of environmental control, and Neoliberal in the sense that the Savior State is an active partner with global predatory finance Capitalism to exploit both foreign markets and domestic populations.
By the standards of our status quo, residents of Vanuatu are living at…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site