Russia a competing superpower? No, but China is a different story!

Spengler writes at PJ Media,

...When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, Russia and its satellites had a population of 375 million, vs. 225 million for the United States. Although Russia's economy was rotten--as Reagan and his team insisted against the prevailing consensus--its military power threatened to make Western Europe a Soviet economic colony. Reagan beat Russia in the Cold War and broke up the Soviet empire. Russia now has 146 million people, less than half of America's 300 million. Game over. The problem at present is managing a rancorous spoiler rather than a competing superpower.

...China is entirely different. Its per capita GDP has risen 45 times (that's 4,500%) since Deng Xiaoping began China's economic reforms in 1979. Although its growth rate has cooled from double digits to between 6% and 7% a year, China's economy still doubles roughly every ten years. China now graduates four times as many STEM bachelor's degrees and twice as many STEM doctorates as the U.S. During the past two years, moreover, Chinese applications to U.S. graduate schools (where foreign students comprise about 4/5 of all students) have dropped by about half during the past couple of years, because Chinese universities are roughly on par with America's in math, physics and computer science. One out of 3 Chinese university students majors in engineering. The number in the U.S. is one out of 14 (and that counts Chinese foreign students at U.S. universities).

...China's exports to Asia are three times larger than its exports to the U.S., and have grown three times as much as exports to the U.S. during the past 10 years. China has a $1 trillion program to assert economic dominance over Asia called "One Belt, One Road," and its Asian business is booming.

We won the Cold War because the innovations of the 1960s and 1970s became the weapons of the 1980s. That was the result of Eisenhower's response to Sputnik, including a crash program for tech education, the Kennedy moonshot, the tech investments at Harold Brown's Defense Department, and Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.

America remade the world. Wages and salaries rose in real terms by 20% between 1981 and 1998 as a result. But we have been coasting on these innovations, making incremental but not fundamental changes, and real wages haven't budged since 1998.

America has done it before, and we can do it again. We need a grand national strategy for technological supremacy. I've spelled it out in any number of publications, including this essay for the Journal of American Affairs. China has a grand strategy for technological supremacy. We're better at it this kind of thing than China. But China is the diligent tortoise and we're the sleeping hare.

Read more here.

"I just want to drive my car myself without a computer doing it for me."

How are auto sales of US cars doing? At Theo Spark's blog, Rico writes,

- I do NOT want the internet in my car,
- or touch screen,
- or steering assist,
- or self-parking,
- or cameras,
- or eco-mode that turns off the car at stop lights,
- or buttons/dials for Park-Drive-Reverse,
- or pedestrian detection,
- or automatic emergency braking,
- or lane departure warning,
- or touch-button start.
I just want to drive my car myself without a computer doing it for me.

Read more here.

"The problem for most workers isn’t too much technology but too little."

Bret Swanson and Michael Mandel report at the WSJ,

Some anxious forecasters project that robotics, automation and artificial intelligence will soon devastate the job market. Yet others predict a productivity fizzle. The Congressional Budget Office, for instance, expects labor productivity to grow at the snail’s pace of 1.3% a year over the next decade, well below the historical average.

There’s reason to reject both of these dystopian scenarios. Innovation isn’t a zero-sum game. The problem for most workers isn’t too much technology but too little. What America needs is more computers, mobile broadband, cloud services, software tools, sensor networks, 3-D printing, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and, yes, robots.

For the sake of explanation, let’s separate the economy into two categories. In digital industries—technology, communications, media, software, finance and professional services—productivity grew 2.7% annually over the past 15 years, according to the findings of our report, “The Coming Productivity Boom,” released in March. The slowdown is concentrated in physical industries—health care, transportation, education, manufacturing, retail—where productivity grew a mere 0.7% annually over the same period.

...Fortunately, many physical industries are poised for dramatic transformations into digital industries—if we let them.

The shale oil and gas boom is an IT story, since 3-D modeling of underground formations enables horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the right places. This shift to digitized mining has not destroyed jobs. Rather, hours worked in oil and gas rose 17% since 2007.

Or consider the digitization of retail and distribution. E-commerce has added 397,000 jobs since December 2007, which more than makes up for the 76,000 full-time-equivalent jobs lost at bricks-and-mortar stores.

Read more here.

What's better, incompetence or corruption?

Once again Bookworm does a magnificent job analyzing an important issue facing the country. In this case it is Hillary's incompetence and corruption with technology. Bookworm links to a Politico story, then provides us with her own translation.

The problem with all the heavy lifting that the media is doing to foist President Hillary on the American people is that the media is in a bind. There are enough facts out there to indict Hillary a thousand times over on charges of violating laws, engaging in heavy-duty financial corruption by selling off American favors and assets, lying constantly, and making exceptionally bad judgment calls during her tenure at State regarding substantive matters (i.e., Russia, Iran, Syria, Libya, etc.). Burdened as the media is by this data, the only way to weasel Hillary out of charges of corruption and incompetence is for the media to paint her as Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, a harried, hapless vehicle of chaos.

Read more here.

Researchers have fixed the problems with incandescent light bulb

Jeffrey Tucker reports at Foundation for Economic Education,

Researchers at the MIT are publicizing that they have fixed the incandescent lightbulb with a brilliant improvement. They have wrapped the interior filament in a crystal glass that both bounces light and contains heat. It recycles energy in a way that addresses the main complaint against Edison’s bulb: It burns far too much energy for the light that it produces.

Why is this interesting? About a decade ago, governments around the world developed a fetish for banning incandescents (through an efficiency rule) and replacing them with expensive LED technology and florescent bulbs. It happened in Europe first but eventually came to the United States. The last American factory to produce them closed in 2010, and they are ever harder to find in even the big-box hardware stores. (As with all such bans, there are exceptions for elites who desire specialty bulbs.

...As the MIT innovation in lighting suggests, there are possibilities yet undiscovered that regulators have not thought of. If you write detailed regulations about existing technologies, you are forestalling the possibilities that scientists and entrepreneurs will discover new ways of doing things in the future.

A vast regulatory apparatus on cell phone technology in 1990 could never have imagined something like a modern cellphone. Regulations on digital commerce in 2000 might have stopped the rise of peer-to-peer services like Uber. Indeed, one of the reasons that the digital world is so innovative is precisely because the regulators haven’t yet caught up with the pace of innovation.

Regulations on technology freeze the status quo in place and make it permanent. How, for example, will regulations respond to the news that a new and improved form of incandescent bulb is possible? Early tests show it to be more efficient than the replacements which the regulations favor. Will there be a new vote, a rewrite of the law, a governing body that evaluates new lightbulbs, the same way we approach prescription drugs? None of this can possibly match the efficiency of a market process of trial and error, of experimentation, rejection, and adoption.

In government, a ban is a ban, something to be enforced, not tweaked according to new discoveries and approaches.

Herein we see the problems with all attempts by government to tightly manage any technology. Bitcoin is a great example. As soon as the price began to rise and the crypto sector began to appear viable, government agencies got in the business of regulating them as if the sector was already taking a shape that would last forever. And because technology and industry are always on the move, there is never a rational time to intervene with the proclamation “this is how it shall always be.”

Regulatory interventions stop the progress of history by disabling the limitless possibilities of the human imagination.

By the time regulators get around to rethinking the incandescent, the industry will probably have moved on to something new and even better, something no one can imagine could exist today.

Read more here.

The case for capitalism and technology

James Pethokoukis writes at AEI,

Back in 1995, now-Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said, “I personally happen not to be a great believer in the free enterprise system for many reasons.”

And having watched Sanders during this primary season, it doesn’t appear to me that the self-described democratic socialist has much changed his opinion of capitalism. Which is both amazing and appalling. The single greatest story of human achievement of the past 2,000 years is the dramatic rise in living standards of the past 200 years. It’s an astounding ascent — see above chart — driven by innovative, entrepreneurial capitalism. Free enterprise. Economic freedom.

Yes, workers in advanced economies today are many multiples wealthier — almost incalculably so — than their counterparts in the early 19th century. But here is another way of looking at, thanks to a new study by consultancy Deloitte showing how technology-driving innovation has radically altered lives in Britain for the much better:

1) Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed in the last 144 years.
2) It has been saving us from dull, repetitive, and dangerous work. Agriculture was the first major sector to experience this change. In 1871 it employed 6.6% of the workforce of England and Wales. Today that stands at 0.2%, a 95% decline.


3) Overall, technological innovation has resulted in fewer humans being deployed as sources of muscle power and more engaged in jobs involving the nursing and care of others. Just 1.1% of the workforce was employed in the caring professions during the 1871 census. By 2011, these professions employed almost a quarter of the England and Wales workforce.
4) Technology has boosted employment in knowledge-intensive sectors such as medicine, accounting and professional services.
5) Finally technology has lowered the cost of essentials, raising disposable incomes and creating new demand and jobs. In 1871, there was one hairdresser for every 1,793 English and Welsh citizens; now there is one for every 287. In 1948, a Freed-Eiseman 16-inch TV cost $795 in the US, roughly a quarter of the average annual salary, or roughly $12,000 today. A top of the range TV can be bought today for less than $1,000. On a quality-adjusted basis, the decline in prices is even more pronounced. US CPI data show that the price of a TV has fallen by 98% since 1950.

Read more here.

An Uber for the trucking industry?

Walter Russell Meade writes at The American Interest about how technology is changing the trucking industry.

The wave of creative destruction unleashed by twenty-first century information technology has left no industry untouched. The latest beneficiary—or victim, depending on your perspective—is the trucking industry. The Wall Street Journal reports on a handful of Silicon Valley backed startups looking to cut costs in the industry by reducing the need for intermediaries between truckers and customers.

...Teamsters and the big trucking companies will likely try to use their political clout to stop change in its tracks, and will cite everything from safety to fairness—as taxi medallion fleets have done against Uber, as teacher unions have done against charter schools, and so on. There will be some truth to some of these claims—no changes come without a cost. But what will really be driving their ire isn’t the general good of the public, but the mortal threat to the business models on which they depend. There is nothing wrong with that moral point of view — it’s only natural that people who are heavily invested in one way of doing business should organize to protect their way of life. In a democracy, citizens have every right to do this.

...Of course, the new trucking economy—if in fact Silicon Valley succeeds in making one—won’t be the end of the story. Next up: self driving trucks…

Read more here.

Politicians accumulating money, power, and prestige

Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today,

politicians don’t care, except to the extent that we make them care. Whatever they say when they’re running for office, their top priority once elected is to build a coalition that will keep them in power, and accumulating money and influence, regardless of whether the interests of that coalition coincide with the public’s.

One of the reasons that America enjoyed such tremendous growth over the past century was that technology outran regulators’ ability to keep up. Will that remain true over the coming decades? Let’s hope so. We can’t make it in the 21st century with a 1950s economic model, however appealing that approach might be to politicians.

Read more here.

Flowing in one direction

Today Seth Godin writes about the technology ratchet:

Any useful technology that's successfully adopted by a culture won't be abandoned. Ever. (Except by top-down force).

The technology might be replaced by a better alternative, but society doesn't go backwards.

After books were accepted, few went back to scrolls.

After air conditioning is installed, it's never uninstalled.

Vinyl records, straight razors and soon, drivable cars, will all be perceived as hobbies, not mainstream activities.

This one-way ratchet is accelerating and it's having a profound effect on every culture we are part of. As Kevin Kelly has pointed out, technology creates more technology, and this, combined with the ratchet, has a transformative effect.

In a corollary to this, some technologies, once adopted, create their own demand cycles. A little electricity creates a demand for more electricity. A little bandwidth creates a demand for more bandwidth.

And the roll-your-own media that has come along with the connection economy is an example of this demand cycle. Once people realize that they can make their own apps, write their own words, create their own movements, they don't happily go back to the original sources of controlled, centralized production.

The last hundred years have also seen a similar ratchet (amplified, I'd argue, by the technology of media and of the economy) in civil rights. It's unlikely (with the exception of despotic edicts) that women will ever lose the vote, that discrimination on race will return to apartheid-like levels, that marriage will return to being an exclusionary practice... once a social justice is embraced by a culture, it's rarely abandoned.

Fashion ebbs and flows, the tide goes in and it goes out, but some changes tend to flow in one direction.

Boys in 2015

Absent fathers and feminized schools are driving boys into a disconnected online world of porn and video games, argues the academic psychologist Philip Zimbardo in an interview with Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian.

In the UK today, a young person is more likely to have a television in their bedroom than a father in their house by the end of their childhood. And even if fathers are around, their sons don’t engage with them much: boys spend 44 hours in front of a TV, smartphone or computer screen for every half hour in conversation with their fathers.

Why does any of this really matter, I ask the American psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who cites these figures in his new book Man (Dis)connected: How Technology Has Sabotaged What It Means To Be Male. Why do boys need fathers?

Zimbardo, professor emeritus at Stanford University, replies that everybody needs a mother and father because they give different kinds of love. “Mothers give love unconditionally – because you came out of her body, a mother loves you. You bring home your report card and it’s all Cs? Mom will say, ‘It’s OK. Momma loves you anyway. Try harder.’

“Fathers give love provisionally. If you want your allowance, if you don’t want me to turn off your computer, then you’ve got to perform. That’s always been the deal with fathers and sons – you don’t get a pass just because you exist, just because you got my name on your birth certificate. You’re going to do it because you want your father to love you and admire you. That central source of extrinsic motivation is gone now for almost one out of every two kids.”

...Why are boys more likely to retreat into cyberspace than girls? “Boys have never been self-reflective. Boys are focused on doing and acting, girls are more focused on being and feeling. The new video-game world encourages doing and acting and not really thinking. Video games are not so attractive to girls.”

...Zimbardo reckons that online pornography is much more appealing to boys than girls, in part because it eliminates narratives. “With the old pornography there were typically stories. There was a movie, like Deep Throat, and in the course of some interesting theme people were having sex. Now it’s only about physical sexual contact.”

“It’s always been difficult for boys to talk to girls because you are never sure what they want or what their agenda is. And now without trying or practice it becomes more and more difficult. So it’s a reason to retreat into this virtual world.”

...“The one thing every boy or man fears from girls is being rejected. I don’t want you to kiss me, I don’t want sex, I don’t want you, I don’t want to date. That fear of rejection by women is eliminated in this virtual pornography world.”

“Pornography is being moved to the next level. You’ll put on 3D glasses and the woman or man will proposition you. And in some cases it’ll be interactive – you could say ‘Take off your clothes’. The idea of the film-maker of 3D virtual sex is to make it seem ever more real, just as video games are. Soon they’ll be able to put the face of the viewer on to the leading character. So you’ll be the man the woman wants to have sex with.”

...But there is a grisly paradox, Zimbardo argues. Boys’ retreat into a putatively safe virtual world involves, in fact, a new kind of rejection. “In online porn, the men are incredibly well-endowed – they are paid precisely because they have those attributes. In addition, some of the men take penile injections so they can perform for half an hour non-stop. When you’re a 10 or 15-year-old kid, you say to yourself, ‘I will never, ever look like that or perform like that’.”

As if to clinch the point, Zimbardo tells me about how he recently took part in a documentary about boys called The Mask You Live In. Directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, it’s a sequel to her film Miss Representation, about the false depictions of women in the media. In one scene, a US school teacher gives a group of boys each a circular piece of paper. On one side they write what their image is, and on the other what they are feeling. Then they scrunch up the paper and throw it to another kid. “What they said was all the same,” recalls Zimbardo. “On the outside it said: ‘Tough. Fearless. Kick your ass.’ And on the inside: ‘Lonely. Sad. Got no friends.’ Each boy was stunned that the others felt the same way. I think it’s what it’s like for boys now – they’re in a terrible state and I can’t imagine that it’s going to get better any time soon.”

Read more here.

What can you do?

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Does technology make us happier, or distracted, busy, and unhappy?

Two Australian academics have written a new book in which they assert that technology should "support well-being, wisdom and human potential.”
Read more here.

America owns the future!