Facts and Myths

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As to the economics, remember that when it comes to deficits and debt, the real issues over the long term are (1) the ratio of debt to GDP (we’re still under 50 percent, which ain’t bad, considering all the spending that’s been going on; at the end of World War II it was substantially above 120 percent). And (2) whether and when we’re back to growing the GDP, which is the most reliable way of improving the ratio.

“Obama’s Goal: Halving the Budget Deficit by 2012. Really?” Monday, February 23, 2009, Robert Reich

If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.

“The Big Test,” February 23, 2009, David Brooks

The next several months– much of the summer too, no doubt– is going to be party-time for the right wing, wacky to relatively reasonable, as the debate over the Obama changes begins to build up steam. I think some careful educational reading is in order.

I don’t think it’s quite true, as Brooks claims, that the Obama administration is inventing a plan whole-cloth alone in an office. I don’t know the history of each of these ideas, but certainly everything from deficit spending to green energy investing has a rich and varied history they can use.

Brooks’ fears about bureaucrats is a gentile version of the Reagan hypocrisy. The right’s myth says one thing– big government is bad, the market is good– and then does something else. Expand the government by expanding the defense budget; ignore the market when your pals want a no-bid process.

I think there is psychological truth to the paranoid sounding notion that the right would like to cripple government by bankrupting it both ideologically and financially. I can’t think of any other reason why they (in the guise of Bobby Jindal) would propose a simplistic repetition of bad policy.

I think Robert Reich is a good guide to the stimulus plans and budget, although I think his lack of confidence in the economic recovery might be overstated, perhaps purposefully. We also have a lot of data that will help flush out the myths; I like the Swivel Site for the visuals, which help me keep track of things.

Posted in: Language, Writing

The Work of the Future

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In the late 18th century, the Industrial Revolution started the transition from a manual-labor based economy towards an economy based on using technologies, tools and machines to significantly improve the manufacturing of physical goods. Over the next two hundred years we have seen the industrial sector of the economy achieve major improvements in the productivity and quality of manufacturing, ranging from very simple to highly complex physical objects.

A major step in that remarkable story of innovation occurred around thirty years ago. Before that time, most manufacturing plants were fairly inefficient by almost any contemporary measure, and were turning out products of varying quality. Then, driven by the huge success of Toyota and other companies around the world, the industrial sector and academia discovered the merits of applying engineering discipline as well as a holistic, systems-wide approach to manufacturing processes. Company after company embraced the Toyota Way, Six Sigma, Lean Production and similar methods in their manufacturing and logistics operations, which have brought the industrial sector of the economy to a whole new level of productivity and quality.

The Industrialization of Services, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, February 23, 2009

I think Wladawsky-Berger is correct: the next wave of digital rationalization is going to be in services, and that explains the hype and or excitement around cloud-computing. I think he’s also right that a big part of this is going to be a massive reinvention of consumer appliances.

The genius behind the CD was that you had to re-buy all of your music; it was a boon to the music industry. The next wave will attempt to get us to re-buy all of our appliances. In part this is going to be a good thing– new appliances are more energy efficient, for example– but in part it’s going to be silly.

Do you need to be able to peek into your refrigerator at home while you are sitting at your desk at work? Someone will insist that your house’s Twitter account provides an essential service to yourself and your neighborhood. What is missing from the piece, though, is some sense of how these services will change work.

Efficiency and productivity push the unemployment numbers. Usually the larger economy compensates by creating jobs elsewhere. At least that’s how things have worked in recent decades. But at some point we will either have to invent faux industries to occupy our time or shorten the work week.

Posted in: Writing

Digital Wisdom, Digital Education, Digital Exhaustion

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Digital technology, I believe, can be used to make us not just smarter but truly wiser. Digital wisdom is a twofold concept, referring both to wisdom arising from the use of digital technology to access cognitive power beyond our innate capacity and to wisdom in the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities. Because of technology, wisdom seekers in the future will benefit from unprecedented, instant access to ongoing worldwide discussions, all of recorded history, everything ever written, massive libraries of case studies and collected data, and highly realistic simulated experiences equivalent to years or even centuries of actual experience. How and how much they make use of these resources, how they filter through them to find what they need, and how technology aids them will certainly play an important role in determining the wisdom of their decisions and judgments. Technology alone will not replace intuition, good judgment, problem-solving abilities, and a clear moral compass. But in an unimaginably complex future, the digitally unenhanced person, however wise, will not be able to access the tools of wisdom that will be available to even the least wise digitally enhanced human.

H. Sapiens Digital:From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom, Marc Prensky

I don’t mean to be glib or anything, and I certainly like the idea of promoting wisdom over “mere cleverness” as Prensky suggests, but this piece makes me tired. There are lots of good ideas here, but it’s the Utopian vision of an ambitious professional more than a near-future prognosis.

One way to get at what I mean is to think about the “we” that Prensky uses throughout the essay. It’s certainly true that cell phones and notebook computers extend our cognitive abilities in a helpful way. Everything he says “we” will do or will need to do, however, is dependent on higher education.

Prensky wants us to assume that access to these tools will be more or less universal. It’s easier to imagine a world in which the vast majority of people have very limited computers or cell phones (like the so-called $100 laptop or my TracFone) while a small minority use more sophisticated versions.

There are already two very different systems of health care in U.S., for example, and nothing inherent in the technology will ensure that there won’t be two (or more) Internets, one that works via a simple search interface (for example) and one that works through more complex information aggregation.

Technology can’t trump class. It’s no substitute for all the messy work necessary to make sure that a majority of people have the education they need to use the new tools. I think Prensky misses something else: we won’t just need the tools, we will need the tools to help us escape, if only for a moment, from the world.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing