It is getting ever harder to do business in the United States, argues Niall Ferguson, and more stimulus won’t help: Our institutions need fixing.
WSJ THE SATURDAY ESSAY June 7, 2013 : How America Lost Its Way
Ferguson nails it!
Where are the entrepreneurs? More evidence the very heart of the US economy is failing
James Pethokoukis | June 3, 2013
In my opinion the culprits are easy to discern…..
I am also thinking that:
Which may be hiding lots of small scale entrepreneurial efforts.
But in the main what we are seeing is the aggregate effect of the first list which significantly suppresses the urge to grow. Many commentators miss that the way so much regulation is structured once you reach a certain size it suddenly becomes asymptotically more difficult / expensive / stressful to operate. This makes even starting much less attractive. It also means that we are suppressing companies just as they start to kick up into a realm where they could potentially quickly accelerate out of small business land into middle sized and become more consequential.
This is a socio-economic problem that has to be solved on a broad scale:
Both main parties need to develop their versions of this list, the massive scale, top down, big corporation supporting model both have devolved into has come to the end of its efficacy and we need to go back to our roots. Those roots are individuals acting on, in and through the small scale collective, which both Dem and Rep should be able to support. Of course the downside is that large scale pandering and petty corruption are less hide-able in such a polity.
Body count: U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara briefing the press on Vietnam at the Pentagon in 1965.
Read more: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514591/the-dictatorship-of-data/#ixzz2V67sF8kO From MIT Technology Review
Seems to me that McNamara epitomized the dark heart of the blue model industrialization, he was trying to make central planning work using the tools of capitalism. Big data has the the potential to make Stalinist (central planned top down industrial society) real like no tool before it. But at the same time the underlying technology will make centralization ever less attractive overall, ever less economically efficient. Some nations may fall to Big Data / Big Brother but they are not likely to become conquerors by economic or military coercion because the Maker States will be so much more resilient and efficient. Of course that assumes short sighted politicians/bureaucrats don’t take us all down some ‘consensus’ path because of short term returns that fools take as structural not ephemeral.
WIRED: Why We Can’t Send Humans to Mars Yet (And How We’ll Fix That)
BY ADAM MANN
This is a good article and it has an excellent recap of needed technology, but it is in my opinion reduced in power by a negative tone. It seems biased by a drum beat I have been seeing about how hard, how expensive, how risky…etc, and while I appreciate the challenges one does not open frontiers by dwelling on all the horrid ways one is likely to die. This also seems Blue centric NASA, NASA, NASA. In the end the commercial civilian drive will send us outbound not risk averse bureaucrats.
As always lots of great thought at The American Interest read more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/05/22/jobs-jobs-jobs-2/
First, make hiring easy and cheap.
Second, put the service economy and especially small business and entrepreneurship front and center.
Third, we need to feed the state to the people even as we individualize its services.
That third one had me puzzled till I read the explanation, which is a good description of what the statesmen of the past have done.
A characteristic of American political economy going back to colonial times has been the use of the resources of the state to promote the welfare of what today we would call the middle class. For much of our history we “fed the state to the people” by turning over publicly owned lands at low and ultimately zero cost. The public lands, which once included virtually all of the continental United States, were a possession of almost infinite value, but it seemed wiser (and more politically sustainable) to the leaders of the day to make them cheaply available to the people rather than to hoard them or try to retain a larger share of their value for the public purse.
phys.org : Reports from “Humans 2 Mars Summit” suggest dust may prevent human settlement of Mars by Bob Yirka
…. perchlorates appear to be widespread on the planet’s surface. The fine dust material produced by perchloric acid has been known to cause thyroid problems in people here on Earth.
Just as problematic, … is gypsum…. been known to cause a condition similar to black lung in coal miners in people exposed to it for long periods of time.
… known presence of silicates on the Martian surface—if breathed-in they can cause reactions with water in the lungs and result in the creation of harmful chemicals.
Martian dust could pose health hazards because of the difficulty of removing it from space suits and boots. … fear the dust would build up in air filters and living quarters, adding yet another life threatening element to the list of other known hazards (traveling and landing safely, exposure to radiation and cosmic rays, etc.) for the people who seek to colonize the planet.
You can always find some pretext for why not to do something.
This sort of narrow thinking is why it the Mars colonization effort by somewhat older unworried warriors is a great idea, they will lead the way, they may die earlier…will almost certainly die earlier than they would on Earth but in the big picture they will be immortal.
I think that a commercial fly by of Mars possibly convoying with early colony equipment makes a lot of sense. Drop off a 3D printer to start fabbing buildings or building parts. The fly by would work on the tech of getting there and of living in space for long periods. Multiple (4 in a Bigelow Cross?) inflatable Bigelow modules would make a light weight but spacious habitat that one or two couples could live in for the time needed. I would boost and decelerate the complex with an earth orbital tug and have minimal onboard propulsion since its pointless mass to take with you. With the right kit of science and DIY they would keep busy doing various types of investigation the whole time.
Big picture:
All possible in the next twenty years, tenish if we really pushed, and I think we could commercial/ kick start/survivor fund the whole bloody thing…
From the Liberty Law Site: Silent Cals 6 Simple Rules
1. “Don’t hurry to legislate.”
2. Don’t promise much.
3. Economize.
4. “Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.”
5. The Meaning of Progress.
6. Humility.
Coolidge was not looking to return to the days of “horses and bayonets,” as Obama has joked. “We review the past,” he said, “not in order that we may return to it but that we may find in what direction, straight and clear, it points into the future.” Several of Coolidge’s speeches read like short history lessons, tracing the path of civilization from the Greeks and the Romans, to the Pilgrims and the Puritans, to Washington and Lincoln. To Coolidge, the history of western civilization culminated in the American founding.
Well-intentioned policies to make achieving tenure more family-friendly actually have negative consequences for the salaries of college faculty, says a study co-written by University of Illinois labor and employment relations professor Amit Kramer:
“The norm in academia is that success requires the focused pursuit of academic work at the expense of other responsibilities, including family,” he said. “That suggests that the use of these policies may be detrimental to the career outcomes of tenure-track faculty members. In particular, evaluators may perceive stopping the clock for family reasons as an indicator that the faculty member lacks the commitment to his or her academic role. And that, in turn, may constrain their career prospects.”
This ‘unintended consequence’ should have been predicted (and my bet is that it was) by any rational adult who has worked in even a moderately competitive workplace (and academia in main line universities is anything but just moderately competitive.) This sort of thing is a fact of life among us monkeys, move on, nothing to see here! Trying to add some kind of anti-bias bias, as suggested later in the article, is nuts and will only make things worse.
If you want to provide this sort of benefit, do so knowing there will be ‘unintended consequences’ of this sort and allow your adult, professional staff figure out their own best path. I think providing more personal days per year and allowing them to accrue along with a reasonably strict use policy to offset impacts to the company / coworkers would be more fair and flexible.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-family-friendly-tenure-policies-result-salary.html
Eye Candy : Wired Photo Gallery
Jan Grarup for The New York Times || Robert Nielsen, 45, said proudly last year that he had basically been on welfare since 2001.
Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault
By SUZANNE DALEY
Published: April 20, 2013
I’ve always found the NYT generally more nuanced than it rock ribbed critics make it out to be.
And you could say that this article supports welfare reform, tax reasonableness, fairness etc … Until you think a bit more deeply.
“Denmark is what progressive New Yorkers want to be even if they don’t know it,” the ‘Smithsonian’ liberal in me jeers. The Danes start from such incredible heights of social redistribution it would take huge changes to get it down to the fondest dream of leftish US liberals. In regards to this article, a progressive could comfortingly say “yes welfare can go to far” and then finish with “but we ain’t even close yet.”
This is a tiny, densely populated and historically rich and educate European nation. The Danish welfare state, the Danish tax regime, the Danish government, the country of Denmark…are simply impossible to compare to the US equivalents. It has no real international borders, a proportionally huge and productive coast (the US would count the whole country as a coastal region) it’s comparable to New York City and environs in size and population, it’s highly educated, pretty homogeneous and highly protected from outside threat. Things that work in Denmark simply cannot work in the US because of scale…and even in Denmark the Danish system is tottering.
Interesting article in the HuffPost by Roger Pilon (vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute and director of Cato’s Center for Constitutional Studies,) discussing the libertarian view on gay marriage. But on a more general note, this quote really struck home as a fundamental point we need to think about when discussing the gov’t doing this, that or the other:
In truth, principled equal protection starts at precisely the other end, not with government’s power but with the individual’s right — with the idea that we’re all equally free. And it continues by recognizing that because government belongs to all of us, it must treat us all equally — unless there is some serious, compelling reason to do otherwise, to draw distinctions among us. That gets the presumptions and the burdens right.
Just because it’s beautiful.
This World and Others 