Category Archives: Web Article Review

Ralph Nader on R&D

I’m still thinking about innovation – Ralph Nader says the U.S. government invests plenty in research and development, but only wealthy and powerful interests reap the benefits.

We send our tax dollars to Washington, D.C., and the federal government gives trillions of these dollars to companies in the form of subsidies and bailouts.

Trillions of dollars are devoted to government research and development (R&D), which has built or expanded private companies. These include such industries as aerospace, pharmaceuticals, military weapons, computers, internet, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and containerization.

Our taxpayer-funded R&D is essentially given away free to these for-profit businesses. We the People receive no royalties nor profit-sharing returns on these public investments. Worse, we pay gouging prices for drugs and other products developed with our tax dollars.

Counterpunch

Maybe, but if this means an obsession with patents and copyrights and other forms of “intellectual property rights” designed to capture value for investors, I think it can go too far and actually limit innovation. It might make more sense for the government to make the investments, institute a value added tax to recoup the benefits of increased progress economy-wide, and return some combination of benefits and services to the people. This would be a pretty obvious win to the private sector and the public at large. Of course, the illogical pro-business, anti-tax ideology U.S. corporations have spent decades manufacturing and imposing on the population makes this combination of policies politically almost impossible.

“innovation driven industrial policy”

I’m still on the topic of innovation. Slate has an article on what an “innovation driven industrial policy” would look like.

It is not—and has never been—that the U.S. does not have a de facto industrial policy. Through regulation, foreign investment rules, trade barriers, and even subsidies (think ethanol), the federal government has found ways to support U.S. industry. And even the most ideological appropriators have not succeeded in removing millions of dollars of research funding channeled through the long-standing research agencies like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or through programs established to support development of that research, such as the Small Business Research Innovation program (now branded as “America’s Seed Fund”).

Slate

So the idea is that an industrial policy would take all this and put it under some kind of central management intended to spur progress in key areas. Then it would pump out more funding and encourage private industry to do the same.

a new “science of progress’

This article in the Atlantic says we need a “new science of progress”. It’s an interesting philosophical question – the universe is all around us, its secrets there for us to reach out and understand. The knowledge that exists to discover is not changing, and yet we seem to only be able to discover it in fits and starts. Are there things we could do to discover it faster? Well, there is something called the scientific method. There is something called technology. The field of economics certainly tries to study progress in a systematic way. How best to educate and train human beings is a perennial field of research. Maybe we need to mash all these together somehow, then add hefty doses of system thinking and data science? Or maybe we just need to find the really smart, innovative, unconventional thinkers and figure out how to harness their genius better?

This is exactly what Progress Studies would investigate. It would consider the problem as broadly as possible. It would study the successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures that have arisen to date, and it would attempt to concoct policies and prescriptions that would help improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future.

Along these lines, the world would benefit from an organized effort to understand how we should identify and train brilliant young people, how the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas, which incentives should exist for all sorts of participants in innovative ecosystems (including scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers), how much different organizations differ in productivity (and the drivers of those differences), how scientists should be selected and funded, and many other related issues besides.

The Atlantic

nuclear weapons are still out there

Stephen Cohen, a well-known Russia scholar, has died. His last book (I think) was called War with Russia? and was basically a reminder that nuclear war with Russia is still a distinct and very dangerous possibility. Not only have treaties and arms control agreements been broken and abandoned under Trump, but U.S. and Russian troops are engaged in violent conflicts dangerously close to each other in Ukraine and Syria, among other places. I can’t help noting that these locations are very close to Russia’s borders, not close to ours. Remember how we reacted to Russian missiles in Cuba? We have a double standard. Biden hasn’t talked much about nuclear weapons, which disappoints me, but at least he is a knowledgeable, responsible adult and things can’t get much worse under his leadership.

freight vehicles and urban design

Next City has a roundup of ideas for more efficiently accommodating freight vehicles in dense cities.

  • Better, cheaper (or even free to the user) public transit, so there aren’t so many cars clogging up the streets trucks need to drive on
  • “logistics hotels” where goods from many sources can be mixed, matched, and put on smaller vehicles appropriate to city streets (this is kind of how a port works?)
  • “design infrastructure like intersections and bus lanes with interactions between freight activity and vulnerable road users, like children, in mind” (sounds good, if a bit non-specific
  • Design trucks so they just aren’t so dangerous
  • Better allocate curb space to get more deliveries out of fewer vehicles

I have a few more ideas.

  • Don’t forget some kind of temporary parking for contractors and delivery people serving urban customers. It doesn’t have to be free, but it should be reservable.
  • Don’t forget garbage trucks, unless we are going to think of a better way to deal with garbage or get rid of garbage entirely.
  • Alleys can work well for trash and deliveries, if they are designed with that purpose in mind. They can provide play space and just generally space for people to spread out the rest of the time (but NOT if they are just a bunch of garage entryways).
  • I still want my robot deliveries, both ground and air! In my city though, robots using the sidewalks for deliveries will need them to be in a better state of repair, and that won’t happen because sidewalks are technically the responsibility of homeowners, many of whom are poor and/or don’t even know the sidewalks are their responsibility. On the few streets with incompetently designed, unenforced, and unmaintained bike lanes, the robots’ wheels and gears will get all gummed up with the blood of children and old people who believed the mayor’s promises to build safe protected bike lanes like they have in Europe.
  • I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. COPY DUTCH STREET DESIGN NOW!!! Just don’t let it go to their heads, the smug bastards…

James K. Galbraith on the coronavirus economy

Here is how James K. Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, explains the effects of coronavirus on the U.S. economy.

  • The global market for U.S. exports has shrunk drastically. The U.S. exports high-tech capital goods like airplanes and weapons.
  • The U.S. oil industry is pretty much shut down because hydraulic fracturing is not cost-effective at current prices, which are caused by low global demand.
  • Car sales are down because people are driving less, and their cars are going to last longer.
  • The service economy is largely shut down. He says it will not reboot quickly because many services are basic luxury goods, things people have been convinced to want but don’t necessarily need, and things that people can do at home if they really want or have too. To certain extent, people have gotten used to doing things at home, and there is also the problem that many people have lost jobs (in the service industry) and will not have extra income to spend on luxury goods.
  • The service industry business model typically depends on very high occupancy (i.e. crowding) to be viable. Businesses are starting to fail and will continue to fail. Once commercial districts start to have high vacancy, they tend not to come back quickly.
  • Unpaid bills and debts are starting to mount, and this will eventually become a problem for creditors and investors.

Here are his solutions, along with my thoughts in parentheses.

  • Redirect idle industries that export capital goods to internal goods such as public infrastructure. (Makes sense, although it’s not necessarily the same people and equipment. Retooling and retraining would be necessary.)
  • A federal jobs guarantee in industries like teaching and home health care. (Makes some sense, but it makes sense to let the private sector lead in markets that are functioning well. The trick is identifying which sectors like education represent genuine market failures.)
  • Nationalization (or the local government equivalent) of some firms and industries that can’t survive at the reduced volumes. (yuck, in general, but maybe industries where this already exists to some extent, like utilities and transportation.)
  • Domestic manufacturing (maybe, but makes sense to focus on industries where we have a competitive advantage, plus those with value for risk management, resilience, robustness – certainly food, medical equipment, etc.)
  • Just have a universal health care system like all other advanced countries. (For crying out loud, just do it now!)
  • Debt forgiveness, especially student and medical debt. This transfers some wealth from creditors to debtors. He says this will occur in either a controlled or uncontrolled way, so we might as well pick controlled. He says major financial reforms might be necessary, like turning banks into public utilities. (Sounds good to me, but can’t happen without major campaign finance reform.)

coronavirus changes to keep

This article in Axios lists some changes brought about by the coronavirus that we might want to keep after the coronavirus.

  • not just remote work, but remote hiring and onboarding – There are now people working at the local branch of my company who I have never met in person. Conversely, it seems no more weird to work online with people anywhere in the world* who I have never met in person, than it does to work with someone local who I have never met in person. This gets us closer to the economists’ dream of a truly mobile workforce that could iron out some inequities. (* Time zones still exist, and I can tell you from working with U.S. staff while I was living in Asia, working in the middle of the night still sucks. I worked with someone in South America last year though who was only one time zone away from mine, and that worked out great. India – I love you guys but the time zone thing is just too brutal…)
  • new movies streamed – well, okay, if you’re a big movie buff… but I do see the distinction between movies and TV shows with a series of hour-long episodes slowly dissolving, and the shows tend to be higher quality. I suspect 2-hour movies that take a year or more to produce and then release may be on their way out.
  • more seamless delivery of everything – yes, but we still need street and parking design in our cities to catch up
  • telehealth and teletherapy – yes, this seems good. I’d like to see home visits make a comeback basic routine health care – no real sign of that yet, although my life insurance company did recently send a nurse to my house to check my weight and blood pressure, stick me with a needle and collect a cup of my pee. So it can be done. Here’s an idea – let’s do vaccination this way.
  • Maybe some states are realizing the internet needs to be treated like a public utility going forward. We’ll see….
  • better remote education tech – this article mentions smaller class sizes and better parent-teacher-school communication. I agree – some of what the remote model lacks could be offset by more one-on-one and small-group attention where it will do the most good.

I’d like to add timed tickets to this list. I’ve seen a few museums, parks, etc. do this in the past, but it has become much more prevalent to buy a ticket that gets you in within a certain window during the day, and this has a huge crowd control benefit. Things are just much more enjoyable when they are less crowded. I also like restaurants and stores that let you check in online, then text you when your table or customer service person is ready for you. Let’s get rid of standing in line forever!

Covid and automation

Pew has an update on activities that might be automated in the near to medium term. Covid might be speeding this up – there’s not much hard evidence offered in this article, but one expert interviewed said he thinks it has been accelerated by five years. Sadly, the articles does not contain any videos of robots at work, which are always fun.

  • taking orders in restaurants – seems like a no-brainer, most of us have probably done this
  • flipping burgers – I haven’t seen this yet
  • delivering meals and towels in hotels and hospitals – The first place I saw this was a hospital in Singapore. I played a (very low speed) game of chicken with the robot. The robot won – or I won, if winning means walking away with all my limbs. It was a children’s hospital so if I lost a limb I would have had to go to a different hospital.
  • cleaning hospital rooms – I’d really like to see this one! If they can clean hospital rooms, can they clean my house?
  • welding in factories – I don’t spend much time in factories
  • meatpacking – no, I haven’t seen a robot rip a chicken open but it seems like the kind of thing that makes sense for robots, if we are all going to continue ripping open and eating animals (which I do myself, and would be a hypocrite if I said I didn’t think we should continue doing this)
  • “Jobs also could be automated for better-educated knowledge workers, including some computer programmers, medical assistants and sales professionals.” The logic here is a little tenuous – replacing travel and convention industry jobs with online meetings. I guess, but is that really the same job being automated, or is that just a job that went away? Did refrigerators “automate” the job of delivering blocks of ice to our homes? If you were the ice man (and now you no longer cometh – I couldn’t resist), I guess that distinction doesn’t matter much to you. Refrigerators do have to be designed, manufactured, delivered, maintained, repaired, and eventually recycled or disposed of, however.
  • customer service – I think this is true, although the computers aren’t necessarily doing a good job and our expectations may have just been lowered to the point where we accept this.
  • “low wage gigs in stores and restaurants” – When I was a teenager I checked out and bagged groceries. That job has been “automated” by making the customer do it themselves. So again, is eliminating customer service the equivalent of automating it, or do we just not remember what customer service was? Not that it was ever perfect.
  • “low skill jobs in mining or factories” – I don’t spend much time in mines
  • “department stores dropping off automated orders at the curb” – a couple years ago, I would have called the police if people were banging on my door and leaving things in front of my house at odd hours. Now it’s the norm.

You can see how all this could lead logically to the idea of a universal basic income. If automation is increasing the productivity of the economy as a whole, but displacing some workers, you can take a portion of new wealth created (this is called taxes) and redistribute it. Or you can set up a sovereign wealth fund and distribute dividends from it, while saving some of the money to redistribute on a future rainy day (you don’t need to do this if you can just print as much money as you want and people will accept it worldwide, but then again maybe you should be planning for a day when that will no longer be the case). Set the tax rate right and you can help everybody at least a little while maintaining the incentive to innovate. Or you can try to be more targeted and use the money for unemployment payments, education and training. This should all be a no-brainer, but the people making the profits don’t want to give up even a small share, and they have spent decades manufacturing a toxic anti-tax culture that makes this politically very hard to do.

Richard Florida’s plan for Philadelphia

Richard Florida and another dude I hadn’t heard of (but he’s local) have a plan for post-pandemic Philadelphia, and it goes something like this:

  • Focus heavily on medical and biotech R&D and startups, where we are a major center.
  • Upgrade workforce skills to participate in this industry.
  • Local procurement policies, especially from minority businesses.
  • Do something to fill vacant store fronts.
  • Do something about poverty.
  • Raise the minimum wage.
  • Develop “concrete actionable strategies” to do these things.

This all sounds pretty good to me. It’s short on specifics of course. We need to grow the economy and create professional jobs somehow without alienating the anti-gentrification crowd. Then tax revenue could increase and just maybe you could do something about poverty. Poverty is the tough nut to crack because there may just not be enough money to go around within a single political jurisdiction, although there probably is plenty to go around in the metro area as a whole, and certainly in the state and country as a whole.

I think professional management of city services would also help. Philadelphia should be a first class international city, but in addition to the income and education inequities it is held back by a personality that is too accepting of amateurism and mediocrity, and too unwilling to look at what is working elsewhere and adapt it. This is not such a tough nut to crack, in my view. Government, businesses, educational institutions, and the public worker unions could get together and probably come up with a plan to upgrade services significantly while saving money, building skills, and creating jobs in the process. This would be a win-win-win for everyone.

bumble bee watch

If you have some free time or are looking for an outdoor project with kids, you can take pictures of bumble bees and upload them to this website. Scientists there can help you identify them and tell you if they are rare.

Bumble bees seem to like my anise hyssop, milkweed, and sunflowers especially. I tried to take a photo of one just now but it turns out they don’t always sit still for photos. There is only so much you can do for wildlife in an urban situation, but one thing you can do is plant to help bees and butterflies, then have friendly conversations with family, friends and neighbors when they ask what the heck you are doing in your “overgrown” garden and when your “weeds” make attempts to expand beyond your borders.