I recently finished
Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth
, by James Bessen of the Boston University Law School. It’s a good book to check out if you are worried about whether workers will be able to weather this latest wave of technological innovation.
One of the key insights of Bessen’s book is that, as with previous periods of turbulent technological change, today’s workers and businesses will obviously need find ways to adapt to rapidly-changing marketplace realities brought on by the Information Revolution, robotics, and automated systems.
That sort of adaptation takes time, but for technological revolutions to take hold and have meaningful impact on economic growth and worker conditions, it requires that large numbers of ordinary workers acquire new knowledge and skills, Bessen notes. But, “that is a slow and difficult process, and history suggests that it often requires social changes supported by accommodating institutions and culture.” (p 223) That is not a reason to resist disruptive forms of technological change, however. To the contrary, Bessen says, it is crucial to allow ongoing trial-and-error experimentation and innovation to continue precisely because it represents a learning process which helps people (and workers in particular) adapt to changing circumstances and acquire new skills to deal with them. That, in a nutshell, is “learning by doing.” As he elaborates elsewhere in the book:
Major new technologies become ‘revolutionary’ only after a long process of learning by doing and incremental improvement. Having the breakthrough idea is not enough. But learning through experience and experimentation is expensive and slow. Experimentation involves a search for productive techniques: testing and eliminating bad techniques in order to find good ones. This means that workers and equipment typically operate for extended periods at low levels of productivity using poor techniques and are able to eliminate those poor practices only when they find something better. (p. 50)
Luckily, however, history also suggests that, time and time again, that process has happened and the standard of living for workers and average citizens alike improved at the same time. Continue reading →
Writing last week in The Wall Street Journal, Matt Moffett noted how many European countries continue to struggle with chronic unemployment and general economic malaise. (“New Entrepreneurs Find Pain in Spain“) It’s a dismal but highly instructive tale about how much policy incentives matter when it comes to innovation and job creation–especially the sort of entrepreneurial activity from small start-ups that is so essential for economic growth. Here’s the key takeaway:
Scarce capital, dense bureaucracy, a culture deeply averse to risk and a cratered consumer market all suppress startups in Europe. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a survey of startup activity, found the percentage of the adult population involved in early stage entrepreneurial activity last year was just 5% in Germany, 4.6% in France and 3.4% in Italy. That compares with 12.7% in the U.S. Even once they are established, European businesses are, on average, smaller and slower growing than those in the U.S. The problems of entrepreneurs are one reason Europe’s economy continues to struggle after six years of crisis. The European Union this month cut its growth forecasts for the region for this year and next, citing weaker than expected performance in the eurozone’s biggest economies, Germany, France and Italy. This week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development delivered its own pessimistic appraisal, with chief economist Catherine Mann saying, “The eurozone is the locus of the weakness in the global economy.”
[…]
Europe’s unemployment crisis may be eroding a deeply ingrained fear of failure that is a bigger impediment to entrepreneurship on the Continent than in other regions, according to academic surveys. “Fear of failure is less of an issue because the whole country is a failure, and most of us are out of business or have a hard time paying our bills,” said Nick Drandakis of Athens, who in 2011 founded Taxibeat, an app that provides passenger ratings on taxi drivers.
Continue reading →
If you want a devastating portrait of how well-intentioned regulation sometimes has profoundly deleterious unintended consequences, look no further than the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) current ban on commercial drones in domestic airspace. As Jack Nicas reports in a story in today’s Wall Street Journal (“Regulation Clips Wings of U.S. Drone Makers“), the FAA’s heavy-handed regulatory regime is stifling America’s ability to innovate in this space and remain competitive internationally. As Nicas notes:
as unmanned aircraft enter private industry—for purposes as varied as filming movies, inspecting wind farms and herding cattle—many U.S. drone entrepreneurs are finding it hard to get off the ground, even as rivals in Europe, Canada, Australia and China are taking off.
The reason, according to interviews with two-dozen drone makers, sellers and users across the world: regulation. The FAA has banned all but a handful of private-sector drones in the U.S. while it completes rules for them, expected in the next several years. That policy has stifled the U.S. drone market and driven operators underground, where it is difficult to find funding, insurance and customers.
Outside the U.S., relatively accommodating policies have fueled a commercial-drone boom. Foreign drone makers have fed those markets, while U.S. export rules have generally kept many American manufacturers from serving them.
Of course, the FAA simply responds that they are looking out for the safety of the skies and that we shouldn’t blame them. Continue reading →
[Updated 7/10/14: See new addendum at bottom. Updated 4/28/13: Included links to several things + started list of additional resources at end.]
Each year I am contacted by dozens of people who are looking to break into the field of information technology policy as a think tank analyst, a research fellow at an academic institution, or even as an activist. Some of the people who contact me I already know; most of them I don’t. Some are free-marketeers, but a surprising number of them are independent analysts or even activist-minded Lefties. Some of them are students; others are current professionals looking to change fields (usually because they are stuck in boring job that doesn’t let them channel their intellectual energies in a positive way). Some are lawyers; others are economists, and a growing number are computer science or engineering grads. In sum, it’s a crazy assortment of inquiries I get from people, unified only by their shared desire to move into this exciting field of public policy.
I always do my best to answer their emails, calls, and requests for meetings. Unfortunately, there’s only so much time in the day and I am sometimes not able to get back to all of them. I always feel bad about that, so, this essay is an effort to gather my thoughts and advice and put it all one place so that I will at least have something to send these folks. Perhaps I’ll try to update it over time.
#1) Understand that Specialization Matters
I don’t want to bury the lede here, so let me start with the most important piece of advice I share with everyone who contacts me:
specialization matters. When I got started in the sleepy field of information technology policy back in 1991, it was possible to be a jack-of-all-trades. There were only a few issues that really mattered, and most of them were tied up with traditional communications and media policy. If you knew a little something about telephony, universal service subsidies, spectrum policy, and broadcast regulation, then you could be an analyst in this field. There were only a handful of people in the think tank world back then who even cared about such issues. Continue reading →
Public Policy Analyst/Computing and IT Policy
A leading organization of computing professionals is seeking a Public Policy Analyst in its Washington DC Office of Public Policy. The position will assist in carrying out the society’s policy agenda by working with the federal government, the organization’s volunteer leadership and other organizations. The position’s duties include:
• Following, researching, analyzing and reporting on policy issues being discussed in the Congress, the Executive Branch, the Judicial Branch and the media
• Providing advice and direction on policy issues and strategies for engagement • Keeping members informed of relevant policy developments
• Developing and/or reviewing policy position statements (letters, white papers, etc.)
• Planning meetings and/or conference calls
• Developing and managing projects to implement policy agenda
• Maintaining and updating website
• Identifying and recommending opportunities to further the overall policy agenda
• Producing and distributing newsletters, blog posts and various other communications
The qualifications for this position are:
• Minimum of a Bachelor’s Degree
• Command of the legislative, regulatory and legal process, including the ability to conduct legal research and analyze policy developments
• Minimum of three years of experience in the policy, legislative or regulatory
environment
• Superior communication (writing and oral) and organizational skills
• Demonstrated interest in and/or prior experience in the technology policy
• Ability to work both in teams and independently
• Self-starter and ability to manage multiple projects and meet tight deadlines • Strong IT skills
Applicants should submit a resume and cover letter describing interests and qualifications by e-mail policy.analyst.job@gmail.com
You wouldn’t think that policymakers need to be reminded that technological progress raises living standards and creates new (and better) employment opportunities. Alas, some comments President Obama made in a speech last week seemed to link technology to job losses. “There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers,” he said. “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”
In an essay in today’s
Wall Street Journal, one of my Mercatus Center colleagues Russ Roberts, a professor of economics at George Mason University, brilliantly deconstructs this logic and points out why technology doesn’t destroy jobs:
Somehow, new jobs get created to replace the old ones. Despite losing millions of jobs to technology and to trade, even in a recession we have more total jobs than we did when the steel and auto and telephone and food industries had a lot more workers and a lot fewer machines.
Why do new jobs get created? When it gets cheaper to make food and clothing, there are more resources and people available to create new products that didn’t exist before. Fifty years ago, the computer industry was tiny. It was able to expand because we no longer had to have so many workers connecting telephone calls. So many job descriptions exist today that didn’t even exist 15 or 20 years ago. That’s only possible when technology makes workers more productive.
Read the whole thing. Great stuff.
Harvard Berkman Center professor Jonathan Zittrain has published another pessimistic, Steve-Jobs-is-Taking-Us-Straight-To-Cyber-Hell editorial building on the gloomy thesis he set forth in his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. His latest piece appears in the Financial Times and it’s entitled, “A Fight over Freedom at Apple’s Core. Concerning the recent Apple iPad announcement, Zittrain warns: “Mr Jobs ushered in the personal computer era and now he is trying to usher it out.”
I’m not going to go into yet another lengthy dissertation about what it so misguided about his thesis that cyberspace is becoming more “regulable” and that digital “generativity” is dying because of the rise of devices like the iPhone & iPad, or sites like Facebook. Instead, I will just point you to the many things I’ve written before explaining just how far off the mark Prof. Zittrain is on this point. [See the complete list down below + video of our debate.]
But let me just say this… Ignoring that fact that he is an iPhone user himself — which makes no sense considering that he thinks of Apple as the font of all cyber-evil — he can’t muster any substantive empirical evidence proving that the Net and digital devices are being more “closed, sterile, and tethered,” as he repeatedly claims in his book and editorials. And that’s not surprising because the reality is that the digital world is more open and generative than ever, and even if there are some “closed” devices and systems out there, they are actually quite innovative and not perfectly closed as Zittrain suggests. The spectrum of “open vs. closed” systems and devices is incredible diverse and nothing is
perfectly “open” or “closed.” We can have the best of both worlds: many open systems with some partial “walled gardens” here and there (or hybrid systems combining both). Regardless, we are witnessing greater digital “generativity” and innovation with each passing year. Until Zittrain can prove the opposite, his thesis must be considered a failure.
Finally, I want to associate myself with this excellent critique of the Zittrain thesis by Prof. Ed Felten, who points out that Zittrain’s argument doesn’t even work for the iPad, which I would agree is a fairly “closed appliance” in the Zittrainian scheme of the things:
Continue reading →
An Associated Press story posted at 9:31 pm last night by Brett J. Blackledge notes that the Obama adminsitration “has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Barack Obama‘s economic stimulus, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money.” Recipients of federal money were originally supposed to report how many jobs they had “saved or created.” Now, they’re just supposed to report how many people got paid with the money.
The “saved or created” approach was an attempt to estimate how the Recovery Act spending affected employment. Unfortunately, it was impossible for this approach to deliver what it promised, as I pointed out in testimony to Congress last May. To know how many jobs the Recovery Act spending saved or created, we need to control for other factors that affect employment. We also need to control for the employment effects of the borrowing (and future taxing) that pays for the spending.
This is what good “macroeconomic” analysis does. It is not what employers do when they put people on the payroll. Asking employers who received federal money to tell us how many jobs were created or saved is asking them to give us information that they do not have and cannot acquire.
Under the new approach, employers will report quarterly how many people they are paying with the federal money. Since the reports will be quarterly, some jobs may be counted more than once — I guess as much as four times a year. According to the AP story, some Republicans are complaining that the new approach will lead to even larger and more misleading job numbers.
The numbers will likely be higher. But they will not necessarily be misleading, as long as recovery.gov makes clear that these are simply reports on the number of people paid with the federal money, not an attempt to measure the number of jobs created.
Estimating jobs created is work for serious macroeconomists who try to control for other factors affecting the results. There’s of course plenty of room for disagreement over how to do this, as this commentary by my Mercatus Center colleagues Garrett Jones and Veronique de Rugy demonstrates.
The administration’s decision demonstrates once again the old adage that data is not knowledge.
It almost seems pointless for me to continue my ongoing media DE-consolidation series, which has been an ongoing effort to debunk myths about the media marketplace (specifically, the notion that rampant consolidation is taking place and that operators are only growing larger and devouring more and more companies.) After all, even the kookiest of the media reformistas can’t deny the truth anymore: Traditional media operators are struggling to keep their heads above water, and markets are growing more atomistic by the day, not more concentrated.
The
New York Times website seems to run a story per day about traditional media giants falling apart as consumers and advertisers disappear. For those of you with short attention spans, you can even follow the death of old media on Twitter now via “The Media is Dying.” If 140 characters per entry is still too much for you to read, here’s the cribbed version: Lots of downsizing, bankruptcies, and closing of doors. The Tribune’s bankruptcy has been the biggest news this week, but few noticed the amazing statement by CBS Corp. Chief Executive Les Moonves that within 10 years he thinks CBS may dump all its affiliated TV stations and just sell programming direct to cable and satellite operators (and the Net, too). Once other networks take that path, that’s pretty much the end of traditional broadcast local affiliates. (I wonder who the FCC will impose those “localism” regulations on then!)
For those working in the business, the news couldn’t be any worse. As Ad Week reported a few days ago:
Continue reading →
Google has just 
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