Economics of Technology – Page 104

Europe’s Antitrust Policies Based on “Pathological Revulsion” to Creative Destruction

One of the EU’s findings is that Microsoft uses its desktop dominance to capture the market for Web server software, and now the EU further charges Microsoft with failing to honor its ruling. So Microsoft’s takeover of serverware proceeds apace? Er, Brussels we have a problem.

At last count, Apache-Linux had 62% of the market, Windows 25%, with various others capturing smaller slices. True, Microsoft saw a nearly five-point increase in market share last quarter thanks to GoDaddy.com shifting its 3.5 million hosted sites from Linux to Windows. Maybe the EU should subpoena GoDaddy on grounds that for Microsoft to compete successfully for a customer is illegal.

The other pillar of Europe’s case is Microsoft’s alleged ability to foreclose the market to rival media-playing software. This week, EU lawyers are trying to swat down the inconvenient fact that, since their ruling, Apple’s iTunes and Macromedia’s Flash Player have carved out big niches for themselves. The Apple example is worth inspecting up close. It demonstrates that people don’t buy computers to run software, but to consume information and entertainment "content." Apple gave them the music they wanted, and its software easily found a home on their computers.

Yet the EU simply rejects the example as irrelevant because it doesn’t fit its mental category about what constitutes a "media player." More than stupid — this suggests a pathological revulsion against the kind of disorder in which an Apple can come along and upend all the procrustean assumptions of the EU’s drearily youthful staff of economists and lawyers. We’re not kidding when we say there’s a connection between the Microsoft case and the European 20-somethings who riot in the streets because they’d rather have no job than take a job from which they might fail and be fired.

For the full commentary, see:

HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. "BUSINESS WORLD; The Land (and Antitrust Case) That Time Forgot." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., April 26, 2006): A17.

The Best Company at Making Cars Powered by Steam

Danny DeVito was Larry the Liquidator in the movie “Other People’s Money.” The source of the image of the VHS tape box cover is Amazon.com.

A key passage from Larry the Liquidator’s great speech in “Other People’s Money”:

This company is dead. I didn’t kill it. Don’t blame me. It was dead when I got here. It’s too late for prayers. For even if the prayers were answered, and a miracle occurred, and the yen did this, and the dollar did that, and the infrastructure did the other thing, we would still be dead. You know why? Fiber optics. New technologies. Obsolescence. We’re dead alright. We’re just not broke. And you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes. Slow but sure.

You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies makin’ buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let’s have the intelligence, let’s have the decency, to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future.

For a transcript, and audio version, of the full speech by Larry the Liquidator, see:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechotherpeople’smoneydevito.html

Larry would not have been surprised by the following account of steam automobiles that mentions that the last maker of steam-powered cars, Doble, “managed to hang on until the early 30’s, building what many consider to be the finest of all the steam cars.”

The notion of steam cars seems quaint today, but they were a natural offshoot of an age when much of industry was powered by pressurized steam. By the end of the 19th century, steam engines were ubiquitous, running everything from factories to ships. As a mature, well-developed technology, steam was a logical competitor to electricity and gasoline as a power source for early cars.

Electric vehicles disappeared relatively quickly, a result of their batteries’ meager storage capacity and high weight. The popularity of early gasoline cars was hampered by the arduous, sometimes dangerous, hand-crank starting routine.
As a result, in the early decades of the 20th century steam managed to hold on against the “explosive” engine — as Stanley advertising derisively referred to the internal combustion motor. More than 125 companies manufactured steam automobiles. Among American companies, Stanley, White and Locomobile were the most successful, with Stanleys priced higher than mass-market Fords but below the luxury brands of the time.
Even the most innovative makers of steam cars were not impervious to developments in other technologies: the introduction of the electric starter on the 1912 Cadillac sealed their fate. While gasoline-powered cars became “transportation on demand,” steam cars still needed up to half an hour for the entire process of lighting the burners and developing sufficient pressure before driving away.
White dropped out of the steam business, and Stanley’s operation in Newton, Mass., was gone by the mid-1920’s. Only Doble, in Emeryville, Calif., managed to hang on until the early 30’s, building what many consider to be the finest of all the steam cars.

For the full article, see:
ROB SASS. “Autos on Monday / Collecting; When These Boil Over, They’re Ready to Drive.” The New York Times (Mon., February 27, 2006): D9.

The Stanley Rocket Racer that held the land-speed record for four years for cars of all power plants, starting in 1906. It reached a speed of 127.659 mph. Source of photo, and caption information: NYT article cited above.

Leading Clinton Economist Advocates a Schumpeterian “Dynamism”

Source of book image: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0743237536/104-0088216-5679944

Today’s review of the new Gene Sperling economic policy book in the New York Times Book Review, begins by emphasizing Sperling’s importance in the Clinton administration:

(p. 16) If you were inclined to identify Clintonism with a single person other than the big man himself, that person might well be Gene Sperling – a top campaign adviser in 1992; a tireless advocate of fiscal discipline during the first term; an inveterate policy wonk throughout all eight years of the administration. So it’s little surprise that this book-length vision for a Democratic economic strategy can best be described as Clintonism 2.0.

NOAM SCHEIBER. “Clintonism 2.0.” The New York Times Book Review, Section 7 (Sun., January 22, 2006): 16.

Here is the opening paragraph of Sperling’s chapter one, which is entitled ” Growing Together in the Dynamism Economy.”

In the 1990s, a new economic era was created when a period of intense globalization collided with an information technology revolution. Yet precisely defining a "new" economy is less important than understanding the nature of the change. I believe a more descriptive label is the “dynamism” economy. Of course, dynamic change in market economies is hardly new. The mid-twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter identified the process of “creative destruction,” positing that a healthy market economy is continually moving forward, replacing old capital, old industries — and existing jobs — with more productive alternatives. Yet, what feels most “new” for average citizens is the breakneck speed at which the increased globalization, rapid technological advance, and the explosion of the Internet are putting fierce competitive pressures on the economy and accelerating change not only in products and services, but also in entire job categories and industries.

Part of the first chapter is viewable at Amazon.com. The book citation is: Sperling, Gene. The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity. Simon & Schuster, 2005.

“Dynamism” as a descriptor for the good society also appeals to libertarian economics columnist Virginia Postrel, author of The Future and Its Enemies and webmaster of dynamist.com.

With Flat Tax, Estonia Has 11% Growth

“Prime Minister Andrus Ansip of Estonia in the cabinet room, which is equipped with a computer for each minister.” Source of caption and photo: online version of NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A4) TALLINN, Estonia – Estonia, one realizes after a few days in the abiding twilight of a Baltic winter, is not like other European countries.
The first tip-off is the government’s cabinet room, outfitted less like a ceremonial chamber than a control center. Each minister has a flat-screen computer to transmit votes during debates. Then there is Estonia’s idea of an intellectual hero: Steve Forbes, the American publishing scion, two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and tireless evangelist for the flat tax.
Fired with a free-market fervor and hurtling into the high-tech future, Estonia feels more like a Baltic outpost of Silicon Valley than of Europe. Nineteen months after it achieved its cherished goal of joining the European Union, one might even characterize Estonia as the un-Europe.
“I must say Steve Forbes was a genius,” Prime Minister Andrus Ansip declared during an interview in his hilltop office. “I’m sure he still is,” he added hastily.
The subject was the flat tax, which Mr. Forbes never succeeded in selling in the United States. Here in the polar reaches of Europe it is an article of faith. Estonia became the first country to adopt it in 1994, as part of a broader strategy to transform itself from an obscure Soviet republic into a plugged-in member of the global information economy.
By all accounts, the plan is working. Estonia’s economic growth was nearly 11 percent in the last quarter – the second fastest in Europe, after Latvia, and an increase more reminiscent of China or India than Germany or France.
People call this place E-stonia, and the cyber-intoxication is palpable in Tallinn’s cafes and bars, which are universally equipped with wireless connections, and in local success stories like Skype, designed by Estonian developers and now offering free calls over the Internet to millions.
. . .
Germans showed how allergic they were to the idea when Angela Merkel chose a flat tax advocate as her economic adviser. Antipathy toward him was so intense that political analysts say it probably cost Chancellor Merkel’s party a clear majority in the German Parliament.
Yet the concept has caught on in this part of Europe. Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia all have a flat tax, while the Czech Republic and Slovenia have considered one. Tax policy, not support for the American-led war in Iraq, is the bright line that separates the so-called old Europe from the new.

For the full article, see:
MARK LANDLER. “Letter From Estonia: A Land of Northern Lights, Cybercafes and the Flat Tax.” The New York Times (Weds., December 21, 2005): A4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

British Inventions Taken Up and Exploited in the United States

Source of book image: http://www.mikemilken.com/fincareer.taf?page=they_made_america

Was it a difference in “innovative energies” that mattered, or was it a difference in institutions and incentives?

(p. 11) This crucial difference between invention and innovation was borne in on me on my return to England in 1957. As a young science reporter, I visited the government-funded National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, and they showed where their senior researcher Robert Watson Watt had in 1935 invented the radar system that was to help the Royal Air Force win the battle of Britain. His former colleagues remarked with chagrin on how swiftly this British invention had been taken up and exploited in the United States after 1939, laying the foundation for the great electronics industry. It was the same story with antibiotics, following Alexander Fleming’s 1928 discovery of penicillin; with Maurice Wilkes’s pioneering efforts in developing the first commercial application of the computer at the offices of J. Lyons and Company in 1951 and with the jet engine. All of these British inventions were superseded by the innovative energies of America.

Source:

Evans, Harold. They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2004.

A “Bridge” Technology Between Gas and Hydrogen?

Premacy gasoline-electric-hydrogen concept car. Photo source: WSJ, see below.

One of the difficulties in major changes in technology is how to handle the transition. Technologies that reduce the cost of the transition (I call them “bridge technologies”) can be important. Here is a potential example.

(p. D5) . . . with the Premacy concept, Mazda is attempting to combine this electric-motor engine with a combustion engine that is itself a kind of hybrid engine — one that can burn either gasoline or hydrogen, whichever the driver chooses. The company already has spent years developing such dual-fuel combustion engines and says they are now ready for the mass market. Mazda is expected to announce at the Tokyo Motor Show, which opens Oct. 22, that it will begin leasing a version of the RX-8 sports car in Japan with a combustion engine that burns hydrogen as well as gasoline.

Hydrogen is normally seen as an alternative energy source for use in cars powered by fuel cells, in which the chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen is used to generate electricity. Fuel-cell technology is attractive because it releases no harmful emissions, and Japan has roughly 15 government-run hydrogen stations to encourage the use of alternative fuels. More are expected.
But fuel-cell technology is also extremely expensive. Because of this, most industry experts think commercial use of fuel-cell cars is years, if not decades, away. That is why Mazda has been developing engines that burn hydrogen much like gasoline. Burning hydrogen, according to Mazda, is much more practical.

For the full story, see:

JATHON SAPSFORD. “Mazda Concept Car Will Run on Three Fuels.” THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (Weds., October 5, 2005): D5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

If Only Caroline Had Read Schumpeter

Innovation is sometimes slowed because innovators do not know that creative destruction will replace old jobs with equally good, or better, new jobs:

In 1834 Walter Hunt of New York City made such a leap in lateral thinking. In his little machine shop down a narrow alley in Abingdon Square, he devised a machine for stitching cloth with two threads from two separate sources, one a needle on a vibrating arm and the other a transverse shuttle fed by an unwinding bobbin.
. . .
Hunt, an altruistic Quaker, never pursued his invention because his 15-year-old daughter, Caroline, recoiled from the thought that it would put seamstresses out of work. (p. 87)

Source:
Evans, Harold. They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2004.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Software Industry Exemplifies Creative Destruction

(p. 4) In our view, Microsoft’s dominant share in operating systems evolved legitimately from a free-market competitive process. The PC software industry was legally open and contained many talented players (Sun, Netscape, Novell, Oracle, Apple, IBM), some larger than Microsoft, some smaller. The market process in this industry has always been characterized by intense innovation, rapid growth, sharply falling prices, and bitter rivalry (and occasional cooperation) between rivals. The industry exemplifies Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s vision of competition as a process of creative destruction. Microsoft achieved its market position by aggressively innovating and promoting an open, standardized operating system platform . . .

Source:

Armentano, Dominick T. Antitrust: The Case for Repeal. 2nd ed: Mises, 1999.

The Impossible Dream?

In Locked in the Cabinet, Robert Reich’s amusing allegory about life in Washington, Reich laments that the Democratic Party — and in particular the labor constituents in the party — did not support his vision of education and training as a means of enabling the labor force to adapt to and flourish in a time of rapid economic change and dislocation. Instead, they constituted what Reich called the "Save the Jobs Party," which wanted to preserve the industry, the companies and the jobs that exist today.

I think there is a similar phenomenon in antitrust. Antitrust is about process, and a particularly arduous one at that. We are proud that antitrust "protects competition, not competitors". We say that the market has winners and losers and that that is good.

Unfortunately, process is less attractive, in the concrete world in which real disputes arise and real grievances are formed, than is a comforting end-state. And political actors, I fear, are generally more zealous in guarding the latter than in seeking the former.

So, I can imagine constituents and lobbyists and public interest groups demanding the intervention of antitrust authorities to prevent the BA/NYNEX merger, to open up Korea for more car exports, or to restrict the imports of Japanese television sets into the United States. And I can imagine constituents urging that competition authorities in the EC should leave the Boeing/McDonnell Douglas merger alone or that the antitrust agencies here should stop meddling with hospital mergers in Michigan. But it’s hard to imagine tens of thousands of people gathered on the Mall, carrying placards with pictures of Joseph Schumpeter, and demanding that the government give them more "creative destruction."

Source:

A. DOUGLAS MELAMED. "International Antitrust in an Age of International Deregulation." Address Before George Mason Law Review Symposium: Antitrust in the Global Economy, Washington, D.C., October 10, 1997.

(Note: At the time, Melamed was Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice. Bold emphasis was added by Diamond.)