Economics – Page 156 – artdiamondblog.com

Public Cannot Go into Space Because of Government Run Space Programs

“‘You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be able to run a spaceship company,’ says Richard Branson.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C11) Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, is just months away from launching what he considers “the biggest Virgin company we’ve ever built.” At 63, he’s already founded multiple businesses worth billions, including a record label and a mobile company. But it’s his foray into outer space with Virgin Galactic that has Mr. Branson excited.
. . .
Safety has been one of the biggest challenges in building Virgin Galactic. In 2007, two workers died after a tank explosion during a rocket test, and three were seriously wounded. The accident, which occurred at a partner company’s facility, delayed the program for an estimated 18 months.
Risk factors weigh on the minds of potential customers as well, especially after NASA’s 1986 Challenger disaster, in which seven crew members, including a schoolteacher, died. Mr. Branson thinks that today most people would want to go into space if they could be guaranteed a safe return trip. “Sadly, I think because the space program was run by governments, there was never any real interest in enabling members of the public to go to space after they tried once” with the Challenger, he explains. “After that, they decided not to take any risks whatsoever.” He adds, “I would say 90% of people my age thought they would go to space because they saw the moon landing.”

For the full story, see:
ALEXANDRA WOLFE. “WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL; Richard Branson; The Virgin Group founder on his out-of-this world venture: space travel.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Nov. 2, 2013): C11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 1, 2013, and has the title “WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL; Richard Branson on Space Travel; The Virgin Group founder on his latest out-of-this world venture, Virgin Galactic’.”)

Edison Failed to Stop Film Projectors from Disrupting His Kinetoscope

Edison tried to kill film projection because he thought the whole country would only need 10 projectors, while they could sell a great many of the single-view kinetoscopes. But the wonderful twist to the story is that it DID NOT WORK because Edison could not stop the Lathams and others from coming forward and disrupting the kinetoscope.

(p. 205) The Lathams were not the only exhibitors frustrated with Edison’s kinetoscope, and the others urged Edison to introduce a projection machine. Edison was adamant: no. He reasoned that the peephole machines (p. 206) were selling well and at a good profit. The problem with projection was that it would work all too well–if he replaced the inefficient kinetoscope with projection systems that could serve up the show to everyone, “there will be a use for maybe about ten of them in the whole United States.” He concluded, “Let’s not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”

At Edison’s lab in Orange, without his boss’s approval, W. K. L. Dickson carried out research on film projection on his own and shared his findings with a friend who was a keen listener: Otway Latham. And when Dickson accepted an invitation to try a projection experiment in a physics laboratory at Columbia, who should show up but Otway’s father, Professor Latham. The Lathams made an offer to Dickson–come join us and we’ll give you a quarter-share interest in the business–but Dickson was unwilling to make the leap. When Edison got word of his fraternizing with the Lathams, however, and failed to reassure Dickson that he believed Dickson’s dealings had been perfectly honorable, Dickson felt he had no choice but to resign. The exact chronology of what he did and what he knew at various points preceding his resignation would be the subject of much litigation that followed. But regardless of intellectual-property issues, Edison lost the one person on his staff who would have been most valuable to him in developing a projection system.
The Lathams and Dickson had discovered that sending a bright light through a moving strip of film did not project satisfactorily because any given image did not absorb enough light before it sped on. The Lathams came up with a partial solution, which was to make the film wider, providing more area for the light to catch as each image went by. The projected images were about the size of a window and good enough to unveil publicly. Professor Latham gave a demonstration of his newly christened Pantoptikon to reporters in April 1895.

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.

When Labor Markets Are Flexible, Workers Need Not Fear New Technology

(p. 6) Driverless vehicles and drone aircraft are no longer science fiction, and over time, they may eliminate millions of transportation jobs. Many other examples of automatable jobs are discussed in “The Second Machine Age,” a book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and in my own book, “Average Is Over.” The upshot is that machines are often filling in for our smarts, not just for our brawn — and this trend is likely to grow.
How afraid should workers be of these new technologies? There is reason to be skeptical of the assumption that machines will leave humanity without jobs. After all, history has seen many waves of innovation and automation, and yet as recently as 2000, the rate of unemployment was a mere 4 percent. There are unlimited human wants, so there is always more work to be done. The economic theory of comparative advantage suggests that even unskilled workers can gain from selling their services, thereby liberating the more skilled workers for more productive tasks.
. . .
Labor markets just aren’t as flexible these days for workers, especially for men at the bottom end of the skills distribution.
. . .
Across the economy, a college degree is often demanded where a high school degree used to suffice.
. . .
The law is yet another source of labor market inflexibility: The number of jobs covered by occupational licensing continues to rise and is almost one-third of the work force. We don’t need such laws for, say, barbers or interior designers, although they are commonly on the books.
. . .
Many . . . labor market problems were brought on by the financial crisis and the collapse of market demand. But it would be a mistake to place all the blame on the business cycle. Before the crisis, for example, business executives and owners didn’t always know who their worst workers were, or didn’t want to engage in the disruptive act of rooting out and firing them. So long as sales were brisk, it was easier to let matters lie. But when money ran out, many businesses had to make the tough decisions — and the axes fell. The financial crisis thus accelerated what would have been a much slower process.
Subsequently, some would-be employers seem to have discriminated against workers who were laid off in the crash. These judgments weren’t always fair, but that stigma isn’t easily overcome, because a lot of employers in fact had reason to identify and fire their less productive workers.

For the full commentary, see:
TYLER COWEN. “Economic View; Automation Alone Isn’t Killing Jobs.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., APRIL 6, 2014): 6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 5, 2014.)

The Brynjolfsson and McAfee book mentioned is:
Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

The Cowen book that Cowen mentions is:
Cowen, Tyler. Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation. New York: Dutton Adult, 2013.

Warren Buffett Lately Low on Alpha

(p. 3) Warren Buffett is probably the most famous investor of his generation, and for good reason: His track record over the long term is a thing of beauty.
He has beaten the market by a wide margin over 49 years, a record so impressive that it’s used in finance classes as a textbook example of “alpha.”
Alpha is an elusive quality. Very simply put, it is the ability to beat an index fund without adding risk to a portfolio. Investment managers are always seeking it. If it exists, Warren Buffett surely has had it.
A new statistical analysis of Mr. Buffett’s long-term record at Berkshire Hathaway has just been done, and it’s come up with some fascinating insights about his abilities, past and present, and about the chances that the rest of us have for beating the market. Using a series of statistical measures, the study suggests that Mr. Buffett has indeed been blessed with an impressively big dose of alpha over a very long career.
But it also reveals something that isn’t impressive at all: For four of the last five years, Mr. Buffett has been doing worse than the typical, no-frills Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fund — so much worse that it’s unlikely to be a matter of a string of bad luck. Mr. Buffett has begun to behave like an investor with no alpha at all.
. . .
A vast majority of individuals, including most people now working in finance, do not have alpha, Mr. Mehta says. It doesn’t matter whether they have studied finance or have prodigious math skills; the statistics show that they are unlikely to have the ability to beat the market.
That has a serious implication for individual investors, he says: True investing skill is so rare that the rest of us shouldn’t even try to emulate those who have it. In addition, he says, we probably shouldn’t bother trying to hire the few outperformers to invest our money. Why? Because we aren’t likely to be able to identify them.

For the full commentary, see:
JEFF SOMMER. “Strategies; The Oracle of Omaha, Lately Looking a Bit Ordinary.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., APRIL 6, 2014): 3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 5, 2014.)

Entrepreneurial Consumer J.P. Morgan “Handled Setbacks with Equanimity”

Schumpeter wrote that the entrepreneur is the one who overcomes obstacles to get the job done (1950, p. 132). Obstacles come in many forms. One of them is consumer resistance to change. So one key contributor to the technological progress is the “entrepreneurial consumer” who is willing to invest in new, buggy, possibly dangerous technologies at an early stage. (Paul Nodskov, a student in my spring 2014 Economics of Technology seminar suggested using the phrase “entrepreneurial consumer.”)
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that in contrast to Europeans, Americans were “restless in the midst of their prosperity” (2000 [first published 1835], Ch. 13). Perhaps even that early, America had more entrepreneurial consumers?

(p. 131) Morgan prized being ahead of everyone else, and the next year was concerned that his plant was already less than state of the art, a suspicion that was confirmed when he persuaded Edison to send Edward Johnson to the house for an evaluation. Johnson was instructed to upgrade the equipment and also to devise a way to provide an electric light that would sit on Morgan’s desk in his library. At a time when the very concept of an electrical outlet and detachable electrical appliances had yet to appear, this posed a significant challenge. Johnson’s solution was to run wires beneath the floor to metal plates that were installed in different places beneath the rugs. One of the legs of the desk was equipped with sharp metal prongs, designed to make contact with one of the plates when moved about the room.

In conception, it was clever; in implementation, it fell short of ideal. On the first evening when the light was turned on, there was a flash, followed by a fire that quickly engulfed the desk and spread across the rug before being put out. When Johnson was summoned to the house the next morning, he was shown into the library, where charred debris was piled in a heap. He expected that when Morgan appeared, he would angrily announce that the services of Edison Electric were no longer needed.
(p. 132) “Well?” Morgan stood in the doorway, with Mrs. Morgan standing behind him, signaling Johnson with a finger across her lips not to launch into elaborate explanations. Johnson cast a doleful eye at the disaster in the room and remained silent.
“Well, what are you going to do about it?” Morgan asked. Johnson said the fault was his own and that he would personally reinstall everything, ensuring that it would be done properly.
“All right. See that you do.” Morgan turned and left. The eager purchaser of first-generation technology handled setbacks with equanimity. “I hope that the Edison Company appreciates the value of my house as an experimental station,” he would later say. A new installation with second-generation equipment worked well, and Morgan held a reception for four hundred guests to show off his electric lights. The event led some guests to place their own orders for similar installations. Morgan also donated entire systems to St. George’s Church and to a private school, dispatching Johnson to oversee the installation as a surprise to the headmistress. The family biographer compared Morgan’s gifts of electrical power plants to his sending friends baskets of choice fruit.

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.

Schumpeter’s book is:
Schumpeter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. 3rd ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1950.

The other book I mention, is:
de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [first published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840].

In France “‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ Means that What’s Yours Should Be Mine”

Guillaume Santacruz is among many French entrepreneurs now using London as their base. He said of his native France, “The economy is not going well, and if you want to get ahead or run your own business, the environment is not good.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) Guillaume Santacruz, an aspiring French entrepreneur, brushed the rain from his black sweater and skinny jeans and headed down to a cavernous basement inside Campus London, a seven-story hive run by Google in the city’s East End.
. . .
A year earlier, Mr. Santacruz, who has two degrees in finance, was living in Paris near the Place de la Madeleine, working in a boutique finance firm. He had taken that job after his attempt to start a business in Marseille foundered under a pile of government regulations and a seemingly endless parade of taxes. The episode left him wary of starting any new projects in France. Yet he still hungered to be his own boss.
He decided that he would try again. Just not in his own country.
“A lot of people are like, ‘Why would you ever leave France?’ ” Mr. Santacruz said. “I’ll tell you. France has a lot of problems. There’s a feeling of gloom that seems to be growing deeper. The economy is not going well, and if you want to get ahead or run your own business, the environment is not good.”
. . .
(p. 5) “Making it” is almost never easy, but Mr. Santacruz found the French bureaucracy to be an unbridgeable moat around his ambitions. Having received his master’s in finance at the University of Nottingham in England, he returned to France to work with a friend’s father to open dental clinics in Marseille. “But the French administration turned it into a herculean effort,” he said.
A one-month wait for a license turned into three months, then six. They tried simplifying the corporate structure but were stymied by regulatory hurdles. Hiring was delayed, partly because of social taxes that companies pay on salaries. In France, the share of nonwage costs for employers to fund unemployment benefits, education, health care and pensions is more than 33 percent. In Britain, it is around 20 percent.
“Every week, more tax letters would come,” Mr. Santacruz recalled.
. . .
Diane Segalen, an executive recruiter for many of France’s biggest companies who recently moved most of her practice, Segalen & Associés, to London from Paris, says the competitiveness gap is easy to see just by reading the newspapers. “In Britain, you read about all the deals going on here,” Ms. Segalen said. “In the French papers, you read about taxes, more taxes, economic problems and the state’s involvement in everything.”
. . .
“It is a French cultural characteristic that goes back to almost the revolution and Robespierre, where there’s a deep-rooted feeling that you don’t show that you make money,” Ms. Segalen, the recruiter, said. “There is this sense that ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ means that what’s yours should be mine. It’s more like, if someone has something I can’t have, I’d rather deprive this person from having it than trying to work hard to get it myself. That’s a very French state of mind. But it’s a race to the bottom.”

For the full story, see:
LIZ ALDERMAN. “Au Revoir, Entrepreneurs.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., MARCH 23, 2014): 1 & 5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 22, 2014.)

‘Diane Segalen moved most of her executive recruiting practice to London from Paris. In France, she says, “there is this sense that ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ means that what’s yours should be mine.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

G.D.P. Is a Useful, But Biased Downward, Measure of Growth

Source of book image: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. 6) Dr. Coyle concludes that while imperfect, the G.D.P. is good enough as a measure of how fast the economy is growing and better than any alternative. It is closely correlated with things that do contribute to happiness. (Nobody is happy in a recession.)

“We should not be in a rush to ditch G.D.P.,” Dr. Coyle writes. “Yet it is a measure of the economy best suited to an earlier era.”
For one thing, it fails to count the value of the staggering growth in consumer choice. Where once we had three television networks, we now have 1,000 channels; greater choice equals greater freedom, she declares. It does poorly in measuring the Internet economy, in which so many benefits — like Google searches — are offered free. It badly lags behind the headlong pace of innovation and creativity. It struggles with the true value of a host of products or services that didn’t exist before. To the degree that it misses those new benefits to consumers, it understates the pace of economic growth.

For the full review, see:
FRED ANDREWS. “Off the Shelf; An Economic Gauge, Imperfect but Vital.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., APRIL 6, 2014): 6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date APRIL 5, 2014.)

The book under review is:
Coyle, Diane. GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Open Source Heartbleed Bug Sends Internet “into a Panic”

Opponents of patents often point to the open source movement as an alternative. The Heartbleed bug illustrates a big downside to open source:

(p. B1) The encryption flaw that punctured the heart of the Internet this week underscores a weakness in Internet security: A good chunk of it is managed by four European coders and a former military consultant in Maryland.

Most of the 11-member team are volunteers; only one works full time. Their budget is less than $1 million a year. The Heartbleed bug, revealed Monday, was the product of a fluke introduced by a young German researcher.
. . .
The OpenSSL Project was founded in 1998 to create a free set of encryption tools that has since been adopted by two-thirds of Web servers. Websites, network-equipment companies and governments use OpenSSL tools to protect personal and other sensitive information online.
So when researchers at Google Inc. and Codenomicon on Monday stated that Heartbleed could allow hackers to steal such data, the Internet went into a panic.
. . .
(p. B3) Earlier in the day, a German volunteer coder admitted that he had unintentionally introduced the bug on New Year’s Eve 2011 while working on bug fixes for OpenSSL. . . .
Errors in complex code are inevitable–Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc. and Google announce flaws monthly. But people close to OpenSSL, which relies in part on donations, say a lack of funding and manpower exacerbated the problem and allowed it to go unnoticed for two years.
. . .
The OpenSSL Project counts a sole full-time developer: Stephen Henson, a 46-year-old British cryptographer with a Ph.D. in mathematics. Two other U.K. residents and a developer in Germany fill out the project’s management team.
Associates describe Mr. Henson as brilliant but standoffish and overloaded with work.
. . .
Geoffrey Thorpe, an OpenSSL volunteer on the development team, said he has little time to spend on the project because of his day job at a hardware technology company.

For the full story, see:
DANNY YADRON. “Internet Security Relies on Very Few.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 12, 2014): B1 & B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 11, 2014, and has the title “TECHNOLOGY; Heartbleed Bug’s ‘Voluntary’ Origins; Internet Security Relies on a Small Team of Coders, Most of Them Volunteers; Flaw Was a Fluke.”)

Russia and China Redistributed Wealth “to Disastrous Effect”

Shane Smith, entrepreneur behind VICE media company. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 10) You believe that young people worldwide are disenfranchised. Do you think popular uprisings will fix things? No. I’m actually worried, because I believe that it’s going to get worse. Look, economic disparity is bad. But we’ve already tried having governments redistribute wealth. We tried it in Russia and China to disastrous effect.

News Corp. bought a 5 percent stake in Vice, and now James Murdoch is on the board. Why did you sell to them? I’ve said that I want to be the next MTV, the next CNN, the next ESPN. Cue everyone rolling their eyes. MTV went to Viacom, ESPN went to Disney and Hearst, CNN went to Time Warner. Why? Because to build a global media brand, it’s almost impossible to do it alone. James has been involved in one of the largest media companies in the world since he was in short pants.
Do you ever fear that Vice will become legacy media itself? It’s our time now. Then, I don’t know, it’ll be holograms next, and some kid will come up and eat our lunch.

For the full interview, see:
Staley, Willy, interviewer. ” ‘Have We Unleashed a Monster?’: The Vice C.E.O. Shane Smith on His New Kind of News.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., MARCH 23, 2014): 12.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date MARCH 21, 2014, and has the title “Vice’s Shane Smith: ‘Have We Unleashed a Monster?’.”)

“The Experts Keep Getting It Wrong and the Oddballs Keep Getting It Right”

“A worker at a hydraulic fracturing and extraction operation in western Colorado on March 29[, 2014].” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C3) The experts keep getting it wrong. And the oddballs keep getting it right.

Over the past five years of business history, two events have shocked and transformed the nation. In 2007 and 2008, the housing market crumbled and the financial system collapsed, causing trillions of dollars of losses. Around the same time, a few little-known wildcatters began pumping meaningful amounts of oil and gas from U.S. shale formations. A country that once was running out of energy now is on track to become the world’s leading producer.
What’s most surprising about both events is how few experts saw them coming–and that a group of unlikely outsiders somehow did.
. . .
Less well known, but no less dramatic, is the story of America’s energy transformation, which took the industry’s giants almost completely by surprise. In the early 1990s, an ambitious Chevron executive named Ray Galvin started a group to drill compressed, challenging formations of shale in the U.S. His team was mocked and undermined by dubious colleagues. Eventually, Chevron pulled the plug on the effort and shifted its resources abroad.
Exxon Mobil also failed to focus on this rock–even though its corporate headquarters in Irving, Texas, were directly above a huge shale formation that eventually would flow with gas. Later, it would pay $31 billion to buy a smaller shale pioneer.
“I would be less than honest if I were to say to you [that] we saw it all coming, because we did not, quite frankly,” Rex Tillerson, Exxon Mobil’s chairman and CEO said last year in an interview at the Council on Foreign Relations.
. . .
The resurgence in U.S. energy came from a group of brash wildcatters who discovered techniques to hydraulically fracture–or frack–and horizontally drill shale and other rock. Many of these men operated on the fringes of the oil industry, some without college degrees or much background in drilling, geology or engineering.

For the full commentary, see:
GREGORY ZUCKERMAN. “ESSAY; The Little Guys Who Saw Our Economic Future; Corporate Caution and Complacency Come at a Cost.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Nov. 2, 2013): C3.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year in caption, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated Nov. 3, 2013, and has the title “ESSAY; The Outsiders Who Saw Our Economic Future; In both America’s energy transformation and the financial crisis, it took a group of amateurs to see what was coming.” )

Zuckerman’s commentary, quoted above, is partly based on his book:
Zuckerman, Gregory. The Frackers: The Outrageous inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013.

Television Improved Test Scores

“Economist Matthew Gentzkow found media slant to be a function of audience preference.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A2) An economist known for pioneering work on slanted coverage in the news media won the John Bates Clark Medal, one of the profession’s most prestigious honors.

Matthew Gentzkow, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, on Thursday was awarded the Clark medal by the American Economic Association, which every year honors the nation’s most promising economist under age 40.
. . .
A big theme in Mr. Gentzkow’s work is finding innovative ways to tackle questions that expand economists’ tool kits.
. . . , in 2008, he and Mr. Shapiro examined the fact that different parts of the U.S. got access to television at different times to gauge TV’s effects on high-school students in the 1960s.
The economists found that children who lived in cities that gave them more exposure to TV in early childhood performed better on tests than those with less exposure. The work also suggested TV helped American children in non-English-speaking households do better in school.

For the full story, see:
NEIL SHAH. “Economist Honored for Work on Media Slant.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., April 18, 2014): 12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 17, 2014.)

The Gentzkow and Shapiro paper on the effects of television, is:
Gentzkow, Matthew, and Jesse M. Shapiro. “Preschool Television Viewing and Adolescent Test Scores: Historical Evidence from the Coleman Study.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 123, no. 1 (Feb. 2008): 279-323.