Economics – Page 184 – artdiamondblog.com

Innovation Depends Less on R&D Spending and More on “Talent, Process, Execution and Strategy”

(p. B1) In the world of R&D spending, more doesn’t necessarily mean better. And R&D may not describe all the innovation that matters.
“I think the numbers are pretty useless,” says Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT’s Sloan School who has studied the subject. “What matters more is the kind of innovator you are. If it were really true that the people who spent the most on R&D were the most successful, we wouldn’t be subsidizing General Motors .”
“There’s no statistically significant relationship between how much a company spends on R&D and how they perform over time,” adds Barry Jaruzelski of Booz & Co. “There’s a set of people who just consistently seem to skin the cat better.”
. . .
(p. B2) Booz & Co. in 2007 listed the biggest global corporate spenders of R&D. The top 10 were Toyota, Pfizer, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, DaimlerChrysler, General Motors, Microsoft, GlaxoSmithKline, Siemens and IBM.
Then it drew up a second list, a group of companies it called “high-leverage innovators” that returned the best financial performance for every dollar spent on R&D. Booz screened for companies that, over the five previous years, outperformed industry peers across seven measures–including profit, sales growth, and shareholder return–while also spending less on R&D as a percentage of sales than the median in their industries.
No company from the first list made the second list. (Winners included Adidas, Apple, Exxon, Google, Kobe Steel, Samsung and Tenneco.)
That disconnect essentially hasn’t changed, says Mr. Jaruzelski. Winning at innovation “is all about talent, process, execution and strategy,” he says. “That’s given the U.S. a pretty strong advantage over time.”
“Technology,” he adds, “is not equal to innovation.”

For the full commentary, see:
JOHN BUSSEY. “THE BUSINESS; Myths of the Big R&D Budget.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., June 15, 2012): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Larry Page on Tesla, Commerce, and Changing the World

Funding is a key constraint for the innovative project entrepreneur. By “project entrepreneur” I mean the innovator who views money as a means to achieving the project, and not as an end in itself. In this brief clip from Page’s 2007 AAAS talk, he discusses how as a 12 year-old reading Tesla’s autobiography he almost cried at how Tesla’s failure to commercialize his ideas limited his ability to change the world.

The Tesla autobiography is:
Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla. SoHo Books, 2012.

Neglecting Valid Stereotypes Has Costs

(p. 169) The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible.

Source:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Web Expedites Labor Market for Small Projects

“Liz Langer helped John Burks retrieve his keys.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) A new crop of websites and smartphone applications are allowing people to farm out chores to a growing army of temporary personal assistants. These micro-employees are taking the division of labor to once-unthinkable extremes.
. . .
(p. A14) Some investors see dollar signs. Zaarly Inc., an online marketplace for micro-labor and goods based in San Francisco, recently raised $14.1 million from Google Inc. GOOG -2.18% investor and venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Actor Ashton Kutcher and clothing designer Marc Ecko have also put in money. In October, Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Meg Whitman joined the company’s board.
After launching six months ago, Zaarly is processing more than 1,000 transactions a week for jobs that cost around $50 a pop. Chief Executive and cofounder Bo Fishback, 33, says about half the requests involve tangible goods, and the rest involve some sort of service. One of his favorites: a person who hired someone to buy a Michael Jackson-themed dog costume for a puppy.
Sometimes the situation can be dire. John Burks, a 30-year-old actor who also runs an arts organization in Chicago, accidentally dropped his keys in a sewer during a rainstorm over the summer. To replace all the keys–including ones to his home, office and Mercedes–could cost well over $100.
After Googling “lost keys down sewer” to see what tactics others had used, Mr. Burks thought he could recover his keys with a fishing rod and a magnet, but had neither. His girlfriend at the time knew someone who worked at Zaarly, so he posted the job on its site. Liz Langer, a 27-year-old neuroscience graduate student and top Zaarly “fulfiller,” spotted the job and within an hour arrived with the needed tools. Fifteen minutes later, they fished the keys out of the sewer. (Price: $80.)
“It’s like stranger than fiction,” Mr. Burks says. “I thought there was a very small chance that anything like that can happen.”

For the full story, see:
EMILY GLAZER. “Serfing the Web: Sites Let People Farm Out Their Chores; Workers Choose Jobs, Negotiate Wages; Mr. Kutcher, Anonymously, Asks for Coffee.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., November 28, 2011): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Why Would I Ever Need 10 Floppy Disks?”

Steven Johnson’s early The Ghost Map is a wondrous story of a courageous medical entrepreneur who fairly single-handedly changes accepted wisdom on a hugely important issue (what causes disease). Steven Johnson’s recent Where Ideas Come From provides a mechanical account that attributes new ideas to the inevitable exploration of “the adjacent possible,” leaving little room for the great innovative entrepreneur.
It takes guts to contradict one’s most recent book, and to contradict it so eloquently. So please join me in welcoming back the Steven Johnson of The Ghost Map:

(p. C3) In the fall of 1986, during the first week of my freshman year of college, my cousin took me to the university computer store to help me buy my first Macintosh. The Mac platform was two years old at that point, and Apple had just released a new machine called the Mac Plus that featured a then-staggering 1 megabyte of RAM. (In today’s mileage, that would be just enough memory to store the first few verses of a Katy Perry song.) But the Mac did not yet offer a hard drive, and so my more tech-savvy cousin told me to buy a 10-pack of floppy disks as well.

I looked at him with astonishment. I was an art kid, not a techie. I needed a computer to write plays and short stories and term papers. The computer was just a tool, nothing more. “Why would I ever need 10 floppy disks?” I asked. “I just need one disk for my Microsoft Word files.” My cousin smiled, knowing full well where I was headed. “Just buy the disks. Trust me.”
He was right, of course, and to this day whenever I call him up to tell him about my latest computer purchase, with its terabytes of storage and gigabytes of memory, he laughs and says, “Just one disk. That’s all I need.”
. . .
The genius of famous innovators and CEOs is often exaggerated: Most fortunes are built on good fortune as much as sheer brilliance, and invention is a collaborative art. But there is no contesting the fact of Steve Jobs’s genius–just a debate about its defining qualities.
I worry that we miss something in hailing him as either a master salesman or a master designer, though he is clearly both. His real gift, from an early age, has been the ability to see that these two worlds could, and should, productively collide. It isn’t just that he made computers cool or put them in pretty boxes. It’s that he put those computers in new conceptual boxes. A machine originally designed for processing equations and building bombs turned out to have a wonderful hidden potential: for song, laughter, poetry, community, family.
. . .
When I heard the news that he was stepping down from Apple, the image that flashed in my head was of a kid in a computer store trying to save a few bucks by skimping on floppy disks. I suspect my own story is not so unusual. There is, on the one hand, the simple, factual accounting of it: Steve Jobs persuaded me to buy a lot more than 10 disks over the years. But the other hand is so much more interesting: all the wonderful, unexpected things that he got me to put on those disks.

For the full commentary, see:
STEVEN JOHNSON. “THE GENIUS OF JOBS; Marrying Tech and Art; Steven Johnson on the magic of his first Mac–and how it changed his life.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., August 27, 2011): C3.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Some Irrationality Occurs Because Not Much Is at Stake, and Rationality Takes Time and Effort

(p. 164) The laziness of System 2 is part of the story. If their next vacation had depended on it, and if they had been given indefinite time and told to follow logic and not to answer until they were sure of their answer, I believe that most of our subjects would have avoided the conjunction fallacy. However, their vacation did not depend on a correct answer; they spent very little time on it, and were content to answer as if they had only been “asked for their opinion.” The laziness of System 2 is an important fact of life, and the observation that representativeness can block the application of an obvious logical rule is also of some interest.

Source:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

A Firm’s Social Responsibility Is to Make a Profit

(p. B1) Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate economist, blasted the very idea of corporate social responsibility four decades ago, calling it a “fundamentally subversive doctrine.” Speaking for many capitalists then and now, he said, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.”
Companies shouldn’t spend profits on unrelated job creation or social causes, he said. That money should go to shareholders–the owners of the companies. Pronouncements about corporate social responsibility, he added, are the indulgence of “pontificating executives” who are “incredibly shortsighted and muddleheaded in matters that are outside their businesses.” And that indulgence can lead to inefficient markets.
. . .
(p. B2) “Jobs are an input, not an output; they’re a cost of doing business, not a goal of doing business,” says William Frezza, a Boston-based venture capitalist and fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“From the perspective of defending capitalism, if you accept the premise of your opponent that business has to give back to society, you’ve already lost,” he says. “To put sack cloth and ashes on–you’ve delegitimized capitalism, which is the goal of the protesters. Businesses give back to society every day by pleasing their customers and employing their employees. There’s nothing business owes other than selling the best product at the best price.”

For the full commentary, see:
JOHN BUSSEY. “THE BUSINESS; Are Companies Responsible for Creating Jobs?.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., October 28, 2011): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Steve Jobs Showed that Art and Commerce Could Be “Happy Bedfellows”

Gary Oldman. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 2) Gary Oldman is an English actor . . . widely known for his roles as Sirius Black in the “Harry Potter” film series and Jim Gordon in the Batman movies.
. . .
READING Right now I’m reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. I love when people have a singleness of purpose and don’t get dissuaded. I can connect with that. I can recognize it. I think a lot of artists have that. Art and commerce are not particularly happy bedfellows, but he was the exception.
I read quite a lot of biographies. I like nonfiction. The other book I’m carrying around with me at the moment is “River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West” by Rebecca Solnit. It deals with the 19th century and the arrival of speed with the coming of the industrial age. We were very much governed by nature before; we were at the mercy of our own speed and horses and the like. It’s interesting to think of living at that pace.

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY. “DOWNLOAD; Gary Oldman.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., February 5, 2012): 2.
(Note: ellipses added; bold in original.)
(Note: online version of the interview is dated February 4, 2012.)

Our Cups Will Runneth Over If We Choose Entrepreneurship, Imagination, Will and Optimism

Source of book image: http://www.abundancethebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/cover-NYTimes-3d-500.jpg?139d23

(p. 18) in Silicon Valley, where the locals tend to be too busy starting companies to wallow in gloom, Peter Diamandis has stood out as one of the more striking optimists. Several years ago, Diamandis founded the X Prize Foundation, which rewards entrepreneurs with cash for achieving difficult goals, like putting a reusable spaceship into flight on a limited budget. More recently he helped start Singularity University, an academic program that convenes several weeks a year in the Valley and educates business leaders about the “disruptive” — i.e., phenomenally innovative — technological changes Diamandis is anticipating. To be sure, Diamandis is both very bright (he studied molecular biology and aerospace engineering at M.I.T. before getting an M.D. at Harvard) and well informed. Moreover, he’s not the kind of optimist who will merely see the glass as half full. He’ll give you dozens of reasons, some highly technical, why it’s half full. Then he’ll explain that your cognitive biases are tricking you into seeing the glass of water in a negative light, and cart out the research of acclaimed psychologists like Daniel Kahneman to prove his point. Finally he may suggest you stop fretting: new technologies will soon fill the glass up anyway. Indeed, they are likely to overfill it.
. . .
(p. 19) Throughout the book Diamandis . . . offers small groups of driven entrepreneurs as a kind of Leatherman solution to the world’s problems. It’s true that plenty of insurgents are doing impressive things out there — Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors, which helped jump-start the world’s electric car industry, is a good example.
. . .
. . . , there’s a significant idea embedded within “Abundance”: We should remain aware, as writers like Jared Diamond have likewise told us, that societies can choose their own future, and thus their own fate. In that spirit Diamandis and Kotler put forth a range of possible goals we may achieve if we have the imagination and the will. A little optimism wouldn’t hurt, either.

For the full review, see:
JON GERTNER. “Plenty to Go Around.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., April 1, 2012): 18 & 19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 30, 2012.)

The book under review is:
Diamandis, Peter H., and Steven Kotler. Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. New York: Free Press, 2012.

Even with Subsidies and High Gas Prices, Electric Cars Cost More

(p. 12) The Ford Focus Electric has a base price of $39,995 — minus a $7,500 federal tax credit and a $2,500 rebate in California. That puts its tab at $30,000, some $7,000 above the upscale Focus Titanium. I can hear the electric naysayers exclaiming “Aha! You won’t make back the savings at the pumps.” That’s despite $4 gasoline, and the Focus Electric’s 110 m.p.g. equivalent rating.
But when buying any new car, especially an innovative model of any kind, emotions, aesthetics and externalities eclipse economics.

For the full story, see:
BRADLEY BERMAN. “BEHIND THE WHEEL; 2012 FORD FOCUS ELECTRIC; The Battery-Driven Car Just Got a Lot More Normal.” The New York Times, SportsSunday (Sun., May 6, 2012): 12.
(Note: online version of the story is dated May 4, 2012.)

Behavioral Economics Does Not Undermine Capitalism

Source of book image: http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/thinkingfastandslow.jpg

Daniel Kahneman first gained fame in economics through research with Tversky in which they showed that some of economists’ assumptions about human rationality do not always hold true.
Kahneman, whose discipline is psychology, went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics, sharing the prize with Vernon Smith. (Since the Prize is not normally awarded posthumously, Tversky was not a candidate.)
I have always thought that ultimately there should be only one unified science of human behavior—not claims that are “true” in economics and other claims that are “true” in psychology. (I even thought of minoring in psychology in college, before I realized that the price of minoring included taking time-intensive lab courses where you watched rats run through mazes.)
But I don’t think the implications of current work in behavioral economics are as clear as has often been asserted.
Some important results in economics do not depend on strong claims of rationality. For instance, the most important “law” in economics is the law of demand, and that law is due to human constraints more than to human rationality. Gary Becker, early in his career, wrote an interesting paper in which he showed that the law of demand could also be derived from habitual and random behavior. (I remember in conversation, George Stigler saying that he did not like this paper by Becker, because it did not hone closely to the rationality assumption that Stigler and Becker defended in their “De Gustibus” article.)
The latest book by Kahneman is rich and stimulating. It mainly consists of cataloging the names of, and evidence for, a host of biases and errors that humans make in thinking. But that does not mean we cannot choose to be more rational when it matters. Kahneman believes that there is a conscious System 2 that can over-ride the unconscious System 1. In fact, part of his motive for cataloging bias and irrationality is precisely so that we can be aware, and over-ride when it matters.
Sometimes it is claimed, as for instance in a Nova episode on PBS, that bias and irrationality were the main reasons for the financial crisis of 2008. I believe the more important causes were policy mistakes, like Clinton and Congress pressuring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make home loans to those who did not have the resources to repay them; and past government bailouts encouraging finance firms to take greater risks. And the length and depth of the crisis were increased by government stimulus and bailout programs. If instead, long-term cuts had been made in taxes, entrepreneurs would have had more of the resources they need to create start-ups that would have stimulated growth and reduced unemployment.
More broadly, aspects of behavioral economics mentioned, but not emphasized, by Kahneman, can actually strengthen the underpinnings for the case in favor of entrepreneurial capitalism. Entrepreneurs may be more successful when they are allowed to make use of informal knowledge that would not be classified as “rational” in the usual sense. (I discuss this some in my forthcoming paper, “The Epistemology of Entrepreneurship.”)
Still, there are some useful and important examples and discussions in Kahneman’s book. In the next several weeks, I will be quoting some of these.

Book discussed:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

The Becker article mentioned above is:
Becker, Gary S. “Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory.” Journal of Political Economy 70, no. 1 (Feb. 1962): 1-13.

The Stigler-Becker article mentioned above is:
Stigler, George J., and Gary S. Becker. “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum.” American Economic Review 67, no. 2 (March 1977): 76-90.