United States Exports More Services, than it Imports (a.k.a. “Outsources”)

This month a poll by Zogby International for the Foreign Policy Association found that 71 percent of Americans believed outsourcing was hurting the economy.   It also found that 62 percent of American workers believed the federal government should penalize companies that send work offshore.

Now, however, we can add some actual figures to the overheated debate.  The Government Accountability Office has issued its first review of the data, and one undeniable conclusion to be drawn from it is that outsourcing is not quite the job-destroying tsunami it’s been made out to be.  Of the 1.5 million jobs lost last year in ”mass layoffs” — that is, when 50 or more workers are let go at once — less than 1 percent were attributed to overseas relocation; that was a decline from the previous year.

. . .

The data did show that from 1997 to 2002, annual imports of business, technical and professional services increased by $16.3 billion.  However, during that same half-decade, exports of those services increased by $20.5 billion a year.  In 2002 alone, the United States ran a $27 billion trade surplus in business services, the sector in which jobs are most likely to be outsourced.  The G.A.O. correctly stressed that it is impossible to compute exactly how many jobs are lost because of outsourcing, but unless its figures are off by several orders of magnitude, there’s no crisis here.

 

For the full commentary, see:

Daniel W. Drezner.  "Where Did All the Jobs Go? Nowhere."  The New York Times  (Weds., September 29, 2004):  A25.

Paperwork is 31% of U.S. Health Care Costs

. . . ,  a large part of America’s health care spending goes into paperwork.  A 2003 study in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that administrative costs took 31 cents out of every dollar the United States spent on health care, compared with only 17 cents in Canada.

For the full commentary, see:

PAUL KRUGMAN.  "The Medical Money Pit."   The New York Times   (Friday, April 15, 2005):  A19.

 

Canada may beat the U.S. in this dimension of health care, but they lose in many other important dimensions–for example the wait time to receive ‘elective’ surgeries.  And anyway, isn’t 17 percent still too high?

Free Market Philanthropy

KochClharles.gif Charles Koch.  Source of image:  online version of WSJ article cited below.

 

Mr. Koch’s latest crusade to spread the ideas of liberty has been his sponsorship of a twice-yearly conference that gathers together many of the most successful American entrepreneurs, from T. Boone Pickens to former Circuit City CEO Rick Sharp.  The objective is to encourage these captains of industry to help fund free-market groups devoted to protecting the fragile infrastructure of liberty.  That task seems especially critical given that so many of the global superrich, like George Soros and Warren Buffett, finance institutions that undermine the very system of capitalism that made their success possible.  Isn’t this just the usual rich liberal guilt, I ask.  "No," he says, "I think they simply haven’t been sufficiently exposed to the ideas of liberty."

 

For the full commentary, see: 

STEPHEN MOORE.  "THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Charles Koch; Private Enterprise."  The Wall Street Journal   (Sat.,  May 6, 2006):  A8.

“Everybody wants to be like Bill Gates”

Vietnamese university students hoping to see Bill Gates.  Source of image:  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/world/asia/27vietnam.html?ex=1303790400&en=255d4d4996b1a9a6&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

 

HANOI, Vietnam, April 26 — It was Lenin’s birthday.  The most important Communist Party meeting in five years was under way. And the star of the show was the world’s most famous capitalist, Bill Gates.

The president, the prime minister and the deputy prime minister all excused themselves from the party meeting on Saturday to have their pictures taken with Mr. Gates, who has more star power in Vietnam than any of them.

When people heard he was in town, hundreds climbed trees and pushed through police lines to get a glimpse of him.  He was the subject of the lead article in the next day’s newspapers.

This is where Vietnam stands today, moving cautiously toward a new version of communism while the people and their leaders lunge eagerly for the brass ring of capitalist development.

"That was very symbolic," said Le Dang Doanh, an official in the Ministry of Planning, speaking of the reception for Mr. Gates.  "It is a very clear sign of the new mood of society and the people.  Everybody wants to be like Bill Gates."

 

For the full story, see:

SETH MYDANS.  "Communist Vietnam Lunges for Capitalism’s Brass Ring."  The New York Times (Thurs., April 27, 2006):  A3.

Note:  the version of the article above corrects an error in the print version that had misidentified the day of Lenin’s birth, and Gates visit as a Sunday (it was a Saturday).

Spontaneous Order in Cockroaches

Even cockroaches manage to make collective decisions that, seemingly by magic, produce an outcome that benefits everyone (except the people whose kitchens they are in).  When roaches decide where to move in, they must balance crowding against protection against predators.  The goal: pack enough roaches into a shelter to provide strength in numbers, but not so much that dangerous crowding results.

When scientists put roaches into a dish containing identical shelters, they thought the roaches would fill one shelter and then use others for spillover.  But the gregarious bugs defied expectations.

When more than half the bugs could fit into one shelter, they divided into two equal groups:  For instance, when 50 had a choice of three shelters, each with a capacity of 40, 25 cockroaches gathered in one, 25 in another, and none in the third, biologist José Halloy of the Free University of Brussels and colleagues reported last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dividing up evenly, he says, "spreads benefits and risks among all individuals," rather than having 40 bugs safe and happy while the 10 for whom there was no room at the inn suffer.  But when each of three shelters could hold 70, all 50 cockroaches packed into one.  Each outcome was optimal, producing the greatest safety in numbers without crowding.

Yet no leader assigns lodging. Roaches just check out shelters, with later arrivals deciding that a crowd signifies "this is the place to be."  Overcrowding means "find somewhere else."  A group decision that perfectly balances protection and crowding emerges from dozens of such individual decisions.

For the full story, see: 

Begley, Sharon.  "Buffalo Seek Consensus and Other Tales of How Animals Decide Things."  The Wall Street Journal  (Fri., April 14, 2006):  A11.

Will Google Leapfrog Microsoft?

 

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.  Source of photo:  online version of NYT article quoted and cited below.

 

The Microsoft-Google rivalry is shaping up as a titanic corporate clash for the ages.

It may not turn out that way.  Markets and corporate fortunes routinely defy prediction.  But it sure looks as if the two companies are on a collision course, as the realms of desktop computing and Internet services and software overlap more and more.

Microsoft, of course, is the reigning powerhouse of computing and Google is the muscular Internet challenger.  On each side, the battalions are arrayed: executives, engineers, marketers, lawyers and lobbyists. The spending and competition are escalating daily.  For each, it seems, the other passes what Andrew S. Grove, a founder and former chairman of Intel, calls the "silver bullet test" of strategic competition.  "If you had one bullet, who would you shoot with it?"

How the Microsoft-Google confrontation plays out could shape the future of competition in computing and how people use information technology.

Do the pitched corporate battles of the past shed any light on how this one might turn out?

Business historians and management experts say the experience in two of the defining industries of the 20th century, mass-market retailing and automobiles, may well be instructive.  The winners certainly scored higher in the generic virtues of business management:  innovation, execution and leadership.

But perhaps even more significant, those who came out on top, judging from history, had two more specific attributes.  They were the companies, according to business historians, that proved able to adapt to change instead of being prisoners of past success.  And in their glory days, these corporate champions were magnets for the best and brightest people.

 

For the full story, see:

STEVE LOHR.  "And in This Corner . . . Microsoft and Google Grapple for Supremacy as Stakes Escalate."  The New York Times  (Weds., May 10, 2006):  C1 & C14.

  Source of graphic:  online version of NYT article quoted and cited above.

Charles Koch Participates in Schumpeter’s Process of Creative Destruction

 

KochClharles.gif Charles Koch.  Source of image:  online version of WSJ article cited below.

 

I heard Charles Koch speak at the April 2005 Orlando meetings of the Association of Private Enterprise Education.  Part of his speech involved how he has tried to apply in his own business, Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction.  For a long time Koch has been a stalwart defender of the free market in word and deed.

Ideas seem to exhilarate him.  This no doubt explains in part why this professorial CEO delivers "dozens and dozens" of lectures around the country to his employees on these very topics.  But what does any of this have to do with explaining his company’s prodigious profitability?  Well, everything — he believes.  Mr. Koch contends that the key insight of his business career was melding these philosophical insights about the way the wealth-creation process works into a business operating system called "Market Based Management."  This system, which he has trademarked, enables every division of his business empire to operate as a separate, autonomous, profit-maximizing unit.  It is intended to reward employees who think like entrepreneurs.

"Long-term success entails constantly discovering new ways to create value for customers and building new capabilities to capture new opportunities," he instructs.  "In this sense, maintaining a business is, in reality, liquidating a business."  Mr. Koch likens the cycle to Schumpeter’s "creative destruction" — where the old and inefficient are ruthlessly swept away by the new.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

STEPHEN MOORE. "THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Charles Koch; Private Enterprise." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 6, 2006): A8.

 

Charlie Munger Calls Ethanol “Stupid”

Charlie Munger.  Source of image:   http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=16135&repository=0001_article#

 

Charlie Munger is the number two executive, next to Warren Buffett, at Berkshire Hathaway.  He is old enough, and successful enough, and gutsy enough, and curmudgeony enough, to call ethanol "stupid" while in the "cornhusker state" for the company’s annual meeting.  (Of course, he wasn’t running for public office, and knew he would soon be flying back to his home in California.)

 

Munger said using ethanol for fuel seems "stupid" to him because it takes more energy to create than it produces as a fuel.  Buffett said there are so many ethanol plants, existing or planned, that he doesn’t see how they can all continue operating profitably.

 

For the full article, see:

STEVE JORDON and JONATHAN WEGNER.  "Berkshire Notes: Clayton’s Excutives Double Up."  Omaha World-Herald  (Sunday, May 7, 2006):  1D.

(Note:  the annual meeting was held on Sat., May 6, 2006)  

Incentives and Constraints Matter, But Sometimes Values Do, Too


 Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson.  Source of image:
http://www.iadb.org/idbamerica/index.cfm?thisid=681

 

Cambridge, Mass. – Several recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.

The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960’s: the rejection of any explanation that invokes a group’s cultural attributes — its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members — and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.

Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and a co-author of one of the recent studies, typifies this attitude. Joblessness, he feels, is due to largely weak schooling, a lack of reading and math skills at a time when such skills are increasingly required even for blue-collar jobs, and the poverty of black neighborhoods. Unable to find jobs, he claims, black males turn to illegal activities, especially the drug trade and chronic drug use, and often end up in prison. He also criticizes the practice of withholding child-support payments from the wages of absentee fathers who do find jobs, telling The Times that to these men, such levies ”amount to a tax on earnings.”

His conclusions are shared by scholars like Ronald B. Mincy of Columbia, the author of a study called ”Black Males Left Behind,” and Gary Orfield of Harvard, who asserts that America is ”pumping out boys with no honest alternative.”

This is all standard explanatory fare. And, as usual, it fails to answer the important questions. Why are young black men doing so poorly in school that they lack basic literacy and math skills? These scholars must know that countless studies by educational experts, going all the way back to the landmark report by James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University in 1966, have found that poor schools, per se, do not explain why after 10 years of education a young man remains illiterate.

Nor have studies explained why, if someone cannot get a job, he turns to crime and drug abuse. One does not imply the other. Joblessness is rampant in Latin America and India, but the mass of the populations does not turn to crime.

And why do so many young unemployed black men have children — several of them — which they have no resources or intention to support? And why, finally, do they murder each other at nine times the rate of white youths?

. . .  

So what are some of the cultural factors that explain the sorry state of young black men? They aren’t always obvious. Sociological investigation has found, in fact, that one popular explanation — that black children who do well are derided by fellow blacks for ”acting white” — turns out to be largely false, except for those attending a minority of mixed-race schools.

An anecdote helps explain why: Several years ago, one of my students went back to her high school to find out why it was that almost all the black girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly all the black boys either failed to graduate or did not go on to college. Distressingly, she found that all the black boys knew the consequences of not graduating and going on to college (”We’re not stupid!” they told her indignantly).

So why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the ”cool-pose culture” of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation’s best entertainers were black.

Not only was living this subculture immensely fulfilling, the boys said, it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths. This also explains the otherwise puzzling finding by social psychologists that young black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image is independent of how badly they were doing in school.

I call this the Dionysian trap for young black men. The important thing to note about the subculture that ensnares them is that it is not disconnected from the mainstream culture. To the contrary, it has powerful support from some of America’s largest corporations. Hip-hop, professional basketball and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry pie. Young white Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book.

For young black men, however, that culture is all there is — or so they think. Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and self-respect, is a major factor in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.

 

For the full commentary, see:

ORLANDO PATTERSON. "A Poverty of the Mind."  The New York Times, Section 4 (Sunday, March 26, 2006):  13.  



British Pull Own Teeth Under Public Dental Care

KellyWilliamToothless.jpg "William Kelly, 43, extracted part of his own tooth, leaving a black stump. He plans to pull one more."  Source of caption and image:  online version of NYT article cited below.

 

ROCHDALE, England, May 2 — "I snapped it out myself," said William Kelly, 43, describing his most recent dental procedure, the autoextraction of one of his upper teeth.

Now it is a jagged black stump, and the pain gnawing at Mr. Kelly’s mouth has transferred itself to a different tooth, mottled and rickety, on the other side of his mouth.  "I’m in the middle of pulling that one out, too," he said.

. . .

But the problem is serious.  Mr. Kelly’s predicament is not just a result of cigarettes and possibly indifferent oral hygiene; he is careful to brush once a day, he said.  Instead, it is due in large part to the deficiencies in Britain’s state-financed dental service, which, stretched beyond its limit, no longer serves everyone and no longer even pretends to try.

Every time he has tried to sign up, lining up with hundreds of others from the ranks of the desperate and the hurting — "I’ve seen people with bleeding gums where they’ve ripped their teeth out," he said grimly — he has arrived too late and missed the cutoff.

"You could argue that Britain has not seen lines like this since World War II," said Mark Pritchard, a member of Parliament who represents part of Shropshire, where the situation is just as grim.  "Churchill once said that the British are great queuers, but I don’t think he meant that in connection to dental care."

Britain has too few public dentists for too many people. At the beginning of the year, just 49 percent of the adults and 63 percent of the children in England and Wales were registered with public dentists.

And now, discouraged by what they say is the assembly-line nature of the job and by a new contract that pays them to perform a set number of "units of dental activity" per year, even more dentists are abandoning the health service and going into private practice — some 2,000 in April alone, the British Dental Association says.

. . .

The system, critics say, encourages state dentists to see too many patients in too short a time and to cut corners by, for instance, extracting teeth rather than performing root canals.

Claire Dacey, a nurse for a private dentist, said that when she worked in the National Health Service one dentist in the practice performed cleanings in five minutes flat.

Moreover, she said, by the time patients got in to see a dentist, many were in terrible shape.

"I had a lady who was in so much pain and had to wait so long that she got herself drunk and had her friend take out her tooth with a pair of pliers," Ms. Dacey said.

Some people simply seek treatment abroad.

 

For the full story, see:

SARAH LYALL.  "In a Dentist Shortage, British (Ouch) Do It Themselves."  The New York Times, Section 1  (Sun., May 7, 2006):  3. 

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Benjamin Rogge in 1973 Discussed Leapfrog Competition


Ben Rogge and the members of Wabash College’s John Van Sickle Club in 1973.  Source of image: The Wabash 1973 Yearbook, p. 173.

 

In explaining Schumpeter’s concept of competition within the process of creative destruction, I have long thought the phrase "leapfrog competition" was apt.  I have no memory of Schumpter himself using the phrase, but did think I remembered Rogge using the phrase.

Today (4/21/06) I used the Amazon.com "Search within the Book" feature to search for the "leapfrog", "leap-frog", and "frog" in Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.  No use of any of the three was found.  This provides some support to my belief that Schumpeter himself did not use the phrase.

I also today examined my lecture notes from Benjamin Rogge’s Comparative Economic Systems course at Wabash College.  In the midst of a discussion of creative destruction on 1/25/73, I note "leap-frogging analogy" which supports my memory that Rogge made use of the phrase "leapfrog competition" in class.

In terms of in-print uses of the analogy, I have performed the same three searches using Liberty Fund’s HTML version of Rogge’s Can Capitalism Survive?  I found one "hit" which appears on p. 22 of the print versions of the book.  

The technical description of the market structure, in the language of the textbook model, would be that of “oligopoly”—the rule of the few.

All of this Schumpeter would label as nonsense. Why? Because the investigator would be examining “each year—taken separately” rather than the never-ending game of leapfrog that the data reveal and that represents the true nature of the competitive process.

I will be in the debt of anyone who can show me an earlier use of the word "leapfrog" in the context of a discussion of competiton in Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction.