Category: Government

Uncertainty on Future Government Policies Reduces Firm Investment

(p. A6) A shoe factory owner, Rafeeque Ahmed, says he has put expansion plans on hold until he has more confidence about New Delhi’s policy plans, particularly about minimum wages. The $16 million he was going to invest to boost his production capacity by 20% may now go to setting up facilities in Myanmar or Bangladesh.
“We are afraid to invest,” because the government could suddenly change policies and thus our costs, he said.

For the full story, see:
Anant Vijay Kala. “Uncertainty Dulls India’s Business Appetite.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, November 7, 2017): A6.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 6, 2017, and has the title “Apple’s Market Cap Hits $1 Trillion.”)

When Volunteer Bystanders Save More Lives than So-Called First Responders

(p. A1) In the days after the shootings at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas, many stories emerged of bystander courage. Volunteers combed the grounds for survivors and carried out the injured. Strangers used belts as makeshift tourniquets to stanch bleeding, and then others sped the wounded to hospitals in the back seats of cars and the beds of pickup trucks.
These rescue efforts took place before the county’s emergency medical crews, waylaid by fleeing concertgoers, reached the grassy field, an estimated half-hour or more after the shooting began. When they did arrive, the local fire chief said in an interview, only the dead remained.
“Everybody was treating patients and trying to get there,” Chief Gregory Cassell of the Clark County Fire Department, said of his personnel. “They just couldn’t.”
The experiences in Las Vegas have implications for the nation. Emergency medical services have changed how they respond to mass attacks, charging into insecure areas and immediately helping the injured rather than standing back. Still, every minute counts, and bystanders can play a critical role in saving lives, as shown in the aftermath to the shooting on Oct. 1 [2017] outside the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.
. . .
(p. A14) In Las Vegas, several factors impeded the arrival of emergency medical workers at the scene of the shooting itself.
Confusion abounded. One fire crew that happened to be passing by during the first few minutes saw people running from the festival and heard what sounded like gunfire. “You got reports of anything?” a member of the fire crew, Capt. Ken O’Shaughnessy of Engine 11, asked a dispatcher over the radio. “That’s a negative, sir,” he was told. Three minutes later, the dispatcher confirmed that there was an active call.
Members of that crew remained nearby, and later assisted injured concertgoers.
“From what it sounds like talking to them, they didn’t identify the hot zone because they didn’t know where it was,” said Mr. Cassell, the fire chief. “They just knew they had dozens and dozens of critical patients.”
More than 10 minutes after the shooting began, a battalion chief advised firefighters to “stage at a distance” and put on protective vests and helmets as he tried to understand the situation and make contact with a police lieutenant on the scene. The battalion chief radioed in seven minutes later that there were reports of gunfire at both the concert grounds and the Mandalay Bay across the street. “We can’t approach it yet,” he said.
The injured were already fleeing and being carried out in several directions. “Those crews making their way to the concert venue were met at every turn by patients in the streets,” Mr. Cassell said. The fire department helped establish several assembly points, and ultimately, about 160 firefighters and emergency medical workers from departments in the region went to the scene.
Inside the nearly empty concert grounds after the shooting stopped, some volunteers remained, roaming among the fallen near the stage, checking pulses and finding some of them unconscious but still breathing.

For the full story, see:
Sheri Fink. “‘First Medics on Scene in Las Vegas: Other Fans.” The New York Times (Monday, Oct. 15, 2017): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 15, 2017, and has the title “‘After the Las Vegas Shooting, Concertgoers Became Medics.”)

The passages quoted above, provide one more example of one of the main messages of:
Ripley, Amanda. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008.

Genetics Entrepreneur Compares FDA to DMV

(p. 1) MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In 2007, Anne Wojcicki, then 33, lassoed the moon.
She was getting her new company, 23andMe, a mail-order genetics testing firm, off the ground with her “Party ’til you spit” celebrity get-togethers.
She married Sergey Brin, the cute co-founder of Google, also 33 and already one of the richest men in America, at a top-secret Esther Williams extravaganza in the Bahamas. The bride in a white bathing suit and the groom in a black one, they swam to a sandbar in the Bahamas and got hitched in the middle of the sparkling aquamarine ocean.
Soon after the marriage, as Mr. Brin accumulated more power, a yacht, and a fleet of jets, Ms. Wojcicki became pregnant with the first of their two children and Google invested millions in her start-up, named after the 23 paired chromosomes that consist of our DNA.
But six years later, the Silicon Valley fairy tale was shattered by two public humiliations: Mr. Brin got involved with a beautiful young Englishwoman named Amanda Ro-(p. 12)senberg, who provided a public face for Google Glass — an attachment that broke up his marriage. And the Food and Drug Administration shut down the primary function of Ms. Wojcicki’s business, calling her D.N.A. spit vial “an unapproved medical device” and imposing stricter rules for consumer genetic testing. Her business, once so ripe with promise to tackle health issues, was curtailed to its ancestry testing division.
. . .
“In some ways, when you have that many bad things happen, it’s a sense of disbelief,” she says. “This was one of those situations where there’s two aspects. A divorce and the F.D.A. There was no workaround in either. So it was one of the first times in my life where you have to accept, you have to actually change. Like, I need to come up with a different way of approaching both of these relationships.”
. . .
(p. 13) She’s focused for now on her children, her new Bengal cats and her company, which has more than three million customers and its own drug-development program. It started selling kits in CVS and Target, got the F.D.A.’s permission to resume giving consumers health reports on 10 conditions, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and the $99 ancestry kit won a spot as one of “Oprah’s favorite things” this year, with Oprah calling it “The Ultimate Selfie.” Fast Company portrayed Ms. Wojcicki as the Comeback Kid of tech.
She realized that she had a treasure trove of DNA data and began teaming with Genentech and Procter & Gamble, which started mining it to make breakthroughs in Parkinson’s, depression and skin care.
In many ways, her struggle with the F.D.A. was a microcosm of the increasingly tense battle between hidebound regulatory agencies and freewheeling tech companies.
Although some people thought Ms. Wojcicki would have to sell her company, she healed the breach with the F.D.A. the same way she healed the breach with Mr. Brin. She did not huff away and seethe and backbite. She “put one foot ahead of the other,” as her mother advises, hired the best regulatory experts and found a respectful new configuration for the relationship.
“We were not communicating in the right way,” she says of the period the F.D.A. felt it was being ignored. “We were not showing Silicon Valley arrogance. We just were running around with our shoes on in a Japanese house. We were not a cultural fit and we weren’t expressing what we were trying to do in the right way.
“Some companies are trying to circumvent the regulators. We weren’t. We just got caught in the cross hairs. We clearly pissed them off. It took us a long time to generate a lot of data to prove that our intentions actually were right. But I feel like we’re doing the right thing in terms of proving that the customer is capable of getting this information on their own.
“I see it from the F.D.A. perspective. It’s a new product. It’s genetics. It’s direct to consumer. It caused anxiety. So, you know, the onus was on us.”
She had to explain to her team: “Listen, when you go to the D.M.V., you don’t argue about the vision test. You don’t say, ‘Oh, I just had a vision test. I don’t need to do the vision test.’ Like, you just do it. The F.D.A. is in charge of public safety, and I have a respect for the job that they have to do. And we’re just going to do the job that they’re asking us to do.”

For the full story, see:
Maureen Dowd. “‘Adapt and Evolve.” The New York Times, SundayStyles Section (Sunday, Nov. 19, 2017): 1 & 12-13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 18, 2017, and has the title “‘The Doyenne of DNA Says: Just Chillax With Your Ex.”)

Long Lines at California DMV’s Fumbling Bureaucracy

(p. 12) LOS ANGELES — They were lined up by the dozens clear down the street on a recent afternoon — hot and frustrated in the sun, trying to attend to the most routine (and unavoidable) encounters with local government: renewing a driver’s license.
Inside the Hollywood office of the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the wait was close to two hours. Folding chairs, all filled, were set up three-deep against three walls.
“There’s a six-week wait just to get an appointment,” said Alfred Kendrick, a fitness trainer from West Hollywood who, like many people here, showed up without one. “Come on. This is 2018. I can order a bowl from China in less time than it takes to get a driver’s license in California.”
Few states have embraced the idea of an expansive government as fervently as California, with its vast public university system, $100 billion high-speed rail project and even, the other day, the passage of legislation outlawing plastic straws. California’s leaders are on the forefront of global efforts to combat climate change and the Democratic challenge to President Trump.
But these days, to the embarrassment of Democrats who control the state government, California is fumbling one of its most basic tasks. Waiting times at motor vehicle offices have increased as much as 46 percent from a year ago, spotlighting a departmental bureaucracy marked by green computer screens and computers that still run on DOS.
California is by no means the only state where motorists have had to endure long lines. Complaints could be heard this summer from Texas to North Carolina to Connecticut. But the breakdown is particularly striking here in a state whose identity is defined in no small part by the automobile and by a sprawling view of government.

For the full story, see:
Adam Nagourney. “‘To Get on Road, California Drivers Spend Hours on Sidewalk.” The New York Times (Monday, Sept. 10, 2018): A12.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 9, 2018, and has the title “‘A Scourge for California Drivers: Hours on a Sidewalk to Renew a License.”)

Alibaba’s Jack Ma Retires Early as Chinese Communists Intervene in Ventures

(p. B1) HONG KONG — Alibaba’s co-founder and executive chairman, Jack Ma, said he planned to step down from the Chinese e-commerce giant on Monday to pursue philanthropy in education, a changing of the guard for the $420 billion internet company.
A former English teacher, Mr. Ma started Alibaba in 1999 and built it into one of the world’s most consequential e-commerce and digital payments companies, transforming how Chinese people shop and pay for things. That fueled his net worth to more than $40 billion, making him China’s richest man. He is revered by many Chinese, some of whom have put his portrait in their homes to worship in the same way that they worship the God of Wealth.
Mr. Ma is retiring as China’s business environment has soured, with Beijing and state-owned enterprises increasingly playing more interventionist roles with companies. Under President Xi Jinping, China’s internet industry has grown and become more important, prompting the government to tighten its leash. The Chinese economy is also facing slowing growth and increasing debt, and the country is embroiled in an escalating trade war with the United States.
“He’s a symbol of the health of China’s private sector and how high they can fly whether he likes it or not,” Duncan Clark, author of the book “Alibaba: The House Jack Ma Built,” said of Mr. Ma. “His retirement will be interpreted as frustration or concern whether he likes it or not.”
In an interview, Mr. Ma said his retirement is not the end of an era but “the beginning of an era.” He said he would be spending more of his time and fortune focused on education. “I love education,” he said.
Mr. Ma will remain on Alibaba’s board of directors and continue to mentor the company’s management. Mr. Ma turns 54 on Monday, which is also a holiday in China known as Teacher’s Day.
The retirement makes Mr. Ma one of the first founders among a generation of prominent Chinese internet entrepreneurs to step down from their companies. Firms including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and JD.com have flourished in recent years, growing to nearly rival American internet behemoths like Amazon and Google in their size, scope and ambition. For Chinese tycoons to step aside in their 50s is rare; they usually remain at the top of their organizations for many years.

For the full story, see:

Li Yuan. “Founder Sees A ‘Beginning’ As He Retires From Alibaba.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 8, 2018): B1 & B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 7, 2018, and has the title “Alibaba’s Jack Ma, China’s Richest Man, to Retire From Company He Co-Founded.”)

The book by Duncan Clark, that is mentioned above, is:
Clark, Duncan. Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 2016.

Billions of Public Dollars “Siphoned Off” by A.N.C. Leaders in South Africa

(p. A1) VREDE, South Africa — With loudspeakers blaring, city officials drove across the black township’s dirt roads in a pickup truck, summoning residents to the town hall. The main guest was a local figure who had soared up the ranks of the governing African National Congress and come back with an enticing offer.
Over the next few hours, the visiting political boss, Mosebenzi Joseph Zwane, sold them on his latest deal: a government-backed dairy farm that they, as landless black farmers, would control. They would get an ownership stake in the business, just by signing up. They would go to India for training, all expenses paid. To hear him tell it, the dairy would bring jobs to the impoverished, help build a clinic and fix the roads.
“He said he wanted to change our lives,” said Ephraim Dhlamini, who, despite suspicions that the offer was too good to be true, signed up to become a “beneficiary” of the project. “This thing is coming from the government, free of charge. You can’t say you don’t like this thing. You must take it.”
But, sure enough, his instincts were right.
The dairy farm turned out to be a classic South African fraud, prosecutors say: Millions of dollars from state coffers, meant to uplift the poor, vanished in a web of bank accounts controlled by politically connected companies and individuals.
The money from an array of state contracts like this one helped pay for a lavish wedding that a top executive at KPMG, the international accounting firm, described as “an event of the millennium,” according to leaked emails. And Mr. Zwane, continuing his meteoric rise, soon leaped to the national stage to become South Africa’s minister of mineral resources.
Almost nothing trickled down to the township or the scores of would-be beneficiaries after that first meeting in 2012. The only local residents to get a free trip to India were members of a church choir headed by Mr. Zwane.
In the generation since apartheid ended in 1994, tens of billions of dollars in public funds — intended to develop the economy and improve the lives of black South Africans — have been siphoned off by leaders of the A.N.C., the very organization that had promised them a new, equal and just nation.

For the full story, see:
NORIMITSU ONISHI and SELAM GEBREKIDAN. “‘They Eat Money’: How Graft Enriches Mandela’s Political Heirs.” The New York Times (Monday, APRIL 16, 2018): A1 & A8-A9.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 16 [sic], 2018, and has the title “‘They Eat Money’: How Mandela’s Political Heirs Grow Rich Off Corruption.”)

Soichiro Honda Rushed Prototype Car “in Defiance of a Planned Japanese Law”

(p. A10) For many Japanese, Honda reflected the originality and self-confidence that turned the country into an industrial powerhouse after World War II.
. . .
The company was founded in 1946 by Soichiro Honda, a tinkerer who loved to battle the giants with his own innovations. He and a dozen workers took engines intended for small electric generators and attached them to bicycles, the first Honda product. Within 15 years, a Honda motorcycle was beating European rivals at the Isle of Man motorcycle race.
Around that time, Mr. Honda rushed out a prototype automobile despite having almost no experience in building them, in defiance of a planned Japanese law that would have restricted entry in the market.

For the full story, see:
Sean McLain. “Tech Costs Force Honda To Let Go of Engineering Legacy.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Aug. 6, 2018): A1 & A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 5, 2018, and has the title “Honda Took Pride in Doing Everything Itself. The Cost of Technology Made That Impossible.”)

Americans Today “Are Far Less Likely” to Trust the Government than 40 Years Ago

(p. A16) . . . Suzanne Mettler, a political scientist at Cornell University [was] perplexed by the trends that Americans have come to dislike government more and more, even as they have increasingly relied on its assistance through programs other than welfare. Americans are far less likely today than 40 years ago to say in surveys that they trust the government to do what is right or to look out for people like them.
. . .
People who strongly dislike welfare were significantly less likely to feel government had provided them with opportunities, or to feel government officials cared what they thought, . . .
“Their attitudes about welfare end up being a microcosm for them of government,” Ms. Mettler said. “They look at how they think welfare operates, and if they see that as unfair, they think: ‘This is basically what government is. Government does favors for undeserving people, and it doesn’t help people like me who are working hard and playing by the rules.’ “

For the full commentary, see:
Emily Badger. “The Outsize Hold Of the Word ‘Welfare’ On the Public’s Mind.” The New York Times (Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2018): A16.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 6, 2018, and has the title “The Outsize Hold of the Word ‘Welfare’ on the Public Imagination.” The page of my National Edition was A16; the online edition says the page of the New York Edition was A14.)

Mettler’s research is more fully described in:
Mettler, Suzanne. The Government-Citizen Disconnect. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2018.

Swedish Welfare Paid for by “the Highest Personal Income Tax Rate in the World”

(p. A17) American liberals sometimes hold up Sweden as a model of social order, equality of the sexes, and respect for parental responsibilities. Its welfare state offers excellent free or subsidized prenatal care, 480 days of paid leave for both natural and adoptive parents, and additional leave for moms who work in physically strenuous jobs. Swedish parents have the option to reduce their normal hours (and pay) up to 25% until a child turns 8.
But all this assistance comes at a steep cost. At 61.85%, Sweden has the highest personal income tax rate in the world. That money pays for the kind of support many American women would welcome, but it comes with pressure on women to return to the workforce on the government’s schedule, not their own. The Swedish government also supports and subsidizes institutionalized day care (they call it preschool), promoting the belief that professional care-givers are better for children than their own mothers.
If a mother decides she wants to stay at home with her child beyond the state-sanctioned maternity leave, she receives no additional allowance. That creates an extreme financial burden on those families, and the pressure is social as well. A 32-year-old friend told me that she was in the park with her 2-year-old son, when she was surrounded by a group of women who berated her for not having the boy in day care.

For the full commentary, see:
Erica Komisar. “The Human Cost of Sweden’s Welfare State; A group of women berated my friend in a public park because her 2-year-old son wasn’t in day care.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 12, 2018): A17.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 11, 2018.)

Central Banks Epitomize the Administrative State

(p. A15) The promise of the modern central bank is that it will make its corner of the economic-policy world technocratic and academic–in a word, boring.
The lesson of the past decade is that this promise is a lie. The developed world’s four major central banks–the Fed, the Banks of England and Japan, and the European Central Bank–have executed a series of extraordinary policy maneuvers to rescue us from the 2008 financial panic, with debatable success. These include ultralow or negative interest rates; the purchase of sovereign debt in mind-boggling quantities; forays into commercial debt, equity and real-estate markets; and ventures into mortgages, small-business loans and other similar instruments. Central banks have also taken on vast new supervisory powers over the financial system. Each of these measures has had profound effects on our economies: debtors win, savers lose; large, bond-issuing companies get credit, smaller firms don’t; owners of assets accumulate wealth, wage earners see their salaries endangered by inflation. Such distributional choices are normally left to elected leaders, but no one elects a central bank.
Mr. Tucker reminds us how this happened. He places the development of modern central banking firmly within the wider story of administrative governance in the 20th century and its expansion at the expense of electoral accountability. “Central banks might well be the current epitome of unelected power,” he writes, “but they are part of broader forces that have been reshaping the structure of modern governance.” His brief account of the Fed’s history starts not at the usual spot–the 1907 panic and its aftermath–but with the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission, in 1887, taken by some as the first step in the development of America’s modern bureaucracy.

For the full review, see:
Joseph C. Sternberg. “BOOKSHELF; ‘Unelected Power’ Review: Monetary Mavericks; The question is not whether recent interventions by central banks were effective, but whether they were legitimate.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, June 28, 2018): A15.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 27, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Unelected Power’ Review: Monetary Mavericks; The question is not whether recent interventions by central banks were effective, but whether they were legitimate.”)

The book under review, is:
Tucker, Paul. Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Ridiculed Nathan Myhrvold Perseveres on Asteroids and Is Vindicated

Nathan Myhrvold has also been ridiculed on his entrepreneurial patent clearinghouse (called Intellectual Ventures), and on his geoengineering solution to global warming.

(p. D1) Thousands of asteroids are passing through Earth’s neighborhood all the time. Although the odds of a direct hit on the planet any time soon are slim, even a small asteroid the size of a house could explode with as much energy as an atomic bomb.

So scientists at NASA are charged with scanning the skies for such dangerous space rocks. If one were on a collision course with our planet, information about how big it is and what it’s made of would be essential for deflecting it, or calculating the destruction if it hits.
For the last couple of years, Nathan P. Myhrvold, a former chief technologist at Microsoft with a physics doctorate from Princeton, has roiled the small, congenial community of asteroid scientists by saying they know less than they think about these near-Earth objects. He argues that a trove of data from NASA they rely on is flawed and unreliable.
. . .
(p. D4) Dr. Myhrvold’s findings pose a challenge to a proposed NASA asteroid-finding mission called Neocam, short for Near-Earth Object Camera, which would likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A congressional committee that controls NASA’s purse strings just included $10 million more in a budget bill for the development of Neocam.
. . .
When Dr. Myhrvold made his initial claims, the Neowise scientists made fun of a few errors like an equation that mixed up radius and diameter.
“It is too bad Myhrvold doesn’t have Google’s bug-finding bounty policy,” Dr. Wright told Scientific American. “If he did, I’d be rich.”
Dr. Mainzer also said at the time, “We believe at this point it’s best to allow the process of peer review — the foundation of the scientific process — to move forward.”
. . .
Earlier this year, Icarus published Dr. Myhrvold’s first paper on how reflected sunlight affects measurements of asteroids at the shorter infrared wavelengths measured by WISE. It has now accepted and posted a second paper last month containing Dr. Myhrvold’s criticisms of the NASA asteroid data.
. . .
When the scientists reported their findings, they did not include the estimates produced by their models, which would have given a sense of how good the model is. Instead they included the earlier measurements.
Other astronomers agreed that the Neowise scientists were not clear about what numbers they were reporting.
“They did some kind of dumb things,” said Alan W. Harris, a retired NASA asteroid expert who was one of the reviewers of Dr. Myhrvold’s second paper.
Dr. Myhrvold has accused the Neowise scientists of going into a NASA archive of planetary results, changing some of the copied numbers and deleting others without giving notice.
“They went back and rewrote history,” he said. “What it shows is even this far in, they’re still lying. They haven’t come clean.”
Dr. Harris said he did not see nefarious behavior by the Neowise scientists, but agreed, “That’s still weird.”
. . .
Dr. Myhrvold said NASA and Congress should put planning for the proposed Neocam spacecraft on hold, because it could suffer from the same shortfalls as Neowise. “Why does it get to avoid further scrutiny and just get money directly from Congress?” he asked.

For the full story, see:
Kenneth Chang. “A Collision Over Asteroids.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 19, 2018): D1 & D4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 14, 2018, and has the title “Asteroids and Adversaries: Challenging What NASA Knows About Space Rocks.”)