Deirdre McCloskey Offers Advance Praise for Openness to Creative Destruction

Astoundingly rich in ideas and stories, Diamond’s sweet and beautiful book is more: an open-handed guide to what really matters in explaining, and sustaining, the Great Enrichment of 3,000 percent per person 1800 to the present. Diamond assuages the ancient fear of betterment, recently haunting us with spooks of AI and technological unemployment. He shows conclusively that an “innovative dynamism” enriches us all, materially and spiritually. The poor are bettered. The jobs are bettered. Read the book and be bettered, freed from specious and politically poisonous worries about economic change.

Deirdre McCloskey, UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics and of History Emerita. Author of Bourgeois Equality and many other works.

McCloskey’s advance praise is for:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming June 2019.

Government Fiscal Stimulus Does Not Speed Job Growth

DebtAndEmploymentGrowthGraph2019-02-17.jpgSource of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A17) . . . is there evidence that stimulus was behind America’s recovery–or, for that matter, the recoveries in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Britain and Ireland? And is there evidence that the absence of stimulus–a tight rein on public spending known as “fiscal austerity”–is to blame for the lack of a full recovery in Portugal, Italy, France and Spain?
A simple test occurred to me: The stimulus story suggests that, in the years after they hit bottom, the countries that adopted relatively large fiscal deficits–measured by the average increase in public debt from 2011-17 as a percentage of gross domestic product–would have a relatively speedy recovery to show for it. Did they?
As the accompanying chart shows, the evidence does not support the stimulus story. Big deficits did not speed up recoveries. In fact, the relationship is negative, suggesting fiscal profligacy led to contraction and fiscal responsibility would have been better.

For the full commentary, see:
Phelps, Edmund. “The Fantasy of Fiscal Stimulus; It turns out Keynesian policies are correlated with slower, not faster, economic growth.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2018): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 29, 2018.)

“The Market Doesn’t Care If You’re Indigenous or Not”

(p. A8) MELBOURNE, Australia — It was a disempowering experience at a large corporate organization that prompted Morgan Coleman to become an entrepreneur.
Initially, he was proud to work there. But soon, as one of the few Indigenous employees, he felt patronized and unwelcome by some, and worried that his manager resented him because of his Torres Strait Islander background.
Now, as part of a growing number of Indigenous Australians finding success in the entrepreneurial world even as the rate of non-Indigenous business ownership has fallen, he feels his future rides solely on his merit.
“Whether I succeed or not, it’s entirely up to me,” Mr. Coleman, 28, said in a recent interview at the Melbourne offices of Vets on Call, the app he left his corporate job to start. “The market doesn’t care if you’re Indigenous or not.”

For the full story, see:

Kenneth Chang. “For Indigenous Australians, Defining a Destiny Through Entrepreneurship.” The New York Times (Monday, Feb. 4, 2019): A8.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 30 [sic], 2019, and has the title “”It’s Entirely Up to Me’: Indigenous Australians Find Empowerment in Start-Ups.”)

Top Fourth of Humanities Grads Earn Far More Than Bottom Fourth of Engineering Grads

(p. A3) Graduates of liberal arts areas like philosophy, foreign languages, ethnic and gender studies, history and English all have a better-than-even chance of landing a job that fits their education level.
They may not pay well, with teaching and social services popular destinations, but graduates can expect to fare better in terms of landing credential-appropriate roles than transportation, culinary services, agriculture and public administration majors.
. . .
The report’s findings are bolstered by research from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, which has found that job prospects and earnings vary widely by college major, with some counterintuitive results. For example, the bottom quartile of architecture and engineering majors earn far less than the top quartile of humanities and social science majors.

For the full story, see:
Melissa Korn. “Many Grads Underemployed After College.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 27, 2018): A3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 26, 2018, and has the title “Some 43% of College Grads Are Underemployed in First Job.”)

Civil-Rights Leaders Argue That Green Policies Saddle the Poor “with Higher Living Costs”

(p. A19) French President Emmanuel Macron stirred popular rage by trying to raise the gasoline tax by about 25 cents a gallon. He argued that higher taxes would reduce fuel use and hence emissions of CO2, helping France meet the lower emissions goals to which it is pledged as a signatory to the United Nations’ Paris Agreement to fight climate change.
Mr. Macron has learned the hard way that voters don’t see climate change as a threat demanding personal sacrifices. The rebellion is global. Green measures that caused energy prices to soar damaged Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany’s 2017 election. Green energy plans were repudiated by voters in Australia and helped cause a political upheaval in the Canadian province of Ontario.
Voters in Washington state and Arizona rejected November ballot measures aimed at reducing CO2 emissions. The Journal’s William McGurn reported last week that 200 prominent civil-rights leaders have filed suit against the California Air Resources Board. Green policies, they argue, are saddling the poor with higher living costs.

For the full commentary, see:
George Melloan. “The Yellow Jackets Are Right About Green Policies; They have distinguished company in questioning the science behind climate-change dogma.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 17, 2018): A19.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 16, 2018.)

“Artificial Barriers to Housing Production”

(p. A3) America’s housing shortage is more wide-ranging than cloistered coastal markets, stretching from pricey locales such as California and Massachusetts to more surprising places, such as Arizona and Utah.
Some 22 states and the District of Columbia have built too little housing to keep up with economic growth in the 15 years since 2000, resulting in a total shortage of 7.3 million units, according to research to be released Monday by an advocacy group for loosening building regulations.
California bears half of the blame for the shortage: The state built 3.4 million too few units to keep up with job, population and income growth.
. . .
“The artificial barriers to housing production aren’t constrained just to California,” said Mike Kingsella, executive director of the Up For Growth National Coalition. “As we dug into the numbers behind this, at a local market level, we’re seeing a pronounced affordability challenge in places like even Arizona.”
Arizona and Utah are among the states that have built too little housing in the 15-year period, according to the report.

For the full story, see:
Laura Kusisto. “Shortages in Housing Are Widespread.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 17, 2018): A3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 16, 2018, and has the title “Homebuilding Isn’t Keeping Up With Growth, Development Group Says.”)

Worn Down by Growing Regulations, American Entrepreneurs Leave China

(p. A1) SHANGHAI–Fifteen years ago in California, a tall technology geek named Steve Mushero started writing a book that predicted the American dream might soon “be found only in China.” Before long, Mr. Mushero moved himself to Shanghai and launched a firm that Amazon.com Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. certified as a partner to serve the world’s biggest internet market.
These days, the tech pioneer has hit a wall. He’s heading back to Silicon Valley where he sees deeper demand for his know-how in cloud computing. “The future’s not here,” said the 52-year-old.
For years, American entrepreneurs saw a place in which they would start tech businesses, build restaurant chains and manage factories, making potentially vast sums in an exciting, newly dynamic economy. Many mastered Mandarin, hired and trained thousands in China, bought houses, met their spouses and raised bilingual children.
Now disillusion has set in, fed by soaring costs, creeping taxation, tightening political control and capricious regulation that makes it ever tougher to maneuver the market and fend off new domestic competitors. All these signal to expat business owners their best days were in the past.
The Trump administration is making a hard-nosed challenge to China using trade tariffs, in-(p. A12)vestment controls and prosecution of technology thieves, and many in American business are cheering, if silently, having soured on the market after years of trying.
. . .
From Silicon Valley in 2003, Mr. Mushero felt China’s rumblings and started writing his book, “Off-Shoring the Middle Class.” He saw U.S. companies save money by shifting accounting, X-ray evaluations and other technical jobs overseas. China, he thought, was becoming globalization’s “one-stop-shop” for manufacturing, basic tech work and advanced research.
He predicted a broad shift to China of not only factory work, but U.S. white collar jobs, too.
. . .
At a Starbucks in mid-2008, he sketched out “a napkin business plan” for a new company called ChinaNetCloud (Shanghai) Co. with Mr. Eron. China was overtaking the U.S. as the biggest internet market, and the partners would trail-blaze into cloud services by managing the online operations of local businesses.
. . .
Tougher regulations and competition deterred foreign players. China’s reputation for technology theft kept many out of the market, which reduced the number of Mr. Mushero’s potential clients. In 2013, the American Chamber of Commerce said only 10% of its members trusted data security enough to consider cloud services in China.
Walt Disney Co. tapped ChinaNetCloud to manage the computers hosting some interactive games in 2012, including one based on its hit movie “Frozen.” Mr. Mushero looked forward to more work with the U.S. entertainment giant, but Disney scrubbed the gaming push in mid-2014. Disney declined to comment. Online gaming in China is dominated by big domestic tech companies; it is derided by regulators as chaotic and harmful and hit regularly with new rules.
. . .
On a recent drizzly afternoon, flanked by framed commendations from Amazon and Microsoft for his firm’s achievements in China, Mr. Mushero said that after New Year’s he will head back to California, where he sees burgeoning demand for corporate online services, to market the company’s cloud-management tools.

For the full story, see:
James T. Areddy. “American Entrepreneurs in China Are Heading Home, Disillusioned.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018): A1 & A12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 7, 2018, and has the title “American Entrepreneurs Who Flocked to China Are Heading Home, Disillusioned.”)

“Not Enough Workers”

(p. B1) MILWAUKEE — At Western Building Products’ banana-shaped factory on the lip of the Menomonee River outside Milwaukee, the company’s president, Mark Willey, is wrangling with a stubborn problem: not enough workers.
“If someone is here a year, they never leave,” Mr. Willey said. “Our problem today is just finding people who want to work.”
It is a headache employers across the country are confronting, as Friday’s monthly jobs report from the government illustrated. The unemployment rate in November [2018] held steady at 3.7 percent — the lowest in nearly half a century. And while the pace of hiring slowed to 155,000 from October’s above-average showing, the parade of payroll gains marched on uninterrupted for the 98th month

For the full story, see:
Patricia Cohen. “‘Hiring Slows in a Labor Pinch.” The New York Times (Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018): B1.
(Note: bracketed year added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 7, 2018, and has the title “As Hiring Slows, Employers Say It’s Getting Harder to Find Workers.”)

Learning Skills Should Not Be Demeaned as “Training”

(p. A13) One of the few lessons that stuck with me from all the courses I took on the way to earning my Ed.D. came during a classroom discussion that sparked my passion for changing the way we talk about education. I’ll never forget how the professor responded to a student who used the word “training.” Training, the professor admonished, was for animals. Humans receive an education.
We can’t keep speaking of people as if they are animals. Whether an individual acquires a skill credential, a bachelor’s degree, a postgraduate degree or anything in between, it’s all education. We need to think about the words we use and why we use them if we are to break the stigma around all forms of education. If we don’t, we will never overcome the abiding sense of inequality and unfairness that so many Americans feel.

For the full commentary, see:
Virginia Foxx. “Stop Calling It ‘Vocational Training’; How we speak about education reflects class prejudice.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, January 2, 2019): A13.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 31, 2018.)

Many Believe Women Should Have Equal Work Opportunity, but Are Better Than Men at Child-Rearing

(p. B1) A new study, based on national survey data from 1977 to 2016, helps explain why the path to equality seems in some ways to have stalled — despite the significant increases in women’s educational and professional opportunities during that period.
Two-thirds of Americans and three-quarters of millennials say they believe that men and women should be equal in both the public sphere of work and the private sphere of home. Only a small share of people, young or old, still say that men and women should be unequal in both spheres — 5 percent of millennials and 7 percent of those born from 1946 to 1980.
But the study revealed that roughly a quarter of people’s views about gender equality are more complicated, and differ regarding work and home. Most of them say that while women should have the same opportunities as men to work or participate in politics, they should do more homemaking and child-rearing, found the study, which is set to be published in the journal Gender and Society.
“You can believe men and women have truly different natural tendencies and skills, that women are better nurturers and caretakers, and still believe women should have equal rights in the labor force,” said Barbara Risman, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an author of the paper along with William Scarborough, a sociology doctoral candidate there and Ray Sin, a behavioral scientist at Morningstar.

For the full commentary, see:
Miller, Claire Cain. “THE UPSHORT; Equality Valued at Work, Not Necessarily at Home.” The New York Times (Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018): B1 & B5.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 3, 2018, and has the title “THE UPSHORT; Americans Value Equality at Work More Than Equality at Home.”)

The academic paper mentioned above, has been published online in advance of print publication:
Scarborough, William J., Ray Sin, and Barbara Risman. “Attitudes and the Stalled Gender Revolution: Egalitarianism, Traditionalism, and Ambivalence from 1977 through 2016.” Gender & Society (2018): https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243218809604

“The Death of the Dead-End Secretary”

(p. A25) Evelyn Berezin, a computer pioneer who emancipated many a frazzled secretary from the shackles of the typewriter nearly a half-century ago by building and marketing the first computerized word processor, died on Saturday [December 8, 2018] in Manhattan. She was 93.
. . .
In an age when computers were in their infancy and few women were involved in their development, Ms. Berezin (pronounced BEAR-a-zen) not only designed the first true word processor; in 1969, she was also a founder and the president of the Redactron Corporation, a tech start-up on Long Island that was the first company exclusively engaged in manufacturing and selling the revolutionary machines.
To secretaries, who constituted 6 percent of the American work force then, Redactron word processors arrived in an office like a trunk of magic tricks, liberating users from the tyranny of having to retype pages marred by bad keystrokes and the monotony of copying pages for wider distribution. The machines were bulky, slow and noisy, but they could edit, delete, and cut and paste text.
Modern word processors, which appear as programs on computers, long ago simplified the tasks of authors, journalists and other writers — sometimes after misgivings over the risk of surrendering to a future of dystopian technology — but became so efficient in offices that they killed off the need for most of the old-fashioned secretarial skills Ms. Berezin was trying to enhance.
“I’m embarrassed to tell you that I never thought of it — it never entered my mind” that the word processor might endanger women’s jobs, Ms. Berezin said in an interview for this obituary in 2017. Though she was not an ardent feminist, she said, her first ad for the Redactron word processor was placed in Ms. magazine in 1971, hailing “the death of the dead-end secretary.”
. . .
Even in her Redactron heyday, Ms. Berezin was hardly alone in the word processing business. Her chief competitor, International Business Machines, made devices that relied on electronic relays and tapes, not semiconductor chips. I.B.M. soon caught up technologically and swamped the market in the 1970s and ′80s, pursued by a herd of brands like Osborne, Wang, Tandy and Kaypro.
But for a few years after Redactron started shipping its computerized word processors in September 1971, Ms. Berezin was a lioness of the young tech industry, featured in magazine and news articles as an adventurous do-it-herself polymath with the logical mind of an engineer, the curiosity of an inventor and the entrepreneurial skills of a C.E.O.
In a 1972 profile in The New York Times, the business writer Leonard Sloane wrote: “Miss Berezin, a serious, soft-spoken individual, nevertheless talks at times like a systems engineer (which she is), a sales executive (which she is) and a proponent of a sophisticated product (which she is). She is also obviously a woman on the senior level of a field where her sex are still a rarity at any level.”
Early in her career, Ms. Berezin designed numerous single-purpose computer systems. They calculated the firing ranges of big guns, controlled the distribution of magazines, kept accounts for corporations and automated banking transactions. She also claimed credit for the world’s first computerized airline reservations system.
“Why is this woman not famous?” the British writer and entrepreneur Gwyn Headley asked in a 2010 blog post.
“Without Ms. Berezin,” he added enthusiastically, “there would be no Bill Gates, no Steve Jobs, no internet, no word processors, no spreadsheets; nothing that remotely connects business with the 21st century.”
Credit for her early achievements does appear to have faded with time, perhaps under the obliterating speed of technological change, the greater notice paid to her corporate competitors, and the tendency of the tech world to diminish the accomplishments of women.

For the full obituary, see:
Robert D. McFadden. “Evelyn Berezin, Computer Pioneer Who Built First Word Processor, Dies at 93.” The New York Times (Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018): A25.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Dec. 10, 2018, an has the title “Evelyn Berezin, 93, Dies; Built the First True Word Processor.”)

The book mentioned as a source above, is:
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016.