Jon Taplin’s Blog

5 responses so far ↓

• len // December 4, 2008 at 9:16 am | Reply

  I’ve blogged and embedded Jon’s presentation at my own blog. As usual, I differ with Jon on some details of his solutions but otherwise, I am recommending this presentation for must-see viewing.

  http://lamammals.blogspot.com/2008/12/jon-taplins-america-30-presentation.html

• Seth // December 4, 2008 at 2:33 pm | Reply

  OT, but under the “New Federalism” rubric, Californians visiting here should have a look at this “CPR for California” initiative. The Courage Campaign is seeking feedback on priorities for this project.

• Davaudian // December 5, 2008 at 8:16 am | Reply

  Like len, I can’t get behind all of this. I think some facts and history is missing. And like most profs, he wants to get the approval and admiration of his students and cohorts, but Jon has it about 80% correct. I love the way he went against his peers like Jackson Browne, who is an idiot, and recommends nuclear power. I just wish that there were more forward looking concepts here instead of a past reflective on old fashioned fixes. The kids today who will do most of what’s ahead, don’t care about the 1930’s. Why not mention what illegal labor has done to working wages and how computers have streamlined companies. Also, none of our fixes will be partisan.

• len // December 5, 2008 at 9:47 am | Reply

  I agree about 80% too and that’s not bad.

  There are cruel aspects to the ‘innovation from the edge’ meme. The edge meme is the watered down version of ecotonal relationships in ecosystems. A different meme is “life is hot in the ecotones” meaning there is a high rate of change and little in the way of justice. Mean rules.

  For example, while Marconi still receives the history credit for the wireless, he is very much like the so-called web innovators who successfully skimmed the work of lesser notables and were credited with invention where in fact, they only implemented. Marconi was forced to pay Nicola Tesla and the Marconi patents were invalidated. Tim Bray is still trying to get pundits not to call him “the inventor of XML”. Andreesen revels in his role but those in the business knew that much better browsers could have formed the basis of the web technology. All of us know or should understand what a bad design HTML turns out to be. And so on.

  I once described the ‘myths of the web’ because near-term history is fed as bad signal into the media amplifier and used to make heros of the just-there-when-the-camera-rolled and to make duds of people who took all the risks and came up on the wrong side of the political spectrum.

  Take for example, “The Right Stuff” that presents an incredibly falsified history of the US Space Program. Sorry Tom, but tests did prove the explosive bolts of a Mercury capsule would blow when dropped. Oliver Stone’s JFK is another.

  Just good storytelling or mythmaking for the sake of political/social agendas? Both.

  The latter is the kind of superstitous learning that made me step back from the web in horror once I realized what would be done with it. I get a queasy feeling when the entertainment industry uses its crafts to attempt to shape policy. There is only so much politeness one can offer to the ’shaping the arc of the political story’ meme. Bottom-up systems have drawbacks and one of them is that poisoning and propaganda are both bottom-up systems. Caveat vendor.

  That said, I’m not taking Jon’s accuracy too seriously except where the conclusions don’t follow. Specifically, I think the idea of block grants have to be looked at as a serious approach to infrastructure and innovation incentives, and that we indeed do have to keep them out of the hands of lobbyists, yet I don’t know how to do that because lobbying is legal and politics really are a “No Buck Rogers No Bucks” affair.

  As to New Federalism as the idea that the States should take more control, they have that now. They tax. The problem is wherever the cultural lifestyle shows signs of unwillingness to pay for the lifestyle locally and demand that the Federal government step in and pay for it while simultaneously thumbing noses at serious problems such as immigration reform, one just can’t take that state or its culture seriously.

  The nut of Jon’s approach that will receive the least debate but should be taken most seriously is ‘guns for butter’. Our defense spending is disproportionate and a free rider problem but what is the right response? Historically, the Soviets did attempt a form of economic colonization particularly in Africa. China is following their example now. We responded with aid and defense and we seem to be afraid to back away from the defense posture because the other side of the free rider problem is that unless the other nations do pick up their own spending, a power vacuum emerges and that was the situation when the Japanese expanded across the Pacific Rim pre-WWII. If we make them provide us trade advantages as the British did, we become a mercenary nation and that was the Bush Doctrine in a nutshell: war for booty.

  Defense spending has to come down in the sense of power projection, but real dollar spending is still required for logistical refurbishment. Quite a thorny knot that one.

• JTMcPhee // December 5, 2008 at 12:25 pm | Reply

  Trouble with blogs is that everyone wants to write the brief, necessarily simplified, detail-short epigram that both captures and resolves “the problem,” whatever it might be. And get naming rights and pats on the electronic back.

  “Defense?” Power vacuums? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that there are “power peaks” in places like Japan in the late thirties and parts of Moscow and Berlin for a while and of course the Pentagon and Langley and certain Congressional committee rooms and the Oval Office and the headquarters of the major “defense contractors,” for the last 65 years?

  It’s not a “vacuum” if people in a place with resources, say Costa Rica, decide not to get on the treadmill of weaponizing everything and placing the monkey of military-industrial national socialism on their backs.

  Maybe it’s not survivable behavior, but I don’t think the folks who “benefitted” in China and Korea and the Phillipines from the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere were in the same game as the warlords and samurai culture in Nihon.

  I gotta ask, having seen “power projection” up close and personal in Vietnam, just what that phrase is supposed to mean? Like the M-113 “armored personnel carrier, costing a couple of hundred thousand bucks each, destroyed by a B-40 RPG round costing about 3 bucks and the sweat to carry it down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from a Russian freighter in Haiphong? The overloaded but highly constituency-ized Bradley Fighting Vehicles for a million a copy, also vulnerable to cheap munitions (and friendly fire, of course) .F-111 fly (or crash)-by-wire aircraft, maybe $10 million each, which supposedly could fly supersonic at treetop height but had some little glitch in their programming that made them nose into the ground at 600 knots, giving their pilots and their constituencies at home a real headache? How about the V-22, unarmed and unarmored crash-by-wire “transport,” recently “deployed” to Iraq with a large contingent of contractors and low-paid GIs to keep them flying long enough to give the impression that the $400 billion was “well spent” even though the aircraft are apparently being kept studiously outside any areas where they might be shot at?

  How about “projectng power” by giving Stingers to Mujahedin “freedom fighters” who of course morphed into “the Taliban,” which like the collective noun “Afghanistan” conceals the reality and complexity of things “we” try to analyze and control and direct through a lack of understanding so complete it’s like watching a blind man trying to thread a needle in boxing gloves.

  Or “projecting power” by building more $4 billion nuclear aircraft carriers (and all the ships, subs, guns, missiles and aircraft needed to protect them against cheap, low-tech USS Kohl-type demolition) to transport the egos of a bunch of 4-star admirals in wood-paneled, busboy’d and batman’d style? And selling aircraft and technology thingies to the rulers and military elites of areas that it’s really not all that hard to see might actually use them to blow up “our” trillions of dollars of “power projection” assets in so many different “scenarios?” Because our war leaders (let alone our political leaders) do not have
  any sensible, survivable “doctrines” to inform the “strategies” that ought to make obvious the “tactics” that are so obviously lost in all the complexities of promoting and procuring weapons systems and climbing the career ladders in the Rings of Power in the Pentagon?

  “Projecting power.” It sounds so neat and manly and right for a”great power” to be doing whatever that is. Seems to this cynic, (that’s another shorthand for “disappointed romantic”), that if you just follow Deep Throat’s advice and “Follow the money” you get a more honest picture of what the whole complex jigsaw puzzle really looks like.

  Whether it’s the tens or hundreds of millions in bribery cash dispensed by people like Gary Schroen (try reading “First In,” this CIA advance man’s brag book about his Great Impact in post-9/11 Afghainstan,) or the billions in unaudited and unaccounted $100 bills by the pallet load that have “disappeared” into Iraq, or every other nick in the veins and arteries of the world’s economic body that bleed to let those that profit from or love war (going by popularity and frequency, humanity’s favorint pastime to pleasure the parts of our limbic systems that get off on power over others and killing and violence,) or the trillions that have been burned up to warm the Cold Warriors’ hearts and scare the bejeezus out of the rest of us.

  And of course the people who set us upon this treadmill, who have their identical opposite numbers on “the other side,” know that the rest of us, who generate the REAL wealth that goes to pay for all these really neat weapons and conflicts, have been trained by years of propaganda to be so fearful that we keep tossing money at them, kind of like feeding the lion in the living room lots of raw steaks so it won’t eat you.

  We worry about “free riders?” When the real concern is to force “them” into the same game we are playing, a negative sum game for all I can see for everyone concerned except those who profit from making the weapons and moving the troops and wiring the outlets in the showers, and of course all the humans who get to play their really double-secret most favorite game, war.