Gail Collins poses a question today to her readers: should a president have a college degree? That immediate question is somewhat interesting (I would say yes, if only because entry-level secretaries in offices are required to have a bachelor's degree these days), but there are others with more intellectual excitement.
Two deeper questions are: to what extent do credentials and qualifications help a president in decision-making and how closely should analysts of politics pay attention to the backgrounds of their subjects?
I was reading my undergraduate advisor's critique of Graham Allison's Essence of Decision in International Security [1] yesterday, and he repeatedly references the value of historical biography in analyzing foreign policy decisions. In contrast with Allison, who argues that the process of policymaking is the fundamental framework for understanding decisions, this paper argued that we should instead not lose sight of the people within the room and their similar backgrounds.
Perhaps no quote sums up the piece better than this one from the paper's final paragraph: "Resisting the narrowness of Essence, scholars should think deeply and critically about the underlying values framework of major policy, and perhaps even about the class background or social origins of major policymakers." Such a point is heretical to international relations scholars, who believe that countries are black boxes. It's one of the many reasons I have a sociological bent to my research.
Academics too often are willing to cede that historical contingency for theories that offer more "science" at the expense of real explanatory power. The background of the president doesn't just matter -- it matters a lot! The fact that Obama was trained as a lawyer shows through in much of his decision-making, and is in contrast to Romney's
And on the right, the candidates are beginning to narrow to Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and now Mitt Romney, with maybe some others throwing in their hats.
What is striking is just how familiar these names are. Bush and Clinton certainly need no introductions of their political family connections. Romney, who has now run for president twice -- once as his party's candidate -- is also the son of a former governor. And of course, Rand Paul is the son of erstwhile libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul.
That leaves Rubio as the sole candidate running outside of a political dynasty.
Political dynasties aren't uncommon in America. We have already had John and John Quincy Adams, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as George H. W. and George W. Bush. But it is far less common to see the vast majority of candidates in the primaries come from such backgrounds.
What is happening in American politics today is a pattern that has already befallen professions as diverse as professional soldiers and medical doctors. One element is competition. As these areas of work increasingly see new entrants, advantages that accrue to those with parents in these disciplines tend to become decisive later on. Children with parents who are doctors can be better prepared for life in a hospital simply by listening to the vocabulary and procedures that their parents are talking about.
Similarly to competitiveness, the increasing search costs for work means
I lost a good friend in San Francisco today to depression. He had been battling his illness valiantly for years since I knew him in high school. He was brilliant, hilariously funny, and someone who I always looked forward to having dinner with. He had so much potential to offer the world with his intellect, and we are all worse off without his presence.
As many of you know, I think mental health remains one of the most under-examined areas for research, creativity, and innovation that we have today. Depression is one of the leading causes of death in this country, and yet, we still treat it much the way we have for decades: with drugs whose effects we barely understand. Irving Kirsch, one of the leading experts in the field at Stanford, said last year, "One hundred years from now, people will look back at the age of giving SSRIs and they will have a reputation that's akin to bloodletting."
There has to be a better way.
There have been a handful of startups like Teletherapy and 7 Cups of Tea that have started to address this area. But so much more can be done. I hate it when entrepreneurs ask me how they can make a difference in a reasonable period of time for a lot of people, and then begin to focus on things like aging. This area is so under-explored, we don't even know if there are ways of dramatically improving the lives of millions of people with just some lines of code.
My friend was an engineer, and I can't think of a better way to remember his legacy than to take his problem-solving ethos and apply it to one of the most important health problems today.
Meyer makes the fair point that owners have rarely done what is in the best interests of their workers in the past, and so the concept of "flexibility" that I trumpet isn't really about control over one's working life. At the end of the day, the owners of technology platforms like Uber still wield disproportionate power over workers and their livelihoods.
This got me thinking on a hypothetical question: why can't workers, through their representatives, write the algorithms behind work allocation?
This isn't a crazy proposition. Workforce algorithms are simply methods to solve an optimization problem given a set of objectives. When owners control these algorithms, efficiency tends to be the most important goal, but we can imagine other objectives like most stability or most flexibility to be acceptable.
For example, Uber's data shows that it needs a certain number of drivers in a certain part of the city at certain times. If workers controlled the algorithm, it would meet those requirements, while also prioritizing certain policy goals. So, we could prioritize having as many different drivers on the road as possible, having the most senior drivers on the road get the most hours, prioritize the highest-ranked drivers, etc.
Since Uber is fundamentally a network, the idea is that it shouldn't care where the drivers come from as long as they show up when and where they are supposed to.
One of the great advantages of being a superpower like America is that everyone has to care about you. I see this all the time in a relatively small country like Korea, where news from a Congressional sub-committee's decision about the peninsula may never get a line of print in a newspaper in the US, but is front-page news here locally.
As the former Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau, once said, "Living next to [the US] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt."
With the rise of China globally, and countries like Turkey, Indonesia, India, Brazil and others more regionally, America's absolute dominance is waning. Students, business leaders, politicians, and academics now have a choice on where to spend their energies. If you are an African college student, do you learn English and head toward the West, or do you learn Chinese and head toward the East? That decision is still likely weighted toward English — for now — but the answer is not nearly as obvious as it once was.
America has to adapt to a world where people have a choice on where to study and do business. It needs to engage the world by sending more of our citizens abroad to ensure that we have dense personal networks worldwide, while also encouraging as many people as possible to come to the United States and bank their futures in our country.
That obviously means improving our immigration system, but we also need to work on policies designed to get Americans traveling outside the country.
Which leads me to the news this last week that the Obama Administration
This week, South Korean President Park Geun-hye's second candidate for prime minister, Moon Chang-keuk, pulled his name from consideration, following outrage over comments he made about imperial Japan's occupation of Korea. This follows the collapse of the candidacy of Ahn Dai-hee, a former judge who made an income of $1.6 million after his return to the private sector late last month.
For the president, the loss of two candidates for prime minister has hit hard. Polls show that approval ratings for the president have declined sharply over the past few weeks, and are at their lowest point since Park assumed office. The loss of political capital so early in the administration portends significant difficulties in the coming years for Korea's government.
But beyond the polls, the withdrawals of both candidates illustrates a growing problem in Korea: the exacting expectations of political candidates for office. This is a real challenge, both for Korea as well as for many established democracies like the United States. Due to the rallying effect of the Internet as well as an aggressively adversarial political culture, candidates are now put under an unbelievable amount of scrutiny.
That scrutiny would seem useful; after all, politicians holding ministry portfolios or senior government positions are entrusted with powers that few others in society wield. But as the bar has moved higher for candidates, the number of candidates that might have a shot of making it through the political system has narrowed.
The United States has not been immune to these kinds of political purity tests. We can see this effect most keenly on the Supreme Court, where jurists who hope to one day be nominated by a president avoid stating a controversial opinion on, well, anything. Take Elena Kagan for instance. Despite being
I want to thank the organizers of Key Platform 2014 to speak today. My name is Danny Crichton, and I am a writer at TechCrunch, writing about startups in South Korea, Asia, and in Silicon Valley. Many people seem to think that much has changed over the last 50 years when it comes to journalism.
A History of
Little Change
That notion is false. Despite the incredible technological progression made in all kinds of industries like commerce, social communications, enterprise storage, security, and information retrieval, news content and journalism more generally hasn’t changed all that much over the past 50 years. I realize I am being a bit contrarian, but let me show you the evidence.
For instance, content today for news sites is developed much the way it has been for decades. Journalists around the world interview subjects, take photos and video, write up stories or maybe edit a short documentary, and then post it to the web. While technology has certainly made this process more streamlined through online editing tools, and the demands placed on journalists in producing content are higher today, the basics of the profession have really not changed all that much. Great content is visceral, engaging, interesting, and timely. That formula works as well during the 1960s as it does today.
The way we edit and curate our work has changed a little bit, but there has been far less interesting results here than many presume. Before the internet, the number of writers of content was manageably small, and a small group of people called editors acted as gatekeepers for content. If you could get an editor at the New York Times interested in your story – you were published. There was definitely a bias here,
The news has been all over the press – Stanford's admissions rate has now reached 5%, and its implications for college applicants is clear: everyone is screwed.
This is false. As everyone knows about admissions, the aggregate admissions rate has almost no value to any student, since every student is bucketed into different groups with radically different acceptance rates. Athletes aren't facing a 5% acceptance rate, nor are legacies or development cases. Intel Science Talent Search winners aren't facing such long odds to success.
This thinking that everyone has an equal chance reminds me a lot of startups, where talk of a "lottery" persists. This is also false. Startups have uneven probabilities of success, much as applicants to college have uneven probabilities of success. People need to stop looking at an aggregate admissions statistic, or the chance of going from conception to a billion dollar company if they want to find success. The reality is, 95% of efforts are going to end in failure. The key is to find the reason why you should be disproportionately chosen, in applications and in a startup.
That said, despite the flurry of articles on admissions rates these past few days, there doesn't seem to be any depth of thinking about these statistics. Here are two questions I would love answered:
What is the makeup of the applicant pool? Admissions officials have been trying to increase the diversity of applicant pools for years through outreach events, etc. Are these programs working, and thus the applicant pools are becoming more diverse, or is it the opposite, that we are just getting applicants from the same groups we have always gotten them from in the past. You can't glean this from a single aggregate statistic, but it would seem to
Hi, I'm Danny. I'm Partner, Research at VC firm Lux Capital, where I publish the Riskgaming newsletter, podcast, and game scenarios. I'm also a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York. I analyze science, technology, finance and the human condition.
Formerly, I was managing editor at TechCrunch and a venture capitalist at Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst.
