Danny Crichton

Students practice and perform Taekwondo maneuvers in downtown Seoul. You can read more about Korean martial arts on that highly peer reviewed source, Wikipedia.

Korea is a crowded place, an urban environment often more geared to pedestrians than motorists (although you would never know that trying to cross an intersection). Engineers at KAIST are searching for the next major revolution in personal transportation, and one example of this is an ultra-compact electric car that seems perfect for the hipster road warrior. I caught the car in action a few days ago, and ran after it to its home on campus.

And it's home outside of mechanical engineering.

Yesterday, I discussed my lack of sympathy for students who majored in the humanities without any particular direction - and who then end up waiting tables as described in a recent New York Times article. In that post, I also commented that the liberal arts are an important component of university education. This blog post will attempt to answer how to major in the humanities while avoiding the unsavory service jobs that some graduates have faced upon graduation.

I'll discuss three plans: 1) Humanities Plus, 2) Practical Humanities, and 3) Pure Humanities.

Plan #1: Humanities Plus

This plan complements a major in a humanities discipline with a skill-based discipline like statistics, computer science, economics, engineering, business, etc. (one could arguably add a critical language like Chinese or Arabic as well if at a high proficiency). This particular approach allows for a tremendous amount of choice, and can also provide considerable depth in the humanities field. A minor in a skills-based discipline at Stanford is 32 units, and if these are spread over 12 quarters, one could take as few as 3 units a quarter to attain the minor at graduation.

While some are surprised to hear this, many careers only require basic knowledge of a few skills - the rest are provided on the job through training and are customized for the particular your particular job function. For instance, technical writing does not require a tremendous amount of knowledge of engineering, but strong communications abilities are crucial for success. Stated without further comment, consulting and finance work in much the same way too. A minor can thus open important new career fields that were not previously available.

In some ways, this is the plan that I chose in my undergraduate education. While I majored in Mathematical and Computational Sciences, I

The New York Times has a piece on our generation's acceptance of low employment prospects - a cultural shift they call "Generation Limbo"

Meet the members of what might be called Generation Limbo: highly educated 20-somethings, whose careers are stuck in neutral, coping with dead-end jobs and listless prospects.

And so they wait: for the economy to turn, for good jobs to materialize, for their lucky break. Some do so bitterly, frustrated that their well-mapped careers have gone astray. Others do so anxiously, wondering how they are going to pay their rent, their school loans, their living expenses - sometimes resorting to once-unthinkable government handouts.

The views of this group are summarized by one student in particular:

"We did everything we were supposed to," said Stephanie Morales, 23, who graduated from Dartmouth College in 2009 with hopes of working in the arts. Instead she ended up waiting tables at a Chart House restaurant in Weehawken, N.J., earning $2.17 an hour plus tips, to pay off her student loans. "What was the point of working so hard for 22 years if there was nothing out there?" said Ms. Morales, who is now a paralegal and plans on attending law school.

How much sympathy should we have for these students? More specifically, how much sympathy should we have for others in our generation who have been caught up in a bad economic situation?

Despite being empathetic and sympathetic for anyone caught in this economic morass, I can't help but feel that these people made seriously bad decisions - majoring in areas like English and the arts that have poor job prospects no matter what the outlook of the economy. While I am a strident defender of the classic liberal arts, these subjects must be

This NYTimes article, "Does America Need Manufacturing?," perfectly encapsulates why industrial policy must become a major component of the government's efforts to renew and rebuild the American economy. There are strong echoes in this article of Clyde Prestowitz' "The Betrayal of American Propserity," a book that convinced me to move away from software programming and toward economics.

Important Quotes:

For decades, the federal government has generally resisted throwing its weight - and its money - behind particular industries. If the market was killing manufacturing jobs, it was pointless to fight it. The government wasn't in the business of picking winners.

Repatriating a high-tech manufacturing plant to the United States is not simply a matter of hiring the local talent. It requires good-old foreign know-how. "We call it 'copy exact,' " Forcier said. "We bought a company in Korea that had the technology around this type of battery and had developed the manufacturing process there. We basically brought that here, copied it exactly and scaled it up." A123 also brought a team of six Korean engineers to help transfer the technology to the U.S. and sent a team of Americans to Korea to learn.

And most importantly to what I study:

Federal agencies like the Department of Energy have long financed scientific research - through university grants, for instance - on technologies like lithium-ion batteries. But a basic feature of government policy is to allow corporations and entrepreneurs to pick through the results of that research, commercialize the promising ideas and let the market sort things out. In other countries, it often works differently. Governments are more willing to help companies pool information about a new industry or technology and (especially in Korea and China) assist with the early-stagecommercialization of products, including

I have arrived in South Korea, and now that the jetlag and immigration offices have been handled, I finally have the time to begin updating this blog with a little more frequency (of course, I am no doubt setting myself up to fail on that point).

I study industrial policy, which is heavily related to science and technology policy and political economy. The picture above, shot in the center of Seoul, encapsulates what in my mind is so fascinating about South Korea: a rush to the future at breakneck speed. Few countries have ever industrialized as fast as South Korea, and despite the attempt of many, I believe those ranks will stay rather small even into the future.

Marc Andreessen is certainly bullish on the value of software if his recent op-ed in the WSJ, entitled "Why Software Is Eating The World," is any indication. Andreessen writes that "My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy." He then proceeds to list almost every industry in existence (no really, he has separate paragraphs for all of them) and how they are being affected by software.

His main point though, is that these developments in software "makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market." I'm not optimistic.

No other force in existence today is driving greater social inequality than the development of software. The death of Border's also means the death of the jobs for almost 20,000 employees in the United States, yet those jobs are not re-materializing in quantity elsewhere in the economy. Amazon.com, theoretically the most important competitor for Borders for instance, only has 34,000 employees. This disruption is at the heart of the current internet revolution.

I believe in progress. I don't shed a tear at the demise of the buggy-whip manufacturers who confronted the rise of the automobile - Detroit's rise provided a bounty to millions. I worked at Google this past summer building a new social network, and I saw progress happening in real-time. But is software really providing progress? Software disruption has often meant replacing thousands of people with a single piece of software designed by a few dozen or hundred people.

We are approaching a society in which the only occupation will be software programmer. That

From Thomas E. Ricks:

People who joined the military since 9/11, when the money spigot was opened full, have no sense of the budget environment they are heading into. Kind of reminds me of the time during the Depression when the military took a month-long pay holiday. Back then George Marshall, overseeing a garrison, encouraged his subordinates to make sure that married soldiers planted vegetable gardens, to ensure that their families would eat.