Danny Crichton

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

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.

1. The New York Times reports on the quick decline of vocational education in the United States, due to a greater push by the Obama Administration and others to get students to college. While funding remains over a $1 billion, the total funds have declined (and are a pittance compared to funding for colleges and universities). Such an overwrought plan, though, is likely to be tremendously damaging to students for whom a vocational education is a perfect fit. We must be mindful that the future global workforce is going to need a spectrum of skills, including those provided by a vocational education. There is an elitism about a college degree that I think is unwarranted.
2. Members of the Obama Administration have complained that Jon Huntsman is running for the presidency after the president appointed him as ambassador to China. It seems to me that such anger is misplaced - if Huntsman benefited from the arrangement, it was ultimately the president's decision. There may not have been a tacit agreement between the two regarding Huntsman's candidacy, but we cannot forget that Obama was trying to avoid a race with Huntsman in the first place. Seems as if each side played against the other.
3. Talks on the deficit seem to be breaking down quickly. Republicans have little incentive to solve the deficit, and Obama is weak in support. This is a very dangerous spot for the United States, and mirrors the situation being seen in Minnesota: neither side has an incentive to get the policy right. The tea party conservatives that are pushing hard against a compromise need to be reminded that living in a pluralistic democracy requires just that - compromise. Without that, our democracy will fall apart.
4. Texas Governor Rick Perry is driving to create metrics to hold professors accountable for

Two news stories prompt the question. The first comes from the New York Times analysis of the recent budget cuts in California, which have hit the state's premier higher education system very hard.

Quote:

The state's two-tier system has long been seen as a model of public higher education, with the University of California's 10 campuses as major research hubs and the California State University's network of 23 campuses graduating tens of thousands each year. But the cuts, which are the biggest in the state's history, threaten to erode the system's stellar reputation.

"There's no question that California has had the most emulated public universities in the nation, and for the rest of the world," said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education. "What we are seeing is the abandonment of the state's commitment to make California's education available to all its citizens."

The architecture for the system came from California's Master Plan during the 1960s, a time when Berkeley was among the great universities of the nation (and led by one of the greats of higher education administration - Clark Kerr, known for coining the term multiversity). The destruction of those dreams is shocking when one considers that the system lasted only about a single generation - far shorter than the visionaries behind it intended.

The second story comes from Minnesota, where the state government continues to be shut down over an impasse regarding the state's budget. The Star Tribune's introduction says it all:

Budget talks have produced few clues about how Minnesota's historic government shutdown will end, except for one: Schools likely will pay the price for yet another stalemate in St. Paul.

The state intends to

This year, we are approaching the ten year anniversaries of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan - the longest war in U.S. history. Like many, I find that the war has receded from my day-to-day thinking - I rarely follow the latest news from Afghanistan, except when a story reaches the top headlines like the bombing of the Intercontinental Hotel (given the patriotic events going on around me, this particularly nagged on me).

Realizing this, I decided to step back from the day-to-day and look at the issue of the global war on terror a little more longitudinally. I read the Al Qaeda Reader, a translated compilation of the major pieces of theory written by the leaders of the group, as well as significant speeches and interviews.

I am mostly going to avoid the theocratic theories behind the movement - while they are by far the most interesting and insightful of the collection, I think that few of the writings would surprise. Instead, I want to focus on the policy statements of Osama bin Laden, which I have never seen before.

First, its disappointing that these statements never got publicity at their time of publication outside of the news that bin Laden had spoken. While the statements occasionally go on conspiratorial tangents (usually about Israel and Jews), the bulk of the writings would not be out of place in a major U.S. newspaper like the New York Times or the Washington Post. I understand the patriotic desire to not publish these sorts of writings in major newspapers, but I think the last few years may have been transpired very differently with the added context.

Bin Laden desired to force the United States to go through the collapse that accompanied the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan

One of the more interesting academic labor economists who I follow rather religiously is Anthony P. Carnevale at Georgetown, who focuses on the labor market and how it relates to higher education. I have cited one of his previous studies dozens of times to friends, discussing the quality problem facing science PhD programs in the United States.

Carnevale's latest study (InsideHigherEd summary here) looks at the growing wage gap between college and high school graduates and argues that the lack of college graduates is a significant factor. The number of college graduates matched the needs for employers throughout much of history, but that has not been the case recently, and thus, college graduates are receiving a wage premium.

The author does attempt to discuss the issues surrounding the not insignificant number of college graduates who are unemployed, which is estimated in the millions. However, what always gets lost in these discussions is the need to critically assess the quality of the college experience as it currently stands. That debate has been going on all year in response to Academically Adrift, and I won't rehash that books central arguments.

Instead, I want to focus on the issue of statistics and quantification. Counting the total number of college graduates in the economy is simple if not quite logistically easy. So is getting a solid estimate on the number of college graduates, and the mix of majors and degrees those students receive. Basic survey methodology and national educational data systems can develop the answers to these questions.

A far more difficult - yet in my view, far more important - issue is the quality of that education. Are students learning the material they need to in order to be successful in the careers they hope to pursue? Is the quality of a computer

Since its development decades ago by the Defense Department, the Internet has connected computers together in a decentralized, democratic way. Network design was open and transparent, themes built into all of the core protocols that underpin the internet today. The development of the World Wide Web and its later commercial expansion in 1995 connected the world's population like never before, undermining the notion of national sovereignty by creating a borderless environment, accessible by everyone (save for a few select regions and countries).

However, is that level of democracy and openness a permanent feature of the internet, or is it merely a temporary phenomenon before the system devolves in a balkanized network of islands?

We can see the tension today in countries like China, which effectively is already an island of sorts, preventing the importation of undesired content across its borders (it is less clear that there are restrictions the other way - an important point to remember about the internet). The Arab Spring revolutions have shown that authoritarian governments are very much at the mercy of their populations if they have access to modern social networking tools. Furthermore, stories like the one in the NYTimes today that describe efforts by the Obama administration to increase the utility of the internet in undermining these regimes only increases the prominence of the internet's ability to counter dictatorships.

Despite my enthusiasm for the internet (I do work for one of its most successful companies), I agree with the general themes developed by Evgeny Morozov, who believes that there is nothing fundamentally liberating about the internet, and that the technology can easily increase repression rather than weaken it.

We are seeing the slow fragmenting of the internet into separate regions, which will have borders not unlike their physical manifestations on national boundaries. It